Ever since I heard the news about a month ago that she was in the hospital, I have been thinking about Joni Mitchell and how much her music has meant to me since I first heard her in 1968, when I was 18 years old. I had looked for and found no updates on her condition, and a few days ago I went to her website to check again. I didn't find an update, but I found 300 pages documenting her art work. Although I knew that she was a painter, I had no idea how much work she has done throughout her life. The catalogue opens with pieces of undetermined dates and then moves year by year through her art work that can be dated, beginning with drawings when she was 3 years old in 1947.
It has taken me several days to look at all the art work and notes. That was time well spent.
Here are some of my favorites:
"Untitled" -- 1947
"Calico Cat" -- 1969
"Ladies of the Canyon" -- 1969
"Sweet Sucker Dance (Abundance and Decline)" -- 1976
"Georgia O'Keeffe" -- 1978
"A Chair in the Sky" -- 1978
"In the Park of the Golden Buddha" -- 1995
"Untitled" -- 2001
"Untitled" -- 2002
"Dreamland" -- 2004
Panel 2 of "Green Flag Song" exhibition -- 2007
Panel 17 of "Green Flag Song" exhibition -- 2007
On her website, I also found that a video documenting her exhibition of 60 new works in Los Angeles in 2007:
Early this morning, I planted seeds of yellow and red Zinnias out on my porch. It turns out that I did the same thing last year on Memorial Day. I had forgotten.
We're not there anymore either. That was 12 years ago.
We're not there anymore. That was 6 years ago.
We're not there anymore. That was this last Tuesday evening.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.” (Albert Einstein,Living Philosophies)
"My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness." (The Dalai Lama)
"... You a praying man, huh? What do you pray for? You pray for the world?" I never thought about praying for the world. I said, “I pray that I can be a kinder person.” (Bob Dylan, Chronices: Volume One -- from a conversation with "Sun Pie" near Raceland, west of New Orleans)
Well it's all right, riding around in the breeze Well it's all right, if you live the life you please Well it's all right, doing the best you can Well it's all right, as long as you lend a hand
You can sit around and wait for the phone to ring (End of the Line) Waiting for someone to tell you everything (End of the Line) Sit around and wonder what tomorrow will bring (End of the Line) Maybe a diamond ring
Well it's all right, even if they say you're wrong Well it's all right, sometimes you gotta be strong Well it's all right, As long as you got somewhere to lay Well it's all right, everyday is Judgment Day
Maybe somewhere down the road aways (End of the Line) You'll think of me, wonder where I am these days (End of the Line) Maybe somewhere down the road when somebody plays (End of the Line) Purple haze
Well it's all right, even when push comes to shove Well it's all right, if you got someone to love Well it's all right, everything'll work out fine Well it's all right, we're going to the end of the line
Don't have to be ashamed of the car I drive (End of the Line) I'm glad to be here, happy to be alive (End of the Line) It don't matter if you're by my side (End of the Line) I'm satisfied
Well it's all right, even if you're old and gray Well it's all right, you still got something to say Well it's all right, remember to live and let live Well it's all right, the best you can do is forgive
Well it's all right, riding around in the breeze Well it's all right, if you live the life you please Well it's all right, even if the sun don't shine Well it's all right, we're going to the end of the line
Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, "were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.” ― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.” ― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
“For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back.”
My cataract surgery went well. I have excellent distance vision in my left eye now, but most book reading and all drawing are not an option until I get a new pair of prescription glasses in June after the new lens has settled in. I started Mandala #12 before having cataract surgery.
Here is the mandala my mother made after her cataract surgery in the 1980s, when cataract surgery was a much more complicated and painful process than it is today.
"Members of Lummi Nation and other Puget Sound tribes meet Thursday, April 30, near the site of a proposed coal terminal at Cherry Point to show solidarity against the terminal." (from the Bellingham Herald)
An old friend of mine who has a young grandson sent me a link to a YouTube reading of The Color Kittens, by Margaret Wise Brown, with accompanying delightful commentary from a child:
Last week I graduated from the medical transcription editing program with "High Honors" and was able to finish Mandala #11.
With gratitude to a distant cousin in Norway who posted this on her Facebook page. As a child, I had no interest in dolls. I played with my stuffed bears and lambs and my collection of horses. In 1959, I was just old enough to avoid being given a Barbie doll as a gift, but I remember both of my sisters having Barbie dolls. I'd love to see Barbie dolls transformed in this way. A Tree Change Doll would feel at home with my stuffed animals and my collection of horses.
Added thoughts:Thank you, Sabine, for giving me a different perspective on Barbie dolls. As someone who didn't play with dolls, I never understood what playing with dolls was all about, much less Barbie dolls. Not playing with dolls was one way that I rebelled against my mother from an early age. I have a vivid memory of my mother bringing me to a toy store and showing me shelves of dolls behind glass and suggesting that I choose one. I remember how angry I felt towards her that day. I refused to choose a doll. Now I'm wondering what that was all about. She loved her dolls and wanted me to love a doll, too, but dolls were not soft and comforting like my stuffed animals. I felt alienated from dolls.
