Born in 1949 / We travel like an ox

I buyed me a little dog

Color it was brown

I learned him how to whistle

Sing and dance and run

His legs they were 14 yards long

His ears they were quite broad

Around the world in a half a day

And on him I could ride

Sing Tattle O’Day

I buyed me a little bull

About four inches high

Everybody feared him

That ever heard him cry

When he began to bellow

It made such a melodious sound

Until all the walls in London town

Came tumbling to the ground

Sing Tattle O’Day

I buyed me a flock of sheep

I thought they were all wethers

Sometimes they yielded wool

Sometimes they yielded feathers

I think mine are the very best sheep

For yielding me increase

For every full and change of the moon

They bring both lambs and geese

Sing Tattle O’Day

I buyed me a little box

About four acres square

I filled it full of guineas

And silver so fair

Oh now I’m bound for Turkey

I travel like an ox

And in my big chest pocket

I carry my little box

Sing Tattle O’Day

I buyed me a little hen

All speckled gay and fair

I sat her on an oyster shell

She hatched me out a hare

The hare it sprang a handsome horse

Full fifteen hands high

And him that tells a bigger tale

Would have to tell a lie

Sing Tattle O’Day

Yesterday something happened.  I've been feeling an underlying sense of progressive depression and fatigue for some time now, and yesterday morning I just didn't want to get out of bed and chose instead to enter into a form of meditation and soon drifted back into sleep.   

I dreamed a dream that didn't make me sad.  Because I was dreaming that I was in bed, I didn't completely realize that I was dreaming until I woke up. In the dream, I was awakened from sleep by a frightening commotion and loud voices and a tempest strong enough to force my body to move down my bed in the direction of my open bedroom window. 

For a few seconds, I fought being moved from my bed and then remembered a dream I had in October of 1998 while traveling on the coast of Northern California.  In that dream, I didn't realize that I was dreaming either because the dream also involved me being awakened from sleep while in bed. In that dream, I dreamed that I awoke to the sound of Hell's Angels on motorcycles outside the rented cottage where I was staying on the bluffs above the Pacific Ocean in southern Mendocino County. I awoke in terror, feeling myself being pulled by my feet from my bed by an invisible force at the foot of the bed.  The feeling in that dream was similarly and oddly familiar, and felt like a memory from my childhood.  The dream room in that previous nightmare was filled with a subdued golden light which should have been reassuring but was not.

Still thinking that I was awake, as I fought the tempest and recalled that previous nightmare which had seemed to be based on a childhood memory, I noticed that everything in my vision was illuminated by a white light, and my distress shifted to the curiosity of lucid dreaming.  

Understanding clearly that it was within my power to make a decision to relax and see what would happen, I did just that.  Instead of finding myself flying out the open window, it was as if the tempest went through me, and then I woke up.  

I've felt disoriented and aimless since 2008 when Richard died. Or was it when the First Gulf War started in August of 1990 or was it in December of 1970 when Richard returned from Vietnam or was it somewhere way back in my childhood?

When I woke up this morning, I found that I suddenly had the ability to focus my energy enough to sit down at my work table for the first time in a long long time and listen to Another Self Portrait while I prepared a plan for warping my inkle loom and then warped the loom and began weaving.  

Listening to Another Self Portrait this morning inspired me to look through my CDs for the rest of the Bootleg Series, and I found I was missing Vols. 6 and 7 and promptly bought them both on iTunes and began assembling a Bootleg Series random playlist for listening while I am doing creative work. So far the playlist is over 10 hours long! 

After August 1990, as I began to exhibit symptoms of PTSD similar to those which many Vietnam veterans began to experience at that time, I found that preparing to do creative work only upset me. What was once the source of my solace had been transformed into a dark place that I could no longer tolerate.  

Although I had frequently been inspired by listening to Bob Dylan's voice in the past, I haven't been able to bring myself to do that for years when I have sat down in an attempt to do art work. In the past few weeks, I've come to realize that I can listen to the alternative versions and live versions of songs sung by Bob Dylan and can feel something new instead of reliving the past.  

P.S. I'm still playing my ukulele daily, inspired by George Harrison:

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.

In the unemployment line in Madrid

Watch for the woman with the purple headband, 2:54 to 3:00.

Listening to Seamus Heaney while thinking about the United States and Syria on September 1, 2013

(Marie and Seamus Heaney in 2009)




The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.

