I don't have much for you today. I sent this photo to C.C. with the note, "My life in pictures." He wrote back, "Good self-portrait." I probably need to go back to meditating. So says my mountain buddy's wife. I went to dinner with them last night and then we came back to the house. She is like my other "witchy" friends--an herbalist who can work on your chakras and see auras, etc. The world is made up of energy and vibrations, she says, and it is true. We can agree on that. It just takes on different meanings for the two of us.
But that's o.k. She's a good witch, not a bad witch, just like my other friends. I told her that someone thinks she put a hex on me, some sort of voodoo or dark magic, and my friend's wife said it's possible. But I don't live there, not in that "reality." That was, in the main, the topic at the dinner table last night.
Morality is a made up thing, I say. There are not stones or tablets, no universal moral code.
"You don't have a moral structure?"
Sure I do. I work harder on my moral code than most people. I think about it every day. I don't get it from a book I never read. It's not as easy as "see no evil, speak none, hear none." But most people like the easy version. I have a code, but it is not universal. My code won't be the same as yours.
"We each make up our own realities."
Well, there are things that are real. We know things experientially, though, that are not universal.
It went on like that. I tried to illustrate how science is a narrative full of metaphors and symbols even as it tries to represent reality. Symbolic language is inescapable, etc.
You know how that goes. Her husband, my buddy, laughed and spoke in Spanish to the servers at the restaurant. That gave him great joy.
"Does he sound like a gringo?"
The waitress laughed as I said "Buenos Dias" in Texican.
"No," she said.
I had the carne asada, pork marinated overnight in Mexican beer. My god, it is tender and good. We drank spicy skinny margaritas and ate far too much chips and salsa. And when we got back to my house, I broke out my palm reading cards and we smoked a little boo.
All this witchy stuff must be working for my buddy's wife, though. She looks like a kid. Well, she is, but she is 45 and hasn't a line in her pretty face. Meditation and a stress free life, she says. Yes, I said, that is what money can do for you. But I think there is more to it. Some "magic" if you will.
I want to believe in the Loch Ness Monster, but science has taken all of that away from me. So when I read this in the paper today, I thought it a bit of kismet.
Brahe, Kepler, Newton and Galileo Galilei changed the way people understand the world and its place in the universe.
“Tycho Brahe was the first of four giants standing on each other’s shoulders with 25-year intervals from 1580 to 1680, who formulated what can be called the modern view of the world — as opposed to the medieval view,” Rasmussen said.
Brahe and English physicist-mathematician Isaac Newton were some of the canonical figures of the Scientific Revolution who engaged in alchemy, said Principe, the Johns Hopkins historian of science.
While it may seem strange that an astronomer who created precise instruments to study the heavens and chart the positions of more than 700 stars would be involved in alchemy, it all came down to Brahe’s worldview, study coauthor Grinder-Hansen said.
“He believed that there were obvious connections between the heavenly bodies, earthly substances, and the body’s organs,” Grinder-Hansen said in a statement. “Thus, the Sun, gold, and the heart were connected, and the same applied to the Moon, silver, and the brain; Jupiter, tin, and the liver; Venus, copper, and the kidneys; Saturn, lead, and the spleen; Mars, iron, and the gallbladder; and Mercury, mercury, and the lungs. Minerals and gemstones could also be linked to this system, so emeralds, for example, belonged to Mercury.”
Brahe, the alchemist, may have died from gold poisoning. Gold was abundant in his remains, and he was known to make tinctures from it.
My buddy's wife makes perfumes from organic things that are personalized to each individual's something or other--chemistry, I guess. I told her that one of my unfulfilled projects was a company called Potions, Lotions, and Elixirs. I spent a lot of time researching bottles and labels, marketing, I said, being more of what I was interested in. I knew two fellows, each of whom had started suntan lotion companies in warehouses with 50 gallon drums and some fellows to mix up the chemicals.
"The chemicals are cheap," they each said. "It's the other stuff that costs, the bottles and the labels and the advertising."
Their logos were famous, of course. And that was my thinking behind wanting to start the company. But as I say, like most of my great ideas. . . .
Maybe it is just the mountain air and good water that is the tonic for her youth, but I think I'll give mediation and herbal teas another try. I'm open. Ever since I gave up taking the tincture of silver. . . no, I'm not kidding.
It is true! I did.
I'm a hippie, by and large. I'm open to most anything.
Ha!
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