Electricity

Convenience Stories Chapter 16

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Breezy springtime early evening. Getting dark quick. Ravilla Ave. and Overbrook Blvd. 15210. Odd triangle shaped patch of land a block from BEER 4 LESS. A bronze statue, labeled L’enfant, on a cobblestone road. Hecate of course is sometimes recognized as goddess of childbirth and motherhood. Makes sense. Hecate can be frightening or comforting. So can mom.

In the west, the witch or crone is seen as the polar opposite of the nurturing mother figure. Mom brings life, cares for the newborn; the witch kills livestock and causes the mother to stop producing milk. In such cultures, motherhood would offer some protection from accusations of witchcraft. But the image of Hecate-as-mother harkens back to an earlier time, a time closer to the origin.

Nobody is quite sure how the statue got there. We think that 100 years is not a long time, but several generations have passed over the last century. People forget, they don’t write things down, books get lost or burned.

The statue is signed: Roger-Bloche 1899. It won second prize at the Salon des artistes français that year, then some time was lost. Nobody knows exactly what happened in the intervening years, and now a 4,000 pound, prize-winning French bronze statue is sitting in a nondescript plot of land in a nondescript neighborhood in Pittsburgh, waiting for me to discover it.

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Bus 93. Public transit to the authentic self. Fitrah or True Will?

Gematria is the spiritual discipline assigning numerical values to letters; when two words have the same numerical value, the connection between the two is explored. It’s a sort of thought experiment. According to Greek gematria, THELEMA (divine will, desire) is the same as AGAPE (unconditional love). In Jewish Gematria, the value 93 is calculated for the words BIMBO and OMFG.