my thoughts written in lower case

dear friend,

thank you for sending me the email regarding the gardener you’ve asked me to pass along and were you stated: "i hate doing this, but…”.

i find it interesting, how often we do things we hate doing. case in point is how you and all of us at some point when we’re faced with the task of not breaking the chain of these well-intended blessings, prayers, jokes, money angels, psalms, buddha wisdom and now the flowers, which my friend had sent to me against her better judgment recently.

though in our heart of hearts we really don’t believe our lives will change by doing this frivolous and simple act (which we hate doing),  our fear causes us to dither back and forth on the chalk line. invariably we succumb to the task.  conversely, should we decide not to play this game which causes us to do so in ten secs flash, where we scurry around in our memory banks to hustle up the names of our dearest and best ten fav friends, to whom we must send this sort of email on to, in order to assure ourselves that the circumnavigation chain of these valuable missives will not be broken.  in turn, the recipients will do the same. most will begin by saying, “I hate to send these kinds of….” eventually the blessings or money might come might back and bite us all in the ass. so far, i have not won any money from this type of lottery!

on the subject of fear,  is our growing old. we know we can't do a damn thing about it.  to this, the other day i was listening to the leonard lopet show on national public radio. or perhaps i was watching tee vee. as you can tell, my confusion as to which form of media i was engaged -- listening to/or watching, has completely left the room!!!. with certainty my lapses of memory is a clear sign of me lacking daily large doses of gingko.

anyway, as i move further into life, which  i prefer to say rather than using the "o" or "a" words --  that somehow by me not uttering these three letter words is my way of veiling the truth about getting older. further, by me not mouthing the truth, might somehow miraculously stall  life's progression. and then i think to myself, "well honey what about old money and old cars (as in vintage ) or wine and the old country? none of these seem to bother me. so how is it that when i speak about time’s passing, do my thongs get all twisted in a bunch! um i am not referring to my havaianas flip flops here! 

are you laughing yet?  

anyway, the other day there was a wise woman on lopet’s show, as i began to say a few paragraphs ago. she spoke about  the tick-tocking of our personal clocks that will undoubtedly stop one day.  she asked the listening audience, "why are we so afraid of growing old? adding, can't we get it that aging is a gift, rather than something we must fear and fight to the teeth. the teeth by the way, which we habitually and ferociously whiten to look younger.  btw have you ever watched old movies on turner movie classics, say one starring charlton heston, playing god or one of those old dudes from biblical times, who’s teeth are as yellow as lemons!  just wondering.

further, how is it that we use hair dyes to cover ‘the grey” and diet pills to get back to the clothes size we wore when we  were ten years old, and potions of anti-aging creams, which we smear on our faces and bodies in such a frenzy that one would think our minds were slightly bent toward the left? (or right). this is not political thinking on my part, but something that runs straight down the middle of the aisle of life and  death.

eternally yours,

 moi mahmoudah

ps: omg!!! its suddenly , lightening and thundering outside!!!!! i wonder if is this a sign from god,  aka charlton heston, that i will be damned for the rest of my years, because i broke the chain by not sending the flowers from the gardener my friend had sent me even though she hated to do so, on to someone, which I utterly hate to do and therefore have refused to play the hold my breath and wait game any longer!

oh well.

in our own time

of  late, i've been spending time with four of my 11 grand children, ages 15 - 19, who are working with me on a project that began before summer arrived.

it’s been a gas, as we used to say back in the day. and intense. but,seeing them interact with one another in a group effort, which has required them to  problem solve and systems think is an amazing experience for me and them as well.

i hear the music  they listen to as they work. sometimes a lyric jumps out at me affronts my senses, or the stinging verbiage of profanity might do this as well, causing me to completely lose my cool. particularly when i hear a reference to a female's  body part that totally misses the mark of her actual anatomy. this level of ignorance  causes me to think about the miseducation of young people in america, to the point i to want to puke, as my rebuttal to the wholesale dumb leading thee blind syndrome is pandemic in our society.

