Flowers in the Cracks

Ideal
The Flowers in the Cracks
Express the joy of renewal of our spirits
With beauty, truth, and love

Real
The Flowers in the Cracks
Is a cultural arts program
Celebrating the renewal of our spirits and communities

Sunday, January 29, 2006

Calling Ilona

Today I spent a good few hours on the phone with Ilona. We have different visions for what we can do with the project. Ilona has a great vision for this to be a museum or gallery installation. I'd like to make it a fund-raising dinner with an art auction done by young people.

I also have to get my photographs from my Sprint Treo mobile phone onto this blog. Ilona is also trepidatious about this prospect. Being a professional photographer, she likes for images to be top-quality. Being a non-professional shutterbug, I am fine with grainy images, blurred and digitized raster graphics, and thumbnail "sketches" of phosphors.

I'm also encouraging Ilona to simply write for the blog. To not think about it. To just do it. She's up in her head on the process, planning and forethought. Which is good. I'm one for fighting from the front-line, scaling the battlements and revolution in the streets.

We probably need to tackle this from both a bottom-up and top-down approach. I also see it as a middle-in approach. Finding ourselves in the forest of possibilities, we can face each other and strike forth for a common ground somewhere in between.

Ilona and me are "buds." As in buddies, as well as blossoming, burgeoning persona dramatis. I'm also in contact with a few other creative principles. I'm hoping they see this project continuing on through the coming year and eventually may decide to participate.

In the meanwhile, there's plenty of my work-work and schoolwork to keep me busy-busy.

Night, night!

-Pete.

Friday, January 20, 2006

Justice Divine — The Minute I Say "I Do."

Justice Divine
The Minute I Say "I Do."

The Ideal of Living
Money is very important for living
to live and survive
in the city
or on a ranch
if you could grow your own food
write for enjoyment
to get people's attention
like to write
love to write

Copyright © 2006 Justice Divine. Published with Permission by the Author.

Justice Divine, who was once known as Regina Jordan, is an authoress living in Oakland, CA. Her unpublished novel is The Minute I Say "I Do".

She called Green Knight Publishing this morning. Green Knight Publishing, which has sat back and laid fallow like an overgrown field buried under a jungle of spam. Like a castle hidden in the ivy. This book only has something to do with the world of King Arthur, Merlin, the Holy Grail and the Knights of the Round Table on a metaphysical basis, and on an ironic real basis that my number was still in the book. She called me, after trying a dozen other publishers.

So I took off my "Green Knight" hat, and I put on my "Flowers in the Cracks" thinking cap. I accepted to represent her as an editor, as an agent, and as an emmissary. For now, without charge. We can get to that element later. Right now, we have a deal. On a verbal agreement, a wing, and a prayer.

Justice Divine is a beautiful, self-selected name. She is a member of the Acts Full Gospel Church of Christ in God. Justice Divine owns no computer. No phone of her own. She just moved.

Justice Divine is a 36 year old woman in Oakland, California. A land of sheltering oak trees in the midst of the land of heat. An oasis of the spirit in the midst of the desert.

Justice Divine has already written this book, The Minute I Say "I Do." She just needs the possibility of publishing it. I know what's required, from R.R. Bowker listings to Amazon.com Affiliate set up. Yet her book ideas, her hopes, are so big that my humble talents and my capital resources are too small for it's true success. Perhaps we can find a proper place in the world for her book. That's what I'd like to do. To find it the best home.

Justice has bestowed upon me her consent to help get her book edited and properly prepared for publishing. For her and for myself I dropped into a few doors and made a call today. It's too early to speak of who or what, and I have my reasons why. It is merely a few possibilities I wish to check on. I need to do some other work for my daily bread too. Just a quick thought here and there for Justice. A flower in the crack in the blink of an eye. And then, on to the next moment.

Justice Divine. That's a name that sticks with you. So is The Minute I Say "I Do." To be honest, I have not read this book. I just heard about the thought of it. Just the title. It is about the thoughts of a woman (or I suppose ideally also a man) as they commit themselves to a relationship. A marriage is sacred under the eyes of God and legally binding before the laws of mankind. Of course, it made me think that all the moments of our lives could be lived that way.

I heard about her book. I accepted her call because I could hear good Justice implictly asking me for my assistance.
I heard her proposition. When a call like that comes in, there's only one thing you can say at first:

"I do!"

