Jun 15, 2005, June 2005

Here in New York we endured two brutally hot days but now it's much cooler and very pleasant. For me the heat is especially immediate since I don't have air conditioning - I figure it's summer, it's supposed to be hot and besides it reminds me of being in Calcutta! I'm so much looking forward to conducting the auction in the Hamptons this weekend. Dick Cavett is going to be helping me so it should be a lot of fun. Then the following week I'm driving up to Canada, to Toronto. There is to be a large convention there and I will be leading one of the smaller workshops. I'm meeting a friend from Ireland at the convention and we plan to drive back down to New York together. I watched one of the most horrific things on Nova the other evening. It was about the Brazilian Nut Tree in the Amazon. The Brazilian Nut Tree is extremely tall and has a huge canopy - it's one of the giants in the jungle. A seed embedded in bird droppings landed on the branch of the tree. The seed sprouted and sent out a shoot which grew and grew downwards - hundreds of feet - until it reached the jungle floor and planted itself in the soil. Then that shoot grew up and as a slender vine wound its way around the tree. As it grew, it became stronger and stronger, so strong that eventually is was a thick, tree-like thing itself. It took years, but it kept on winding its way up the trunk crushing the tree as it went. Eventually, years later, it was so thick around the tree that all one could see was vine. Then the camera took you to the top of the tree to look down inside the vine casing which by now was a lattice-work giant tube, and the tree was completely gone. Gone. Crushed to death. Destroyed. It's life sucked out. It makes one think: what tiny, seemingly insignificant character defect do I have that is hardly recognizable, which I can't see but which will grow and eventually crush me? What part of my personality do I overlook because it seems so minor, OR, I don't even notice it and it just becomes habit. That's why it's so important to have close friends who will say, in a loving way of course, "Do you know you have a piece of shit on your arm?