Monday, March 31, 2014

clams

Clams are on my mind, and I’m a little frustrated that I cannot find much information about them online. An individual clam that made the news in 2006 has surfaced, however. Off the coast of Iceland, a clam was dredged whose shell indicated it was 507 years old, the oldest living creature on earth known to humans. (Each ring on a clam’s shell is reported to measure one year in time.) Scientists named the clam ‘Ming’ because its established birthdate of 1499 dates back to the ‘Ming Dynasty’ period of China. Ming is reported not to have survived the investigations of the scientists. However, the details are very limited. Perhaps if I dug longer, I’d learn how large was this creature. I’m curious about the circumstances under which it was removed from the ocean floor.

In the last year or so, I’ve seen old photos from the 1960s of certain species of clam harvested for food. Some were as wide as a foot, and looked to be bulging with life. The people who caught them did not seem proud or pleased but rather a little unsettled by their catch.

In the Old Testament, there is mention of the religious law directing that the Jewish people were not to eat shellfish. I don’t remember there to be an explanation.

I have an odd technique when painting or drawing whereby I do not decide in advance what I intend to create, but rather wait to see what shows up. In 2012, whales sometimes energetically emerged. In 2013, there were clams, although I’d not before experienced any special interest in them. In drawing them, I became interested in their existence, and wondered why they come forward in such a powerful way.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

yoga at home

Yoga is a great practice for keeping an even keel. One may take lessons from a teacher or have friendly sessions with friends or practice alone. It took some effort for me to learn to practice alone. Weekly classes had worked well; we had a skilled, caring, intuitive teacher and I showed up for nearly every class. We were encouraged to practice at home, but it was a long time before I was able to get past my resistance. Turns out that a simple key was waiting for me. I didn’t commit to a whole routine of movements and breathing on my own. I just did something that felt good. If it was only one movement, I patted myself on the back just as I would for a longer or more complex series. Quickly, my practice became rewarding, and it flowed very easily.

Over time, yoga practice has faded some with the embrace of other activities. But the body awareness integrated with conscious breathing became imbedded in my core and is never lost. This week, I just had to find that old key: one small exercise done with sincere intention is very good. Practice can maintain or grow or contract at its own timing.
Kids bring gifts to the puddle:
tadpoles, bugs, sheltering leaves.
Creation!

Waterbug shadows
dance on the watery floor.
Life’s mouldering scent.

Friday, March 28, 2014


As I sat at a traffic light today, two bright green, almost neon green, birds were in flight. Though Austin has been known for its healthy population of monk parakeets, these parrots were of a far more brilliant shade. The two flew about six feet apart, darting and weaving in a surprising synchrony, like the Blue Angels, or a pair of eyes. That would not have prompted me to write, except that later in the afternoon, at another traffic light, I saw two grackles in flight, perhaps 12 feet apart, again in this intricate and intimately perfect synchrony. So, I wondered about it a bit. It’s the season for mating and building nests. Perhaps the birds pair up and become as one in flight without thought, for the pleasure of the union. The purpose of such synchrony which is perhaps beneath their consciousness is to become a team to rear young (reproduction for the survival of the species).

I’ve written in a past blog about the scientific method. The steps we were taught in high school circa 1970 have changed. The first step we learned was and still is my favorite, and in my opinion could stand alone. It’s the one that is now completely left out: Observation.

To learn about animal behavior, or how the weather works, we can juggle numbers and measurements and laboratory conditions all we want. I deeply believe it is essential, though, to walk outside and observe.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales

Fairy tales and nursery rhymes several centuries old were a staple of a child’s introduction to story-telling in the United States when I was a kid. The rhymes were recited in playgrounds, at bed-time, in the first years of school. The stories of giants and elves and trolls were written down in famed collections of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and Mother Goose, among others. They were also retold in simplified forms for the youngest listeners – sometimes in thin hard cover publications like The Golden Books. Mostly descended from the European tradition, the stories and rhymes had kings and princesses and knights, and tales of elves that repaired your shoes in the night. There was the kid who climbed a beanstalk into the territory of one very ferocious giant who complained ‘Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman! Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll eat him with a loaf of bread!’

