Many patron saints brighten my life. Most are living, and not ordained in a formal way, but informally saintly, courageous in the day-to-day, funny and grumpy. They don't require religous medals - the saints show up in the quirkiest of places - in a skein of yarn or a bunched up T-shirt - or a little clutch of leaves on a broken twig. They come to the rescue in bad dreams, and sometimes they surface in my index card art, and I call these 'holy cards'. The saints may live far away, but they're present in mysterious ways when danger lurks. I feel precious in their hearts and I treasure them too, and see myself on call for them when times are good and when times are not-so-good.

January Birds

Drizzle, snow, and ice erratically coated the roads and countryside today in south

central Louisiana, and the birds came out in numbers. More in one day than I've seen

on any other day for the last six years - there were American robins and cardinals

and a brown thrasher, and flocks of the fast and tiny and the big and plodding -

species I didn't recognize. A flock of perhaps 16 large birds made me think of the

vultures of Africa, the way they held their heads in flight, except that these were

pale, a shade of white. Fresh woodpecker holes dotted weathered snags.


The birds were a happy surprise on such a freezing day. On my return home, I tossed

more seed and mealieworms to our backyard avian residents to help them get through

this bitter spell.

the wise auntie
came to mind.
'open the package
and share,' she said.
'open the package
and share.
When the package comes,
open the package
and share
immediately.'

(the birds are everywhere
waiting to return.
the banana trees
are seeking a new home;
they are broken
by the freeze.
what we call
the time and date
don't matter so much
Wednesday to you -
Thursday to me -
it's timing that is all.)

'open the package
and share,'
the wise auntie said.

I've never been enlightened before, and I'm not sure I like it. The 'dawning of the age of Aquarius' has left me reeling, and sometimes I get wistful for the days when I knew much less and enjoyed life more. Living on a superficial and somewhat ignorant level may not be so bad as I thought.

Take cholesterol for example. Here's a threat I have never seen with my own two eyes. Yet it can make me worry about what I eat, and whether I should take expensive pills every day for the rest of my life, and am I going to be gone sooner rather than later because of genes that bring out a number over 200 every time they look at a drop of my blood under a microscope. Please let me live in peace and unenlightened.

Carpal Tunnels, Root Canals, and Glutens could be erased from my vocabulary, and I wouldn't miss them.

Glitches, time warps, Tivo, and out-of-the-body experiences dancing with zombies or whatever - whoeeee. Let me just have a good night's sleep and a walk in the forest now and again. Let me sail on a lake in a real, non-mystical boat. Take me to a picnic that has Coke and potato chips. Let me wink at as many guys as I want. Let me be imprecise, clueless, and somewhat careless. Enlightenment has given me one big headache.

Potato Soup

Potato Soup

3 large potatoes
1 medium onion, chopped
1 carrot, diced
1 teaspoon salt
black pepper as desired
water
@1/4 cup half & half
@2/3 cup milk
1/2 tsp Papa Jeabert's Spice de Terre (or 1/8 tsp ground cayenne, or 1/2 tsp dried dill)


Peel your potatoes and dice them into cubes (about 3/4 inch). Put potatoes, onion, and

carrot into a large pot. Add salt and black pepper. Add water at, or just slightly above,

the level of the potatoes. Bring to a boil and then simmer, covered, until tender (15-20

minutes). Do not drain. Use a potato masher or fork to lightly mash the vegetables, and add

the milk and half & half to the mixture. Stir, and bring to a simmer over low heat. Stir in

seasoning and serve with crackers or croutons. Serves four. Warms you on a cold night!

iiii birthdays iiii

Birthdays are about the date you were born. They are about time, how long you have lived but that means they're also about location.

The earth travels around the sun. Your birthday is the point on the orbit where the earth was when you were born. It is the start/finish line on the racetrack, the start/finish line for each of your years. Turning ten years old means you have ridden on the earth around the sun ten times, and are starting your 11th lap.

Now, we people have developed many calendars across the centuries, and we have labeled each and every day in the year. For example, here in the U.S., we call today 'January 24'. Ideally, the next 'January 24' falls one year from today, and the earth returns to this very same spot in its orbit around the sun. That is what a 'year' means. The earth has completed one lap around the sun.

Years ago, I wrote a blog post about the way Montessori pre-schools celebrate birthdays and how three-year olds come to grasp the concept of 'year'. The teacher holds a lighted candle and pretends to be the sun. The honored child holds a globe of the earth and walks around the candle, one time for every year, for every lap they've lived on this planet.

