Just because (just because)

"... She's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she's free to look back if she wants to..."

"... And reads us stories out of the I Ching ..."

Yesterday YouTube churned up a song I remember well from 1967, the year I bought the Richard Wilhelm copy of the I Ching for three reasons.  One was that Bob Dylan had mentioned it in an interview, second was that Country Joe and the Fish mentioned it, and third was that my college roommate had a copy and taught me how to use pennies to consult the I Ching.

Today Blogger let me know that someone had visited one of my old posts which mentions the I Ching:

"It is very difficult to bring quiet to the heart."

"True quiet means keeping still when the time has come to keep still, and going forward when the time has come to go forward. In this way rest and movement are in agreement with the demands of the time, and thus there is light in life."

For some reason today, my attention was drawn to my blog archive:

Interesting to see that during my first year of blogging I posted almost every day of the week and that ever since I have not come close to that.  The smallest number of posts were during my last year working as a medical transcriptionist before I retired.  The largest number of posts were the year after the year R died.  Given that this is only August of 2021, I'm well on my way to an unusually prodigious year of blogging.

December 8, 2021, will be the 15th birthday of my blog.  I find it astonishing to think about all that has come to pass during these years and am grateful for the lasting connections made with blog friends near and far in this unforeseen community.

 

Hiroshima Day Meditation / They come and stand at every door

Jacob Lawrence's Hiroshima Series

*

Jacob Lawrence's Hiroshima Series was inspired by John Hershey's book titled Hiroshima:

"It was time for someone to describe the bomb in terms that the human mind could grasp. As Hersey finished The Bridge of San Luis Rey, he realized that emphasizing minutiae, not grandeur, was the way to drive the point home. Not everyone could comprehend how the atomic bomb worked or visualize an all-out, end-of-days nuclear world war. But practically anyone could comprehend a story about a handful of regular people — mothers, fathers, grade school children, doctors, clerks — going about their daily routines when catastrophe struck. Hersey would take readers into the victims’ kitchens, on their streetcar commutes, into their offices, back on that sunny summer morning of August 6, 1945, and show what befell them."

Koko Kondo speaks Wednesday [am's note:  That was August 6, 2020] in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome near the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. (Eugene Hoshiko/AP)

“I’m so glad John Hersey wrote that book because that is what happened,” Kondo said in an interview.

But she also worries that it has been forgotten. One piece of evidence in favor of that conclusion is that nuclear weapons still exist.

I come and stand at every door
But no one hears my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead, for I am dead

I'm only seven although I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim, my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And that was scattered by the wind

I need no fruit, I need no rice
I need no sweets nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead, for I am dead

All that I ask is that for peace
You fight today, you fight today
So that the children of this world
May live and grow and laugh and play

(Nâzım Hikmet)

*

".. the Second World War, it came to an end ..."

*

Speaking with and without words, sending love near and far.

*

ADDENDUM:  After posting this, I noticed that one of Jacob Lawrence's images in the HIroshima Series is called "Boy With Kite."  I hadn't noticed that when I chose the cover by Dave and Tyler who are identified as "A Boy and His Kite."  Take what you have gathered from coincidence.

Summer of 2021 Fire Meditation / Listening to Crow Rez Radio

Yesterday was mixed overcast and cool.  Late in the afternoon I noticed that the patterns of light on my porch had taken on the faint sickly yellowish cast that I now recognize as a sign that smoke from fires near and far has filled our skies -- that the air that I am breathing has smoke in it, although I cannot smell the smoke and find myself hoping beyond hoping that things won't get worse before they get better.

This morning at 3 a.m. when I went out on my porch, I saw that the waning moon in the sky to the northeast was reddish yellow instead of white.  I've closed my windows and brought out my portable air cleaner and portable air conditioner from their places in my hall closets, placed them in my living room and turned them on for the duration.

When I went to my laptop to ask Google about where was the best place to set up my air cleaner and air conditioner, I noticed that this had appeared spontaneously.  I'm listening to it as I write this post.  

Trying to remember which year it was that we in the northwestern corner of Washington State first experienced hazardous air from wildfires, I found that it was late summer in 2015.  The red sun seen through the trees in the photo above is from that summer.

Growing up in California in the 1950s and early 1960s, I remember hearing about the season of fires in Southern California.  The home of my Uncle John Wald, a radio announcer, was one that a fire in 1961 spared.  I remember hearing my mother saying that the houses on either side of his were destroyed.  For some reason, the fire jumped over his home.

