Welcome to The Mystical Underground

In our backyard are an avocado tree, several coconut trees, two papaya trees, a grapefruit tree, and three mango trees. The largest mango tree is right outside my office window, where Rob has created a beautiful garden that is shaded by this tree.

We planted a tiny shoot of this tree right after we moved here 12 years ago. It’s a Hatcher mango tree,  and around here, for people who know their mangos, Hatchers are the sweetest, most succulent, biggest and plumpest mangos. Slice a Hatcher in half, and the color is a visual feast, a gorgeous shade of gold. One of these mangos constitutes a meal. Click here for a list of mineral and vitamins that a mango contains. It’s impressive.

Last summer, in July, we started picking the crop off the Hatcher tree. We had so many mangos that we gave away a lot of them, ate several a day, then peeled, sliced, and froze the leftovers. Ever since,  we’ve used the frozen mangos for smoothies.  This year, there’s something off about the mangos – not in taste but in harvest time. That mango in the photo could probably have grown and ripened for a couple more weeks, but was blown off the tree during a thunderstorm. For this time of year, it’s way too huge.

I don’t know if it’s attributable to changes in climate, soil, intensity of sunlight, or something else, but this accelerated growth is not business as usual. I’m not complaining, but this has me wondering if nature is fine tuning herself in some way, compensating for changes in climate and  for catastrophic events.

Today, for instance, I went shopping. At the fish counter, Sal, the gray-haired guy who really knows his fish, said they’d just gotten in some fantastic tuna for a good price and he was thinking of me and here I was. “Atlantic tuna,” he says. “From Costa Rica.”

“Farmed?”

“Nope. Wild. Just got an email this morning from headquarters that we’re no longer carrying any fish from the Pacific. It’s all infused with radiation from the Fukushima nuke disaster.  So if you eat out and order tuna, ask where it’s from.”

Well, I know where my mangos come from. And my avocados. And the veggies Rob grows in the garden. So maybe it’s time to become a real vegetarian and eliminate even fish from my diet. I haven’t eaten beef or pork since 1992, when we listened to Diet for a New America as we drove across the Hopi reservation. In fact, I had my last hamburger right before we started listening to that tape.

After listening to that tape, Rob and I spent several years eating mostly vegetarian meals interspersed with occasional meals of fish. Then my dad moved in with us and asked if we could, please, have chicken and turkey once in a awhile. I don’t miss steak. I don’t miss pork. I didn’t miss chicken during those years we ate just fish. But I would miss tuna, I would miss salmon. Then again, radioactive fish don’t appeal to me in the least.

I wonder if I can survive on just mangos, papaya, grapefruit, avocados, and whatever we grow in the garden. Maybe toss in some sprouted bread. And peanuts, especially almonds. One year, we had a couple of nice cantaloupes, a small crop of cauliflower, and about 4 strawberries which the critters ate. Green peppers do well here, but can I grow potatoes? Radishes? Apples? Probably not. OK, so hit the green markets for those items. Or hey, how about a community garden? There’s a huge swathe of vacant land in our neighborhood that would be perfect for that.

I sense something new is underway here, all because of that big, beautiful mango and this troubling revelation about Pacific fish.

We just spent the week in the Florida keys, mostly in Sugarloaf Key, a nice getaway. So when I came across this cartoon, it seemed an appropriate ending to a great week.

I first read about the Death Café on Daz’s blog. Blogger and author Lizzy Miles, who conceived the idea, is onto something big, I think.

From Lizzy:As you may know, I am actively involved in hospice and palliative care advocacy and what keeps coming up is that people in general, and specifically Americans, are averse to thinking or talking about death.  We see families at end-of-life who have never had the conversations about their wishes.  Not only that, the individuals who are dying themselves have always avoided contemplating their own deaths.  A Death Cafe is a pop-up event where people get together to talk about death and have tea and yummy cake.  Here’s something on the history.

What I personally find so interesting about this project is that it’s long overdue. For example, the other day, we met some friends for lunch. He’s a writer, she’s a trust attorney who helped my parents set up their health care proxies and wills, and has also done the same for us. At lunch, she mentioned that her previous firm had lost our file and she, now commandeering her own firm, had some questions to ask us about our end-of-life preferences and about updates to our will.

She knew that my dad had made his death easier for us – at least in the bureaucratic sense – by putting our names on all his financial accounts. She suggested we do the same with Megan. In the U.S., this enables you to avoid endless months of haggling.  My dad didn’t have any problem planning for death, but he sure had big problems talking about it. This is where Lizzy’s Death Café will prove invaluable.

Have guest speakers. Show videos like 20/20’s piece on James Lenienger,  one of the best cases in the Western world on reincarnation. Acknowledge the role that synchronicity plays in the whole death scenario and its aftermath. Strive for an atmosphere of acceptance and tolerance for differing viewpoints. If the first U.S. Death Café is done right, it could very well prove to be a tipping point in the discourse about what death is – and isn’t. Novelists do it in fiction,  but when it happens in the real world, in real time, in your life, while one of your loved ones is dying, well, that’s a game changer.

Hey, maybe we’ll try the second Death Café here in our repressed community. Stay tuned!

This photo is from our family room, a portion of the books we own – which, as you can see, are spilling from the shelves.  And that’s just one of the bookcases. A conservative estimate is that we own perhaps 5,000 books. Before we moved into this house twelve years ago, the owners from whom we were buying the house allowed us to move our cartons of books into their living room before we actually closed on the purchase. The cartons filled the entire living, floor to ceiling fan.