i am a bonified elder 'cause i've been around the block more times then i can remember and i do cuss at times. at the same time, i don't think i 'm a poster child for the older person, chomping down on a wad of tobacco and rolling it around in my toothless mouth with my tongue and waiting for the next day to come and go.  actually i consider myself to be quite youthful and liberal and hip and open minded and inspired about life for someone my age. and so with my grand kids, we talk about everything from sex to economics to politics and the wars. we cover the gamut of  rap music and revolutions. we also dither over our questions about strife and storms occurring all over in the world these days, and then moving onward to religion and upward to god or billions of people's idea of 'a god' and the quandary this still imposes on human beings leading to bloodshed and annihilation in the name of god.


my grandchildren are all smart and wise and good looking and talented and creative. i love learning from them. for example the symbolism of the Buddha’s' long ears that often appears in statues of him, or how political polls are created from samples of imaginary groups of people and not actual people who we are led to believe just happen to be standing on the corner of main street or wall street when a pollster appears from out of nowhere and starts counting. i worry about some of the stuff they take into their senses and pores from society on a daily basis , such as genetically reorganized food, petroleum in tooth paste, corn syrup that the human body has no idea how to digest; the terror of cell phones and the damage they are doing to their brains. or  the games they play incessantly  on the internet and their pads;  or the disembodied social networking  that has done away with true human connections (as i am guilty of doing right now).

further, i am concerned about the more far-reaching dangers that lurk about in the dark minds of men who run/ruin the world, all of which has given me an opportunity to chime in with the kids some story or political view point i might share with them or an historical reference that somehow is stored in my brain, as if i were a lending library and suddenly a hidden memory or piece of information i learned ages ago, presents itself as a thesis for our conversations. whew, was that a long run on sentence or what?


any way, recently, i heard about the danger of listening to music through ear phones. i shutter at the thought that the next generation will be hard to hear folks, which will include my grandchildren. Humm 

also in our talks, while we work, my grandkids and i  might cruise along the road about safe sex, or the recently passed gay marriage law, and then suddenly jump over the divide and talk about visual art, or skate boarding as a sport or theater and then we  might  switch over to the opposite lane going against traffic, where i tell them stories about my childhood and the simple games i once played growing up in harlem, and how my friends and i would  get so excited when one person in the neighborhood got a television set or when the watermelon man, who drove a  horse drawn-wagon, laden with ice and melons that used to have seeds! and that people who had telephones used a party line (to mean that your neighbors could listen to the person on the other line gossiping about them), and most people didn't have phones because they were a luxury item back in the day.

or i might tell them a story about the night i spent in the great pyramid in egypt in more recent years,  which  inspires them to want to travel,  or i might retell them a story my mother told to me when i was a girl, that has stayed with me all my life.

so the kids know stuff about racial segregation and martin luther king, jr's d march on washington and about  slavery ,which they are taught in school. to them this information is somewhat of an abstraction, which causes me to understand that they live in the world now, and to speak about these things of the past , might make me  seemed dated to them! but i know when they are older they,  like me,  will look back to this moment in their lives and might recall what we shared this summer.

to this, it was two summers ago that one of my younger granddaughters, whose bi-racial, came to visit me at my home in brooklyn precisely to learn about my side of the family. oh, before i go further, the kids are color blind when it comes to 'others'.

anyway, my granddaughter took notes as i told my stories to her!  she also shared with me what her great grandmother, whose  of spanish and caribbean indian decent on her mother's side, had told her about her past. that my granddaughter. then age 11, had the mind to inquire about her history on her own volition amazed me!. I was esthetic to be able to share with her what my mother had passed down to me about the our family.

at times  i think back to my youth and when my mother would say to me, "jazz what's that noise? you call that music?" well i try not to asked this question of my grandchildren in the same way or tone in which my mother spoke to me. but if rock music is being played on my bose, as it was the other day while they were here working, i offered, "you see kids the difference between the artists of today and back in the day, musicians and singers knew how to read music, and play a real instrument. and they sang not yelled; and did you know that rock used to be called rock and roll and that white people stole this music  from us?....blah, blah, blah. sharing this really put me in my place as an elder. i think.

