42 years: a book of changes

"What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."
(T. S. Eliot)

Using the iPhoto application on my MacBook, I created a 50-page book of a selection of art work created as a result of RTN's presence in my life for the last 42 years. The book includes a short introduction and a poem after the art work. The book was shipped to me via FedEx. This first attempt was an experiment, allowing me to learn that I can design a high-quality soft-cover book using my MacBook. However, the book cost me about $50.00, including shipping. One step at a time.

A CHANGE IN THE WEATHER

"We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot live without human affection."

(Dalai Lama)

Thinking about the human affection visible in photographs of Barack and Michelle Obama and their two daughters.

Thinking about the Dalai Lama, a man with no wife or children, a man who gives and receives human affection as if he did.

Thinking about the extreme changes in the weather that are part of life on the Gulf Coast of the United States.

ANOTHER NEW MORNING

Am finding myself with very little energy on these new mornings. Or the rest of the day, for that matter. Will post again when my energy comes back. It always does. 

Just finished re-reading Toil, by Jody Proctor. One of my favorite books, published in 2000. RTN was a carpenter. Toil helped me understand just what it might have been like for RTN to have made his living as a carpenter.

A well-loved place

"The remedy of all blunders, the cure of blindness, the cure of crime, is love."

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

STAND UNDER THE OAK

"They walked softly here. So will the others, the 

ones I seek.

The only way I can think to find them, the only 

archaeology that might be practical, is as follows:

You take your child or grandchild in your arms, or

borrow a young baby, not a year old yet, and go 

down into the wild oats in the field below the barn.

Stand under the oak on the last slope of the hill,

facing the creek. Stand quietly. Perhaps the baby

will see something, or hear a voice, or speak to

somebody there, somebody from home."

                  

                 Towards an Archaeology of the Future

(page 114, WAY OF THE WATER'S GOING:  IMAGES OF THE

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA COASTAL RANGE, with 

photographs by Ernest Waugh and Alan Nicholson

and text from Ursula K. Le Guin's ALWAYS COMING HOME)

("Person with Questions," gouache and watercolor on 

Arches watercolor paper, painted by am in the early 1980s)

Thank you to all who continue to visit NEW MORNING 

IN THE NORTH COUNTRY. I am grateful for your

presence.

OBOE SLEEPING ON A HOT DAY

TALKING SONGS OF EXPERIENCE

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious."

(Albert Einstein)

AUGUST FLOWER

OBOE'S YOGA PRACTICE

THERE WAS WIND BEFORE THE RAIN

"Think of it; all that speech pouring down." 

(Click to see complete quote at Whiskey River)

ORANGE IMPATIENS 8 A.M. / I'M PATIENT

Today my Zen Calendar says: "When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was." (Alan Watts) A few days ago I got my turntable out of the closet, along with my collection of Bob Dylan albums. "What's the matter with me, I don't have much to say . . . " (from "Watching the River Flow" -- Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Vol. II, 1971)

"Your vision will clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens." (Carl Jung) "No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear." (C.S. Lewis) "Fear is felt in the upper chest and breathing passages. It is a sense that somehow our life and survival are being threatened. It is felt as a sense of dread and anxiety which eventually spreads throughout the entire body." (John Friel and Linda Friel)

NEW MORNING AT SCUDDER POND

A while back, my sister emailed this video to me. It just takes a few minutes to watch. I've been meaning to post it.

I've been listening to a CD with the title of "Graceful Passages." I bought it at the hospital gift shop during my father's last years, the years that followed the death of my mother. I was drawn by these words on the back of the CD case:

"A powerful tool for the grieving; a healing comfort for the heart." -- Stephen and Ondrea Levine

"Music with spoken messages and prayers, presenting a peaceful reflection on the eternal questions of life while helping us care for ourselves and our loved ones. Spoken by:

Ram Dass
Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh
The Very Rev. Alan Jones
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D.
Fr. Maximillian Mizzi, O.F.M. Conv.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
and other mentors and guides.

