Marylinn Kelly

Deservingness

2012-01-25T10:00:00.000-08:00

We each, I suspect, have familiar inner bullies, personal quicksand, toxic enemies that sap our will and brave attempts at self esteem. In the past few days, my adversary was unmasked: the sense of not deserving (pick a word) happiness, comfort, joy, convenience or the peace that comes from order.

The circumstance that illuminated this ancient belief was the offer of a gift, something generous, unexpected, by my definition extravagant yet wanted but I found I was unable or unwilling to say, simply, yes. Thank you. It became another round of demon rassling, with the difference being this time I could look the demon in the eye and begin to wonder if it was as powerful as I'd once thought.

At any moment, I have a mental dossier of my shortcomings, evidence, that stretches back practically to quill pens. It certainly pre-dates electric typewriters and the Thermofax. No pages have been misplaced, and if they were, I'm sure there are carbon copies, smudged but legible. A part of me has clung stubbornly to the fiction of lives perfectly led - by others. It is a belief that keeps me tethered and dense, Earth-bound rather than lifting with no small grace like a wired actor in Chinese martial arts movies, Jackie Chan excepted. To soar means escaping our own gravity, those pockets full of rocks and rigid ways of relating to our souls.

I am fortunate to have the counsel, when I need it, of my son, who brings youth and, I can but hope, less baggage to a situation than I. I told him of the offer, I told him of my resistance. He found the right words: you work hard, you deserve it. To my eyes this hard work looks an awful lot like avoidance, farting around, procrastination and sloth. He helped me own that there IS hard work in the process of simply living with some measure of joy, of aspiring to evolve, of reaching out, of stillness and contemplation, of being present. He helped me say yes.

By saying yes, thank you, to the gift, I noticed that certain narrow thinking had widened. I have struggled with disorder much of my adult life. It may have begun as I spent too long in situations which felt helpless and helplessnss has clung to me though the circumstances changed. It doesn't seem as important to know those details as it does to acknowledge that impossible-seeming things became less so. I could envision a gradual step-by-step process to finding order, letting go of things and mistaken believes with one gesture. I could feel peace inching toward me, settling in, becoming real.

Whoever does not see life as a process is not paying attention. Sometimes the increments are so slight as to be nearly undetectable. Nearly. Then we turn and look over our shoulders at the discernible signs indicating something permanent has begun to shift. Contrary to all our assumptions, we are becoming.

Why I heart Stamp Your Heart Out

2012-01-24T21:14:00.000-08:00

ATC samples by Michele Daly

My warmest thanks to Michele Daly, one of the staff artists at Stamp Your Heart Out in Claremont, CA, for her Saturday demo of Artist Trading Cards using images from my new Rubbermoon collection. SYHO has been my home store since it opened in 1989. It is where I began teaching paper arts. Owner Joan Bunte, the talented staff and all whom I've met through my years of involvement are unfailing sources of support for my varied endeavors.

You might enjoy signing up for their weekly newsletter at the website, where you will also find contact information, should you have a question about stamping and scrapbooking products, or wish to place a telephone order. If you live nearby or visit the area, please stop in and tell them I said, "Hey."

EVERY day

2012-01-21T14:18:00.000-08:00

On Rubbermoon's Facebook page, owner Debra Valoff has been, for the past couple days, showing samples of shipping tag art which feature stamps from the new lines. I wanted to play. It feels as though many of my moving parts are rusty, even with new stamps, new inks, newly-arranged pencils. Whatever we love, we are the better for working at it, even just a bit, every day. Without that, stasis may develop, reduced creative flow, stagnation, rust.

In the journaling community, there is, and has been, a movement advocating journaling every day. On-line groups offer support to one another, provide a venue to share photos of each day's accomplishments. I've visited other sites where bloggers post about taking challenges for things like "30 paintings in 30 days." Year before last I signed up for NaNoWriMo, committing to daily writing for the month of November with a minimum number of words produced by month end. I set myself a daily word count quota as well. No novel resulted from the exercise but a lot of showing up did and the awareness that showing up, sitting down and typing something every day, before doing anything else, produces its own satisfaction.

On the evening of February 7, it will be 18 years since I received the call that catapulted me from rubber stamp amateur to professional. There was no union to join but earning money doing what we love is vastly appealing. Regaining the edge I once had matters, for I intend to keep doing this until I really am too inflexible to manipulate the tools. Plus, as Woody Allen said in another context, it's the most fun I've had without laughing.