i also feel though that my grandkids and I , meet somewhere in the middle. we are standing on a common ground of intergenerational diversity, and as i offer them stories about the past,  they school  me about the present. together we are all moving  toward the future in our own time and rhythm. with our own reasons for being here at this time in the human story we all share.



 moi,
 Mahmoudah

Just(ice) for Fathers

Father’s Day is celebrated in countries around the world at different times of the year. Here in America the first Fathers Day was celebrated on July 15, 1906. It was organized by Grace Golden Clayton, in response to a deadly mining accident in Monogah, West Virginia that claimed the lives of 210 men including her father.

However, it was over a sixty year period beginning, in 1906 that Clayton and two other women, Sonora Dobbs and Margret Chase Smith who in this span of time, fought to make Father’s Day a legal holiday in this country. Collectively these women’s efforts had required the involvement of four U.S. Presidents (Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Bain Johnson). Finally in 1966 Johnson signed a bill that made Father’s Day an official holiday that falls on the third Sunday in June.

While Iam on the subject of Father, I thought you might find it interesting that non-human males who have offspring, for example the Waterfowls (geese, swans, gulls and loons) are very protective in raising their off spring and that Empress Penguins incubate their eggs (not the moms). If you saw the movie, “Happy Feet” you already know this. Beavers fiercely protect their off spring (along with the females during the first few hours of their children’s lives.  It’s not long after they are born, that the father begins to teach them how to search for materials needed to build and repair their own dams, this of course is a lesson in survival. Wolves are known to help feed and protect and play with their off spring as do Dolphins. Then there are the Silverback Gorillas, who’s  role  it is to protect their families from harm as well.

On the opposite side the father protection coin, male bears leave the female bears shortly after mating with them and they are known to kill and eat their cubs.  Geeze.   Obviously this fact totally kills the image of the friendly Papa Bear (as in warm and cuddly children’s story “The Three Bears”) or the Northern Toilet Paper television commercials!

Moving on.  Domestic dogs couldn’t care less about their pups. Unlike Wolves they are more likely to abandon the mother’s of their children right after mating with her. Hmm.

Male Lions, barely tolerate their cubs. Some are even mean and cruel to their young. But the cuddly Rabbit have more tolerance for their kits, though they tend to be a bit rough when playing with them, especially with their sons. Horse Stallions are in complete denial about their roles as fathers.  With some  species both the father of mother couldn’t care less about for their off spring, leaving them to their own devices to survive in the wild.

And lastly, I thought you might be interested to know that International Men’s Day (celebrated around the globe) falls on November 19^th each year!  

To all you dads out there, please enjoy your special day!

Moi,

Mahmoudah

From Darkness to Enlightment

The Buddha once said, "Even a theif loves his family."

What remains in the wake of Osama bin Ladens's uncelebrated and unattended burial by water, is the suffering and grief of his widows and children, which allows me to think that somewhere

within this tourtured soul, there must have been at least a molcule of love.

I am in no way, condoning his actions. Rather I am wanting to think that Osama bin Ladin reflected something dark in our world, in order for humanity to wake up to our light. That's a tall and and impossible concept for many people to injest. I know. 

Buddism also teaches about the karma of a people and the country where they are born and live. And that what goes around comes around as we Westerns say to explain the implacable Eastern Religous concept of the deeds of one's past life circling around and showing up again in other incarnations somewhere in the Universe.

About compassion, which is the basis of Buddhism, I offer my condolences to the wives and children who have lost a husband and father. For to put Osama bin Laden outside the context of the human family  as this relates to his private life,  is as if to suggest we ourselves don't exist.

Regarding bin Laden as the orchesrator of the Holocust that consumed the lives of nearly three thousand people at the World Trade Center in New York city,  this year the Memorial to the descesed will rise like Pheonix with cinged wings out of the flames of the past during the unveiling of the Memorial on 9/11/11.

