Haunted by Waters

photo by Steve Kye

"But when I am alone in the half light of the canyon all existence seems to fade to a being with my soul and memories. And the sounds of the Big Black Foot River and a four count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."
from Norman Maclean's beautiful book, A River Runs Through It

"My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things - trout as well as eternal salvation - came by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy."

"Reverend Maclean: Each one of us today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding."

A River Runs Through It

My friend Steve went fly fishing in Arkansas on a side trip from work. Ever read Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It (1976)? Maybe you saw the film directed by Robert Redford, with a truly boyish Brad Pitt, Craig Sheffer, and more very able actors. I highly recommend both. Both gave me a new appreciation of the poetry in wading in water and knowing fish.

There is true beauty in water that runs so cold and clear and strong. Think of it: fingers twisting flies, the whir of the line in air and radiant with light, the dance of light across the river, a silence surrounding and enveloping and carrying all molecules of water and fins with it.

I see a man squatting by the river's edge, smooth stones in his pocket, his cuffed pants wet and long. He is crouching with the weight of a caravan on his back, memories of gaunt-eyed faces peering through windows that rattled. Greek gods people his dreams when he watches running river water, and their every form appears - thunder, lightning, serpent, quail. So much became about ravishing and conquest, the beliefs in fates like a moody wind. Here, the water removes the chaos he associates with air, since he left that burning house so many years ago. Firemen had carried him out, while he called for his sister, Sophie. Her face was black with ash, but he never heard a cough sound so good.

When he thinks of her, he smiles, and those years between disappear, faint as dust. He puts his palms in the water and feels the current against his skin. He closes his eyes and listens: crackling of leaves somewhere, birds chirping, the slight sound of heavy water moving. The stones in his pocket are from that driveway. They've been around.

One of Many Leaves

“Behind a pointed tip, the minuscule embryo of a potential tree waited, backed up by enough protein and starch to generate a first root, a tiny stem, and its first four leaves. Yet, for all the promise of this crop of acorns, life would be sparingly given; fewer than one in ten thousand would ever develop into an oak tree. “ (Biography of a Tree, 5)


Georgette and I walked by the lake once as a blue sailboat went by, gently enough as though it were not real but only a painting that had changed my life. She turned to me with those lilting looks, those deep-set eyes that had no end, and she was without sentimentality, only full of the memory of those moments gone by.

I used to move my hands that way, as though I was conducting music, and I was lost in my own world. What does this mean, to be “lost in our own world”? When I opened my eyes, I saw clouds then, and the blue of sky was the ocean that covered the world.

There were no endings, no real beginnings. I was a boy in her hands, then a man. She was a young girl in mine, then a woman, a mother. Then I became the child with curls, the girl seeking her mother-love, the girl giggling and sad, the girl with dirty hands, and a loud voice.

The sailboat continued by, tranquil. We continued walking. We held hands. The sun was bright. I breathed it all in, and the sparks and salt that flew from the sun and clouds were like stars in the brightest dark sky. The trees reached for me as they do. To disappear into green had been my dream. Now the green came from me, one of many leaves.

Kid Sparrow Loves

Last night we watched La Vie En Rose, a film about the life of Edith Piaf, in the Varsity Theater across from UNC. The Franklin Street theater is small, with an air of lots of use over years, though not stale. Upstairs leading to the restrooms are a few seats, a smart set-up with bright colors that say retro fresh. My friend had a lemon-mint ice cream combination that was a taste burst of sweet-fresh brighter than the theater itself. Seeing the film brought back memories of grad. School when my friend Tom and I would listen to Edith Piaf sing as we sat in his dark living room. Jacques Brel, old theater set pieces, were conjured up by some of these listenings, and the drama of them lingered in the air. “The Little Sparrow” had lung power and a voice that championed little girls, “little people,” common ground, the force of being alive – very early on, after many had heard her for the first time and were astonished and pleased, an artist admirer told her, You are an immense artist” (en Francais), and she answered, amid the New Year’s hubbub and laughter, “I’m wearing high heels.” Her face and gestures became so distinctively part of her presence that they seem sometimes exaggerated. Those stunning blue eyes seem both purely direct in their gaze and wide open as an ocean, to the vulnerabilities of life and all the winds that blow. What a presence, what a life, what a look, what a voice she had. Moments linger, such as when she first sang, at 9 years old when her father, a “contortionist” was trying to make money for them by twisting up his limbs for passers-by in the street, and the lingerers wondered what talent she had. Her father prodded her to act, so the audience wouldn’t leave, and she stepped up and opened her mouth to sing the French anthem with a sound and strength that brought slow smiles and claps from the gathering listeners. As they sat on a beach an interviewer asked her – what would you tell a woman, a child, any advice – Love, she answered. “Je ne regrette rien,” she sang, at the end.

