Going silent for a little while / 16 years ago and 52 years ago on December 8

Changing of the Guards

WRITTEN BY: BOB DYLAN

Sixteen years

Sixteen banners united over the field

Where the good shepherd grieves

Desperate men, desperate women divided

Spreading their wings ’neath the falling leaves

Fortune calls

I stepped forth from the shadows, to the marketplace

Merchants and thieves, hungry for power, my last deal gone down

She’s smelling sweet like the meadows where she was born

On midsummer’s eve, near the tower

The cold-blooded moon

The captain waits above the celebration

Sending his thoughts to a beloved maid

Whose ebony face is beyond communication

The captain is down but still believing that his love will be repaid

They shaved her head

She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo

A messenger arrived with a black nightingale

I seen her on the stairs and I couldn’t help but follow

Follow her down past the fountain where they lifted her veil

I stumbled to my feet

I rode past destruction in the ditches

With the stitches still mending ’neath a heart-shaped tattoo

Renegade priests and treacherous young witches

Were handing out the flowers that I’d given to you

The palace of mirrors

Where dog soldiers are reflected

The endless road and the wailing of chimes

The empty rooms where her memory is protected

Where the angels’ voices whisper to the souls of previous times

She wakes him up

Forty-eight hours later, the sun is breaking

Near broken chains, mountain laurel and rolling rocks

She’s begging to know what measures he now will be taking

He’s pulling her down and she’s clutching on to his long golden locks

Gentlemen, he said

I don’t need your organization, I’ve shined your shoes

I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards

But Eden is burning, either brace yourself for elimination

Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards

Peace will come

With tranquillity and splendor on the wheels of fire

But will offer no reward when her false idols fall

And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating

Between the King and the Queen of Swords

Copyright © 1978 by Special Rider Music

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The sky is exquisitely clear of today after intermittent smoke since the beginning of September.  This morning I took a two-hour walk through the woods, through the beautiful city cemetery, back through the woods, returning refreshed and renewed.

December 8 will be my 16th blog birthday.  I'll be going silent until then, reading your blogs but not commenting and not posting anything here.

Here is my first blog post, written on the 36th anniversary of the day R returned from Vietnam.  A wise and thoughtful person had suggested that I do something different on December 8 in 2006, that I bring something new to a day that had caused me such pain for so many years.  So much has healed since I began blogging.

The last time I took a blog break was in 2011.  Looking at the video I took then, it is shocking to see how green everything was.  We haven't had any substantial rain since last spring.  Many of our trees, deciduous and evergreen, are stressed and some appear to be dying.  We did have a rainy spring.  I hope that we have our usual month of steady clouds and rain in November.

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Sometimes these Bob Dylan lyrics come to me:

Peace will come

With tranquillity and splendor on the wheels of fire

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Sending love always to blog friends near and far.    

Y Más Música / Trust Meditation

When I was born, I know had the capacity to trust.  It wasn't long before I lost that much of that crucial aspect of feeling safe and secure in the world.  I remember being two years old.  Although, I felt that I couldn't trust other people, I must have had some level of trust in myself and my perceptions of what was safe and what wasn't.  I sought safety outside myself and found enough of it to survive.  When I was 6 or 7 years old, I heard something in Mahalia Jackson's voice that I knew I could trust.  A woman singing on television gave me something human to trust.  There was something in certain songs, certain voices singing, that I could trust.   I began to trust the human voices that I heard in books when I learned to read.  I learned to trust myself to find my way home when I went on long walks as a child.  When I was 13 years old, I heard Bob Dylan singing and knew instinctively I could trust that young man's voice.  When I was 35 years old, I heard this song for the first time and took it to heart because by that time I nearly lost the ability to trust myself or anyone else or anything else.  I began to consider trusting myself.

Don’t trust me to show you the truth
When the truth may only be ashes and dust
If you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself

(Bob Dylan)

Here are a few more versions:

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As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Take no one's word for anything, including mine -- but trust your experience.

(James Baldwin)

Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.

(Kahlil Gibran)

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You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.

(Anton Chekov)

Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.

(Maya Angelou)

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust.

(George Eliot)

Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.

