While in Albany, I stayed with a friend who recently bought her first house. And so I gave her a gift for her new home — a mandala/talisman for peace and prosperity as she embarks on the next stage of her life. The center is crocheted all in one piece, the circle is make of willow and vines layered and twisted together.
I like combining natural materials and fibers. I have everything I need now to start the piece I want to make with the yarn that Andrea spun, dyed, and sent to me from Australia.
But it’s going to take some powerful magic to give me the time I need to work on something that creative.
It’s raining today. She’s sleeping. I still haven’t unpacked from my glorious four nights away from here.
Time. Time. Time. Time alone. To create.

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily’s guest writer every Monday.
911
Tomorrow is the 6th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It’s a time to remember again/still those who died and to recognize again those first responders who tried to make rescues at the cost of their own lives. They are deserving of our attention and honor.
But it’s also a time to remember and condemn those who since 9/11 have used that day for political advantage and dragged this country down into a morass of a war having nothing to do with 9/11, and while doing so have also launched major assaults on the freedoms our democracy guarantees us. While purporting to be fighting to protect them.
Who are these scoundrels? Not bin Laden. Not muslim terrorists. No…our own Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rove: the Fatal Five. We didn’t know that the date, 9/11, would take on the additional significance of another emergency in our land — that 9/11 would also become the symbol of a 911 call to all of us. The call telling us that we were under attack by the Fatal Five: our Constitutional rights, our reputation in the world community — all being dragged down the tubes because of the incredibly ignorant audacity of the Fatal Five.
Terrorism is not defeated by war as we have known it (as we should have learned in Vietnam) because there’s no visible enemy as in a war as we’ve known it. Terrorism arises out of uniform and apart from armies from people feeling and being done grievous wrong (like the Jewish underground in WWII Poland and later against the British in the yet-to-be Israel). Or out of pure hatred, which is harder yet to combat or change. Terrorists will always achieve their vengeful or murderous or righteous goals — if not today, then tomorrow. They will wait, they will choose numerous targets, and successful completion of ANY of them is satisfactory. They have no intention of rolling over their enemy in some kind of blitzkrieg. Only dumbheads like the Fatal Five think the latter is what they’re fighting. Terrorism is reduced only by changing conditions that foster it, and through diplomacy (a foreign word to the Fatal Five).
At this time, the Fatal Five has shrunk. The others having bailed out, we’re now left with the DD, i.e. the Dreadful Duo (or Dumbya and Darth), namely Bush and Cheney. The latter, as in most of his time in office, is hiding in his unknown location. While the former, having made the world an incredibly more dangerous place, is reduced (if reduction were possible) to sneaking out of America and into Iraq or Afghanistan. He calls them surprise visits, but in truth, he’s sneaking out and in and out. Not risking his cowardly butt with open visits. Risk is for those he sends to war in his chicken place. Imagine: an American president having to sneak around the world.
So on tomorrow’s 6th anniversary, honor those we’ve lost: take time to write or email the Dreadful Duo, those 2 sniveling cowards who evaded military and combat service themselves but send others’ loved ones, and who keep using 9/11 for their own advantage (like timing the upcoming so-called Petraeus report release for the week of the anniversary), and who continue only to lie and equivocate and make a further mess of what already seems as bad as it can get. Tell them what you think of their stupidity. Tell them they are far and away the most shameful administration in our country’s history. Tell them that in some very real respects, they have been treasonous to our nation. Tell them how, most of all, they have dishonored those who lost their lives on 9/11 and since. Tell them they should recognize their shame and remember and live with and be haunted by it all the rest of their miserable, cowardly, dishonorable lives.
That may be the best we can do with them. Unfortunately.
If by chance, you’d worry that writing such things to them might somehow rebound badlly on you, then understand that such a feeling means they have achieved their goals: they’ve squeezed your Constitutional rights out of you. C’mon, suck it up, call your personal, internal 911. Take those rights back — if only out respect for those who lost everything on 9/11 and since.