At dinner we had been talking about choices, how and why we make the choices we make, what it means to use our mind as a sense, to live with our senses as the life force of love that we are designed for. “There but for the grace of choice go I,” my friend said, and we laughed at the depth of this thought rippling in the pond of our lives and lifetimes.

We scan for details of a personal nature when we want to know more. When I think of Edith Piaf and her life, as it is depicted, I scan with my mind as fingers the scenes and ripples I feel as I watch and think. Those hands she had to be encouraged to use, that voice which kept her alive. She shouted often, dismissive of many. Yet she loved deeply. Care was there in moments that stood out in that hard-scrabble early life, and the tragedies that followed. She was bent and sedated by the time she died (cancer), still young but also ancient. She was 48.

I have to sing at least one song, she said (or something like it), or I will forever lose faith in myself – this near her death-time, her collapsing, remembering her fondest career moments as every time the curtain rose. Think of it: An actress acting a part written for the “real woman,” characters chosen as the supporting cast, to represent that supporting entourage of hers, faithful friends. We accept these, moved to tears and more, so why do we question our reappearance on stage after stage, in life after life, with supporting casts of our own? A good moment appears when Edith dismisses an orchestra she had kept waiting, and a Radio official, distraught, says, You can’t do that! She plants her palms on her hips and says, Why not? What’s the point of being Edith Piaf if I can’t? It’s a good scene that sounds a resounding chord. We’re so accustomed to operating by rules and regulations as fact that we forget we created them, that they are not Nature’s laws. We choose what we do. The energy we are becomes part of our every environment, as our environment is what we create.

A friend told me she called another to ask him to come over and join their swimming – what? At 8:30am, this early? He said. Is there a rule about that?, she said to me. Her son remarked about not having to mow the lawn. We use this “competition” mode in every way. I see this better now. With every thought I use that way my energy adds to the bucking-horse energy, the bull-rider out of the gate at the rodeo, with the crowd watching and a stopwatch ready. I listen to remarks about ex-wives and husbands, another friend’s refusal to respond to her ex-husband because he is being judgemental or instructive. I understand her forceful defense of not wanting to be criticized. Not being told she is not doing something right, not good enough. Also, her impetus to want to “stand up for herself,” when she feels her own structures of life (marriage) have not held the weight she thought they did for her. When each thought is new, the world is fresh, and there is no stale air in our interactions. We are free to choose. Je ne regrette rien.

Love, Truth and Perception speaks to these changes that free us from these beliefs. “The emotions that we feel for ourself will always be our definition of the love that we feel for another.” (LTP, 175)

“The intellect and ego is judging itself in relationship to its ability to be loved by others. But being loved by another eases the sadness, pain, and longing only temporarily before our loss is again triggered by the soul and spirit mind saying, ‘ you still haven’t found me’ as our soul and spirit seeks to become one with the intellectual mind.” (LTP, 173)

“But we will forever seek to fulfill our unquenchable thirst for the beauty of love, because love is the hidden power of our life. “ (174)

Our knowing that love is essential to our life comes from our soul motivation, which keeps us searching.

“Our perception of love is accepted from the reflection of our self-image that is reflected back to us from the veil of the ego.” (174) We do not perceive that the love which we physically seek is in truth the love of ourself and our life. The vision that we see of ourself is what we will seek. If we see ourself as physical, we will seek physical love.

My reflection was an image of a “strong female,” i.e., equal to a male, a “male in a female body.” Because I did not see myself as a “strong female” - despite all evidence to the contrary, I did not believe there was such a "thing," and did not even know I believed it! What does it mean to be "strong," willful, free? What does it mean to find your own voice?

“For many individuals who have continued their unexplainable search for true love, there is no logical explanation within their mind to explain the motivation for their actions. They simply feel an overwhelming need to continue their search and they follow their sense of ‘need.’” (174) The external love that we seek is the physical symbol of our internal path as our intellect seeks to unite with the love of our spirit.

One reviewer of Le Vie En Rose wrote, "Piaf's will to live is inspiring even in the face of self-destruction that makes Judy Garland's own battles with alcohol and drugs seem minor in comparison." Marion Cotillard's performance is incredible. She was born in Paris, in 1975. She aged realistically in the film, in hours, through torment, triumph, and with power. Love, Edith said. We are all connected within our spirit consciousness and the spirit never fails to honor that love.

