All Good Things

I do not mean to be shallowly optimistic or habitually cynical. What I mean to be is informed, committed, intelligent, compassionate, open-minded, engaged, and interested in who I am, what I am doing, where we are as a culture, as a world, as human beings. There is so much happening on large-scale stages in our world today that demands and needs our attention, our understanding, our resolving.  I understand, now, that we do not have to know the infinitely changing physical details of each dramatic situation to understand what path we want to take and what energy we choose to contribute, just as we do not have to know each chemical within our bodies and the name of each muscle and nerve that makes us to understand the basis of who we are and how to support our healthy structure and energy of life. We do have to want to know, and begin to seek the knowledge that teaches us to know more about ourselves and what it means to support a good life, which supports a collective “good life” as we define it. We must be open to expanding our definitions of life, too, or we will not be able to go with the changes that offer the opportunities that life reveals to us every day, every moment, from “near” and “far.” What I contribute to the world is my life as I live it. Love more, love better, be love and think always of what it means to have the gift of being alive. We have to know what we want to create before we can become conscious of our power to create.  This is a beginning of wisdom. Choose wisely ... .Laugh lots. Bake cake, eat cake, toast all good things that come.

Captivating

 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/49.55.29

My mind is prone to wander into mazes that may be playful and fun but not as productive perhaps as … so many other things and perhaps another look at habits of mind and remembrance. There isn’t anything so scary there anymore, in that dark path, where twilight once hovered and slipped into a sometimes beautiful blanket of dark and moon. Moon-shadows that light the ground like outstretched limbs rest in full length, awaiting full light. Heat returns as sun rises and all nuance of light and dark changes. It is the thrill of a page turning, lunar light over water. Absolutely captivating.

The thrill of a page-turning is as simply beautiful as a leaf turning, a leaf floating, borne by any wisp of wind or even silence, to the ground waiting below, where it will begin to dissolve, slowly, into pieces, fragments, becoming almost fossil-like if we know how to look. The map and story of that leaf remains, in memory – ours and the Earth’s and the tree’s – as we honor the simple turning of seasons.

The delight of glittering sunlight is like a glimmer of a smile on a face which lights with love, remembrance, memory of laughter, and the spark of what will come next, an outstretched hand, a thought as a bridge to new tomorrows, and the absolute joy of come-what-may, the adventures we create and are.

"Excellent Sheep" and Spiritual Growth (More on What's Love Got to Do With It)

“Instead of being intervals of freedom, they are breeding grounds for advancement.” What are we trying to advance and why?

David Brooks writes about William Deresiewicz’s vision of what it means to grow up (I’m paraphrasing – he says “what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood”).  What it means to be educated in an environment that encourages a mind to discover what it is that is “worth wanting.” He writes about how in Deresiewicz's view elite universities have been absorbed into the “commercial ethos.” Stephen Pinker, the much read and visible psychologist, suggests that the university’s job is cognitive. He says “… I have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul.” Students should acquire specific, practical knowledge. Brooks articulates what we have before us, as these thinkers suggest: three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career); cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think); and the moral purpose, as Deresiewicz offers in his new book, Excellent Sheep:  The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. Brooks articulates perfectly, I think, that “people in authority no longer feel compelled to define how they think moral, emotional and spiritual growth happens.”  Either they don’t think it’s their place or they don’t think they know.

I had a college education in the early 80s, after a boarding school education in West Africa. My first “classroom experiences” began in a converted carport where my mother taught us, her four children, and other children who dropped in at different times. She incorporated what was called a correspondence system, which homeschoolers will recognize. I was born the third of triplets and we had an older brother, so we had a good beginning for a classroom. We graduated from high school in Nigeria and returned to the US for college. It took me a long while to sift and absorb and understand and balance that college experience (as I’ve written about in my “memoir), but all in all the incubation and environment was a wonderful one for me to begin to balance all of the energies of life I’d lived so far and was introducing in this next big new phase of life adventure that college is and was. There were wonderful professors who were passionate about their mission to teach young minds as they embraced the big world of both people and ideas. There was enough of a range of students to always offer a new horizon to watch, engage, and learn from as one’s mind opened to all that was offered. I am eternally grateful for that incubation, especially the professors whose intense mission helped create a great and warm environment for learning and advancing the life of the mind along with the Life of the individual and the individual as part of a collective.