October 1967, in my weeks of college at University of California at Irvine, was the first time I experienced what is beginning to be the late summer experience here and for much of the western United States.  The sky darkens with smoke and the sun turns red.  I remembering thinking in 1967 that what I was seeing looked "like Mars." It was just as disconcerting then as it is now.

*

Ojibwe prophecy speaks of a time during the seventh fire when our people will have a choice between two paths. The first path is well-worn and scorched. The second path is new and green. It is our choice as communities and as individuals how we will proceed.

-- Winona LaDuke

*

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

*

High Romanticism shows you nature in all its harsh and lovely metamorphoses. Flood, fire and quake fling us back to the primal struggle for survival and reveal our gross dependency on mammoth, still mysterious forces.

-- Camille Paglia

*

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

-- Gaston Bachelard

*

If the Lord comes and burns - as you say he will - I am not going away; I am going to stay here and stand the fire, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego! And Jesus will walk with me through the fire and keep me from harm.

-- Sojourner Truth

*

Pessimism and optimism are slammed up against each other in my records, the tension between them is where it's all at, it's what lights the fire.

-- Bruce Springsteen

*

I try to keep that fire burning inside of me.

-- Rita Marley

*

Technology is, of course, a double edged sword. Fire can cook our food but also burn us.

-- Jason Silva

*

I remember June 8, 1972. I saw the airplane. And it's so loud, so close to me. Suddenly, the fire everywhere around me. The fire burned off my clothes. And I saw my arm got burned with the fire. I thought, oh, my goodness, I get burned. People will see me different way.

-- Kim Phuc Phan Thi

*

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

-- Buddha

*

“It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice -- there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”

-- Frank Zappa

*

Bob Dylan 2021:

So many possibilities beyond what we know.  

Right here, right now.

Against all odds.

Crow Rez Radio

Morning Meditation on a poem by David Whyte / Larger, freer, and more loving / "A noble truth is a sacred creed"

 THE TRUELOVE

by David Whyte

There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.

Years ago in the Hebrides,
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,

and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them

and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly
so Biblically
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love

so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you simply don’t want to
any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.

*

Oh, I'm sailing away, my own true love ... (Bob Dylan, lyrics from "Boots of Spanish Leather")

*

Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within (James Baldwin)

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him (James Baldwin)

Be a light unto yourself; betake yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the Truth. Look not for refuge to anyone besides yourselves (Buddha)

Love is all there is, it makes the world go 'round
Love and only love, it can't be denied
No matter what you think about it
You just won't be able to do without it
Take a tip from one who's tried (Bob Dylan, lyrics from "I Threw It All Away")

*

True love needs no company (Bob Dylan, lyrics from "If Dogs Run Free")

The truth was obscure, Too profound and too pure, To live it you had to explode (Bob Dylan)

A noble truth is a sacred creed (Bob Dylan, lyric from "Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum," 2001)

Blog friends / Writing letters / Finding a Home in the World

 

Thanks so much to Beth at Alive On All Channels for introducing me to so many writers from diverse traditions all around the world.  Pádraig Ó Tuama is one of them.

*

From Pádraig Ó Tuama in my email inbox this morning:

Dear friends,

I’ve always loved writing letters. The older I’ve gotten, the less reliable I am in replying quickly. But there were enough years — perhaps from the age of ten to thirty — when letter writing was such a significant part of my life that I know it’ll always be part of me. In fact, I’m trying to do it more. Letter writing is often predicated on distance, and it takes time — not just to arrive, but to read, too; often when I get a letter, I wait for a good time to read it properly. I’ve kept all the letters I’ve received. They are a treasure. 

I wrote letters to people who’d never reply, too, notably to Saint Augustine. Reading his Confessions made me want to know him, so I decided to write. While he never replied, I did get more of a sense of him knowing that whatever I read in his writing was likely to come up in a letter. The distance between us was, of course, unbridgeable: time and death are certain barriers, but that didn’t stop me. Utterly complicated as he is, I retain an extraordinary love for Augustine. I hope he’d say the same for me.

This week’s On Being episode feels like a letter. One of the things that the pandemic has done has been to remind us of distance. No longer able to call around to a house, or arrange a visit while on a work trip, the qualities of connection are nonetheless strong between us: Zoom calls, or texts, or cards, or other ways continue to bridge the distance with love and well-wishing. 

