"... 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.

 

Tom Wood / Deeply missed / The place where looking in and looking out meet

 Tom Wood is a Bellingham artist who died on January 5, 2022, at age 70.   His art has been a vital part of my life since the 1970s when he and his beloved wife, Pam Brownell, had a booth at the Point Roberts Arts and Crafts Fair where they were selling his earliest etchings and aquatints.  I bought an aquatint in which he conveyed what I understood as three views of reality, using the image of three birds with the heads of men (or maybe three men with the bodies of birds) -- one looking in, one looking out and one looking at the place where looking in and looking out meet. 

Over the years, I bought several other prints and one oil painting and even traded one of my paintings for one of his monoprints along with a tiny painting in gouache by Pam Brownell. A few years ago, under financial duress, I sold all of them except the first one I bought and Pam Brownell's gouache.

"In all his work he kept an eye toward beauty. Tom will be deeply missed ..."

"Thomas Wood’s works are included in countless collections of private individuals and in institutions such as the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Philadelphia Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Microsoft, University of Washington Medical Center, Whatcom Museum of Art and History, Stanford University, New York Public Library, and the Museum of Northwest Art among others. Over the last decade Wood was commissioned by Nawakum Press to create a series of etchings that accompanied publications of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and Bruno Schulz. A large-scale mural by the artist graces the Timber Park Pavilion performance stage at Boulevard Park in Bellingham, Washington. Though living with inoperable cancer for the past few years, he enjoyed making art on an almost daily basis and continued to embrace his local community of artists, transitioning his studio into a space for visiting artists to experiment with the printmaking medium he so loved."

Take a look these slides that show the murals Tom Wood painted for the Timber Park Pavilion here in Bellingham.

*

Coincidentally, it was on the day that Tom Wood died that I sat down at my drawing table in despair at having lost all motivation to draw and found myself prompted to pick up a 6B drawing pencil and draw my right hand with my non-dominant left hand and found to my delight that something new had entered my life as an artist.  It was only yesterday that I learned that Tom Wood had died on the 5th of January.  It doesn't seem all that long ago that I saw him in our local art supply store where we talked for a few moments about making art.

Dear blog friends, near and far, I hope you will take the time to look at some of Thomas Wood's lifetime work of prints and paintings that can be easily found with some internet searches and that you will be inspired by his art which shows an "honest and inquiring mind, a playful spirit quick to make a joke, a deep appreciation of the natural world, and an endless imagination."

Augen Gallery

Harris Harvey Gallery

i.e. gallery

A coincidence of cosmic shepherds and poets

"... Jesus was a good guy, he didn't need this shit ..." (from "Jesus The Missing Years," by John Prine, at 2:46.  I hope you have time to listen to the entire song.)

For my birthday, not long after I watched the birthday greeting card video featuring a shepherd, a friend gave me a copy of the CD, "The Tree of Forgiveness," by John Prine.  She had just discovered his music and thought that I might like it, too. 

The first time I heard John Prine's voice was in the 1970s when I was in my mid-20s.  I was washing the dinner dishes while my former husband sat in the living room watching television.  My mind was far away and unsettled.  Suddenly I thought I heard Bob Dylan's voice coming from the living room.  I had been listening to Bob Dylan since I was 14 years old, and he had become my cosmic shepherd and poet.  I turned abruptly from the dishes and ran to the living room, fearing that he would be gone by the time I got there.  Instead of Bob Dylan, I saw a younger man singing.  That man turned out to be John Prine.  I don't remember what he was singing.  It didn't matter.  He had my attention.  I knew that, once again, I was hearing the voice of a man that I could trust and learn from, a voice of someone who had experienced both joy and sorrow and had a sense of humor.  I had found another member of what in the years that followed became for me a vast community of cosmic shepherds and poets, many of whom had died before I was born.  Cosmic shepherds and poets continue to be born.  Sounds like a story from a John Prine song.

