A Hard Rain Is Falling / Surviving Against All Odds

Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking in 1967:

We’ve got to understand what is happening. Now they often call this the white backlash … It’s just a new name for an old phenomenon. The fact is that there has never been any single, solid, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans to genuine equality for Negroes. There has always been ambivalence … In 1863 the Negro was granted freedom from physical slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation. But he was not given land to make that freedom meaningful. At the same time, our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the Midwest and the West, which meant that the nation was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor, while refusing to do it for its black peasants from Africa who were held in slavery two hundred and forty four years. And this is why Frederick Douglass would say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger, freedom to the winds and rains of heaven, freedom without roofs to cover their heads. It was freedom without bread to eat, without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time. And it is a miracle that the Negro has survived.

Patti Smith and Joan Baez (a few days ago in Germany and in 2016 in Sweden)

Summer of 2016 with Mavis and Bob / Another Side of Christianity

Meditation in the rain on the 5th day of May

Isis, oh, Isis, you're a mystical child

What drives me to you is what drives me insane

I still can remember the way that you smiled

On the fifth day of May in the drizzling' rain

(lyrics from "Isis," by Bob Dylan -- the phrasing and music in this recording sound like the original but the voice doesn't sound like Bob Dylan.  There is a discussion on YouTube as to the identity of the vocalist.)

(pastel drawing on paper, by am, early 1980s and rainy day film clip taken at Derby Pond not far from Whatcom Falls in Whatcom Falls Park.  Whatcom is a Lummi Indian word meaning "noisy, rumbling water") 

BLACK ELK SAW A FLAMING RAINBOW

From Black Elk Speaks:

Then they all stopped short, rearing, and were standing in a great hoop about their black chief at the center, and were still. And as they stood, four virgins, more beautiful than women of the earth can be, came through the circle, dressed in scarlet, one from each of the four quarters, and stood about the great black stallion in their places; and one held the wooden cup of water, and one the white wing, and one the pipe, and one the nation's hoop. All the universe was silent, listening; and then the great black stallion raised his voice and sang. The song he sang was this:


My horses, prancing they are coming.

My horses, neighing they are coming;

Prancing. they are coming.

All over the universe they come.

They will dance; may you behold them.

(4 times)

A horse nation, they will dance.

May you behold them. (4 times)


His voice was not loud, but it went all over the universe and filled it. There was nothing that did not hear, and it was more beautiful than anything can be. It was so beautiful that nothing anywhere could keep from dancing. The virgins danced, and all the circled horses. The leaves on the trees, the grasses on the hills and in the valleys, the water in the creeks and in the rivers and the lakes, the four-legged and the two-legged and the wings of the air--all danced together to the music of the stallion's song.

And when I looked down upon my people yonder, the cloud passed over, blessing them with friendly rain, and stood in the east with a flaming rainbow over it.

(Many thanks to the art farmer, who left me a phone message saying, "Look outside at the rainbow!")