Welcome to a World of Spiritual Harmony

I can’t believe I haven’t talked about this real find - but checking my blog back to August, it looks like I haven’t!

The Green Dog Cafe, in Columbia Tusculum, in the new Neyer office building and complex at Delta and Columbia Parkway, is a definite winner. Yummy, fresh food, light and airy ambience, moderate prices, lots of organic and veggie dishes, presented in creative and excellent ways. Good food made with love and presented with beauty and style. That’s how to stay healthy forever!

They serve wine, good tea and coffee, lots of burgers - some with meat and some without. And bowls of many different kinds, with an interesting grain (quinoa is so cute, with those little tails!), creative mixes of veggies. Choices, choices, choices.

A good place for vegetarians and vegans to take our friends, so everybody can be really happy! Breakfast, lunch, dinner. You’re gonna love it!

Michelle looks beautiful, calm, powerful and happy on the cover of the December 2009 Glamour magazine. Don’t know if I’ve ever bought Glamour before. May have, back in the 60’s. Not since then, though - that’s when my own feminist thinking began, and when the movement really burst into flame.

The Michelle story is an interview by Katie Couric, and has questions from readers as well. Lots of good stuff in the story. My favorite quote - which should be must reading for every teen / 20-something American woman / girl - When you’re dating a man, you should always feel good. You should never feel less than. You should never doubt yourself. You shouldn’t be in a relationship with somebody who doesn’t make you completely happy and make you feel whole.

Just think if every woman quit thinking so hard, quit feeling so sorry for, quit waiting on him to fulfill his potential. Domestic violence would drop instantly, if women really decided they were only willing to stay in relationship with someone who made them feel good.

Instead of thinking about how our job is to make guys feel good, Michelle is asking us to think about whether or not they’re making us feel good - a paradigm shift in thinking right there. Thanks, Michelle!

There’s also a good article on Rihanna, and a roster of Women of the Year. Glamour does seem to have updated itself, to be more real about the world. Still, it’s an expensive read, and all those trees are destroyed to make all that glossy paper with the unreal airbrushed fashion shots. Don’t think I’ll buy one again.

My friend Pat and I love Daveed’s, but it’s been a bit too pricey to make a regular spot. She and I each noticed last week, though, the mention in the press of Daveed’s new menu and adjusted pricing.

Next time we spoke, we each had Daveed’s on the mind, and so ended up going for dinner this evening. It’s always a great New York-y kind of place - tucked in at 934 Hatch Street in Mt. Adams. We met early, parked over by the Playhouse, and took a Mt. Adams walk before arriving.

Prices are more moderate, and meals are three courses, each course priced separately (and you don’t really have to choose three). We chose appetizers, then entrees and ended with salad. I had a wonderful squash soup, then an interesting pasta and rapini dish, and then a great salad with goat cheese, walnuts, cranberries. I goofed on the salad, though - had meant to ask about a different dressing, since the set dressing had bacon. They were very nice about replacing it, though it was clearly my fault.

The pacing was great, they kept my tea warm throughout (they use Harney’s - one of my favorites), there was not too much food nor too little. They brought two tiny canapes as starters - ingredients included mustard and salmon. I wouldn’t eat the salmon, Pat is decidedly un-fond of mustard. So she took the salmon off the top and I ate the rest. An excellent solution. The fresh and warm French bread came with a wonderful white bean spread.

So each of the courses was great, and so were the in-between happenings. The only mis-cue, since we didn’t want to be stuffed, was ordering cookies. They are made as ordered, so we had more coffee and tea as we waited. Unfortunately, we forgot to ask - and half the cookies were peanut butter. As long as we’ve been friends, we didn’t know that each of us doesn’t like peanut butter cookies. The birds will have a treat in the morning. The mini-chocolate chip cookies, though were great. Next time, we’ll be more adventurous.

It was a great treat of an evening, and nice to know that Daveed’s doesn’t have to be just a big celebration evening - surely we can find something to celebrate most anytime we want to go.