How many times have you traveled around the sun?

water
along the river's edge
rocks in slow motion.
it's grown heavy
or slow slowed down.
joggers trot past -
the trail a zone much faster
than the low-wave
river in slo-mo.

roots

Roots below provide balance for the green growth above. A tree with a root system that reaches as deep and wide as the trunk and branches stretch up and outward will not topple in the wind.

spiders at the entry into 2014

Maybe it was around the year 2000 that we visited the Field Museum in Chicago and there was a special exhibit on spiders. Spiders, a subgroup of arachnids, are not insects. They have eight legs instead of six and as we all know, they build fascinating webs, using oozy gunk that flows from their bodies like Silly String as they weave their intricate food traps.

The one piece of information that sticks in my mind from that day was a sign that read that on average within - was it six feet? - of where you might be standing at any given time, there is a spider.

Every now and again after we left, I looked closely around me, and sure enough, I could find a tiny living spider in the corner of a room, on a window sill, in the grass or a shrub, hiding under a drain stopper or a leaf, walking on my car windshield or in the straw of a broom. The bigger, fancier ones were not as common, but the drab little house spiders sure got around, and there was always one, minding its own business, within six feet.

The greatest drought (et cetera) ever is finally somewhat on the decline, but its effects are immeasurable. I live in central Louisiana. One casualty in my small world is the spider. I haven't seen one in months now. I did see a few a little over a year ago, and I have a kind of confidence in their tenacity. I'm hoping some of them are riding out these challenging years deep beneath the molding of windows, or under especially thick tree bark that's retained moisture and mites through the dry spell. I'm trusting some have continued to find mates, and to find a stray insect for food, enough to nourish them through a reproductive cycle so that their descendents can provide the foundation for their recovery.

moon poem

Did someone turn a flashlight
on the dark side of the moon?
the sun up in the east;
the plain lunar disk
shining whitely, drowsing
in the westward morning sky.
Was the rabbit napping
on the other side?

mind travel

In one of the Star Trek Voyager episodes, (or was it Next Generation?) visitors arrived whose body matter was nonexistent. At some point in the history of their species, they had become pure energy and as such, could effortlessly travel across thousands of light years. Meanwhile, Voyager - a starship - chugged along, with people and other creatures as passengers, with no end in sight to their journey.

As we earthlings have constructed vehicles for space travel, great amounts of fuel are used to propel the ships outside of the atmosphere. The ships have traveled to the moon, to Mars and Saturn. There are probably private ships that have traveled with destinations unknown to the public. Humans have taken steps outside of their planetary home.

Some of those steps have been costly to the earth. There are the resources used up in the construction and fuel. But there are also dangers to layers of the atmosphere that have perfectly sheltered the earth like a blanket since life first developed on the planet. The atmosphere protects the earth from the sun's rays and heat. Most importantly, it keeps the air we breathe from escaping the earth, fizzling away like air from a hole in a balloon. When we punch holes in our atmosphere with spaceship launches or with nuclear weapons tests, we seriously threaten the well-being of life on the planet, including our own. The oxygen content can thin to levels inadequate for our needs. There have been notable changes in my lifetime.

Over the past decade, I've spent time developing practice in meditation to which I was introduced as a girl in Catholic schools, as a young woman studying psychology, astrophysics, and neuropsychology, and then in yoga classes. The concept of traveling great physical distances via the mind, and experiencing other times and places in the way we experience dreams does not feel foreign. Other cultures have developed such practice in ways most of us westerners have never known about. Using mind travel, there are no issues with whether the atmosphere of destination planets is breathable or toxic, or if the temperatures suit our physical needs, because we leave our bodies behind. I am not accomplished in such things, but somehow I recognize that given the costs of travel in ships, travel via the mind is worth serious exploration as an alternative or additional approach.

nuevo birdie

nuevo birdie
new vogel
perched on a fence
not sure how he got here
he grips the picket
to keep from falling
cause he's not sure he can fly
he'd like to eat
but he's not sure how
there are no walls, only sky

Maze puzzles were popular when I was a kid. They might be found near the crossword puzzle in a newspaper, or you could buy a book of them printed on tablet-style paper. You pressed your pencil point where it read 'Start!', then tried to forge a path to 'Finish!' without crossing a line. Most were brief and simple, but some were large and intricate. You wanted to avoid a dead end, but you also didn't want to get to the finish too soon because then, what was the point of the puzzle?

If you think mazes are not much of a challenge, try designing a maze or two. I watched my kids and their friends do this with chalk on concrete when they were young, and so thought it must be simple. When I first tried it a couple of years ago I discovered it wasn't so easy, but it was fascinating. When I try to sketch a maze, it feels like my brain is stretching in unfamiliar ways. (Well, where does the word 'amaze' come from? Sketching a maze is indeed amazing.)

The brain loves games like Tetris and jigsaw puzzles. I've become intrigued during the last decade by wordless learning. After many years of schooling dominated by learning via verbal teaching and the language in books, I recognize that sketching mazes, painting, yoga, knitting, and playing an instrument all are a kind of learning too. I don't mean the process of learning to play a song or knit a scarf as much as that the activity itself is an experience of enlightenment.

