John Lennon and Yoko Ono Dick Cavett Show Excerpt 1

Remembering John Lennon today. When I went to YouTube today, the site was in Italian and there was no American flag among the choices and my password no longer worked. I wonder what happened? John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Dick Cavett made me laugh. Laughter is the universal language!

FINDING BALANCE / NORVAL MORRISSEAU

While practicing asanas (yoga poses) this morning, I noticed the moon in the clear sky before sunrise. The poses I find most difficult are those that involve balance on one foot. After all these years of practicing asanas, I still lose my balance on a regular basis. Fortunately, I find humor in that. Only recently have I been able to hold something resembling the pose called natarajasana (king of the dancers pose) for more than a few seconds.






















"I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea. Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times it's only me. I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man, like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand."

As I do every morning, I visited wood s lot. I learned of the recent death of Norval Morrisseau and was deeply moved by his art.

The cover art for the Bruce Cockburn album, Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws, is a painting by Norval Morrisseau.

I KNEW THE NIGHT HAD GONE

"Struck by the sounds before the sun, I knew the night had gone.The morning breeze like a bugle blew, against the drums of dawn."

(from "Lay Down Your Weary Tune," written by Bob Dylan in 1964)

After the sunrise today, a thick fog rolled in. When the fog burns off, I imagine there will be some December sunshine.

The ocean wild like an organ played, the seaweed wove its strands. The crashin' waves like cymbals clashed, against the rocks and sands..

See New Dharma Bums views of December storm surf on the coast of Central California.

ON BEING AN ARTIST AND ON HAVING PARENTS WHO ARE ARTISTS

During the first week of November, I visited my middle sister who lives in the town of Ocean Springs on the Gulf Coast in Mississippi. While I was there, we participated in a yoga class at River Rock Yoga. On the wall of the entryway of the yoga studio were engaging drawings by Lief Anderson, a daughter of Walter Inglis Anderson whose art and life have been meaningful to me recently. It turns out that the yoga studio is owned by Moira Anderson Miller, daughter of Lief Anderson and granddaughter of Walter Inglis Anderson. Before the yoga class, as my sister and I filled out the forms required in order to take the yoga class, I had a brief conversation with Moira, in which we affirmed that yoga had brought healing into our lives and in which I felt I had met a kindred spirit.

Since then, I have enjoyed reading DANCING WITH MY FATHER, by Lief Anderson, described on the book jacket as "a daughter's remembrance of life with the eccentric genius and artist Walter Anderson." It makes me think of the documentary, "The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack" made by Rambling Jack Elliott's daughter, Aiyana Elliott, another daughter with an absent artist father. Both women's memories of their fathers remind me of my father and mother, who didn't called themselves artists but were artist nonetheless.

Although the painting I have posted today is titled "Imaginary Brother With Fish With Open Heart," I also think of it as a portrait of my father, a man who loved gardening, music and God. During my childhood, my father was frequently away on business trips and was present and distant in the same way my mother was. I am beginning to see how much I am like them, except that I don't have children. There is something about me that is present and distant, too. I am most at ease with people who have that quality of being both present and distant (bloggers, for example!) I spend much of my time in a joyful and creative and fulfilling solitude. The painting also reminds me of my first boyfriend, an artist who spent a year in Vietnam in 1970. I would like to post some of the artwork he did during his first days in Vietnam but it is not my place to post his work without his permission.

PACIFIC NORTHWEST STORM / OBOE LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW AT THE WIND AND RAIN

While wind and rain continue, I'm still thinking about my mother with gratitude and love, remembering that she instilled in me her love of books and art.

Here's Kurt Vonnegut talking about novels:

"I’ve said that to open a novel is to arrive in a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform. [Laughs.]
To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and to be able to put a show on in your head, it requires the reader to perform. If you can do it, you can go whaling in the South Pacific with Herman Melville, or you can watch Madame Bovary make a mess of her life in Paris..."

I found the quote here.

AN EARLY MORNING MEDITATION ON ANGER AND GRIEF AND FEAR AND GRATITUDE AND LEARNING THAT I DID LOVE MY MOTHER ALL ALONG AND ALWAYS WILL

Thirteen years ago, around 11 o'clock on the morning of December 3, 1994, during Hanukkah and Advent, on the day before my parents' 45th wedding anniversary, my mother died unexpectedly at age 78 of a massive heart attack.