Birds' Eye Views

pic by PIJ (C Buffington)




pic by Dwain Ritchie

Revelations in Ordinary Things

I do not seek to be obscure, Magritte said. I simply want to be understood via ordinary things, and those ordinary things I choose change with each moment. The “Song of Love” painted in oil by Chirico in 1914 changed my view of how I entered my dreams and how I came into the mornings and afternoons awake, with history intact or broken into fragments with luminescent colors.

I met my Georgette at the fair too, and although I did not know immediately that she was to be the love of my life, I felt the atmosphere change around her when we met. We exchanged words the way others exchange gifts, the ring to signify marriage, joining. That is why I wonder and rasp when I think of the mistreatment we give symbols and how they, as we, are misunderstood. What is real is distorted only our vision. Our education of vision has left us to see umbrellas as only a function of bouncing raindrops back into the air with our heads under them. Once we begin to think of an umbrella, and especially when we see one in the quiet of really looking at it, dry, our minds are full of every form and association that may follow – the last time we ran through rain with a lover, or someone we anticipated loving into an eternity we could not yet foresee but could feel, the way raindrops feel fat and full while they are falling; one view from a late life as we stood on the veranda beneath the eaves listening to the rain as the horizon heaved like a tangible and largely quiet ocean; of jumping into puddles while only 3 feet tall, dragging an umbrella given by our mothers. You see how the images float, fly, make their way? Hasty viewing is as disruptive as conversations cut off by a lost cell phone signal; and to have already forgotten that such signals are new is already to have forgotten a path of history as technology grows.

When did I begin to think of symbols as “symbols”? I shunned this later because I came to know the things themselves as the energy of how I moved them in my mind, the way they and I explored together their meanings, like the treasure chests of old wars, and even the paintings said to be found hidden under bridges and behind locked doors. Wars make us seal up art, and what we knew as art turns into propaganda until we change our seeing. What is propaganda? The mysteries of the visible world suffice to show themselves as our minds move with them through time. I tip my hat to the smooth Greek face that stands giant sentinel over so much silence, so much that is hidden and cold as stone, yet so full of the heart of our mind. The gloves that hang in “The Song of Love” tell their own colorful story.

Georgette, I ask you, was our dance the ferris wheel you remembered? I took your hand one day and remembered the gate through which we passed, and that gate opened into a few years’ absence, then into a lifetime of longing and laughter.

With words I reach to you, knowing yet that the realms in which our world works are beyond this ink, and beyond the turnstiles of any local fair. Subordinating visual images to thought, or vice versa, is nonsense. With you I only aim to make myself more visible, as I am.

"AntiGravity: The 2007 Tour"

When I read Ginia Bellafante's NY Times theater review, "Where Bodies Are Perfect and Not Very Earthbound" (June 29) out of sync with other more recent reviews, I landed on her phrase, "the mood is loose" and stayed there for a while. Nan Melville for The New York Times - “Girl Power,” one of the segments of “AntiGravity: The 2007 Tour.”

She writes that the show bears no narrative, message or commentary, and the director says there is nothing to "figure out," yet there was a great deal she tried to figure out. Then she writes, "I wondered, for instance, how it could be that nearly every female dancer onstage seemed able to contort her body into a vertical split while few people I know can muster the flexibility to pick up a fallen bar of soap in the shower." This is a great description I think of how we think about what is "real" and not, and why. Airbrushing our way through our thoughts and deeds as we present them to ourselves and others for review keeps us from truly appreciating the energy and act of creation itself that is so beautiful.

This fits with what I've read about Sarah Ruhl too, the playwright who is being kept busy these days according to reviews. Her new play "Eurydice" was reviewed by Christopher Isherwood in the Times also in June with a headline of "The Power of Memory to Triumph Over Death." "The fabled creatues of 'Eurydice' may look like people you've seen on the subway, but they speak in images plaucked form the blue sky of their mythic imaginations." Shut up and get used to being dead, the blunt-spoken and familiar chorus of stones keep telling her. Constantly we are reminding ourselves of the power of our memory that transcends each single incident in our life, why the ordinary moments are what create the buoyancy within us as we swim in this ocean that is life. Smart, snappy, simple language, but full of the twists and turns which show the paths we take as we learn to know ourselves and what true love is. Risk and loss are continually painful if we have no knowledge of the true value of memory. I heard that voice in my head for years - "shut up and get used to being dead," even as I felt parts of me were alive. It's a very strange feeling without the knowledge of the classical structure and form that such a life story follows. Without form and structure that is well-defined, myth loses its way and such imagery is merely a forest of what feel like ghosts or guests you'd like to get rid of but don't know how without burning down the house.

Eurydice's quest is the same as mine, the same human quest to truly know who we are and what we want. The perfection Gina I's review reveals, in these wordless bodies, is one more image of appreciation of the simplicity of this beauty. The "why" reveals itself. We just have to know who we are to see it.