They left out the preparation, practice and hard work

2012-01-20T11:19:00.000-08:00

As Pogo used to say,

FRINGE

2012-01-19T13:18:00.000-08:00

When my second, my replacement, HD converter box died last week (older tv, no cable) I needed time to decide what my best choice might be. Yet another short-lived box or an HD-enabled small, flat-screen tv? Either seemed frivolous, for now. Meanwhile, I'm watching for the second time, as the signal-bereft set does act as a monitor, season one of FRINGE. In the first season, we have not yet been shown the East River vortex, which scares the bejeezus out of me every time I see it. Whirlpools and watery vortexes do that.

Fox is grumbling about the cost to produce the show, which it, Fox, scheduled to appear on Friday nights when the audience is notoriously small. The show reminds me of early X-FILES, and while I am not a fanatic, I am a fan.

My son tells me of fan sites and message boards for the programs we enjoy, or did enjoy before they were cancelled, of just how wrapped up in and dogmatic about the invention viewers become. Between FRINGE, current and earlier, and Hulu's access to the newest JUSTIFIED, I've been reminded why I generally lean toward fiction. Perhaps more so now as I find myself saying, "I don't know," twenty or more times a day in response to everything. Everything.

My states of unknowingness may likely remain that way; there aren't answers to questions I ask. Is Steven Hawking right and will mankind only survive by colonizing space and is the most remote possibility of that more than 100 years away? Will there ever be anything resembling harmony between our political parties again? Did Congress really pass a bill that allows the government to detain without charges or explanation - and in an undisclosed location - anyone who fits any profile of what may constitute a terrorist? When did a quart of brand-name ice cream start to cost more than $10.00? When did access to a computer begin to equate with the likelihood of becoming a best-selling author? Why are we being told relentlessly that we need coaches for everything from what to wear to, especially, how to promote ourselves and all the things we are supposed to be trying to sell?

In fiction, someone who knows their craft ties up the loose ends. Someone - or in the case of tv, a team of them - knows how things turn out. They reveal to us, an episode or a scene at a time, why or who.

It is not that I need answers to all my questions to feel comfortable. I believe that much of life is intended to be a mystery, but come on. I can tell the difference between an existential unknown and deliberate misdirection, intentional lies. For now, the unsettling FRINGE universes seem less baffling than my own.

Modern conveniences, color and not much about the sun

2012-01-17T13:42:00.000-08:00

Thinking this might be a flash fiction day, I Googled a bit, seeking current challenges. The "snake hunter" photo was not an answer, nor was a three-sentence story told from the POV of a, in my case, mosquito. Worthy challenges, just not quite hitting the mark.

Another site suggested the title of whatever song came up first on one's Shuffle as the title for the story, or, lacking an iPod or iTunes, mentioned Pandora. Am I the last human to know about Pandora, a radio site where one can choose from eight or so categories of folk music? I'm not sure that I agree it belongs there, but my first tune was George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun."

As I spent the first part of my morning photographing (yes, at the last minute with the flash and its glare) and copying color pencil samples I was mailing to a rubber stamp store and as I had the choice of a sun image or a sunflower, I squinted and proclaimed the signs were lining up. Or so it seemed.

Our scattered clouds have gone back to their corners, leaving open space for sunshine to reach around trees and a wall, warming my left knee. I guess I'm not fiction-inclined today, thinking instead of elements connected to my stamping.

For years I lusted after any impossibly costly color copier that I would lease and have in my home. Having been through the travail of a black and white copier and its paper jams and toner mishaps at my last real job and knowing - this was in the 80s - how long one could wait for the technician, it is a fact that I hadn't thought the matter through. Luckily, if you want to look at it that way, the cost was too crazy and my credit too ordinary and that fantasy, though not forgotten, was surrendered.

That brings us to this morning. Six a.m., in my home, in my house clothes and house hair, and I am making color copies of my samples there, steps from the kitchen, in mere seconds, really. I am awed once again at the advancements that make our lives better, richer, happier, easier and the world is not, entirely, careening down the greased chute to extinction based on too many years of too many bad ideas. May I never lose the wonder and gratitude I feel for being able to make color copies at will.

The magnitude of this only-dreamed-of luxury ties for Best Thing with the US Postal Service having procedures set up that allow citizens to print out labels with postage on their computers, schedule pick-up for Priority Mail at the front door and not have to take every package weighing more than 13 ounces to the post office. In a flat rate box, with printed label and pick up, it's on its way, no questions asked. When I discovered that, my life improved by a factor of at least 7.

