August 24, 2004

Archbishop Jajjawi at the Dances in Seattle In June and July of 2004 the Archbishop Dionysius Behnam Jajjawi was in the area to preserve some of the chants from the Liturgy of his Aramaic church. This was a project brought together through the fund raising efforts of Peggy Hegbar, of Ohio, and using the recording expertise of Anahata Iradah a dance leader from the Seattle area who has become an international powerhouse for creating, recording and fostering Dances of Universal Peace. i first managed to catch up with him at the Whidbey Island last Sunday monthly dance circle on June 27th. Where Hayra Fatah and Michael were leading. This group shot was actually taken by both Peggy Hegbar (upper right) and i (upper left) ... who are both in the image, the miracles of Photoshop;) Click to see more images of that dance event (in higher resolution). A week later on July 7th Anahata led dances at the regular Wednesday dances at Keystone in Seattle. In this picture we see the Archbishop giving us information on the relatedness of the words for peace in Aramaic and other languages on the chart behind him. Click on through for more pics, in higher resolution. This time Anahata was with him leading the dances with the support of many of our best local leaders and musicians, many of whom knew Anahata when she was a regular leader in Seattle. After the recordings, and the public Seattle events, the Archbishop continued on with Peggy and Anahata to Ohio where this web site lists some of their public events and gives some historical information of the origins of the Aramaic Church with St James. His church and monastery still occupy the original Cathedral where the Last Supper was held and the house where St Luke and Mary lived. Neil Douglas Klotz, the foremost scholar of the Aramaic teachings in the Dance community also has a web page. He met the Archbishop and gives additional information on the significance of the church and of Jajjawi's efforts towards peace, quoting him: "My friends, the Middle East has too much religion, not enough spirituality." 7:19:02 PM   comments [] / trackback []

May 16, 2004

Jamal's new book i was privileged to witness the opening of a new book by one of our local luminaries (one who spreads the light?) Jamal Rachman! Maybe you can guess by his pose here (unpremeditated i'm sure!) that he hopes it will be a contribution towards peace. He did regale us with a few anecdotes of one of the spiritual worlds favorite apocryphal beings: the Mullah Nasrudin, or known as Goha in Egypt - i wonder what in Bangladesh, where Jamal comes from? The Interfaith Church in the Ballard District of Seattle is a lot of fun and know how to put on a party. So there was lots of good food and dancing throughout. A Maypole was still up from Beltane so some of us took the opportunity to rewrap it. Speaking of Beltane i know i have been negligent in getting the photos for that (and many other events too!) out! Partly that was migrating some new blog tech to the web that i have been using for the latest edition of my CD (don't forget to ask me for one;). This should help with that. Let me know how you like the new layout. Part also had to do with a hard disk crash i suffered on the biggest day of the Beltane retreat Saturday May 1st: i have been experimenting with a magnetic ball head mount for my camera and it appears my microdrive CF card did not like that one bit! Fortunately after much searching for software i have managed to recover 95% of it - and i have modified my design slightly to keep the magnetic field out of the inside of the camera! i used that modified monopod quick release this time. BTW, these pics are stored at a new online photoarchive operated as a free service. Highstreet. As you saw earlier i opened an account with Photobucket to house the pics i took for the Dances of Universal Peace events. They also work by donation: please contribute to both! i know it is hard to believe, but even techies sometimes do not have money, and it helps to give them some, if you expect to continue to get help and other boons from them! 1:04:04 PM   comments [] / trackback []

February 21, 2004

Pir Shabda Kahn at the Universel 2004 Pir Shabda Kahn was at the Universel last weekend. From the smiles i think you can see he was well received. Shabda is the Pir or head of the Ruhaniat order, which is the direct successor to Samuel Lewis founder of the Dances of Universal Peace. He carries a direct transmission from Sam whom he worked with. He has been carrying some of the emphasis that Murshid Sam had for a more Buddhist approach to meditation, including sitting for short periods. Please click the pic to open up a photoblog of some 88 pictures taken on the Saturday. The storage for these pics is provided by Photobucket. -- Which is free but runs by donations. i have set this account up specifically for dupnw events with photo essays by anyone who wishes to contribute. If you think this is a good idea you can show your support by donating to Alex who runs Photobucket. Donating to that link will directly benefit our usage by lifting the 100MB storage and 2.5GB monthly bandwidth limits! This one essay has used over 10% of our storage! 8:18:34 PM   comments [] / trackback [] ShivRatri 2004 at Salt Spring Centre [Click for the full set of Pics] Amazingly good connections treking up to the SSC this year. Ganesh was at my back;) Actually got in before dark settled in. All the photography linked to above though was done at night and w/o flash - pretty hard to have a yogic ceremony going on with flashing lights ... waving lights, sure ... but even the shutter click is enough sometimes to be distracting. Anyway i hope the little photo tour gives you a chance to become acquainted with some of the people at the Salt Spring Centre. This year many of their mainstays were with Babaji (Baba Hari Dass, see the Mount Madonna Center where he stays most of the year) in India. Where he goes for a couple months every year at this time to the Sri Ram Orphanage in Hardwhar. 10:33:54 PM   comments [] / trackback []

