What Tarot card am I?

I Am (description) Which tarot card are you?

Okay, I’m not one to litter my very, very proper blog with a lot of silly personality quizzes, like “What Tropical Fish are You?” or “Which Spice Girl are You?” or “Are You Igneous, Sedimentary, or Metamorphic?,” or whatever is out there now.

Yet this one made me laugh out loud for being spot-on. There are “types” among spiritual seekers and mystics, just as anywhere else; some would be: the sage, the crone, the warrior, the priest, the holy fool, the oracle, the wounded healer, the blind prophet. I’m drawn to several of these, but none more than the holy fool, with his openness, innocence, and courage to leave everything behind and strike out on the path. I use the term “holy fool” a bit loosely, though. My picture of the fool is more like St. Francis rather than the Russian yurodivy.

Just ten days ago, a visitor to Kitabu’s satsang asked me “What are you?” and I answered, “I’m a holy fool.” It was cool to see this archetype pop up as the answer to the quiz.

Tagged! 5 Weird Things/Habits

OK, I?ve been tagged by friend and fellow blogger Darrell in a cybergame that goes like this:

The first player of this game starts with ?5 weird things/habits about yourself.? In the end you need to choose 5 people to be tagged and list their names. The people who get tagged need to write a blog about their 5 weird things/habits, as well as state this rule clearly, then tag 5 more victims. Don’t forget to leave your victim a comment that says ?you’re tagged!? in their comments and tell them to read your blog.

Hard to limit myself to just five, but here they are:

1. I burst into song at the drop of a hat. Any hat. Perhaps I was raised on too many musicals as a youngster. I thought it would be cool if people spontaneously burst into singing to express themselves in real life; I started doing it, and haven’t stopped.

2. It’s virtually gone now, but milk used to taste colors to me. Yes, you read that right. Especially during my undergrad years, I tasted milk on a spectrum of yellow-to-blue. Fresh milk was yellow (meaning delicious!) and less fresh milk moved into the blue zone. Stale was dark blue, and sour, black. Also, skim milk tended to taste just a tad bluer, or less yellow, than whole milk, no matter how fresh it was.

I learned that this cross-sensory perception is called synesthesia. Apparently many composers have it. Olivier Messiaen wrote about composing “stain-glass window chords,” Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov heard specific musical keys as colors. Music-color synesthesia might have helped during those years, as I was a composition major. But noooooo, I got milk-color!

3. I used to save my pennies, then Scotch-tape together in short stacks of five or ten. Then I’d carry them in my pocket to spend them as ordinary change. When a cashier was suprised to be handed one of those mini-rolls, I explained “it’s a fat nickle (or dime),” as if it were the most natural thing in the world. (Most of them didn’t like this.)
4. Anagrams. I love them, but there are no anagrams for Jon Zuck. However, “Jon Meyer Zuck” converts to:

MERE COZY JUNK and
ZEN MUCKER JOY.

5. I love alternate writing systems. I developed the first computer font for an alternative English alphabet known variously as the Second Shaw alphabet, or Quickscript, or the Read Alphabet. Here’s a copy of the Lord’s Prayer in that font:

Lord's Prayer in Read Alphabet

I also developed my own personal shorthand. It’s a mixture of Gregg, Quickscript, and my own stuff.

Be it known to all, that on this 30th day of July, in this the year of our Lord 2006, I do hereby tag:
Ryan, Zach, Julie, Bob, and Meredith

We just want to eat your brains!

zombies.jpgI was writing a letter to a friend this morning, and zombies came to mind as a metaphor about trying to be an awake person in the world. You want to be alive, conscious, and know God/Ultimate Reality/Truth, and—they don’t. Some of them actually want very much for you to not want that. (Hell, almost every dollar spent on advertising is for that very purpose!) The zombies see your difference as something they need to fix. And they’re willing to help. They just want to eat your brains!

There’s something definitely less-than human about the ego-self. Rather than embodying the consciousness of God in the world, we shuffle along, half-alive, half-dead, destructively seeking to satisfy our insatiable appetites. And whether that manifests as a literal lust for blood, or mere selfishness, the result is the same—we want to stay entranced, “dead while we live,” destructive, and unconscious. Oh, and yes, more blood is shed.

If God created mankind to be his manifestation in the world, the result was a tad lacking. The script was rewritten. Son of Man. Man II. HumanThe Sequel. Not only is this one going to be more uplifting to watch than Dawn of the Dead, but you can star in it!

Check out Jonathan Coulton’s hilarious song, Re: Your Brains.

Seen on the Web

Sometimes there’s nothing better to share than what others have been sharing:

I’ve encountered an exceptionally beautiful blog, (some of you know it already), that of Sadiq Alam. The title is “Inspirations and Creative Thoughts, and the address is mysticsaint.blogspot.com, both of which are perfect descriptions for what I see there.

From a link from Twyla’s blog, I found another link that had this link “Martin Zender. This site might be the best expos? of the misunderstanding of “hell” as “eternal torment” on the Web, and I’ve added it to my list of hell-blasting sites on God is Love.

Here’s a bit of humor for anyone who remembers The Shining, the scary movie with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Long. Here’s a parody trailer for it, found at Real Live Preacher.