Thinking about the possibilities, I said, "I will." I will help Justice get her book to readers. It is just one of many things I have on my plate in life. It is on the plate. I wish to commit through this project, "Flowers in the Cracks" to seeing it done.

I wish for the name Justice Divine to reach your ears. I wish you could hear her gentle voice. The poem above was not a conscious effort on her part. I simply listened to what she was saying to me. I was writing down notes, as I often do in a Silicon Valley meeting. From that came the poem. Her voice is lyrical. Hopeful. Filled with trepidation that it is really happening. Like at one's own wedding. The belief and the disbelief all at one time that she was getting a person who had published books to listen to her and saying, "I do."

When she had spoken nine lines of her hopes, her dreams, her most natural thoughts, I asked her to name her words.

The
Ideal of Living.

I once learned the difference between involvement and commitment in terms of the breakfast table. The chicken is involved. It gives an egg. It sacrifices a thing of itself, but not itself directly. The pig? It's no chicken. Its puts its bacon on the line. So I sacrificed a bit of my time today, to at least involve myself with the possibility of Justice Divine's new book. It is the egg of the chicken. It is the egg in the incubator of thought.

In the musical 1776 there is the lyric:
You know it's quite bizarre
To think that here we are
Playing midwives to an egg

All:
We're waiting for the chirp, chirp, chirp
Of an eaglet being born
We're waiting for the chirp, chirp, chirp
On this humid Monday morning in this
Congressional incubator

Franklin:
God knows the temperature's hot enough
To hatch a stone, let alone an egg
We are caretaking the egg of her novel. Readying it to hatch out. Chirp! Chirp!

It was somewhat warm today in Mountain View, California. Yet the heat and humidity of those days leading up to July 4th in Philadelphia were far hotter. Instead, the heat was radiating from the ideas alone. My mind was ablaze. I had heard of this phenomenon before. I thought about the words of Henry Lloyd Garrison, as celebrated in Henry Mayer's book: "All on Fire!"

Mr. Garrison had an epiphany in his own way. He'd have been a blogger had he the same technology in the 19th Century. Copying articles from other "radical" liberation newspapers, scrawling all day and setting type by hand, and doing in any way he could to put forth the simple proposition that no one in the United States should be the slave of another.

In a way, I'd like to create a radical act of liberation. The property is expressional, intellectual, not human bodies. I'd like to help Justice Divine get her book published. To liberate her little egg of an idea. To make it available to the public. Yet as Justice points out, she would like to be paid for her creativity. If we try to get her work without paying her, if she is not volunteering it, she cannot thrive.

This is just Justice's first book. It will be a short one. It still needs to get from manuscript form to be input to a computer so we can get it (if necessary) edited, revised, perfected, and then ready for publishing. It may already be perfect as it is now. In a way it is. It is already. Regardless of the elbow grease, the proofreading notes, the discussions, the bills and the other work it needs to get into the printer's, the distribution systems, and the booksellers of the world — it is already perfect.

Reading over her poem above, I almost wanted to correct it. "or on a ranch, if you could grow your own food." You wouldn't need money then would you? Well, of course you do. A lot of it. Just to pay property taxes, if nothing else. We all require money at some level or other to live in these United States. Even if very little. And in point of fact, many ranches and farms are not cheap to maintain. All the farmers growing the food need to thrive too. So, yes. Justice, you had it right. As was once said by an entrant to the Edward Bullwer-Lytton contest decades ago, "If you want to eat, you've got to work, and at last I knew Pittsburgh."

If there are any sponsors out there who would wish to help see this book get to print, open your hearts and your minds and your third eyes and your wallets. If you have computer or an old phone to donate, or any funds you would like to grant to the project, we'd accept them. We'd find a way to make it work. Like stone soup. And we'd put some flowers in the pot to go with it.

Onwards to adventure!

Thursday, January 19, 2006

In the Beginning...

In the beginning there was the quiet.
God was at peace.
And it was good.
God then thought,
"What if I were to disturb the peace?"
And with the thought, the peace was disturbed.
This led to the creation of the Universe.

God realized immediately what He had done and smiled.
In fact, He knew what He was going to do already.
He knew exactly what He had wrought, and He was glad.
He could simply reestablish the peace and harmony of the quiet.
He could destroy the Universe with another thought.
He could destroy it all.
Yet He created something.
And it was good.

God reflected upon his Creation.
"What if I were to let it grow?"
And so, it grew. In a Big Bang!

