The second laundry load is churning away and due in about thirty (30) minutes. Today Herman and I have lunch again and that is why I wanted to get started early on the laundry. I have one more load to go in and that one has to be dried and taken care of, so at nine am now, I’ll just have time to get this done before lunch.

On the way back from lunch I need to pick up fruit and veggies at DJ’s; fruit is in over abundance right now and I tend to buy too much. This I compensate for by means of having fruit for snacks! Tomorrow I visit John again and will drop a card of for Shirley who returns from her European trip. I still owe her a few grocery $$ from flood evacuee time last June.

I bought a box of Art Deco type cards by Lloyd Wright’s design fame and am looking for opportunities to use them. Shirley and my family will be subjected to one these four designs of glass in lead drawings. Cards are not used that much anymore except for theme days like birthdays. This gets kind of boring, so I tend to use neutral cards with my own message.

Yesterday my book titled “Zealot - The life and times of Jesus of Nazareth” came in and I have already made a start with reading it. The author Reza Aslan is a Muslim and a well established author and scholar. The book came out a last July and is making it up the charts.

As I am reading the first chapters, I am reminded of my own essay and talk titled ‘Jesus the Man’, in which I make the case the Jesus grew up and was educated as an Essene, but broke away from that movement - as did John the Baptist - and struck out with a message of his own.

Many of the points that Aslan makes about the hamlet of Nazareth, the feuding of the Jews and the temple worship sound familiar to me, as I recall my own research for that essay and my talks on Christianity. I find it fascinating that the figure and teachings relating to the Jesus symbolism keeps us engaged even today two millennia after the presumed date and poorly recorded events.

The last load is in the washer and due in about thirty (30) minutes, to be followed by a forty minute drying cycle. This combined with the ‘putting’ of the laundry will put me close to departure time.

With regard to my note above on our fascination with the figure and teachings of Jesus, I observe that the same can be said about Muhammad, Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao-Tzu, ‘Krishna’ and other such combinations. I see this confluence if you like, as an outcome of our globalising world over the last fifty (50) years. In a way we need to know about all these different aspects of religions, cultures and identities.

This diversity and inter-contact has become a part of our daily reality and we now are learning how to live with this diversity. We like to be promoters of bio-diversity, but when it comes to diversity of identities and religions, we are have to overcome many resistances.

It is a learning process, but we should not just let it unfold on its own. It is more efficient to recognise it for what it is and learn to manage this encountering process and so prevent costly conflicts that spiral beyond our abilities of good governance.
<10:13am, break time.