A Meditation On The Day After Walking Up To Oyster Dome at age 73

ON ANOTHER PANEL ABOUT CLIMATE, THEY ASK ME TO SELL THE FUTURE AND ALL I’VE GOT IS A LOVE POEM

What if the future is soft and revolution is so kind that there is no end to us in sight.

Whole cities breathe and bad luck is bested by a promise to the leaves.

To withstand your own end is difficult.

The future frolics about, promised to no one, as is her right.

Rage against injustice makes the voice grow harsher yet.

If the future leaves without us, the silence that will follow will be an unspeakable nothing.

What if we convince her to stay?

How rare and beautiful it is that we exist.

What if we stun existence one more time?

When I wake up, get out of bed, my seven year old cousin

with her ruptured belly tags along.

Then follows my grandmother, aunts, my other cousins
and the violent shape of their drinking water.

The earth remembers everything,
our bodies are the color of the earth and we
are nobodies.

Been born from so many apocalypses, what’s one more?

Love is still the only revenge. It grows each time the earth is set on fire.

But for what it’s worth, I’d do this again.
Gamble on humanity one hundred times over

Commit to life unto life, as the trees fall and take us with them.

I’d follow love into extinction.

(written by Ayisha Siddiqa & read by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson)

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Oyster Dome

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Always sending love.

Dancing to the magic of suggestions by YouTube / Rainbow Girls Channel / Energetics of feeling

It takes a long time to become young.

-- Pablo Picasso

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Yep.  Indeed!

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Energetics of feeling, at any age:

Have been saving this to share.  Not sure where I found it.  The Rainbow Girls appear to be feeling love.

"... knowing that love is to share ..." / here, there, and everywhere during these hard times / Weather report and Hoopoe

 

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Mostly cloudy here with blue sky appearing and disappearing.

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" ... the love that moves the sun and other stars ..." / "... unarmed truth and unconditional love ..."

Thanks to  "the cassandra pages" for leading me to read "We Can't Comprehend This Much Sorrow"

Thanks to Dante Alighieri and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy.

Forever / Leonard said so

"... there are children in the morning / They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever ..." 

(Leonard Cohen)

This morning when I got up at 4 a.m., thinking of the children of the world near and far, I saw that the Abutilon bud I had been watching this past week had opened during the night. 

"... this life is a sacred opportunity ..."

I experienced some synchronicity in connection with Sabine's recent post when I read these words from Sogyal Rinpoche's book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

"Saints and mystics throughout history have adorned their realizations with different names and given them different faces and interpretations, but what they are all fundamentally experiencing is the essential nature of the mind.  Christians and Jews call it "God"; Hindus call it "the Self," "Shiva," "Essence," "Brahman," and "Vishnu"; Sufi mystics name it "the Hidden Essence"; and Buddhists call it "buddha nature."  At the heart of all religions is the certainly that there is a fundamental truth, and that this life is a sacred opportunity to evolve and realize it."  (am's italics)

I'd like to add that an Oglala Lakota activist, Russell Means, spoke of his culture's experience of "The Great Mystery."

"To each his ("their" would be my translation) own, it's all unknown."

The quote is from Bob Dylan in "If Dogs Run Free."



"Imagine":



"Somebody Was Watching":



This post is dedicated to my father.  As we all do, he had realizations about life and death; however, his path led him to look to God as he understood God for concrete answers.  He died alone on St. Patrick's Day in 2003 of congestive heart failure.  We had a difficult relationship. When I mentioned those difficulties yesterday to a small group of friends, one friend who had a difficult relationship with her father who died recently laughed gently and said to me, "In a future life, you might end up being your father's father."  In the years before he died, my father believed that he was the first person that God had spoken to since Jesus.  He kept a handwritten record of the questions he asked God and how God answered.  These were questions that had haunted him all of his life.  While my father was playing his regular games of Solitaire, God as he understood God would answer my father's questions in one of three ways:

"Yes."

"No."

"No comment."

He asked his God several times if Jesus was his son.  His God's final answer was, "No."

My father and I shared a love of plants and gardening.  I am grateful for that experience.  Yesterday I went out to the nearby botanical garden where I found a home for the Coast Redwood Seedling that I nurtured this past year in honor of my father.  Due to unexpected circumstances involving a steep hill that the friend who came with me could not walk down, I will have to return on another day to visit the Coast Redwood seedling.

My experience after death of both of my parents was that was all that was left of them after they died was the love they couldn't express while alive.  I have had a hard time accepting that love.  Writing this down is part of my acceptance of that love that I experienced only after they died.

Art That I Can Hear

From the Friends of Silence newsletter for July and August of 2015:

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things, it is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of awareness of the spirit.

~ Ansel Adams in a letter to Cedric Wright, 1937, as quoted in ART AS A WAY OF LIFE, ed. by Roderick MacIver

Unusual Summer Clouds During Hot Weather / Broken Person and Broken Guitar / Joni Mitchell's Meditation on the Book of Job / More People Who Are Not Broken

"A mind filled with love can be likened to the sky with a variety of clouds moving through it -- some light and fluffy, others ominous and threatening. No matter the situation, this sky is not affected by the clouds. It is free."
(Sharon Salzberg)

This morning before 8 o'clock I was a few blocks from my home, driving west on my way to SeaMar Community Health Center, a low-income clinic on the north end of town, to turn in paperwork that will have to be filled out by my doctor regarding accommodations that I am requesting in regard to the part-time job that I hope to have soon. The offer letter for the job is problematic. I will not sign it unless I am guaranteed a consistent work schedule and a guarantee that I will not be asked to work on my days off. I have been unemployed on and off since 1998 due to symptoms of PTSD that will be triggered again if my sleep is disrupted by frequent schedule changes that involve working into the evenings and if I am unable to plan anything because of never knowing when I will have a day off or when my work shift will begin or end.

