What scene would I want to be enveloped in more than this one, an ordinary night at the kitchen table, floral wallpaper pressing in, white cabinets full of glass, the telephone silent, a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to think about all that is going on outside-- leaves gathering in corners, lichen greening the high grey rocks, while over the dunes the world sails on, huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table there is nothing that I need, not even a job that would allow me to row to work, or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4 with cracked green leather seats.

No, it's all here, the clear ovals of a glass of water, a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin, not to mention the odd snarling fish in a frame on the wall, and the way these three candles-- each a different height-- are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me if I lower my head now and listen to the short bass candle as he takes a solo while my heart thrums under my shirt-- frog at the edge of a pond-- and my thoughts fly off to a province made of one enormous sky and about a million empty branches.

In the United States, we're sexually obsessed, largely because our media have been putting us in a constant priapic condition, and our religion and culture have been telling us that it's not OK to have a hard-on. We're in this terrible double bind.

help them to focus on the long-term view but that's pretty difficult to accomplish in a business where people's heads are always turned by a pile of cash instead of by what the pile of cash can actually do."

If the Net enables me to have higher and higher resolution in my communication with people‹in the sense that I can feel to an increasing degree that they are "right in front of me"‹that's a very interesting business opportunity. They're going to lose a ton of money and lots of them will back off. And when they do, we're going to be left with brand-new infrastructure, and the artists will come along and do something interesting with it. I figure ten years will go by before that happens. All these iterations are absolutely necessary‹failure built upon failure built upon failure. I don't think you can speed up that process.

The fundamental power of network technology is that it blows apart huge existing infrastructures because just about anyone can put a Web site on the Net and publish for an audience of millions, instantly. This distributed environment of networking obviates huge media structures. If they don't pay attention, the technology will blow them apart.

So early it's still almost dark out. I'm near the window with coffee, and the usual early morning stuff that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters, and one boy has a bag over his shoulder. They are so happy they aren't saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take each other's arm. It's early in the morning, and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly. The sky is taking on light, though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute death and ambition, even love, doesn't enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, any early morning talk about it.

When I awoke this morning with a bad groggy feeling and later around 7.00-7.30 am ish checked my email, which I was doing after a few days, I saw this poem that was sent out on the Wondering Minstrels poetry list, in my mail box.

I realise that this is exactly what the Divine within me wanted to tell me, that happiness is more of a state of mind and less of anything else and that it's only by simplicity that we may go towards being in that state more often that we may do now.

It also brought back memories of walks I took with people I intensely loved on various continents and how very truely happiness was manifest in all those silences between our words and each of our footfalls.

As Thoreaou said, "Simplify, simplify for more is less and less is more." This would be my thought for the day, today.

Love. Sashi