The One and the Many

At this point in time as in all others we can always assimilate our creation with an other, for if we are not that one, one would suppose we were connected or thinking the same thing at the same moment. As history always shows it is only the one not the many- this too will change as we all invent that which has already been thought of or even brought to fruission- how does one spell that- grammar does not always come along with the knowledge of that subject as someone is always trying to perfect something which has no need for perfection as it is always in the mind of the beholder (GOD, of course). Tennis anyone? That is why technology is sometimes foreign for one drawing on that which we have already conquered or perhaps will have no long term need for- since memory also helps us to see what the future holds for us. (G.L.)


I’m thinking again about what it means to create the present and future from our past – the creativity of the past is obsolete, already gone, “frozen” in time – captured as an image, fixed only in that way. Looking into the picture, its creation, the urges of its inspiration, the beauty of its textures, layers, colors, movement (its energy) opens its infinite experiences, “meanings.” Building upon the past (obsolete) creates for us the circumstances of never being able to go beyond the past. If obsolete means no longer useful, the urge is to create anew, and this is the sense of life eternal, seeds, sprouts, ocean waves. I am gaining a new understanding of independence.

If I relate to all I am, all we have been, as equal, I have no favoritism, no attachment or “possession,” so no need to be envious or try to force one hand or another one way or another. This is the energy of competition and inequality which is the rumbling of war. My urge is to love, to join hands.

To look at all of life energy as one is to know we are one.

When I have felt the jealousy of possessiveness, I know it is because I am crouching before a pebble on the beach, having been drawn by its energy to and within me, and caught with this attention to the one stone and forgetting the roar of the sea, the movement of the tide. The roar and tide continue. The pebble has its markings from sand and tide, a certain shine or trail of dirt.

Friends I have known before have written or spoken fragments of words which make this tide more visible within me, just as my own thoughts and feelings do. The comfort of knowing we were comrades at times, known, unknown – the comfort being the continuity of the stream more than the familiarity of a role. This is the mind-tide turning on the movement and depth of the sea-life rather than a fixation forever on the one pebble, beached, or half hidden in sand. The bond of brotherhood, of “la familia,” with a friend helps me recognize how the sense of “love” was known by its fierce loyalty, this the “unbroken circle.” This is why any sense of “betrayal” was so intensely felt. Rejection, betrayal were unforgivable. They were fixed in stone, forever cast into memory. This is how we create our present and future from the past. So to choose “other than what was” is a betrayal to a “possessed” (ego-controlled) mind. “Other than what was” means change. To know we create each new memory as we live is to know that we are each pioneers, explorers, creators, sharing journeys.

What is true love? Not to cling to the raft of the past, but to know the love within us is real, and infinite, eternal. There is nothing greater. To remember there is a raft and an ocean, over and over, the beauty. This is perhaps where the “greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friend” comes from – the depth of love when we love our neighbor as ourself and have no need to cling to life as on the raft away from a country which oppresses us, not knowing whether we will live or die. The life we cling to is the love that creates and emanates within and from us. This is my true home, and on this plot of land is where I come to know what fertility and growth truly mean.

“Possession” means controlled by something other than ourself. It’s ironic how our definition of possession in one basic historical way is by “demons” – yet it is our beliefs, our dependence and worship, loyalty to those things other than ourself (our perception of Life itself) that define possession, to “own.”

Saturdays at Saxapahaw

The children at the Saturday Saxapahaw Market making their train are fun to watch. I love being able to enjoy the afternoon or early evening there, with fresh produce and treats, music, and this leg-parade dodging little ones as they roll in the clover.

rivermillvillage
satinsax

Explicit Growth

“Our thinking mind controls our internal process of thinking and knowing as well as our reflective physical behavior. Therefore our thinking mind cannot and will not accept the Intelligent Design of our Spirit Consciousness, until it is willing to open itself to thinking as an internal process of self-reflection as it studies the philosophy of its own explicit growth with each life experience in each physical lifetime.” (4, Spirit Consciousness: Our Intelligent Design by Kathy Oddenino)


Certain words conjure energy images that teach me how to know the energy of my reflections. When I have felt a thin veil of “resentment,” the word “prelate” came to my mind with it, and I have this energy-image of a man moving in just such a way, in robes, his hands in a familiar pose, that quiet dignity that is a reinforced dignity, a more physical stacked-up sense of dignity than a true internal strength. There is a smugness in him, mixed with the satisfaction of truth, so the process of change is mixing the mortar of it all.

