Acculturation, the modification of the culture of individuals
or groups through prolonged contact with different cultures
has, up until recently, been a rare phenomenon. The internet’s potential
to acculturate … surely … is treasure.

Acculturation’s a natural process, not readily appreciated in the absence
of an expansive perspective, as, for example,
from the Creator’s point of view. In His view, irrelevant is difference,
but indifference is … abominable.

Time for Global Truth and Reconciliation; whether you think we
can, or whether you think we can’t, you’re right, absolutely!
And so, The Wine and Cheese Miracles; prose, poetry, tragedy and comedy;
nonfiction, posing as fiction … ironically.

In poems melding Ovid’s and Emily’s; (wo)men about change, otherworldly
visionaries ask of you: Of what good are borders and nationalities?
From a nonfictional dream, a poetic and prosaic tragi-comedy,
and prophesy too, for prediction … is prophesy.

Arthur prayed to his deity, He of the Jews, Christians and Muslims;
praying he’ll find … the missing Bohemians.
Allah, Jehovah/God, Yahweh as if answered in dreams: , “Tweet to the denizens,
a blog and a book. Write … to your global co-citizens”.

And so, inspired by Arthur and Emily, Arthur wrote a fiction, non-fictionally.
This tribal nation-state thing is untenable … undeniably.
“To be … or not to be ….” So wrote the great Willy. It’s past time we
take a page from that play and ponder its implications … wisely.

The title and eight verses that follow are taken directly from
the manuscript of The Wine and Cheese Miracles.
It’s co-authors fancy its pages as fictional nonfiction,
in itself … a miracle.

A DEDICATION … TO HUMANITY

Dedicated to a humiliatingly humbled humanity, the essence of every man, woman
and child ever created in His Holy image;
more than any other word, it defines us. Ere we were African, we were human.
Knowledge and language, span our … stages.

Dedicated to a Mother Earth, desecrated; a God-given light, in a rock,
in a bubble, within a vast abyss, become by
His power, our home; become, by our ignorance, landfill, toilet, and earthenware crock.
Both Earth and humanity live, but to someday, by and by … die.

Dedicated to the ninety-nine percent, jumbled, who toil for scraps from the banquets
of the percent whom justify their entitlement
as God-given; and to those of the percent too, whom share the mindset that our planet
begs more sustenance, and less … armaments.

Dedicated to the exasperated one percent of us whom, to some degree,
worry re global prospects and/or work towards our
expiation; and to those of the ninety-nine percent too, whom, disconnected, see
not forests’ vastness, for trees that … tower.

Dedicated to the one hundred percent that are only apparently powerless
and may expand their carbon imprints … positively.
Dedicated to our individual purposes within God’s plan for us,
to duly evolve … spiritually.

Dedicated to a bigger picture that is, increasingly, coming into view
just as smaller pictures, seven billion plus surreal
realities, increasingly overwhelm us. Coming down to the wire, then, anew,
this roiling stew, our fate, does duly … seal.

Dedicated to communalism, a synonym of communism, a word heavy
with baggage. Call it what you will, working together
is the common-sense cure for what ails us. Reason, without more, shall never be
how best to get from here to … there.

Dedicated, therefore, gratefully as well, to all of the animal denizens
of this Animal Planet. Ought we not wisely learn
from the Jain, whom sweep as they walk, in rapt reverence of all of the denizens
in the circle of life. Ought we not … learn?

To: All having wisdom in the palms of their hands, but clutch it not, to their hearts
From: The Zoo Crew (aka, The Sexy Six, aka, The Council)
Re: Visions in Nutshells: A Proposal and Request for Further Proposals to start …
Date: Today and tomorrow, ‘til Kingdom comes, when it will

“… perchance to dream …” of what was, ought, may and shall be. The illustrious literati
of history: Plato, Aristotle, Socrates,
Shakespeare, Shaw, et. al., in occidental lands and their eastern peers, Lao-zi, Kong-fu-zi,
the first Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi …

… et. al., in oriental lands, were all men of flesh and blood. No God amongst them …
philosophizing wordsmiths … one and all. Such great men
eloquently speak to and for humanity about the burning question of whether then …
to be, or not … then … and now … and again.