They were there - I saw them! The first bits of snow, more like little streaks than like flakes - arrived late yesterday afternoon when I was playing outside with my surrogate dog. A surrogate is so much easier than a real dog, I’ve found. When Lauren and Ryan across the drive are gone for a day or two, Delilah and I get to play. Or if she’s outside for a regular excursion into her big yard, and I call her, she’ll come.

So it was that I was observing the dark looking sky and feeling the chill in the air when the first snow appeared.

And today it was so warm (upper 50s), that I got the last of the leaves raked, and all of the outside Christmas stuff up (pine roping from the drive up to the porch, a big Christmas welcome sign, and a gnome peering through the porch railing). So I’m already for tomorrow’s rain. In fact, I want it to arrive for at least part of the day, to soak the leaves on all the flower and garden beds.

Living in the woods is so great!

I’ve only done one full-blown Thanksgiving feast in my life. And lately, I seldom cook - living off dinners out and leftovers - since lots of restaurants provide enough for 2 or 3 meals. I make a Christmas feast a couple of days after Christmas, and come up with great soups in the wintertime (though not at all last winter!), and that’s about it.

But this year, son Brian and I decided to have our own vegetarian / pretty much vegan feast. I did use tons of butter on the mashed potatoes - the last of this year’s crop from the garden. Brian came home from the grocery on Monday with every vegetable known to human kind. I came home from Clifton Natural Foods on Tuesday with the genuine Tofurkey (tofu turkey with dressing in the center), several Harvest Roasts (sort of tofurkey), various vegetarian gravy concoctions and lots of organic butter.

We still have growing in the organic garden 3 kinds of lettuce, parsley, kale and collard greens. Brian was in charge of the veggies, so he harvested the greens and we started cooking / roasting / baking / sauteing / boiling, etc. I’m not sure what he did to the broccoli before putting it in the salad, but it was sure yummy.

There were only 6 of us for dinner, candlelight, soft music and all. An excellent meal and great fun, though clean up wasn’t finished until noontime today - since I have a policy of stopping once the dishwasher is full, and taking a break.

We may do this again next year!

I was intrigued by this movie - George Clooney as a psychic? And what an odd title. There’s another line that will grab your attention: after the preamble is over, and George and Ewan McGregor are heading off into the wilds of Iraq, a sentence appears on th dark screen: you would not believe how much of this movie is true.

It felt true to me. I had read over the years about the Russians’ remote viewing’ experiments. They also had created Kirlian photography, where the energy emitted by a human body can be seen - and where blanks and irregularities in that energy can easily be seen, and explained by the physical diagnosis of that particular being.

Remote viewing is simply sitting wherever you are sitting, taking your awareness to wherever someone asks you to, and talking about what you see there. Takes practice, like all spiritual work, but it certainly can be done. You might be looking for a particular item or just observing. Both we and the Russians were working on this as an espionage / war tool. It can be fun just to do it, particularly if you’ve got a friend at the other end, who can confirm what you see.

So George and Ewan are heading off, having one disaster after another, and yet there’s just enough truth that they always take the next step. And, of course, for me, the psychic who misses all the time is just as psychic as the one who hits all the time - both are way outside the range of normal.

The movie really is a comedy - the dance scenes (no, I’m not going to explain) are wonderful. And the Kevin Spacey bad guy had me hissing in my seat. He appropriately gets his in the end.

And the goats are liberated. Enough said.

Mike Moore’s latest movie is good - and his most laid back. Even though it is still fairly outrageous. Wrapping crime scene tape around a Wall Street building, for instance. I’m a big fan of Michael Moore. He really is a major patriot, a passionate patriot. Or he wouldn’t work so hard to get us to be all we can be.

He is just not going to let us off the hook, not going to let us lay the blame at the feet of the bad guys, as varied as they are in all his movies. We are the folk who need to bust some moves, put ourselves out there, go for change in a big way.