December 18, 2003

2003 poetry retrospective Since it has been about a year ago that i started writing in the poetry form more intensively i thought it would be a good time for a retrospective! Not being able to settle on a single format i am offering three, each with slightly different content, all have the same folded booklet format, but with different graphics and color photographs. So vote for which you think is a good format by asking for it! The basic Black and white, compact version, is also available on these pages Also available is one with a few complementary photographs and an additional longer poem about spiders. The third version features a 2004 calendar as well. These booklets are still free however your donations will support the artist, and others who would also like copies...Thanks! Send your requests for these or other booklets in the rePsychlery series on to me. If you would like them by mail please also include a SASE (self addressed stamped envelope). While on the topic of retrospectives i might also mention that i have submitted a number of items to the Poets Against the War site as well. And note that i have a blog devoted to Poetry: And of course there is the rePsychal discussion group, and our occasional get togethers! All of these will overlap somewhat as i think to publish one way or another... One way or another i look forward to more rePsychaling and just plain fun word plays with you! In principio erat Verbum, "In the Beggining was the Word" see the Sri Yantra graphic in its relation to the opening of the Latin Mass. 4:27:49 PM   comments [] / trackback []

October 10, 2003

mirror circles communities are mirror/circles each woMan is the intersection society is this truer mir/\cle ourselves weaving a reflection endless mirrors recede in mist woven in lights of expectation the love that makes us coexist an infinity of our combination Oh what society we could leave being in your unbordered midst our deFocussed eyes all seeing so shall all communities weave cyclopean view none are missed flow through O Mitakuye Oyasin 10:46:04 AM   comments [] / trackback []

October 9, 2003

the poesis of trackback i had this bad experience with trackback in the summer when i started blogging and it was new to Radio. So it is only today that i decided to try to reinstall it. Now i am wondering how and which of all these links get hooked up;) At the moment the creativity of trackback is still rather intense. Waiting for all the servers to sync up makes debugging tedious and highly asynchronous. my goal is to use the Harvard server for the trackback links. At the moment i am testing on RadioU's servers ... but i cannot get RadioU to respond for most of my pages. In particular only the `Home Page' now shows the `trackback' links. And the test links i want to work with are in categories... Perhaps it is because categories use different themes? Or perhaps it is because the RadioU server is never completing its updates? Ok looks like it is the Theme that is the problem. So i will stick to the main blog for testing. So there i see that my links are not being served as trackbacks... So i will stick the trackback link (which finally i could get by going to the main page's copy of the post i am linking to!;-) into the URL's to ping ... autodiscovery does not seem to be working ... have to find out about that later. Still cannot increment that trackback counter for my August 6th entry. The references say i should be seeing a screen with the outgoing ping ... but that was for MoveableType not Radio... And why does the `URLs to Ping' field empty itself when i go back to redit the entry? Does the entry not keep track of where it pings or is there a glitch in my setup? Well it is still not holding onto those `URLs to Ping' ... but pings are going through!! How is one supposed to remember whom one pinged?? i was getting adrErrorString in place of the edit form on my radio home page. Yet in another window i had the form. So i dismissed the bad one and next time i looked at my cited post it had a trackback on it! ... But again how does one know one has pinged another post? Do i need a `trackforward'? Right now RadioComments seems to be down so testing may be out of the question for a while... i get empty trackbackcounts and a time out when i click the trackback link. Working again. Still no `trackforward' refs. The data seems to be there in weblogData.root so i guess one has to figure out how to hack the home page editing form so the `URLs to Ping:' comes preloaded with URLs already Pinged:) Would that mean multiple trackback hits? So far no. All my rev's of this item show up as a single trackback on item 25 OK, leave that aside. Next task is to get the Harvard trackback server to handle the tracking. Need to keep this enterprise somehow vendor independent. But the morass of absolute URL's is truly daunting. Is there anyway in Blogdom to create relative references? Or at least to use DNS names through out ... eg substitute www.myowndomain.com for radio.weblogs.com/0127271 everywhere, consistently? That would go a long ways to vendor independence. Could that be hacked? Hmm i wonder have i poisoned all my trackback links with RadioU values? Would i need to do a `republish all' to clean up the muddle so i do not get some blokes tracking me with RadioU links while i only monitor throught Harvard? Guess i can check some trackback links in unchanged categories to test. Such a simple seeming thing TrackBack, Englebart and Nelson said it should be ... but it is 2003 and it is still pretty fragile. Such is the Poesis of Trackback. 7:03:06 PM   comments [] / trackback []

October 2, 2003

Zoo Life Problematic for Peripatetic Carnivores #date 03/06/27 Sein Blick ist vomVorübergehn der Stäbe so müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält. Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt. Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte, der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht, ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte, in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht. Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille sich lautlos auf—. Dann geht ein Bild hinein, geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille— und hört im Herzen auf zu sein. Rainer Maria Rilke The Panther In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris ... From unremitting experience his gaze on the flickering of a thousand bars seeing only barriers comes to glaze even in the imagining only more mars The easy power of his lissom stride paces around ever smaller orbits bespeaking magical dances deep inside of a great will in numbed eclipse When a crack unshutters that timeless haze a flash of the real dashes freely through that taut body poised like a temples maze straight to the heart, and vanishes from view - tr, greg heil 9:14:21 AM   comments [] / trackback []

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