So, it was to the sage words of our predecessors, often teachers, that the Council
has often turned, along, of course, with a trinity
of His Books, to offer humanity some last minute advice; arrange your affairs; little
pleased, is He. As we strew debris … He seethes.

That’s He’s understandably but little pleased is conjecture, true. Reflective of the
mutually shared conviction of the Council, it does
conjure too the precise words that were sent via electronic-mail (in dreams) to the
six Council members … That brief message was:

“What ten words do you bequeath?” Each had gotten an identical inquiry. All were
from resident at bliss dot com. Uh-huh. But before
long, upon each not finding any resident there but rather, each other, over
wine, cheese and the net … was the Council born.

Fancying testimony helpful toward soul-salvation on some mission completing,
the invite’s oddity (which had completely freaked out
each uniquely unqualified slacker), turned into allure. With calming wine advancing,
all agreed to seed … albeit … self-doubts.

And so came to pass upon Milky Way dreams that delightful interchanges ensued;
the setting … cyberspace; the pressing subject matters …
education, peace and prosperity. Six lives intertwined when somehow so summoned,
the subjects … on cue … all dreamed together.

Indeed we ought learn; and not just from the Jain and the Jesuits nor just from
prophets and peers. Ergo Arthur dreams
and he and his intergalactic dream weavers write of what’s dreamt … for from
dreams … dreamers … may realize … dreams.

Art’s thirty poems in thirty days are meant to plant a seed. Taken from the Council’s
manuscript, they’re a fair summary of the rest of the text.
Accordingly, NOW HEAR THIS: The rest of the Council’s proudly populist civil
manifesto is meant someday … to be a text.

The Wine and Cheese Miracles is a manuscript that begs all … “To be or not to be?”;
it is a question that is, as a plan in itself, an insightfully
wise way to inter-connect, to help, to get help, to learn, earn and prosper to be …
in peace. To so be … be … connectedly.

Given human nature and the irrational ‘rational’ interests that form the bedrock
principles that determine our international
policies there’s no reason to believe that greed, monopolies and corporate stocks
of the enfranchised … will be helpful.

For many it shan’t sit well. For many of the many, riches out of proportion
to equitable principles is all the birthright
that matters. Powers that be have always been; equitable redistribution …
aimed at righting wrongs … is wrong … alright.

So no one ought hold their breath awaiting presidential responses to what ought be
of utmost concern to everybody, everywhere,
not just Americans. What if we cast off blinders and opened eyes? Would we see
beyond trees, the forest? Shall we so … dare?

The Holy Scriptures, Rick’s tome respecting our individual purposes, Tony’s
on near instantaneous, positive changes in
conduct, Nelson’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and the Sexy
Six’s on kinship, auger, we may act … akin.

Rick and Tony eloquently potentiate a hopeful reality; for if destinies
individually may be purposefully
forged, ipso facto, so may we forge regional destinies. A global destiny
we may, by His Grace, forge … communally.

“What ten words do you bequeath?” A spookily cryptic question, electronically
mailed from a ‘resident’ at bliss dot com. Predictably,
no resident answered Arthur’s reply. Surreally, his co-authors did. Collaboratively,
over wine and cheese, the Council was born … dreamily.

Collectively fancying the salvation of their souls upon some impossible mission
completing, and mesmerized by the seemingly supernatural
nature of the inquiry, for each member of the astonished Zoo Crew, trepidation
turned into allure; wine and cheese … seemed natural.

And so it came to pass upon Milky Way dreams that an ambitious plan was formulated;
the setting … cyberspace; the pressing subject matters …
education, peace, and prosperity. Six lives intertwined when somehow so drafted,
the sexy six … on cue … all dreamed together.

