Love / Update June 1, 2025

Still finding a need to share in a simple way what moves me and heals me, I'll be posting what I find on Tumblr from now on.  It's part of that something new that my psychotherapist suggested for April 2024.  I'm not deleting this blog because I want to honor the healing years from December 2006 to April 2024 and the world-wide community of friends I found here whose blogs I will continue to read and leave comments on.

Love,

am

*

UPDATE ON JUNE 1, 2025:

No longer on Tumblr

Walking / O California (the landscape of my younger days)

"Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts. I wasn’t sure whether I was too soon or too late for the purple lupine which can be so spectacular in these headlands, but milkmaids were growing on the shady side of the road on the way to the trail, and they recalled the hillsides of my childhood that first bloomed every year with an extravagance of these white flowers. Black butterflies fluttered around me, tossed along by wind and wings, and they called up another era of my past. Moving on foot seems to make it easier to move in time; the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations."

(Rebecca Solnit)

*

*

I'm grateful to have been born into and grown up experiencing the landscape of California.  It brought a joy that is still with me all these years since I left, never imagining that I would spend the rest of my life living a thousand miles to the north in Western Washington which has its own beauty but is not my first love.  Eastern Washington does look much the way coastal California did when I was young but only for part of the year, and the Cascade Mountains separate Western and Eastern Washington. Eastern Washington has snow in the winter and extreme heat in the summer, unlike the coastal region of Northern California where I grew up, never far from the Pacific Ocean.  I continue have dreams where I rejoice that I am living near the Pacific Ocean.

Celebrating Janis Joplin's 81st Birthday with gratitude

Janis Joplin's unexpected death on October 4, 1970, was a turning point in my life and in the lives of many of those in our generation.  I had wanted to be just like her and now I just wanted to be alive.  I had just had my 21st birthday a few days earlier and could drink legally.  Upon her death, I had the thought that perhaps drinking wasn't was a particularly good idea for me.  I told myself I would be more careful than Janis had been with alcohol and would not use any hard drugs.

I know I've told these stories before but need to keep telling them because each time I tell them I realize something that didn't occur to me on the previous telling.

At the time of Janis' death, R was in the last months of his year serving as an Army helicopter mechanic in Vietnam.  Jimi Hendrix had died unexpectedly a few weeks earlier on September 18.  

In the early morning hours of December 7, 1970, the day R returned from Vietnam, we took some LSD that his older brother (also an Army veteran) had given to us and drove west in my Volkswagen to Half Moon Bay where his parents and seven younger siblings lived.  R was the third oldest in that family of ten children and the last to serve in the military.  His father had been in the Navy in Pearl Harbor when it was bombed on December 7, 1941.  As we approached Crystal Springs reservoir, I heard the heartening sound of an acoustic guitar followed by Janis Joplin's clear voice coming from the car radio.  She was singing in a way I hadn't heard before but her voice was unmistakable.  That was my introduction to "Me and Bobbie McGee." 

It was also the beginning of a nightmarish period in my life.  My living nightmare eventually came to an end.  R's nightmare went on and on until he died at age 58, having spent his last months in a VA hospital after suffering a brainstem stroke as a result of his drug and alcohol use.  It's occurring to me that R and Janis Joplin had much in common in the suffering that alcoholism and drug addiction brought to their lives and in their unmet desire for peace of mind and heart.

I've had two vivid  two dreams about Janis Joplin since she died.  In one, she was in recovery from alcoholism, celebrating life in the company of other recovering alcoholics.  In the other dream, just before the turn of the century, Janis Joplin looked at me in a thoughtful way and said, "Please kiss the 21st century for me." 

*

Elizabeth Zharoff was born 16 years after Janis 

Joplin died.  She had not heard Janis' voice until 6 months ago.

Thank you, Janis Joplin.  Your extraordinary voice is still with us.  

Gratitude to Allison Russell and her band

 

Grateful to have lived long enough to hear this voice, these voices, this music on Tiny Desk just now.

*

"I met my biological father, Michael George, and my paternal family when I was 30 years old. I learned that I am a first-generation Canadian on my father’s side. He was born and raised in Grenada, one of 13 children. I found out that ours is a family that values education deeply. I found out that we have a historian in the family who has traced our line back to an enslaved woman named Quasheba, who was sold off the coast of Ghana.

Such was her strength and resilience that she somehow survived the transatlantic crossing in the hold of a slave ship, and was eventually sold to a large sugar cane plantation in Grenada. She survived multiple rapes and sales. She survived backbreaking labor in the cane fields. She survived her children being taken and sold. She survived, and she founded generations. I wept to learn her name. I am honored to be her many-times-removed daughter and am eternally grateful for the gift of her strength and resilience. Though we can never know if Quasheba was actually from Ghana, in this song I imagine that she is.

