lucky thirteen, Mother's Day aikido

dia treze dá boa sorte, Dia das Mães
Up, Down.

"I know how it feels like to lose a loved one. Being a prisoner is halfway similar to being dead."

"I would not want to see a death used to avenge my husband's own."

"Security guards at the Delamere family estate have been chasing and beating us for simply gathering dead wood for firewood in the farm. This has been going on for as long as I can remember. The situation is so skewed, we feel like we're still living in colonial Kenya."

"I expect no favors from the aristocrats. I've been lonely, hurt and stressed up for three years now and even if they do offer anything to me now, a decent education for my children is what I can accept."

"My husband died a painful death that could be avoided. But people make mistakes. Let's forgive, forget and move forward."

        Sarah Njoya.



Thomas Cholmondeley (pronounced chum-lee), shoots and kills a 'ranger', Samson ole Sisina (19 April 2005), and a year later shoots and kills a 'poacher', Robert Njoya Mbugua (10 May 2006). A murky story, a tale with deep roots and large horns and cross pressures up the yin-yang - not black and white by any means. To touch upon just a few: "Kenya cowboys," "Happy Valley," Elephant Walk (okokok, Kenya not Ceylon, but whatever), White Mischief.

And here, this beautiful young woman steps up out of the wreckage with forgiveness; God bless her heart.

Also in my prayers.


        As a teacher I know how emotionally explosive the material I am dealing with is, and how constantly it is the anxieties of the reader that make the primary response to whatever is being said. There are fewer mental blocks in studying religious traditions outside our own. Naturally, in teaching a course under the rubrics of academic freedom and professional ethics, one has to avoid any suggestion of leading the student toward or away from any position of what is called belief. The academic aim is to see what the subject means, not to accept or reject it. The great majority of my students understood this principle at once: those who had difficulty with it showed an invariable pattern of resistance. If they felt already committed to a position of acceptance, they were afraid of being led away from it; if they were antagonistic to such a position, they were afraid of being led toward it.

        This raised the question in my mind: Why are belief and disbelief, as ordinarily understood, so often and so intensely anxious and insecure? The immediate answer is that they are closely associated with the powers of repression I referred to earlier as being the teacher's first point of attack. What we usually think of as acceptance or rejection of belief does not in either case involve any disturbance in our habitual mental processes. It seems to me that trying to think within the categories of myth, metaphor, and typology -- all of them exceedingly "primitive" categories from most points of view -- does involve a good deal of such disturbance. The result, however, I hope and have reason to think, is an increased lucidity, an instinct for cutting through a jungle of rationalizing verbiage to the cleared area of insight.

        Northrop Frye, The Great Code, Introduction.

i thought maybe ... 13 days (?) but it will not be so easy, the urge is still strong, almost inevitably strong, the signs i asked for are coming i think but they are not here yet, she says maybe tomorrow ... meanwhile there are green shoots, sprouts emerging: avocado sauce with ginger and garlic this time, bicycle thoughts

and the rebuffs, real and imagined, are not having such an effect as i expected, parallel but not as strong, and it is almost an end in itself anyway isn't it? a reason ... even though nothing but an accident really, a fortuitous toothache and an off-hand comment by the dentist, ahh, if only it had been done during those heady early weeks in Brasil it might have made more difference eh?

still, maybe it will be 21 days this time, maybe i won't make it even but, ok, shoot for 21, who can say?

Down.