While my sisters were playing with Barbie dolls, I was watching American Bandstand on television and listening to rock and roll music and dreaming of having a boyfriend who was a rebel who would "love me tenderly and always treat me good." My dreams were not of being a mother or a successful woman or even of being married, for that matter. All I wanted was a boyfriend who loved me. That would be enough. I didn't love myself. I could love him. Both of my sisters dreamed of being mothers, and one of them became a mother. Both of them became successful professional women, unlike me.
I finally love myself, regardless. We've all come a long way.
Here's my mother in Minnesota on a snowy day with one of the dolls she so loved:
Here is my mother a few years later:
Here I am with my father and Panda. Not sure if that is my first or second Panda. The first one was lost, and the story is that I was inconsolable. My father understood that I would not stop crying unless Panda was found, and he went out and bought another Panda for me. For that I am deeply grateful.
I remember, too, how much I loved my red horse. He, too, was lost but was not replaced. I remember thinking about him for some time after he disappeared. I missed him.
Something weird is going on here. I can't fix the margins or move things around the way I would like.
Oh well. I should be studying for the final examination right now. Come to think of it, I still do have my red horse. I can still feel what it felt like to hold him. I felt brave and powerful, loved and loving, because of Panda and my red horse.
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.
- Robinson Jeffers
As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I would still be in prison.
- Nelson Mandela
The healing of our present woundedness may lie in recognizing and reclaiming the capacity we all have to heal each other, the enormous power in the simplest of human relationships: the strength of touch, the blessing of forgiveness, the grace of someone else taking you as you are and finding in you an unexpected goodness.
- Rachel Naomi Remen
While on a brief break from working on the medical transcription editing online training program just now, I was right on time for sunset at the Lost Coast webcam.
There are 29 days left for me to finish the training program. I've been unemployed since 2011 and hope to be working part-time as a medical transcription editor sometime after I have cataract surgery on my left eye in mid-April.
My memories of time spent on the Lost Coast continue to sustain me.
“The misconception of totalitarianism is that freedom can be imprisoned. This is not the case. When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight and land on a windowsill.” — Ai Weiwei
Thank you to Sabine for bringing "Small Hours" to my attention. It brought to mind Carlos Santana, and, sure enough, there is a connection. Carlos Santana has performed "I Don't Wanna Know About Evil," by John Martyn, but I like John Martyn's version better.
Yesterday morning the Canada Geese arrived in the fog. Each year around this time, I listen for their arrival. Other years I have seen them land in Scudder Pond or simply heard them flying over my bedroom, announcing their arrival.
“Love, that moves the sun and the other stars - L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.”
-- Dante, Paradiso
Above is "Person with Questions" in gouache, water, and chalk pastel on paper, created by me around 1982 during the last years of a marriage I had entered against my better judgement. In 1976 I had married a man I didn't love and had remained in what I then knew as love with a man who was as incapable of love as I was. Still, that man and I were kindred spirits, trauma-bonded by our experiences in connection with the war in Vietnam.
When I looked through my drawings and paintings for something to post for Valentine's Day today, I noticed the heart-like images to the left of the woman in this painting and wondered why I had not remembered them until I saw the image again.
In 2008, when my kindred spirit was in the last months of his life in a VA hospital in California, I used this same image a few days before Valentine's Day and then posted this on Valentine's Day.
Here is my first Valentine's Day post in the first year of my blog. At that time in 2007, early in my blogging days, I had been out of touch with R since early 2003, unable to act as a witness to the alcoholism and drug addiction that continued to destroy him and doing my best to go on with my own life. 2003 was the year he sent me lovely pale purple carnations on the day after Valentine's Day but didn't respond when I tried to thank him and didn't respond when I let him know of my father's death on St. Patrick's Day a little over a month later, and then sent a flower arrangement including red roses on July 3 of that year, the day after what could have been our 35th wedding anniversary. On that day, I was horrified to find myself feeling no love at all for him, only an anger that I had never dared to feel. I couldn't bear to have the flowers in my home and decided to take them to the chapel at the local hospital and to leave them there. As angry as I felt that day, I couldn't bring myself to throw those flowers in a dumpster.
Completely letting go of those flowers proved impossible. The next day I went back to the chapel to see if they were still there. For several days, I returned to the chapel and sat looking at them in the silence. Then the day came when I returned, and they were gone, and I felt both sadness and relief. The anger was gone. I assumed that they had wilted and that someone from the housekeeping department had disposed of them.
I'm not sure why I returned to the chapel an additional time a week or more later but as I entered the silence again, I saw dried dark red rose petals arranged in a chaotic way on the disturbed white cloth covering the altar, and I knew they were the same roses R had sent to me, being used by someone else to make a startling statement. As I approached the altar, I saw an 8-1/2 x 11 inch piece of paper with a child's handwriting on it. It was an anguished prayer to God. The girl was asking God to help her alcoholic mother who was in the hospital for life-threatening complications of alcoholism. I could feel the anger the young girl felt in connection with her mother. Somehow, by letting go of those flowers in the most loving way I could imagine while feeling the long-denied anger that turned out to be part of my healing and regaining my ability to love, I was able to pass on to that young girl what she needed to express herself in the best way she could imagine under circumstances that were pushing her to the edge of her own ability to cope.
