When I was a kid in the 1960s, I read magazines while waiting at The Band Box beauty parlor for my mother to get her hair done. They had some of the usual ‘ladies’ magazines’ like Good Housekeeping and McCall’s (which had ‘paper dolls’ each month), and they also had some unusual ones whose names I don’t remember. One was kind of fascinating in a creepy way, with detailed articles that were neither news nor totally fiction, and tended toward fringe topics such as psychic mysteries.

The article that was on my mind the other day was about a person who had a behavioral dysfunction that reportedly required state-of-the-art brain surgery. The process was described in detail – how the patient was given a local anaesthesia but was left awake during the entire surgery since the brain itself has no feeling, according to the write-up. The patient was awake as the scalp was shaved, and as the surgeon drilled a series of holes in the skull until he could remove a circular disk of the bone. He then applied some sort of stimulation to different locations in the brain and asked the patient to tell him what each stimulus felt like. The replies were like: ‘My ring finger is itching.’ ‘There’s a pain in my right eye.’

In that way, the surgeon reportedly was able to locate the specific area of the brain causing the patient’s dysfunction.

I experienced the article from the perspective of the patient. I was fascinated and horrified.

Though at this time, I'm not equipped to take photos and load them to the blog, and most of my paints and brushes are in storage, my funky work as an artist continues. Using pens of varied quality and condition, pencils, and bits of debris that come my way, I'm still entranced with the process and the product: mingled living realities on one 2-dimensional surface. I think this keeps me sane. Getting to the coffee shop and walking also contribute to my well-being in this awkward time. And there's the ongoing practice of producing a blog entry.

notahaiku 2

it’s not the coffee.
the large space
café with bright windows
with familiar strangers

the great withered oak

as neighboring trees grew green
with spring,
newly frocked with foliage,
a great oak stood stoic
in an abandoned parking lot
on a high-traffic highway,
still leafless into April.

well the tree was not safe -
what if the chainsaws came?
what if they mistook the tree for dead?
drivers stuck at the busy intersection
turned away from the bright sun
and gazed at the derelict situation
their engines purring and grumbling.
‘You can do it!’ they thought to the tree.
‘Don’t worry!’
but the drivers worried nonetheless
and some secretly gave up on the withered oak.
a rain shower wandered through,
and still the branches bare as December.
then came a day
approaching May
a glance from the road showed
the oak arrayed
in a fine halo of pale green
glowing with light,
small new leaves in cheerful smatterings
against the grays of the old trunk.
the return of life was a radiant gift
in the worn down parking lot
along the noisy highway.

chimes
sing in the wind
notes clean and random as raindrops
the door is open

We humans have all these big ideas, plans and activities about improving the world. We build skyscrapers and rockets and tremendous highways. When confronted with troubling problems that result from our activities, we have big ideas, plans and activities to fix what’s broke or destroyed.

There seems to be a lack of faith in the successful natural design of our planet, the interweaving of species, weather, terrain, plants and trees. There have been natural disasters across the millennia, such as hurricanes and eruptions of volcanoes and collisions with meteors of varying sizes. But in that distant history, human activity plays only a small part of the healing and recovery. There is a system of recovery already in place that integrates all life forms and weather and other factors present on earth.

During the drought and other catastrophes of this past decade, I’ve worried like many others. I’ve also watched nature patching itself back together here and there. Squirrels planting pecans and acorns as trees wither around them, the trees shading seedlings of the future from the heat and drying wind.

Our own self-destructive behavior (such as leaking oil and chemicals into the waters, use and testing of bombs, chemicals such as defoliating agents, fracking and breaking down the mountains and river beds) worries me more. We're not only self-destructive, but destructive of the homes the many other animals depend upon. Humans may be a part of the overall design of the planet, but our rate of modernization has surpassed our understanding of what is right, and our natural ways of cohabiting with other life. Our technology and oversized equipment have grown faster than our judgment can keep up. When we change things in a big way, even in an attempt to fix what is breaking, there is no way to know in advance all the consequences. We unintentionally step on the toes of our fellow inhabitants.

Before we give up hope, there are tried and true safer ways to be a part of natural recovery.

As humans, it’s good to step outdoors and breathe where for thousands of years we’ve survived within the fabric of nature. It’s possibly safest and most successful to be a connected part of the great interweaving of life rather than to isolate ourselves in buildings, trying to dominate the earth, forcing change on nature’s beautiful, durable, and near perfect system. Together we are heroes, the trees and grasses producing oxygen, the humans and all the other animals and rain showers and flowers and fishes that go into the formula of life.

