Why turn over control of our important bodily functions from an infinite inner wisdom that perfectly controls 25 quadrillion cells in every function every second of the day to our educated intelligence that has a hard time remembering a telephone number?

For the first twelve years of my life, my symbol for pain was an uncle I’d never met, my mother’s brother Bill, who died at 24 in a plane crash.

Gangs of workmen and an iron wrecking ball (invented for the occasion) pounded the great ship’s metal hull round the clock for two years. Like everything else about the Great Eastern, the task of removing its three million bolts confounded the experts of its time. When quiet finally returned to the countryside near Cheshire, England the salvagers, like every other group that owned the Great Eastern, had lost a fortune.

I have this perhaps incorrect notion that you get whatever you ask for. (It’s just the delivery date that’s uncertain.) The purer, more in-tune you become, the less the “you” exists. “You” become what is and always has been. Which is just a lead-in to the fact that I “asked” at some point to have this experience, since I am at a stage at which I would fear a violent death.

It should be nearing evening as you set the table, first covering with a gingham tablecloth, then arranging the two place settings — yours on the left, and one for Agnus, your lily of a sweetheart, on the right. Place two candles mid-table, taking care to leave sufficient space between them so as to be able to view Agnus through the bosom of fire. A decorative arrangement of stephanotis is lovely at the base of the candelabra, or leaping lilies of the valley. The table should be round, and small enough for you to reach, at an easy arm’s length, for Agnus’ liebfraumilch cheeks, or claret lips, or her stocking incarcerated leg. And between the two of you, in a semi-circle arching like a sickle toward the wall, arrange the following buffet so that it spans the table, a collapsed bridge between you and Agnus:

No one needs astrology. Everything a person can learn from his or her birthchart can be learned someplace else. Like any other language, the symbolism of astrology is just a tool, just a finger pointing at reality. And like any tool it can be abused, used as a crutch, hidden behind, and misapplied. Despite all these pitfalls, it remains a good tool for certain people at certain times in their lives.

In recent years, by chance, Wallace Fowlie had occasion to visit a playground where he had spent many hours of his youth. “An old forgotten feeling of panic rushed over me,” he writes. “This was the site of my exposure where, in the presence of all the children, I was suffocated by my incapacity to improvise gestures and runs, shouts and games.” In the rigid order of the classroom, where many another child felt awkward, Fowlie was secure. It was in the playground, where life was spontaneous, that he felt out of place. “Our childhood is our entire life,’ he states in the Foreward* to Journal of Rehearsals, and the marvel of this elegantly composed memoir is that so much of the man can be traced back to the child, to events that to another writer might have seemed banal and inconsequential.

The Book of Kudzu! Now this is a book that I’ve long waited for. The authors produced two very fine books before this (The Book of Tofu and The Book of Miso) which catered more to natural foods people, vegetarians and macrobiotics alike. Myself, a macro, have both books and use them periodically, but this book . . . ahhh.