What I Do For A Living

I'm a Production Worker. I assemble and wrap and eat words at home on a computer instead of a typewriter or a conveyer belt. The funniest thing of all is that I like the job and that when I was in high school I got a D in Typing. It's also funny when the voice recognition software concludes that the patient goes to a physican named Dr. Flying Machine.

Jacob Lawrence's Typists, 1966. Gouache on paper, 22 x 30 in.

"They say sing while you slave and I just get bored."
(Bob Dylan)

I don't sing while I slave but I do laugh more than I used to.

Always

Memorial Day 2010

Gracias a La Vida (Thank you to Life)

poem by Violeta Parra
English translation by William Morín



Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto.

Thank you to life, which has given me so much.

Me ha dado la risa, me ha dado el llanto.

It gave me laughter and it gave me longing.

Así yo distingo dicha de quebranto,

With them I distinguish happiness and pain,

Los dos materiales que forman mi canto,

The two materials from which my songs are formed,

Y el canto de ustedes que es el mismo canto.

And your song, as well, which is the same song.

Y el canto de todos que es mi propio canto

And everyone’s song, which is my very song.

Walking Home Meditation / Mi Viejo Maestro (My Old Teacher) Boblo Picasso

Near the shop where my 21-year-old Honda Civic is being repaired are these stairs which lead up into Whatcom Falls Park. After the stairs, I've got at least a half-hour walk home in the rain.






















I don't know how many steps there are. Let's just say "a multitude of steps." I don't photograph all the steps. There are at least this many that you can't see.

As I approach the bridge built by the WPA during the 1930s, with its view of Whatcom Falls, I stop to take a picture, not realizing that my camera is set on automatic flash. The rain and the mist rising from the falls is illuminated.

















It was last year at this time that I started taking black and white photographs during my walks in Whatcom Falls Park. At this time last year, I was suffering from severe fatigue and depression caused by minocycline, a medication I had been taking for ocular rosacea. For some reason, taking black and white photographs lifted my spirits during that time of medication-induced depression.

A year later, walking along just beyond Whatcom Falls Bridge, I realize that I feel better than I have felt in my entire life. I'm not taking any medication except for St. John's Wort for some residual depression from the minocycline. I stop to photograph the sign for the trout hatchery, also built during the 1930s, remembering the time in the early 1980s when we saw a peculiar-looking truck drive up to the circular cement ponds. I thought, "What kind of truck is that???" When the men began to load up the hatchery trout, I suddenly heard Bob Dylan singing in my mind:

"The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the FISH TRUCK that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain."

(lyrics from "Visions of Johanna")

Of course. The fiddler, the fish truck, my conscience, harmonicas, skeleton keys, rain, visions of Johanna. I was alone with my gratitude that day. Not everyone has Bob Dylan for a teacher.

Beyond the trout hatchery, the rainy scene at the fishing pond for children prompts me to switch to color.












































After I cross the nearby bridge, which is also the dam that creates the fishing pond, I switch the setting on my camera to black and white again. As I look back across the fishing pond, I hear Bob Dylan singing in my mind again:

"Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now."

(lyrics from "My Back Pages")

















I think, "Hey, wait a minute. My black and white photographs aren't lies!"

Now my mind shifts to one of Bob Dylan's spiritual teachers, Pablo Picasso, who said:

"Art is a lie that tells the truth."

and:

"It takes a long time to become young."

and back to Bob:

Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now."

















Pretty soon, I'm walking in the rainy woods again and can see home up ahead.

"Gotta get up near the teacher if you can
If you wanna learn anything"

(Bob Dylan, lyrics from "Floater (Too Much To Ask)," Love and Theft, 2001

Listen to "My Back Pages."

Beautiful rainy day

Talking Happy 69th Birthday

“I’m just as good a singer as Caruso …You have to listen closely. But I hit all those notes. And I can hold my breath three times as long if I want to.”
(Bob Dylan, age 25, from the documentary film "Don't Look Back")

Listen

(Image from the 2003 film "Masked and Anonymous")

After the wind storm / Lummi Nation First Salmon Ceremony

See.

7:30 in the evening / Just like this

Listen.

Don't have too much to say

Listen

Concerning the Spiritual in Art

In the interests of everyone the artist has the responsibility of using his medium well. In the Tibetan culture, most of the paintings are of deities or Buddhas, and they try to send a message of the value of the spiritual.

-- Dalai Lama

Concerning the Spiritual in Art, is a book by Wassily Kandinsky I read during the 1980s.

View from Upper Whatcom Creek Bridge

Listen.

A few weeks after Richard died in 2008, I was surprised and overjoyed to hear New Morning. Take what you have gathered from coincidence. Yes indeed!

I don't know East Bay Dave, but I do like the way he sings "New Morning."

Nothing But The Whole Wide World

"Mama she raised me to sing and just let them talk."
(Listen to Jakob Dylan, Neko Case and Kelly Hogan)

My mother died in 1994 when she was 78 years old. She would have liked Jakob Dylan. She liked Bob Dylan and thanked me for introducing his music to her. My father took the Polaroid photo of her when she was 71. That was on Mother's Day in 1987, with flowers I sent to her.

Read about The Mothers' Peace Library in Quang Tri Province in Vietnam.

"It is the peace between the Mothers that is the most important peace of all."
(Ambassador Le Van Bang -- Vietnam)

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

The birds still playing in the clouds

After I finish work, I have a little bit free time in the evening before I fall asleep. The daylight hours keep increasing. It's after 8 o'clock and still the sun is high in the sky even though summer is still a ways away, which reminds me of this poem that was read to me in my early childhood:



Bed in Summer, by Robert Louis Stevenson

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.


I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.


And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

Source: A Child's Garden of Verses

(click on the photo to see the swallows playing in the clouds to the east)

The smile returning to their faces.