Beginning in 1987, at age 36, when I began my recovery from many years of bulimia and anorexia, I had felt an increasing resentment toward my mother. On the day that my mother died, I woke up feeling an unexpectedly deep and painful anger toward her, which I wrote about at length in my journal that morning. Later in the morning while I was at work, I received a phone call from my youngest sister who told me that our mother had died that morning. I had not experienced before, and have not experienced since, the profound shock I felt in that moment. In my shock, I "saw" a dark heavy cloud, located at the level of my eyes, lifting up and disappearing and revealing clear sky, and I said to my sister, "I don't believe you." Then I said, "She can't hurt me anymore." Then I began to cry. In the following 24 hours, I began to experience the anger and grief that had been building up since I was a tiny child. What was missing was the fear I had always lived with.

One of my earliest memories, at somewhere around 2 years old, is that my mother was angry. I didn't know why she was angry, but I didn't sense that she was angry at me. She was vacuuming the living room in the apartment where we lived. My father was at work. I don't know where my baby sister was. I listened to my mother's angry words and thought, "Anger is stupid. I will NEVER be angry." How a 2 year old could come up with that vow is still a mystery to me, but that was my vow -- a vow I tried to keep, consciously and unconsciously, to the detriment of my physical and mental health, until after my mother died. Now I know that anger is not stupid. It is a challenging and revealing part of being human. I understand now that my mother may well have been experiencing unexpressed grief in the form of expressed anger and rage that blocked her ability to live in peace and love fully.

My mother's first memory was that she was a very young child in a room full of people, that she looked out a window and saw a human body fall from above and said, "Body," and that no one understood what she was trying to say. Soon it was discovered that someone had committed suicide by jumping out a window. After my mother died, my father told me that when my mother was a young woman in her 20s, a young man killed himself after she expressed that she was not interested in a relationship with him.

The last time I saw my mother, in February of the year that she died, she told me that she was tired of being angry. Until she died, I had always had a hard time understanding other people's anger because I had not been able to consciously experience my own anger. After she died, I was shocked to discover the extent of that anger. As a child and until after she died, I don't remember feeling love for my mother. What I often felt in connection her was fear and something else I couldn't identify but now understand was anger and grief.

My mother's mother wasted away and died at home of gallbladder cancer when my mother was 20 years old. My mother told me that she had felt anger toward her mother long before her mother became ill and that she had felt anger towards her mother throughout her mother's illness. When I look at the above photo of my mother and her mother in the year prior to her mother's death, I see the physical and emotional "distance" between them. I suspect that my mother, too, was not able to love her mother until after her mother died. I believe that there was considerable emotional distance between my grandmother and her mother. When I was in my early 30s, always deeply ambivalent about motherhood and never having been pregnant, I made a clear decision not to be a mother and at age 36 underwent a tubal ligation, creating an irrevocable distance between me and the possibility of giving birth to a child.

When my mother was in her late 60s, in the years when she was considering converting to Judaism, she began to study Tai Chi. My favorite photos of my mother are those of her as a child, as a young woman on a horse, and as a 70-year-old woman practicing Tai Chi. On the first photo of her in the series of photos above, her mother had written, "Miss Independence." Maybe "independence" is what I first began to love in my mother after she died, something that made her somewhat distant and confusing as a mother but which now endears her to me, as well as this sonnet she wrote thirty years before she died and in which she expresses both grief and gratitude. It has taken me a long time to learn to begin to understand and love my mother who at age 50, as she began to turn away from organized religion, wrote:

The answers rise and fall like waves. I wait

Then blindly stumble on towards heaven's gate.






















Sometime in the months after my mother died, I was startled to experience a vision of my mother inside heaven's gate, being greeted by her mother whose name was Irene and whose name means "Peace."

THE MUSICIANS

Garth Hudson, from an interview by Martin Scorsese in the film, "The Last Waltz":

"There is a view that jazz is 'evil' because it comes from evil people, but actually the greatest priests on 52nd Street and on the streets of New York City were the musicians.

("Imaginary Brothers Listening," painted in gouache and watercolor by Old Girl Of The North Country in 1990)

REMEMBERING DECEMBER 1, 1955

I will no longer act on the outside in a way that contradicts the truth that I hold deeply on the inside. I will no longer act as if I were less than the whole person I know myself to be.
(Rosa Parks)

On December 1, 1955, Parks became famous for refusing to obey bus driver James Blake's order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger.

("Woman Listening" (chalk pastel on paper from the early 1980s), by Old Girl Of The North Country)

GREAT NATURE / UPPER SKAGIT INDIAN TRIBE / SEMIAHMOO RESORT IN BLAINE, WASHINGTON / MIND OR HAND?