Introduction by Ira Byock, M.D.
Foreward by Sam Keen
Epilogue by Kathleen Dowling Singh, PH.D.

Epilogue:

PRAYER FOR PRESENCE:

Let us be the ear that listens without judgment and with deep compassion
to all that the voice of our loved one has to say in the phase of Chaos.

Let us be the still and quiet point of acceptance where the personal life is
reviewed and resolved, honored and released.

Let us be the silent and understanding companion to the voiceless time
of Surrender.

The love will endure, never fear. In fact, beyond the personal self,
love just gets stronger, purer, freer, deeper. Go there with your
loved one.

Sit and breathe with your loved one, matching your rhythms.

Sit and meditate with your loved one, matching your visions.

Sit and pray with your loved one, matching your deepest longings.

Let us share, far beyond the last breath and even through a breaking
heart, in our loved one's Transcendence; the entrance, at the edge
of life, into the peaceful luminous Center."

I had put the CD away before my father died and completely forgotten about it until a few weeks ago.

















"So happy just to be alive
Underneath the sky of blue." (Bob Dylan, "New Morning," 1970)

TALKING WESTERN SKY

42 years: a book of changes

Above is an idea for the cover of simple book I am working on using some iPhoto accessories. Unfortunately I can't complete the book-making process because I don't have Mac OS 10.4.9. Oh well. I'm making progress anyway because I can store the book in PDF format.

Here's the chapter I read today from MEDITATIONS OF JOHN MUIR, compiled and edited by Chris Highland (a wonderful book!):

"Chapter 26: On and On into Infinite Mystery

Probably these gallflies make mistakes at times, like anybody else; but when they do, there is simply a failure of that particular brood, while enough to perpetuate the species do find the proper plants and nourishment. Many mistakes of this kind might be made without being discovered by us. Once a pair of wrens made the mistake of building a nest in the sleeve of a workman's coat, which was called for at sundown, much to the consternation and discomfiture of the birds. Still the marvel remains that any of the children of such small people as gnats and mosquitoes should escape their own and their parents' mistakes, as well as the vicissitudes of the weather and hosts of enemies, and come forth in full vigor and perfection to enjoy the sunny world. When we think of the small creatures that are visible, we are led to think of many that are smaller still and lead us on and on into infinite mystery.

'The inner -- what is it? if not intensified sky; hurled through with birds and deep with winds of homecoming.'
~ Rainer Maria Rilke"

Santana - Soul Sacrifice (Woodstock 1969)

In the summer of 1969, after RTN did his basic Army training at Ft. Lewis in Washington, he was sent to Ft. Eustace in Virginia for training as a helicopter mechanic. He wrote in a letter that he wanted to be at Woodstock.

I remember driving to San Francisco in 1970 to see the film "Woodstock" when it was first released. I remember that I was moved to tears when I saw and heard Jimi Hendrix sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and when I saw Janis Joplin simply walking and smiling. I'm guessing that Jimi Hendrix had already died. Janis Joplin died soon after I saw the film. I was devastated.

Carlos Santana survived and thrived. I still experience intense feelings listening to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, but Santana's music makes me glad to be alive, no matter what happens.
Santana's music lifted my spirits in during those troubling years from 1969 to 1971. It still does.

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED #7

After several weeks without DSL, I've got a connection again. Since RTN died on April 20, my posting has been erratic, and then losing my DSL connection compounded my distress but at the same time gave me a break from email and the internet, which has been good for me. I've not been able to respond to comments or leave many comments at other blogs as I did in the past. Thanks to all who have continued to visit. Your presence has helped me as I make my way through this time of change.

Above is the last of the series of images I received from RTN from Vietnam in 1970. As with the others, he made his drawing on the front of the envelope and put my address on the back of the envelope. Californians may recognize that the image is of the old Russian Church at Fort Ross in Sonoma County. I believe that RTN copied the image from a popular postcard.