Council member meetings over the years since 2004 suggest that the Scriptures,
the internet, our will, our numbers and our letters
united may be both remedy and means of transmission of that larger picture
whereby brotherhood … we better foster.

The sublime fact of the matter then is that whether or not we act wisely
going forward, where individual destinies
may be purposefully forged, ipso facto, so may we forge a collective destiny;
transcendence too … all the more grandly.

So, like forests unseen for towering trees, words, wondrous gifts we so wantonly
waste revealed to the Council that destiny equals
the letters of the internet times the numbers in nature exponentially
from a Scriptural base; an alchemic equation … to increase capital.

Re-characterizing alchemy in such a way may potentiate millions of dreams for prosperity;
accordingly the Sexy Six distillation of an apt answer
to the cryptic “What ten words do you bequeath?” inquiry is to “Forge destiny
with love, compounding history’s letters …

… through nature’s numbers.” An answer as accent, like the icing on a glorious cake, like
those from which we might delight of, in foreseeable futures;
to be or not to be, indeed? Accent your humanity, not your nationality unlike
our past history …. That’s the big picture!

Harder to write and to read than prose … however … poetry
expresses far more emotively
than one may ever aspire to … prosaically.
Poets: Masters of … irony.

New breed leaders must step up; courageous but pragmatic leaders that
realize this nation-state fixation is taking us down. Some
day hence, it won’t be sunny; black ground and gray skies contrasting at
somber horizons; nuclear skies … blotting … the sun.

Unprecedented capabilities may await what transcendental empowerment
offers. ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘The Divine Comedy’
inspired this letter to all from Art and his Crew. Its call: for prescient
wisdom … and action … to forge destiny.

‘Miracles’ is intended to be more than just a howdy-doody to his brethren.
As ontology, it’s a self-help book. As sorry
apology, anecdotes from a co-author’s life are confessions
of gross ignorance … and … sad apologies …

… to all, especially those injured along Art’s tortuous and torturous way.
Furthermore, it purports to weave the Crew’s subjective
observations into contexts of world and cosmological history to lay
out a bigger picture than often we’ve …

… generally been able to appreciate, much less those generations that have
preceded us. The world is in a sense much smaller
and in a sense we know more than we ever have. Yet, we yet behave
in accord with the ways of forefathers …

… long gone. They and theirs, make it evident that we’re the legatees
of ever more aggressive and, moreover, horrific
conduct, set over ages of competing for a stranger’s or neighbors’ free
use of his water, his kill, his saltlick …

… his camp-fire, cave, women, children, slaves, pelts, horses, livestock,
tools, land, currency, gold, oil, ideas and more.
Conditioned to behave selfishly, we act accordingly. Yet we’re shocked
as successive generations’ box-scores …

… set lower standards for truth, tolerance, and social justice, furthering
us from His Grace. There’s little doubt to some we’re near done;
a cosmic train wreck just waiting to happen. Ever better equipping
ourselves to just reach out and touch someone …

… Ma Bell would’ve been so proud of us. Would that the Crew were
only literally referencing telephones and the plethora of devices
to appear these past two decades. But drones, lasers
and, not incidentally, reliable nuclear devices …

… permit cleanly remote, bloody physical contact with perceived
antagonists, placing her ad-line of reaching out
and touching someone in a ghastly new light. Like lemmings to the sea,
headlong, you blindly follow … round about …

… your leaders of every ilk; for all leadership is but illusorily real.
Sargon, Hammurabi, Vladimir and Barack share with all
the rest of us the human frailty of reactivity to a very great deal.
Thus it … and fickle circumstance ‘oft call …

… if your fate’s to die young, eke an existence, or succeed in life.
But whether it’s the loss of many innocent lives
such as at the Twin Towers, or the loss of a single life,
as when the Arch-Duke was assassinated, loss of lives …

