Beginnings: June 13, 2011--5 PM

A sense of time is important for me, not because astrology is for me a soft science, but because life itself is about time. Time is life whether it is past, present or future.

    From my website, rubinartrstudios.com, you shall notice my education, my presentation to a public for decades through my art, my activities as a medicine person, and now, as a writer.

    The writer in me is very old. There are: poems written about a cat “Topaziurca” when I was 7 years old, a play written at 12, and more “stuff” later, intermittently as life wavered itself along various pathways.

     The question is, why NOW?

      The answer is because NOW is the time for doing it.

At 75 years of age none of us can look forward to half a century more of life, nor to a quarter of a century… that is unless one lives in a stress free world, has excellent community support, great genes and imagination to create a future for one which has relevance to oneself and others.

     The imagination is there, the genes are questionable and so is the support. Reacting to stress is up to me as how to wing it. At times I feel it is worthwhile to keep going at other times living feels like a load made for Sisyphus, something one keeps losing down the slopes and needs picking up once again every new day. Surely most of you know about the unevenness of life.  Taking responsibility for it does not apply to unforeseen circumstances, but as to how we feel about them.  Yes. It is possible to change our attitudes, our feelings, but it is not easy and may require training with professionals. Most of us neither have the time nor the desire for it. Therefore, we just "schlep around" waiting for something to happen.

     It usually does.

This “blog” is such a happening.  The thought of my “living” on the Internet might have been completely absurd ten years ago when I could barely type a word on a computer board. It took writing 1,200 titles for my photos of flowers in order to become able to type, not rapidly, but decently.

     There is obviously a coordination problem at play. It did show it when I was told to learn to play the piano. I could not play without looking at the keys, my own fingers, and the score at the same time. It became so frustrating after two years of lessons and practicing one hour a day that I pulled over one of the shutters in the living room in my grandmother's house in Rome, placed my right hand fingers in the space between where the shutters folded and bingo!  I pulled hard with my left arm and jammed my fingers between the shutters: done.

      Soon they all turned dark, then very dark at the tips. I was taken to a doctor who, having been an army doctor during WW1, simply pulled the nails off while I was slightly jumping up and down to divert the attention while my Mother was aghast.  No, anesthetic was not used. Perhaps it was my first act of self-hypnosis. I was 13 years old. A possible career as a pianist abruptly ended. I was relieved.

       Yes, I am still uncoordinated. My brain is just wired that way, but it also has good things going for it.  Things started happening to me as a young child, around 8 or 9 years of age. Strange things started happening, like sudden clairaudience about aspects of my future.  As time went on other portals of experience opened up, always suddenly, without previous training. A thousand years ago these incidents might have me designated as a witch or as some other very unusual person, short of the village idiot in a Jewish Schtatdel. I was raised as a Roman Catholic and kept all unusual events to myself until the ripe age of about forty when I happened to find out that there were many other people as strange as I was, and furthermore, they were not strange at all!

        In this blog, I shall start conveying some of my early life experiences while attempting to show the environment and the roots of such unusual life developments. Perhaps I will parcel these stories into weekly segments. There may be someone reading it and posting comments. There may be no one now. Whatever happens is just fine, because I shall proceed weekly to add another segment to the blog.  This is easy because I have already written about the historical and psychological environment into which I emerged at 8:30 AM unto a whitish kitchen marble table in the apartment of my grandmother Zaira, in Rome.

        The process of writing an autobiography started 30 years ago when Martin Ebon (go on Google to learn more about him) suggested that I write about the anomalous and spiritual experiences in my life. Then, I was unable to do this in the first person, as he wished me to do, because many people I would have written about were still alive. That is not the case now.

       Regardless of the privilege of any writer to write about anyone as long as it is not malicious, my regard for privacy of others needs to be compassionately shielded. My decision to go public in writing about my own life took some thirty years of gestation, and it is obviously related to my own age. If you have a message, get it out while you still have the capacity to do so.

        This is the end of first installment.  I am inviting my readers to comment.  Thank you for your attention, Fiammetta.