Sometime in the winter and spring months of 1971 after RTN returned from Vietnam, we spent a couple of days driving up the coast from our cottage in San Mateo County to the town of Mendocino. During that trip, RTN told me that he remembered that his family had traveled north in the same way and had been met with a dense and seemingly endless fog. His story was that his father had turned off the road on the ocean side after dark and parked the car for the night, unsure of where they were. In the morning when the family woke up, the sun was shining, and they found that they had parked alongside that church at Fort Ross.

We, too, spent the night in the car, but we parked in a turnout on a bluff just south of the Russian River. We were barely able to sleep because it was uncomfortably cold, and the sound of the wind and the ocean kept us awake. Besides, any two adults would find it difficult to sleep comfortably in a VW bug. I remember how angry RTN was and how sad I was, thinking I was the reason for his anger. That morning we drove as far north as the town of Mendocino and walked on the beach. Before RTN had gone to Vietnam, we had always loved walking at the ocean together. That day, though, as I stepped away from him to look at something along the tideline, he startled me by saying sharply, "Why aren't you walking with me? Are you ashamed to be seen with me or something?" He had been using amphetamines before and after going to Vietnam and had begun to more frequently exhibit the same paranoia that I had witnessed while growing up with my mother who took prescription amphetamines for narcolepsy. It's hard to remember the sequence of events during those first months after RTN returned from Vietnam, but it seems now that that trip was a turning point which led to our eventual separation. Although we never lived together again, I kept in touch with him, always hoping for the day that he would "return from Vietnam."

The doctors, nurses and staff at the VA Hospital told his sister that in the last seven months of his life after his brain stem stroke, they had observed him to be in the midst of an intense internal struggle. They said that after I spent time with him for four days in the ICU, he appeared to find a level of peace. He died a week after I returned to Northwest Washington.

I remember visiting him, around 1976, after being out of touch with him since 1973. Both of us had married. I told him that I had not been sure if I should contact him. He said, "You should always contact me."

I took this photo this morning at 8 a.m. Still working on linking the past with the present, with an emphasis on living in the present:

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED IN THE SUMMER OF 1970 / SUMMER OF 2008

This is the sixth of the seven drawings by RTN, which were sent from Vietnam in 1970 on the front of mailed letters.

Still on dial-up and very limited in terms of internet access. Thought I would try to upload some photos. It took longer than usual, but now I know I can upload photos if I'm willing to wait the extra time.

From my Zen Calendar, the entry of a few days ago:

"And I would answer you. . . that to prepare the future is only to found the present. . . for the sole true invention is to decipher the present under its incoherent aspects and its contradictory language. . . You do not have to foresee the future, but to allow it. . .

(ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY)

The present:

TAKE WHAT YOU HAVE GATHERED FROM COINCIDENCE

I've been without an Internet connection since June 26. I made a deliberate decision to take a vacation from email, blogging, and internet searches when my modem stopped working. My internet provider gave me several options, including free dial-up. I chose to wait 10 days for a free replacement modem to arrive and to decline the dial-up option. That modem arrived yesterday.

A technician spent an hour with me on the phone, trying to reestablish an internet connection. He was unable to do that and determined, as I had suggested early in the phone call, that the replacement modem was defective. This morning I decided to use the free dial-up connection while I wait for another free replacement modem. I had not bothered to set up the dial-up before now because my recollection was that dial-up is impossibly slow. I'm not going to try to download any pictures until I have a DSL connection again.

The vacation from the Internet has been good for me. The weather has been beautiful, and I've been in good spirits for the most part.

This morning, after checking through and beginning to respond to my backlog of email, I received an email from a friend who sent this timely poem:


Don't worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn't matter.

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world's harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.

So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can't see.

Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.

(Jalaluddin Rumi)


A few hours after reading that poem, I opened my copy of MEDITATIONS OF JOHN MUIR: NATURE'S TEMPLE, compiled and edited by Chris Highland. Chapter 18 is called "All the Air Is Music." It consists of a paragraph about a brave little water ouzel, taken from the writings of John Muir. At the bottom of the page it says:

"We have fallen into the place where everything is music.' -- Rumi

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED #5

The drawing was made on the front of an envelope sent by RTN from Vietnam in 1970.