Everyone knew Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, The Princess and the Pea, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, Puss ‘n Boots, King Midas, Sleeping Beauty, and Goldilocks and the Three Bears. They could sing or shout Mary Had a Little Lamb, Pease Porridge Hot, Old King Cole, A-Tisket, A-Tasket, and Pop Goes the Weasel.

Many of the stories traditionally began with the phrase ‘Once upon a time…’ and ended with ‘And they lived happily ever after.’ (Except for the stories where they did not live happily ever after! Some tales were plum scary.)

Kids tended to embrace these books when they showed up on their birthdays because of the amazing illustrations. Many were printed from paintings lush with color and intricate detail. You looked at the pictures first, then picked out the words to find out more about these amazing scenes. A wolf dressed like Grandma! Two kids stuffing a witch into an oven! The beautiful swan that was once an ugly duckling! A little mouse pulling a thorn from a lion’s paw.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Songs

There are all kinds of songs. Ballads tell stories. Some songs are brief and repetitive. The rhythm can make sure the point gets across. Some are silly or sweet or angry. Some songwriters spend a lot of time on the lyrics: the flow, the meaning, the imagery, the poetry. The power of the words. Others are more focused on the tune, the instrumental, or they just weave something magical out of notes and words that rhyme. Some ache with emotion. There are the blues, and there’s folk which tends to have a societal edge. Hymns are prayers with melody.

One song I composed is just the repetition of a single syllable: Hey!

Monday, March 24, 2014

unscheduled meditation

The neighborhood creek is largely dry but there is a broad shallow puddle just past the dam. I took a break from my walk and sat above, looking at the water and the leaves collected at the water's edges. I stayed longer than usual, in a quiet little peace, the temperature mild, a frog and a few birds making noises. I felt a little guilty - why was I staring so long in one spot? When I first sat, my body was still, with my mind still active. After awhile, both my body and mind were still, were one, and that is when I began to see.

Sunday, March 23, 2014

I was going to write about cows tonight, and I guess this gets to a cow in a roundabout way.

When I was pregnant in 1987, there was quite a lot of encouragement for natural childbirth. The belief at the time was that rapid medical advances of the 1950s and 60s had taken childbearing away from the mother and infant and messed it up with medications (thalidomide one of the disastrous pharmaceutical errors), scientific formulas, scans made of x-rays and sonic vibrations, and caesarian-sections. The mother was often anaesthetized, and missed the precious moment of birth, and the opportunity to bring her infant soon to breast. The infant at times was affected by the anaesthetics as well, and was thus slower to breathe.

This is not to snub the advances that had been made that improved rates of survival for mothers and infants. But somehow, the successful, nurturing process of many thousands of years was being broken.

My husband and I attended a series of natural childbirth lessons together to prepare for the birth (since unfortunately, we didn’t know how to give birth like cats or deer or bears in the woods). We used the Bradley method. (The Lamaze approach was probably better known and was very popular.) A core aspect of those lessons, though not referred to as yoga or meditation, involved awareness of breathing, and how to use breath and imagery to relax the body through contractions and birthing the child. One bit of homework we were given was to practice the breathing exercises, and to come up with images that were calming to the expectant mother.

Here’s where the cow comes in. I came up with two relaxation images. One was of our cat Pearl peacefully sitting near the fireplace. The other was of a cow in a field chewing her cud on a mild afternoon, white cumulus clouds adrift in the blue sky.

Now, cows in India have been revered across centuries. I don’t know much about why. The domestic cat was held with esteem by the Egyptians. That wasn’t on my mind though at the time of the lessons. It’s just a cow’s steadiness can be very calming, and Pearl, our cat, was a tolerant friend of great serenity.