My few hundred word overture to flash fiction was not worth preserving, other than that it brought up colors and caused me to spend time with the names for such I found in researching Memento stamp pads, such as Tangelo, Rhubarb Stalk, Paris Dusk, Bamboo Leaves, Potter's Clay and Grape Jelly. I wonder if one could work from home inventing color names for assorted products. I remember sending for, with great anticipation, a Mr. Peanut bank, paid for with several cellophane peanut bags and a small amount of cash, finally picking his color from among, I believe, three or four choices. I thought he would feel most like himself in Peanut Tan.

Thinking of letters and lights

2012-01-10T10:06:00.000-08:00

In some quarters, the second week in January is considered National Letter Writing Week. There seems to be a difference of opinion on the subject. If we allow every week to be a time of correspondence and sending odd, lovely or controversial snail mail, the debate evaporates.

One of my Christmas gifts was a copy of FLOATING WORLDS: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer. Neumeyer is interviewed on the subject HERE.

Examples of illustrated envelopes from the book.

Mr. Gorey simply makes me want to better at everything I set my hand to.

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Other post-Christmas musings.

The Christmas tree still sits beside the bookcase but the lights have not been turned on for three nights now. I leave the Christmassing of our home to my son. It asks more than I have to make it happen. Yet I would not be unhappy to have that warm glow of the lights for a bit longer. For years (years!) I’ve thought of having some light strings in my bedroom - I have a string of heart-shaped lights which haven’t left the box since I bought them 12 or so years earlier. There are unused clear lights I could add, maybe a spare clutch of the small, multi-colors I favor, left from when we got bigger trees. Our artificial, pre-lighted tree has been the right answer on so many levels. When the in-town tree farm prices hit $80 for the smallest fir, I knew we were finished with that. Freshly cut and drilled to drink up water from its specifically-designed stand, it would stay moist and fragrant. We’d bought from the farm for so long that I no longer trusted the dried-out offerings from tree lots. Especially as December almost always brings wind which speeds the drying. And there was no reason or possibility of going to the Chinatown auctions to buy a tree right off the train. Our little bright tree is just right. But there is something that reaches beyond the season in the lights, plus the string of large, old-fashioned bulbs we have draped around the wrought iron baker’s rack that holds the children’s book collection. Both bring an inner and outer warmth, the absence of which I feel when they have been extinguished for the year. It would be a gift to me, and not take away from what the Christmas lights add to human days when it is their season, to allow myself the simple gift of finding a place to drape, in safety, a few strands of light that I could see from bed, like having a bit of Christmas, like a plate of cookies each bedtime, to sweeten the fact of being human, of longing for what cannot be had or regained. Light and color feed my soul. I need to take that more seriously.

Keith Jarrett and the shoebox

2012-01-06T16:11:00.000-08:00

The friend who gave the Keith Jarrett album and opened another door into music's vastness has been gone several years. Her memory visited me over the holidays, thinking of her caroling parties through the narrow lanes of a local foothill canyon, how we managed to increase our numbers with neighbors who grabbed their jackets, and a bottle or a violin, and fell in among us. Her name was Jane. We were reporters together, neighbors, and got ourselves tangled up in the drive to start a guild at our paper in a county, and a chain, that had no tolerance for organizing. Soon after, we slid over into advertising and public relations. At her memorial service we were each handed a box of Junior Mints. She occupies almost as much territory as real tinsel, hung a strand at a time, in the land of what Christmas once was.

There is a threshold over which we step and discover that not everything about the past still has the power to wound. Benign melancholy, bearable and casting an ochre-colored light over people and events, carries a warmth that doesn't deny loss but makes appreciation possible in spite of it. How much of life's sweetness is in spite of, rather than because of? Compare and contrast, as they used to instruct us on those long-ago essay tests.

Since the brain and heart, as organ or metaphor, do not require that much space within the body, I imagine all their contents fitting into shoebox. Tied with string for its creases and corners soon began to wear and droop, a shoebox was issued to each of us. Before we ever speak, we can tell our brethren by the battered parcel held close in the crook of an arm. There is comfort in acknowledging we have histories. Angella's post of January 6 introduced me to the characters from Showtime's Homeland, people whose pasts, it seems, are always with them.

If we were rocks, I think we'd be categorized as metamorphic. A simple sentence on-line tells the story: "Heat and pressure can change many things." Who we were travels forward with us. Where we've been and with whom somehow still leaves room in the box for what comes next.