Even as so many pieces of the Big Picture seem to be on the road to the big garbage dump, it’s hard not to appreciate days like this here in the mountains, with the sky a perfect summer blue over miles of sunflowers lining the road to and from where I travel.
I am eating tomatoes from my garden. The daily flocks of birds are back at the feeders in hopes that the bear will not return. And, on Monday, I will set out for five whole days away from caregiving. I have not had that stretch of time away from my mother in six or more years.
It’s supposed to rain most of those five days, but I will take the sense of this sunflower day with me as I visit my grandson (who just started kindergarten) and his parents, and then go on to spend a few days with my women friends in Albany.
I don’t know how my brother is going to manage our mother by himself while I’m gone. He has agreed to have a friend who is a home health aide come in on one day to give him a break. I don’t think that’s going to be enough, and I am willing to pay to bring someone in every day. He makes his choices and he takes his chances.
Meanwhile, the open road less traveled is waiting for me. It will all be here when I get back. Although the sunflowers might be getting droopy headed. Summer is, after all, over.

The girl from Iraq who has written so movingly of life in the city of death leaves for refuge in Syria. Read her whole post about the escape, which includes the following.

via emailer myrln:
Of course: 4 days before the 9/11 anniversary and who knows how many days before the great Petraeus report (written by the White House), a bin Laden video “surfaces” and is being “studied” by u.s. intelligence (oxymoron) agencies for validity. Tape obtained from “jihadist” website, BUT it is now no longer available at that site. How convenient. When are folks gonna catch on that this kinda shit goes on every time there’s an important decision to be made and they want to insure there’ll be no opposition to their direction? Not in Congress, certainly.
In South Korea, the Chairman of Hyundai was convicted of embezzling over 100 million from the company and sentenced to 3 years in jail. An appeals court, however, suspended the sentence because he “is too important to South Korea’s economy to go to jail…” Teach your children well, as the old song goes, only today means they need to learn to make millions so they never have to worry about jail.


via the one true b!X:
Down in Australia, the GOPresident manages to mistake the APEC summit for an OPEC summit, refer to “Austrian” troops instead of Australian ones, and (deja vu!) try to leave through the wrong door.
You can’t help wondering if something really IS wrong with Bush’s brain. We know something is very wrong with his capacity for critical thinking, but I’m referring to his physical brain. Lapses like those he displayed in Australia are very similar to those my mother had early on in her dementia. These days, of course, her misnomers are really off the wall and are not consistent, either. I often have to rely on her pantomiming to give me an idea of what she actually wants. Yesterday, she wanted her toothbrush, but she kept saying “place.” There’s no way I would have made the connection to her toothbrush if she hadn’t mimed how it’s used.
I don’t know why I watch the local (NYC/NJ) news. Yes I do know why. I can’t stand not knowing what’s going on. Today’s broadcast featured a couple of individuals who operate (make that past tense because they’ve been arrested) a couple of hair braiding salons in New Jersey. They were going back and forth from their home village in Africa and kidnapping pre-teen girls to work in their salons. The girls were forced to put in 14 hour days, seven days a week, and never saw a penny for their efforts. They were kept as slaves and forced to live in squalor.
It seems to me that most crimes are about money. Money for drugs. Money for cars. Accumulating more money. I like money as much as the next guy, but I always figure that I have to work to earn it. And I never seem to be able to accumulate very much. It’s a good thing I’m not high maintenance, since I’m the only one available to do the maintaining.

The above cartoon is for those of you who know the relationship I have with my brother. Heh.

We were eating lunch at the table near the window when my brother pointed to the bear cub, just outside, raiding our bird feeders.

We went over to the breezeway to get a better look, and I also got some video.
Unlike the raccoons, who totally demolished the feeders, dragging them away and leaving them, useless, on the hillside, the bear, having knocked the feeders to the ground, gently pawed and licked them, getting as much of the food as it could but not mangling the feeders in the process.
Even my mother was fascinated by the cub, who was about the same size as the giant white Malamute my brother had years ago. She kept thinking it was a dog; I’m not sure she remembered what a bear is.
“She’s so pretty,” she kept saying.
And, indeed, it was a beautiful bear cub, hungry and preparing for winter. I wondered where its mother was, where it was going to find food here on the mountain, which is getting more and more populated.
We knocked on the window to scare it away after it had eaten all the bird food that was out there. It was still hungry, nosing up at a hanging flower basket, hoping for something more before it sauntered down toward the lake, toward our neighbor’s house, where, I assume it hoped to find a garbage can or two.