Saturday, March 22, 2014

the wonderment of night
from a long ago dorm room
the crazy guys and conscientious girls
- and vice versa -
watching the snow fall
the foot bridge mounded in untouched white
a candle like a melting lake
of shadowy blues,
sand, driftwood
aglow in the window
- a little too much cheap wine -
a fellow plays his guitar
his melody wandering like incense
down the hollow stairwell.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

cardinal

The doors were open today and a cardinal flew in. Perhaps he did not know how to exit because he kept throwing himself into the glass of the windows facing the woods of the backyard. I opened the doors wider and left for a bit. It was late in the afternoon, the air mild, but the sun was bright. When I returned, he was still in the room near the windowsills and on my arrival, tried to escape again the hard way - through the glass. I opened a third door that was near him, and walked up, thinking he'd fly outdoors as I moved toward him, but no. After a little fluttering along the sills, he let me pick him up. I lightly held him, he weighed very little, but he struggled nonetheless and I lost him once. I held him more securely as we went through the doorway and he bit me hard with his beak, three times, on the fingers. His eyes were lit up with anger, gleaming black against the red of his feathers. He would not release his hold. He was staring right at me. I felt a kind of elation to be holding a cardinal at all, but abashed that he'd clamp down so fiercely on the fingers of his rescuer. This whole situation lasted only a minute or two. Once outside, I opened my hands and he flew into the woods.

My evening changed its course. As though I'd been furiously scolded for some error on my part, I left the house to celebrate the equinox elsewhere.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

The vernal (spring) equinox is approaching and I went for a good walk at dusk. A chickadee, a mourning dove, and a white-winged dove were calling from the trees along the road. Two or three frogs conversed among themselves in tinny erratic sounds. Deer went crashing and splashing through the dammed part of the creek as I approached. A few water bugs were zipping about. There were goats with bells on their collars, ringing as they browsed. There were tufts of wild grasses that brought to mind porcupines.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a porcupine. The first I ever saw was in the late 1970s just west of Crater Lake, Oregon. It was toddling across the forested road as dawn approached. The next 13 porcupines that crossed my path were all in one evening in Alberta near Kicking Horse Pass in the Canadian Rockies. We were driving after a hike, and at every curve in the road, there was one or three or two porcupines. I counted eleven, and that number held the record for only a few minutes before we came upon two more!

Visiting a chateau in the town of Blois, France, early 1990s, I was surprised to see the porcupine as a kind of royal family emblem, dating back several centuries, gleaming in gold above a mantel in the great room. A curious and beautiful antiquity – I was pleased to discover the quilled beasty respected so far across the ocean from the wilderness where I’d first cheerfully met them.

a good laugh

We’re thankful for our comedians and comediennes; they expose just about every topic that embarrasses us and then turn our fears into a good laugh.


Our fear immobilizes us. Perhaps a good laugh lets us move on.

Monday, March 17, 2014

Piano (continued)

A piano, unlike most other musical instruments, has a separate string for every note. In a ‘grand piano’, the cover over the keys is propped open – you can see the strings, and the little hammers that bring the string to life when the pianist presses a key, and the pads that mute the sound when the piano player releases the key. The keys are traditionally black and white. There are foot pedals with which you can vary the softness and the duration of sound.

What I like about a piano is that you can see with your eyes the distance between two sounds. You can see with your eyes which notes are related. All of the ‘C’ notes are white keys just to the left of the paired black keys. The piano brings something that is auditory to the visual and tactile senses. You can see with your eyes and feel with your hands how different harmonies are linearly spaced. You might recognize a chord is the same as an arpeggio, only with all the notes played at the same moment in time (a collapsed arpeggio). Unlike with a chord, in an arpeggio, each note is not only separated by distance, but by time. (If you think of music as a multi-dimensional experience, there is a certain architecture or framework to it, galaxies of notes in motion.)

