Looking out at Scudder Pond on a windy September afternoon

Children learning about songbirds and ducks / Teaching Children and Learning From Children / Goodness

                                          

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.” (John Steinbeck)

Clear and Cold and Windy

At around 1:10, somebody appears at the right side of the screen, walking out of the woods.

Revisiting "Rivers and Roads," by The Head and the Heart:

Small Hours

Thank you to Sabine for bringing "Small Hours" to my attention. It brought to mind Carlos Santana, and, sure enough, there is a connection. Carlos Santana has performed "I Don't Wanna Know About Evil," by John Martyn, but I like John Martyn's version better.



Yesterday morning the Canada Geese arrived in the fog. Each year around this time, I listen for their arrival. Other years I have seen them land in Scudder Pond or simply heard them flying over my bedroom, announcing their arrival.

ADDENDUM: February 17, 2015

Look here for something else that moved me:

Walking meditation in color and black and white / Reading meditation

Thank you to wood s lot for this:

Children Selecting Books in a Library

Randall Jarrell

With beasts and gods, above, the wall is bright.
The child's head, bent to the book-colored shelves,
Is slow and sidelong and food-gathering,
Moving in blind grace ... yet from the mural, Care
The grey-eyed one, fishing the morning mist,
Seizes the baby hero by the hair
And whispers, in the tongue of gods and children,
Words of a doom as ecumenical as dawn
But blanched like dawn, with dew.
The children's cries
Are to men the cries of crickets, dense with warmth
-- But dip a finger into Fafnir, taste it,
And all their words are plain as chance and pain.
Their tales are full of sorcerers and ogres
Because their lives are: the capricious infinite
That, like parents, no one has yet escaped
Except by luck or magic; and since strength
And wit are useless, be kind or stupid, wait
Some power's gratitude, the tide of things.
Read meanwhile ... hunt among the shelves, as dogs do, grasses,
And find one cure for Everychild's diseases
Beginning: Once upon a time there was
A wolf that fed, a mouse that warned, a bear that rode
A boy. Us men, alas! wolves, mice, bears bore.
And yet wolves, mice, bears, children, gods and men
In slow preambulation up and down the shelves
Of the universe are seeking ... who knows except themselves?
What some escape to, some escape: if we find Swann's
Way better than our own, an trudge on at the back
Of the north wind to -- to -- somewhere east
Of the sun, west of the moon, it is because we live
By trading another's sorrow for our own; another's
Impossibilities, still unbelieved in, for our own ...
"I am myself still?" For a little while, forget:
The world's selves cure that short disease, myself,
And we see bending to us, dewy-eyed, the great
CHANGE, dear to all things not to themselves endeared.


Also see: 12-year-old wisdom

And this:

Rainy March Day / Black and White and Grey

When I looked outside at the rain falling on Scudder Pond a little while ago, I noticed that there was a curious dividing line of dark and light on the water.

I came to a high place of darkness and light.
A dividing line ran through the center of town.
(Bob Dylan, lyrics from "Isis")

You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was. 

(Irish Proverb)

Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí.  

(Irish for "Praise the young and they will blossom")

Everything was grist to the Mind’s mill; therefore they destroyed nothing.  Neither did they foster anything.  They seem not to have interfered in any way with any other species.

Metals and other raw materials needed for their physical plants and technical  experimentation were mined by their robot extensions in poisoned areas or on the Moon and other planets; this exploitation seems to have been as careful as it was efficient.

The City had no relation to plant life at all, except as it was the subject of their observation,  a source of data.  Their relation to the animal world was similarly restricted.  Their relation to the human species was similarly restricted, with one exception:  communication, the two-way exchange of information.

(Ursula K. Le Guin, writing about the "City of Mind" in Always Coming Home)

When I saw this video recently, I thought of the "City of Mind":



Love takes up where knowledge leaves off. 

(St. Thomas Aquinas) 

Work in progress / artists' studios / winter birds / wanting to work

Artists' studios

When I looked out a little while ago this morning, I thought I saw a person with a brown corduroy jacket and yellow hat standing at the edge of Scudder Pond.  I thought I could see the figure moving.  When I got my binoculars out, I saw that what I had thought was a person's head was the few remaining bright yellow leaves on a small tree, and that the brown corduroy jacket was the tree's dark wet branches and trunk.  The blurred photo only gives a general idea of what I saw.  As I look out right now without binoculars, it stills looks to me as if a tall thin contemplative man is standing there on the trail.

