Mandala #10 / "That Lucky Old Sun" / Building Bridges, Not Walls

THAT LUCKY OLD SUN

Lyrics: Haven Gillespie, Beasley Smith
Music: Haven Gillespie, Beasley Smith

Played by Jerry Garcia regularly with the JGB from 1986 to 1995. Also covered occasionally by Robert Hunter in 1997.

Up in the morning, out on the job
Work like the devil for my pay
But that lucky old sun has nothing to do
But roll, roll around heaven all day

Fuss with my woman, toil with my kids
Sweat till I'm wrinkled and grey
While that lucky old sun got nothing to do
But roll, roll around heaven all day

Lord above, can't you hear me pining?
Tears all in my eyes
Send down that cloud with a silver lining
Lift me up to Paradise

Show me that river, take me across
Wash all my troubles away
Like that lucky old sun, give me nothing to do
But roll, roll around heaven all day

Show me that river, take me across
Wash all my troubles away
Like that lucky old sun, give me nothing to do
But roll around heaven
Let me roll around heaven
I just want to roll around heaven
All day

"Shadows in the Night", with Bob Dylan and his Band, gets my five stars. Started listening to it this morning in my car. It works for me on many levels. These are the songs that were being sung when my parents were young. These are the songs that I never thought would speak to me at all.  For me, there is something about Bob Dylan's voice that has held my attention since I first heard it when I was 13 years old. I walked into our family living room on August 28, 1963, and heard this:



"... and the sun will respect every face on the deck ..."

"... Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught
They lowered him down as a king
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He'll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game."

Hearing "Shadows in the Night" makes me think about my parents and the way the world was when they were young. Bob Dylan builds bridges, not walls. He has done that as long as I have been listening.

Progress not Perfection: Fearless and Asymmetrical Mandalas

On September 17, 2014, I began working on the first mandala of the "Fearless and Asymmetrical Mandala Series," (scroll down past today's post) using an inexpensive box of watercolor pencils made for children. My mother's mandala series was the inspiration. Below is the palette I used for Mandala #1. I was using 17 colors from the spectrum, minus the shades of brown. As I continued making mandalas, I found it frustrating that some of inexpensive pencil tips continued to break off over and over again as I used them. As a result, I was using fewer and fewer colors with each mandala I made.

Yesterday I finished Mandala #9, using Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils with a completely different palette that I chose by eye from the shelves at the Dakota Art Store. However, my new palette doesn't have as many colors as the old palette, and looking at this last mandala, I want to remedy that.  

My new pencils are not watercolor pencils, and I don't need to worry about accidentally getting the paper wet and having the colors run. They aren't showing any signs of breakage either.

Here is the limited palette I used for Mandala #9:

Here's the palette in progress I'm using for Mandala #10:

I'm going to go back to the Dakota Art Store with the original watercolor pencil palette and try to duplicate it as closely as possible. May not be possible, but I'll give it a try. I loved the names of the children's pencils. The names of squirrel jacket, hedgerow, dew at 5 a.m., rabbit boots and berry pie appeal to me more than cadmium orange, viridian, light cobalt turquoise, crimson and violet.

"I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name."

(Bob Dylan)

This is the longest run of works on paper that I have had since the First Gulf War began in 1990. That was when I began to experience symptoms of the post-traumatic stress disorder that is the result of my experiences during the war in Vietnam. Recently I've been hearing in my mind the words that Richard wrote in the summer of 2002:

"Please take all my love and go on with your life."

It's been 45 years this month since Richard left for Vietnam and 44 years since he returned as a haunted man. For so many years, I didn't feel I could go on with my life as long as he was suffering. It's been almost 7 years since he died. It's never too late to accept his love and go on with my life. Half measures avail me nothing. What am I waiting for? Why not now? There is nothing holding me back except me.

"Question from Robert Love: And productive work is a kind of salvation in your view? To feel pride in what you do?

Answer from Bob Dylan: Absolutely."