I also went to graduate school and, after a little meandering path, received a Master’s degree which was satisfying to me at the time.  With some struggle, I had accomplished a goal. Five or six years later, I was introduced to a woman whose career was as an R.N. and also began teaching what she called Spiritual Philosophy.  Though I had been born the child of missionaries and was deeply incubated in religious teachings and culture, I discovered I did not have a definition of the soul that was satisfying to me as a mind. I thought I knew what “the soul” was, yet after listening to teaching about the soul for a few years and being asked to define the soul, I discovered that my answer did not really make sense to me – it was simply something I had heard and been taught at some point, but it did not have any true meaning that was valuable to me as a mind, to continue expanding and exploring and make this definition useful in my everyday evolution.

We have this dual concept in our world about what is “practical” and what is “spiritual,” I think, which harks back to  our ancient beliefs about the material and the spiritual; the lofty and the low; the body and the spirit. What Spiritual Philosophy has given me, as I continue to study “the meaning of life,” is a definition of the soul (as the mind and emotions), what it means to be designed as an evolving spirit consciousness, and the structure of what we have given ourselves to follow as physical human beings who are made to “live a good life” – the Ethical Values which are our spiritual heritage and embedded as part of our physical design.

Just as with any system of beliefs, we can pick and choose what we want to learn and we may also think we already “know it all.” We may think we are open to learning but mightily resist being taught. Children and parents the world over may smile at this enlightening thought, as I do. I have learned that we are “attracted to” (curious about) what we want and need to learn, even if we are not consciously aware of why we need to learn it.  We are energy and energy must move and change. (We have learned that.) It is our soul (as our mind and emotions) that, as energy, is attracted to and by energy and attracts other energy.  If we think about “energy” only as natural gas, oil, or calories burned, we are denying our mind and emotions (as our soul) the satisfaction of coming to know itself in the thrill of its adventure of life and growth.

Once we are motivated to want to learn something new, we have truly begun to expand our mind. We commit ourselves to learning, to growing as a mind. Our body knows how to grow itself – as a mind, we have to learn to support our optimum physical growth. We also have to learn to support our mind and our emotions in their optimum growth. These realms of knowledge support our spiritual growth, just as our spiritual growth supports a healthy mind and a healthy body and a happy life. We don’t have to know how to “build a soul,” as Pinker writes – we do need to know that we are a soul, of dual mind and emotions, and that we are designed to expand our consciousness. Acquiring useful knowledge is a main mission of the soul; but how do we define “useful knowledge”?  The intellect is not alone in the Universe of our internal mass consciousness. The mind and the heart are not designed to act independently, just as we humans are not designed to live on an island alone, as our own universe. Until we begin to think about what is our human design, in more than just physical ways (how can we fix the heart; why do we have high cholesterol, etc.), we will gather a lot of data, but not necessarily be truly educated (civilized).  We will not have to spend lots of money to study, again, why drinking more pure water is good for our overall health, beginning with our cells; why neurotoxins defeat our design of being healthy and energized as; why being kind and compassionate to ourselves and each other is a lesson we are all invited to learn to better our human and planetary health. And so on.

Anybody remember The Education of Henry Adams (1919 Pulitzer Prize)?

We learn only when we want to learn. There is always more to learn.

Another Scrimshaw, Surfer, Art Form Connection

Another Scrimshaw, Surfer, Art Form Connection

I love this! Finding "real-world forms" as we go.

