daily headspa

New and improved. Bring it on! It’s what we live for. Surely everything can be improved right? And everything improved is new again!

We want it always new and improved. We expect it, we demand it! In fact we seem so addicted to the idea that we will buy something that really can’t be improved that much something that we know can’t be improved that much, (peanut butter for example; you crush some peanuts and put them in a jar...), just because it has a new and improved sticker on it...

We’d be wrong, I think, to imagine that the addiction to novelty was itself novel. Or that its always a bad thing.

Take Jesus. Wasn’t his message a new and improved version of historic Judaism?
“Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved." Matthew 9:17
Or this lovely poem from Rumi:

The New Rule
It's the old rule that drunks have to argue
and get into fights.
The lover is just as bad. he falls into a hole.
But down in that hole he finds something shining,
worth more than any amount of money or power.
Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing,
falling up into the bowl of sky.
The bowl breaks. Everywhere is falling everywhere.
Nothing else to do.
Here's the new rule: break the wineglass,
and fall toward the glassblower's breath.

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
Your covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side.
Die, and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.
The speechless full moon comes out now.
"I used to want buyers for my words.
Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.

I've made a lot of charmingly profound images,
scenes with Abraham, and Abraham's father, Azar,
who was also famous for icons.

I'm so tired of what I've been doing.

Then one image without form came,
and I quit.

Look for someone else to tend the shop.
I'm out of the image-making business.

Finally I know the freedom
of madness.

A random image arrives. I scream,
"Get out!" It disintegrates.

Only love.
Only the holder the flag fits into,
and wind. No flag. "

Rumi