Update: It's A Troubling Day as Roe vs Wade is overturned / "... Receiving Hexagram 54 often reflects a very insecure, frustrating situation ..."

Yesterday was a beautiful day in Bellingham, much like the days I remember in the summer of 1972, living on the San Francisco Peninsula.

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Yesterday's early morning light

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My Japanese Coral Bark Maple gift to Big Rock Garden yesterday

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Yesterday, this part of the summer sky reminded me of California

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This late afternoon sky yesterday is more typical of Western Washington on the occasional sunny summer day.

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Today, stunned.  Remembering January 22, 1973, and the years that followed.  

Another harsh reminder that I cannot take anything for granted.

24 languages! / Cloud language / Speaking without words

24 languages!

Today a friend emailed me an article about a dear man who speaks 24 languages fluently and can converse in many more.  This man and his story delight me.  I am still working on learning Spanish as a second language on Duolingo.  I feel that I know some of the happiness that Vaughn Smith experiences each time he learns a new language.

Attempting to learn Spanish has brought me unexpected joy every day since I began the free Duolingo lessons in the fall of 2019.  This year I decided use some of my limited income to pay for more thorough lessons on Duolingo.  In addition to that, I listen to books on tape in Spanish whenever I am in my car.  Although I had two years of Spanish in high school, I never learned as much as I have learned on Duolingo.  It was only since 2019 that I learned to roll my R's! 

I love the sound of language whether I understand it or not.  I love the numerous ways that English is spoken in the United States and throughout the world.  I love all the ways people speak English as a second language.  I love seeing people speak in sign language.  Music is a language understood all over the world.  And everything has its language.  Birds.  The sky,  Trees.  You name it and it speaks with or without sound.   

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" ... this need ..."

Denise Levertov

Of Being

I know this happiness
is provisional:

the looming presences –
great suffering, great fear –

withdraw only
into peripheral vision:

but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:

this need to dance,
this need to kneel:

this mystery:

Morning Meditation: Fast-moving Clouds with Trees and a Flock of Birds in the Northeast

Koan/Prayer:  May our children have roots like birds and wings like trees.

First Day Of June 2013

Clouds to the east after rain mixed with snow

(Click on image for fuller experience)

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick

Thanks to Whiskey River for this quote for my post today.

Thanks to Wikipedia for this:

"There are no heroes in Dick's books," Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, "but there are heroics. One is reminded of Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people."

The every-other-day-on-the-internet experiment is working out well. The effect so far is that I am spending half as much time on the internet and savoring the time off as well as the time on.

LOOKING NORTHEAST / LOOKING SOUTHEAST / LOOKING AT MY SKETCHBOOK

Aleph Series: Bhagavad Gita / Psalm 104 / Lao Tzu (2003)

My father died at age 89 on St. Patrick's Day in 2003, just before the Iraq War began. During the last years of his life he wrote his autobiography and chose this photo of himself at 30 years old for the cover:






















My father didn't consider himself an artist, but he was.

The Aleph Series is the only art work I did in 2003.

Today the swallows arrived at the cattail pond I look out on from my computer desk. Today to the east are the kind of clouds my father said were one of the many things he liked about Northwest Washington.