Traffic Rerouting--www.debismith.blogspot.com

Another traffic rerouting. I'd love to get to Cafe Now more often, but it just isn't happening these days. It's taking me forever to get my blogs the way I want them. It'd be easy if I didn't have so many different personalities.

What I'm currently thinking, and obviously that is want to change, Cafe Now will be the place I write my observations, ponderings, and things I like to contemplate or recommend.

And for now here is where I'll be posting current published writings. It'll probably mostly consist of my ongoing profile series for my local newspaper, but it'll be something new at least once a week, which is more than I can say for any of the other stuff.

Electronic Intelligence

My ipod reads my energy. I'm sure of it. Tonight, after two days of agonizing over my taxes that are due in three days, I took a break to do some of the dishes that've been piling up. Wanting to listen to some music, I got out the ipod, put it on shuffle, donned the headphones, and got to work with the sponge, soap, and day old dishes. What's the first song my ipod decides to play? Out of 1669 songs that my husband and I have loaded since getting it three months ago? Taxman. By The Beatles. No shit.

The second song was from Rodrigo Y Gabriela, a group that I've been listening to, almost exclusively, for the past few months.

It'd be a bit disconcerting if it weren't so fascinating and coincidental.

It reminds me of an email I got a couple months ago from a man I interviewed. Jordan Pease, the director of the Rogue Valley Metaphysical Library. One day, while working feverishly on the article that profiled him, Jordan sent me an email:

Hi-
You’ve got to try this if you haven’t already. It’s called “20Q” and it’s an amazing Artificial Intelligence Technology (AI) demonstration website in the form of a guessing game.

Players think of something and answer 15-30 questions about it (yes, no, maybe, unknown, etc) and the computer will guess correctly nearly every time you play!

It is downright spooky how accurate it is, especially with such seemingly vague questions. They claim it’s 80-98% accurate, and so far I’d agree.

20Q.net Try it.

Maybe my ipod has some of the same inherent intelligence. Yeah, a pretty whacko proposition. But the fact that Taxman was the first song it played has me wondering.

When a library closes in a community . . . does it make a sound?

Yesterday's closure of the Jackson County Library System in Southern Oregon, due to lack of funding, is the largest ever shuttering of libraries in the history of the United States.

The doors at Ashland's public library were locked at 5pm on Friday, April 6th.

In a staged protest/sit-in--proposed by several young library patrons
and carried out with the help of supportive adults--a large group of
young people, ranging in age from 5-16, refused to leave the
library until Malcus Williams, an officer with the Ashland Police Department showed up (as part of the plan) to escort them out.

The following is a video I shot and edited for the local newspaper.

Tomãs Lockwood: Living in the Great Outdoors

This is the video that accompanies the Daily Tidings profile on Tomãs Lockwood, published by The Daily Tidings on 3/21/07

Tomãs Lockwood has lived outdoors, by choice, for 24 years. Believing that the earth is his home, he doesn't consider himself homeless and prefers being referred to as an outdoorsman.

In this video, Tomãs talks about riding the rails to Ashland, why he picks up litter, why he's not homeless, and some of his thoughts on panhandling.

The two halves of god

I just had an epiphany and had to come write it down before it slips away. Not sure I should share it publicly, but here goes.

I was sitting on the toilet-- yes, epiphanies can happen anywhere--and I picked up the Sept/Oct 2006 issue of Spirituality & Health that a doctor friend loaned me. I'm reading an article by Louise Danielle Palmer titled: Empowered by the Sacred.

It's an article about the "living mystic" Andrew Harvey and I've just finished reading the 7 aspects of the "Great Death" that he teaches about. The author of the article then writes:

In the course of evolving as a species, we have discovered one-half of the God-power within us: the power to destroy.

And all of a sudden it came to me that this is why the bible seems to describe two completely different gods. It's something people rarely attempt to explain and understand, but remains a glaring inconsistency nevertheless.

If God is truly within, and not something outside and over us, then she/he/it (Holy Sheheit, the middle h being silent, as a group of us laughed about a number of years ago) is evolving right alongside/inside us and/or because of us. And whether a parable, prophecy, or just an interesting story, the bible shows us how God/we evolve from being judgemental, vengeful, and destructive to forgiving, compassionate, loving, and creative.

When I imagined, in a very brief flash, asking God/The All/Source if this was true--the impression that came back was of a bunch of gleeful beings jumping up and down saying, "yes, yes, yes, that's it!"

I was stopped in my tracks when I read the above words "we have discovered one-half of the god-power within us," now I continue reading the paragraph to find out what comes next:

...Now, Harvey believes, we must embody the other half: the power within us to create.

Now that I write it down, it seems so simple and obvious that I wonder that it felt so epiphanous. Maybe everyone else already knew this, but I'd never thought of it this way. The thought/revelation gave me goosebumps, and it's something I want to spend some more time pondering.

Blog Maintenance

Okay, doing a little housecleaning here. Putting the writing links on the sidebar. Next up is adding to my quote blogs. I've had piles of books/scraps of paper/magazines/etc., that I want to pull quotes from--really good quotes. Damn, there's just so much I want to do.

And then . . . maybe some good ole fashioned blogging? Imagine that.

More Writing Links

And perhaps Cafe Now will just become an online repository/archive of my other writing. Here's a few more links.

Published in The Ashland Daily Tidings
Whitfield Smith: A Passion for Ashland's History
Orlando: Ashland's Famous Feline

Published at CommonDreams.org on 1/22/07
The Dump, a Soldier Called Name, and Butterfly Wings: Changing the Course