Hot Grass Buns

Another year but not another place. Still in the Big Apple, still suffering the ignominy of a 2 not 4-day Easter Weekend. By planning ahead this year, I was able to eat the buns of delight at work for breakfast so did not spend the day fearing for my immortal soul. My single strand of potential ascendance to dogma heaven continues albeit as tenuous as ever. And here they are … this time I bought a bunch so I could do some valuable missionary work with the locals, a heathen lot – many had never had one in their lives!

Other folk’s traditions often look pretty good but really I think this is a lot to do with the grass being greener on the other side.

Yet isn’t that phrase just meant to make us happy with our lot, no matter what it’s state? Look down, look around, what is the state of your patch? Lush and full, or sketchy and dry, overgrown, out of control, filled with weeds or stones. Chances are it needs some tending. Looks great? Maintenance is still required! And by tending I mean spending good old quality time, digging in the dirt of your life because that is what this is really about.

Fingers in, kneading the soils that provide for the roots of your joys. You may find a lot of hard things, sticks and stones and all the names people have called you! They’ll need removing so the lawn can grow evenly, each root able to find its way to the blades they support immediately above

Its ok to leave the fun and curious things, a mushroom or little wild flower are great but if something will pervade and takeover - it should go.

And if you don’t then the phrase is likely to also lose all meaning… if your grass ain’t green then why would the neighbor think it is!

Here in New York I only have 2 trays printed to look like grass... Here is a pic of me lovingly laying a lawn I once had. It is an old picture and reminds me of the joy of tending one’s grass. Do it while you still have it, before the last Sparrow flies.

Also you never know when a butterfly might flutterby and charmed by the state of the place alight for a beat. And in that beat they may find another and leave you some Easter eggs of the caterpillar kind… meet Stripe, a butterfly baby.

Just as he thought his whole life was coming to an end, he turned into a Schmetterling.

    

         

It is extraordinary how fast things can change but I no longer consider the Medieval Wheel of Fortune an accurate model. Yes Fate is blind and She’ll spin you a merry dance but I do believe the Sun can rise on one man without having to set on any other. Even if we aren’t truly free, we have to act as if we are! We can live in abundance, take down the fence, let our grasses grow as One.

Love and Light

Click on this to listen rather than read!

Slither-Me-Timbers

10 Feb - Year of the Snake

After the calm of the Rabbit came the ecstatic flight of the Dragon. From that great height you surveyed the world and its horizon of wondrous mountains. And well you did to set your aspirations on them.

But between there and the now stretches the Valley of the Snake.

Remember where those distant Ranges lay, as one danger after another opportunity will rise, challenging you to keep your focus necessarily near. Stay low to the floor. The closer you are to the pulse in your gut the easier you’ll know your path.

Change is coming, so seek planning permission for character building. Make it solid and worthwhile, helm over, rudder on its way, the creak as the ship of your life begins to shift course. No going back mehearties… that old skin wont fit anymore.

A good year for a new perspective… lower your gaze, shorten your stride… doubt not. Wriggle and writhe… Internal growth through external change.

Much love

Doctor Lobster

Previous years:

As Fresh As Dragon Breath
Hoppity-Hop
RRR-Miaow
Oxen-HO!
Rat-a-tat
Wallowing in it
Woof Hey

Cock-a-doodle-do
Monkey-man

Hot Cross Buns of Existence

I’ve taken many steps down the uncertain path of self-inspired spirituality. This has led me away from the Catholicism I was half-born into. Yet last weekend I recognized something I do value about religion.

It came as indignance not epiphany. Imagine discovering that not even one extra day of the God-given right to a 4-day Easter weekend was going to be honoured by the masters of the Apple on the Eastern Shore. Heavens above it’s a religious holiday and tradition and I was deprived of it!

Indeed, you reach for the hypocrite button but that’s nothing I deny. Its been plainly evident from my always refusal to eat Octopii (they have 3 hearts!) to an acquired honourable act of not eating Crabs to the relevant indulgence of Hot Cross Buns on Good Friday.

How would I be able to enjoy these delectations while smeared up against the coalface of my current film project – unable to squeeze in even a ray of daylight?

