There's a couple posts still to come on the changing face of the book, but it's time to talk about objects. 

A big difference in today's bookscape from what went before lies in the material objectiveness of the book itself. Instead of a huge, ornate, unique work of art, a book now can exist solely in electronic form, immaterial in the sense that it's not composed of "matter."

I would suggest that when something is immaterial, non-physical object, it's less likely to be objectified. How appropriate, then, to go visit a touring exhibit of Buddhist relics, where the whole of devotion and spiritual consciousness is focused into pieces of body.

Is a picture really worth a thousand words?

The bees are vanishing. Your organic produce was grown in China downstream of a coal-powered water mill.  Sea otters are found on Alaska beaches dead of canine distemper, spread from Atlantic seals  because the ice cap has melted. That plastic in your water bottle is making fish infertile and giving little boys boobs.

It's called the finite pool of worry.  Or compassion fatigue. Information overload.  I get it in my schedule too--so many things to do, I don't know where to start and end up doing nothing.

That's one of the reasons I love the Origins film and telesummit: the presentation is solutions-oriented and positive.

But that can be overwhelming too. You get the "someday" syndrome, and btw, "someday" isn't on the calendar! "Oh, great idea! Someday I'll build a solar greenhouse." "Oh, when I finish this project I'm totally going to go salvage building materials and make raised beds and domesticate a bunch of quail..."

It sometimes strikes me as so backward that I learned most of what I know about herbs from reading books and looking at them captured in jars in stores. Going out "in the wild" and getting to know the herb and making a relationship with them would be "better," in my judgment.

Then again, most of our learning is secondhand, isn't it? I give thanks for all the teachers and books who share portals into knowledge, leave threads that we can pick up and follow through the maze to find our own experiences.

I was also the little girl who made potions from herbs in the back yard, so experiential learning has always been there.

I'll be talking about herbs often here, both for what they teach and offer, and for the metaphorical lessons.

Perhaps it's because I've been thinking about Mastery lately, but yesterday a mallow taught me about persistence.

This morning I woke up with blanket. Blankets plural, actually. All the blankets I own were piled on top of me, folded double, and I still hadn't slept well for being goose-bump cold. It's getting into the 40s at night (and I'm a very chilly girl). And yet the sun shines by day, it warms up enough that I cling to leaving the windows open wide, letting the air dance through the little house.

Yesterday I finally, reluctantly, closed my back door. Save during a couple thunderstorms, it's been open the whole time I've lived here up to now.

It's November, after all! In Alaska, I'd be wearing multiple layers all over; it's snowing there.

I have an intention to be open to synchronicity. It happens all the time anyway, so why not ask for it? Yes, I'm aware of the objection that I'm autosuggesting it, that we see what we want to see to some extent--but why on earth not? If I whisper a prayer to see a message about peace and then find a message about peace on my way to the grocery store, my prayer is looking for peace, and finding it! 

Sometimes I make specific requests, sometimes I just put an idea out there in a more general way. Lately, I've been thinking about doing a parasite cleanse, probably a couple weeks from now when I finish the current diet (which is a red-orange-yellow-white-spectrum-focusing diet whereby I don't eat any green/blue/brown/black food; I have eleven days left of 45). I'd been assembling the herbs that speak to me for such a cleanse. Then I found myself at a park, totally by chance, looking at what I thought were black walnut trees! 

• A cool thing about this website: check out my calendar page, where can be found Sufi events in Tucson and online, literary events, and more.

It's natural, almost cliche', for a writer to be drawn to Sufism. For most of us in the West, "Sufism" means Rumi and Hafiz, two poets of ecstasy and beauty. I've loved those poets since my childhood too, but I was also lucky enough to grow up in a house with books by Idries Shah and Hazrat Inayat Khan among other Sufi thinkers. And I'm a Greek geek of all things etymological, so I was quite young when I recognized that "sufi" is a Semitic pronunciation of "sophia" and allied words--that this is a wisdom religion, forged at a time when there was crosss-pollination with the Greek-speaking world.