Peter Spacek -PS: "I know. It’s weird. As I started to cut up old boards, I began to see real-world shapes. A book in a rail cross-section, a smile in a fin curve, a perfect barrel in a delaminating glass job. The shapes themselves kind of told me what to etch on them.

RG: And unlike many surf artists, you actually infuse humor into most of your pieces.

PS: Well that’s always been my style, part of my “artistic persona.” Or to put it another way, I’m a sucker for a gag…so I saw no reason to stop." Surfer mag - check it out!

Just Listen.

Rather than suggesting logic while defying sense (as I read in a review of Laurie Anderson's Kronos Quartet collaborative Landfall), I like the suggesting sense while seeming to defy logic.

So much of what we sense becomes entangled in a maze of ... something that we try to identify in bits and pieces ... that we forget that we are the creators of our own maze. Hurricane Sandy made landfall and ruined so much. Laurie Anderson writes of seeing floating keyboards and such, and looking at the good side, that is, never having to sort through any of this stuff ever again. There is something restorative about such cleansing. About having to let go.

Instead of "convert or kill," what about cleanse?

Laugh. Paddle. Move. Dance, or something like it.

What if we had to register Poetic Licenses?

Climb a ladder, swim through a doorway, unearth an ancient cave, scale a tall building (if only for a selfie), identify a mountain, remember geography and the way topography teaches us to know our own journey, if we're paying attention.

Just listen.

The Rhythm Kings

Thomas Willis-

Coined the term “neurology”-

Worked hard, diligently

I presume to solve some riddles

Of the relationship of mind

(thought) and body (motion, action, leading

To behavior).

Thomas Willis sometimes beat his patients over the head with

Sticks. Talk about finding a

Rhythm.

Security and Insecurity

"As the inner self expands, the energy frequency expands and man moves forward in his understanding of self and his relationship to the Universe. All things are duplicated within all things. There is nothing new within the Universe. Indeed, the understanding of man is already there, it is only being suppressed by man because he is unaware of its existence. The memory has become overgrown with other material issues of the physical reality.

The advancement of all scientific technology in your physical world has occurred because of the soul memory that is being utilized by some souls now on Earth. All of man has soul memory. He only has to acknowledge that it is available to him, open the gates that fence it in, and he will then have total access to the inner mind."

Bridges of Consciousness, by Kathy Oddenino, p. 137.

Nadine Gordimer

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/books/nadine-gordimer-novelist-and-apartheid-foe-dies-at-90.html

Nadine Gordimer."It was not her country’s problems that set her to writing, she said. “On the contrary,” she wrote in an essay, “it was learning to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.”

Falling through the surface of our way of life is a wonderful description, I think, of what can happen when we take on a tool of expression which opens us to not only ever-expanding exploration and expression, but also to new awareness of the nature and energy of life itself. Nadine Gordimer is one of those giants with class, whose mark in our literary and social-consciousness will forever ripple into our collective consciousness. 

By Design

What got me going
further
is simply the life-
the everyday machinations and little miracles of
breath and step and word
and deed.
Touch and Go.

As "caregiver" goes - what a word
that is, like an Indian word, a naming
by deed and so much more-
"deer hunter", "tracker,"
"dog catcher"-
a defining of roles.

We the people define
for ourselves the divine
in simple physical terms
because energy is a hard
concept to accept as real
as bread, truck, beer, ice,
broken bone,
ice cream,
bacon,
peach.

Challenging for a mind more than
a body, already engaged
committed, living
loving motion-
ingesting, air water, breathing, changing.
Being.

I love you life,
the body says in a
million infinite ways.
Let's go. Do.
I'll show you as you
show me.
Trust the inhale
to exhale-
We're made to.