Yesterday this came up on on my blog reading list:

“We could say the search for meaning – which is a holy search – becomes imperiled whenever the poet-self and the shepherd-self are out of balance. If one is only a shepherd, she will risk being pedantic and overly serious; her ego will get in the way of her true service, and she will forget that each being shares the burden of caretaking – it is not up to her alone. The image of one shepherd over many no longer holds. Similar to how it has been said that the next Buddha is the sangha, the Jewish view of redemption imagines a shepherd-collective, a community of shepherds taking turns taking care. 

If one is only a poet, without a good measure of shepherd mixed in, there is a risk the poems will not reach outward and be in dialogue; that they will not intend towards the transformative – which is where all poems must intend, even if they fail. The poet brings to the shepherd an appreciation for the multiplicity of truths, for the impossibility of fixing anything. Without the poet-self, we become ideologues. The shepherd brings to the poet a reminder that too often our search becomes self-serving, discovery of self for its own sake; that others become stepping stones for us on the road to some imagined “actualization.” Often the search for meaning unwittingly becomes a defense against whatever or whoever is quietly sitting across from us in the café, across the table, by the side of the road, the other in our life as it is.”

—Josh Boettiger

Coincidence?

Then "What the Figtree Said," a poem by shepherd-poet, Denise Levertov, came to mind:

"... I served Christ the Poet, who spoke in images ..."

and I found what she wrote in her poem "On a Theme from Julian's Chapter XX":

"... Every sorrow and desolation he saw and sorrowed in kinship ..."  

In the past few weeks, I came across this quote:

“We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other.”  (Thaddeus Golas, from Love and Pain)

There is now a growing world-wide community of shepherds and poets who see and sorrow in kinship.  Some of us belong to the religious and spiritual traditions of the world.  Some of us, including me, don't.  We respect each other.  We work together.  We aren't going away any time soon.  We are a beloved community that doesn't condone the shit that went down before and is going down in 2018.  They can't crucify all of us, but they will try.  A diverse community, we will survive against all odds.

Seascape: Storm and Stillness / Gathered From Coincidence

Now that I am self-employed as a medical transcription editor, early Sunday morning between about 5 a.m. and 9:30 is the only time during the week where I have truly unstructured time.  Unlike every other day, nothing is planned during that quiet time.  I just wake up and ask myself what would be a good way to savor that time.  I've been frequently surprised when the answer comes.  It is fertile time.

Last week I spent the entire time reading The Man Who Loved Dogs and a few days ago was able to finish that nearly 600-page book just before it was due back at the public library.  Fearing that I wouldn't finish it on time, I had renewed it, and after finishing it, I wanted to start reading it over again, despite the fact that reading it was mostly a painful experience.  Yesterday after entering the first pages of the book again with more insight than I had the first time, I realized that I wasn't up to living again through the experience of that harrowing fictionalized story of the lives of Leon Trotsky, Ramon Mercader (Trotsky's assassin who was sent by Joseph Stalin), and Iván Cárdenas (the fictional man Ramon Mercader entrusts with his life story).  It's a book I keep talking about with friends because it sheds light and talks about the mystery of compassion.

Leonardo Padura's book has been translated from Spanish to English. Leonardo Padura is Cuban, born in 1955 in Havana, two years after Joseph Stalin died.  Although the translation, according to book reviews, is supposed to be a good one, I found myself wishing that I could read Spanish because the translation seemed clunky to me.  Still, the disturbing story comes through.

The Man Who Loved Dogs filled in so many gaps in my understanding of history because it is based on extensive historical research.  By the time I was 5 years old in 1955, I had heard of Stalin but had no context for him except vague fear.  Could I have heard of his death on television?  I don't remember my parents talking about world events, but I do remember that I knew about Hitler from the same early age, probably through television or talking with other children.  I connected both Stalin and Hitler with what I would come to know as the word terror. 

Picasso said that art is a lie that tells the truth.  As a result of reading The Man Who Loved Dogs, I looked around for more information about Sylvia Ageloff, a young Jewish American woman who was cruelly used by Ramon Mercader and who seemed oddly one-dimensional in The Man Who Loved Dogs, and I found a very different picture of her from that painted by Leonardo Padura.  For fictional purposes, she was part of a Leonardo Padura's elaborate lie that nevertheless that has brought me much light as well as an unsettled feeling that may well lead to more light.