For this hour, we get to eavesdrop on a conversation between two friends: Krista and the young leader, Rev. Jen Bailey. Jen is in the conversational driving seat this week, asking questions of Krista. Together, they engage in a discussion about belonging, healing, what the past year has planted in us, and what that might look like as we progress. Listening to the show, it’s evident that Krista and Jen’s deep friendship is nurtured by both their similarities and their differences. 

Jen paraphrases the Oscar Romero prayer where he says, “It helps, sometimes, to take a long view,” and this long view of time is something that they explore: Krista reflects on her years in divided Cold War Berlin; Jen calls to mind 9/11 and Ferguson, becoming a mother during a pandemic, and the murder of George Floyd. The combination of tenderness and brutality, possibility and anxiety in these events are held together in their conversation. What does it mean to live in this time, now? And what can we do that will be beneficial for the future? 

Sharing in common a love of theology, Krista and Jen riff on Moses, who never got to see the Promised Land he was leading his people toward. Krista says, addressing Jen from the vantage point of a different generation, “What I’m going to do for the rest of my life, I will not see the end, the final fruits of. And that is fine. And it’s the way of things. But I’m also partly able to just embrace that, because I see you.” Jen brings Toni Morrison into the conversation, paraphrasing Morrison’s line: “We live and then we die.” Having experienced a lot of grief in her own life, Jen is wise in speaking about how the recognition that life can be short is a protection against apathy and cynicism. In part, what Krista and Jen are doing by this is bringing ancient text into conversation with contemporary reality, and using literature — whether ancient or contemporary — to speak to the question of what it means to live, and how we can find out who to be with one another. “Belonging,” Jen calls this as their conversation begins. The “Beloved Community,” too. 

To return to how we began, it is friendship and care that hold this conversation together. That isn’t just because Krista and Jen know one another, but because the posture of care they model — toward self, others, and the world — is necessary for this good work to continue. Jen wishes to see a time when every movement-based organization in the U.S. would employ a chaplain to look after the spiritual and emotional wellbeing of the workers. Those organizations work for policy and legislative change to improve the lives of individuals. But policies and laws will not be enough. They need care, “that tender, tender work,” Jen calls it. 

Friends, in all your work, friendships, connections, readings, and energies, we wish you this tenderness, too, in order to shore up the strength for the good work that’s before us. 

 

Beir bua, 

Pádraig Ó Tuama
host of Poetry Unbound

"Lo and Behold" / Oddly enough

 

Early this morning I watched a library copy of Werner Herzog's "Lo and Behold:  Reveries of the Connected World."  Fairly quickly I realized that I had seen it before.  This time I took extensive notes, including noting my body sensations and emotions -- nausea, feeling chilled, feeling scared, feeling fear, feeling chilled, feeling chilled, and feeling chilled.  

After watching the film in which all the "experts" laughed nervously when admitting how dependent we have become on something as truly fragile as the internet, I went to my laptop and HA!, I abruptly lost my internet connection for the second time in the past two weeks.  Two weeks ago, several thousand XFINITY subscribers on my side of our town had no internet for most of a weekday at a time when more and more people depend on the internet in order to be able to work from home, not to mention working from anywhere else.  So much now depends on an internet connection.  I began to wonder if widespread internet outages are the wave of the future, like fires and floods and water shortages.

This time, though, it seems that it was just my very own corner of the internet that was down.  A kind XFINITY tech named Grace (!) spent close to an hour with me on my cell phone doing diagnostic tests.  It was determined that she needed to send an XFINITY technician to my home, and it was arranged for a technician to appear within the hour.

Within a few seconds of thanking her for her help and clicking on "End Call" on my cell phone, the internet connection was mysteriously restored and I cancelled the tech visit.  

Hmmmm ...

This experience has not been reassuring.

*

Gonna save my money and rip it up!
Lo and behold! Lo and behold!
Lookin' for my lo and behold,
Get me outa here, my dear man!

(Bob Dylan, "Lo and Behold")

One thing leading to another / "Blue Horse with Couple"

 

There were two blue horses at the top of the mandala that I just finished.  Before the mandala was finished, a friend of mine suggested that I put horses in the mandala.  I laughed at his suggestion because I couldn't see any place to add horses.  Before long, though, I realized that there was a place that I could put one or two horses that were like that red horse I had drawn at the center (the beginning) of the previous left-handed mandala.