God watched as it grew.
Wherever his eyes played across the void
Galaxies and stars blossomed.
Here was a puzzle to solve.
These fireballs could destroy and create.
Just as He could.

God thought,
"Here is my grand puzzle.
I already hold the solution.
Now I must create something to solve it also.
To please me that I could create such a clever thing
that it would seek My ultimate truths, and love, and beauty.
With consciousness, faith, wisdom and joy."
And so, all manner of life came into being in His Creation.

God thought,
"Whatever you reward, you will get more of."
So He rewarded each creature as He saw fit.
And those that He rewarded were fruitful and multiplied.
And those that were not rewarded withered and are no more.
Humans were rewarded nearly most of any creature on the planet.
Though God loves dogs and cats and horses and ants too.
Yet to humans fell the rulership of the world.
And to them fell the puzzle of the Universe.
To be solved.

The lifeless Earth was once entirely inorganic.
Then came life, and organic creatures flourished.
Flowers poked their petals up through the cracked stone.

Today, this often plays out as a literal human drama
As real flowers struggle to survive.
They peek out between paved-over asphalt jungle floors

It plays our metaphorically, as our hearts, hardened by pain
By misery and disappointment, turn into cold, hard stone.
And once in a while, our hearts are cracked open
By the hammer wielded by an Immortal Hand.

Life dies.
Yet life is reborn.
The deadly Ω (Omega) factor leads back to the A (Alpha) principle.
This is what people mean when they say they were "born again."
Or when we speak of rennaisance.
Or we speak of renewal.
When we laud the triumph of a luminous, levity-filled arsis
Over a heavy, dark thesis.
My mother used to sing to me the song,
"You've got to ac-cen-tu-ate the pos-i-tive. E-lim-in-ate the neg-a-tive."
Maybe if we had more songs ending on a high note, we'd have happier people.
Just a thought.

This is not the first post for "Flowers in the Cracks." There is no beginning. There is no end.

The flowers always were and always will be. There is now. There is the now in which you witness them. There is the now that you think of them.

And there is the then of when you recall them in your past. And the future when you wish to see and smell and touch the soft petals of them in the future. Yet the future and the past are summoned to the now by your imagination. It is all now.

The miracle of the flowers is that they grow at all.
The curiosity of them is why there are so many.
Each looks beautiful in its own way.
Even if they are sort of oddly shaped or smell horrid.
Even those are beautiful for their uniqueness,
Given the right perspective on the witness' part.
There are so many forms of beauty.

Joyous Thanks

My thanks to Gretel Ehrlich and other conscious and unconscious teachers of Aesthetics.
My thanks to those at PS 114. I'm sorry Mrs. Glaser. Thank you for the hug years later, even if I was such a stinker. I never forgot it. Thank you Mrs. Nova. You were my "Super Nova."
My thanks to those at JHS 180 and Beach Channel High School: Mr. Lazoff and Mrs. Renee Darvin and Mr. Bruce Degen and to Bernie Rattner.
My thanks to those who taught me at Carnegie Mellon.
My thanks to my mother for singing to me as a child.
And for pressing certain books in my hands, especially a good Dictionary now and then.
My thanks to my father and my grandfathers and grandmothers.
My aunts and cousins and all my kinfolk.
My thanks to my siblings, and their spouses and children.
My thanks to my friends, for helping me keep me grounded, sane, and whole.
My thanks to all those I have adventured with.
In the real world, in our roleplaying universes, or in the realm of spirit and dreams.
My thanks for the folks at Apple Computer, and Cisco Systems, and Microsoft and Intel and IBM and Sun and Oracle and the Free Software Foundation folks, and the W3C and the IETF and IEEE and ISO and Yahoo and Google and Amazon.com and Wikipedia and Blogger and Frappr, and everyone in every project around the world that is building this massive collective consciousness record and truly mass media.
My thanks to all those who have introduced me to the world of memes and mnemonics and semiotics.
My thanks to all those who have celebrated healthy, hospitable human religious worship and kept the faith, in whatever form.
My thanks to the artists, scientists, craftspeople and engineers of the world, the parents and pet owners and all those who have maintained a right livelihood, who have shared with me their light.
If you are reading this and say, "Hey! Where's my name?" Give me a comment below and say hello.
Finally, my thanks for Ilona Lieberman, who begins this next great journey with me.

Onwards to adventure!

-Peter Corless.