Coincidentally, the book begins as Hurricane Ivan was threatening Cuba in September of 2004.  As I was reading the book, Mexico was experiencing the threat of Hurricane Patricia, the most powerful hurricane ever recorded.

I hesitate to recommend this book, and yet it has had a profound effect on me, and I find myself thinking about it often and now wanting to write about it.

Anyway, what got me started on this blog post was a painting by Monet, titled "Seascape: Storm," that I saw clearly for the first time this morning in a stack of four open engagement calendars dating back to 1984, which is when I left an unhappy marriage and moved to this place where I look out on Scudder Pond.  Over the years, I have jotted down bird, animal, sky, and weather notes, and noted days that I want to remember in these engagement calendars.  When the days are filled with notes, I purchase a new calendar.  It's occurring to me that 2016 would be a good year to start a new one.  I've been so busy with being self-employed that, since sometime in September, I had only turned the pages of the engagement calendar which sits on the top of the pile and has the most current notes in it. This morning I flipped the pages of the three other calendars forward to today and was struck by the peculiarly familiar image of a boat on a stormy sea on the page of November 1, 1984, and was startled to realize that the boat looked very much like the boat in R's painting from the early 1980s.  Odd that I had never noticed that boat in the 31 years I have gone through the pages of that engagement calendar.  I have had R's painting since October of 1982, which was the year I stood with my parents at the top of one of the towers that fell on September 11, 2001.  We had gone to see an exhibit of sculptures by Rodin, but the exhibit turned out to be closed that day.

I went to look at R's painting, which is on the wall near my front door. Sure does looks as if R may have used Monet's stormy painting as a starting point for his painting which was done during that brief period of his life that was peaceful, during the time he was in college, taking art classes. Even if he didn't use that painting as an inspiration, it certainly is the same type of boat. What do you think?

Bob the Baptiste and the Rose and the Sacred Ordinary

Tickets go on sale tomorrow for Bob Dylan and His Band in Seattle in October.  I am asking myself if I want to buy a ticket for the Sunday evening concert at the Paramount Theater, which is where I thought I had seen Bob Dylan in concert in 1981, among other years. When I go to the Bob Dylan website to look to find that concert in 1981, I am puzzled to see that according to the website, there were no concerts in Seattle in 1981, and that the two concerts in 1980 at the Paramount Theater were on November 29 and November 30.

Hmmm.  This is very odd.  My memory of that concert is that it happened not long after John Lennon was murdered on December 8, 1980.  I was 31 years old that year.  The concert was part of the "Gospel Tour." I wasn't about to become a Christian, but I was curious about Bob's newfound passion for Jesus.  I recall that I wanted to see Bob Dylan from as close a spot as possible and that I left my seat and made my way down to the steps to the left of the stage and sat on a step about 20 feet away from Bob Dylan.  As I sat there I had the thought that no matter how close I got to Bob Dylan, it wouldn't be close enough.  He was a huge part of the myth of my life, but I was not part of his life and never would be, and suddenly that was fine with me.  I didn't need to get any closer.  All I needed to do was listen at a respectful distance.

As I watched Bob Dylan sing, someone threw a red rose up on the stage, and it landed right in front of Bob.  I will never forget the startled look on his face, the way he winced, and how his entire body appeared to react in apprehension.  He moved backward as if his life were in danger.  He not only moved backward but soon paused in his singing and let his band play for awhile before stepping forward and resuming singing. Immediately I thought of John Lennon's murder and how vulnerable Bob Dylan was to the same kind of death.  His body language made me think that he was consciously (or unconsciously) aware of the real possibility of a fan killing him, too.  When I went back to my seat, I was sustained by the knowledge that I truly didn't need to get any closer to Bob Dylan, and with tremendous respect for his courage each time he walked out on stage.

How could I have that memory if the concert took place before John Lennon's death? Perhaps John Lennon's death was still quite fresh in my mind in 1992, the next time Bob Dylan played at the Paramount Theater.  Now that I think of it, it must have been 1992.  Yes.  In my mind I can only see Bob Dylan and his band on the small stage, and I don't see his back-up gospel singers anywhere.

