Welcome to a World of Spiritual Harmony

Had a great evening a couple of weeks ago at The Aronoff! A traveling company of The Pirates of Penzance, created in 1879 by Gilbert and Sullivan, brought this rowdy and rousing rendition of pure silliness and good humor to Cincinnati for just one evening.

A good friend of mine had acted in it while in high school, so it was fun to see it with her. Subtitled “A Slave of Duty”, the story itself is preposterous, as are most of the characters - which only made it all the more fun. Lots of charming songs, dancing and marching, and over the top acting.

Thanks, Cincinnati Arts Association! How about bringing one G&S in each season????

One question I’ve had several times this week is - my parent / my friend is either at a distance where I can’t ask them directly if they want me to send them healing energy - or it’s someone who insists they don’t believe in / or want to be healed in any way except by medical professionals - what can I do? (Never mind that lots of medical folk do Reiki and Healing Touch, and definitely believe in energy healing.)

The answer - ask the Higher Self of the person you want to work on. Your spirit can talk to their spirit, in other words. Get quiet, and start the conversation. Mentally explain the situation as you see it, and ask their permission to proceed sending Reiki across time and space.

Most of the time, you will get an answer you recognize - and much of the time, the answer will be yes, since Higher Selves are often much smarter than our day-to-day selves. If you get a definite no, stop.

If you aren’t sure what the answer is, send the Reiki, knowing that if it isn’t accepted, the energy will be used to add healing to the earth. It won’t be wasted. So go for it!

You’ve seen this book advertised in your neighborhood Starbuck’s - A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah.

My friend Mary Dusing passed it on to me - knowing that I’d be very unlikely to pick up a story about violence on my own. She was quite right - and I’m glad she made reading it sound imperative.

There are serious matter-of-fact descriptions of violence done by Ishmael in not very many pages in the middle of the book. Most of the book is about the story of how he became a boy soldier at age 13 and was pulled out of war at 16.

The chaos of life in Sierra Leone - which could happen anytime, anywhere on this planet - rendered his life unrecognizable. No family, no food, no school, no television, no hip-hop. Instead, a war where rebels and the army were indistinguishable and cruelty was the norm.

Ishmael now lives in New York City, with a family he adopted, and his redemption is on-going. May we listen and learn from his story - making future stories like his unnecessary.

I ran into an old friend at Joseph-Beth’s Bronte Bistro a few weeks ago. I had been thinking about him, wondering if he had any news of another old friend, who lives out of town and had been in a bad patch last time I heard from her.

We talked for just a minute, I got a little news, we promised to share with each other any additional info we might find out, I got his current email - and discovered that he had moved to Vermont, and was only in town for a few days, for the first time in months.

His remark as we parted - so true and so funny - Serendipity is a great time saver.

I count on those little miracles / coincidences / the Universe on my side. Wouldn’t get through a day without them!

All the junk food you can buy in a mainstream grocery store can be found in any health food store - just in a much healthier version! And the taste will be identical. Organic potatoes in organic healthy oils still taste just like regular unhealthy chips. They’re just a bit better for you.

The mainstream granola bars that are full of corn syrup and preservatives are here - minus the corn syrup and preservatives. Same for cans and bottles of pop without the worst of the ingredients, cookies without transfats and partially hydrogenated oils - even beef jerky with no meat and no additives.

It’s all there - so there’s no need to feel deprived. Just go wander around your friendly neighborhood health food store, find all those TV-watching snacks - and feel better about it all!

Travel narrative is one of my favorite forms of writing…I can settle down and be in another country for a long time very happily - and I’ve read a lot of travel narrative.

The Places in Between, by Rory Stewart, is one of the very best - and about a place that is fascinating to me - Afghanistan. Rory has also written The Prince of the Marshes, about Iraq, and was a guest columnist for the New York Times in March. He now directs the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul, to save an archaelogical site he found on his lonesome walk across Afghanistan, right after the fall of the Taliban.

With simple descriptive prose, few adjectives, nearly as spare as Hemingway, Scotsman Rory makes us smell the aromas and breath the cold air with him. A journey, a vocation, a need - he himself is not sure why he walked. But the beauty, the poverty, the anger, the cold, the near death he and Babur, the mastiff who attached himself to Rory, experienced are reason enough.

The sweep of ancient history and of current history follow us on this trail, the mix of peoples, and their languages, beliefs, ideas that have climbed these peaks and dwelt in these valleys , the wars and infrequent peace - Rory presents all of it with understanding and respect.

Afghanistan is no simple puzzle, but is a beautiful one.

Anton Chekov thought he wrote a comedy, all the directors of the play have believed it to be a tragedy…and the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company makes both points clear!

A lot of really terrific acting, levels of comedy from physical pratfalls to intellectual gibes, plenty of pathos. What a thorough-going treat the entire production is.

You’ve got one more week to make it - last day is next Sunday, April 15, 2 p m.

Wasn’t March an incredible month? Roaring in with a major thunderstorm early on that first morning, then spending its last two weeks acting a lot more like early May.

Life simply is easier, isn’t it, when the the weather is mild, the sun is out, our part of the world is greening. The birds, the deer, the squirrels, the wild turkey are going through their daily rounds with ease, as am I. Days feel like they have more time in them, and that there is much less to worry about.

Except, of course, for realizing that these are short term benefits of global warming. Just to make sure we don’t get too complacent, the weather folk are predicting that Mother Nature will bring back the cold and rain - perhaps even some snow - starting tonite. Doesn’t feel to me like it will be as bad as expected, but we’ll see.

Let’s hold warm and peaceful thoughts!

Practice the Middle Path without going to extremes; practice it in every aspect of your life, says the Buddha. And then, driving home the point, here’s a Tibetan proverb: you yourself must make the effort, the Buddhas are only teachers.

I always love it when Tibetan Buddhist sayings raise more questions than they answer. A little confusion keeps us from being totally sure and set in our ways - always good, say I.

The Middle Way keeps us awake and paying attention to the balance.

And now you know what’s on the Face of Tibet 2007 calendar for March and April - though you can’t see the bright and beautiful pictures. Tibetans look happy - all the time!