Morning view from my yoga mat

A few days ago I dreamed that I was living near the California coast again after 37 years of being away. As I walked down a steep gravel path with the ocean to my right, I felt sunshine as well as deep joy and gratitude. I was not with anyone but I was not alone either. The water was an unusual dark jade green. Grey whales began to appear just below the surface of the ocean, followed by golden fish with almost human faces. Sea lions came out of the ocean to be touched. Finally, a group of ancient sea turtles arrived to look into the faces of all those who stood on the gravel path. I woke up in amazement but drifted back to sleep. As I was between sleeping and waking, I heard this:

"Half of it is gratitude. The other half is being the mayonnaise."

Linda Rees, Tapestry Weaver (Updated)

Above are "River Rhumba" and "Our Folly, His Future."

























When I was first living in Bellingham in the mid-1970s and after I received my first paycheck from my job as an industrial sewing machine operator in a Columbia Sportswear factory, I purchased a striking tapestry weaving that I had seen at a yarn shop in downtown Bellingham. I think of the figure as that of a lizard but it could be a salamander, both of which I sorely missed. I was new in Northwest Washington. I was deeply homesick for California. As I handed my check to the store owner, she noticed my address and told me that the tapestry weaver lived a few doors away from me. Linda has been my art friend for a long time now. The lizard/salamander is on the wall at one of my work tables. I was delighted when Linda told me that she had been putting a website together. It is like being able to visit her in her studio any time I want!

She will be showing some of her tapestries in La Connor, Washington, at the Gaches Mansion, from October through December 2010.

Also, as I've mentioned before in other posts, she is the author of Nezhnie: Weaver and Innovative Artist. I recommend it.  You can find it here.

Update on November 5, 2017:  Linda's website is no longer accessible but if you would like to see some of her work, just go to Google Images and enter "Linda Rees tapestry".

My father became a child on Father's Day / Loved and Forgiven / Salish Sea

Listen

Here is a prayer written by my father a few days before Father's Day in 2002, exactly nine months before his death on St. Patrick's Day:


You are above all of creation.

In it You have created all universes and everything in them.

In it You have created millions of stars and planets, far apart.

In it You have created the greatest physical force in our Universe, the magnificent sun.

In it You have created the planet for us all to live on, the Earth.

In it we have You, the sun, oceans, mountains, caves, rivers, lakes, rain, snowflakes, waterfalls, forests, land, air waves we cannot see, every living creature and the most powerful force of all, Love.

Thank you my Almighty God for everything on our planet, Earth.

I ask You, my Almighty God, to forgive me for any harm I have done.

I ask You, my Almighty God, to forgive anyone who harmed me, whether I knew it or not.

You are above all human beings that You have created.

No one on Earth can be compared to You, my Almighty God.

Amen.


My father signed his prayer with his childhood name, Carl William, and gave a copy to his brother and sisters, all of his nieces and nephews and to me and my sisters. He was named after his mother's father, Carl Lien.

A story he told me (or was this a story my mother told me?) is that when he joined the Navy, he discovered that his birth certificate gave his name as "Boy," and it turned out that his parents had not come to an agreement on a name for him at his birth. His mother wanted to call him Carl William, and his father wanted to call him William Carl. Until he was in high school, he was called "Carl." When he was in high school in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the Depression, he decided that he didn't want to be just one of many Norwegian boys named Carl and began calling himself "Bill."

My father titled his prayer "My Daily Prayer to My Almighty God."

On the day after my father died, I walked alone on a beach in West Seattle and looked out at the relatively calm expanse of salt water, which suddenly appeared to me to be much like my father. I could only see its surface from my place on the shore. I knew nothing of its depths and neither did anyone else.

















"... the most powerful force of all, Love." (Carl William, June 17, 2002)

The Swallows' Nest Mandala

The five Tree Swallow nestlings fledged on June 14. A House Sparrow was harassing the remaining Tree Swallow father and mother in an increasingly disturbing manner. I took the nesting box down, thinking that the House Sparrow wanted the nesting box and was going to continue to intimidate the Tree Swallows. House Sparrows are known to kill nestlings, and so I was concerned about the fledglings. The House Sparrow hung around for awhile and then was gone. This morning I removed the nest from the nesting box so that I could clean the box and noticed the beautiful spiral pattern on the bottom of nest.

The Tree Swallow father and mother have been returning to sit on the hummingbird feeder ever since I took the nesting box down.

A pause in the evening

Listen

To the hilltops, my daughter, my son
The rescue's too little to cover the slums
Cross this river deeper than it ever was
There's a pause in the evening
When prayers are supposed to be done
(Jakob Dylan)

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