At another concert in Vancouver, B.C., which must have been in 1993 (according the set list on the Bob Dylan website), I again left my seat.  I wanted to get closer to the stage as he sang "Girl From The North Country" as an encore.  This time the concert was not in a small theater setting.  There were no steps to sit on.  There was only a concrete platform on the left, quite some distance from the stage, where I was not alone in wanting to see Bob from as close as possible.  From that distance,  I was again struck by his vulnerability. He looked fragile.  For the rest of the concert, the sound had been so loud that it was close to being unbearable.  It had taken all my efforts to figure out what he was singing because the song arrangements were unfamiliar and jarring. For that final song, though, the sound was turned down to an intimate level, and he sang in a different voice, in what seemed to me to be a generous and humble voice. That was the last Bob Dylan concert I attended.

Now I really am bewildered.  I don't recall going to a Bob Dylan concert two years in a row, but according to Bob Dylan's website, that is what I did.  I would have thought that the last time I saw Bob Dylan in concert was in Vancouver in a later year, more like 1999.  My memory doesn't appear to serving me well.  So be it.

In the image above, Bob Dylan reminds me of an old Baptiste.  Baptiste is a character from the film, "Les Enfants du Paradis," a French film from 1945 that made a lasting impression on Bob Dylan.  Baptiste works as a mime, but in this clip with a Beatles song superimposed we see him both with his mime makeup, holding a rose, and without his mime makeup:

While looking for more images of Baptiste, I found this image,














which reminded me of the scene in "Masked and Anonymous" when a little girl sings "Blowing in the Wind."

If I know nothing else, I know that at least one thing is true -- that the sacred is in the ordinary.
(quote from the film "Masked and Anonymous")

Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead.  But then I realize that to someone else it might not seem so ordinary.
(Georgia O'Keeffe)

Coincidence?

Here's Georgia looking through a cheese hole, and reminding me of Bob Dylan:

There is no end to the richness of the associations I have with the work of Bob Dylan.  That's just the way it is.

Gathered From Coincidence On A Snowy Day

The Invisible Peak from Gary Yost on Vimeo.

A few days ago, I watched Werner Herzog's Little Dieter Needs To Fly after Dominic Rivron had mentioned it in a comment here on my blog.  Dieter Dengler lived on Mt. Tamalpais.  This morning after reading Sabine's thoughtful post, I moved on to the Doonesbury website and came across a video about the Coastal Miwok and their sacred mountain, Mt. Tamalpais.  If you don't have time to watch the entire video, go to the end of the video and listen to Sky Road Webb drumming and singing on the top of Mt. Tamalpais.

If you watch the entire video, look for Sacheen Littlefeather.

"If we take care of the mountain, the mountain will take care of us."
(from the credits at the end of "The Invisible Peak")

If not for turquoise rings and new ways to sing old songs on a foggy Sunday morning in September 2013

A few days after Richard died in April 2008, I was walking in the woods, and on the trail I found a silver ring with a round piece of turquoise set in it.  Although I tried to find its owner, I was unsuccessful and put the ring away.

A few weeks ago I had a dream where I said to Richard, "Let's do things differently this time."  He looked intently at me for a few moments and then said, "Yes."  It is the second time this year I have had a dream of having that conversation with Richard.

Not long after the dream, I remembered the turquoise ring I had found in the woods, remembered where I kept it, and tried it on.  It fit tightly on my ring finger.  

Kept with that ring was another turquoise ring that is adjustable:

I don't remember where or when I bought the second ring, although it might have been during the 1990s.  It occurred to me that the adjustable ring would look good next to the tight ring if I had the tight ring sized, and if I wore the adjustable ring below that ring.  

When Richard came back from Vietnam in December of 1970, his mother asked that I wear a ring on my wedding ring finger when we visited.  She had told his younger brothers and sisters that we had married upon his return.  We had made no plans to marry, but I had a silver ring encircled with squares of embedded turquoise and wore that. My mother had given me the ring (made in Arizona by a Native man named Elias, which is my father's father's name), after she had visited a friend in Arizona some years earlier.

