Falls Church morning.

Oh what a beautiful morning!

Oh what a beautiful day!

We were running late - tie too short, can't find a belt, where are the black socks, and more questions/issues raised by the boys.  And then there were my own, including a pair of suit pants [not pictured above] that i could barely fit into.  Then waiting for Eli in the car....  Should I send Miller up after him?  No, Spencer says, seated behind the steering wheel, calm down dad, so I close my eyes, take two easy breaths, and out the door steps Eli.  But, it is 15 minutes past the time I had planned to be on the road!

As it turned out, traffic was light, and we arrived at Dwan's only five minutes late, and then had to wait five more for the female folk to be ready.  Vive la difference...  Made it to the gazebo in a nearby park, plenty of time to set up before the ceremony at 11:00 (the time and date having been chosen by our celebrated astrologer - whose name cannot be mentioned to protect her privacy.  Isn't that right Dwan?)  The ceremony was over in a flash:  suddenly we were man and wife!  Woman and husband?  Actually, the wording was 'husband and wife.'

Dwan and I each gave a reading, which I will post here:

A READING FROM ANCIENT HINDU SCRIPTURE,  AS INTERPRETED BY ALAN WATTS (and paraphrased with oblique gender syntax by the reader - PJP.)

When God plays hide and seeek and pretends to be you and me, the earth and sky - and everything else - he does it so well that it takes a long time to remember where she hid herself.  But, that's the whole fun of it - just what God wanted to do.  She doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game.

That's why it's so hard for you and me - all of us - to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending to be somebody else.  But when the game has gone on long enough, we will all wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we're all one single self - the God who is all there is - and who lives forever and ever.

A READING FROM ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPE´RY'S THE LITTLE PRINCE (read by DRR.)

The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.

"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

And the roses were very much embarassed.

"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you--the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose. 

Japan Syndrome

While my heart goes out to the illustrious island nation that has brought us Zen, sushi, Honda, the kimono - and so much more - I wish I could say that my morning cold showers are taken in solidarity with the privations the Japanese have been facing each day since the earthquake/tidal wave/meltdown disasters.  But no, my daily bracing ablutions date way back to the California energy crisis of 2000 (which was revealed to be the result of Enron's predatory practices.)  However, regardless of the reasons, the state - our state of residence at the time - faced roving blackouts, and other such pleasantries.  What was a bike-riding, light switch Nazi, vegetarian like me to do?

And it turned out that these cold showers actually felt good - though it's been something of an acquired taste - and left me feeling energized.  Whereas, hot showers I had been noticing kind of had the opposite effect.  Well, turns out that 'heat sensitivity' is very common in MS - hot days make your symptoms markedly worse - a condition I was soon diagnosed with.  In fact, back in the days before MRI, spinal taps for chemical markers, and other diagnostic testing, patients where put in a hot bath, taken out, and asked to 'walk the line,' heel to toe fashion - if they looked drunker than before the hot bath (but weren't) - they were diagnosed with MS. Additional benefits of the cold shower:  no matter how chilly the morning, once you finish rinsing off and turn off the spigot, the bathroom instantly feels nice and warm, the towel even more so.  This means, no need to heat the bathroom - or the house much for that matter, the shower kind of judo-kickstarts your internal power plant.

We all know the problems with profligate energy consumption:  Exxon and BP oil spills (just a couple of the big ones), nuclear power risks and the waste disposal 'problem' that won't go away - for eons, global climate change, and on and on.  So, give it a try, I know you are curious...  Maybe start with lukewarm, and gradually drop the temp day by day.  Or jump right in - the water is great!