Food, Sex, Sleep and Knowledge

I am nearly finished reading Donna Tartt's Pulitzer-winning, fan-loving The Goldfinch. Reading this 700+-page novel along with (in  manuscript) Kathy Oddenino's upcoming novel, also with notes of Hippocrates, MFK Fisher, and various other pieces online - reminds me how much our mind can take in, and how much our mind wants to be fed, especially when we can appreciate a healthy appetite. A friend recently remarked that, while men are said to think about sex maybe once a minute, what she thinks about constantly is food! What research shows, and which makes sense to me, is that food, sex, and sleep (our survival basics) are what we humans think about most often. We know how we respond to cravings, generally speaking, as individuals and as people - humans. Do we know why? Isn't this one way we define "knowing what we want?" Self-discovery invites us to understand the levels of our consciousness, of ourselves, more deeply, more intimately, and the rewards are infinite. If we accept that it is our mind that creates our reality as we experience "reality," then it follows that what we feed our mind is also a basic survival need. Good food, good sleep, and good sex make us happy! As I continue to learn and appreciate, thinking and speaking are our highest, or most developed senses. Without thinking, none of the food, sex, or sleep would have the status they have in our world. Would they? Knowledge is both appreciated and often misunderstood, it seems to me. Knowledge is a gift to us, to our minds, to our evolving consciousness. This is why teachers, beginning with our parents, are to be honored, respected, and valued throughout their/our lives and beyond. Memories remain after those we love die. As I think of my parents and the snatches of memory that flash into my mind every day, I appreciate ever more what memory means to us, and how sharing our lives is a gift that keeps on giving, not just "in the physical."

Scrimshaw - my new book!

 
 
   

      Scrimshaw by M E Martin
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Scrimshaw by M E Martin
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Cartography

Grave

            Graven

                        Gravura

            Gravitas.

Graver.

            Engraver.

A typeface based on copperplate style,

Calligraphy

            Caliph

Cartography,

The maps of the heart show our provenance,

The journeys we’ve made, what we bring,

What we have gained.

Script

If not scrimshaw

Scroll work

Engravings

Engrained

Carving bone or ivory

Harvesting whalers’

Handiwork, byproduct of

What our DNA brings forward

As if carved into our

Choices as we make them,

Plainly

Once we open our eyes

As we take that one step at a time.

Don’t wait.

If scrolls are not read

When they’re ready they become relics,

Turned to stone and bone fragments

To be pieced together by

Men

Women

of another time,

Whiling away a present to seek

Seeds of a story they have

Forgotten.

           

Scrimshaw.

            Harvest.

from my new book

Just Thinking

If the energy of our mind as we share our thoughts, ideas, etc., is simply to persuade others to share our view, then we are already seeing ourselves as “different.” We can be set up and set off by the ingrained pattern of “mutual hostility” or competition (hidden or overt belief).  This is a way that our male mind has seen itself throughout time, in many lives, as our ego has formed, developed, and strengthened as we have created beliefs to define or support our perception of life (the meaning of life).  This is one image that shows our belief in what survival means, rather than evolution. This is a dual image and as we learn and grow as a consciousness we enlighten ourselves with the loving image of who we are  – of us as male and female, rather than simply male or female, in the positive light of our creation as evolving consciousness. We come to know ourselves not as the Lone Warrior battling all forces which may obstruct us from obtaining our Holy Grail, but as the Pilgrim seeking to know himself as one within the world but sent and created of the Spirit – to be in AND of the world in its highest expression as evolving consciousness.

The “lone adventurer” ready to set off into the big, wide world, the Great Unknown that is full of danger, adventure, possibility. It is the same image of when we choose to enter another physical life – with all of the chemical poetry in motion as energy beings, reviewing, sharing, communicating in all sensory ways, then choosing the portal of entry, with consent, and “taking the plunge,” with full excitement as a soul to Begin Again – to learn, grow, to Be. This is the same image parents must have, and children must have, as babies are conceived, born, and nurtured until the day a child sets off for the first day of school – the new adventure, the precipice of a new life in a big world of other children, peers, beyond what we have experienced before. First day of school, first moment of awakening to a new spark of knowing, of knowledge, the first tying of a shoe, the first taste of… whatever awakens that love within us, the first moment of pedaling the tricycle faster and faster into a speed where we feel the independence of movement in a new way; jumping off of a high dive, diving into a pool for the first time, having a first haircut, a first kiss, singing a first song, or hearing one we instantly love, that sings to our cells in a way not like the others. All are part of this amazing Universal language of love within us and which we share through our interaction as physical beings on this Earth with its own expressions that we share and honor as we learn to love.

