Plague / Newborn babies wailing like a mourning dove

A cousin of mine brought this to my attention.

Just this morning I re-read the liner notes to Blood on the Tracks after a friend mentioned that he had just re-read them.  I remember standing in a record store in Bellingham in January 1975 reading those liner notes and weeping and then going home to listen for the first of many many times.  That was over 40 years ago.

The painting from 1990 above is titled "63rd Month / Talking 43-Hour Day With Roots Gathered From Coincidence."

This morning I woke up feeling something I couldn't define.  When I focused on the feeling, not the words about the feeling, my body sensations were minimal but murky and unpleasant nonetheless.  If pressed for a single word that matched the feeling, I could only come up with "flat." If asked for the color of the feeling, it would be a sickly tan.  Suddenly I heard Janis Joplin singing, "Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train, feeling just as faded as my jeans ..."

With that, the feeling shifted because I could hear a human voice singing accompanied by musical instruments.  The first time I heard that song was the morning my Richard arrived home from Vietnam.  We were riding in my 1965 Volkswagen, on our way out to the coast to surprise Richard's family, who didn't yet know that he was home.

Then I found this.

Don't know what else I want to say.  Don't know where I am going with this.  No easy answers.  Lots of questions.  Wait.  I know what I want to say.

We can refuse to live in fear.  We can know that we are not alone.  Any loving action, no matter how small, counts.

A New Baby Boy On Bodhi Day 2014

Although I am not affiliated with any spiritual or religious tradition, I listen carefully to the teachings of all traditions and find wisdom in each one. Today is Bodhi Day in Buddhist tradition.

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find anything that agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
-- Siddhartha Gautama Buddha

In what I hope is in the spirit in which the Buddha teaches, these thoughts came to mind after reading the above quote because through a process of observation, analysis, and reason, I don't believe that observation, analysis, and reason are everything. There is much to be said for the wisdom and experiences of the heart:

"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing."
-- Blaise Pascal

"I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad.
'They say they think with their heads,' he replied.
'Why of course. What do you think with?' I asked him in surprise.
'We think here,' he said, indicating his heart."
(Carl Jung, during a visit to New Mexico, in conversation with Ochwiay Biano, a Pueblo Indian, quoted from Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

"I believe in the impossible, you know that I do."
-- Bob Dylan

"I don't believe in Buddha."
-- John Lennon (who died on December 8, 1980)

"Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible"
-- Thich Nhat Hanh (Zen Buddhist monk) from Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers

"Because suffering is impermanent, that is why we can transform it.
Because happiness is impermanent, that is why we have to nourish it."
-- Thich Nhat Hanh, 10 June 2014

Today is the 8th birthday of my blog which began in December of 2006 as "Old Girl of the North Country," a vehicle for a 40-year retrospective of my art work. From that beginning, this blog became for me a path of healing from unresolved grief dating back to the last years of the war in Vietnam.

Although I do not post as much as I did that first year or read as many blogs as I once did, blogging has continued to play a huge part in keeping my creative spirit alive. I have immense gratitude to you whose blogs I visit regularly and am grateful to you for visiting my blog.

This past year has brought one dear baby after another into my life, along with a sense of a place of peace within me no matter what happens, and much has happened this year to challenge that peace.

A few weeks ago I began helping a younger friend and her husband who are in their early 40s and have recently adopted fraternal twin infant boys who were born to a meth-addicted single mother who had no prenatal care and simply appeared at a hospital in labor and, through an adoption agency, chose my friends to parent her twin boys. What a joy it is to be able to be part of a group of their friends who are spending mornings and afternoons helping this first-time mother and father by comforting, feeding, and talking to and playing with their baby boys. We are doing our best to take the place of the grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles who do not live nearby or who are no longer living.

Today on Bodhi Day at 10:38 a.m., a sweet baby boy was born in New York City and one of my oldest friends became a grandmother for the second time and emailed the above photo.

Welcome to L.L.S in his first few hours of his life!

It is only a little planet, but how beautiful it is.
-- Robinson Jeffers

The Wild Blue Sky Of Day

Thanks to R. L. Bourges for the inspiration.

Sending all my love to my nephew and his girlfriend who
will be having a baby in May.

A NATION OF SLEEPLESS WOMEN WITH MOON AND BIRDS

Awake and alert

As full and fragmented as the moon

Rising and reflecting

In a western sea

We hear night birds

Singing in the shadows

Mocking darkness

Mocking darkness

The moon asks an impossible question:

Do I control you

Or do you control me

In my circular journey

We ask the moon an impossible question:

Do we control you

Or do you control us

In our cyclical journey

We hear night words

We sing in the shadows

Mocking darkness

Mocking darkness

Imagine us at dawn

A nation of sleepless women with moon and birds

Just above the hills of childhood

Caught between impossible questions

And the wild blue sky of day.