(Seamus Heaney, from his 1995 Nobel lecture)

Sacred Work / Quite Early Morning

The goal of singing a song is not to reach the end as quickly as possible.  It is a state of creating harmony, beauty, growth and understanding.  The goal of work, as a sacred art, is to use the need for a product or service to develop the greatest possible power on the object, and the users.  Sacred work puts the mind on service to the heart as well.

(Tom Bender, from Silence, Song and Shadows)

QUITE EARLY MORNING
Don't you know it's darkest before the dawn
And it's this thought keeps me moving on
If we could heed these early warnings
The time is now quite early morning
If we could heed these early warnings
The time is now quite early morning

Some say that humankind won't long endure
But what makes them so doggone sure?
I know that you who hear my singing
Could make those freedom bells go ringing
I know that you who hear my singing
Could make those freedom bells go ringing

And so keep on while we live
Until we have no, no more to give
And when these fingers can strum no longer
Hand the old banjo to young ones stronger
And when these fingers can strum no longer
Hand the old banjo to young ones stronger

So though it's darkest before the dawn
These thoughts keep us moving on
Through all this world of joy and sorrow
We still can have singing tomorrows
Through all this world of joy and sorrow
We still can have singing tomorrows

Words and Music by Pete Seeger (1969)
(c) 1969 by Fall River Music Inc.

March on Washington Meditation / 1963-2013

Listen Live today from Washington, D.C.  Just heard Shirley Caesar and others singing "How I Got Over".

Right here, right now

Listen to a short documentary with music and interviews.

Another Self Portrait (1969-1971) / Talking 37th Dream with Rainbow (2013)

"... 'Copper Kettle' stood out on the original Self Portrait.  Dylan's commitment to this instant folk song -- it was written in 1953 -- was too strong.  But now, with the same vocal, on the undubbed master, you are in a different world. Here, Bob Dylan really does disappear.  1970 disappears.  The sixties never happened.  A moonshiner is telling you why he does what he does:  so he can lie back and think about nothing, forever.  The voice is so clear, so convincing, so plainly the voice of someone who has weighed life's choices and made his, that it shames your own compromises.  With the guitars so slight they could be hands waving in the air and Al Kooper's piping organ, which would be erased on Self Portrait, coming up slowly as the voice of the singer's nighttime dreams, it's as if the words too have disappeared, as if the song doesn't need them, as if the singer can communicate without even opening his mouth, by pure will."

(from the booklet written by Greil Marcus, accompanying the two-CD Another Self Portrait (1969-1971)

Everyone who was there has their own story of the years 1969-1971, when Bob Dylan recorded these songs.  In spring of 1969, my beloved Richard was drafted into the U.S. Army.  We were 19 years old.  He was in Vietnam for year of 1970.  We turned 21 years old in October of that year.  In 1971, we lived through the dark aftermath of his year in Vietnam and separated, "both agreeing it was best," just after our 22nd birthdays that year.  We listened to Bob Dylan's music before, during and after those years.  In one of the last letters I received from Richard, he asked, "How's Bob doing?" My copy of the CD arrived in the mail today.  I'm listening to it right now.

Richard was someone who weighed life's choices and made his.  I have tried not to compromise my life as a result.   I hear Richard's voice in Bob Dylan's voice.  Always have.

I recommend Another Self Portrait (1969-1971) The Bootleg Series Vol. 10.   I can't imagine someone not loving these recordings, but I know by now that not everyone will.

Here's Bob Dylan's 1970 version of "Copper Kettle":



You'll have to buy Another Self Portrait to hear the version without overdubs.  You won't regret it.  I promise.

Restless

If

With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody's having them dreams
Everybody sees their self walkin' around with no one else
Half the people can be part right all of the time and

Some of the people can be all right part of the time but
All the people can't be all alright all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours", I said that

-- Bob Dylan (lyrics from "Talking World War III Blues")





"Good luck to ya"




Update:  Blue Moon

Sing along with the Soul Shakers from Ahousaht First Nation / Paddle to Quinault 2013

 "Baby I love you
with all of my heart
for the rest of my life,
hay yo, hay yo ..."

Thinking about Nelson Mandela

Now I get it

"Pretty Saro" / Bob Dylan 1970

Looking forward to hearing more of "Another Self Portrait" when it is released on August 27, 2013.