Do the next indicated thing

2012-01-02T13:28:00.000-08:00

Because we hear her, or of her, too seldom, Nina Simone sings Leonard Cohen.

It is not easy to identify whether the no-man's land sense that follows the year-end holidays is a place where only I falter, or whether most of us fall into a wandering torpor. Under clear skies with mid-80s temperatures, under the shadow of a passing blimp on its way to the Rose Bowl, today it feels that I'm waiting for the courier to arrive with my assignment. Mine arrives via index card inside a manila envelope. The note says, Do the next indicated thing. I can just hear the subtext: stop tap dancing. Catch any bus that passes.

Yesterday my son found and printed for me the DON'T BREAK THE CHAIN chart from The Writers Store, a simple grid of 365 blocks to be crossed off each day that one has written something. There is room, fortunately, to add 366 for this leap year.

Wanting to keep IT, whatever It is, as simple as possible, I will do all I can not to break the chain. In the meantime, I have a collection of new rubber stamps that needs to be turned into samples. If you see Rubbermoon's posts on Facebook, the two most recent cards as of Monday morning, submitted by Kathy Lewis, are glorious, light-hearted and inspiring.

So, with a blog post and my weekly retail paragraph completed, I can draw my "x" through box number 1 (I got a late start). So far, so good.

This year

2011-12-31T11:47:00.000-08:00

"Leroy says, ah, keep on rockin', girl. Yeah, keep on rockin'."

This year I remembered...I have faerie folk in my lineage.

Previously, poetry grabbed me by "the sharp lapels of my checkered coat" and this year a teacher/friend/mentor/poet/angel appeared who reminds me that I can know with my heart and need not care so much about gaps in my formal education, yet steadily, subversively, affectionately, addresses them as well.

Those who would be called angels are abundant in my life, shoring up the still-skeletal hull of this vessel I decided to build in my second-floor living room. I have their unspoken promises to help me launch it. For today, we are not required to know how. It seems I have what I need to do my work. This year delivered my two assignments: show up and get out of the way.

It is a job of paring, paring, discarding and evaluating, finding how to keep the good from being siphoned off for no purpose. This year I have begun to see options where before there appeared to be none. I make my best choice and reserve the right to change my mind.

This year, as do all my years and other measures of time, evaporated. I am less and less inclined to count or quantify, growing closer to allowing events to unfold as they do. Unfolding is not a process to be hurried. Trusting it is no job for the impatient. At times the fluid quality of my days hisses at me about idleness. It may be true but I now have just the one speed and am learning not to call it by unloving names.

There have been miracles this year, as there have in years past, whether I recognized them in the moment or needed distance to clear my vision. Either I've relaxed my earlier definition of the miraculous or, as I suspect, it is ever more plentiful. What more could be asked of any year?

Why the USPS rocks

2011-12-28T12:47:00.000-08:00

(Oh, I wish I'd been able to post the Mad Dogs and Englishmen version of this with Leon Russell, being decidedly 'elsewhere' on keyboard. Vocally, however, this is better, if not such a 1970s artifact.)

I have a story, greatly shortened to prevent boredom, about the postal service, Christmas and why the word "service" is not misplaced. There was confusion on my part and that of our letter carrier on Dec. 21 about a Priority box for which I had requested front-door pick-up, while, at the same time, putting a Priority envelope downstairs in the out-going mail. A call to the national help line, an assigned "case" number, a call (once the number was shared like a secret handshake) to our local P.O., a bit more confusion, then our regular carrier at the door around 5 p.m. to take away my package so that it could reach its destination by the 25th, with kindness and an explanation of where things had gone awry. Having learned, on Saturday, that the box arrived on the East Coast, I was surprised to receive another call from the local P.O. after 6 p.m. (Christmas eve) to be sure that the problem had at least been addressed, if not resolved. I assured them all involved had done everything to see that the mail got through in a most professional manner. It would be nice not to have good customer service in the real world come as a surprise, but it does. Thank goodness we do experience it, and I am so grateful when I do.

My next post, after I do a bit more reading, will also be about letters or postcards and more mail art. I worried that by calling I had created a problem for our carrier in uncertain times. I love snail mail, sending and receiving. I love our colorful postage stamps, that I can print out Priority labels on line and mail, from my home, packages that weigh more than 13 ounces. If you didn't send cards for any December holidays, why not send some New Year's greetings or belated Solstice wishes? Please send snail mail. Send lots. Decorate it and make it fun for all those who handle it. I can't bear to think of the USPS riding into the sunset.

