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There are many varieties of rice, and truth be told the variety my mother and I eat is not in short supply according to the news.

A few weeks ago, the news instilled a low level anxiety as we watched reports on the growing number of people around the world suffering from diminishing food supplies, the increasing burden of gasoline prices, and rising prices for groceries for just about anyone. My mother went out and bought a large bag of rice. We generally buy large bags, because that is our staple, and we tend to buy a supply that will last through the Winter, so we had one large bag remaining from the end of Winter. Each bag will last about 3 months for the two old women who live here. Last night the news began to report that some stores were going to limit the amount of large bags customers can buy, while others reported that there really was not a shortage. They indicated that small restaurants might buy start hoarding it before the prices rise.

So, today, I went to the store to get one more large bag of rice. All that remained in the aisle of Asian foods was a couple of small bags and a large empty space on the shelves. A stock boy was busy in the aisle so I asked. He got a strange look on his face and said “It was full this morning.” I bet rice doesn’t ordinarily move so quickly. Perhaps the local restaurants made a run on the market. We do have a very high ratio of teriyaki joints per capita. Or are there other hoarders, similar to ourselves, who will keep 9 months of rice in the basement?

I, personally, feel that it is necessary to keep a decent supply in house because of the past. My mother has often said “If you have rice in the house, you are not poor.” While growing up during WWII, my mother lived through a long period with little food and absolutely no rice. I asked her what they ate instead. She said they would get rations of corn that had been pressed so all of the oil had been taken out, and a dried flaky substance remained…something like cereal.

Today, in every day, at least one meal includes rice, and every time that she opens the pot, she performs a ritual that sets aside a spoonful to her interpretation of God and one to her ancestors, before it is served…(of course that part gets eaten later.) She never wastes a grain on her plate or containers…(that requires a lot of dexterity with chopsticks.) To me, for our specific little universe, these actions are to be honored and are threads in the fabric of who and why she is. They are a part of me as well, as the listener and descendant. I would never want her to feel poor.
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Cloud speak:
Off on another tangent – at work, RICE is an acronym that stands for values of reverence, integrity, compassion, and excellence. The big boss played a bit of a joke on April Fool’s Day and sent out a message for everyone to look out of the building at 9:00 am to see skywriting of the acronyms of our values and standards drawn over town. I missed all of that because there was some appointment early in the day, but after reading it in the afternoon, I was left wondering how that would have turned out. “Wow”….”the word RICE pasted on the sky!…Nobody in town’s going to know what it means…..”:s!. I imagined morning onlookers craning their necks and wondering who was running for office named Rice or if there was a new market in town.


I’ve looked at rice from both sides now…from food to faith, from philosophy to frivolity…
And still somehow…

One thing I would do is make a staple challenge. For every bag of rice I buy for our own use, I’d be willing to donate the same amount to help provide someone else their staple at the food bank.


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Believe in me
Help me believe in anything
I want to be someone who believes

Counting Crows: Album – August and everything after

I’m new to an Orthodox discussion community (monachos.net). The members are educated and (often) leaders of the church. The topics are discussed in depth and with citations.

Just to share. I found this post interesting:

We went to Butovo today. Just to mention some information we were given. It now appears the shootings there continued until the early 1950s. Some of those who did the shooting are still alive. One man is insane; he says nothing but repeats over and over again, ‘they turned on the lights and we fired’. It seems the guards said to the prisoners, ‘do you believe that the Soviet system will last for ever?’ The reply was, ‘no - it is punishment for our sins but it will not last’. They were then shot. At first, the shootings took place in a large brick hut. The smell of blood became too strong. The executioners could not get rid of this smell from their bodies and in some cases, their wives left them. So the shootings then took place in the open. For some executioners, the stress became too much and they said they could not carry on. They were shot. Prisoners arrived in vans marked ‘bread’. They were shot at night. In the morning a bulldozer flattened the place killing any who were still alive and slightly covered the bodies with earth.

I found this news story about Butovo:

Butovsky Poligon is a symbol of a much larger, bloodier conflict in Russian society, that between the Bolsheviks and the Russian Orthodox Church. One thousand of those killed here are known to have died for their Orthodox faith. Over 320 have been canonized as “new martyrs” of the church - bishops, monks, nuns and lay people who were victims of the Soviet regime.

It’s hard to describe the influence martyrdom has on the Orthodox Church. My Priest often makes “political” statements (regarding our president, or the war in the middle east, for instance) based on his perception of religious persecution. That perception, in turn, is biased by the fact that even the youngest children in the church are regularly read to from books detailing the brutal tortures which occurred in The Lives of the Saints. An example:

Then they tore holy virgin’s eyes out with hooks, but she bravely endured everything, praying for her tormentors that the Lord would open their spiritual eyes.

Seeing her completely healed of all her wounds, they stripped her and beat her, and slashed her body with razors. A wondrous fragrance then filled the air. Then she was stretched out on the ground and beaten for so long that the servants had to be replaced several times.

She was hung up and scraped with iron claws, and her breasts were cut off.

On the following day, they took St Tatiana to the circus and loosed a hungry lion on her.

They threw Tatiana into a fire….

The judge then condemned the valiant sufferer to be beheaded with a sword.

Father Alexis bemoans: I hope that I might do the same some day! But, in the church’s favor, it doesn’t promote voluntary martyrdom and has even “forgiven” those who denounce Christ under duress.

I said to Fr. Alexis: If someone held a gun to me and told me to say that one plus one equals three; they could make me say it but a gun could never convince me the “truth” of the statement.

Yea, still, he said, we’re supposed to put our beliefs into action …

Rome will never rise again! Another church member yelled angrily.

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Two phases of the moon
Both dreaming
Sleep in silver robes
At my collar

The fanciful faces
Inspire peace
Carved in simple lines
On animal bone

I look again and ponder
The illusion
Two faces of a mask
Dreaming or deceiving?

I’m not much of a poet. I thought of a phrase “cloud speak” for how a person looks at a thing (idea) their own way or more than one way, and looked up the phrase on the internet to see if people already used it.

A lady out there has a site devoted to cloud speak, as a way to find your oracle in the sky, and actually has cloud pictures for you to literally draw your interpretation upon. http://www.oraclesinthesky.com/html/whatdoyousee/index.htm
We don’t get a lot of the big puffy clouds out here.

Dreams: I had an unusual non-dream last night.
The sun shone brightly, whenever I closed my eyes, brighter than daylight. I had to keep opening my eyes to get away from the light, and fell asleep staring into the darkness.