(Fred Rogers)

¡Más música!

¡Susana Baca!

The experience of joy

Today the topic of joy came up in a group of friends of mine.  Just what is it?  How is it experienced?  As I was listening to what everyone had to say, I remembered this YouTube video which brings tears of joy to me every time I listen.  It's been a while since I listened.

Revisiting the littlest birds / Variation on recurring dream / And Addendum (-:

 

Lyrics

Well, I feel like an old hobo, I'm sad, lonesome and blue
I was fair as a summer's day, now the summer days are through
You pass through places and places pass through you
But you carry them with you on the soles of your travellin' shoes

Well, I love you so dearly, I love you so clearly
I wake you up in the morning, so early just to tell you
I got the wandering blues, I got the wandering blues
And I'm going to quit these rambling ways one of these days soon

And I sing, the littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs

Well, it's times like these I feel so small
And wild like the rambling footsteps of a wandering child
And I'm lonesome as a lonesome whippoorwill
Singing these blues with a warble and a trill
But I'm not too blue to fly, no I'm not too blue to fly

'Cause the littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs

But I love you so dearly, I love you so fearlessly
I wake you up in the morning so early, just to tell you
I've got the wandering blues, I've got the wandering blues
And I don't want to leave you, I love you through and through

Well, I left my baby on a pretty blue train
And I sang my songs to the cold and the rain
And I had the wandering blues, and I sang those wandering blues
And I'm gonna quit these rambling ways one of these days soon

And I sing, the littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs
The littlest birds sing the prettiest songs

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Another left-handed mandala near completion, after waking up from a new variation on a recurring dream where it is getting late in the day and I am alone and not at home.  

This time I was in an airport in a time of war.  People were booking flights out of the country.  There were very few flights left.  I realized that I didn't have any money with me, not even a credit card.  I wandered around the airport, wondering what to do about my situation.  I was not feeling desperation but was concerned.  At one far end of the airport was an unfamiliar man I sensed I could not trust.  When I wouldn't go with him where he wanted me to go, he became threatening.  I ran.  He chased me.  I ran past a man I didn't know and asked for help as I ran by.  The man stopped the threatening man and told him to leave me alone.  I felt immense gratitude.  Even though I knew that the threatening man wouldn't follow me, I kept running until I got to the other end of the airport.  There I saw a man who died, at peace with life and death, last January.  He is an artist.  I trust him and began to talk with him.  He had decided to stay in this country where he is accepted for who he is as an artist.  He said that he knew he wouldn't fit in anywhere but in this country.  As we were talking, his beloved wife approached.  She was wearing a deep yellow dress.  She was frowning at me.  She thought I was trying to take him away from her.  She was wrong but I couldn't convince her otherwise.  I continued walking to the very end of the airport and stopped to talk to an airport employee, a young woman whose job was to keep the airport clean.  She had a calm and peaceful presence.  She wasn't going to leave the country.  It was not an option for her or any of the other airport employees.  I continued walking at the end of the airport where I felt safe and began to suspect that I was dreaming.  I wasn't ready to wake up just then.  I was curious to see what would happen next.  Still, I was relieved to realize that I was dreaming.  I don't remember anything happening next.  

When I woke up, I checked the time.  It was about an hour before I usually wake up.  I wrote down the dream to make sure that I wouldn't forget it.  It is occurring to me that in this dream, I knew that I had a home in this country.  The recurring dream focus had shifted from its traditional focus on getting home before dark.  At the end of the dream, I felt at peace, not alone, in the company of other people who would stay in this country, those for whom this country is home.  My focus was no longer that of trying to get home before dark.  When I asked for help, help was available.  I was misunderstood but it wasn't the end of the world.  I was curious to see what else would happen in the dream and relieved to know I would wake up.

The girl in this mandala is 12-year-old Regina, one of the characters in Rosemary Sutcliff's book, Dawn Wind, which I read when I was 11 years old, identifying closely with Regina.  She was wandering alone in a time of war in Britain in the sixth century.  This illustration shows her at the moment she met Owain, a 14-year-old boy who was also wandering alone.  They became traveling companions.  I'm in the process of copying illustrations from that book, featuring them in my mandalas.  I don't remember how the story of Regina and Owain ends but will find out soon.  