For You

2011-12-24T21:35:00.000-08:00

From the late (and, at our house, much lamented) STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP, "The Christmas Episode" segment with New Orleans musicians, post-Katrina, playing "Oh, Holy Night." The perfect show to watch tonight. Merry Christmas, merry and peaceful December 25 and the days that surround it. Joy, love and light.

To the doodlers, the daydreamers, the lost

2011-12-19T08:46:00.000-08:00

Some words to ponder from Henry David Thoreau:

"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves."

In my land of curious synaptical leaps, this, of course, connects to doodling. I believe unshakably that our best focus comes down to the point of a pen or pencil. There are others who share and support this notion. One of them presents her thoughts here.

Between staring out the window, my splendid view being of treetops and the sky, and doodling, I am never more than inches from a pen and paper, I could easily be chosen Least Certain to Pay Attention in any group. I maintain it is more likely that our very best ideas and interpretations come from inner-generated concepts rather than from those forced upon us by the outside world.

Doodling, or sky gazing, connect me to a fluid mental state where the obsessive and compulsive no longer exist. I am afloat on a vast Jules Verne-esque subterranean sea of imaginative no-thought. With no credentials whatsoever, I propose that we are the better, the saner, the more tranquil for time spent outside the company of conscious, purpose-filled thought. There are no lists in doodling, no clocks. The notion of here is in a state of flux, for we are free-wheelingly transported by a mind no longer under the influence of nine forward gears. (We seemed to get along very well with four, maybe five speeds, four plus overdrive in a 1956 Austin Healey 100-4. More has never meant the same as better.)

We may become lost through denial, avoidance, illness, forgetfulness, apathy, indifference and life being life. We get thrown off the bus, drummed out of the corps, abandoned, rejected, ignored, shunned and snubbed. We can also choose to be lost inside our daydreams or within the lines and shapes of doodles. Once removed from our thinking, ordinary-reality selves, we have time and space to encounter spirit. It is my theory that spirit always seeks to connect with us, to reach us beyond all that is busy and distracting, and will use whatever means are necessary. In my experience, spirit finds us through health-crises, through seismic shifts, through reversals of fortune if our attention can't be caught any other way. Or we can volunteer as doodlers and wool-gatherers and see what happens.

In her TED talk, Sunni Brown explains how doodling assists in retaining information, demonstrating how it is not a wasteful activity. Beyond that, I believe it aids us in uncovering information, allowing us access to collective knowledge or our own greater, undiscovered wisdom. By wandering away from ourselves, we are returned but at another level. Lost does not equate with emptiness. Lost is how we begin to fill.

This is NOT my studio

2011-12-12T15:09:00.000-08:00

Photo from apartmenttherapy.com

However, in MY studio, in a drawer of quite fine papers, envelopes, valuable resource materials, I found what follows, the beginning of something. Does that happen in an orderly space, where the location of everything is known, the treasure hunt is over, there are no discoveries to be made? I think not.

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David was smiling the foolish, open-mouthed, lip-twitching smile that reminded Gloria of a dog sticking his head out a car window. She imagined she could hear him panting, the rapid, shallow breathing making his heart beat faster. David even blinked, as though the rushing air caught him by surprise.

When he smiled like that, she usually started picking on him about something, like forgetting to bring health insurance forms home from work or leaving the butter out all day. It didn't seem to her appropriate to scream, "I hate it when you smile like that." If she had, he would just blink more rapidly, shake his head and ask, "What are you talking about?"

Solid matter

2011-12-11T11:47:00.000-08:00

While it is not what I intend, my mind has the habit of seeing things as connected. In most circumstances, I find this beneficial, even enlightening. There are moments, however, that deserve to have no ties to anything that came before. One such settled upon me this week as I opened and gazed into a box of the 50-some ready-to-stamp images (thank you Debra of Rubbermoon for the work of affixing rubber to wood), my new collection. Detaching this experience - or myself- from other debuts/releases, I was aware of how extraordinary it is to trace the process of imaginative spark becoming solid matter. Hardly an event to compare with, say, the first flight of the Space Shuttle, it is an emotion that may not stop to measure world impact. No matter what idea takes us on this journey, the transformation of electrical impulse to physical form, whether it is the work of one or many that bring it into being, ignites a sense of wonder. And appreciation.

It has taken me a long time to recognize, then own, that I have a problem with consistency. Because of that, evidence of borderline-reliable, possibly grown-up behavior takes on greater meaning. The least significant event turns me to examination of a bigger picture; if I had to write my life story today, the two key phrases that I see pulsing just above the horizon are "slippery fish" and "the bigger picture."