I think of bats and whales and their awareness of location through sound wave feedback. No one gives them written directions or tells them where to go. The language of words is not always the most effective way to learn. I think of how much brighter I feel after dancing, or gazing at the network of the night sky.

It's 1 AM, and the digital notepad has been staring at me blankly for over three hours now. Words fail me, and so instead, I knitted a scarf in blue and red and listened to songs from the 1970 Derek and the Dominos album, and the 1987 'Trio' album with Linda Rondstadt, Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton. Then I found another great version of 'Farther Along' (which is in 'Trio'), this rendition performed by Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers. In recognition of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthay on January 15, I located some images of him, and quotes from his many uplifting speeches. I've almost left out that Simon and Garfunkel's 'me and Julio' song and 'Homeward Bound' were on the unplanned list, and The Flatlanders' version - and then Emmylou's - of 'If I were a bluebird' brought me a kind of joy.

The scarf is around my neck. I now have this urge to draw mazes, but still no ideas about what to write.

a brewskie at the Brick -

Living in a world where Star Trek meets Northern Exposure. The Trek cast are in uniforms and answering to the commander; the Northern Exposure cast dances with cranes and weaves philosophies under very tall conifers and northern lights. The Northern Exposure folks are cool with the Treks.

'That's cool,' they say, without a whole lot of judgment.

'But what's in the directive? Where are you heading? What is your mission?' the Treks ask.

'Directive?' Northern Exposure-ites ask.

(Except for Maurice, who yells out - 'I have a directive! Let me show you the blueprints.')

Everybody sighs. Commanders scratch their heads.

The Northern Exposure cast tours the Enterprise or the Voyager space ship and then everybody beams down to The Brick for a brewskie and a few tunes on the juke box. A moose walks up and peers in through a window near the bar.

apples and stamps

I'm looking at a small page of apple stamps. (They are U.S. postage stamps, 33 cents each, the current rate for sending postcards.) Four different images - each stamp has a single apple - one round and red, another tilted and green, one in yellows, golds, and rose that could be a Golden Delicious, and another that could be a lumpy Fuji or perhaps a wild crabapple. Each has a leaf on its stem, like little flags and I wonder about the leafy limb that may have borne each apple before it was picked. Fifteen of the twenty stamps still remain.

There's another page before me of 'First-Class Forever' stamps for mailing letters an ounce or less. Cheerful images of 'vintage seed packets' adorn the stamps: calendula, digitalis, linum, alyssum, pinks, cosmos, aster, and primrose.

There's traffic noise outside and slamming doors noise inside and noisy thoughts within me. But somehow postage stamps hold a little magic. The apples seem more real than whatever's making all the noise - they are tangible and organized in their rows on the page and their categorization, and the apples are a little messy in the imperfection of their shapes, and maybe that's a gift from God.

Ask Johnny Appleseed what is most important, or ask the horses, the birds and the bees. It's not what's making all this noise on highways and in hallways.

The seeds and flowers, the fruit we eat, the happy miracles, are products of nature's organized and disorganized ways - nature's messiness and its nurturing of life with unmeasured unpremeditated quantities of sun and water and wind and dirt and excretions and carcasses and birthings.

The apples and flowers are full of good cheer. Maybe the stamps themselves.

wildflower seed

Probably you could plant wildflower seed in formal rows and sections, and they'd come out just fine. But with wildflowers, the seeds are laid back and easy, and every seed is a little different. One might like nudging up next to a drippy rock; another might thrive in arid soil. One might germinate just great under fallen leaves; another might be resting on top of the ground under the sun and still take root. Some might germinate two years from now. In other words, you can scatter wildflower seeds and they'll likely fare well (unless the birds are unusually hungry - then you want to scratch up the soil a little before sowing). January is not a bad time to sow your seed. The seeds will be so grateful by the time spring warmth arrives, they'll grow in ecstatic profusion, producing fresh oxygen, food for birds and bugs, and stunning beauty.

Winter hawks
stare down from power lines
along the Texas highway -
their intent posture
silhouetted against pale dry fields
and leafless trees.
Lenticular clouds swim like whales
across the oceanic gray of sky.

The best I can tell, whales (like horses, monkeys, parrots, kangaroos, cats and dogs) do not seek material possessions. They seek nourishment for their bodies, and they seek those activities that lead to the production of young. The only other thing they seek is nearness to others. Companions.