He's got a friend who calls him Shaman Perplexy

Listen

"It's more like we're Tonto and Tonto."(Thomas-Builds-The-Fire from "Smoke Signals")

One of the best movies ever.

"Lummi Nation Sees No Compromise On Gateway Pacific"

Read here.

Photo and headline from Bellingham Herald.



May the Lummi message be heard and may Mr. Peabody's coal trains be stopped from shipping coal to China through the proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal.

Quileute Canoe Rules

(photo by Harvey Anderson)

Canoe Rules

1. EVERY STROKE WE TAKE IS ONE LESS WE HAVE TO MAKE

Keep going! Even against the most relentless wind or retrograde tide, somehow a canoe moves forward. This mystery can only be explained by the fact that each pull forward is a real movement and not a delusion.

2. THERE IS TO BE NO ABUSE OF SELF OR OTHERS

Respect and trust cannot exist in anger. It has to be thrown overboard, so the sea can cleanse it. It has to be washed off the hands and cast into the air, so the stars can take care of it. We always look back at the shallows we pulled through, amazed at how powerful we thought those dangers were.

3. BE FLEXIBLE

The adaptable animal survives. If you get tired, ship your paddle and rest. If you get hungry, put in on the beach and eat a few oysters. If you can't figure one way to make it, do something new. When the wind confronts you, sometimes you're supposed to go the other way.

4. THE GIFT OF EACH ENRICHES ALL

Every story is important. The bow, the stern, the skipper, the power puller in the middle ‑everyone is part of the movement. The elder sits in her cedar at the front, singing her paddle song, praying for us all. The weary paddler resting is still ballast. And there is always that time when the crew needs some joke, some remark, some silence to keep going, and the least likely person provides.

5. WE ALL PULL AND SUPPORT EACH OTHER

Nothing occurs in isolation. When we aren't in the family of a canoe, we are not ready for whatever comes. The family can argue, mock, ignore each other at its worst, but that family will never let itself sink. A canoe that lets itself sink is certainly wiser never to leave the beach. When we know that we are not alone in our actions, we also know we are lifted up by everyone else.

6. A HUNGRY PERSON HAS NO CHARITY

Always nourish yourself. The bitter person, thinking that sacrifice means self‑destruction, shares mostly anger. A paddler who doesn't eat at the feasts doesn't have enough strength to paddle in the morning. Take that sandwich they throw at you at 2.00 AM.! The gift of who you are only enters the world when you are strong enough to own it.

7. EXPERIENCES ARE NOT ENHANCED THROUGH CRITICISM

Who we are, how we are, what we do, why we continue, flourish with tolerance. The canoe fellows who are grim go one way. The men and women who find the lightest flow may sometimes go slow, but when they arrive they can still sing. And they have gone all over the sea, into the air with the seagulls, under the curve of the wave with the dolphin and down to the whispering shells, under the continental shelf. Withdrawing the blame acknowledges how wonderful a part if it all every one of us really is.

8. THE JOURNEY IS WHAT WE ENJOY

Although the start is exciting and the conclusion gratefully achieved, it is the long, steady process we remember. Being part of the journey requires great preparation; being done with a journey requires great awareness; being on the journey, we are much more than ourselves. We are part of the movement of life. We have a destination, and for once our will is pure, our goal is to go on.

9. A GOOD TEACHER ALLOWS THE STUDENT TO LEARN

We can berate each other, try to force each other to understand, or we can allow each paddler to gain awareness through the ongoing journey. Nothing sustains us like that sense of potential that we can deal with things. Each paddler learns to deal with the person in front, the person behind, the water, the air, the energy; the blessing of the eagle.

10. WHEN GIVEN ANY CHOICE AT ALL BE A WORKER BEE MAKE HONEY

The Ten Rules of the Canoe were developed by the Quileute Canoe contingent for a Northwest Experimental Education Conference in 1990.

Bob Dylan, Wilco, and My Morning Jacket singing "The Weight"

Bob sounds good to me!  They all sound good.  This song has lasting power.

"Gracias a la vida" / Summer sky near the Salish Sea

"When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life."
 - Stanley Kunitz

Thanks so much to whiskey river for the quote for today.




It has occurred to me that my blog is nothing if not an ongoing expression of gratitude.

