Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Going silent for a little while / 16 years ago and 52 years ago on December 8


Changing of the Guards

WRITTEN BY: BOB DYLAN

Sixteen years

Sixteen banners united over the field

Where the good shepherd grieves

Desperate men, desperate women divided

Spreading their wings ’neath the falling leaves


Fortune calls

I stepped forth from the shadows, to the marketplace

Merchants and thieves, hungry for power, my last deal gone down

She’s smelling sweet like the meadows where she was born

On midsummer’s eve, near the tower


The cold-blooded moon

The captain waits above the celebration

Sending his thoughts to a beloved maid

Whose ebony face is beyond communication

The captain is down but still believing that his love will be repaid


They shaved her head

She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo

A messenger arrived with a black nightingale

I seen her on the stairs and I couldn’t help but follow

Follow her down past the fountain where they lifted her veil


I stumbled to my feet

I rode past destruction in the ditches

With the stitches still mending ’neath a heart-shaped tattoo

Renegade priests and treacherous young witches

Were handing out the flowers that I’d given to you


The palace of mirrors

Where dog soldiers are reflected

The endless road and the wailing of chimes

The empty rooms where her memory is protected

Where the angels’ voices whisper to the souls of previous times


She wakes him up

Forty-eight hours later, the sun is breaking

Near broken chains, mountain laurel and rolling rocks

She’s begging to know what measures he now will be taking

He’s pulling her down and she’s clutching on to his long golden locks


Gentlemen, he said

I don’t need your organization, I’ve shined your shoes

I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards

But Eden is burning, either brace yourself for elimination

Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards


Peace will come

With tranquillity and splendor on the wheels of fire

But will offer no reward when her false idols fall

And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating

Between the King and the Queen of Swords

Copyright © 1978 by Special Rider Music

*


The sky is exquisitely clear of today after intermittent smoke since the beginning of September.  This morning I took a two-hour walk through the woods, through the beautiful city cemetery, back through the woods, returning refreshed and renewed.

December 8 will be my 16th blog birthday.  I'll be going silent until then, reading your blogs but not commenting and not posting anything here.

Here is my first blog post, written on the 36th anniversary of the day R returned from Vietnam.  A wise and thoughtful person had suggested that I do something different on December 8 in 2006, that I bring something new to a day that had caused me such pain for so many years.  So much has healed since I began blogging.

The last time I took a blog break was in 2011.  Looking at the video I took then, it is shocking to see how green everything was.  We haven't had any substantial rain since last spring.  Many of our trees, deciduous and evergreen, are stressed and some appear to be dying.  We did have a rainy spring.  I hope that we have our usual month of steady clouds and rain in November.

*

Sometimes these Bob Dylan lyrics come to me:

Peace will come

With tranquillity and splendor on the wheels of fire

*

Sending love always to blog friends near and far.    

Thursday, October 6, 2022

Y Más Música / Trust Meditation


When I was born, I know had the capacity to trust.  It wasn't long before I lost that much of that crucial aspect of feeling safe and secure in the world.  I remember being two years old.  Although, I felt that I couldn't trust other people, I must have had some level of trust in myself and my perceptions of what was safe and what wasn't.  I sought safety outside myself and found enough of it to survive.  When I was 6 or 7 years old, I heard something in Mahalia Jackson's voice that I knew I could trust.  A woman singing on television gave me something human to trust.  There was something in certain songs, certain voices singing, that I could trust.   I began to trust the human voices that I heard in books when I learned to read.  I learned to trust myself to find my way home when I went on long walks as a child.  When I was 13 years old, I heard Bob Dylan singing and knew instinctively I could trust that young man's voice.  When I was 35 years old, I heard this song for the first time and took it to heart because by that time I nearly lost the ability to trust myself or anyone else or anything else.  I began to consider trusting myself.


Don’t trust me to show you the truth
When the truth may only be ashes and dust
If you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself

(Bob Dylan)





Here are a few more versions:




*

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Take no one's word for anything, including mine -- but trust your experience.
(James Baldwin)

Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
(Kahlil Gibran)

*

You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.
(Anton Chekov)

Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.
(Maya Angelou)

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust.
(George Eliot)

Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.
(Fred Rogers)

Wednesday, October 5, 2022

¡Más música!


¡Susana Baca!

The experience of joy


Today the topic of joy came up in a group of friends of mine.  Just what is it?  How is it experienced?  As I was listening to what everyone had to say, I remembered this YouTube video which brings tears of joy to me every time I listen.  It's been a while since I listened.

