So Very Special

The Joy of Gullibility | This episode is proudly sponsored by the following poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=48785

An ellipse-focused moment & Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching.

Digging My Own Gravy is a year-long, durational project where I record a couple of minutes of material each day in which I am able to stay present, let go, and enjoy something happening to or around me. -- This episode is proudly sponsored by the following poem: INCANT AGAINST SUICIDE Buy neither gun nor blue-edged blade. Avoid green rope, high windows, rat poison, cobra pits, and the long vanishing point of train tracks that draw you to horizon’s razor. Only this way will another day refine you. (Natural death’s no oxymoron) Your head’s a bad neighborhood: Don’t go there alone, even if you have to stop strangers to ask the way, and even if spiders fall from your open mouth. This talk’s their only exit. How else would their scramble from your skull escape? You must make room first that the holy spirits might enter. Empty yourself of self, then kneel down to listen. -Mary Karr

Digging My Own Gravy is a year-long, durational project where I record a couple of minutes of material each day in which I am able to stay present, let go, and enjoy something happening to or around me. This episode is proudly sponsored by the following poem: THE WAY the way I could tell today that yesterday is dead is that the little gray bird that sat in the empty tree yesterday is gone: yesterday and bird are gone: I know there's no use looking for either Of them, bird running from winter, yesterday running downstream to some ocean-pocket of rest whence it may sometime come again (changed), new as tomorrow: how like a gift the memory of bird and empty tree! how precious since we may not have that configuration again: today is full of things, so many, how can they be managed, received and loved in their passing? -A.R. Ammons

This is a telling about me examining my conscience.  -- TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS/THE TWELVE DAZE OF CHRISTMAS MINI-SEASON I thought it might be interesting to write and record some episodes about two psychotherapists (for what it's worth) going through a weird, online, Covid-19 break up RIGHT NOW AT THE END OF 2020! The best time of the year to be breaking up with someone. Which is why the human animals (us) all seem to be doing it. Right about now. Seeing if it might be possible with this batch of episodes to disentangle a certain strand of crazy-bordering-on-insane behaviour that Eros all-too-often steers us towards. Or something like that. See what you think. -- Today's Telling is Proudly Sponsored by This Poem: GRAMMAR Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend, smiles like a big cat and says that she's a conjugated verb. She's been doing the direct object with a second person pronoun named Phil, and when she walks into the room, everybody turns: some kind of light is coming from her head. Even the geraniums look curious, and the bees, if they were here, would buzz suspiciously around her hair, looking for the door in her corona. We're all attracted to the perfume of fermenting joy, we've all tried to start a fire, and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own. In the meantime, she is the one today among us most able to bear the idea of her own beauty, and when we see it, what we do is natural: we take our burned hands out of our pockets, and clap. —Tony Hoagland

A telling about the delay to the next instalment of Together In Electric Dreams/The Twelve Daze of Christmas. -- TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS/THE TWELVE DAZE OF CHRISTMAS MINI-SEASON I thought it might be interesting to write and record some episodes about two psychotherapists (for what it's worth) going through a weird, online, Covid-19 break up RIGHT NOW AT THE END OF 2020! The best time of the year to be breaking up with someone. Which is why the human animals (us) all seem to be doing it. Right about now. Seeing if it might be possible with this batch of episodes to disentangle a certain strand of crazy-bordering-on-insane behaviour that Eros all-too-often steers us towards. Or something like that. See what you think.