No, I’m not referring to earthquakes.
The talisman that I made for r@d@r was delivered to him today. I hung it askew for this photo; r@d@r needs to decide how he wants it hung.

And I put b!X’s in the mail this morning. He really does need to find another job.
And now I need to find more willow branches. I think I saw a willow tree near the side of the road toward Poughkeepsie. I wonder if I’ll get in trouble if I just pull over and cut off some branches.
And if someone sees me and asks why I’m cutting off willow branches, I wonder what they’ll think when I tell them it’s to make magic that shifts the universe.

In case you haven’t noticed, i have a new box in my sidebar that shows the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the U.S.’s invasion. I got it from www.justforeignpolicy.org, a site I got to last last night after one of those marathon linkfests. So, I don’t remember how I got there, but I’m glad I did.

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily’s guest writer every Monday.
Wanderlost in Languageland
Language is our major means of communication. But sometimes it doesn’t cleanly live up to that function. That’s not language’s fault, though. The fault lies with those who use it…or misuse it. Meaning us. In the hands (and minds and mouths) of its users, language often goes down strange roads — sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately, and sometimes through carelessness. Accident leads to some funny or incomprehensible or just plain dumb results. More sinister is the deliberate manipulation of language for what are ultimately dubious or selfish or manipulative ends. Carelessness often creates undesirable or questionable outcomes.
For example, the overuse of the word “hero” falls into the careless basket. Nowadays, many legal acts only slightly outside the ordinary activity of daily living are labeled “heroic.” A dog barks to scare an intruder, a child calls 911 to save a parent, a person joins the military. All “heroes.” No harm, you say? Well, what about when someone acts in a truly selfless, important way that has deeply meaningful results? Like the first-responders on 9/11, or the G.I. who dies throwing himself on a grenade to save his buddies. They’re heroes, for sure, but overuse of the word has diminished its meaning. The barking dog and the G.I.: both “heroes?” Both acts of equal status? Unh-uh. By labeling both with the same word, we’ve robbed the term of its real heart. And thus the G.I.’s unselfish act of its important meaning.
Language’s accidental basket is much more fun, ‘though sometimes annoying — as when a t.v. talking head after a commercial break says “Welcome back” to us. Huh? We’ve not been anywhere, just sitting in front of the t.v. all along. “Welcome BACK?” Then there’s the truck driving the main road in front of your car. On its tailgate is a sign: “Construction Vehicle. Do Not Follow.” What do you do? Pull off the road ’til it’s gone? Turn and go the other way? And product instructions/descriptions, too, can be baffling. The shampoo bottle says, “Lather, Rinse, Repeat.” Something that open-ended has you washing your hair every second of the rest of your life. Or the juice bottle: “Shake well before using.” Like you’re a dog ridding its coat of water? Or the small/tall kitchen trashbags. What makes for a “tall” kitchen or defines a “small” one? Oh, and there’s the Department of Motor Vehicles conundrum: at a 4-way STOP sign intersection, four cars arrive simultaneously, one
at each sign. Which car proceeds first? The one on your right, says DMV. Okay, great, but…uh…each of the four cars has a car to its right. Now what? Uh-oh…language making for an hilariously incomprehensible situation. Permanent gridlock.
Of real concern, however, is the manipulation of language for questionable or sinister ends…especially by government. “Weapons of mass destruction,” for example, used to evoke fear and/or anger to get a particular action started. “Detainees” — guilty of anything or not. “No terrorist attacks since 9/11 proves administration policy is succeeding.” (Yeah, and spitting once daily in each direction is also responsible.) “Mission accomplished.” Richard Powers, in his 1991 book, THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS, wrote, “Wars come down to the control of information,” (suggesting the “encoding” of language, using it in deceptive ways). That’s a truth we’ve learned the hard way in this Iraq conflict. The current administration has, at every turn, withheld, distorted, and contradicted information by deliberately misusing language. Powers’ point was about keeping an enemy from knowing what you’re really doing. Our problem is a government doing the same to its own people. Assisted, perhaps, by the fact that, as a recent study discovered, only 1 in 4 adults read a book in a year.
Maybe what we need is to deal with language the way a 5-year old child does: by continuously asking, “WHAT?” until clarity is achieved. Maybe then language will be returned to its major function: communication.