Sacred Journey / Paddle to Quinault 2013

Watch a short video here about the Paddle to Quinault 2013.

Take a look at the map of the Canoe Journey route here.  Look for Cowichan Bay on the eastern side of lower Vancouver Island. Bellingham and the Lummi Nation are almost directly east of the Cowichan First Nation.

Here's some footage from the Paddle to Lummi Canoe Journey in 2007:

Creation Story Told By Tom Sampson Of Tsartlip First Nation

"Tom Sampson shares the Creation Story with 800 people at the "What About Those Promises?" stage play premier on Saturday, June 1, 2013, Bellingham High School Auditorium." (from the Lummi Nation YouTube channel)

Listen through to the English translation at 4:40.

The Things We Carried

Ever since I heard that there was going to be a showing of a movie of a fairly recent book talk by Tim O'Brien on The Things They Carried (first published in 1990), I considered whether I should go see the 1-hour movie with a discussion afterward.  The movie was part of a series called "Writers in the Limelight," presented by Village Books (Bellingham's independent book store) at the tiny Limelight Cinema in downtown Bellingham.

Since 2006 when I began this blog, I've come a long way with the things I've carried in the wake of the Vietnam War, and I questioned the wisdom of visiting those memories today.  After a walk with a friend down by Bellingham Bay this morning and meeting with a group of friends afterward, I decided to risk opening old wounds in the hope of finding some healing for those old wounds.

Outside the theater, I recognized a Vietnam veteran who speaks in the local schools as a member of Veterans for Peace.  There were two other men of similar age along with a few women who looked to be in their 60s.  The event was sparsely attended.  There may have been a few younger people, but most of the men and woman appeared to be in their 60s or older.  After the movie, there was a short discussion facilitated by one of the booksellers from Village Books.

It was a wise decision for me to be there today.  I can look back, look at the present, and also look forward without the haunted feeling that I lived with for so long.

What I've posted below is a similar recent book talk on The Things They Carried.  It's worth listening to.  After an introduction, Tim O'Brien begins speaking at about 3:40:

Twelve Gates to the City / AmericanaramA

Bob Dylan sounds to be in fine fettle for the AmericanaramA Festival of Music:



Earlier versions of "Twelve Gates to the City":









and a Dave van Ronk version which slips into "In My Time of Dying":



and a Joan Baez version:

A Conversation with Saginaw Grant / Another Self-Portrait by Bob Dylan

Saginaw Grant (Chief Big Bear in "Lone Ranger") said, "I would suggest to the people who will read this that they go see The Lone Ranger.  It's not what we've seen in the past.  It's going to be completely different. That's what's going to make it different. It's not the way we were portrayed in the past episodes of the old Lone Ranger.  You have to see it to understand it, and to really see what we've done.  I encourage especially our Native people to come and watch it."

It has just occurred to me that Gore Verbinski's "Lone Ranger" reminds me of all those years of songs by Bob Dylan that have been in my mind and heart since I was 14 years old, fifty years ago.  No wonder I keep thinking about the movie.  No wonder most movie critics are giving it terrible reviews.  It's a movie that either speaks to you or it doesn't.

Well, the Lone Ranger and Tonto

They are ridin' down the line

Fixin' ev'rybody's troubles

Ev'rybody's 'cept mine

Somebody musta tol' 'em

That I was doin' fine

(Bob Dylan's Blues, 1963)

Just heard about "Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series Vol. 10 (1969-1971)" which will be released on August 27:

407 years old today / Rembrandt van Rijn

About "The Night Watch."

One of Rembrandt's many self-portraits:

View from my porch before 7 a.m. this morning:

Two of the three Amaryllis flowers are blooming today:

With gratitude to Toshi and Pete Seeger

Listen for Toshi's five extra verses to "Turn, Turn, Turn."

Toshi Seeger (1922-2013)

Wild Blue Sky of Day Meditation

Rebecca Solnit

In reading The Faraway Nearby,  I learned about the Library of Water where Rebecca Solnit was a Writer in Residence in 2008.  If you have time, read three of her essays that can be found at the Library of Water website.

Ever since I changed this blog's URL recently, the traffic to my blog is now pretty much limited to people whose blogs I read.  There are a few mysterious readers whose locations still show up regularly on my ClusterMap.  Thank you, mysterious readers, for continuing to stop by.  It's just like starting over, as John Lennon once remarked.  Things are pretty quiet around here.  The Amaryllis on my porch is about to bloom.