Stoner - I like Gatsby AND this "Anti-Gatsby"

University of Denver photograph

I just finished John Williams’ 1965 novel, Stoner, a novel John McGahern describes in his introduction as “this classic novel of university life, and the life of the heart and the mind.” It’s a powerhouse of a book – I imagine even for those who have less affection and affinity for “university life” or the pull toward both the flashy polish of Gatsby and the austere precision of Stoner than I have.  Williams’ precise use of words to convey so much so simply is a true gift and a rare one.  He captures the truth of personalities and the energy of their expression in wonderful and thoughtful ways, and by doing so offers an endless palate of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to think about, appreciate, explore, and to learn from.  It is very sad in its seemingly relentless sense of isolation, yet reading Stoner is like an excursion into a certain kind of art gallery – old masters, the musty sense of reverence for “pure knowledge,” the life of the mind and of learning, and a persistent quiet reverie as the reader absorbs all that is happening in this intense microcosm which expands into a whole world and reverberates beyond. Love, lust, and learning all make an appearance, each given life in particular ways.  The “meaning of life,” of a particular life and lives, is laid bare for inquiring minds and hearts to know themselves. To read this is an honor – is to honor Williams for his creation, and to honor the gift of life itself, which we all share.  Without honor and the Values of the Spirit which begin with love and are expressed with a quiet but firm and growing dignity (which comes from learning and experience), we are left with sadness and the pettiness of confusion and the false power that the ego wields.  There is much poetic beauty in Williams’ language of “love becoming,” even as he describes the way the softness of snow, the whiteness of the sky suffused with snow, the permeating silence which invites the mind into a state beyond the nature it has known and experienced before.

The saddest thing to me may be what Tim Kreider wrote in his October 2013 New Yorker review - that wisdom is "perennially out of style." The popularity of the novel in Europe makes sense to me. Older sensibilities learn that loss does not necessarily lead to "failure."

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.” (195)

Something I wrote a few nights ago fit into the influence of his book more than I realized, until I read the last few pages.

Nautilus.

                Spiralling into me.

The book between worlds

The pages

Walking the pages

As if struck by chords

Harmony falling

Sounding and falling

We are holding on

Thin wisps of light

Gleaming, powerful

Beaming like strings

Moonlight

                Into morning

A new day, hope

And words illuminated.

Love, Sweet Love

Ah, Christmas. There is no substitute for spending the holidays with family. There is no true substitute for family, however we may define it. In the days before Christmas and through the holiday, I thought a lot about love and what love means. I remembered holidays past, and people I’ve known and love – including, of course, my wonderful parents, givers of life. Flashes of memory ran through my mind as I drove toward the coast – memories of when we were children, the excitement of the holiday as we trimmed the spindly tree and thought of that land far away which was our “home,” where others were celebrating the holiday perhaps in snow or with Christmas Eve services and caroling and shopping and sharing all kinds of traditions. Our families had shopped for presents and mailed them at least six weeks early in hopes of the gifts arriving between the US and Nigeria “on time.” My brother was a child enchanted by the idea of Christmas, and gifts wrapped so beautifully, awaiting the unveiling on Christmas morning. He tiptoed around the tree, studying the presents and shaking many of them, thinking so intently about them and what they might hold. He was left with a profound impression of how much stuff there was and how many have so little.

As generations grow and change, such memories bring such pleasure as new ones are added and build upon one another – intertwining and stacking with beauty and care in the same way the gifts do, awaiting unveiling.