This is where I stayed on Thanksgiving night, a wonderful place owned by the Upper Skagit Indian Tribe. Although some of the rooms facing the water to the west are very expensive, I stayed in the least expensive room, a cozy and comfortable room on the fourth floor, looking east toward the mountains, the rising moon, and the sunrise.











































































































































































These days human beings have forgotten what religion is. They have forgotten a peculiar love which united their human nature to Great Nature. This love has nothing to do with human love. Standing in the midst of nature you feel this love of Great Nature . . . . Zen students must experience this peculiar love. This is religion.
(Sokei-An)
















The hand that guides the brush has already caught and executed what floated before the mind at the same moment the mind began to form it, and in the end the pupil no longer knows which of the two -- mind or hand -- was responsible for the work.
(Eugen Herrigel)

("Painting in America," by Old Girl Of The North Country, from the early 1980s)

One last thing.

VIEW FROM THE FAR NORTHWEST CORNER OF THE STATE OF WASHINGTON ON THE DAY AFTER THANKSGIVING 2007

High Speed Rubiks Cube / Bob's Rolling Koans

Oh, where have you been, my brown-eyed nephew?

Oh, what did you see, my brown-eyed nephew?

And what did you hear, my brown-eyed nephew?

Oh, who did you meet, my brown-eyed nephew?

Oh, what'll you do now, my brown-eyed nephew?

The Band with the Staples Singers

Van Morrison and The Band

COMPUTER SLEEPING / OBOE LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW

It's quiet here today.

See Lori Witzel's post, including lines from "A Blessing," by James Wright. Take a look, too, at her New Book Of Hours blog.

THE WEIGHT / THE WAIT

I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half past dead;

I just need some place where I can lay my head.

"Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?"

He just grinned and shook my hand, and "No!", was all he said.

(lyrics from "The Weight," by Robbie Robertson, aka J.R. Robertson, 1968)

(chalk pastel drawing from 1982, "Self-Portrait of an Old Friend as a Young Man," by Old Girl Of The North Country)

WAKING UP / THANKSGIVING DAY 1976

"When you awake you will remember ev'rything

you will be hangin' on a string from your...

When you believe, you will relieve the only soul

that you were born with to grow old and never know."

(lyrics from "When You Awake," by Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson, 1969)

(I always heard the words as "you will BELIEVE WITH ALL YOUR SOUL that you were both with to grow old and never know)

Every so often I watch my VHS copy of Martin Scorsese's film, "The Last Waltz." I had forgotten that "The Last Waltz" was filmed on Thanksgiving Day in 1976. Now it seems highly appropriate that I chose to watch that exuberant concert film during this Thanksgiving weekend more than 30 years later.

The Band:
Rick Danko
Levon Helm
Garth Hudson
Richard Manuel
Robbie Robertson

Master of Ceremonies:
Bill Graham

Poets:
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Michael McClure

Musicians:
Paul Butterfield
Eric Clapton
Neil Diamond
Dr. John
Bob Dylan
Emmylou Harris
Ronnie Hawkins
Joni Mitchell
Van Morrison
The Staples Singers
Ringo Starr
Muddy Waters
Ron Wood
Neil Young

It just occurred to me that "The Last Waltz" took place just a year and a half after the end of the Vietnam War. I can remember, in a clear and visceral way, how profoundly relieved I was when the Vietnam War finally ended. Watching the film, I thought about that short period of time when the United States was not involved in a war.

I was reminded that before my boyfriend was drafted in March of 1969, when we were both 19 years old, he had bought tickets for us and we had driven to San Francisco to see The Band in their debut concert in San Francisco on February 28, 1969. That is one of my many joyful memories of the time we spent together before he was drafted into the Army.

Recent interview with Robbie Robertson

("Morning With Three Suns," gouache and watercolor painting from 1988 by Old Girl Of The North Country)

THANKSGIVING 2007

("Woman With Her Hands Full," drawn and painted by Old Girl Of The North Country in 1986)

DESIRE / GIFTS

Never relinquish the fiery sadness called desire
(Basho He's young and on fire Full of hope and desire In a world that's been raped, raped and defiled If I fall along the way And can't see another day Lord, protect my child (Bob Dylan, 1983, from "Lord Protect My Child"
See gifts (post from November 16).

(Gouache and watercolor on Arches watercolor paper, painted by Old Girl Of the North Country in 1999)

LOVING AND BEING LOVED BY A PLACE

My love it speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
It doesn't have to say it's faithful
Yet it's true like ice, like fire
(Bob Dylan's "Love Minus Zero / No Limit," with "it" substituted for "she")

It is a place. We loved and were loved by a place.

See "Standard Time, a poem by Velveteen Rabbi.

THE TRUTH OF THE WORK ITSELF

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no worth at all, if not perhaps, results opposite of what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you will start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.
(Thomas Merton)

To action alone have you a right, and never at all to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be your motive; Neither let there be in you any attachment to inaction.
(The Bhagavad Gita)

(pastel drawing from the early 1980s, by Old Girl Of The North Country)