It’s helpful to use our senses to their fullest, to be one with nature around us, to be a part of the great and powerful networking of the amazing earth, without trying to take over or interfere with that remarkable healing process. From the ants to the elephants, all have intertwining roles.

Waltz Across Texas

This beautiful song is a favorite of mine, a gift from Ernest Tubb:

When we dance together my world's in disguise
It's a fairyland tale that come true
And when you look at me with those stars in your eyes
I could waltz across Texas with you

Waltz across Texas with you in my arms
Waltz across Texas with you
Like a storybook ending I'm lost in your charms
And I could waltz across Texas with you

My heartaches and troubles are just up and gone
The moment that you come in view
And with your hand in mine dear
I could dance on and on

Waltz across Texas with you in my arms
Waltz across Texas with you
Like a storybook ending I'm lost in your charms
And I could waltz across Texas with you

crossing paths with rabbits

A large hare crossed my path late this afternoon, this day before Easter, and I’m thinking about the odd rabbits and hares who have crossed my life over the years. In grad school, we took a class on sleep and dreams and were expected to write or type up our dreams throughout each semester. Early on I had a dream with an image of a field of rabbits, many rabbits and nothing else. Some thirty years later, traveling by train in England with a friend, we slowed as we passed a football (soccer) field. There were no people there, but the grassy pitch was dotted with rabbits. We counted fifty of them before the train carried us past.

For some years in the 1970s, I made several plane trips a year with layovers in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas. As the plane taxied on the runway, awaiting permission either to pull up to a gate, or to take off, there was little to see but the airport and the runways with the signs and light fixtures that marked them. There were strips of land between the runways, short-cut grass in the sun and nothing else, except… there was always several jack rabbits sitting motionless or calmly nibbling in the grass. I wondered about the jack rabbits’ hearing as they had no ear plugs to protect their sensitive ears! The huge noisy jet planes and the hares in the grass made for quite a visual contrast.

I’ve written before of the ancient, graying jack rabbit who sat among us on a rocky hilltop near Comfort, Texas as we roasted hot dogs on the night before Easter, 1987.

And of course there is Elwood P. Dowd’s dear friend, the invisible rabbit in the 1950 movie, ‘Harvey’:

Wilson: Who's Harvey?
Miss Kelly: A white rabbit, six feet tall.
Wilson: Six feet?
Elwood P. Dowd: Six feet three and a half inches. Now let's stick to the facts.

Good Friday 2014
dream exodus


The red-headed league was up ahead,
assorted kin behind.
The elder Sonny was floating,
harnessed to a kite in flight.
We five in the middle walked and limped
except when we could not,
surgeries one by one begun
to replace that which was lost,
to fix the damage done.
And so we took turns traveling in
two box-store battery-powered go-carts,
an exodus of the wounded from hell.

Our caravan thus slogged on
till we touched the borderline.
(a fenced-in Cerberus
had only one barking head
He growled and jumped
and we said, ‘good job’
but stepped out far and wide.)
We imagined a safe Passover
and Christ without a cross
a world without circumcisions
a boat without the pistol
that hurt wildlife of the sea
and hoped we all would fare well anew.
We paid the invisible ferryman
for the crossing
each of us one coin
and bid tearful adieu to the dead
as they faded away.
Twin infants were born
and named: Lily and Beth,
our unmarked newborns,
innocents traveling forward
with the exodus parade.

sleep

slow
trickling of rain
random sounds
of wilderness
outside the window
the steady quiet of breathing
of sleep this spring night

write what you know -

Earnest Hemingway when asked for advice on writing is reported to have said: Write what you know.

Around the turn of the century, I got to visit the museum at his childhood home in Oak Park, Illinois and the museum at his home in Key West, Florida where he lived for some time as an adult. If I remember correctly, when he began a new work, his first sentence was something he knew, and that was his starting point. He wrote on from that truth.

During my years of writing, I’ve followed Hemingway’s advice at times when I’m stuck. Even on days when it seems I don’t know anything at all, I can always write: It seems I don’t know anything at all.

Everything seems in flux today, and what I know seems propped up on a spindly table. It topples easily. I could be successful as a tree, perhaps. A tree soaks up sun and rain. It knows the wind through the fluttering of its leaves, and the happiness of squirrels and birds perched on its limbs. A tree just lives, and I suspect does not worry about reality and deception.

Or I could write: I drove a little gray car a couple hundred miles on this mild and breezy day.