There is a newspaper article on the wall next to my drawing table.  It celebrates the life of the artist who was at the airport in my dream.  He died last January and has been an inspiration for all of my art work this year.  I didn't know he had died or even that he had been ill until I saw his obituary, but it was in those days after he died without my knowledge that I felt a sense of despair, wondering if I would ever do any art work again and sat down at my drawing table and was moved to pick up my 6B pencil with my left hand and start drawing.  

Addendum:

Finished Mandala #72 just now:

These mandalas inspired by the Charles Keeping's illustrations in Dawn Wind are certainly edgy, dealing with old feelings from my childhood, giving my 11-year-old self a place to speak her truth that was silenced.  I've come a long way since I was 11 years old and want to honor my 11-year-old self for the ways she learned to survive what she couldn't understand.

Inspired to keep drawing with my non-dominant hand

Tibor Spitz

"The Joy of Music"

"In essence, my birthday is every day."

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On October 1, I will be 73 years old.  I don't let many people know when my birthday is.  For years, I would be traveling alone somewhere in Northern California on my birthday.  I like quiet birthdays in beautiful places.  In recent years, my home is my beautiful place to be on my birthday.  I like being in my 70s.  I am grateful to be alive.  

Meditation on the freedom in living simply

If I were younger, I would consider living in a van in the way this young woman lives.  Not permanently but long enough to travel and see what I could see.  With so many jobs online these days, I could support myself while living in a van.  Sarah has learned to live simply at a young age, after a major surgery which requires her to have an ostomy bag for the rest of her life.  Although I have more living space than Sarah, my total living space is under 700 square feet and requires some of the same strategies that Sarah uses.  I also live alone and, like Sarah, have learned to handle whatever comes up regarding home maintenance, learning that I don't have to pay for maintenance and repairs that I can do myself.  

Sarah's cat, Bodhi, reminds me of my beloved Oboe.  If I were to live in a van, I would certainly share the space with a cat.  

"I was talking to a friend about this the other day and she is moving to Australia and wants to do van life there but she is so scared of all the what-ifs and the unknowns and I like to call them figure-outables.  Like, it's okay if you don't know how to do it, you can figure it out ..."

(If you have time for nothing else, listen to Sarah from 9:30 to 9:45 on the video)

Sarah and so many of the young people give me hope for today.

 

Fall Equinox Meditation / Fearless and asymmetrical mandala series / You didn't do anything wrong

This September has been an odd month for my body.  It began, as all Septembers do, with the  anniversary of traumatic events that occurred when I was almost 5 years old, coinciding with the birth of my youngest sister on September 4, 1954.  For many years in early September, I would come down with an upper respiratory cold that would take hold of me and not let go for weeks.  It didn't occur to me then than this might be a trauma reaction.  

For many years now, I have been free of upper respiratory illness in September as well as the rest of the year.   In late August, though, my eyes began to itch for no reason that I could determine.  On September 5, the first stye of my life developed in my right eye.  My eyelid was red and swollen and painful to the touch.  I went to the doctor, thinking it was a chalazion, and was told it was a stye and was given erythromycin eye ointment which eventually cleared it up.  

A few days later I had a painful flare of lower back pain, after seven months without any flares.  Both of those issues resolved and then I began having bouts of sneezing.  In the last few days I have had a runny nose with intermittent sneezing but no other symptoms.  Thinking the problem must be an allergy, I took an antihistamine but that gave little relief.  I have been free of environmental allergy symptoms for some time now and am puzzled to have them again.  

There is nothing I can think of that would be causing my body to react in these ways, unless it is a stress reaction.

Last night I woke up just after midnight and couldn't go back to sleep because of the runny nose.  The mucous is clear.  My eyes are mildly itchy.  There is no congestion, but I have a mildly irritated throat as a result of the postnasal drainage.  I have no fever.  These are minor health problems.  I feel well otherwise.

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Oddly enough, my creative energy is up.  Unable to sleep, I sat down at my drawing table about an hour ago and finished Mandala #71, continuing to draw with my non-dominant left hand.

