Still hanging in there

Spent a great weekend at GSP, just hanging with the peeps

What's Up?, Heaven's Gate

Hello, my phantom readers. What have I been up to? I've been doing lots of henna because it gives me happiness. The last several days I have been undertaking an informal study of cults, religions, religious clashes with the government and mass suicide.

Why? I don't know really. It's just something I find interesting. I was thinking about Waco, Texas and the Branch Davidians the other day and what a terrible tragedy that was. This lead to questions I had about the tragedy (I don't really know that much about what happened. However, I spent a couple of hours reading about the event and watching news clips on the internet.

Reading about the tragedy and trying to decipher and determine the U.S. Government's culpability and thinking about all those people who died, I began thinking about other large groups of people who died in modern history because of their religion.

I have read, watched video, searched the internet and studied about the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, Jonestown, Scientologists, the Unification Church (Moonies) and the Hare Krishna group. I will write separate entries about each, as I have time.

I studied about three hours about Heavens Gate and watched some clips on You tube. What what I have read and deciphered by theories implied is this:

a. God is a supreme being, all of earth acknowledges that. The Bible refers to God as the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and End. Well, it makes you wonder how that can be? How can there be a supreme being, responsible for creating and ruling the earth and yet be the only one of his kind in existence? Yes, it's too much for our tiny human pea brains and maybe God doesn't want us wondering about His Origin.

b. But -- if there is a God and he is a Supreme Being, isn't it likely there are others? I mean, who or what made God? A supreme all knowing all seeing being doesn't just poof into existince without some cause one day, does he? Everything we know about science and physics tells us that for an existence or for an effect, there is also a cause. For every action there is an equal and opposite Reaction. So, for God to exist there must be other beings like him somewhere.

c. And if those beings aren't on this earth, then where are they? They must be in space somewhere, somewhere out there in that vast infinite unknown cosmos. They must be of an alien race, they must be aliens. It's a bad word to call God's family, I mean you don't really think of God as a shrunken little green thing with webbed fingers and a big head.

d. Okay, we've established that Heaven's Gate must have believed God was an alien. God told us that he made us in his image. He told us through the Christian Bible that he sent his son to earth to die for us on the cross so that we may live, so that we may have access to Heaven. In order for God to have put his son into Mary's body, he had to have incorporated his supreme DNA with Mary's earthly DNA. Is there any other way for Mary to have had God's son than for God to have had some part in it? How could Jesus be the son of God and Mary without God having anything to do with it? So, therefore, if Mary wasn't just a surrogate mother and Jesus was actually the child of both God and Mary, then Jesus was part a supreme being or partly alien.

e. We are told in Christianity that Jesus descended into Heaven and that he will come again, known as the Second Coming. If he comes from Heaven or the heavens and he has been with God and perhaps the other aliens, then how would he arrive?

f. When Jesus was born there was a star in the sky, according to the Bible, which signified his arrival. Some have theorized that the star was actually a comet because it was so bright.

g. The Heavens Gate people believed that Jesus would come again and that he would arrive through the Heavens, that they had to be free of their bodies, their Earthly containers to join him. Therefore, they believed that when the time was right, they had to free themselves from their bodies (yes, die, to join him).

h. When the Heavens Gate leader, Marshall Applewhite (known as Do) learned of the impending arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet, he figured that it was a signal of the second coming. Therefore, the members prepared to free themselves from their earthly containers and join Jesus.

i. Around the time of the comet's arrival they committed suicide in three stages, first 15, second 15 and then 9. Thirty nine of them died. They were intelligent, accomplished people. The remainder of their theories are pretty wacko and I can't really make much sense of them. My own theory is that they were people, intelligent and good in general, who were misfits in one way or the other. They didn't quite know where they fit in society. They belonged to the island of misfit toys and perhaps their suicides were a way for them to escape to such a place.

I know that Marshall Applewhite was gay and that he was a practicing gay in his younger years when being gay wasn't cool. He struggled to throw off his gender preferences and to be a normal, regular, straight guy. I think that he was unable to do so and this made him feel bad about himself. He wanted to rise about the needs of his own human mind and body, his irregular sexual preferences. He and 8 other men of Heaven's Gate actually were castrated so that they did not succomb to the sexual needs of humanity. Marshall Applewhite believed that these aliens had transcended sexual needs. They were neither male or female, they were androgynous and did not require sex for pleasure or reproduction. I believe that this theory comforted Marshall Applewhite and made him feel better about being gay.

Perhaps other members of the group had similar experiences, feelings, ideals; things they wanted to cast off and transcend. Perhaps they beleived that by joining the aliens, they could rise about their own human awkwardness, geekiness, feeling of not belonging, their nonconformity and "finally belong".

I don't know. I can find out very little information about the individual Heaven's Gate members other than Applewhite (Do) and the female leader (Ti). I have seen video of some of the other members but there is very little personal information about them. It's all very intriguing though. Thirty Nine people died because they believed that their souls could somehow join the aliens traveling with Hale-Bopp. If you have additional information, or want to comment, please do so on the following comment line. I would love to hear from you.