Trees curl inward during dry spells, defensive against the heat, and dry spell is a bit of an understatement for these past few years. Rain showed up in a big, generous way this morning, cold and heavy. The trees this afternoon were happier than I’ve ever seen them, opening their upper branchlets of wet shining leaves, trustfully yearning upward toward a mild and kindly sun.

proposed addition to Geyser Charter addendum

The club known as Geysers has come up now and again in my blogs. Primarily a social networking group, its only requirements are the embrace of love, principle and fluid hierarchy. No mission, no dues, no fundraising nor exchange of money. The charter, a draft still in progress, has an addendum with thoughts to consider (such as ‘No martyrs.’ ‘Muddle through.’).

Members can come and go as they wish, and many belong to other communities as well. Obedience is an expectation that is in no way associated with the easy-going, no-agenda Geyser club. Obedience is integral to some religious and other groups that may include Geysers within their memberships. A possible addition to the list of ‘thoughts to consider’ in the Geyser Charter might be: ‘Respect for life before obedience.’

Are any two foods more different than fresh asparagus and canned asparagus? I mean, if you took the blindfold test, and had a bite of one, and later on a bite of the other – would you recognize it as the same food? No!

Now when it comes to corn – canned and fresh corn are at least both recognizable as corn. Green beans too. But not so with asparagus.

And how about peas? Have you ever had bright green peas right out of the garden, sweet and thrilling off the vine? They’re spherical but that’s about all they have in common with the squishy, drab canned pea. Fresh sauted spinach next to canned? Nyet.

Now we’ve acknowledged they’re not the same experience as fresh, but here’s a good word or three about canned produce. My mom used to chill canned asparagus in the ‘icebox’ in the summer, and put it in iceberg lettuce salads with some cucumber and tomato. We really liked that, lightly coated with Wishbone Italian Dressing. Fresh asparagus I love, but sometimes I secretly return to salad of the 1960s.

I’ve been told canned tomatoes can be better for a good spaghetti sauce. Unlike most fresh store-bought tomatoes that are plucked early to survive travel, tomatoes used for canning are left on the vine in the sunshine until completely ripe. The taste is full, the color rich red, and nutrients are preserved. Thus, a sauce made of the canned tomatoes may be more flavorful than one made with fresh tomatoes.

It’s harder to justify canned spinach if you can get fresh. However, prepared with a little sauted onion or light cream cheese, it is good, and let’s be grateful.

Canned foods can keep well for long periods of time. They don’t go bad after a week or two. You can have good tomatoes in the dead of winter. And, back to the green peas. Have you ever taken a fork and used mashed potatoes to capture warm, buttered canned peas running around on your plate? Yep. Who would want to give up that?

money

Money
The paper
The gold bricks
The metal disks
And tiny numbers
In ‘Your Financial Picture’
On the computer screen.
Do you have money?
Then you’re in
You’re happy
Keep bringing
It in

Music on paper -

Many people these days learn to play music by watching musicians perform on videos or listening over and over to recordings of something they’d like to play. We can watch a performer’s actions, or listen carefully and pick up subtleties by hearing.

In the past, composers couldn’t play for people far from where they lived and so systems for communicating music by writing on paper were used to let people who were distant, or people to come in the future, know how the music went. Think Mozart and Beethoven. Folk music was transferred from person to person and was maintained in the public awareness not so much by writing it down, but just by memory and/or sharing. Think Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, or school anthems or patriotic songs.

Personally, I think instrumental and vocal music learned by ear sounds better than music learned off of paper. This is in general and not in all cases, but it seems less contained and more expressive.

That said, I’m fascinated by written music. I’m speaking of the western tradition, the only one I know, sheet music with the black flagged dots for notes and the five-lined graphs.

It interests me that visual communication can be used to produce auditory experience, and that anyone trained to read music could produce the original sounds without having ever heard the piece before. Just the appearance of the clefs, the lines and dots can convey some of the physics of sound – you visually see the distance between two melodic sounds. I can read music on a primitive level but how wonderful to be experienced to where by looking at some dots, lines, and squiggles on a page of paper, you could without previous exposure hear the composer’s music in your mind.

Usually, a composer starts with a melody he or she has tinkered with, and then writes it down. It would be fun, though, to experiment with composing a piece by drawing something visually satisfying – varying the number of notes per bar – creating a pattern of lines and dots – then hearing how it sounds.