This is the way he moved, smoothly but not quite gliding, because gliding brings with it a naturalness of movement that is poetic, that recalls leaves, water, wind. When taken this way, his moving revealed an effort underneath, a wooden way just visible that belied that assurance that may first be taken for dignity and the reserve of patience and kindness.

As the public spokesperson for a body such as the “world church,” this man had assumed a mantle with the weight of centuries, but in ways he did not yet understand. The mouthpiece that took sounds already formed and strived to carry them forth into the world moved slowly as a long train full with cargo.

What is his explicit growth in that moment? Moving down that wide road or aisle, smoke rising, the incantations low and steady, he is hypnotized in his own robe and miter-walk, the steady drumbeat of time. The air within and around him has a hint of sulfur, and the strong scent of oiled wood.

Then there is lightness, a freshness I see, with a young woman moving through groves of trees in early morning sunlight. She is happy, with dark curls, alone. The dappling sunlight bathes her face and her bare arms. There is nothing else to the world in that moment but her happiness, which encompasses and comes from the pulse of the earth, the air, the speaking green of those trees.

The realm between these scenes is the energy of change which comes with explicit growth and the internal self-reflection of thinking.

Echoes

“The origin of the map is lost to history.”

“For years I had been the greyhound chasing the rabbit of permanent solutions.” (37, Paul Hawken)

“The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.” (16, Rachel Carson)

A woman named Sarah reluctantly accepted the idea that came to her for the millionth time – she could save only herself. Why reluctantly? She wondered. It was as though each time the thought came, it came with the roll that made the hill she tumbled down as a little girl, gathering clover. Or it came with the pebbles she saw on the drive ground into glass by the tires of the car she rode in. The sky was bright with clouds and shattered with sun. Leaves from every tree fluttered in her, and they felt like butterflies. With each moment the thought of renewal, of rising from the yeast of Earth, of the groundwater always on the move, rose in her until she felt the sky itself inside her. Sometimes the thought came as a dream, and she felt tiny bones break and blood form, feathers rustle. Speckled eggs rested in nests, watched over, and heartbeats began. With wings to fly, she floated through history, stepped through battlefields made of grass and sometimes four walls, and the throat of history opened with its eyes for her, the yawn and groan and laughter of all voices calling out to be heard. The sharp voices were like swords. When she hung her head, she saw her feet webbed, she counted coins, she knew the hemp that made the ropes, the cloth that formed the sweeping sails. Overland, over the endless sea which tossed and turned, her organs and entrails, every cell, felt its journey through time, finding the poetry and pain in birth, the perfection like a song in each death. Was she ever alone? There was no time without this thought of spring eternal, the ground water always on the move. Poisoning one spring poisons all. The mind must know how it moves and changes, through shadows and bright sun, with the groundwater moving so deep and far.

Reluctantly, it seemed, because somehow the lingering sense of loss hung on to her shoes, her feet, her joints, and when she slept, her heart seemed to open like an accordion. She awoke on a raft in bright sun, gentle waves rippling into a past and future beyond her horizon. No alarm clock needed, time clicked away while caves opened, rocks started avalanches, coral reefs formed. Reluctance turns to liquid crystal, glittering, even with twisting roots.

A boy she remembers touched her like she was something new, a first wonder. Another’s voice came to her like the wind, whispering, whistling, humming, even as a metronome, sweet as strings. The man he became had eyes that welcomed the world in – she saw him in cabins deep in woods, scribbling on pads, whittling. Wood smells, shavings, branches were strong, then switched to steel girders blinding with sun as they turn on a cable, strong as a lullaby. Plate glass, concrete, stone embedded with ground glass and more, the elements surround him, planed differently than what he remembers. Then the sister she remembers, the echo of love which made her lean into the dance with her eyes closed as if she could scarcely believe what she held, this simple beauty of a moment when such a homecoming held together. She remembered, then, what another friend said, with that wish in her voice – My mother, my husband, never there to just hold me and say, Everything will be alright. Sarah’s own mother, a French aristocrat a few generations removed, would wave her silk scarf and say, Ah, life is much more than a dream.

The wounds we hold within us heal, cell by cell, thought by thought, love easing the skin together. She will pay tribute, plant a flag along the way, note the garden path, cry when she feels the heartache that lingers through time, looking for the History of Everything. It’s a red book, and very useful. The pages are blank, and each thought fills them with feeling. Ink spills over like water and runs like a river into holding ponds while we study causes and effects. She has the book of life always ready now, by the piano, or beneath the tree branches that hang heavy. The alphabet of life is always ready to be read.

Each day she drives, her car windows down, and the green and heat bring the world home to her. As her friend cut flowers and gathered them into bouquets, she went to a place inside with a meadow which held memories of every friend, some forever fresh.