I don't remember when I stopped wearing that turquoise ring on my wedding ring finger, but I do know that I continued to wear the ring for a few years afterwards, after Richard and I had separated.  It was sometime in 1972 that I took the turquoise ring off to wash my hands at the sink in the restroom of the insurance company where I worked as a kitchen helper and cashier in the cafeteria.  One of my co-workers went into the restroom right after I did.  When I went right back to look for my ring, it was gone.  My co-worker, a woman in her 50s who had one artificial leg and a tragic life story, denied having seen it.  I didn't believe her, but I let it go.  

Anyway, two weeks ago I took the ring I had found in the woods to a jeweler to be sized.  I am not a person who wears rings or necklaces or other jewelry.  My ears are not pierced.  

When I went to pick up the ring at the jeweler's store a few days ago, I was wearing the adjustable ring.  I slipped the newly sized ring on above it. The two rings looked beautiful together.  As I was looking at the rings, I thought I heard Bob Dylan singing.  When I listened closely to the background music in the jewelry store, I heard this:

"We always did feel the same

 We just saw it from a different point of view

 Tangled up in blue."

Those who were reading my blog in 2008 may remember this from a post a few weeks after Richard died:

"Last week, I finally was able to go to the photo lab in downtown Bellingham so I could order some prints of my old friend and his art work to send to his sister. As I was standing at the counter trying to explain my project, I heard Bob Dylan singing. I stopped talking to listen to him sing. When I tried to talk again, I couldn't because I started crying. The young woman clerk was playing Bob Dylan's album, New Morning, which is what I listened to while my old friend was in Vietnam and what we listened to during the 5 months we lived together in  early 1971. The clerk was playing the ALBUM (!) on a turntable and handed the album cover to me. More than a coincidence. How else could that happen? New Morning is a great album. Ends with a beautiful song called Father of Night. The song that made me start to cry was If Not For You."

My fingers just aren't made for rings anymore, unless they are adjustable.  Later in the day, the newly sized ring, which had been fine in the morning, was in danger of slipping off.  I don't want to lose that ring and will keep it in a safe place where I can look at it and think about doing things differently this time.  

I'm still listening to Another Self Portrait, deeply grateful to be hearing new versions of those songs I remember from 1969-1971 and appreciating how Bob Dylan has taught me to see how everything, not only music, can be open to interpretation and transformation.

A morning's work in the mystical studio / Martin Luther King's Birthday 2012

Yesterday someone from Ashtabula, Ohio visited my blog without commenting. I knew that because their visit showed up on my ClustrMap. According to the Wikipedia site, Jack Kerouac passed through Ashtabula in a Greyhound Bus in his novel On the Road, Ashtabula is listed as a train stop in "The Pilgrim (film)" by Charlie Chaplin, and the name Ashtabula means "river of many fish" in the Iroquois language.

Immediately my mind starting playing Bob Dylan's song "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go."

"... I’ll look for you in old Honolulu
San Francisco, Ashtabula ... "

I found many many cover versions of that song on YouTube. Here are two I especially like:





For me, Bob Dylan's songs are mystical and wide open to interpretation. Bob Dylan loved how Jimi Hendrix took "All Along the Watchtower" and sang it his own way. Bob Dylan continues to reinterpret his own songs. He's done that as long as I can remember. At first the reinterpretations bothered me, but I got used to them years ago and began to appreciate the way a song has a life of its own and eventually had to accept that Bob Dylan could even choose to sing his songs in such a way that it is nearly impossible to know what he is singing.

"Old Man and Old Woman at the Ocean" is the gouache and watercolor painting at the top of today's post. Some years ago I had a clear vision of Richard and me as an old man and an old woman, reunited at the ocean. Maybe it was the ocean of compassion. Maybe it wasn't us at all. Maybe it was. Maybe "twas in another lifetime." Who knows? That must have been in the late 1990s when I was out of touch with Richard. The vision gave me hope. Someone else might see something different in this painting. Let me know if you do.

Mystical:

"Having a spiritual meaning or reality that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence."
(from Merriam-Webster)

From that definition, could it be said that Zen koans sail into the mystic?

