Shiny Things in Everyday Ramblings

Diego likes shiny things; nail clippers, tweezers, the gold mouse laser pointer on a keychain (they clearly have never encountered a laser pointer before coming to live here) my hair…

He is a handful. But he is teachable. One just needs to be very patient. He gets into this tough guy him against the world mode that I suspect many creatures that are different adopt, and has trouble switching out of it. Kes suggested this afternoon that maybe his off switch is his adorable gray nose, or perhaps behind his left ear?

Carlo is so patient with him, like the big brother he is. When I turn the light out at night, Diego jumps up on this particular spot on the bed near my head and curls up. Last night just after lights out, Carlo came up and tried to spoon with Diego but he was still too hyper and bapped and nipped and pushed at his brother. So Carlo went away for a while. Just as I was drifting off to sleep he made the attempt again and Diego groomed his head briefly and they both fell asleep.

Saint Carlo.

Going deeper into the scholarly history of modern postural yoga I was very excited to find, (this is such a hoot), Unitarians!

Seriously, Unitarians in Indian who supported independence and offered another alternative to the Western Christian missionaries influenced Swami Vivekananda, who brought yoga to the West, as a young man. There are all these colorful amazingly outrageous folks out there in the relatively recent past of yoga including the Russian occultist Madame Blavatsky and Abner Doubleday. The guy that didn’t invent baseball, even though many folks still think he did.

Doubleday did have a patent on the cable cars in San Francisco and was a war hero. He later went on to be a leader of the American Theosophical Society after Madame Blavatsky decamped to India.

You can’t make this stuff up.

I am hoping to understand more about how this whole hell and redemption deal works when I take the next part of the Dante class and reread Purgatorio.

Apparently you are judged by your worst sin on a specific scale where betrayal and disloyalty is the absolutely worst thing you can do, and it is Minos who with his tail circling decides on your entry to hell, which circle you end up in. This judgment is irrevocable and eternal.

“In Greek mythology, Minos was a king of Crete, son of Zeus and Europa. Every nine years (or 7 depending on the source), he made King Aegeus pick seven young boys and seven young girls to be sent to Daedalus’ creation, the labyrinth, to be eaten by the Minotaur. After his death, Minos became a judge of the dead in the underworld. “

It is interesting because the professor that I am listening to in the lectures on philosophy starts with Minos and talks about Theseus, slaying the Minotaur, using the ball of golden thread to find his way out of the labyrinth and then his eventual betrayal of Ariadne, Minos’s daughter who was in love with him.

I guess the betrayals that get one to the very bottom of hell are of state and religious authorities, not personal relationship type betrayal. I am not sure what circle of hell that gets you to but I do know that if you truly are repentant than you don’t go there.

There is, however, so much I don’t know! All these references to folks that were once real and then move into myth.

These little bits and pieces of fact and myth and beautiful language, like the idea of blue thorns to describe the man in the moon, who was put there for gathering firewood on the Sabbath are my shiny things.

I bap the ideas around in my head as Diego baps the nail clippers around on the floor; he loses interest after a time, but me?

Hopefully I make poems.

Last updated December 08, 2014