… increasingly ripple far and wide, so any single event all by itself, or
more likely, a series of events or confluence of
events shall likely trigger a conflagration unlike any ever before
imagined … much less seen …. Trumpets above …

… shall eventually signal the righting of things. But we digress; for
eschatological scenarios are many,
unknowable, un-probative and not subject to scientific inquiry before
the real McCoy … besets us. Any …

… purported intervention at that late date may be but a fanning of flames.
Consider the increasingly illusoriness
of American presidential power. It has eroded since atomic shames
cast over Japan … a pall of darkness.

Little Boy and Fat Man evolved into their vastly more powerful hydrogen kin
and a new kind of clock was invented, a Doomsday
Clock. For all its movement, the 11 p.m. hour that’s never been
likely … shall ne’er be; nor may …

… be approached, notwithstanding close proximity to a twelve o’clock hour.
Humanity’s spacecraft nears and is drawn into
a black hole of its own making. Its inhabitants sense it but sense no power
to avert … a black hole … being … sucked into.

Hear us, silly Earthlings. Madness, that of people and nations alike, a zoo
of peoples, and His mysteries, crossing ages, are clues.
Nazcan lines, pyramids, ancient prophets et, al., mysteries all, clue you
to do, what a … homo sapiens’ … got to do.

Art asked God if he’d gone freaking mad. He’s asked about you too. Really,
who’s sane? Was only he loopy? Or, are all of you, too?
Mysteries across the ages are clues. Souls; Urantia; Casee; really eerie
ancient lore … and much, much more … all are … clues.

It’d all begun dreamily; later, precursor plans were unceremoniously
panned (albeit by inattention); such were the non-events
that led to Art’s asking God for a sure Way to a movement, invent. Easily,
in dreams, the Crew … came … and went.

Notwithstanding implausibility, the Crew knew exactly what to do, when to
do it, and how to do it. Art gaped, dumbfounded. “See,”
they said, “What you’ve done is good; for very good, expand it artfully, into
epic. Write something … to forge … human destiny.”

New breed leaders must step up; courageous but pragmatic leaders that
realize this nation-state fixation is taking us down. Some
day hence, it won’t be sunny; blackened ground and gray skies contrast at
somber horizons …. Nuclear skies … may blot … the sun.

Much is at stake. So much so that The Almighty’s Words inspired a dense
wino-child of His to show you God’s sense
of humor’s cool and laughter’s still the best medicine. The uncommon sense
of critters … may open eyes … to common sense.

Our Holy Scriptures, Rick’s book re our individual purposes, Tony’s
books on near instantaneous, positive changes in
conduct, Nelson’s example, Art’s coop model, and a Zoo Crew’s dreamy story
on kinship … augur … we may act … akin.

A failure to plan is a plan to fail. Essentially, absent a sound plan (whether or
not in the event of a calamity), humankind’s plan
by default is anarchy. More than a crying shame, it’s a damning indictment for
prolific planners; end games beg … sound plans.

Wouldn’t the Truth and Reconciliation Commission model that so ably so
transformed South Africa yet serve to task
peacemakers to bring about a similar transformation to the still woe-
begotten Middle East at long … long last?

Ivory-tower scholars easily stigmatize people of faith as naïve fools or
as gullible saps and a 666-tatooing
Anti-Christ as over the top fantasy. Yet, whom indeed would have believed, before
it actually happened, that gassing …

… burning and burying Jews would be preceded by tattoos to better and more oft
efficiently implement … The Final Solution?
Not learning from history’s lessons is but one of our fatal flaws. Bernie Madoff
prospered enough to pose … Ponzi’s solution.