When I look at the archtectual renderings  of the memorial I am uttery astounished by the immesity of this project and the awewome beauty that has come from such pain and grief.

This past week our President Obama gave orders for the take down of Mr. Bin Ladin. The next day his body was intered in the sea. Two days later, our President was in New York City laying a wreath at the foot prints of the WTC memorial site.

It is through our pain and suffering that one achieves enlightment, the Buddha also teaches us. 

                               "Imagine"- John Lennon

To Birther or Not to Birther

Hmm my spell check won’t accept the word Birther.

Here’s the thing, if birther were an actual word, it would refer to a female (human or lower animal) who has given birth; not the one who is or was born. You see my point?

Now I am wondering what the new term will be as The Trump begins his new investigation to mount the public’s consensus against the legitimacy of the standing President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, higher education?

Honestly what I would give this individual whose sense of hair do is as crazy as his mind, and the hole in face is standing in for a  ‘mouth’  that utters much to do about nothing,  are the old diapers The Barack once wore when he was born in the United States of America, and had shat in!

Yes folks, s-h-a-t, is a word. It’s the past tense of the noun, shit!  Meaning 'one who …' well I think you get my point.

Moi, Mahmoudah

Eman Al-Obeidy: The Whore Of Libya

This blog you will read below, I had written on the last day in March in recognition of Women’s History Month. The news report from which I  drew my inspiration,  didn't have much information about the woman in Lybia. Many people hadn't heard of this young woman, Eman Al-Obeidy who is a lawyer. Her story is tragic and at the same time triumphant. On Anderson 360 last night, we heard what is thought to be Ms. Al Obeidy's testimony translated to English where she reported that she was  sodomized with guns,repeatedly beaten, and raped by her captors. I paraphrase what she said:  My life  it is beyond this; it is meaningless, I don't care if I die; I just want people to know what is happening to me and other women in this country.
Eman, I saw you on television last night. You were outraged, and disheveled.  I saw your beauty, and felt your anger and pain. I understood your fury. I applauded your noble stance you have taken in the throes of your country’s upheaval.  You have inserted your own pain and made the world aware of what’s happening to women as the men go about fighting for their liberty. Your mere presence has sparked such terror in the souls of an entire country it seems.

It was reported that it was an army of men, who purposefully perpetrate a war against you; that you have been raped by 15 soldiers. Now you are imprisoned for their sins -- disappeared to an unknown location. I shutter, at the thought of what might be happening to you since you were last seen.

Fifteen men you say, who have misused the instruments of love as a weapon against your holy body and mind?  

I too fear for these men, who cannot see their mother in you, or their sisters or daughters. How blind they are, to not be able to see themselves in your eyes when they raped you.  For surly you must have thought about your son, brothers or father who sit with you at the same dinner table and who sleep beside you at night. Did you wonder if they were like these men?

Oh you Whore of Libya, I am also given to understand from the news report I watched on CNN last night that you’re insane. Well of course you are, as the image of your madness was clearly evident and repeatedly televised, to prove that you are out of your mind.  I watched you scream and shout and witnessed you being dragged away from the camera and shoved into the back seat of a car. I saw someone throw a black coat or something, over your head as if this would make you null and void in my mind.

Could it be possible, that you the Whore of Libya, who allegedly  took on these fifteen men like a champ, are part of a long line of women in your country who are silenced? And that you have broken this code by choosing to speak out about the age old atrocities, visited on women not only in Libya, but all over the world”

And if what you say is true, I am wondering if you will be seen as one of the heroes in your country’s war for liberation?   I am wondering if the women in your country are allowed to be heroes. Because clearly sister, you are well qualified to be Libya’s Whore.

I Want

I want to walk along the edge of time.

I want to meet a perfect stranger.

I want to romp and sing in the rain.

I want to dance when someone is looking.

I want to crawl among the stars.

I want to kiss the man in the moon.

I want to feel like a kid again.

I want to fall in love with love.

I want to cry unitil I laugh.

I want to hear the sound of peace.

I want to be a perfect stranger.