I know there is now computer software that offers this experience – and it’d be cool to play with that. But give me white paper and the black ink and let’s play with a 2-dimensional motionless silent piece of paper. Let’s draw something visual that translates into something for the ears, into a range of sounds moving across an expanded period of time.

hail and thunderstorms

Hail is a gem made of water. It’s different from sleet (freezing rain) or an ice cube. Hail happens when winds high in the sky toss raindrops up and down through layers of air of varying temperatures. The raindrops freeze, melt a little, freeze, pick up more rain, freeze again. If you examine a piece of hail before it melts, you’ll see the layers of water that went into the creation of this icy gift from the sky.

The end product that comes pelting to the ground, your roof, your windshield, your corn field is a generally spherical (ball-shaped) object of ice. I suspect pea-sized is most common. You hear now and again of ‘golf ball sized hail’. I’m fortunate not to have experienced that!

At ground level, the temperature does not have to be at freezing or below for hail to occur. The cold temps are in the air currents above - it can be 80 degrees Fahrenheit outside when hail is falling. Sometimes there is so much hail it covers the ground like a thin blanket of snow. More often, it’s just a few little pellets mingling with the rain that is falling.

The storms that bring hail are often dramatic, with wind and lightning and thunder. Though I haven’t experienced this in years, when I was a kid, there was a kind of ‘high’ or intoxicated feeling that preceded a real storm. The air would turn an odd shade of green, and the smell was bright. We were taught in science class that the lightning stripped oxygen in the air of some of the electrons. The number of protons in the nucleus (positive charge) no longer matched the number of electrons (negative charge) - the oxygen in the air was thus unstable and this was called ozone. (This is a very primitive description. Also - a digression -I'm not clear if the word ozone as in 'ozone layer' refers to the same thing as the charged air before a storm.)

So, you could tell when an exciting storm was soon to blow in by the dark clouds, the flickering of lightning against the dark approaching clouds, the thunderous rumble, the greenish air, and the energizing smell of the air. The frisky, distinctive odor seemed to break up that which was stagnant, both in the atmosphere, and in one’s mind. An average storm (not a hurricane or tornado) was not generally considered a bad thing – it left trees and buildings clean and wet, the air smelling fresh, water for the birds and beasts and gardens, with only a few damp twigs, leaves, and branches on the ground to show for its brief passing.

Dark and welcome rain passes through
and now it's orange sky.
The soaked goblins
of the backyard trees
are peering at the setting sun,
wet spindly branches
like raised eyebrows.
Thunder calls out
from the stormy mass of clouds
as it rumbles away to the east -
the tree ghosts waggle their ears
in fondly foolish reply.

mr. goodfellow

he carries
a tapestry bag
of many threads,
soothes the heart
and then departs
thin as a whisper

I meandered around the internet this evening. (‘Surfing’ would suggest more vigor and focus than was involved!) Out of the blue, I started with the Hatfield and McCoy families and their three decades of vicious feuding. The feud (in Kentucky and West Virginia) was between a large family of Irish origin and another large family of English origin. Unhappy with gory details of the feud, I went on instead to read about Pawpaw trees, which were mentioned in the article. My mother used to recite a funny story she learned as a kid about ‘Aunt Peggy and Uncle Peter’ and a pawpaw patch, but I couldn’t locate it online, and I wonder if the story disappeared with her passing away in 2008. In looking for the story I discovered, though, a wonderful link to an index of folk songs. I listened to a couple of the songs, and so learned about Lord Franklin’s last attempt to find a Northwest Passage, and about sailors lost at sea on a whaling journey.

Here’s the link to a page on Stephen Griffith’s site, featuring a song about the racehorse ‘Stewball’: http://www.stephengriffith.com/folksongindex/stewball/

(image of postcard circa 1900 is from a Wikipedia article on mistletoe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistletoe )

A branch of mistletoe was in my path today, and although the above postcard is out of season, I thought I'd share it.

the wordless arts -

Have you ever heard the album, Journey to the Amazon? Wordlessly, Sharon Isbin’s guitar, Paul Winter’s sax, and Thiago de Mello’s percussion wind among the sounds of birds along the river. I listen to this as I sit at the table. My pens and pencils press against the texture of paper. The lines and curves flow with the music to where words cannot reach. They flow like an unobstructed river.

we crawl beneath the bed
to the other side
through the tall window
into the leafy embrace
of the old old elm.
there is a wad of dust
on the elbow of your shirt,
the smell of decay
and polished furniture.
a winged seed spirals toward the ground
are we made of the same stuff?
we children whisper urgently
behind the door left ajar
about childhood matters with no answers.
You others are wiser than I
and I remember in this place
soft is wiser than clever.