Renewal

Working on Mandala #22 / Full Moon / The Ants Go Marching

Not quite finished with Mandala #22, when I looked up and saw the full moon.

This morning when I was walking in the woods before I started editing medical reports, I heard the voices of very young children singing on the trail, out of sight, just ahead of me.  I soon caught up with them, a preschool class of tiny children and two teachers who appeared to be in their early 20s.  They were making their way down the trail in twos, happily singing "The Ants Go Marching" with the same enthusiasm as these children:

This Tree Is Alive

The Way In

Above is a living tree in Whatcom Falls Park. It's on the trail where I walk frequently. The sign appeared this week. The bark was stripped from the tree about a year ago.

Odd duck with her ducklings, revisited

Haven't been doing much walking in the past month. The first time I saw this mother duck with her ducklings was on May 23. Was delighted to see her and her ducklings again yesterday at the Derby Pond in Whatcom Falls Park.

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:

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") 

The way it is, the way it was, and the way it will be

This view of Bellingham Bay and sky changes by the minute, but the water, shoreline of the Lummi Peninsula, and sky have been here for a long long time. Makes me think of a Mark Rothko painting:

This was a narrow motorbike trail on the way to Whatcom Falls when I first arrived in Bellingham in spring of 1974.  Now it is part of the extensive trail system that runs through Whatcom Falls Park.  Most of the trails are graveled.  Otherwise, they would be muddy messes throughout our long rainy Pacific Northwest winters: 

Through the trees you can see Derby Pond, created by damming Whatcom Creek:

The beauty of landscape architecture:

A moment of reflection:

Thank you for all the comments on my previous post.  You've all given me much to consider about the changing nature of landscape -- for reasons both relating to human intervention and otherwise.

Having grown up in Northern California and having spent my time between age 17 and age 23 as often as possible on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, I walked along vast sections of shoreline that showed no evidence of human intervention and major evidence of the power of the ocean to change the contours of land.  Since my last post, I have been highly conscious that so many of the places I walk in and around Bellingham are a mixture of the wild order of nature and of human orderliness.  On the other hand, take a look at this map of Whatcom County (White Rock, Clearbrook, and Abbotsford are in British Columbia, 25 miles north of Bellingham):

There are parts of eastern Whatcom County that are truly wild and pathless, and the 1895 photo below of Lummi Island, which is west of Bellingham across Bellingham Bay, shows a Lummi Indian camp and a glimpse of the way the shorelines looked then.  Not wild and pathless, but not meddled with to a great extent either.  

(photo credit)

Interesting to see that the shore appears to be covered with stones similar to ones on the newly engineered beaches.  Now I am guessing that the landscape architects used photos like this for reference when they reconstructed the current beaches on Bellingham's shores.  Looks as if I was wrong in my original perception that the engineered beaches are not in character with the historical landscape.  I believe I owe an apology to the landscape architects for criticizing their work.

The self-portrait was taken in the mirror of the fairly new restroom near the children's playground which is near the red, orange and golden trees in the photo of the parking area in Whatcom Falls Park.  Kind of looks like I might be in meditation hall or a chapel.  I like the effect of the scratches on the mirror.  That's my new camera!

Last week I started free Microsoft Word classes at the Goodwill Job Training and Education Center and will take a class in Excel in January and possibly a class in cashiering;  

It's not easy to find a job in Bellingham at age 64 with my job background as a medical transcriptionist, but I am going to find a way to support myself for the rest of my life.  If I can focus my energy on weaving, that can be a source of income as well.

Just yesterday I applied for health insurance, and it was affirmed that, because of the Affordable Care Act, I am eligible for free health insurance through the State of Washington until next October when I will qualify for Medicare and will have to pay for Part B and can chose to pay for Part C and Part D, if I wish.  I've been without health insurance since the end of August of 2011 and am fortunate to be in good health.

Next week I begin volunteering to comfort babies in a childcare and learning center.

That's it for today.  Need to get going so that I will arrive at the classroom early and be ready to go when the lessons start.  

From wood s lot:

Sojourns in the Parallel World
Denise Levertov
b. October 24, 1923

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension--though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal--then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we've been, when we're caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
--but we have changed, a little.

Whatcom Falls Park 5-Mile Walk Meditation

"Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be," writes Agnes Martin. "I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step."

(quote from here)

At the beginning of a 40-minute walk in Whatcom Falls Park yesterday morning

"All my life I have been haunted by the fascinating questions of creativity. Why does an original idea in science and art "pop up" from the unconscious at a given moment? What is the relation between talent and the creative act, and between creativity and death? Why does a mime or a dance give us such delight? How did Homer, confronting something as gross as the Trojan War, fashion it into poetry which became a guide for the ethics of the whole Greek civilization?"

(from the preface to The Courage to Create, by Rollo May)

Walking Home Meditation / Mi Viejo Maestro (My Old Teacher) Boblo Picasso

Near the shop where my 21-year-old Honda Civic is being repaired are these stairs which lead up into Whatcom Falls Park. After the stairs, I've got at least a half-hour walk home in the rain.






















I don't know how many steps there are. Let's just say "a multitude of steps." I don't photograph all the steps. There are at least this many that you can't see.

As I approach the bridge built by the WPA during the 1930s, with its view of Whatcom Falls, I stop to take a picture, not realizing that my camera is set on automatic flash. The rain and the mist rising from the falls is illuminated.

















It was last year at this time that I started taking black and white photographs during my walks in Whatcom Falls Park. At this time last year, I was suffering from severe fatigue and depression caused by minocycline, a medication I had been taking for ocular rosacea. For some reason, taking black and white photographs lifted my spirits during that time of medication-induced depression.

A year later, walking along just beyond Whatcom Falls Bridge, I realize that I feel better than I have felt in my entire life. I'm not taking any medication except for St. John's Wort for some residual depression from the minocycline. I stop to photograph the sign for the trout hatchery, also built during the 1930s, remembering the time in the early 1980s when we saw a peculiar-looking truck drive up to the circular cement ponds. I thought, "What kind of truck is that???" When the men began to load up the hatchery trout, I suddenly heard Bob Dylan singing in my mind:

"The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the FISH TRUCK that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain."

(lyrics from "Visions of Johanna")

Of course. The fiddler, the fish truck, my conscience, harmonicas, skeleton keys, rain, visions of Johanna. I was alone with my gratitude that day. Not everyone has Bob Dylan for a teacher.

Beyond the trout hatchery, the rainy scene at the fishing pond for children prompts me to switch to color.












































After I cross the nearby bridge, which is also the dam that creates the fishing pond, I switch the setting on my camera to black and white again. As I look back across the fishing pond, I hear Bob Dylan singing in my mind again:

"Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now."

(lyrics from "My Back Pages")

















I think, "Hey, wait a minute. My black and white photographs aren't lies!"

Now my mind shifts to one of Bob Dylan's spiritual teachers, Pablo Picasso, who said:

"Art is a lie that tells the truth."

and:

"It takes a long time to become young."

and back to Bob:

Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now."

















Pretty soon, I'm walking in the rainy woods again and can see home up ahead.

"Gotta get up near the teacher if you can
If you wanna learn anything"

(Bob Dylan, lyrics from "Floater (Too Much To Ask)," Love and Theft, 2001

Listen to "My Back Pages."

WHO, COOKS, FOR-YOU? WHO, COOKS, FOR-YOU, ALL

Listen.

Read.