Father's Day 2021 meditation

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Here's a song for my father who was born in 1914, died in 2003, and loved baseball.  I'm sure that my childhood memories of Father's Day had a baseball game on the radio as part of the sound track:

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For many years, for Father's Day, I used to bake my father a loaf of Norwegian braided bread and mail it from my home in Washington State to where he lived with my mother in Northern California after he retired.  He always expressed appreciation for that bread.  My father was confusing to me in the ways he hurt my feelings deeply, undermining my self-esteem throughout his life and at the same time seemed to be proud of me.  After my mother died, a first cousin asked him which of his daughters was most like him and he said, "Amanda."  I found that startling.  Perhaps he had mixed feelings about himself as well as about me.  Who knows? It has occurred to me in recent years that my father may have had Asperger's because that is being diagnosed in numerous members of the younger generations of my family.  Perhaps my father's father had Asperger's, too.  

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I wish I could remember my father holding me when I was a baby.  I'm grateful for this photo of him as a first-time father at age 35.  He was often away on business trips.  I became used to his absence as a young child and eventually didn't miss him at all when he was gone.  I have to remember that he always came home eventually and that the work that took him away from us was what supported us.

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In celebration, with immense gratitude to Louise Glück who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature / Long ago many of us were wounded and many of us have been healed by this poem

(1914 -- during my father's first year)

FIRST MEMORY

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

-- Louise Glück

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

"... 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.

Josephine's mandalas: #6 of 21

1/31/90

Twinkle Twinkle, little cell .....
You've done your work and done it well
When I die, you'll drift to sea ......
And wait there for another me ..... (-:

(click on the image for additional details)

This mandala was made on a Wednesday, within 24 hours of the previous one.

Up until the last year of her life, my mother had planned to be cremated and have her ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean. My recollection is that she had made arrangements with the Neptune Society.  This was a sore point with my father. He wanted her ashes to be buried alongside his ashes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where his mother and father and younger brother were buried. Almost exactly a year before she died, she gave in to his wishes and changed the details of her will.

It has always seemed to me that her freed spirit remained in and around Gualala. Three days after she died, a Black Phoebe appeared on the ocean side of my parents' home. I had never consciously seen a Black Phoebe before. It sat on the porch railing and peered at me as I stood near the door to the porch, talking on the phone with one of my older cousins who had been close to my mother. The Black Phoebe remained for sometime, seeming to be calling to us in the house:



Twice when I returned to Gualala for visits after my father had sold their home and moved to Bellingham, I had encounters with a Black Phoebe. Both times I was out walking and felt greeted by a Black Phoebe who stood on the soft dirt path and looked at me in what I perceived to be a friendly and fearless manner. Black Phoebes are dear to me now.

I like the single bright red star and the shimmering energy of this mandala with its radiating words.

After both of my parents had died I had an unexpected dream of seeing them joyfully reunited on the sloping hillside outside their home in Gualala. In the dream image, they were free of the differences that had kept them at odds with each other -- at least during many of the years I observed of their 46 years of marriage. They seemed to truly love each other in my dream.

This is what their home looked like in 1974 before more houses were built on their street. My Dad is looking south out of the living room window. My impression is that this was the happiest time in their lives. Their three daughters were grown. My father had retired and enjoyed gardening and woodcarving. My mother loved their new life in Gualala and had an abundance of creative energy. As always, she was never without a book to read.


My mother is sitting just to the south of house.

My father did the finish work on the addition to
their house which included a garage, a master
bedroom and an art room for my mother.

My mother took the paintings she had done in the
early 1960s and hung them up in the garage.


I am guessing that this photo was taken in 1974.

It just occurred to me that, in these photos, my mother 

is 7 years younger than I am now. I am 9 years

younger than my mother was when she made her

mandalas. My mother's mother died when my

mother was 20, and her father died when she was

29. She didn't have her parents for as long I 

did. 

It is also occurring to me that looking at my mother's 

mandalas is bringing thoughts of my father and of

my parents' marriage to my mind.

Thanks to whiskey river for this reminder.

AN OLD AND VERY PRIMITIVE KNOWLEDGE

Man knows that he springs from nature and not nature from him. This is an old and very primitive knowledge.

(Loren Eiseley, featured on Zen Calendar, December 17, 2007)

I bought these wonderful sculptures from The Lucia Douglas Gallery, using gift money from my father who was a sculptor in wood and clay but denied being an artist. When I was a little girl, he made a sculpture of a mermaid with green molding clay. I wonder where that clay sculpture is now. Will have to photograph some of his woodcarving and post it.

On the left is "Malin Head," a steel sculpture, 7-3/4" tall, by C.A. Scott.

On the right is "Intuition Free," a small version of a bronze sculpture, 6-1/2" tall, by Ann Morris.

Their sculpture can be visited at Big Rock Garden. Scroll down the link to see the large version of "Intuition Free" and more sculpture by C. A. Scott.

(1 hour drawing, 5:30 to 6:30 a.m. -- 6B pencil on heavy weight, medium tooth surface, 9 x 12 Canson drawing pad, while listening to Chants of India, a work of love by Ravi Shankar and George Harrison, which plays for approximately 1 hour)

UKULELE / MIRACLE

(1 hour drawing, 5:30 to 6:30 a.m. -- 6B pencil on heavy weight, medium tooth surface, 9 x 12 Canson drawing pad)

For the Christmas before my father died on St. Patrick's Day in 2003, he gave me some money to buy myself a present. Inspired by George Harrison's ukulele playing on his final album, Brainwashed, and learning that George had dozens of ukuleles around his house, I used part of the money to buy myself a ukulele in honor of George Harrison. When I visited my father on his 89th birthday, the last time I saw him, I brought my ukulele and played him a simple 3-chord tune in my goofy not-a-natural-musician style. My last visit with my father was peaceful. It seemed that whatever had been the problem between us was resolved. We had dinner in the assisted-living community dining room. He introduced me to his friends. I felt that he was proud of me, something I didn't usually feel. After dinner we watched an interview on TV with Elvis Presley's ex-wife, Priscilla. As I was leaving, he said, "I'll see you in the spring."

From "Pisces Fish," by George Harrison:

". . . and the river runs through my soul"

See One Word, Miracle.