When I first saw RTN in the Intensive Care Unit at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto on April 10th, his eyes were closed. When his sister told him I had come to be with him, he slowly opened his eyes. His left eye was the deep blue I remembered. His blind right eye looked very much like the sky in the photo below. I don't know how he became blind in that eye.

He was heavily sedated, and I'm not sure how well he could see me with his left eye. I held his left hand with my right hand. His hand held mine. His blind eye was surprisingly beautiful, like a late afternoon sky with a mixture of white clouds. I was reminded of what Alice Walker wrote in "Beauty: When The Other Dancer Is The Self" about her daughter's response to first noticing her mother's blind eye:

She studies my face intently as we stand, her inside and me outside her crib. She even holds my face maternally between her dimpled little hands. Then, looking every bit as serious and lawyer- like as her father, she says, as if it may just possibly have slipped my attention: "Mommy, there's a world in your eye." (As in, "Don't be alarmed, or do anything crazy") And then gently but with great interest: "Mommy, where did you get that world in your eye?"

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED #4

Life is short. Art long. Hippocrates. View from my porch at 5 p.m.:






















Oboe with view of cattails:

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED #3

Drawing on the front of an envelope mailed from Vietnam by RTN in 1970 and the view today at 5 p.m. I wish you could see all the swallows and that the cattails are moving like the ocean.

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED #2

It's one of those overcast 7 a.m. Pacific Northwest June mornings that looks better in black and white than in color.






















Chapter 1, page 49, From SEVEN CHOICES, by Elizabeth Harper Neeld, PhD:

THE TERRAIN OF OUR ACTIVE GRIEVING

Life As It Was
The Event of Loss
Life and Loss Integrated
Freedom from Domination of Grief

IMPACT: Experiencing the unthinkable
CHOICE: To experience and express grief fully

SECOND CRISIS: Stumbling in the dark
CHOICE: To endure with patience

OBSERVATION: Linking past to present
CHOICE: To look honestly

THE TURN: Turning into the wind
CHOICE: To replan and change our lives to include but not be dominated by the loss

RECONSTRUCTION: Picking up the pieces
CHOICE: To take specific actions

WORKING THROUGH: Finding solid ground
CHOICE: To engage in the conflicts

INTEGRATION: Daylight
CHOICE: To make and remake choices

I just realized that I have come to the third choice and entered that process.

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED #1

After receiving the "I Love You" Series, I received seven more images, either drawn on the front side of envelopes which were addressed on the back side, or as part of handwritten letters. I believe that most of these drawings arrived in the early days of RTN's time in Vietnam. We wrote a letter to each other every day that he was gone. Ten months after he returned from Vietnam, we separated for a second and final time, remaining friends. Not long after that, I burned the approximately 335 letters he had sent from Vietnam, saving only his drawings. I knew that if I carried those letters with me, I would never go on with my life. Nevertheless, the grief that followed that separation lasted a long, long time. As hard as I tried, I never completely went on with my life. I'm still working on that, only now beginning to feel the holy ground beneath my feet again.


THE LOVING TIME

It reads like a fairytale
and that's what it was
Young man in his prime
young girl from the cross
The most perfect of strangers
and then the night closed in
and the holy ground took care of everything

Now she was a fine one
and he was a handsome man
One look was enough
and away they ran
They spend many happy hours
and then the night closed in
and the holy ground took care of everything

Oh what's the use in complaining
In for a penny in for a pound
I remember the loving time
and nothing else really counts

And I recall the promise they made
With a faith I can but admire
That she'd be the one he adored
and he'd be her hearts desire

It didn't come true in the end
they went their separate ways
He couldn't change what he was
she wasn't ready to wait
They couldn't live in the daylight
they let the night close in
and the holy ground took care of everything

I remember the loving time
and nothing else really counts

(Lyrics by Noel Brazil, sung by Mary Black -- If you'd like to listen to a clip, scroll down here)

A view of today:

NOTES FROM RTN FROM VIETNAM 1970

TIME PASSES SLOWLY

Time passes slowly up here in the mountains,
We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains,
Catch the wild fishes that float through the stream,
Time passes slowly when you're lost in a dream.