Have I told this story before? If so, I must have needed to tell it again this Valentine's Day, and thank you for listening again.
Looking at the hearts on the left side of the person with questions today, I remembered writing a poem about an experience I had in a meditation where I suddenly was aware of tiny hearts everywhere. With a little searching of my bookshelves, I found the poem and was surprised to see that I had written it sometime between December 28, 2003, and Good Friday of 2004:
POEM ABOUT SOMEONE AND SOMETHING NEW
Someone breathing
Someone not alone
Someone walking lonely paths
Someone leaving lonely shelters
Someone finding a lonely ocean
Someone feeling Something New
Thousands of tiny hearts
Within the left side of Someone
Someone's right side perfectly empty
Someone's emptiness graceful as sky
Thousands of tiny hearts
Filling half the emptiness
Something loving the emptiness
Emptiness loving Something
Yes and No becoming simple again
Something New becoming emptiness
Emptiness becoming Something New
Something New and emptiness finding Someone
Someone finding the seasons of a lonely path
Someone finding shelter from a lonely storm
Someone finding a lonely ocean
With Someone sleeping, there was still Something New
Still the emptiness, still a path,
Still a shelter, still an ocean.
And Someone waking up
Feeling sacred hearts everywhere
On paths in and out of time
In shelters from a lonely storm
By the lonely and beloved ocean
Hearts bearing sacred cushions
Of loneliness, emptiness,
And Something New.
As I recall, I wasn't thinking about "Person with Questions" when I wrote that poem, but it describes her well in that moment before she woke up to feel sacred hearts everywhere.
In the past few days, I noticed that the day lily bulbs on my porch are up and that my flowering quince is budding out. Watch for the Red-winged Blackbirds in the cattails. Maybe you can identify some of the other bird voices, including a Steller's Jay:
I'll leave you with a song which I first heard as part of the soundtrack of "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," which tells a story about alcoholism and drug addiction from the perspective of the daughter of a Dexadrine-addicted alcoholic mother whose first love died in a time of war. The mother reminded me of my own mother who also suffered from the effects of using prescription Dexadrine and alcohol. This song from 2002 seems to have planted the seed for the experience I had in meditation and reminds me of what I want to remember as part of Valentine's Day 2015:
And one more thing I came across late in the day today at whiskey river that made me think of one of the gifts R gave to me:
Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.
-- Rebecca Solnit, from A Field Guide to Getting Lost
...when asked if you care about the world's problems, look deeply into the eyes of he that asks you, he will not ask you again... (Bob Dylan, 1964, from "Advice for Geraldine on her Miscellaneous Birthday")
Joan Baez sang after John Martyn on the Jools Holland Show in 1992.
Thank you to Sabine and Robert for introducing me to the life and music of John Martyn which inspired this stream of consciousness post and reminded me of Tim Buckley and brought to mind my Richard who was nothing if not a kindred spirit to John Martyn. I wouldn't be surprised if they shared some of the same creative/self-destructive DNA, seeming to be at war with themselves unto death.
...I fought with my twin
That enemy within
'Til both of us fell by the way...
(Bob Dylan, 1978, from "Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)")
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
(Sun Tzu)
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.
How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be? -- Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
Welcome to "37TH DREAM (RUMORS OF PEACE)".
The photograph currently at the top of my blog was taken from my porch before sunrise on October 29, 2023.
"OLD GIRL OF THE NORTH COUNTRY" (the earliest name for my blog -- http://oldgirlfromthenorthcountry.blogspot.com
) came to life in early December of 2006 so that I could post a 42-year retrospective of my paintings and drawings and through that action, create a new relationship with the day the man I loved returned from Vietnam in December 1970. For a while (sometime after spring of 2008, which is when he died) my blog was "TALKING 37TH DREAM WITH RAINBOW (RUMORS OF PEACE)". For a number of years, it's been "TALKING 37TH DREAM (RUMORS OF PEACE)." As of April 12, 2017 my blog was titled "37TH DREAM / TALKING 37TH DREAM (RUMORS OF PEACE/LOOKING UP)". Somewhere along the way it became 37TH DREAM (RUMORS OF PEACE).
To begin viewing the retrospective with narrative, scroll down to December 8, 2006, on this page:
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. -- Martin Buber (1878-1965)
It is only a little planet, but how beautiful it is.
-- Robinson Jeffers
The true end of a war is the rebirth of life; the right to die peacefully in your own bed. The true end of war is the end of fear; the true end of war is the return of laughter.
-- Alfred Molano
Enjoy every sandwich -- Warren Zevon (1947-2003)
Not in God's wilds will you ever hear the sad moan, "All is vanity." No, we are paid a thousand times for all our toil, and after a single day spent outdoors in their atmosphere of strength and beauty, one could still say, should death come — even without any hope of another life — "Thank you for this most glorious gift!" and pass on.
-- John Muir (1838-1914)
Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do? Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well. Hugh Fennyman: How? Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.
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