It’s a long shot but eternal redemption may lie in even a strand of inexplicable dogma adherence. So twinning that with the lottery law of “you have to be in it to win it” I make sure I do leave the office on Good Friday in search of my winning ticket to heaven in the form of a delectable Bun, Crossed and Hot.

After a few wanderings around god-forsaken Times Square all I found was the most blasphemous cling-film-wrapped masqueraders. Hardly the most tempting of your work Satan! Aside from dubious consistency these things visibly contained those chips of mangy fake fruit all shiny green and red. I have standards and these would not do. So, I was forced, by weight of calvinist work ethic (I blame my atheist father), back to the office empty-handed, bereft of hope.

Sigh.

But when long past dark I made it back to the Apple Core, Gabriel himself made a visitation in the form of the superlative Miss Sparrow who’d equally scoured the Orchard and found 2 types of Hot Cross Bun! So while I normally appreciate these in the morning at least I was able to scoff them in the evening! See them here in all their finery next to the small shrine of special things I’ve assembled in a short few rounds of the sun.

A few of the more observant among you might notice a half-zested orange in that shot and the curious among you will wonder what significance it might hold in a religious “still life”. It signifies that this weekend was also to be a belated birthday weekend. In the annals of Lobster-lore, there is an allowance to defer the true celebrations if a birthday is had on the far side of the planet from one’s lover especially if it’s a big one! I was filming in Manila for my last “sun-circle”. And orange zest is essential as an ingredient to the icing of a Carrot Cake. And Miss Sparrow’s is indeed a formative religious experience. So that evening was like Michael and Gabriel popping by together.

As for growing up… from the beginning of ‘all-things’ the universe has strived to get as big as it can as fast as it can. And right now its exponentially expanding to more area all the time. Me too! Probably more like a Hot Cross Bun in the Oven expanding at the speed of yeast than the speed of light but now I am a 40-year old sphere of existence! The orb of my life expands 40 years in all directions giving me a much bigger surface experiential area than when I was a mere 38, 29, 7, 1 year old globule. And intriguingly this reminds me of the saying “The greater the searchlight, the greater the circumference of the Unknown”… This explains quite well how the more one knows the more one might be aware ones does not know.

So this ‘Me-sphere’ abuts with more unexplored territory than ever before and this fuels my thirst for horizon expansion. I understand this may fuel those perceptions some have that I will never be happy nor satisfied with what I have. Let’s not think because things are good that one shouldn’t continue to adventure!

But I think we’re less ‘Bun-beings’ than ‘Bubble-people’. Gorgeous cosmic existences, appearing, swelling and finally popping to scatter traces of our iridescence across all the spectral dimensions. I await my ‘after-bubbleness’ with all the expectation that my floating has served something else’s purpose.

Hope you had a great Easter – mine has been in a bubble of loving joy!

Much love

Doctor Lobster

ps here are a few other sphere-ish places I've been or things I've seen recently...

Bizarre Species

As Fresh as Dragon Breath

23 January - Year of the Dragon

Dum dum de dum and here the Dragon comes!

A tempest blowing up the gentle slopes of your life during the Rabbit. Whipping up your stagnant plans and deeds, so your only recourse is to climb higher into the mountains.

And in their deep fearful caves lies your destiny. Meander not this year. Feet forward and eyes on the horizon, rise. For as long as you stride with purpose the dragon will carry you on its back. To each of your steps she adds a dozen wingflaps. Head in the wrong direction and by years end you will be in a far worse place.

Now that last sounds wretched indeed but fear not for it only takes a beat of intention and integrity in line with your heart to give the dragon true direction and with it dreams far beyond the conventional ...

As each of us owes god a Death so too each of us owes a Life. Welcome the fresh air in to rejoice from the windswept majesty of the peak you're about to scale.

Much love

Previous years from Doctor Lobster


Hoppity-Hop
RRR-MiaowOxen-HO!
Rat-a-tat
Wallowing in it
Woof Hey
Cock-a-doodle-do
Monkey-man

and thanks to Pashet for the fetching blueness

Hot Cross Double Toad*

Few of you may know this but I am a deeply spiritual man, given to an annual retreat to the ritual of the Hot Cross Bun (previous HCB here and here). Today I had the blessed opportunity to (thoroughly) enjoy some of these delights of Christian tradition in the comfort of my own home. Or, care of unseasonally good weather, my garden.