("The Wild Blue Sky of Day" is a pastel drawing on paper from the early 1980s by am)

Listening in on Native conversation about "Lone Ranger"

(photograph of Long Otter by Richard Throssel, early 20th century Cree photographer who documented life on the Crow reservation)

Read what Chris Eyre, James Lujan, LaDonna Harris, Laura Harris, Sterlin Harjo had to say.

"For me, it's about making your own work in your own artistic voice," Eyre said.  "One of the great qualities to come out of this is that people are talking about this, which is more than we had last week or the week before.  The fact that it is engaging Native people on both sides of the conversation is an incredible thing." (Chris Eyre, director of "Smoke Signals," with its screenplay by Sherman Alexie)

I've seen "Lone Ranger" twice now because I couldn't catch it all in a single viewing and was not clear about some of the details of the story. I rarely go to movies anymore, but something prompted me to go see this one despite the nearly universal negative reviews.  Both times there were fewer than 10 people in the theater. As I watched the movie credits on my second viewing a few days later, I was struck by the way the long lists of names (scrolling over a view of Monument Valley and a solitary Tonto walking into that landscape) were formatted like the names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and I suddenly pictured a vast wall with the names of all the Native people who died in the United States of America since the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. Despite all the joking and silliness in the movie, reminding me at times of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and Martin Scorsese's "Last Temptation of Christ," as well as "Smoke Signals," its story struck me as pensive in nature.  I recommend the movie.  It moved me to laughter and to tears and something that transcends both and is murky and unsettling.

Independence Day 2013 / "True Independence of The Spirit"

"I started out in silence, writing as quietly as I had read, and then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers entered my world or drew me into theirs. I started out in silence and traveled until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away –first the silent voice that can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud.  When I began to read aloud, another voice, one I hardly recognized, emerged from my mouth. Maybe it was more relaxed, because writing is speaking to no one and even when you’re reading to a crowd, you’re still in that conversation with the absent, the faraway, the not yet born, the unknown, and the long gone for whom writers write, the crowd of the absent who hover all around the desk.

Sometime in the late nineteenth century, a poor rural English girl who would grow up to be a writer was told by a gypsy, “You will be loved by people you’ve never met.”  This is the odd compact with strangers who will lose themselves in your words and the partial recompense for the solitude that makes writers and writing.  You have an intimacy with the faraway and distance from the near at hand.  Like digging a hole to China and actually coming out the other side, the depth of that solitude of reading and then writing took me all the way through to connect with people again in an unexpected way.  It was astonishing wealth for one who had once been so poor."

(p. 64-65,  The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit, 2013)

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

Thanks to Doonesbury's featured video on July 1, 2013.

"Let's risk it," said Mrs. De Soto / A tale of two compassionate mice with good heads on their shoulders

Above is a reading of the book Doctor De Soto and below is the animated version of the book. The first video (in English) below is incomplete.  The second one is in Dutch and is complete and worth watching for the animation.  I first heard this story when I watched the English version on a video player last night.  It's a good lesson in the art of combining compassion with self-preservation.





If you don't have time for the above today, here is a very short video of the beauty of summer wind:

A real different frame of mind

Today, having seen the contrasting yet related sets of pictures that surface in Google images depending upon which of my blog titles I enter, I've decided to change my URL from: 

oldgirlfromthenorthcountry.blogspot.com

to:

talking37thdream.blogspot.com

to reflect that my blog is now called Talking 37th Dream (rumors of peace) and has been for quite a while, and that I am in a different frame of mind from when I started blogging as Old Girl of the North Country on December 8, 2006 in order to present a 40-year retrospective of my art work as a way of working through nearly 40 years of unresolved grief.  

"First it gets better.

Then it gets worse.

Then it gets real.

Then it gets different.

Then it gets real different."

(Unknown)

Thanks to Tara (who changed her URL recently) at Out of the Lotus, for the inspiration to change my URL to reflect my real different frame of mind.

When I stepped out on my porch to make a little video to mark this day, I saw a Bald Eagle close by in the eastern sky.  By the time I was able to get my camera out, I wasn't able to focus in on the eagle as it flew out of range but am pleased to be able to show you the wild blue sky of an early afternoon in late June here in Whatcom County.