summer space colony

Now I hold onto a future summer space colony of curves pastel and light.

I used to be allergic to shaved grass and peonies, but I find that with disillusionment and enough pain, irony makes all things loveable.

All the beauty we destroy

Since the United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world, it has assumed the privilege of being the World's Number One Genocide Denier. It continues to celebrate Columbus Day, the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, which marks the beginning of a Holocaust that wiped out millions of native Indians, about 90 per cent of the original population. (Lord Amherst, the man whose idea it was to distribute blankets infected with smallpox virus to Indians, has a university town in Massachusetts, and a prestigious liberal arts college named after him).

In America's second Holocaust, almost 30 million Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Well near half of them died during transportation. But in 2002, the US delegation could still walk out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade were crimes. Slavery, they insisted, was legal at the time. The US has also refused to accept that the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg-which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians-were crimes, let alone acts of genocide. (The argument here is that the government didn't intend to kill civilians. This was the first stage in the development of the concept of "collateral damage".) Since the end of World War II, the US government has intervened overtly, militarily, more than 400 times in 100 countries, and covertly more than 6,000 times. This includes its invasion of Vietnam and the extermination, with excellent intentions of course, of three million Vietnamese (approximately 10 per cent of its population).

None of these has been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal acts. "The question is," says Robert MacNamara-whose career graph took him from the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 (1,00,000 dead overnight) to being the architect of the Vietnam War, to President of the World Bank-now sitting in his comfortable chair in his comfortable home in his comfortable country, "the question is, how much evil do you have to do in order to do good?"

Arundhati Roy's full article

i woke myself up with a giggle

After a lifetime of dark oppressive nightmares, the fact that i woke myself up with a giggle last night seems tantamount to a threshold passing.

I may be in danger of a certain lightness of being, from the sheer volume of detoxifying sweat pouring out and tears.

beautiful machine animals in Nantes

more

Gazans stream over wall

the dumping grounds

Losing a loved one is akin to facing death. In the last year I've lost my childhood dog and my maternal grandmother to death, and my life partner to... I don't know. Just recently there was a surprising death of a lovely woman at work, and the more I look for it, the more I see death abounding. People are dying in Gaza especially this week, in Iraq everyday, in Afghanistan. I check in on these deaths every morning on Al Jazeera, and they create the background white noise of desolation. I may be reducing important differences too much by comparing loss and death; sometimes death seems more like a transition than true loss. But sometimes I fear that this kind of mentality can only really be afforded by those who live outside perpetual war and destruction.

highlight photos from Mexico

Graffiti parody- Lucha Libre mask

Exceptional mural at the Museo Nacional de Antropología

A supermercado in La Condesa with eye catching wall art

Spectacular cactus reserve in Zapotitlán and San Juan Raya, Tehuacán

Despite its touristic intent, this indigenous ritual dance in Chapultepec park left a deep impact on me. Recreations of spiritual rituals, when done with integrity, still hold some critical essence of the original power. I'll post a video of it soon.






















Caitlin at the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán

















A leisurely breakfast of Huevos a la Mexicana at Cafe Momedi in the Cuidad




























Photos taken by Caitlin Berrigan
For Caitlin's full photo stream

When I arrived to work this morning, everyone was huddled around in the hallway outside of my office. They told me that one of the career administrative assistants, Margaret, had passed away last night or this morning.

It struck me particularly hard- both because she was a lovely funny woman who liked to stroll around the building dropping in on everyone to crack a lighthearted sarcastic joke, and also because it changes the atmosphere so completely in our daily lives to encounter mortality so unexpectedly. We all chuckled just yesterday with her, and she even brought her puppy into work. In "safe" little nooks of the ordinary death can still find us, and a newfound solidarity forms around we who are left behind, or still alive.

There is a look of alarm in everyone's eyes. Postures are more stiff and forward leaning.

This is really important everyone thinks.

Nothing can compare to this.

But how do we claim our relative entitlement to grieve her? Who was close enough to her, personally, not professionally, to warrant tears now, in public? Who must cry quietly back at their desk? and how quickly will this abrupt stringy bond around crisis fade into the normal charges that keep us all discrete and separate units of experience?