When I was in Cameroon in 2007 with my other band, Po’ Girl, I was especially struck by three things: not being a visible minority for the first time in my life (though I was called la petite métisse pretty frequently, since I’m “pale” compared to most Cameroonians); how many Cameroonians felt the need either to apologize for or disclaim their forebears’ involvement in the slave trade—“My village, they never sold any slaves!”—and how many people there told me that I looked Cameroonian. Ghana is just a little ways up the west coast of Africa from Cameroon."

 — Allison Russell

1961: Library books and music on the radio

In 1961, at the beginning of the summer when I was 11 years old, I decided to make a list of every library book I read.  Extremely self-conscious about my body that was much more developed than other girls my age , I spent much of that summer lying in my bed reading books.  I had my first menstrual period the previous August when I was still 10 years old and felt that my childhood was over way too soon.  I was tall for my age and went on my first diet at 10 years old, thinking I was overweight because I weighed more than almost everyone in my 5th grade class.  I stopped going out to play with the neighborhood kids and started watching "American Bandstand" on television.  That may have been when I began taking long solitary walks with our family dog, part of my unsuccessful strategy for losing weight.  I started reading books for teenage girls, but my favorite books were those that took me completely away from my life and societal expectations and into lives that I wished were mine and to places I wished I could go, including other worlds.  I did not want to live in the world I was growing up in.

Looking at this long list of books, there are many of which I have absolutely no recollection.  Some I only remembered when I saw the author's name.  The ones I remember vividly were about children and horses, dogs, magic and other worlds.

Some of the books must have been quite short because it appears that I read over 100 books between mid-June and early September.  I do remember that there was an element of competition in connection with this list.  My sense of self-esteem was very low but I was proud of the fact that I was good at reading and could read the books from the library that were designated as above my grade level.  I thought that it would be wonderful to be a writer or an illustrator and, using small notepads, wrote two handwritten books, both about horses, one of which had a few illustrations.  They were very much based on books I had read about children and horses.

I'm wondering if any of you read some of the books in my summer of 1961 book list.

*

And then there was the wonderful music on the radio.  I couldn't sing or dance and felt horribly inadequate in every social way, but I knew the lyrics to all these songs and felt all the emotions they evoked in my 11-year-old heart.

"... I got lost on the river, but I got found."

*

Last night I dreamed that at the end of a long journey, I found myself looking into a vast aquarium at a large blue fish who looked out at me with a steady gaze.  I began to cry.  I woke up weeping.

*

Yesterday YouTube churned up a short video devoted to helping students understand what calculus is.  The goal was not to teach calculus but to explain why one would want to learn calculus.  For some reason, I decided to watch it, and was delighted to understand what calculus is.

I remember going back to college when I was in my late 20s and vowing to attempt to learn math from the point at which I had not been able to understand it.  I was good at math until 7th grade when New Math was introduced.  My father who was good at math did not understand New Math and was unable to help me understand it.  I remember my 7th grade teacher taking me aside and saying that she was puzzled by my poor math grades because I was clearly intelligent, having scored in the 99th percentile on the verbal portion of my aptitude tests that she had looked at.  From then on,  I continued to do well in English classes and struggle in math classes, despite the fact that New Math didn't last long in my school district.

In my return to the study of math, rather than learning math in a traditional classroom, I chose to learn in what was called a math lab where I could work independently, at my own pace, and ask for help when needed.  Much to my surprise, math was easy and fun, and I quickly finished the courses up to the point of calculus and was considering taking calculus.  Baffling to me to this day, my former husband who had scored 800 on the math portion of the SAT test, scoffed at my enthusiasm saying, "Why would you want to do that?"  Even more baffling is that I lost my excitement and momentum when I heard those words. 

*

When I saw the blue fish in my dream, I remembered the YouTube video and instinctively used a calculus formula which proved, without a doubt, that the blue fish and I had exactly the same volume despite our different physical appearance.

*

Last night I was playing around with my autoharp, specifically A minor and D minor.  Suddenly I was playing the first few chords of something that I couldn't identify, having no idea what the lyrics were.  A few minutes ago, I went over to my autoharp and played  A minor and D minor again and again until I was able to identify that it was reminding me of Bob Dylan's song "Lost on the River." 

The song goes with the dream.

*

Take what you have gathered from coincidence.  Thanks so much, Bob, wherever you are.

