Ceaseless Picasso

This is the fish I look for each day, in the blue blue ultramarine blue waters near the shores of the Red Sea. This order of psychic events may be the same for other extended activities also: for the first few snorkeling days, I went for the thrills, new fish that I never could have imagined, the paintbrush of Ceaseless Creativity splashing me moment by bubbled silky water moment with firework surprises, ooooooos, ahhhhhhhs, screams of delight burbling through my snorkel like prayers. Here a perfect scene of frilled corals in lime green and pink with the long black spines of an urchin reaching towards me from the blue depths, a thousand tiny neon tetras swimming as one organism (maybe that's what an organism is. Maybe that's what I am) and two sudden yellow and black striped butterfly fish swishing through. And there, the fingers, a balletic anemone swaying to the sea's adagio, and always slowmotioning through the fingers, the clownfish in their orange, black and white stripes. The light aquamarine blue of the shallow water, the sudden neon brilliance where the sea's bottom drops sharp cliffs to a depth miles down. I have followed a big purple and green fish deep into the dark blue sea until it swished its last tail of colour and disappeared from me. By the third day of snorkeling, I am not looking for thrills. I am the rhythm of the reef. I breathe underwater, forgetting that my mask, my snorkel, are separate from me. I swim lonely but trusting until I find the Arabian Picasso Triggerfish (I looked up the name others have given him, but still believe he appeared to me alone). And then I swim with the fish, my bright coloured bathing suit and mask, and his Picasso painted blue and yellow mask, shimmering waverippled in the waterspace between us. I swim for hours with him, meet his friends, dart between corals and out to sea. Surprises continue, today a brilliant purple fish with turquoise dots, yesterday a bright neon blue partydress of fins swishing frills in all directions. But I am not looking for change. I am swimming with the fish. One-ing.

For Sara, as we enter our 60th year

To age gracefully. That's what she's thinking about today, on her 59th birthday. Gracefully? Are we such ballerinas? Did we do the first 59 gracefully? Boisterously, impulsively, trustingly, foolishly, forgivingly, deliciously, extravagantly, wonderingly, amazedly. I called Sara from the sunsoaked beach in Eilat, between dives through boisterously coloured fish, all of us swimming, yes, gracefully amongst the corals. Let us enter gracefully into this next phase. Gracefully means balanced. Balancing acceptance with triumph.
I accept the changes.
I will triumph over the changes, fight them, hold them off. I will eat whole grains.
I will balance gracefully between accepting myself as I am, and triumphing over the tempting pull of gravity, laziness, apathy, fear, hesitation, age. Moment by moment I'll find my right balance.
Over the phone as she baked apple pie with a whole grain crust, and I breathed unsnorkled air before my next plunge into that mysterious undersea world, Sara told me that she always sees shooting stars on the night of her birthday. And now, I see a note that there will be meteor showers tonight, the annual perseids. For a world where exciting changes happen, meteors topple out of their orbits, and we grow older, however we grow older. For Sara on your birthday: may we age fabulously.

The Moving Finger Writes

"The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Marshall McLuhan referred to our technologies as "extensions of the self". Let's go back and read our worn paperback copy of Understanding Media, or perhaps, download it on our new Android Smartphones.
Let me tour the Self I have created, in the short three days since I acquired this alterEgo, this tiny black box that functions as my telephone, my secretary, my memory, my piano, my photo albums, my navigator, my computer, my ever-renewing newspaper, and, oh yes, my Zen Guru.
Zen tells me today,
"If you understand,
things are just as they are;
if you do not understand,
things are just as they are."
Let me open it, and present the Self I find here:
*Press "On", and the screen is an orchard of ruby pomegranates, a glorious grove of pomegranate trees I stopped by on my way to work.
*The moving finger writes.......Already this machine and my moving finger are so synched, that I can sweep my index finger over the first two letters of a word and Word Prediction knows what I meant to say and types it. In Swype mode, you don't lift your finger and touch each key on the touch screen. You just sweep through the letters, so the fingers in a very short time simply know the motor pattern. Like talking. Like dreaming.
Next blog, I'll tell you about my piano, about my sign language tutor with videos of each sign, of the gallery that magically, without my input, contains my dearest photoes of all the years (I must have had them stored in Picasa all this time. There is always a realworld explanation for the mystical. And the bits and bytes of the realworld explanation make it all the more wondrous). Press "Latitude" and there appears a detailed map of my exact location. Where am I? Who am I? One more app: Eliza, the therapist. Type in comments and this little phone interacts with you lke a psychiatrist.
All this, and I bring you a small promise to myself: Each morning at 6, except Shabbat, the little black selfmachine will sing me sweet wakeup music. Before I read the Globe and Mail or the Jerusalem Post or my Facebook breakfast conversations or my email or my Zen message or my to-do memos, I will pick up a simple ball point pen, and write one small note on that previous, wondrous technological miracle, paper. Before I ask the world, I will consult the closest I can come to the pure self that I was, before the world began. Good morning, uncluttered one. You are here. Right here on the page.