Tuesday, October 4, 2022

Revisiting the littlest birds / Variation on recurring dream / And Addendum (-:

 



Lyrics

Well, I feel like an old hobo, I'm sad, lonesome and blueI was fair as a summer's day, now the summer days are throughYou pass through places and places pass through youBut you carry them with you on the soles of your travellin' shoes
Well, I love you so dearly, I love you so clearlyI wake you up in the morning, so early just to tell youI got the wandering blues, I got the wandering bluesAnd I'm going to quit these rambling ways one of these days soon
And I sing, the littlest birds sing the prettiest songsThe littlest birds sing the prettiest songsThe littlest birds sing the prettiest songsThe littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
Well, it's times like these I feel so smallAnd wild like the rambling footsteps of a wandering childAnd I'm lonesome as a lonesome whippoorwillSinging these blues with a warble and a trillBut I'm not too blue to fly, no I'm not too blue to fly
'Cause the littlest birds sing the prettiest songsThe littlest birds sing the prettiest songsThe littlest birds sing the prettiest songsThe littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
But I love you so dearly, I love you so fearlesslyI wake you up in the morning so early, just to tell youI've got the wandering blues, I've got the wandering bluesAnd I don't want to leave you, I love you through and through
Well, I left my baby on a pretty blue trainAnd I sang my songs to the cold and the rainAnd I had the wandering blues, and I sang those wandering bluesAnd I'm gonna quit these rambling ways one of these days soon
And I sing, the littlest birds sing the prettiest songsThe littlest birds sing the prettiest songsThe littlest birds sing the prettiest songsThe littlest birds sing the prettiest songsThe littlest birds sing the prettiest songsThe littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
*
Another left-handed mandala near completion, after waking up from a new variation on a recurring dream where it is getting late in the day and I am alone and not at home.  
This time I was in an airport in a time of war.  People were booking flights out of the country.  There were very few flights left.  I realized that I didn't have any money with me, not even a credit card.  I wandered around the airport, wondering what to do about my situation.  I was not feeling desperation but was concerned.  At one far end of the airport was an unfamiliar man I sensed I could not trust.  When I wouldn't go with him where he wanted me to go, he became threatening.  I ran.  He chased me.  I ran past a man I didn't know and asked for help as I ran by.  The man stopped the threatening man and told him to leave me alone.  I felt immense gratitude.  Even though I knew that the threatening man wouldn't follow me, I kept running until I got to the other end of the airport.  There I saw a man who died, at peace with life and death, last January.  He is an artist.  I trust him and began to talk with him.  He had decided to stay in this country where he is accepted for who he is as an artist.  He said that he knew he wouldn't fit in anywhere but in this country.  As we were talking, his beloved wife approached.  She was wearing a deep yellow dress.  She was frowning at me.  She thought I was trying to take him away from her.  She was wrong but I couldn't convince her otherwise.  I continued walking to the very end of the airport and stopped to talk to an airport employee, a young woman whose job was to keep the airport clean.  She had a calm and peaceful presence.  She wasn't going to leave the country.  It was not an option for her or any of the other airport employees.  I continued walking at the end of the airport where I felt safe and began to suspect that I was dreaming.  I wasn't ready to wake up just then.  I was curious to see what would happen next.  Still, I was relieved to realize that I was dreaming.  I don't remember anything happening next.  
When I woke up, I checked the time.  It was about an hour before I usually wake up.  I wrote down the dream to make sure that I wouldn't forget it.  It is occurring to me that in this dream, I knew that I had a home in this country.  The recurring dream focus had shifted from its traditional focus on getting home before dark.  At the end of the dream, I felt at peace, not alone, in the company of other people who would stay in this country, those for whom this country is home.  My focus was no longer that of trying to get home before dark.  When I asked for help, help was available.  I was misunderstood but it wasn't the end of the world.  I was curious to see what else would happen in the dream and relieved to know I would wake up.
The girl in this mandala is 12-year-old Regina, one of the characters in Rosemary Sutcliff's book, Dawn Wind, which I read when I was 11 years old, identifying closely with Regina.  She was wandering alone in a time of war in Britain in the sixth century.  This illustration shows her at the moment she met Owain, a 14-year-old boy who was also wandering alone.  They became traveling companions.  I'm in the process of copying illustrations from that book, featuring them in my mandalas.  I don't remember how the story of Regina and Owain ends but will find out soon.  
There is a newspaper article on the wall next to my drawing table.  It celebrates the life of the artist who was at the airport in my dream.  He died last January and has been an inspiration for all of my art work this year.  I didn't know he had died or even that he had been ill until I saw his obituary, but it was in those days after he died without my knowledge that I felt a sense of despair, wondering if I would ever do any art work again and sat down at my drawing table and was moved to pick up my 6B pencil with my left hand and start drawing.  


Addendum:

Finished Mandala #72 just now:


These mandalas inspired by the Charles Keeping's illustrations in Dawn Wind are certainly edgy, dealing with old feelings from my childhood, giving my 11-year-old self a place to speak her truth that was silenced.  I've come a long way since I was 11 years old and want to honor my 11-year-old self for the ways she learned to survive what she couldn't understand.