Some instruments (trumpet, flute, piccolo) you can only play one note at a time. With a piano you can play as many notes at one time as you have fingers. Given also the gorgeous sounds that resonate from hammered strings, there are innumerable ways to create an infinite diversity of sound and music with the wonderful piano.

What it's really all about, though, is that the piano player can express sounds through the strings of the piano that affect our minds, and the strings of our hearts.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

piano


Moving from pi to pi-ano: Piano music was evident everywhere as I was growing up (TV, movie themes, radio, ‘elevator music’, churches). The first piece that truly caught my attention was Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. On drizzly afternoons, students at school practiced this popular assignment on the ancient auditorium piano. The slow delivery, the simple yet complex structure of melodic tenderness stopped everything else in my head – I had to listen.

A little later in the 1960s, a recording of Mason William’s piano composition, Classical Gas, oddly caught fire on the popular charts. There were no lyrics, no rock and roll or Motown sound like most of the hits of the 60s. Every time Classical Gas came up on my bedside alarm clock/radio, I stopped what I was doing to listen up close. The soaring sound had a way of lifting my spirit – and the intricacies of the rhythm and a kind of call response melody wordlessly fascinated my mind.

There were balladeers of the same era whose music was a tightly woven combination of voice and piano. Elton John, Roberta Flack, Jackson Browne, and Carole King come to mind. Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Wonder thumped the keys as they sang. The Derek and the Dominos 1971 song ‘Layla’, especially the instrumental ending, sailed on a passionate intertwining of piano and guitar.

Some of the recordings I remember seem to have been sped up a bit in their current format of delivery. I miss the deliberation of the original tempo. My mind is clear on this – it says ‘slow down’ when the newer reproductions are faster than the musicians played or sang them. (This might affect the key as well.) Would a tempo change be caused by flawed compact discs, or some fluke in the equipment that plays them, or something else altogether?

Friday, March 14, 2014

happy pi day

News for Today
14 March 2014


Today was 'pi day', but there was no 'pie' hence the masses perhaps were a bit grumpy. It's called 'pi day' because the date is 3.14 which is the value of pi without a lot of frills. (Here is pi with one hundred bits of detail: 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679... . Thank you, Wiki.) Pi is a constant value that helps yield the area and the circumference of any circle. Think 'pi r squared' but remember pie are round.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Texas Bluebonnets - the state wildflower - are possibly the most famed and loved wildflower of Central Texas. People have scheduled spring visits and photo shoots here just to see the rolling hills blanketed with the vibrant blues of this local lupine. During the 1980s, there were not a lot of bluebonnets in our neighborhood. Being wildflowers, they are easy to sow in the fall, and so I bought packages of seeds to produce the blooms that so brighten the landscape. My success rate was quite low, however, with only a handful of the plants showing up in the spring.

Some years later, I discovered stretches of bluebonnets alongside the road in other parts of the neighborhood. Because these already seemed very happy in our limestone locale, after they went to seed, I gathered a few of the pods and scattered the contents in front of where we lived. These were highly successful the next year - we had a great patch of blue along our bit of road. Those bluebonnets in turn produced pods of seeds, and I gathered a few additional pods from elsewhere along the road. The next spring was even lovelier.

I suspect one secret is that something already cheerily growing in your area is more likely to be a survivor than the seeds from plants that were successful in different environmental conditions. The other is not to mow down favorite wildflowers before they've produced their seeds.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Day-o

Harry Belafonte's voice calling out, 'Day-o! Day-ay-ay-o!' was the first sound we heard from the record player. The long notes seemed to echo from some distant, foggy morning. It stopped me in my tracks.

Our dad had bought a 'hi-fi' which stands for high fidelity. (Miriam-Webster defines this as the reproduction of a sound or image that is very faithful to the original.)

Belafonte went on to sing 'daylight come and me want to go home'.