Some Photos of Recent Henna work

From Earth Girls Henna. Get your henna now! Chances are....you've got contacts. www.earthgirlshenna.com

Got Henna?

I am making myself into a self taught henna artist. No, Werner, I didn't forget about your commissioned pack man rock. I promise I will get around to it. I am still painting rocks and other similar craft oriented type endeavors. I have loved henna for several years and about 2 years ago bought some and began experimenting with it again. I have been reading and studying everything I can get my hands on.

EARTH GIRLS HENNA
Lisa@earthgirlshenna.com

Finally I decided I would try henna as a business. I would like to introduce the launching of Earth Girls Henna. We are available for any event or you may come to us for a henna tattoo. We are located in N.E. Kentucky and our henna is very good stuff, stains darkly, smells wonderful. We have done the following festivals and will be at your neighborhood in the future. Be sure to check us out at www.earthgirlshenna.com.

Past festivals:

1. Boyd County Middle School Fall Festival, Ashland, Ky.
2. Barboursville Fall Fest, Barboursville, West Virginia
3. Chillifest, Ashland, Kentucky
4. Old Fashioned Days, Greenup, Kentucky

To come:

Fall Tag Cave in

First Fridays

Camille and I took in Ashland's First Friday celebration. Ashland closes off a city block, opens up the local art galleries, provides live music and some street vendors. There were cornhole games behind the band audience area.

Camille and I decided to try out the cornhole game. I've never really played it but I think Camille has a time or two. I don't know the game rules but they had two cornhole boards, very far apart, almost four lanes of traffic. Camille got at one end, I at the other.

She's only 6. On top of that she was acting very goofy Friday evening. These factors combined for a pretty ridiculous cornhole game. She would wind up her arm to throw the bean bag and it would go straight up into the air then land about 3 feet away from her. Several times her stray bean bags hit the musical audience. One time a bean bag knocked off a lady's hat...behind her.

We were both giggling in the street as we threw the bean bags. The music was really good so we also danced while we played. I was pretty pleased with my cornhole performance. Almost all bean bags landed on the board and about 1/5 went in the hole. My record might have been better if Camille didn't try to catch the bags as I tossed them. She repeatedly stood in the way and gathered up all the wayward bags, making a mountain of them right in front of the hole. I don't know the rules but I don't think that was allowed.

The bean bags were color coded for each game. Ours were green and white. Next to us was yellow and orange. There was also red/blue and purple/pink. I think Camille thought the game's goal was to collect as many bag colors as possible. Every now and then she would disappear, dodge hard flying bean bags from the other cornhole games and try to snatch some of the other game's bags.

I knew she shouldn't be doing that but it made me laugh so hard I hadn't the air to stop her. Now before you cornhole fanatic purists so pish poshing this position, you gotta know that, with the exception of me, all four cornhole games were made up of kids. Camille and I were the only girls. The rest were boys who seemed to think the game was dodge bag rather than cornhole. They were having all out wars with the bean bags, like a painful snowball fight.

Eventually we tired of the game and left the multicolored bean bags in a heap on the street. Jerry arrived and the three of us went to listen to the Pendleton jazz musicians and look through the art studios.

While Jerry was enjoying the music, Camille and I went to the ladies room. She had to poop. She was really straining on the pot, told me she couldn't seem to make any progress. She was straining too hard and her face turned red. With a red face and strained voice, she oddly asked me, "how did Elvis die?" I tilted my head. "I don't know, how?" "No", she said, "how did Elvis die?" Again, I said, "I don't know, how did he?". She relaxed her strain and gave me a puzzled look.

When it dawned on me, the situation's funny factor increased. She wasn't telling me a joke, asking me a question so she could set up the punchline. She really wanted to know how Elvis died. I gave her all the information I had available to me. I said, "he was overweight, took too many drugs and had a heart attack I think". "Oh", she said, then went back to straining, her face turning red again. I encouraged her to stop trying so hard, pinch it off and let it brew.

Later, when I was tucking her into bed, she told me that she thought Elvis died when he tried too hard to poop, causing something to break inside him. Apparently she feared this same fate. She also apparently had more information about Elvis' death than I did.

Cypress Trees

Jerry's boss took him to a cypress tree in Catlettsburg. It is a very large, very beautiful, located in a backyard. He and I have been talking about large champion trees and cypress trees quite a bit lately. I thought I would post a couple of generic cypress pictures. I love cypress trees.

Tidbits and A.I.

I was telling a friend and her eleven year old daughters about the film A.I. I told them that Jude Law's character was a gigolo robot. I told the girls they probably didn't know what "gigolo" meant and would have to ask their mother. One of the girls said, "I know, is that somebody who carries around a plastic leg?" It made me giggle. The other girl said "No, silly, a gigolo is someone who takes pictures of sea animals." It was very sweet to find them still innocent.