So here are some snaps of me at worship with the fruits of his almighty sacrifice…






However I need to turn to darker matters now… You may recall the terrifying tale of The Headless Duck of my De Beauvoir garden. Well strange as that was, the truth may be even stranger. Back then I guessed it was a fox or some-such but new evidence raises a more horrific possibility!!!!!

Over a slightly indefinite period of at least a year but possibly two I have sighted a pair of toads. I saw them first while on a late night snail hunt. I was surprised that there were toads in my garden. But as I had caught them in flagranto delicto, I expect they were even more surprised but they chose to just stay still, two throats a-bloating. Toads fucking, fucking hell I thought! So that’s how they do it! Good on you toads – make more toadlets and eat more snails please. A nice find for a damp spring night. On I moved, stalking the stalky-eyed munchers of my beloved potatoes. I took at least 50 ‘shells’ that evening.

Some time later, weeks perhaps, while doing a routine weed of another snail-zone I encountered the toads again. Once more ‘at it’. It’s a wonder that rabbits have the reputation toads should have. Or maybe snails are a toadal aphrodisiac. Then my garden is the veritable rhino horn of amphibia! These 2 did however hop off together – one still upon the other.

Many months later, deep into autumn, in the company of the nubile, Miss Sparrow - whose often been subjected to the effects of my garden – I reencountered these frogs – at it yet again. I mention her as an independent verifier of this strange tale (and because I love her and am proud to sneak her into my life). Again the frogs made off into the undergrowth in their tandem fashion.

However, I felt the coincidence of always finding these frogs at it quite suspicious. Perhaps it’s a mother child dependent thing in which the child is lazily clinging on a little longer than it should.

Having stopped biology when I was 14 I’d not had the opportunity to dissect a frog nor learn much more than the egg, tadpole, toad cycle… and given that thought – at what point would a tadpole climb onto a parental-frogs’s back to score a free ride? And these toads have been the same fully-grown size since the first encounter. Peculiar…

So this Spring, but a few days ago… I did my first de-weeding of the ‘bog-out-back’. And low – who turns up? But the two toads… just the same size and one on top of another… I’m fond of these buggers, and used to them of course, so I leave them be and get on with bagging up the soon-to-wake slimy marauders I find.

Yet when I turn to the hosepipe I find the toads pottering around in a puddle right out in the open, at least a yard from cover. Having seen them now so often like this, suddenly I wanted to see them separate. But they don’t, and they don’t do it on camera. So what I have in my garden are Siamese Twin-Toads! How about THAT!!!!!

Could they have been the beast that beheaded the duck? Or did that headless fiend do this to them or is my garden the experimental playground for some Frankenstenian fiend?!?!?



And here is the promised video! Much higher quality available!


* I accept that due to my limited schooling the star(s) of this message may in fact be frogs not hot cross buns or toads.



And on another note – I will be off out of London and the UK in a few weeks until July 2012! Working on a top secret movie which one day you will hopefully all see…For the rest of this year I’ll be in Philadelphia, Phillippines and the Yukon while January to June next year sees me in New York.

Super much love…

Hoppity Hop

3 Feb - Year of the Rabbit

A year of indulgence in dream and delight, for what else is there to do between the rock of the Tiger and the hard place of the Dragon?

Seeds sown in previous years will sprout to become more permanent in your life. Don’t expect huge or obvious growth though, that comes with next year’s Dragon. This time is characterized by the small many, yet the sum is always greater than the parts. These innumerable events won’t be domino’s falling one after another but like a myriad of beautiful flowers springing up all across the meadow of your life.

It’s the best year possible to enjoy the verdant valley of existence. So roam free of fences, sniff inquisitively at any rose you pass, roll over, spin around, burrow just for fun and above all be sure to nourish all aspects of self!

Enjoy each precious moment here because next year you scale the mountain.

Til then though, more than beware, be aware.

Much love

Previous years from Doctor Lobster:

RRR-Miaow
Oxen-HO!
Rat-a-tat
Wallowing in it
Woof Hey
Cock-a-doodle-do
Monkey-man