Milltown Memories

Shadows cross over. I read about a man abandoned as a boy, hiding under floorboards after his father and mother were bullied and left in blood, not knowing where he was. They dreamed on, not knowing until beyond that moment, into more. Moments are imprinted as they pass – today Sarah sat on the hillside, in clover, with a plastic wine cup, a cheese wedge, crumbles. That man, Mark, sat nearby, plate full. The cropped hair, that glance that held what, the clouded over memory of labors of love, home renovation of historic proportions, fireplaces large as closets, heavy doors, thick floors, walls thick with bricks. The whisper of a held hammer, the wind blowing, now the river sound in his ears as he sleeps with windows open in the high loft of an old mill nearby.

This is how memories go.
A waterwheel turns, and the sound of endless drops together makes a roar, then a river, then a flow of wind somehow that brings birds and memories of their flight.

Sarah remembers the first day she saw him, the way those eyes narrowed when they looked into hers, from across a small hill, with people in between. Such a glance can fell trees, slicing through trunks, or winding up into branches and pulling with a force that is undeniable. She smiled, though, because there is no more fear of the forest and only a deep ocean she hears inside of her, that is as expansive as the sky full of stars. Her little girl self skipped and rolled with the other children down the hillside, in and out of shafts of sunlight backed by the bright green grass and the sound of music from strings and the lively voices on the bandstand. Her mind twirled with the laughter of the children, and the deep well of it inside her. She could pinpoint the day they married, the way the hem of her dress dragged in the dirt, the way her flowers smelled, the way his face seemed to be absorbing the whole day as a lifetime itself, until death do us part.

She knew their children intimately of course; the way Jenny’s hair fell across her face, the way her smile crinkled into a bright open sunflower face, the way Jane’s curls dropped from her head, bouncing in light. Moments like these passed in and out of her screen, her body, and she sipped the wine from the plastic cup, nodding with the beat and hearing more.

There is always more, and the night air thickens before the rain. That woman, Sarah, remembers the way her hands felt as she opened the door to their house that last time. A dull gold key with deep ridges, before he was gone.

Mark looks up to the grey sky, and he smiles a little, with a laugh about coming home again, only a few miles from where he was born.

They will go on. And remember nothing except the way this coming home feels, this coming and going.

Kathy's new book

At last - check it out, seekers of knowledge and those just plain hungry for truth.

www.lulu.com

My Minority Report

Have you seen Spielberg's The Minority Report (2002)? I happened in on it recently, well into it, and watched to the end as Tom Cruise as Det. John Anderton, Max Von Sydow, and more streamed, leapt, and dragged to an ending that somehow still left lingering that great resounding truth of "You still have a choice." Pre-crime, pre-cog, faces with expressions that captured both the plastics of synthetic ("not real") and human emotion, and the snappy suits of both past and future - what a whirl we live in.

After I saw the movie I had an experience that reminded me of the challenges we have in opening ourselves to the fact that we are both energy and matter, and the way we have both worshiped and used "pre-cogs" among us. As I looked into someone's eyes as they streamed through lifetimes of memories like first a back-lit screen then the water of time right here and now, the pre-cog image came back to me - that movie pre-cog shivering, crouching, seeing, waiting, hoping. Three of us stood by a swimming pool after dark and the frogs were loud as a train symphony. The pool was cool blue. As I leaned backwards into the pool complete with clothes, I thought, we change the future as we change the past. We change the present and our eyes change with us, thankfully without the retinal scans and the awful eyeball replacement and having to carry those orbs around in a ziplock and worry about losing them. Languages come and go like threads, ropes we pull on or tie together. The words identify themselves as we choose them, let them be, and the language of love nudges them gently into view.

This dark is very different. The Minority Report in the film refers to "alternate futures." I've seen it - choice by choice, moment by beautiful moment.

Infinity Plus

The Air is Electric with Elephant

“The air is electric with elephant.” Joy Williams, Safariland

The accessibility of memory belongs to the care taking of the mother, the long line of songs that tell the story of each feeding, each day dying, each birth from its moment of creation through its tangle of thoughts into tissue and liquid, flesh.

What we forget is how this pattern is made, and how it continues eternally, through time. As my father walks slowly into rooms, lays himself down onto beds, beneath covers, sighing that sigh which is only his and smiling a little in full contentment, I feel every rhythmic move and bent of this elephant line, the dignity and precious nature of life, the nurturing of both flesh and memory. We are triumphant in our small ways, in this contentment of life, when we reach it. Knowing, now, is to remember the long line of generations, in their motion and change, the dignity of bearing and creating each life, linking to more. Even knowing that “matter” is more energy than visible density, even as we see it, we require more “proof,” wood we can knock on, to let our thoughts go, without interference of some kind.