 

Not grey inside this mandala / Gratitude

Still not true colors but good enough until I can have this series professionally scanned.

*

Restorative yoga in the early morning

1.  Full set up.

2.  Before adding quilt and comforter.

3.  Basic set up.

I'm grateful to have been moved to take a single series of yoga classes in 1970 while R was in Vietnam.  When I was 27, I began taking weekly classes at the first yoga school in Bellingham and continued classes along with a home practice  until I was in my late 30s and physical limitations became a deterrent to taking classes but did not keep me from continuing my own home practice and refraining from poses that weren't appropriate for my body.  When I was in my 40s, I took classes from different yoga schools that had opened in Bellingham, including classes in restorative yoga, continuing my early morning home practice.  

During the early years of my blog, I continued a vigorous home yoga practice, finding myself able to do poses that I had not been able to do as a younger woman.  The years of yoga practice had strengthened my upper body and given me a sense of confidence in my body that had been missing from my years prior to discovering yoga.  In my 60s, I began letting go of poses that had the potential for causing injuries and those which clearly put stress on my strong but aging body.

Now that I am in my early 70s, I have had to let go of more and more poses due to a low back that has been susceptible to injury since I was in my 30s.   I've lost some of my height and can no longer do backbends without causing a flare of low back pain.  And yet, I am able to do a fairly vigorous yoga practice that combines a basic series of sitting, standing, balancing, stretching, bending, inverted and reclining poses that I have done since I was in my 20s along with restorative yoga poses.

Here's a pose I can no longer do because it hurts my knees.  I was unable to do this pose at all until I was in my 50s.

*

There's something to be said for letting go to make space for something new.

*

Mandala #37:  Woman Moved By Gratitude

O my goodness. With gratitude to Robin

"... Beyond all reason is the mystery of love: you know we are all equal, no one in truth needs any help from anyone else, no one needs to be told anything or given anything—and then you do the most compassionate act anyway, do the best for your brothers and sisters that you have in you.

I'm relaying what was given to me when I felt I needed it: if I felt that way, maybe someone else does, too. This is a letter to my brothers and sisters, a love note to try to show how, when we thought love wasn't working, it was working perfectly ..."

(Thaddeus Golas)

Pileated Woodpeckers

Although I don't see them often, I am grateful to see these wonderful tricksters at all when they come to my porch or when I see them or just hear them in the nearby woods (-:

*Best seen with full screen*

With gratitude for food banks and the volunteers who make them possible / "Hineni"

 

(Drawings of food bank items by Shayna Rudoren)

From this article:

“I get here and the room is empty,” he said to explain why he named the pantry Manna, “and then by 10:30, there’s food in it. And then by 1 o’clock there’s not.” At the end of every day, he continued, “I’ve got nothing left — I’ve got nothing emotionally, I’ve got nothing physically, I’ve got nothing spiritually — I’m done. And somehow in the morning, there’s something there. To me that’s divine.”

Mike is a different story.

“I’m an agnostic,” he told me. Between confirmation in ninth grade and his 60th birthday, Mike said, “I was in a church probably a dozen times.” But his wife is a spiritual person, and when they were living in the Bronx, they got involved in St. Paul’s Lutheran Evangelical Church in the Parkchester neighborhood. Mike helped run the food pantry there, too, before they moved to Bloomfield, N.J., in 2019, and connected with Park United. 

“For me, it’s not religious,” he said. “I really don’t give a whole lot of thought to a Supreme Being. Maybe I should but I don’t. What the church has done for me is it’s provided me with good work to do.”

That’s hineni.

*

"... Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my Lord

*

During the second half of 2019 and until our local food bank closed due to the pandemic, I stood in line there once a week because I was going into credit card debt for the first time in my life in order to buy groceries.  Not serious debt but something I needed to address before it did become a problem.  

Our local food bank was set up like a grocery store.  We would stand in line, be checked in at a counter by volunteers, and then would get a grocery cart which we would fill with all the food we could put in the boxes we brought for that purpose.  The boxes were supplied by the food bank.  We were encouraged to take a box and use it each time we visited.  Because of the generosity of local stores and local farmers and the many people who support the food bank, I had an excellent selection of fresh produce, rice, beans, oatmeal, and nut butters to choose from.  There were also milk and other dairy products, eggs, bread and rolls, tortillas, meat, canned and baked goods, which for one reason or another, I can't eat but are basics for so many people.

There were people of all ages who came to the food bank up to two times a week.  I heard people speaking Spanish and Russian or Ukrainian.  Several of the volunteers had name tags that indicated that they spoke Spanish.  My guess is that there was probably a volunteer who spoke Russian or Ukrainian.