A few years ago, a living voice floated through my open window. There was a big plum tree outside, and a building with blinded windows; there was nothing to give away the source of the haunting call, a call that wasn't very different from Belafonte's plea.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

sailing

The weather was much warmer today, and as I walked in the sunshine, Christopher Cross's song 'Sailing' came to mind. Sailing - the activity and the song - was very popular in 1979, the year of the song's release. On a day like today - sunny, warm, with a light breeze - Lake Travis, near Austin, Texas, would be dotted with tilted sails of white and other colors. Without engines or gasoline, the little boats could quietly gain impressive speed. Those on the boats - in minimal attire - would be casually steering the boom, or dangling their legs in the water, or swimming, or eating sandwiches. These mostly amateur sailors had fun working with the wind to get to their destinations, this cove or that, in the lake.

For a while in the 1990s, we had a subscription to a magazine about Korean culture. In one issue, there was an article about Korean nuns, with a paragraph or two about meditation. One of the women shared an image she said she often experienced in meditation - gliding in a small sailboat on a smooth surface.

I could see how that might be. Even watching sailboats from a distance is a peaceful experience.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Grand derangement



Little kids in America enjoy playing with simple puzzles. Some are made of wood where the knobbed pieces don’t interconnect but are merely set into a carved out spot on a board with the same shape as the puzzle piece. These puzzles usually have a theme. A shapes puzzle might have a colorful round piece and a square piece and a triangular piece. An animal puzzle might have a lion and a tiger and a giraffe and a hippopotamus. A weather puzzle might have a cloud and a sun, a gust of wind and a forecaster with a yellow rain slicker on his or her head. Toddlers do not yet have fully developed fine motor skills and are challenged and entertained just by the task of putting the piece upright into the matching space.

As we get older, puzzles become more complex. The pieces interlock. The animals may fit within a complex jungle environment. A popular American puzzle for grade-schoolers is of sturdy cardboard with a glossy map of the United States in varied colors; each piece is in the shape of one or more of the 50 states.

The bigger we get, the smaller and more numerous the pieces in the puzzles we put together. Five hundred or thousand piece jigsaw puzzles are not uncommon, and are sometimes complicated by ‘trompes d’oeil’ or sections of solid color where it’s mainly the shapes of the pieces that matter, with few other visual clues. Some enthusiasts will spend weeks putting together large puzzles with beautiful or intriguing images – or three-dimensional puzzles of famous architectural landmarks such as the Taj Mahal.

The puzzles of life – our personal puzzles, or those that are world-wide - can become even more challenging. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces flying around you. You grab at them as they float slowly by – or faster and faster – and try to connect them in a way that makes sense. Now think of a game with pieces from several puzzles flying around, mixed with a number of pieces that don’t fit at all. In life, we might call that a ‘grand derangement’. Some players might work on finding the pieces to one little corner, and ignore the rest. Others might try first organizing the pieces in stacks to discover how many puzzles there are.

No point in worrying or being hard on yourself for not having these puzzles solved. One possibility is that just solving a small puzzle might bring about a solution to the larger. Another is that solutions come through assembling the network of pieces in unintended creative ways. What if just grabbing a handful of chips and a glass of beer while the pieces fly around works best? With a grand derangement, nature, given time and minimal interference, may just recompose itself.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

St Hildegard might be pleased to hear
the women's clarion voices -
echoing from little car speakers
they sing St Hildegard's song
of a thousand years ago.

In the driveway
the engine's now off,
the radio still on.
Deer in the scrub,
the shadowy woods of juniper and oak,
are visible in the rear-view mirror
peering toward the ringing sounds -
poised in a narrow window
to an ancient time.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

the hundredth scarf -

Approaching the completion of the hundredth scarf (for the second time since the first count was disputed), the yarn got all tangled and knotted and we wrestled a bit. I won in that I did finish the 100th scarf, and the yarn won in that the scarf was shorter than planned because I could only untangle the tangles so far. Thunder started crashing and the rain came down hard and steady as I cast off and tied the final knot. Who said knitting is a tame sport?

