Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Damnation! / DamNation / Watching the River Flow / Roll on Columbia / All the little birds will come again


Coincidence?  My mother has been in my thoughts frequently since Mother's Day.  This morning I received an email from Bellingham's Mt. Baker Theater, announcing the showing of the film, "DamNation."

Google definition of "damnation":

  1. (in Christian belief) condemnation to eternal punishment in hell.
  2. Expressing anger or frustration.

My thoughts went back to when I was a toddler, and my mother was around 36 years old.  I remembered hearing the first words I can recall my mother saying.  She wasn't angry or frustrated with me (as far I could tell), but she was steamed up about something.  She was vacuuming our small apartment and cursing, "Damnation!  God damn it to hell!"

In one of my last conversations with her (when she was almost 78 years old) she told me that she was tired of being angry.  

Maybe my mother just needed to cry.

People disagreeing on all just about everything, yeah
Makes you stop and all wonder why
Why only yesterday I saw somebody on the street
Who just couldn’t help but cry
Oh, this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though
No matter what gets in the way and which way the wind does blow
And as long as it does I’ll just sit here
And watch the river flow
(Bob Dylan, lyrics from "Watching the River Flow."
The source is clear and bright,
the tributary streams flow through the darkness.
To be attached to things is an illusion:
To encounter the absolute is not yet enlightenment.
(Shih-T'ou)
P.S.  I'm giving some thought to a post inspired by The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob.  My name is am and I am a Dylanologist.  My guess is that only Dylanologists will be reading this book (-:
Coincidentally (or not) one of the Dylanologist websites left a comment (a clarification) on my totem pole post while I was in the process of reading The Dylanologists.  A comment from a Dylanologist website is a first for me. The only Dylanologist website I subscribe to is this one.

I take Bob Dylan at his word in his song "Mississippi":

Well my ship’s been split to splinters and it’s sinkin' fast
I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free
I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.

P.P.S.  Another connection to my mother, revisited today:

"Although I didn't pick up all the details on the first watching, the second time I did notice many significant details I had missed the first time including the Scandinavian knitting pattern that my mother had used when she made a pillow for me many years ago":

Mad River Rising from daniel houghton on Vimeo.

"All the little birds will come again when winter ends ..."
(music by Michael Chorney and Anais Mitchell)

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