Watching deer, it's not long before you'll see them nuzzling each other around the neck areas. Cats curl up on your feet or lap. Dogs and giraffes, cows and many other species lick each other. Goats will press their little muzzles up against each other and their human friends. Parrots flock together, and huddle side by side along canyon walls. Whales travel in pods, and the calves swim in synchrony with the moms. Elephants migrate 'holding hands' trunk to tail. In the wild, horses gallop in herds. Many times, I've seen a single fenced horse stretching its neck as far as it could reach toward a horse leaning from a fence on the other side of the road.

Many animals make companions of creatures of other species. Dogs are 'man's best friend'. The last two farm animals to reside in our pasture, an ancient pony and elderly billy goat, grazed side by side every single day. Humans, dogs, cats, pigs and others adopt hungry abandoned infants from other species.

People are mammals, and though we may have a penchant for the material, we too are not designed for physical isolation. Our bodies and souls yearn for interaction. When we permit ourselves to feel with all of our senses, our bodies know the difference between kin and strangers even while the talk in our minds may try to convince us otherwise. We too have the synchrony of other beasts. We have the animal wisdom when we permit ourselves to experience it.

Scrimshaw

The carving or engraving of bone, tusks, and teeth is called scrimshaw. Scrimshaw is more commonly known as a sailor's art, the carving of images on whale bone or teeth. Detailed and sometimes magnificent pictures of the ship, or the people therein can be found. Sometimes the art was brought to life by rubbing ink or tobacco juice into the carved grooves to generate color. Scrimshaw from whale teeth and bones is now illegal in this country (USA) but the whale art created before 1989 may still be legally traded.

Like with ivory from elephant tusks, there is something in me that is uneasy about scrimshaw. There is a useful truth, though, that the code to the genetic identity of the whale is imbedded in the molecules of tissue, especially in the inner cavities of the teeth, which hold blood cells. We can discover what was this species? Who was this individual? Each bit of scrimshaw contains a key to a whale who once coursed the seas.

the Wise Men

Were they scholars or kids, those Three Kings?
Did they pore over faded scrolls
of astrology and prophecy
or just go for a lark -
Let's follow that star!

Twelfth Night and Hedgehogs

It's Twelfth Night, and a cold wind is whirling across the front yard, the pale grass dimly lit by street lights. Three points of light sparkling from among the grasses bring to mind the triangular face of the European hedgehog. Hedgehogs, with their furry quills and pointy noses are quirky and beloved little beasts, sometimes even kept as pets. I don't believe I've ever seen a hedgehog - they're not native to United States, but they're in a lot of children's stories. They look like spiky guinea pigs. Like guinea pigs, they tend to prefer life at night. They're reported to be omnivorous; they dine on fruit and berries as well as insects and snails.

Farewell to Tarwathie

There's an old Scottish song called 'Farewell to Tarwathie'. In the 1960s, Judy Collins sang and recorded a most beautiful rendition, with recordings of humpback whale vocalizations in the background. I have difficulty finding a good photo or image of a humpback whale these days, or I would include one here.

For many years, I have loved the melody of 'Farewell to Tarwathie', and the Scottish sounding lyrics, and the sense of men seeking wilderness. It has seemed ironic to me, and painful, that such a beautiful song could be composed about men hunting down whales, that it should be layered with the voices of the whale.

I looked up the lyrics tonight, and the last three stanzas go like this:

'...The cold coast of Greenland
Is barren and bare
No seed time nor harvest
Is ever known there
And the birds here sing sweetly
In mountain and dale
But there's no bird in Greenland
To sing to the whale

'There is no habitation
For a man to live there
And the king of that country
Is the fierce Greenland bear
And there'll be no temptation
To tarry long there
With our ship under full
We will homeward repair

'Farewell to Tarwathie
Adieu Mormond Hill
And the dear land of Crimmond
I bid you farewell
I'm bound off for Greenland
And ready to sail
In hopes to find riches
In hunting the whale'

I don't have a good grip on it, the hunting of whales to find riches, and the beautiful voice of Judy Collins singing about hunting the whales. But then I see the phrase 'our ship under full' and I somehow trust her. With her rendition of the men's song, she includes the whales' song. Here I am in this blog, seeking riches in my way, in hunting the whale. I wasn't particularly a 'Save the Whales' activist, a Greenpeace member, in the past. But of late, whales have come my way, and I'm hunting the immaterial, seeking resurrection.

The Star Trek television episode (from either the 'Next Generation' or the 'Voyager' series) that most stands out in my mind is one where the starship meets up with a celestial whale.

In the episode, a guest character makes good friends with one of the regulars, but is suffering from the noise of thousands of voices in his head. By the end, he leaves the relative security and community of the starship for the dispassionate connection with the whale, and the peace and silence he experiences traveling within its dream-like being. His new friend, though, is left behind. The visual image of the whale sailing away from the ship into the deep of the galaxy is etched in my memory.

the sacred seas
an inner peace
the majestic whale's breath