I think of my beautiful mother, her strength and indomitable spirit, all the while as her cells are bombarded by chemicals sent in as special forces, to take out insurgents. I feel the fields of sounds wave as they ripple, and remember that without matter, there is no sound. Matter makes sound? Moments when a worry flutters through like the shadow of a bird across her face, the feelings spread themselves like water, deep, through her, and through all her time. What songs are these, how many verses, voices? Their beauty is eternal. The joy of each moment together, of thoughts touching, of urges and bangs, sparks and waves, brings the colorful changes to light.

Mine are joys specific and general. A friend said one thing she appreciates about how we communicate is that it seems we never have to land. I feel the truth of this and the crest of waves with the rise of air. I have written to find the flow of my life, the threads that make up the beauty of fabric sewn to use, appreciate. The details, like the fruits of the garden – knowing which leaf comes from which seed, the character and life of each breed and presence – determine the flow of life. Now I know this, new. Chemicals carry the messages, the love notes, we write to ourselves every moment, cell to cell, circling, tribe to tribe, cluster to cluster, family to family.

Outside the airplane window, I see a cloud standing free like a giant snowman, and a wisp like a fountain of water spouting. My passion is for mining these trails of life, an explorer at heart, but this time, of artifacts of a different kind. I feel no need to descend into caves and pits with tools and kits to precisely remove dust and centuries of accumulation. This I do internally, following the trails of others in their identifying tracks and making meaning from them in new ways. What a curiously deep satisfaction this is.

I can’t quite reach you,” people have said to me in years gone by. Some clutched more, dug deep, but with different tools. Follow me in, I say, and I’ll do the same with you.

Friends are a gift. "Confusion is resistance to seeing oneself in the energy of another. The vision is not loved if you are not loved by you. Understand you to understand me. Love yoruself to love me. We are one, you and me." Sharing, K.O., 213

How We Know

I don’t suppose it matters, except to me –
And then again, each one in me changing,
Molecule by molecule,
All in how we count ourselves,
Our grains,
Our thoughts,
Our rush of water through time,
Palms cupped to dip and drink.
This moment I’m by a river,
Drying off.
The sun and I shine.
Tomorrow, maybe moss.
Glittering.

Making Memories

I bought this drawing from the Pittsboro General Store one night long ago when Kathy and I visited to hear some music and get some dinner. The drawing hung on the wall above our corner-room table and each time we glanced at it, we smiled. For me, memories of feasting throughout time. I would post the artist's name but am unable to read it completely.


This view is from Fearrington Barn one rainy May morning when I was able to hear Barbara Kingsolver present her new book complete with slides, an introduction to her husband and youngest daughter, and the necessary delight of Nature's treasures. If you haven't read her work, add it to your list for some time, somewhere.

Photos by Friends

White Oak River - Steve K.


Shakori Hills -Dwain R.


Sitting Pretty - Chris B's bird.


My Threesome, & Ginger - Kathy B.

Our Twin Towers, Delta Born

"The Twin towers," my mother and Aunt, were born in Sumner, Mississippi,so this is a nod to family roots and the satisfaction I find in visual trails and portraits of life as we know it, whoever we may be. These links lead to many more. Thank you, cousins, for your contributions to our pleasures.

A native Southerner raised on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta, William Eggleston has created a singular portrait of his native South since the late 1960s. His large-format prints monumentalize everyday subjects. Although he began his career making black and white images, he soon abandoned them to experiment with color technology. The Museum of Modern Art's groundbreaking one-man show of 1976, William Eggleston's Guide, established his reputation as the pioneer of modern color photography.

Here's an online gallery link from Die Welt (premiere German dailiy) in connection with a Munich exhibition, sent on from another cousin: Eggleston and Welt Online

A documentary By the Ways, A Journey with William Eggleston

Delta Dogs at the Delta Blues Museum Photographs by Maude Schuyler Clay 04/12/2007 To: 07/30/2007 - The Delta Blues Museum is pleased to announce the premiere of “Delta Dogs: Photographs by Maude Schuyler Clay." If I were there, I'd definitely visit.

A Little Sumner History

And one more thing: My nephew, Sumner James Martin, and my niece, Ellen Sumner Wiles, are also acknowledged in this string of pearls, this train, this compilation.

Walk This Way

At the Bodies Exhibit yesterday, we read, in big white letters on a smooth grey board, “Disease is a part of life.” My friend and I recoiled. Imagine what words could do if we ate them, I thought, before I tore the page and began to chew. I imagined myself a spy in a strange land, chewing up my origins and mission before the last moment of life, the eclipse of sight with these particular eyes, alert to the dying of the light and eager for the next inhale, the next starburst and wave that is me feeling my way through what I used to call space.