With the pandemic, the food bank building was closed but the volunteers continued to come to the building to fill boxes of food that people could pick up outside the building from their cars or on foot.  Volunteers (many of them friends of mine) stepped forward to deliver boxes of food to people without cars or people who had any other reason that might keep them from being able to have access to food.   Because I have to be careful about what I eat, I was fairly sure that I wouldn't be able to eat much of what went in the boxes.  A friend who did deliveries offered to bring me a box as an experiment.  There was nothing in the box that I could eat.

Fortunately, since the beginning of the pandemic, the U.S. government has been giving those of us who quality for EBT cards nearly twice as much food credit.  With that help and the three stimulus checks, I am no longer going into debt.  I've adjusted my spending down and am sure that I will have enough to live on even when the EBT amount drops back down to what it was before the pandemic.

If I did not own my condominium outright, I could not live on as little money as I live on.  Before I retired, I called our local senior information center, told them what my low-end Social Security income would be and asked if it would be possible for me to live on that amount of money in our county.  I was assured that I could if I lived simply and made use of the many safety nets for low income people.  

I am considered "poor," but I don't feel "poor."  I deeply aware of how fortunate I am to have everything I need and want.  My life is rich and full.  I couldn't be more grateful.

Gratitude for our public library / Library books are dear to us / The Book of Love

With Gratitude 2021 / George Harrison and Bob Dylan 1970

(0:47 "you ready george?")

IF NOT FOR YOU

If not for you
Babe, I couldn’t find the door
Couldn’t even see the floor
I’d be sad and blue
If not for you

If not for you
Babe, I’d lay awake all night
Wait for the mornin’ light
To shine in through
But it would not be new
If not for you

If not for you
My sky would fall
Rain would gather too
Without your love I’d be nowhere at all
I’d be lost if not for you
And you know it’s true

If not for you
My sky would fall
Rain would gather too
Without your love I’d be nowhere at all
Oh! what would I do
If not for you

If not for you
Winter would have no spring
Couldn’t hear the robin sing
I just wouldn’t have a clue
Anyway it wouldn’t ring true
If not for you

Copyright © 1970 by Big Sky Music; renewed 1998 by Big Sky Music

More of one thing leading to another, with no beginning or end in sight / Gratitude for my mysterious parents

The Bob Dylan of my mother 

(am's chalk pastel drawing from the 1980s of Bob Dylan which my mother hung in a prominent place in the small home overlooking the Pacific Ocean in a tiny town in Mendocino County where she and my father lived for 25 years until her death in 1994 and where she listened to "Oh Mercy" during the final years of her complicated life.  My mother thanked me for introducing her to the music of Bob Dylan when I was a teenager in the 1960s.  My father told me during those same years, "You were a nice girl until you started listening to Bob Dylan."  My parents, the first people I knew, remain a mystery to me.  They didn't seem to have much in common and argued frequently.  It was only after they died that I felt safe enough to love them.  That process continues.)

Although I wasn't looking for current articles about Bob Dylan, this arrived in my email inbox today:

"... The Bob Dylan of my dad was the one that told the story of his life drifting, constantly changing in his perspective of being a rolling stone. My Dylan is the one who alludes to the wisdom and guidance to know that even through the years, we can stand confused and be transformed. As he even proposes in “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” a confident voice of only one thing: “When you think you’ve lost everything, you find out you can lose a little more ...”

"... The body of work that he has created is proof of time, of life experienced and lived against being analyzed, we’ve grown with him, and he has a perfect way of expressing it, like a medieval troubadour courting life, the perfect witness and acknowledging that there’s a Bob Dylan for all and that is where his greatness lies ..."

Tatiana Altagracia (click on her name to read the article)



Of course, not everyone is for Bob Dylan.  My father, for instance, thought that listening to Bob Dylan had ruined his firstborn daughter as she made her way through her teenage years.  He didn't understand that Bob Dylan's music brought to me what he could not bring to me -- validation of the creative woman I was becoming and yet, there was more to my father than met the eye.  I have come to understand that his life was as complicated and conflicted as my mother's.  Perhaps that is what they had in common.  Here is the gouache and watercolor painting of mine that he chose to hang in his living room until the last few years of his life when he moved to a smaller independent living apartment:

Calendar Series: 46th Month / Land Fish with Open Hearts Confronting Stranded Tool (1989)



Here are two views of one of the art works of my father who stated that he was not an artist:

The gorilla that my father carved in redwood lives on my porch next to my abbreviated garden, which reminds me that my father expressed his love of beauty and design through gardening and landscaping.



