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Practice--What Einstein Really Said

are you a sightreader or a memorizer?

Practice--What Einstein Really Said

I'm sitting astride a  window sill at my grandmother's apartment, the bedroom window we all like to jump out of onto sandy grass below, despite the adults' interdictions. I'm eleven years old. Opposite me, legs dangling in time with mine, my eight-year-old cousin patiently and proudly blows bubble after bubble. Eyes riveted on her mouth, I work the tip of my tongue into my own pink wad of Bazooka, trying over and over to create that balloon.

A quick Google search will tell you Einstein didn't say it.

Devil's Club

what hurts can heal

Devil's Club

I’ve been gone, and now I’m back. Once again, we’re in in-between time. Beltane, halfway between equinox and solstice. So much transition energy, and aside from the facts (which are extraneous to this particular post), I’m in the nonverbal experiential stage right now.

It’s not that I’m at a loss for words; more that it seems premature to put words to what’s morphing and shifting, for myself and for many in my weave, right now.

Resuming now, we were two-thirds through a spell to do with devils and slanderous spirits, who are not necessarily malign. So, here is the "plant" part, which is devil’s club.

Diabolo!

shuffling the prefixes, translating below the surface

Diabolo!
  • Anabolic = shooting upward -- and so "building up (muscle, etc.)"
  • Catabolic = shooting downward -- and so "breaking down (food,  muscle, etc.)"
  • Hyperbolic = shooting beyond -- and so "exaggerating."
  • Diabolic = shooting  across -- and so...?

The Devil Isn't What's Scary

or "better the devil you know"

The Devil Isn't What's Scary

The idea of a Devil as malignant power that can punish or take control of us is really the grown-up version of a boogeyman to scare children. It's the process of creating a character to act out the idea that the world is full of unknowns and beyond our control and that this should make us afraid.

The truth is--and most children seem to know this, which is perhaps scary to adults--the "unknown" and the "beyond our control" are some of the richest, most compelling, wondrous aspects of being alive. Another truth is this: many things we consider unknown we do in fact know; we just haven't allowed ourselves to recognize that we know.

Pretty much every time I have an "epiphany," after the euphoria of realization the next beat is "Wow, but I already knew that!"

Here's an example: the Devil is supposed to be terrifying, but we actually say "Better the devil you know." What is it that we really know here without acknowledging it to ourselves?

Plant for the Chi-Cross Spell

a throwback post

Plant for the Chi-Cross Spell

In this spell so far, "it is what it is" is not the whole story, and a chiasmus, like that phrase, is an arrangement in the shape of the Greek letter chi χ, or of the cross.

Nice timing, yes? We're looking at the shape of the cross on Easter. Easter which coincides with Pesach this year, unusually but perhaps unsurprisingly in a year already so replete with astrological coincidences and cooccurrences.

Chiasmus--named after a letter

bolstering the cliche

Chiasmus--named after a letter

We love our cliches and jingles, but there's something really satisfying about words and phrases that step out and step back, are mirror images of themselves--"level"--"radar"--"madam I'm Adam." These are palindromes, which means (in Greek) that they "run backward." In Latin the word would be "retrocourse."

But "it is what it is" isn't quite a palindrome, and so "palindrome" is not the word for this spell.
The word is "chiasmus"--a word named after a letter.

Only if it isn't what it was

and other cliches

Only if it isn't what it was

"It is what it is."

How we love our cliches in our poetic little hearts. Those five monosyllables, comprising just three distinct words, symmetrically arranged, trip off the tongue. The vagueness of the "it" pronoun lets you feel just short of flat-out tautology, and with "the right inflection and body language, you could purport to be saying something quite deep.

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