In the beginning was the Word. What once Was feels familiar, begins to be known. My entrails, tongue, the cords, pops, snaps, fountains full of color, show me the earliest signs of life and what I have done to it, what I use it for. Here, outside, plasticene, polymers, the tiny tentacles like coral emblazoned red, blue, and heavily yellow-brown.

Touch me like you know me, a cartoon caption came back to me from another day. Know me as I am. To know me as my nerve bundles, my magnetic fields, is to know me long before we meet with hands and even eyes in those colors we call blue and green and grey and brown. Our proximity, like crossing borders made to change, moves like water moves, the air its own motion and change, wings of words drifting and flapping through.

Who was I to think that scepters and rings, shields and crowns, stamps and spears, guns and missiles could speak for me? The birds of spring and summer sing and flutter through, dive and climb, and the wind that has been building for months has taken on, today, a new weight, an anticipation not so eager but obliged, compelled, called upon to move. Change is here, my heart, and my chest cavity, my ribs, move a little inside. In my mind is chemistry.

I am no prophet or seer, but what I feel has come before, and will again, another day. We are called upon, to know, to simply be ourselves, without trappings hanging from every cave which hide our jewels. There is no salvation in song without the words that we can eat, the apple that began it, the garden we call home.

Another trapeze artist falls to his death. Did you feel it?
A small device blew up in a garage and left one dead. Did you feel it?
A tornado tore through Greensburg leaving broken bits and bodies.
War pounds on, and those confronted steel themselves like old warriors.
Civilians pull their magnetic fields in like capes, mummies, embryos.
My friend’s hands feel every sensation of the air and earth, and the water knows.
There is a rustling, a beauty in the stark clarity of sky, even in this rumbling.

Listen.
Chew.
Swallow.
Breathe.
Touch me like you know me, says the air.
Love me, says the Earth.
Breathe me in, and calm me, says the wind.
Know me as I am.

“The words come out of my hands, not my brain, I write with my hands.”
Philip K. Dick

"I was twelve [in 1940] when I read my first sf magazine…it was called Stirring Science Stories and ran, I think, four issues….I came across the magazine quite by accident; I was actually looking for Popular Science. I was most amazed. Stories about science? At once I recognized the magic which I had found, in earlier times, in the Oz books - this magic now coupled not with magic wands but with science…In any case my view became magic equals science…and science (of the future) equals magic." Philip K. Dick

“Science is a technique where uncreative people use the facts of the past to create. The creation is the result of building upon the past that is known until the present discovers itself.” Kathy Oddenino, Sharing, p. 190

The Bodies Exhibition/

Other People, via Neil Gaiman

I am a fan of Neil Gaiman's arts, and came across this post from his blog that fits in with the Virginia Tech event follow-up. The Red/Gold/Blue is an image from Jamie's site - memory39. Rose photo is Dwain Ritchie's.

Thursday, April 19, 2007 http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/

Here is Neil G's post: Other People

My memories of Virginia Tech are of one perfect day in 1998, when I was wandering around the country for a couple of days with Tori on tour, spending the afternoon at her grandmother's farm and then driving up to Blacksburg for a wonderful evening of watching wonderful music and meeting nice people.

I haven't posted about the Virginia Tech shooting, and wasn't going to. But...

I'm in the UK right now, and it's a long way away, and I'm reading about what happened in newspapers (because I don't turn on TVs in hotel rooms. I don't know why this is, but I don't), still managing to think of this as something that happened, tragically, to Other People. And then I see this, and my heart sinks, because this is the Michael Bishop who I met in 1999 when we were Guests of Honour at World Horror, whose son was a Sandman fan and oh god, and then I click on this, and I get my nose rubbed hard and painfully in the fact that there are no Other People. It's just us.
Jamie Bishop memory39

Kathy Oddenino wrote a great piece on her blog about "Hidden Memories and Mind Control" to help understand events such as the shootings at Virginia Tech. I know this is a new way of thinking about "mental illness," or "memories," and the psychology of us as human beings, and will not make sense to many. For those who find it a gateway to relating to themselves and their own sensory life, and "bigger than life" experiences, this is a real addition to our human education and self-expression. Kathy Oddenino's blog post

I've been reading about Einstein some lately, and how he loved children. Einstein has been quoted as saying, his secret was to "be like a child." He took time to respond to children's letters. I think of how Kathy has explained the ways her parents, particularly her father, responded to her in her creative expressions as a child. I think of my parents and their loving ways of guiding each of us in our explorations of life. Without these memories, who are we?