This is a telling about how (un)enlightened I am.  -- TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS/THE TWELVE DAZE OF CHRISTMAS MINI-SEASON I thought it might be interesting to write and record some episodes about two psychotherapists (for what it's worth) going through a weird, online, Covid-19 break up RIGHT NOW AT THE END OF 2020!  The best time of the year to be breaking up with someone. Which is why the human animals (us) all seem to be doing it. Right about now.  Seeing if it might be possible with this batch of episodes to disentangle a certain strand of crazy-bordering-on-insane behaviour that Eros all-too-often steers us towards. Or something like that. See what you think.  -- Today's Telling is Proudly Sponsored by This Poem:  ENLIGHTENMENT “It’s all empty, empty,” he said to himself. “The sex and drugs. The violence, especially.” So he went down into the world to exercise his virtue, thinking maybe that would help. He taught a little kid to build a kite. He found a cure, and then he found a cure for his cure. He gave a woman at the mercy of the weather his umbrella, even though icy rain fell and he had pneumonia. He settled a revolution in Spain. Nothing worked. The world happens, the world changes, the world, it is written here, in the next line, is only its own membrane— and, oh yes, your compassionate nature, your compassion for our kind. VIJAY SESHADRI -- CREDITS: The Twelve Days of Christmas (Performed by the Pudding Symphony TV Orchestra, featuring Uncle and The Bacon [seriously, I'm not making this up!] . Arrangement by Ulf Langsrud: https://youtu.be/ARu71XKZ3KM Piano cover of Electric Dreams: https://youtubetomp3music.com/en5/download?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DTQMlpab5A2w%26ab_channel%3Dstevechristiepianist Haunting music for poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DKiPY6w8rE&ab_channel=LukeFaulkner Uncle Caveh (Zahedi) talking about Steven Forrest's The Inner Sky and then dancing to Pavement's In The Mouth A Desert :https://youtu.be/2PlpN_5GKTI?t=2427 (from the film In The Bathtub of The World) The Enlightened Beings Quiz: https://www.enlightenedbeings.com/quiz/

This is a telling about my beloved soulmate Max, and his recent quixotic adventures with a pine cone. --  We have no choice in the bodies that hold us Thing of dirt and water and oxygen marked by thinking and reacting and a couch one may or may not be permitted to sleep on. He may not permit me to touch him or to take the bone from his mouth, but he does, and that’s a choice based on many factors, not the least of which is his own desire to let me do these things. How I could ever think or feel myself more deserving of a single thing than this being, whom I call by a name the same way my parents chose a name for me. The same way my genes went expressing themselves to make my face exactly my face. This isn’t special. Or this is special. But it’s one answer, the same, for us both. Holly Amos -- Burl Ives version of "I Know An Old Lady" (the version of the song I  know from childhood):  https://youtu.be/zQHmZMf6zwo Video of Max that I mention in this telling: https://photos.app.goo.gl/j4eJn8qhS4QsPfkg7 Jose Feliciano singing "I Know An Old Lady" to a bunch of kids on Sesame Street (Episode 763/March 19, 1975): https://youtu.be/Ys-42_FKDDs Cat Stevens' "I Love My Dog" (Live, 1971): https://youtu.be/ET5drt_utUY Jane Siberry's "Everything Reminds Me of My Dog" - beautifully animated by Richard Raxlen: https://youtu.be/Y22Ityt7n6Q

COMING TO THE MORNING You make me remember all of the elements the sea remembering all of its waves in each of the waves there was always a sky made of water and an eye that looked once there was the shape of one mountain and a blood kinship with rain and the air for touch and for the tongue at the speed of light in which the world is made from a single star and our ears are formed of the sea as we listen W.S. MERWIN

The Object of Intent Is To Get There One lifetime meets another lifetime in a constant lifetime of wars. Leaning cities greet us at every station and every wound points to the same place. If your unique pain cancels out my unique pain then there is nothing unique about pain. What’s left to do but carry your troubles to where they’re going; once there, you stumble on the rest of us. Luis J. Rodríguez -- Aja Romano's fabulous doc on LGBTQ+ Harry Potter, and much much more: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08y8x0s I Love Therapy snippet from Joe List: https://youtu.be/odtAJ2kPdqc Paulina Villarreal's cover of Creep (thank you Paulina - this is magnificent!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6Y4XpBxjU0&ab_channel=TheWarning Arlo Parks' perfect Creep cover:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRDbsLYSwe0&ab_channel=ArloParksVEVO