Once I had a sweetheart, she was fine and good-lookin',
We sat in her kitchen while her mama was cookin',
Stared out the window to the stars high above,
Time passes slowly when you're searchin' for love.

Ain't no reason to go in a wagon to town,
Ain't no reason to go to the fair.
Ain't no reason to go up, ain't no reason to go down,
Ain't no reason to go anywhere.

Time passes slowly up here in the daylight,
We stare straight ahead and try so hard to stay right,
Like the red rose of summer that blooms in the day,
Time passes slowly and fades away.


Copyright © 1970 Big Sky Music
Bob Dylan

LATE IN THE DAY LOOKING SOUTH

FIRST PERENNIAL BLOOM

LIGHT ON THE PATH

FATHER'S DAY 2008 / 7 A.M.

FATHER OF NIGHT

Father of night, father of day
Father, who taketh the darkness away
Father, who teacheth the bird to fly
Builder of rainbows up in the sky
Father of loneliness and pain
Father of love and Father of rain

Father of day, Father of night
Father of black, Father of white
Father, who build the mountain so high
Who shapeth the cloud up in the sky
Father of time, Father of dreams
Father, who turneth the rivers and streams

Father of grain, Father of wheat
Father of cold and Father of heat
Father of air and Father of trees
Who dwells in our hearts and our memories
Father of minutes, Father of days
Father of whom we most solemnly praise

(lyrics by Bob Dylan, 1970, from the album "New Morning")

SEVEN CHOICES

Am reading Seven Choices again. My ability to concentrate is slowly returning.


















Chapter 2

SECOND CRISIS:

STUMBLING IN THE DARK

I want to go home, to ride to my village gate.
I want to go back, but there's no road back.

Mei Sheng and Fu I
First Century B.C.

(from Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World: Seven Choices, Elizabeth Harper Neeld, Ph.D.)

Dalai Lama's thoughts on China -- 1998

LATE AFTERNOON SUN

“Although the past may not repeat itself, it does rhyme.” -- Mark Twain

HIRED

It's a black and white and grey morning as the summer solstice approaches.

This is the first morning since RTN died that I have had some of my usual energy again. Last night I dreamed that I was hired to do pencil drawings of objects that were found buried in sand. I was working alongside a man who is the same age I am. His drawings were very good, and he gave me encouragement. The first object I found in the sand was a small black plastic toy horse from my Roy Roger's Ranch set, which I given as a child and which was one of my favorite toys.

With a little more Google searching this morning, I found this and this, too.

Hello COWBOY in the sand?

Maybe the dream is the result of having carefully looked through BOB DYLAN: THE DRAWN BLANK SERIES yesterday morning. The drawn-and-then-painted images remind me how much I love working with gouache and watercolor. I liked Bob Dylan's drawings when I first saw them in his first book of lyrics in the 1970s and then again in 1994 in DRAWN BLANK. I like the way Bob Dylan has added vivid color to the drawings he made from 1989 to 1991 or 1992, some of which were drawn in New Orleans. His drawings and paintings speak to me. They say, "She's got everything she needs, she's an artist."

Or may it was a result of having found this by way of a link at RConversation, the blogger who first inspired me to create a blog of my own.

THE SKY WAS WHITE

Thunder and lightning at 6 p.m., followed by high wind and heavy rain.

STATE OF TRANSITION / ETERNAL SELF

Today's Zen Calendar says:

A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition.
(Juan Ramon Jimenez)

Yesterday was:

You, before me standing,
Oh, my eternal self!
Since my first glimpse
You have been my secret love.
(A Zen Monk's Song Of Samadhi)

I am feeling too fragile to respond to your kind comments or write any more of this story just now. Thanks so much for stopping by. What a long journey from Miramar Beach to the 159th Assault Support Helicopter Battalion to the VA Palo Alto Health Care System to this moment where my heart is so heavy.