Nothing can replace the feel of an actual book in my hands – the smell of it, the way the paper feels against my fingers as I turn the pages, the immediacy of the printed words. That said, it became apparent to me about four years ago that perhaps e-books had a much needed place in my life.   I mean, really, we’re running out of wall space. So, Santa Clause brought me a Kindle for Christmas and oh, what fun I had downloading books from Amazon.

When we traveled to Aruba six months later, in June 2009, I felt really great about having four books on my Kindle and not a single book crammed into my suitcase. On our second day in Aruba, I set my Kindle down on the counter, but apparently did it a bit too hard, and the screen image shattered. The screen itself didn’t break – just the image. I discovered that the price to correct this problem would be about the same as a new Kindle.

That ended my love affair with Kindles.

A year or so passed. When I bought books, they were the actual hard copy versions. Then, for Christmas of 2010, I think it was, Santa brought me a Nook – you know, the Barnes and Noble answer to Amazon’s Kindle. Wow. Vast improvement. Except. With Kindle, you can download a book from anywhere because you’re on Amazon’s whispernet network; with the Nook, you can only download a book  if you’re in a place that has WiFi or if you’re in Barnes and Noble.

Eventually, l became disenchanted with my Nook because the system wasn’t all that easy to navigate, it wasn’t very fast with downloads, I disliked how the books looked on the screen. It also lacked what seemed like common sense to me: a button that would actually bring up the virtual keyboard. I gave my Nook to our daughter, and went back to buying actual tangible books, again.

After the iPads came out, I started eyeing them, doing some research. I went to the Apple store to test drive iPads, talked to the sales people, asked about how I could write a book on one. I figured if I could write a book on it, I could justify the price.  So  I talked to my writer friends who had iPads: “Can you write  a book on it?”

“Well, no,” said Hilary.

“Up, sorry, not yet,” said her husband, Jeff. “But hey, it’s great for email.”

“Nope,” said Nancy. “But wow, now I can get online regardless of where I am.”

But my friend Julie, a screenwriter, said she could edit a script from her iPad and that actors were using iPads for memorizing and reading from scripts, that directors were able to view dailies from the film they had shot that day. She said she had downloaded a couple of cookbooks onto her ibooks app and took her iPad with her to the grocery store and bought the ingredients from her ebook recipes. In other words, she considers the iPad to be transformative, particularly when you consider the thousands of apps, many of them free,  which enable you to use the iPad in new ways.

So, for Christmas of 2011, I begged Santa for an iPad and Christmas morning there it was, under the tree in that tidy Apple box. Santa also brought me a portable keyboard for it. Okay, I’ve been using my iPad for six months now.  Gripes? No USB port. Pros? Everything else. It’s the best gizmo I’ve ever owned.

I take it with me to the gym and while on the treadmill, read any of the books I’ve downloaded,  check my email, approve comments on the blog, and surf my favorite Internet sites. When I travel, I use ATT’s network to do everything. I love reading books on this marvel. Everything is easy, effortless, not hard on the eyes. I can read in bed.  I can also download PDF files to my ibooks app and read those when I feel like it. I can walk outside – or sit in my office – bring up the free night sky app and see where the stars are positioned right then. I can press my free Flipboard app and see if there are new posts on the blogs I enjoy. I can press my free Pulse app and read the news from any number of sources.

A few months after I got my iPad, I started reading stories about the miserable  conditions for Chinese workers who put these gizmos together. I had seconds thoughts about my new best friend. Then I read that Apple was trying to correct what had gone wrong in those factories, for those workers. This story drove home the point that we may be living now in a version of Blade Runner, a Philip K Dick masterpiece, where corporations own the world.

I still love my iPad. It surpasses the Kindle and the Nook as an e-reader and really is a minicomputer and camera and tech marvel rolled into one. But it worries me that such techie beauties are created by corporations that take advantage of workers in other countries who earn peanuts of what any of these gizmos cost.
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I can probably write a book on my iPad, using mac’s word system and my portable keypad. One friend told me about Scrivener, a word processing program that will work on an iPad. I’m going to try the free version first. But do I really need it? When I travel, I have my MacAir. When I’m home, I have my iMac.  You see what I mean? Once you go Mac, you rarely go back – to Windows in all its permutations, to Internet Explorer, to  all those security updates with Norton, MacAfee, etc. I’m a happy mac person who hopes Apple does the right thing in China.

Here’s an interesting video that appeared on You Tube earlier this year. It deals with physical mediumship, which is much more interesting to watch than mental mediumship. Physical mediumship was at the root of the surge in spiritualism at the beginning of the 20th century, but because of its nature – appearance and voices of apparitions, tables levitating, apports appearing out of nowhere, objects disappearing and reappearing elsewhere –physical mediumship was soon plagued by fakery and by the 1920s was losing favor.

Today, with all the hi-tech tricks available, it is very easy to simulate physical mediumship in film, and physical mediumship is a favorite target for skeptics and debunkers. But this documentary seems like the real thing, and worth taking a peek. We’d like your opinions.

Things get quite paranormal  here.

Thank you Laurence for alerting us to Scole Experiment.

I found this video at threads of the spiderwoman. And was in stitches.