Anyway. Thanks for the beautiful rain -

Linda

Friday, March 7, 2014

chinaberry tree

Yesterday
i came upon a chinaberry tree,
its limbs still winter-bare
and arched to the sky.
On its lacework branches
perched a diversity of birds
murmuring and cooing and chirping -
doves in gray-brown
yellow finches
cedar waxwings
chickadees
They rose into the crisp air
wove in circles in and out
and returned
sinking in choir-like synchrony
onto the limbs,
the tree
accepting
the lightweight warmth of life and chatter
without complaint

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Lent 2014

Lent began yesterday, and as usual, I'm a little late setting up a Lenten practice. Last year, I was later than this, but did manage to follow through for the rest of the season with my promise to play a harmonica every day. I'd never really played before, so it was a challenge, and interesting, and I hope I didn't hurt God's ears too much.

This year, it seems wise to go very, very small and quiet. I've made a promise to each day, adjust something I see that is awry. We're not talking stop a war or save the whales, because I don't really know how to do that, but only one very very small and doable thing. If I see the hose is out and placed in a way it might trip somebody, I will fix it right away. Or if there is a smudge on a public mirror, maybe I'll take out a hankie and polish it clean. Or a loose screw on a cabinet, I'll tighten it. I've forgotten to thank someone for a kindness? Call right away.

There have been Big fix-its over these last few years and the problem with Big fix-its is that the side effects can be rather problematic and hard to undo.

Also, I'm a terrible procrastinator. A Big project makes me nervous and I may never get to it, or never finish it. A little spontaneous fixit - just one a day - shouldn't create any problems and can gradually add up to something positive.

It seems to me this is how nature works at its gentlest. Rain here, sunshine there, pyracantha berries in the fall and through winter; dewberries and blueberries in spring and summer. Nothing all at once. Yard work for me is much more pleasant and successful if I walk through every day and adjust this or water the thirsty that, or pick up whatever seems a bit awry or in the way. No big sudden makeovers. One day, the yard is noticeably beautiful. So I'm going to do something like that in a more conscious way wherever the opportunity happens to come up. Just one a day.

Anyway. Thanks for reading.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

An interior decorator knows that mirrors add light to a room. Mirrors can create an illusion that a small room is much larger than it appears.

I've thought about how wonderful it would be to take a class on the subject of light. All those issues about particle and wave, and how light can be bended or not. The subject about reflected light, gravity and light, black holes and light, the role of light in spirituality. The concept of God's light is present across time and many different religions. Halos and auras, and the ranges of light some insects and other creatures can see with their eyes but we humans cannot. Flowers have patterns in ultraviolet ranges of light that are like an invitation and map to hummingbirds and butterflies and bees.

But back to mirrors. Were there a physicist at my side this very moment, I'd ask, Do mirrors multiply light?

Monday, March 3, 2014

half the distance


playing the futility game
he's swimming to the finish
half the distance
every day
closer and closer
you're just a micro-inch away!
don't give up
(his eyes burn with salt)
you'll get there soon
closer and closer
you're halfway there!

the swimmer stops and floats...

rocking on the water
the waves beneath his back
a glorious sky
and a seagull above him
rocking on the wind

Sunday, March 2, 2014

moving


everything is in the truck
dishes, slipper socks, shovel,
kids' works of art
and the rocking chairs
that swayed them as infants to sleep.
one day life is there
the next day, 400 miles over here
her things no longer in a natural state
not scattered on a work table
or stacked in cupboards
but padded in knotted bags
and crumpled boxes called miscellaneous

the morning scone and iced tea
of Yesterday's Café
is no longer in walking distance -
the world is a broken thought

then the knitting bag comes to view
the worn needles, the yellow yarn
the quarter-of-the-way-finished scarf
she knits and clicks and tugs the yarn
until the disconnected yesterday
is woven to this day,
the street in the world back there
is linked after all
to the street over here
in a zizag puzzle kind of way