Here are life-long friends, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan:












Here's an older version of "Into the Mystic."



In my searching, I discovered that Jakob Dylan does a cover of "Into the Mystic" that can be found on YouTube.

And today, on Martin Luther King's Birthday in 2012, I learned this about Ashtabula on the above link to the Wikipedia article on Ashtabula:

"Ashtabula was founded in 1803 and incorporated in 1891. The city contains several former stops on the Underground Railroad which was used to convey African-American slaves to freedom in Canada in the years before the American Civil War. Among the stops is Hubbard House, one of the handful of termination points. Ex-slaves would reside in a basement of the house adjacent to the lake and then leave on the next safe boat to Canada, gaining their freedom once they arrived in Ontario."



"... Yer gonna have to leave me now, I know
But I’ll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the ones I love
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go."

Studio:

"The working place of a painter, sculptor, or photographer."
(from Merriam-Webster)

I've been working in the studio since 5 a.m. this morning. It's 10:30 now. Creating these blog posts gives me the same feeling I get when I paint or draw or weave or write a poem.

"Work is love made visible."
(Kahlil Gibran)

“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”
(Martin Luther King Jr.)

Born during the same 24 hours in 1949 / Coincidence?

Yesterday was my birthday, and today would have been my old friend Richard's 62nd birthday. I have one other photo of us together, but that one is in silhouette as we are walking hand in hand in the direction of the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean. If it weren't for Richard, I wouldn't have any photos of us at all. For both photos, he set up the camera and stepped into the picture.

Today when I was getting groceries, I ran into a man that Richard worked for as a carpenter in California a long long time ago. I don't see him around that often. What are the chances that some years ago, I would get out of my car to deliver some paintings to an art gallery and that a man would get out of the car next to me and offer to help and that it would turn out that Richard had worked for him? And that as he and his wife were in the grocery store parking lot today, he would recognize me and stop to talk on Richard's 62nd birthday?

Then, this morning, I was talking with Richard's sister, Dorothy, who had left a message yesterday for my birthday. She said she was driving on a back road in the coast hills on the San Francisco Peninsula and saw a solitary crow skipping along the road. She knows that whenever I see a crow skipping I think of Richard. I even wrote a poem featuring a skipping crow and innocence and forgiveness when Richard and I were both 50 years old.

TWO INNOCENTS WITH EXPERIENCE

All desire. No forgiveness.
Years later it was early spring
with Red-Winged Blackbird,
Goldfinch, faithful Canada Goose on the trail
and return of the Tree Swallows.

Then I remembered.
He was sitting close to me.
Mr. Solitary Crow skipped by us like a child.
We laughed until we were children again.
This was how I experienced love.
I was innocent of forgiveness.

If you have time, listen to something that spoke to Richard's heart and which speaks to mine.

Painting in America/Reconciliation Dream

There's a long puzzling story here, but the drift is that the day after I decided to give away one of my paintings, "Reconciliation Dream," to one of my cousins on my father's side, an old painting of mine titled "Painting in America," appeared next to my front door with a note from someone I have not seen in years, who wrote that she wasn't expecting to see me again but wanted to thank me for giving it to her in 1986, and that it was time for her to let it go and for it to come back to me.

If you would like, take a look at North and South America and another previous post about "Reconciliation Dream."

I've been drawing again in the last few weeks, inspired by the spirit of Suze Rotolo and by Bob Dylan's recent exhibits of drawings and paintings that are clearly a result of his relationship with Suze:

"Her constant sketching inspired him to take up drawing and painting, and some of the songs relating to their relationship were written during a months-long separation while she studied art in Italy."

















I've just been bringing my sketchbook with me when I go out, and I have been drawing what is in front of me when I sit down--a form of prayer and meditation. It feels very good to be drawing again just for the joy of it.

"... Oh, ev'ry thought that's strung a knot in my mind,
I might go insane if it couldn't be sprung.
But it's not to stand naked under unknowin' eyes,
It's for myself and my friends my stories are sung ...
(From "Restless Farewell," by Bob Dylan, 1964)

"It's for myself and my friends, these drawings are done."
(am)