As I waited at the stop light and wondered whether I would be able to get the accommodations I was requesting, I vaguely noticed out of the corner of my eye a nondescript compact person of short stature who was wearing nondescript clothing and a generic knit hat with side flaps with braids hanging down and who was carrying possessions across the cross street to my left. As the light turned green, and I moved forward with the traffic, I was startled to see the person lift an acoustic guitar into the air and smash it hard several times onto the sidewalk, leaving the guitar in pieces. It was like something I might see in a dream. I was shaken, wondering what was going on the mind of that person who was destroying something that was likely dear to that person or someone close to that person. I wasn't sure if the person was a man or a woman. It wasn't Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. It was something else.

I became aware of Joni Mitchell singing from my car's CD player:



On my way home from SeaMar, I had some errands to do in downtown Bellingham, which is on the west side of town. As I drove down Holly Street, I saw someone who appeared to be the same person I had seen earlier and who must have taken the bus into town. He or she was settled on the sidewalk,  not far from the bus station, leaning against the side of a building with his or her possessions. After I dropped off my condo dues at the property management company, I was curious enough to drive back around the block to see if it really was the same person.  Maybe it wasn't the same person, but my gut feeling was that it was. I was still grieving that broken person and the broken guitar. If it was the same person, he or she appeared subdued, nondescript, showing no sign of the anger or grief that prompted destroying an acoustic guitar.















"Take heart and take care of your link with life ..."
(Buffy Sainte-Marie, lyrics from "Look At The Facts")

Listen:

Joni Mitchell / Healing / Resurrection

(Self-portrait by Joni Mitchell on CD cover for Turbulent Indigo from 1994)



From Joni Mitchell's liner notes for Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced, released November 17, 2014:

"This box set is rising like a phoenix from the ashes of two dead projects -- a ballet and a horrendously ill-conceived box set. They started it without me. They hired two incompetents to "do" me. It was to be a 2-disc set -- peppered with discarded and damaged work -- for the sake of something "new." They hired a burglar to enter my storage space (ironically called "A Safe Place"). He rummaged around and came back with the dregs. "Why are you doing this?" I asked the bosses. "That's the way it's done," was the reply. "Not to me," I said and I squelched it. A little while later, the bosses were fired, and just before the company went belly up, I got the bills -- for their mistake.

The ballet is a dream I hope to somehow resurrect. We'll see. Meanwhile, with these notes coming to an end, my work is done. I'm celebrating. I'm pouring myself a glass of wine. I'd like to drink a toast. If God is dead and love is dead, is talent the next fatality? Let's drink a toast to talent. Here's to you, talent -- may you be resurrected, too."

From "Love Puts On A New Face" (1998):

"Everyday
Love puts on a new face
Love puts on a new face
Love has many faces
Many, many faces."

And "My Best To You" (1998), the closing song for Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced:

"So here's to you
May your dreams come true
May old father time
Never be unkind
And through the years
Save your smiles and your tears
They're just souvenirs
They'll make music in your heart

Remember this
Each new day is a kiss
Sent from up above
With an angel's love
So here's to you
May your skies be blue
And your love blessed
That's my best to you

Remember this
Each new day is a kiss
Sent from up above
With an angel's love
So here's to you
May your skies be blue
And your love blessed
That's my best to you"

Love

Color chart by Paul Klee.

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.
(Marc Chagall)

A Birth and a Return and Picasso in November

Every Saturday morning at 7 a.m., I meet with friends for breakfast at a nearby restaurant. Today there was especially good news from three of the youngest. One announced the birth of his first child, a son. The other talked about a celebration the night before of the return of one of his friends from Afghanistan. Another spoke of his teenaged son's long-anticipated visit to the Picasso exhibit in Seattle. There was much talk of love and hope and gratitude from these young men in the midst of the many sorrows of our times.

People Listening (1984)

Person with Helpers (1982-1984)

This clay sculpture was formed sometime between 1982 and 1984 in Santa Cruz, California, at the home of a friend who is a potter and who will remain anonymous. My friend handed me a lump of clay and encouraged me to work with it. I had just spent some time walking and talking with the man from "Middle of the Journey" (see post from yesterday) and was thinking of him as I molded the clay. "Person with Helpers" was the result. 

My friend sent the piece to me a few months later. Although I tried to make adjustments to the photo image to show the true color of the fired clay, my adjustments were unsuccessful. As I look at the image today, I can see it in Jungian terms as an animus image from an earlier time in my life. I no longer have this small sculpture, but I can still see the warm brownish-orange color of the fired clay in my mind. 

As part of a difficult letting-go process in 1999, I placed the sculpture in an inconspicuous location in a city park. Although I had been able to let go of the piece, I felt compelled to return to visit it numerous times until it disappeared. Sometime between 1966 and 1967, I had sculpted a much smaller image of the same man from memory. In 1999, I left that older piece, along with other mementos, at The Moving Wall when it came to a nearby small town.