Thirty years ago, in 1992, I completed #71 in the Calendar Series which I had started working on in 1987 at the beginning of my recovery from anorexia, bulimia and alcoholism.  After my mother died in 1994, I lost most of my creative energy.  Now and then it would break through but never for long.  

Twenty years went by and then in 2014, I made my first mandala, inspired by a series of mandalas my mother had made when she was about the same age I was in 2014.  For the last eight years, my creative energy has been strong, although it was beginning to wane.   This past January, I sat down at my art table and wondered if I would ever draw again.  At that moment of despair, something prompted me to pick up a 6B pencil and draw with my non-dominant left hand.  Since then I have completed five non-dominant-hand mandalas, two of them in the past week, inspired by Charles Keepings' black and white illustrations in Dawn Wind, by Rosemary Sutcliff, which I read during the summer when I was 11 years old.  

Using my non-dominant left hand to copy the drawings from that book has been an unexpected joy.  Something has shifted in me in this last week.  I want to draw again, as never before.

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I sneezed again just now.  What could be causing that?  Did I do something wrong?

I'm reminded of my visit to the health clinic to get help for the stye.  I told the physician assistant that I thought that it may have been caused by a change in what I had been eating.  I had been eating a substantial amount of dairy in the form of yogurt and a substantial amount of raisins.  In the past I have tested positive for an allergy to milk and had not eaten dairy foods for years.  It has been years since I have eaten raisins because of their high sugar content.  My body does not react well to large amounts of sugar.  The physician assistant said that it was possible that the foods had contributed to the stye but it was also possible that I hadn't done anything wrong.  He said that people tend to think that they have done something wrong if they have health problems and that often they have done nothing wrong.  I said, "You mean I'm innocent?"  He laughed and said, "Yes."

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It's been a long journey from 1984 to 2022.

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Mandala #71 (Non-dominant hand) with image copied from Charles Keepings drawings in Dawn Wind, by Rosemary Sutcliff.

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One more thing: From Zhoen's blog

Ocean Vuong at 33 with the Øresund Sound in the background

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From YouTube:

"Ocean Vuong was interviewed by his Danish translator, the poet Caspar Eric, in connection with the Louisiana Literature festival, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, in August 2022."

Gratitude to Allison Russell and her band

 

Grateful to have lived long enough to hear this voice, these voices, this music on Tiny Desk just now.

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"I met my biological father, Michael George, and my paternal family when I was 30 years old. I learned that I am a first-generation Canadian on my father’s side. He was born and raised in Grenada, one of 13 children. I found out that ours is a family that values education deeply. I found out that we have a historian in the family who has traced our line back to an enslaved woman named Quasheba, who was sold off the coast of Ghana.

Such was her strength and resilience that she somehow survived the transatlantic crossing in the hold of a slave ship, and was eventually sold to a large sugar cane plantation in Grenada. She survived multiple rapes and sales. She survived backbreaking labor in the cane fields. She survived her children being taken and sold. She survived, and she founded generations. I wept to learn her name. I am honored to be her many-times-removed daughter and am eternally grateful for the gift of her strength and resilience. Though we can never know if Quasheba was actually from Ghana, in this song I imagine that she is.

When I was in Cameroon in 2007 with my other band, Po’ Girl, I was especially struck by three things: not being a visible minority for the first time in my life (though I was called la petite métisse pretty frequently, since I’m “pale” compared to most Cameroonians); how many Cameroonians felt the need either to apologize for or disclaim their forebears’ involvement in the slave trade—“My village, they never sold any slaves!”—and how many people there told me that I looked Cameroonian. Ghana is just a little ways up the west coast of Africa from Cameroon."

 — Allison Russell

September 11, 2001, revisited (along with 1996)

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("Witness with Courage," pastel image, 1984, drawn by am)

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On the afternoon of  September 11, 2001, I heard this song for the first time on "Love and Theft" ** which was released on that same day, after being left out of "Time Out Of Mind" in 1996.