Listen.

This post is dedicated to my friend, the Art Farmer, who moved away from Scudder Pond a few days ago. I hope the smile is returning to all the dear faces at the Art Farm.

Spring evening / green flower

Afternoon Rainbow at Scudder Pond

Thanks to Rebecca for this about listening and being heard.

La flor es mi profesor

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
(Albert Einstein)

All things must pass and love is the bridge.

When Richard returned from Vietnam in 1970, he bought me a copy of "All Things Must Pass" for Christmas. When George Harrison died, it was Richard who called me with the news. Richard died on April 20, 2008. I lit a candle for him this morning.

"But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
(Thornton Wilder)

(Photo of note from Richard from the VA Hospital in January 2008)

View from my drawing table

Listen.

It's shocking how time has changed since I started working again. I've never regretted going down to Hammond.

"My heart is not heavy. It's light and it's free."
(Bob Dylan)

Oboe noticed the swallows before I did.

Listen.






















This morning around 8 o'clock, I was checking my email and noticed that Oboe was reaching for something on the side of my drawing table. It took me a second or two to realize that she was trying to catch the shadows of swallows in flight. It was just yesterday that I had seen photos of swallows at Loren's blog and wondered when the swallows would be arriving here at Scudder Pond.

In this case it was a crow.

Listen.

















Now that I've been employed again for a little over a month and not feeling so overwhelmed, I've been thinking that I would like to draw during some of my now very limited time. This morning I drove down to Bellingham Bay with the thought of sitting inside at Woods Coffee with my de-caf and drawing something from what I dreamed last night. I parked my car and started to walk over to Woods Coffee. Then I heard this (scroll down to the "Rapid series of caws.")

The crow was a little more than a yard above me in a pine tree. The crow looked at me but didn't fly away. I watched the crow bob and caw as crows do and then got out my small notepad that I had intended to draw on and did some quick contour drawings of the obliging crow. As I concentrated on the crow's posturing, I heard a man's voice saying, "Looks like you have a friend." I turned around to find a man and a woman smiling at me and the crow. The crow remained close for a little while longer and then flew away. Sitting on a tall stool at the window table in Woods Coffee, I drew this with my 6B pencil:

Pier meets voyage

"Mama she raised me to sing and just let them talk."
(Jakob Dylan, lyrics from Nothing but the Whole Wide World -- this is Sofi's version).

April 14, 2010

The first time I ever heard John Prine singing must have been 1974 on Austin City Limits. It was while I was doing dishes in the kitchen. My boyfriend was watching television in living room of the dilapidated rental house we lived in. I was lost in negative thoughts. That wasn't a very good time in my life. I'd made some serious mistakes and couldn't figure out how to remedy them. At first I thought I was hearing Bob Dylan singing, so I ran into the living room, expecting to see Bob Dylan. Nope. It was John Prine.

He didn't sound like Bob Dylan. He sounded like John Prine. It was a happy moment. I wasn't one of those from my generation who had had positive experiences with Illegal Smiles but I loved him and his music otherwise. Still do.

Listen.

"The country where the rain follows plow ..."

Listen.

"I Held Hands With The Forest Floor"

Listen.

("The Forest Floor" is from a series of paintings done by Richard while he was in the stroke rehab unit at the Palo Alto VA Hospital between September 2007 and March 21, 2008. He came to be known as "The Artist" on that unit. I said goodbye to him on April 13, 2008, in the Medical Intensive Care Unit. I had traveled from Washington so that I could spend time with him for the previous 4 days. Because of his brainstem stroke in September, he was unable to speak. He would indicate "yes" or "no" by giving the thumbs up or thumbs down sign. The last thing he said to me was "yes" when I asked if he would like me to read my message on a card that I had sent to him in March and which had just arrived in his M.I.C.U. room. During those 4 days, he indicated to his doctor and his sister that he wished to be taken off of life support. We needed to say goodbye. His doctor said that he had waited for me to come and say goodbye. He slipped into a coma on April 14, 2008, and died on April 20, 2008, with his sister and her Vietnam veteran boyfriend and Chaplain Virginia Jackson at his bedside.)



















(1950, 1965, 1987)









"There is no situation too difficult to be bettered and no unhappiness too great to be lessened."
(from Opening our Hearts, Transforming our Losses)

Healing Thread

The Way It Is
by William Stafford

There's a thread that you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

(Appleworks paint program trackpad drawing from 2005 by am)

Further On Up The Road

Eternal thanks to Rae for telling me about PeaceTrees and being a good friend for all these years.

Listen.

6 a.m.

Listen.

Street Legal / 7:25 a.m. and 8:35 a.m.

...Peace will come
With tranquility and splendor on the wheels of fire...
(Bob Dylan, age 37, lyrics from "Changing of the Guards," from the album titled STREET LEGAL)

Listen.

Man Looking Up at Geese

This morning, while I was trying to photograph the spring snow in the distant foothills,

















a pair of Canada Geese flew into the viewer space.














If your mind shifts the way my mind did, you might see the geese as a pair of eyes looking up, as if the person in my linocut from 1979 were to turn his head toward us as he looked up.

Easter morning 2010

42 years ago.

An elderly Jewish friend of mine said in the year she died, "I don't have to be Christian to be moved by the life and death of Jesus."

...I keep traveling around the bend
There was no beginning, there is no end
It wasn't born and never dies
There are no edges, there is no sides...
(George Harrison, from "Any Road")

Listen.
Listen.
Listen.

Hail / Rain / Early April Morning

...Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail...
(Bob Dylan, age 23)

Listen.

I love the rain!
(A early grade school girl speaking to her mother -- overheard in the grocery store parking lot this morning)

This is my 801st blog post.
(am)

The wind began to howl.

April