A heart-breaking irony, with The Holocaust still freshly seared; that one of their own,
an equal opp economic rapist of all though,
fires passions anew, in sites far from where divisive descendant cousins (like their own
progenitors, long ago split by dough) …

… seem ever endlessly afterward still split by dough. For what is land, if not dough?
The killing there is constant. Again we ask:
Wouldn’t the Truth and Reconciliation Commission model that so near unbelievably so
transformed South Africa … yet serve to task …

… diplomats to bring about a similar transformation to this yet strife-ridden
part of the earth? The truth of the matter is that no
side is totally in the right nor totally in the wrong. The truth being hidden,
the rhetorical answer: YES … and NO!

Yes, because it can be; no, ’cause it likely, won’t be. South Africans showed that
it can be; our history augers that it won’t be.
Bottom-line: it can be, so, it may be. For while we’re addicted to violence, that
addictions can be kicked … we know … may be.

Disavowing hate and embracing love, the killing cousins may yet walk hand in hand
as per King’s dream. For bloodshed is akin to spilt milk.
Each (wo)man is God’s child, with inalienable rights. All resources, the dough-land’s
harvest, need be shared, to make rare, words … like bilk.

And if we can do it there, we can do it everywhere. So, it is up to you,
U.N., U.N. Take a cue from Arthur, a nobody
like everybody, who, inspired by mountain-movers, took from them, a cue;
writing Ussammah, like all, a nobody …

… become somebody, albeit by piling bodies, indiscriminately. Seven Koranic verses
were cited to discredit the killer Ussammah.
To Arthur’s chagrin, the result wasn’t peace, less grieving kinfolk and less hearses
but rather, grave issues, now facing … Obama.

In further analogy, the entire planet begs for security. In a world so fraught
with worry, what first aid is there, for a mankind … effete?
Scripture, might be an unequivocal answer, but it and all else that is taught,
confuses; that taught in schools; that taught … on streets.

What’s taught in uptown schools and on downtown streets is antithetical to Scriptural
teachings. So, sow what you know in your heart. What school in
the world slants not its teachings? Learn to love. Love to learn. What’s anti-pedagogical
(what’s school and street taught) ought not be … cool … and in.

Fundamental to the resolve you must mutually share to move toward the global
community ideal is duly understanding
that quantum leap sorts of unusual change ought often arise from bottom to top as well
as trickling downward … from top to landing.

A monumentally transcendent, paradigm-shattering, evolutionary
metamorphosis arising, like a great groundswell,
upward from the grassroots of the citizenry shall be a revolutionary
quantum leap. For many one-percenters … it shan’t sit well.

G. Santayana said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Strife between the haves and the have-nots is history
in a nutshell. Learning-impaired, humanity has been constantly repeating its
story … since Cain slew Abel. Victory …

… over history seems neither in the cards, nor in the stars. The story of Arthur’s
people is a case in point. Our plight is a strange one,
so like Alice in Wonderland that both The Strategy and The Plan were the author’s
scheme to see our struggle … at long last won.

More on enigmatic Puerto Rico in Chapter Eight. Suffice for now to accent
a disenfranchised people so peculiarly
placed, it’s become a spinning eddy, in the river of time. The fast rushing current
surges …. Spinning in place … Art came to be.

There’s where precursor halves of him become of his parents fused to become a person
such that if and when God ever googled for matches
between contrite alcoholic slackers and celestial pipe dreamers in disunion
with the powers that be … records matched.

More searches and matches followed as our Father only seemingly implausibly
drafted His own Dream Team, The Council, to timely tweak
us to chart a course less hypocritically in line with what’s been previously
revealed to those… whom for God … did so speak.

Peace be upon them. Certainly, no member of the Council may similarly speak.
Neither its Zoo Crew constituents, nor its human
one assert ever having heard, much less seen, the Creator; His Words they ever seek;
but so too do many folks … men … and … women.

Similarly, no one need hear nor see to know that in countless somewheres beyond three
dimensional physical reach, countless kin miserably
suffer in countless ways. We are all more or less locked into paradigm matrices,
cells … to which we have keys … to ourselves … free.