Every step of the way we walk the line

 

Your days are numbered, so are mine
Time is pilin’ up, we struggle and we scrape
We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escape
City’s just a jungle, more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, trying to get away
I was raised in the country, I been workin’ in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down
Got nothing for you, I had nothing before
Don’t even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down
Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around
All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime
Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

Well, the devil’s in the alley, mule’s in the stall
Say anything you wanna, I have heard it all
I was thinkin’ about the things that Rosie said
I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed
Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger nobody sees
So many things that we never will undo
I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too
Some people will offer you their hand and some won’t
Last night I knew you, tonight I don’t
I need somethin’ strong to distract my mind
I’m gonna look at you ‘til my eyes go blind
Well I got here following the southern star
I crossed that river just to be where you are
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long
Well my ship’s been split to splinters and it’s sinking fast
I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free
I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me
Everybody movin’ if they ain’t already there
Everybody got to move somewhere
Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow
Things should start to get interesting right about now
My clothes are wet, tight on my skin
Not as tight as the corner that I painted myself in
I know that fortune is waitin’ to be kind
So give me your hand and say you’ll be mine
Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

Copyright © 1996 by Special Rider Music

** The song's opening line, "Every step of the way, we walk the line" is an allusion to Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line", a song Dylan cited as being "one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time" in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One.^[29]

The song's refrain, "Only one thing I did wrong / Stayed in Mississippi a day too long", is taken from a verse in the traditional folk song "Rosie".^[30] Dylan makes this connection explicit by name-checking "Rosie" elsewhere in the lyrics ("I was thinkin’ about the things that Rosie said / I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed").^[31]

The line "So give me your hand and say you’ll be mine" is a near-verbatim quote from Act 5, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure ("If he be like your brother, for his sake / Is he pardon’d; and, for your lovely sake, Give me your hand and say you will be mine").^[32]

(from Wikipedia)

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Today and for the last few days here in Coastal Northwest Washington State, the sky is filled with thick wildfire smoke that causes pain to all sentient beings who must breathe it.  

Let me not forget what I need to remember.

Handle with care

 

It is only a little planet, but how beautiful it is.

-- Robinson Jeffers

Mandala #70 / Beyond my wildest childhood dreams

Dawn Wind, by Rosemary Sutcliff, was first published in 1961 when I was 11 years old.  The Redwood City Public Library had a copy which I read during the summer of 1961.  The black and white drawings of the two main characters, a 14-year-old boy and a girl of about the same age, made a deep impression on me.  I wished that I could draw like the illustrator, Charles Keeping.  In the following years, the memory of those drawings stayed with me.  When I was a volunteer shelf-reader in the children's section of our local public library, I found the book and looked at the drawings again.  They were just as I remembered them, just as stirring to my imagination.  The drawings brought the story to life for me.  I remembered how it felt to identify closely with the lives of the boy and the girl who lived long ago where my ancestors on my mother's side had lived.

Here's what the book jacket says about the story which takes place in Sixth Century Southern Britain:

The boy lay in the silence of the great battlefield, gazing at his own hand spread on the ground beside him.  The hand moved and he realized, with something like surprise , that he was not dead ...

.... It seemed to Owain that nobody but himself had been left alive, until the lean shape of Dog slid towards him from the shadows and licked his hand ....

... The story covers the twelve years that followed Aquae Sulis; for Owain they were hard and difficult years, many of them spent in thrall to a Saxon farmer.  Yet he found kindness and happiness where he least expected it; he found Regina, hidden and half-starved among the ruins of Viroconium ...

A few weeks ago, I went online looking for a used copy and was able to buy one that had been in one of the Croydon Public Libraries in South London.  My desire was to see what would happen if I tried to copy the drawings into the form of a mandala with my non-dominant left hand.

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Early this morning, way before dawn, I sat down at my drawing table for the first time since June and picked up my 6B pencil with my non-dominant left hand and began to copy the first illustration (besides the cover), which appeared on the title page.  Five illustrations later, I had finished the mandala, all the while listening to Bob Dylan's "Rough and Rowdy Ways" CD.

Once again, I am astounded at my ability to draw with my non-dominant left hand.  The drawing comes easily, much more easily than drawing with my right hand.

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Early morning crow