Once I decided to add a horse or two, the next question was what color would I use?  Nothing seemed right except blue.  One horse didn't seem right but two did.  When I showed the finished mandala to my friend, he said something about blue horses in art history.  I could picture a painting of a blue horse but I felt embarrassed because I could not remember who the artist was, only that he had been a member of Der Blaue Reiter.   My friend tried to remember the name of the artist that came to his mind.  The only artist's name that came to mind for me several hours later was Delaunay and when I Googled "Delaunay," I got my answer -- it was not Delaunay but Franz Marc who painted the blue horse that was still in my mind.  That was about a week ago.  Yesterday my friend texted me, "MARC CHAGALL!"

Early this morning, I Googled "Marc Chagall" and "blue horse."  O my goodness!  There were numerous blue horses in Marc Chagall's paintings!

In September 1982, when I was 32 years old and had just graduated from college with a degree in English Literature and Studio Art,  my father offered to take me and my mother to New York City and Washington, D.C., with the main goal of seeing as many art museums and art galleries as possible.  The experience was one of the high points of my life.  Among so many other wonders, we saw Marc Chagall's "I and the Village" which you can see here.

We visited the Stature of Liberty.  My father took a photo of me and I took a photo of him where he had stood in September 1936.

My father's father, a professor friend of his, and my father began an extensive road trip from Minneapolis in the first week of September 1936, just before my father's junior year at the University of Minnesota.  The purpose of the trip was to visit historical places and photograph them for a lecture the professor, T. E. Odlund, planned to give.  My father was to be the driver and photographer. They drove through Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Main, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island,  New York City, New Jersey, Delaware, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Illinois and back to through Wisconsin to Minnesota during the next three weeks.

Somewhere there is a photo of my father taken by his father in the same place we stood near the Statue of Liberty in 1982 and a street scene taken in Harlem where a relaxed-looking young man smiles at my father who is taking the photo.  Where could those photos be?  I thought I knew, but they aren't where I thought they were.

*

The week that Marc Chagall died in 1985 was the week when I was visiting my parents in Northern California.  Friends of my parents, a couple who were in their late 80s stopped by to visit my parents and when I showed them photographs of my drawings, the man said, to my great surprise, "Ah, a new Chagall!" That, along with R. Allen Jensen's appreciation of my drawings, was the encouragement that I needed.  I had taken a series of drawing classes from R. Allen Jensen at Western Washington University between 1980 and 1982.  I liked my drawings but continued to be startled when other people besides family and friends liked them, too.  

"The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep."
(Marc Chagall)

*

I'm grateful to my mother for introducing me to the paintings of Marc Chagall when I was in high school.  I believe that he was her favorite painter.  Along with Jacob Lawrence, Marc Chagall is high on my list of beloved artists who have inspired me in my art work.

*

My friend who suggested adding horses to my most recent mandala attended art classes taught by Jacob Lawrence at the University of Washington.

*

Take what you have gathered from coincidence -- Bob Dylan

“We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.”

― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

"... That's how the light gets in ... / Rings of Fire and Bells and a Shadow Kingdom

*

5 a.m., looking to the southwest, with and without flash.  Look closely for Jupiter.

*

July 2021, age 71

*

Post inspired by this and this (which, after all, I decided to pay $25 to see online -- worth every penny):

O my goodness. With gratitude to Robin

"... Beyond all reason is the mystery of love: you know we are all equal, no one in truth needs any help from anyone else, no one needs to be told anything or given anything—and then you do the most compassionate act anyway, do the best for your brothers and sisters that you have in you.

I'm relaying what was given to me when I felt I needed it: if I felt that way, maybe someone else does, too. This is a letter to my brothers and sisters, a love note to try to show how, when we thought love wasn't working, it was working perfectly ..."

(Thaddeus Golas)

The mysterious process of one thing leading to another

 

In one of the interviews in "Encounters" when a young man speaks of having found his "tribe" in the eccentric community at McMurdo, that led me to remember a local artist who lived for two years in McMurdo and to see if I could find a video about him.

"In 1997, he embarked for Antarctica where he spent two years managing a general store at McMurdo, an American science station. He says in Antarctica, all distractions were stripped away, and the desolate windblown landscape left him with little else to do than fill his sketchbooks." (excerpted from an article about Ben Mann.  Click here)

Had I not found a copy of "Grizzly Man" on DVD on the free table in the mailroom of the condominium where I live, I doubt that I would have watched it all the way through but in the context of having just seen two other Werner Herzog films and thinking back to the first Herzog film I saw in my 20s, "Aguirre the Wrath of God," "Grizzly Man" had unexpected lessons for me about the consequences of living in delusion, much as "Aguirre the Wrath of God" had taught me the same lesson in a disturbing and unforgettable way so long ago.  