Making memories as we share each other’s company, getting a glimpse into each other’s lives as we honor the year’s passing and the new year beginning. “This is where we are now,” we say, silently.  “Isn’t it amazing!”

What each life means. My six-year-old niece, so full of joy, is a gift to me too, each time I am in her presence – as all children are.  I am reminded of the pure joy of being, and the happiness that is our true birthright. We share what is ours, if we truly enjoy life and appreciate what it means to give and receive, and love grows. Love is how we are designed to live and to grow, together, whether in physical presence or not. The energy of who we are, as love, lingers and lives, throughout the days, nights, throughout the year, until we meet again and whenever we meet, whomever we meet and become, if we are willing to accept it and share it.  Honoring (living) love as our greatest birthright and tradition is the greatest gift I can imagine. Choosing to love satisfies our soul and spirit like nothing else too. This may seem obvious, but what is obvious to me is what the world needs now is love, sweet love. Knowledge of the truth of love is an eternal gift to any mind.

Last night we watched a 2012 recording of the awarding of the Gershwin Prize to Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Among other wonderful performances, the program included Bacharach singing What The World Needs Now. A perfect tribute, and true always.

Satisfaction

What can she “get away with”?

I’ve read this from critics about a virtuoso classics scholar who takes myths and writes new ones based on the structures of the old ones. What’s to get away with, when we are building on structures with meaning? Garnering awards on the one hand and being asked such questions on the other.

Artists of all kinds are asked these questions – or the critics, the public, ask them. What does it mean to “get away with”?

To me, the getting-away-with, in its best light comes from pushing a line of accepted tradition or story or image or belief a little beyond, or sometimes far beyond, where it has settled, and still gaining respect for the integrity of the internal form of creation, the life still humming. This is not crafting a machine, elegant as it may be, but the nourishing of a thought-form, which lives as it is designed and created  and which lives further through the interaction of sharing it – the reading, the seeing, the verbalization, the expectation and breathless anticipation then the birth, the ogling, the possibilities set free and the imaginations excited.

The art of “getting away with” shows when respect is earned through the expression – the individual power of the energy expression, the example of living and breathing form.

Turn to me, she says, though her expression is stoic. The playfulness is inherent, visible in the glow and the intimate knowledge when seen. Watch.

Perhaps Nelson Mandela did this too.  His mischievous nature and quick, bright, warm smile did not belie but was part of the ramrod straight, steel-willed man who was constantly open to examining his life and the purpose, the objectives for which he lived. He knew that the purpose of life was so profound, the purpose of what we devote our lives, our energies to, is so profound that to be willing to commit our energies totally to it, to living this primary focus is to be willing to die for the same purpose.  Our commitment to life and death is equal, as our honoring of change and growth and freedom is complete. The commitment is not separate, but total. And without playfulness, and a sense of humor about ourselves and life, joy is not complete.

Enlightenment of our minds from our heart’s total intention to love and to contribute to the external common and greater good is one of the greatest purposes we can have and live as human beings.

Does how we define freedom change with the times, with events in our lives? Isn’t this one definition of learning?

As Mandela said, yesterday I was a “terrorist.” Today I am accepted as a freedom fighter. More todays and he is accepted as a leader, president, even symbol. Today we have a history to view through many lenses and with many voices and visions. What we choose defines us.

How do we choose/decide except through the living?

Choice by choice, and the strength that comes from that freedom, brings us the power that is inherent in experience, the joy and sorrow bundled together with sparkles and tears, endurance and infinite patience.

Sinking, Rising, Kneading, Knowing

J

ust start, Maria heard. The temples that were the trees let in harmony as the sun caressed and stressed the importance of its rays with the heat of life. We awoke with the brightness nearly blinding and watched transfixed as the light changed moment by moment as the sun traveled across the sky and the blanket of horizon deepened and moved and opened itself to the dark of night and the slivering moon with its silvery light.