My mother was an artist (look here, below my post for today, to see the mandalas she created that inspired mine) and a writer of poetry and short stories, although she abruptly stopped writing creatively in the late 1960s and began doing art work instead, beginning with learning to paint using watercolors and moving, over the years, to Japanese brush painting, silkscreening, batik, stained glass, and finally working at complex pattern knitting until the last days of her life.

When I was out walking in the past few days, I could feel the presence of my friends who have died and of Oboe.  It occurred to me to ask my parents if they wanted to walk with us and then I found it difficult to picture them walking with me.  As I write this, it becomes clear that my parents were not people who walked with other people.  I can picture them wishing me well but declining to walk with me.  What I want to focus on is that I sense that they wish me well.  I wish the same for them.  I know that I know nothing about their inner lives except what was expressed through their creativity.

The formatting elves are playing with my layout again  (-:

Be well.  Be safe.  The world is still being born.



Vocal, guitar and harmonica:  Terayama

Calling all birders (this is part of the story I will be telling mostly in pictures)

A dear friend I have known for 52 years died unexpectedly in late February in Cambria, California.  While accomplishing the major task of settling her estate, her sister and brother-in-law have been staying at the lovely dream house she had bought not far from where she had owned a home in Cambria in recent years.  She was all ready to move in when her death came.  Yesterday a bird began flying at two windows, seemingly trying to get in the house.  Her sister sent me these three videos.  Do any of you have any idea what kind of bird this is?  I am wondering if it is a type of flycatcher.

Three days after my mother died in 1994, a Black Phoebe appeared in a similar manner at my parents' house in Gualala, California.

Before and since then I have heard story after story of a bird appearing after the death of a loved one.  When the husband of my friend of 52 years was dying of ALS in 1989, he told her that he would appear to her as a Baltimore oriole after his death.  A pair of Baltimore orioles appeared in her yard after his death and built a nest and soon there were fledglings.

Here I am, finding that I do have something to write.  I am still gathering photos to celebrate the life of my friend whose death shook me to the core and whose friendship I have treasured since we met in college in 1967.

Here is the view of the backyard of her dream house:

She loved the music of Laura Nyro and Nina Simone:

Update:  Here is a screen shot of a just-received video of the mystery bird:

I'm now safe from the Google and Blogger Sharks that were attacking my blog

This morning I am happy to say that I was able to figure out for myself what the problem has been with my blog.

In yet another attempt to find a solution, I went to a Google forum for people having similar but not identical problems.  There was talk there about which browser a person was using.  I've been stubborn about sticking to my Safari browser.  It seems that Google (Blogger) has arranged it so that I can no longer use Safari if I want my blog to work or if I want to leave comments at other blogs.

When I logged into my blog from Google Chrome, my blog was restored to its usual self, and I could once again comment on other blogs.

Interestingly, when I logged into Google Chrome's email system, which is gmail, I found two emails from the Blogger Support Forum.  Those emails were not accessible to me on Safari.  However, I had read similar responses to my request for help at the Blogger Support Forum.  The suggestions from the Blogger Support Forum in that email and on the Blogger Support Forum were complex and overwhelming.  There was no suggestion there to simply change the browser I was using.

Thank goodness for the gifts of perseverance and intuition that have brought me through so many problems, large and small!  Thank you to everyone who tried to help me solve this problem!

Update:  I just checked to see if my blog works in Firefox.  It does.

Visions of Jacob Lawrence and Barbara Earl Thomas / Gratitude

"The Studio, 1977"


Back in 1980 when I was 30 years old and had returned to college to finish my degree in English Literature and Studio Art, I was introduced to the life and work of Jacob Lawrence.  It has been my good fortune to see much of his work in exhibits here in Bellingham and in Seattle.  He remains a inspiration to me to this day.

"Carpenters"

"The Library, 1967"

"Bread, Fish, Fruit"

"Typists"

"Hiroshima Series -- Boy with Kite"




In 2016, I became aware of the work of a student of Jacob Lawrence, Barbara Earl Thomas, and traveled to Bainbridge Island (not far from Seattle) to see an exhibit of her work.  She had studied with Jacob Lawrence, finishing graduate school at University of Washington in 1977, just a few years before I was introduced to his work.

"She makes catastrophe and beauty keep company—the way they actually, unthinkably, do. (from this article).

If you would like to see more of her art work and learn more about her life, I recommend this book:

As I wait for the inspiration for my next mandala, I feel immense gratitude to these two artists.

"Occupied by living"

A woman occupied by living.