With all this in mind, I met with a neighbor friend and took a 3-mile walk on the trail on the north shore of Lake Whatcom before coming back to work on this post until I could click on "Publish."

Perhaps the truth depends upon a walk around the lake.

-- Wallace Stevens

Sand Talking

 Thanks to Beth at Alive On All Channels who introduced me to Sand Talk on her blog.

Trees Moved By Summer Wind / Mandala #62 (left hand)

*

This may or may not be finished.  I'm 99.9% certain that it is.  I wish that my camera could show this mandala's true colors -- the way it looks to me as I sit at my drawing table.  This will have to be good enough until I get it professionally scanned.

*

Your culture is not what your hands touch or make -- it's what moves your hands.

(Tyson Yunkaporta, page 242 of Sand Talk)

Early morning in July with almost finished mandala / "... the enormous invulnerable beauty ..." / Painting Dream / The horse I drew when I was 5 years old / "Wild Things Run Fast"

 

This early morning I suddenly remembered a poem I first read when I was 18 or 19 years old, at which time I had determined that I was decidedly not religious.  From that poem I understood that one does not need to be a religious person to live gratefully and fully in the presence of beauty.  My desire all those years ago was to become an artist.  

I remember reading this that Hokusai wrote when he was about the same age I am now.  It was early in my blogging days, when I was 57 years old, that I came across that quote.  Although I had experienced an extraordinary amount of creative energy for art work and poetry during the 1980s and early 1990s, I could no longer find it in me after the abrupt death of my mother in December 1994.  There were brief periods where I thought the energy for art work had returned.  

It is occurring to me today that my creative energy was totally channeled into blogging until September 2014 when something prompted me to do what my mother had done when she was about the age I was in 2014.  Inspired by Carl Jung, my mother began a series of mandalas.

This morning, as I look at my almost-finished mandala, #62 in a series, I have found an expanded version of that quote by Hokusai and an unexpected gratitude to my mother for inspiring in me a love of art and books and the beauty of the world:

"From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy-five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At one hundred, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign myself The Old Man Mad About Drawing."

*

This is the poem I read in 1967 or 1968:

Nova

That Nova was a moderate star like our good sun; it stored no
doubt a little more than it spent
Of heat and energy until the increasing tension came to the
trigger-point
Of a new chemistry; then what was already flaming found a new
manner of flaming ten-thousandfold
More brightly for a brief time; what was a pin-point fleck on a
sensitive plate at the great telescope's
Eye-piece now shouts down the steep night to the naked eye,
a nine-day super-star.

                                        It is likely our moderate
Father the sun will some time put off his nature for a similar
glory. The earth would share it; these tall
Green trees would become a moment's torches and vanish, the
oceans would explode into invisible steam,
The ships and the great whales fall through them like flaming
meteors into the emptied abysm, the six mile
Hollows of the Pacific sea-bed might smoke for a moment. Then
the earth would be like the pale proud moon,
Nothing but vitrified sand and rock would be left on earth. This
is a probable death-passion
For the sun's planets; we have no knowledge to assure us it may
not happen at any moment of time.

Meanwhile the sun shines wisely and warm, trees flutter green
in the wind, girls take their clothes off
To bathe in the cold ocean or to hunt love; they stand laughing
in the white foam, they have beautiful
Shoulders and thighs, they are beautiful animals, all life is beautiful.
We cannot be sure of life for one moment;
We can, by force and self-discipline, by many refusals and a few
assertions, in the teeth of fortune assure ourselves
Freedom and integrity in life or integrity in death. And we know
that the enormous invulnerable beauty of things
Is the face of God, to live gladly in its presence, and die without
grief or fear knowing it survives us.

-- (John) Robinson Jeffers, (1887-1962), Poet, writer; born in Pittsburgh, Pa. He attended six colleges and universities in Europe and America, studying medicine and forestry among other subjects.

*

Painting Dream (2000 -- 50 years old)

No one can paint this desire.
No one can paint this forgiveness.
Her hand drawing his.
His hand drawing hers.
They carry silence between them
as if it were a newborn child.
In my dream we were an old man and an old woman walking by the ocean.
Who painted this desire?
Who painted this forgiveness? 

*

I remember looking up from drawing and hearing my mother praising me for this drawing of a horse I made when I was 5 years old.  I am grateful that she saved it.