We learn to roll with the punches of life, and as we do we learn that the punches are the tides of change.

Maria knew that all change would come to her as courage if only she was patient enough. She had learned that to wait is an art for the mind. Waiting is not always a passive act. Active waiting of an alert mind is a mind learning to be alert, to be open to the opportunities that present themselves in the smallest of ways.

Mark is the man she waits for, though he does not know it yet. She feels that within him is the fulfillment of many dreams, though she is not able to enumerate them.

To write each day is akin to being alert to one’s thoughts, to being open to the script that our thoughts, words, and behaviors become. Each page is a day of our life, and the script we live as we write. The skin of our body is our power grid, our solar panel, our sensor, our love. For some, our tattoo parlor, our body armor.

As Maria sits at her computer to write, her fingers hovering above the keys, she knows that each channel in her mind is awaiting expression. Which is ready to know itself in this new moment, to add to all of the experience she has expressed in her being of life?

I remember the smell of yeast, of bread baking, the way the dough moved as I kneaded it, the way the salt smelled and the way the oven seemed ready to swallow each offering and give it back in golden loaves. This repetitious act, in and out of the oven, sliding in, pulling out, became a rhythm she loved. The steadiness of it had its own hypnotic motion, and the ease with which all moved together to complete the motion was a wonderful reminder to her of the connective tissue of all of life. Each part of that cycle has its place, its excited addition to the ritual of life that bread reminds us of.

She saw his growing beard, almost a symbol of quick growth even in drought.  There is something to his scratching at the hair growing just under his chin – both an itch and a distraction that occupies thoughts that may seek to go elsewhere, into new virgin ground.

I am the person I am made to be, she thought to herself. Cake-maker, dog-walker, ephemera-lover.  There is so much to hold in the skull that holds my brain of quivering mass, the dark hair like my mother’s that clothes the bones of my head.

 Dance, dance, the lightfish say, as my dreams come back and forth, full of the memory of water and of sinking and rising, of bread rising and falling, of volcanoes building earth and organism and heat and cold into an inimitable creation of explosion, hot lava rocks spewing like a mixer throwing cocoa batter like paint onto the walls and beyond.

Mark is a sauntering personality, wary and unsure except full of ideas and all he has heard, read, and relates to. His sharp eyes show tears, happiness easily yet fleetingly. His thoughts search his brain database, aiming for relations, curious about people’s faces, full of his own talk.

Sebald said once that he did not consider himself a writer. More like the writing is a dedication, an obsession – building a model of the Eiffel Tower with matchsticks. Exploring the nuances of the fog of the past, which reveals pathways along the moors and the cobblestone streets as the writing happens.

Maria remembers Sebald’s words, the “highway hypnosis” of the kind he mentions and explores – our being hypnotized by what we call life, the pull of sadness that is our destructive nature as we wander in a deep forest of glimmering light.

Mark would talk about this for a while, no doubt – his remembering all kinds of details of his life, throwing out bits and pieces of his parents, his siblings, days at school, the chalkboard, the keyboard, the bright blue car he drove and the sun glinting from the sparkling hood which made him feel happy and powerful. They were pieces, though, not with a fully fulfilled sense of life that let him feel he was born to be powerful, not beaten down, not having to prove that he earned the sparkling blue happiness as he lived, as he loved.

This is Maria’s view of him, even as she laughs with him, loves his tugging at his beard, at his slight pot belly, at his eager curiosity which flags easily but remains.

Bring me one more order, she calls to her friend – I can make one more cake today! Her latest joy is this German Chocolate Surprise, which has all the expected ingredients and also organic oats, coconut, and some buttercream with raspberries to add new surprise. The textured flavors were delightful to a lover of such things.