His treatment of the foreclosure crisis and its many back stories are heartbreakingly beautiful, while he shows us how the system grinds everyday Americans, grinds them again, grinds them one more time - finally paying one ground-down couple to empty out the homes of others caught the web of foreclosure destruction.

These stories are so true, his movies are all so true (Sicko is the best - and very apropos today) - he illustrates his own agony by the weight he gains. Why is it we have chosen not to listen? What has it been in us that has prevented these needed changes? The changes are all coming soon, are on their way as we speak.

And when we get closer to the promised land, we’ll see that Michael Moore has been one of those Moses avatars pulling us along.

What great fun! I knew basically what the play was about, though I hadn’t seen it or the movie or the TV show. And I knew grandson Patrick Keegan had helped to build the sets - which were wonderful, interactive, well designed and created. Big 2 story rigs wheeling on and off the stage. Very Impressive. But I’ve learned that that’s what SCPA theater tech students do - just amazing work. (This is Patrick’s senior year - and his freshman year at UC as well.)

And I knew it would be well acted, danced, sung by a multitude of talented teens. Which indeed it was! What I didn’t realize was that Tyler Nelson - star of MTV’s reality show about SCPA, and now working on productions in New York and Atlanta - was the principal male dancer and singing as well. I’ve known Tyler since he was six - that family is my second family. I thought with all that out of town work, he wouldn’t be on stage.

I was blown away by his performance. He’s only been dancing three years - and is an incredible talent. He has the ability to stay in the air those extra few seconds, the way Barishnykov would. His singing is catching right up with that gift for dance.

We didn’t find Grandson Patrick coming out the stage door - he had to stay and break down the set, since it was the last performance. But I did get a chance to have a Tyler hug, and to tell him what a great human being he’s grown up to be.

I seldom go to the Playhouse, pretty much for the same reason I seldom read bestsellers. My thinking and interests are closer to the edge than that.

But I wanted to see Chekhov’s Three Sisters - since it was a new version by playwright Sarah Ruhl, whose enigmatic and oddly angled works I find compelling. It was also directed by Tony winner John Doyle, who created Company a few years ago. Should have been a treat.

And decidedly was not. To the contrary - half the audience left at the intermission. Evidently, it’s been that way throughout the run. (And this is in the very polite Cincinnati!) I would have followed them, but I’m just stubborn. Sarah Ruhl’s contribution, from my observation, was to make the dialogue more contemporary. The conversations didn’t sound at all like other Chekhov plays I’ve seen.

The set was interesting - but really, just awful. Trash strewn around, a few chairs, much taking off and putting on of coats. All of that stage business was well done - the designers certainly carried out the theme they had chosen, and the cast moved well within it. But O, the Dreariness.

I probably would not have liked this play if it were set in a well-furnished drawing room. But the set made explicit the meanness, the passive aggression, the general passivity of all the roles. Which was good. And then dreadful. Why didn’t someone just get on a train and go to Moscow? Anything would have been better than staying there - and sure would have been a lot more fun. As would almost any other production of almost any other play.

I always love working at the Victory of Light Festival, held at the Sharonville Convention Center twice a year - this past weekend, as a matter of fact. Victor always starts us off with a great meditation, and I’m high for the next two days. Quite legally, and quite high. Always a good thing!

It’s always an incredible experience. This time, even more so. So many of the readings I did became microcosm / macrocosm for me. I would do a reading for someone, dealing with their lives, concerns, joys, outcomes. And as they would walk away, I would get the big picture / the overarching cultural aspect of what the reading had been about.

It became clearer and clearer that we are partly at least ahead of time on the paradigm shift - that some issues are diminishing sooner, rather than everything shifting at one time. Which makes a lot of sense to me, but I hadn’t ever thought of that, or gotten that information.

So how’s your general depression / dullness / lack of energy / discouragement? Lifting? I thought so!