(from the AARP interview)

I've had a upper respiratory infection with a headache for the past 11 days. My voice is still hoarse. I still cough occasionally. The sore throat has finally left, along with the headache. Haven't been able to work on my job retraining program. When I have a cold, I experience the kind of depression that used to be a part of my everyday life for years and years. Yesterday I went out to do some errands because I was feeling better. Once I was out and about, though, I realized that I'm not back to my usual relatively good health. I don't take relatively good health for granted after so many years of compromised health.

Then I came across this.

And here is a view with a surprise guest while I was making a video from my porch. I thought that I had lost this footage and was unusually philosophical about that. I've lost so many things. A second surprise was discovering the footage this morning:

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.

Oh Shenandoah / River imagery / Bob Dylan's voice

I prefer Bob Dylan's version of "Oh Shenandoah" but was moved by the river imagery in the first video, and that prompted me to look for Bob Dylan's version on YouTube.   I am always puzzled when I hear someone say that they like Bob Dylan's songs but not his voice.  There is something in his voice throughout the years that has held my attention in a way few other voices have.  Considering how much Bob Dylan's voice has changed since I first heard it in the early 1960s, maybe it is not the voice itself but that something in his voice. Try muting the voice on the river video and listening to it with Bob's voice:




These other lyrics come to mind:

"... It was for her I crossed the water ..." (from the version of "Oh Shenandoah" that Bob Dylan sings)

"I crossed that river just to be where you are ..." (lyrics from "Mississippi" on "Love and Theft")

The water is wide, and we can cross over.  That's the story I hear Bob telling in these songs.

generosity and humility

"Generosity can be as simple and sweet as a song worth sharing."
(quote from Sight Psalms)

The source for the photo is my sister in Mississippi who is a Methodist and sent me a link to Sight Psalms.

I remember the final Bob Dylan concert I attended in the late 1990s in a stadium in Vancouver, British Columbia. During what was to be the last encore, I was moved to get up from my seat, and I made my way down as close to the stage as I could get -- a long way from where our seats were. My friends remained seated. Bob Dylan was singing, "Girl From The North Country." Others had quietly left their seats as well, moved perhaps in the same way I was . As I recall, we were a small group of women, allowed to be as close to the stage as was possible.

Unlike the rest of the concert, the volume of the loudspeakers had been turned down to a level that was not excruciatingly painful to listen to. Bob Dylan began to sing clearly, unlike the way he had sung throughout the rest of the concert.

Bob Dylan would have been in his late 50s then. To my eyes, he was a surprisingly fragile-looking man. I was struck by a sense of the courage it took for him to put himself in such a vulnerable position. Then the words generosity and humility came to me spontaneously.

To me, in that moment, Bob Dylan was the embodiment of generosity and humility.

When I saw the above photo this morning, it occurred to me that Bob Dylan could have easily been that man at the piano in New Orleans except for a simple twist of fate. I see them as kindred spirits.

The gift of the encore for the last Bob Dylan concert I am likely to see has been a lasting gift.

If you have time and the inclination, listen to Bob Dylan in 1994 (a few years before we saw him in Vancouver), accompanied by the Tokyo New Philharmonic Orchestra.

"I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded in hatred"
(from "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall")

Tangled Up in Blue / The Old Guitarist

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century

...

The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin' on like a bird that flew
Tangled up in blue.

...

But me, I'm still on the road
Headin' for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in blue.

(Bob Dylan, from "Tangled Up in Blue")

"The Old Guitarist," by Pablo Picasso:

THIS DANCE

This dance is the joy of existence. (Rumi)

This pastel drawing of mine from 1984 is "Woman Dancing By Herself."
She is dancing by herself, but she is not dancing alone.






















This watercolor and gouache painting, "EADGBE," from 1987 was painted while listening to Bob Dylan.

"Unexpected travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)

Woman with Hands Full (1986)

Thanks to Bob Dylan.