We are all heart, she says to her satisfied customer who calls, gushing over the Valentine’s Day cake she ordered especially for her one great love. Even he loved it! Her customer exclaimed. He couldn’t stop staring at it. Said he never thought about cake-making as an art before, except wedding cakes. There’s a lot more to life than weddings, I said. Think of everyday as a merging, as lists of mergers happening and lining up to happen as moments tick by. Bidding happens. Celebrating, weeping, highs, lows, and the drips, drops, beams, rush and touch of life- just watch. Listen. Learn.

Sebald said he was hardly interested in the future. We can be captured by illusions of the past. The past can tell us everything we need to know, if we open our eyes and keep them open except when we are sleeping. Then our many eyes will keep recording and we will awaken to more upon morning.

Maria touches Mark when they pass in the hallway. He looks up, distracted. She smiles into his eyes, reaching for that past which makes him up, the illusions which shine, the glimmers of truth which are so playful and ready.

Have your cake and eat it, too. She smiles to herself, but all who know will see it shining from her diamond mind. Mark tugs at his beard, deep in thought.

###

After Reading Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson

After Reading Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson

To remember

the lavaman and his other skin,

the gold burn like enveloping

the sun, what bursts he can 

hold

growing bold

and maybe a little

afraid-

asking for those who may be curious,

and bold, a

little afraid, to pay cents

to touch his golden skin, to know

a little of him, this passion for

substance and for naming

objects by name, for what

they are, at least for this moment

in hopes and time

and open-aired graciousness

from the faint memory of 

what human can mean,

can be

fragments float in, up,

gently, if wondered about

and the mind, with love,

invites them.

In this, his case

the red, the wings, the

otherworldly things, with what

sun buried on the inside,

consciously claiming the inside

as "mine"!

as lines are defined

and become known.

Thinking.

We create a “rule,” based on a belief – a forecast, prediction, hypothesis, which suits the reality we want to see, to create, to live. The “rules” usually follow the collective consciousness belief, within each individual and the greater group or culture or country or world. The rule becomes law as we make it happen. Those who don’t conform to or believe in the law challenge the law. This creates the tug-of-war of holding true to the law to keep “order” (known to some as status quo) and the challenging of the law to not have to conform to what we don’t believe in or think we don’t believe in because we don’t understand – it doesn’t make sense to us. The intricacies of laws that we create as we navigate the vagaries of our minds, the lessons that we have learned and need to learn, reveals the wormholes, the paths, the “mapping” of our minds as we live and create, create and live.

There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

Thanks to caring friends excited to be going on vacation to the beach, and who love “family time,” I was able to spend some wonderful days by the ocean in great company.  Via the internet, I just listened to a “flash-mob” small orchestra in a city square, prompted by a little girl dropping a coin into a black-tied, bald bassist’s upturned hat. How we choose to “spend” our coins, our time, our energies can bring beautiful surprises full of music of all kinds. Sitting on the balcony at the hotel room, 16 floors up, looking at the endless water, feeling the wind from the sea that is like no other, I felt my whole body smiling.

Such a sense brings Magritte to my mind. The modern image, poetry for poetry’s sake, the juxtaposition of layers of life, the symbols that beget symbols and march forward into a world not yet seen yet imagined as each image comes to life. The ocean tides remind me. The laughter that comes with friends sharing life, the moments as they spring up, pass, fill, march forward, ease into a night and day, the sun shining, clouds hazing over water, the bright movement of bodies of all sizes happy to move over the sand bridge to the sea.

These song lyrics came to mind, too. Written by Richard and Robert Sherman for Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress, commissioned in 1964 for the World’s Fair: “There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day.”

Being at the ocean invites such delirious optimism, the constant smiling that happy faces and happy music brings. Hearing the rumbling of motorcycles on the street far below, mingling with the sound of waves just on the other side of the boardwalk, seeing the empty carousel rides with their bright colors- all gave me a renewed image of the celebrations of being alive in so many ways. Like the review introducing the Museum of Modern Art’s Fall survey show of Magritte’s Art, this trip for me was good, solid fun. What can be better than that?