The gouache and watercolor painting up at the top of this post is something I'm working on.  It's something about a dialogue at the ocean at night.  I think I like it better transformed by my computer into a black and white image.  I began working on it more than a week ago, while listening to music from my past, organized in chronological order beginning with music I heard when I was 10 years old or younger:

This week I visited the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham where I saw a traveling exhibit of California Impressionist paintings.  I was drawn to the landscapes of places familiar to me but much changed since they were painted so many years ago before California was so densely populated. The images below are of the California my Minnesota-born parents moved to in the late 1930s and early 1940s and that my father's father traveled through as a young man from Minnesota in the early 1900s. As far as I know, my grandfather only made that one visit to California and the West Coast, living the rest of his life in Minnesota, although he did visit relatives in Norway in his later years.

Arroyo Seco Bridge in 1912:

Arroyo Seco Bridge in recent time:

Today here in Whatcom County there is snow in the foothills to the east.  Here's the view from the porch this morning.  You can hear the Chickadees and Red-winged blackbirds singing:

"I definitely look for things to inspire me or to get me wanting to do work.  It doesn't come all that naturally.  The thing that's helped me the most has been figuring out when I could work best.  This thing about working best in the morning with nobody around, I figured out a long time ago.  If it weren't for that I probably wouldn't get half as much done."

(Dale Chihuly)

KUUMBA / CREATIVITY

December 31 is the sixth day of Kwanzaa and the sixth day of Christmas. Kuumba, which means "creativity," is the word for the sixth day of Kwanzaa.

Girl: Creativity means thinking of new ways to do things.

First Boy: Creativity means thinking of new ways to live in peace.

Second Boy: Creativity means finding new ways to love one another.

(from the movie "Harambee," directed by Fracaswell Hyman. ""Harambee" means "let's pull together" in Kiswahili.)

The pastel drawing, originally called "Woman Dancing By Herself," was done by me in the early 1980's. Today I think I'll call it "Let's Pull Together."

Today is the 10th day following the Winter Solstice, the last day of 2008, with more a little more light, if not sunshine, each day here in the Pacific Northwest. This photo looking to the northeast was taken in the afternoon a few days ago. Most of the snow on the ground has melted, but Scudder Pond is still frozen.

Yesterday after sunset, R's sister and brother-in-law and their two dogs arrived here after driving up from the San Francisco Bay Area. Today, last year, I received the letter from her letting me know that R had had a brain stem stroke. Last April, R's brother-in-law's 95-year-old father was in the ICU and hospice in the VA hospital at the same time R was. They died within a few days of each other. We celebrate their lives by living our lives in gratitude. I'm waiting for sunrise so I can show D and P where I've been living for almost 35 years. I hope they can visit again during a time when the sun is shining, and it's not so dark and cold! This extremely cold weather, with snow these past few weeks, is unusual. If my memory serves me well, I recall many New Year's Days when the weather was sunny and relatively mild. I love the winters when it doesn't snow at all.

RETURN OF THE TREE SWALLOWS

TWO INNOCENTS WITH EXPERIENCE (2000)

All desire. No forgiveness.
Years later it was early spring with red-winged blackbird,
Goldfinch, faithful Canada goose on the trail
And return of the tree swallows.

“The tree swallow glides in circles,
Ending each glide
With 3 or 4 quick flaps
And a short climb.”*

Then I remembered.
He was sitting close to me.
Mr. Solitary Crow skipped by us like a child.
We laughed until we were children again.

This was how I experienced love.
I was innocent of forgiveness.

* from A Field Guide to Western Birds, second edition, 1961, by Roger Tory Peterson, p. 159.

("People Listening" (1984) and "Two Innocents with Experience" (2000), by Old Girl Of The North Country)

When I looked out at Scudder Pond yesterday afternoon, the tree swallows were flying back and forth in the sunlight above the golden cattails.