1. After attending the Northwest Passage's program Wednesday evening featuring Leah Sottile and after listening to her discuss her newly published book, Blazing Eye Sees All, a sweeping historical and contemporary study of New Age spirituality, its origins, its popularity in the USA, and some of its prominent leaders (Sottile focuses primarily on women), I was compelled to start reading it today.
New Age spirituality is not grounded in creeds, doctrines, a single authoratative book, and has no structures that look like, say, Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.
It's amorphous. People who practice New Age spirituality have commonalities, but within the New Age movement exists much variety, many different emphases, and any number of self-appointed, for lack of a better word, leaders.
I referred to Eugene in an earlier blog post as a robust city. I hear or read people typify Eugene as a hippie town, a university town, a town of anarchists, and any number of other things. The longer I lived in Eugene and the more years I taught at Lane Community College, the more variety I experienced in Eugene. It's a business center. A medical center. It has deep roots in logging and blue collar work. I saw close up how the police work as well as the DA's office when I spent a month of grand jury -- nothing hippy dippy about these pros.
So, a lot was, and is, in the air in Eugene -- including New Age spirituality.
Reading Sottile's book, so far, has kindled many memories, many conversations, many fragrances, many images, many visits to Saturday Market and a few visits to the Oregon Country Fair and I'm learning more about what might have lain behind the way many people I encountered, taught, talked with, and was friends with over the years saw the world and their place in it. I couldn't and didn't buy in, but I listened and did my best to sort out the virtues from the wackiness of what these people had to say about their spiritual lives.
2. I listened to Jeff's radio program Deadish tonight live. He arranged tonight's show chronologically, playing cuts from live shows that were performed on April 3 many different years. He played Miles Davis, Santana, Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, Jerry Garcia Band, and treated us listeners to another good dose of the Dead.
Variety.
That's what I like.
Tonight Jeff played a great variety of music, all connected to the Grateful Dead some (like Miles Davis) by improvisation, some by style (like bluegrass), some were musicians who played with Jerry Garcia in projects like Old and in the Way or the Jerry Garcia Band, and some were musicians like, say, Carlos Santana, who were vital contributors to the the San Francisco/Bay Area sound over fifty years ago.
3. I was very happy to complete the NYTimes crossword puzzle I worked today. I figured out that the puzzle featured some rebus squares and I figured out the puzzle's rebus almost right away, a very rare feat for me.
If you wonder what a rebus is, here's help from the NYTimes: "Rebuses are crossword elements where solvers are asked to write multiple letters in the same square."
Or in a single square.
The rebus I figured out today appeared in six different squares.
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