NURSERY  RHYME (1982)

Babies are like us

Except when they smile

Their eyes are so clear

They can see everything we have forgotten

At first they have nothing to say

We draw their attention

Away from holy light

To clocks and alphabets

Words like parallelogram

Make them laugh

They can’t tell time from applesauce

Yet they store words

With smooth stones and skinned knees

No one really knows where they come from

Or where they go

They would put the sun

In their mouths

If they could reach that high

Not knowing who we are

Still they trust us

We impress them

With our brave words

Our clever clocks

(poems and drawing, "The Wild Blue Sky of Day," by am from the early 1980s)

Seven years of healing through blogging

December 8 was the seventh anniversary of my blog.  Some of you know the history of my blog.  For those who don't, I'll tell that story again. Look here for my first posts in December 2006.  My blog's first name was "Old Girl of the North Country."  After being haunted by memories dating back to December 8, 1970, when my Richard returned from almost a year in Vietnam, it was suggested that I do something new on that day, something to give me another way of looking at December 8.  I decided to create a blog where I could present a 40-year retrospective -- my art work up to 2006.  My hope was that by looking carefully at my art work and sharing it, there would be insight and healing and that perhaps I would be inspired to paint again.  I had no idea if anyone would ever read my blog.

In September 2001, Richard's mother had told me that Richard had written down the lyrics for "Girl of the North Country" and had written my name next to them.  He was living with his parents during a time he was undergoing chemotherapy for what was thought to be terminal lung cancer.  By 2006,  Richard's cancer had been in remission for four years.  For my own physical and emotional safety, I was not in touch with him but thought of myself as his Old Girl of the North Country.

Although blogging has brought unforeseen healing to me, including a change in the name of my blog, I have had an usually difficult time this December, with unexpected edginess and anger and grief surfacing.  I hadn't been able to come up with a idea for a post after December 5 and the death of Nelson Mandela, until today when I saw the Doonesbury strip with Alex and Toggle and their twin babies.

Alex and Toggle are dear to my heart.  Their life is unfolding in a way very unlike the way my life with Richard unfolded, and I am grateful to witness other possibilities for veterans and their loved ones than those Richard and I experienced:

During Richard's first nights home he had nightmares, and to his immense dismay and to my bewilderment he punched me in the eye in the midst of one of his nightmares, as I lay sleeping beside him.  In 2008, Richard died in a VA hospital from complications related to Agent Orange exposure, tobacco abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, and cancer.   I was able to be with him in the ICU during the last days of his life.

Toggle met Alex about a year after Richard died.  Toggle reminds me of what I loved about Richard.

Richard gave me a copy of "All Things Must Pass" for Christmas in 1970.  This morning I had just happened to listen to "Wah-Wah" and was listening to the rest of the songs when I went to the Doonesbury website to see the comic strip for today.

Waah!  
Waah!

...

Waah!

"Is that ... harmony?"

I love the smile on Toggle's face.

Thank you for reading my blog.  Thank you for your blogs.  Blogging is a way of my life for me now. I haven't gotten back into painting, but I am beginning to do some weaving and am playing the autoharp, dulcimer and ukulele and am happy to be spending time taking care of babies in a volunteer position.  I have plans to take classes and take care of babies as a job in the future.  I wonder if Alex would hire me.

"In Our Sleep"

Spending an afternoon in a gently lit room full of babies once a week is a revelation to me. There are no computers or cell phones in this room.  The youngest babies don't yet crawl. The oldest is close to a year old and seems to be the tiniest of all.  The babies say so much without speaking words.  They are especially focused when they hear the sound of a little bell that hangs from the light fixture in the middle of the peaceful room.  They laugh and they cry.  They sleep.  They play with the toys.  They look deeply at everything.  They look outside at the wind and rain and trees and grass and leaves and the fence and the cars up on the road, and sometimes they see children a little older than they are who can walk and play outside, bundled in hats and coats and boots. The older ones sometimes wave to the babies. The babies drink from bottles or baby cups and some of them eat solid food.  They have their diapers changed.  Some of them stand up.  Some of them crawl.  They all sit up straight the way babies do. They are curious.  I'm impressed by the early childhood teachers.  They are loving, attentive and knowledgeable about babies.  I have a lot to learn from them.  All of them sing beautifully while rocking the babies to sleep.  The babies appear to feel safe and secure, and then they glow when their families arrive to take them home.

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.