This year has included some bumpy traveling:

• numbness in the right elbow and a burning sensation in the right palm next to wrist from too much typing in a bad ergonomic situation in mar/apr at work. healing takes a long time but physical therapist i've found is tops and learning how to type differently from a person who's background is concert pianist promises blessed results from the Repetitive Stress Injurizing.
• ruptured extensor tendon on left hand's middle finger's outermost knuckle near the end of june required wearing a splint for 8 weeks. almost completely back now.
• fell off the bicycle 4 weeks, 1 day ago and was knocked out for a few mins (no involvment with any cars, simply a case of the tires getting caught in some railroad tracks). turned out there was a tripod fracture below the left eye (hairline fractures in zygomatic arch, lateral orbit, inferior orbintal margin, and lateral wall of the maxillary sinus), hairline frac in left elbow's radius, and mild sprain in left wrist. much numbness below left eye, left of nose center, to upper left teeth but that's been dissipating significantly and can apply "full power" to chewing again.

one of the results of the above was doing a lot of one-armed/handed typing which brought to a halt ratical's development as well. of course, this has driven home yet again the fundamental fact that each moment we choose exactly how it is we choose to interpret what is happening and what we are experiencing and telling ourselves is reality. it has been a tremendous gift thru all this -- especially with being knocked out -- to experience anew the teaching of patience and being released for a period of time from the "i'm too bizi" dis-ease.

it has never felt as "backed-up" as it tends to seem more and more. a dear friend, who created the incredibly unique "i on Visual Computing" ([12/7/97: this was on the following, but is alas, gone now...] http://www.sgi.com/ion/ -- but the article itself has been recovered: see the excellent Mouse Mauls Man!, fall'95, vol #3, ion article on RSI with links to online informational resources) was talking about the pace of things: "but you've been doing this for over 10 years -- you're used to it -- i've only been in this industry for a year and a half and it's unreal." to which i replied, "but it's only been this way since the web kicked in. never has there been as much to do to keep things going, to keep things `current'". the urge within to do the very best possible while at the same time not becoming thrall to the machine at the expense of living has never been more challenging.

while it is true that something is happening at this point with respect to our perception that time is "speeding up", that we have less of it than previously, and that there's no "no time" for living anymore, this does not mean that the bizi future timeline is the only avenue available or open to us. it still comes back to the fact that every moment we choose how we will intepret what we perceive.

so there is the attempt now to pick up the MANY threads left lying on the floor. one of the most exciting for this one is the approaching completion of the first year's revolution around SOL of rat haus reality, ratical branch: it happens this sunday, the Fall Equinox, which occurs at precisely 11am, PDT.

there are a number of parallel tracks being pursued in anticipation of this milestone, the first of which is the expansion of the Ending Corporate Governance subtree to now include 18 more articles and a collection of Recommendable Links and Articles webly.

in all that is happening now, there is clearly a fundamental shift by Gaia herself to re-establish a basis of proportion in response to the disproportion manifesting from an over-emphasis on one aspect of consciousness, the rational, at the expense of other equally significant and meaningful states of being. our culture's worship of the intellect, the past participle of intelligence, and living life placing the greatest emphasis on thought, the response of memory -- of everything we've ever experienced prior to this moment -- storing up these memories and calling that knowledge, has imprisoned us in an idolization of the rational at the expense of instinctual and intuitive awareness and wisdom. we have lost a fertile area of our psychic inheritance and seem determined to leave it lost. present and accounted for as a birthright at the moment we first breathe, this irreplaceably precious universe of understanding and connection is shamefully neglected by the preeminence given to thought. the urgent feeling for life within grapples with this conundrum. for those who feel any sense of affinity with this, i can't recommend strongly enough a story in two books that has deeply touched something within more than anything equivalent in over 20 years: A Story Like The Wind and A Far Off Place by Laurens van der Post.

        He did what he did instinctively. Yet responsibility for an accurate report on his life forces one to ask oneself something about the nature of this instinct. One wonders whether it was not the process of growth, produced by the urgent feeling for life within himself, hastening to the rescue of an inexperienced and vulnerable nature, in danger of having its evolution arrested, compelling him to concentrate on the growth of things in the world without so that their example would set in motion again growth within himself. World without and world within, after all, whether one knows it or not are expressions of one another; interdependent and ceaselessly in communication, serving something greater than the sum of themselves. They are, however stern and exacting, allies of a questing spirit, particularly a young spirit, charged to join them both in a little garden allotment of space and time. Happy for Francois, therefore, despite the miseries of the moment, that he was free of the mistrust of instinct and intuition wherein contemporary Europe tends to imprison human imagination, and that the pagan influences of his environment encouraged an unquestioning acceptance of this impulse which came to him.

A Story Like The Wind, p. 123-4

        . . . Obedience to one's greater awareness, and living it out accordingly to the rhythm of the law of time implicit in it, was the only way. Unlived awareness was another characteristic evil of our time, so full of thinkers who did not do and doers who did not think. Lack of awareness and disobedience to such awareness as there was meant that modern man was increasingly a partial, provisional version instead of a whole, committed version of himself. That was where tyranny, oppression, prejudice and intolerance began. Tyranny was partial being; a part of the whole of man masquerading as his full self and suppressing the rest. All started within before it manifested itself without and tyranny began within partial concepts of ourselves and our role in life. Hence the imperative of obedience, obedience to our greatest awareness and the call always to heighten it still.
        All this, Ouwa would add, meant living in terms not of having but of being; a difference which in his own inimitable, ironic way he always stressed was something our civilised superiors could learn from their primitive inferiors. For what, he often asked, was the difference between the 'Bamuthis of this world and the Europeans of Africa, if not that the Europeans specialised in having and the 'Bamuthis in being.
        At that flashpoint of memory both Ouwa and 'Bamuthi were joined first by what his old nurse Koba had told him of the Bushmen and then above all by the figure of her dispossessed kinsman Xhabbo, poor in everything in which the Europeans and the Africans were rich, but rich in a way in which they were poor and deprived; rich in a sense of belonging. Though naked in body Xhabbo moved brightly dressed in Francois's imagination in his own vivid, unique experience of life and not in the second-hand experience that passed for living in the civilised world without; never alone and unknown but always feeling known and part of life and travelling in the company of even the remotest of the stars.

A Far Off Place, p. 111