Cut The Body Loose!

Several thousand unique threads of fact, opinion or thought, delivered in the form of emails, txts, sms, im, www, face, voice, video links come rushing at us every day.  Life is so much more complex this way than when our anscestors sat in trees or caves and grunted shreiked or grunted their joys and frustrations.

Takes hurricanes, they used to just whack us – we once had no forecasts or satelite photos.  No warning or even acknowledgement that it was only a hurricane was given  in the middle of the thing, our anscestors had no way to even know the storm would sometime end.

Todays ecomonic rush to the bottom is in my mind like droughts and pestulance must have been for our ancestors.  An attack on crops (income) or wealth (stored crops) to threaten securtity.  It is a problem that most of us did not really see coming, if we are honest with ourselves.  At least even the best of us did not know the timing.  How did our ancestors deal with problems they couldn’t forecast or predict?

So today the problems we solve are ones where we have no shortage of different opinions and ideas, forecasts, projections, pundits advice columns, etc.  We often today can even manage to understand and model the effect of solving one problem in different ways would have on the outcome of the other problems!  What has stayed constant is that some members of our tribe, party, clan or neighborhood have done well enough to help lift us all.

The thing I notice about Obama and other successful folks is that they are seldom found idle, usually they are busy working in every “spare” moment, especially when the work consists of thinking and communicating.  So this is how I feel I am motivated by our new President, to get busy and to do whatever small part I can towards fixing problems of the country.  All our ability to forecast and understand the future outcome of our actions will only move us forward if our leaders still continue to make a constant effort and not grow idle or get stuck on some single thing.

Incidently, I slept for 16 hours earlier this weekend, so NOW I am kicking into gear.  Yes, I see the irony in that.

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Twice today I had reason to be walking a couple blocks West of the CCs Coffee House at 2800 Esplanade.  On the corner there is some sort of Indian place, a temple of some kind is my guess, followed by guessing an ashram, a community center  or perhaps just a house where many Indians in white robes live.  I remember occupants had long hair and beards starting to turn grey, and white robes.

So then the next thing is that this place is on a corner lot, and out at the corner in the middle of the sidewalk from both directions, carefully centered on a circular metal cover for I’m guessing a water main stood — wait for it — a half a jar on Dill Pickles looking fairly fresh and with the lid on tight.  And the smiling Indian gentleman in the white robe bobbed his head up and down at us and smiled each time we passed the pickle jar.

So here I am now, deciding what to make of the pickles over the flowing water main on the crossroads in front of the Ashram on January 2, 2009.

While searching for pickle ritual, pickle worship, pickle India and so forth I had cause to wonder, I know this will seem silly, but was teh smiling head bobbing man in white robes Indian or perhaps was he Chinese?  Was he Buddist?  I just don’t know, but its amazing how several witnesses to a scene will remember it differently.  I did find pickle rituals, pickle worship, pickle wate, pickle India links on the web of course, quite a time sink there.  Perhaps you’d be interested in The Pickle Water Festival?  http://pics.livejournal.com/frla/pic/000119a9/

Meanwhile I haven’t found any reallyt compelling information so I guess I will just assign the most likely scenario I can think of.  I’ll guess that the half jar of pickles centered over flowing water was an offering to some sort of Indian Deity.

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