Life is peanut brittle before it hardens, the thick yet vaguely fluid substance peppered with bumps which it eventually wraps and includes. It flows at its own rate. It is not the fast-dispensing, watery ketchup, yet the time it takes to move from one level to another allows so much else to unfold.

The photo is shadowed, crowded, highly informal. The forensics lab would probably be very critical, yet it is evidence enough for me. I become even less focused by things that feel like a tentatively approaching cold, especially when accompanied by a cold sore that may be visible from space. We each have our unique milestones, dragons slain, peaks scaled. It matters that we acknowledge to ourselves and, as a friend calls them, enlightened witnesses that which moves us. Life is too short to take the meaningful for granted.

Visitors

2011-12-10T12:05:00.000-08:00

(I begin with the acknowledgement that other people's dreams are probably pretty boring. If we just pretended they were fiction, fleshed them out, they might be passable. What follows are as many bits as could be gathered from a dream, held as a blog draft, never quite gotten back to. I assume there is a reason that I searched my drafts today and found this. Possibly because I had another visitation dream this week, a different friend of whose death more than 10 years ago I just learned. Are others visited in dreams by the departed, knowing in the dream that they are no longer with us here, yet awakening with the sense of having been given just a little more time in their company?)

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There is no door at the street level to keep anyone from drifting up the stairs. Our rooms are singles; we live where we work, bringing whatever aid, comfort and strength we can summon to children who wash their own tattered socks and underwear, then hang them to dry on the rusted handlebars of wheel-less bicycles at the end of the corridor.

I have another home somewhere but this seems to be where I can be found. I answer a knock on the door to my room and one of the children tells me there is someone looking for me, says he didn't want to startle me by just showing up. It is Jack and even in the dream I know that he died more than 9 years ago. And here he is in workingman clothes with smooth skin and kindness.

He has been looking for me, I know without being told. We half hug and even kiss about 80 per cent, edges of lips touching; it was never like that. Both my dream and dreaming selves feel a deep wonder, heart-stabbing, breath-stopping joy. Is he thinner, is it someone else who just reminds me, in some ways yet not others, of the man, smart and lost, whose Impala was named Magnolia, his dogs Morgan and Bodie?

Reasonable facsimile Impala, thanks to oldparkedcars.com.

His car is downstairs, he tells me, and says let's go eat. Since leaving reporting to work as a city planner, he has been the first to know about new businesses - restaurants - and become friends with the owners. He parks on the dream version of Colorado Boulevard outside a sandwich shop with a frontage no wider than two bodies. They know him, greet him, show us to a table - the inside not much more spacious than the entry suggested - and he orders for us...pork sandwiches, Cuban, Mexican, I'm not sure, but spicy, on fresh-baked, thick bread. In moments of the dream he is more Jack; as I work to remember it, he becomes more slight, quavering almost, yet his essence true.

As we drive from the restaurant, I ask him what writers I have to read before my days run out; who is essential. I say I've never read Joyce, never read Faulkner. He answers but in a voice so soft that I have to lean closer and ask him to say it again. He talks about who were his favorites; says something about Joyce that makes me laugh. Then we are walking on streets near City Hall where he once worked. He tells me he has found free parking, since the meters are now so expensive. What he had done is bury his car in the plantings along the north side of the abandoned YWCA building. I never learn what I must read.

Borrowed delight and birthday wishes

2011-12-07T10:58:00.000-08:00

As it is now Dec. 8 in West Australia, I can wish my brother Mike a Happy Birthday. And I have just the new acquaintances to help launch his celebrations.

Penelope at Rosa Mira Books has obtained the assistance of Ratty as the whole of her Sales Department. In words and engaging illustrations, we learn that Ratty and his exotic Lily, a Pink Fairy Armadillo, have increased the customer roster and shared adventures.

Images, characters by Penelope/Rosa Mira Books.

The warmth and whimsey of Penelope's inventions have the capacity to charm, as a friend of mine says, the ginger out of a gingersnap. That they help promote her publishing endeavor as it nears its first birthday makes them all the more inspired. Please visit Lily, Ratty and Penelope at her blog, discover her titles and authors, leave comments and bookmark the site for return visits. As we in America are clubbed senseless by uninspired advertising, offering new automobiles as the Christmas gift of greatest choice, an entirely different approach has been minted in the southern hemisphere.

And to my brother, who will find kindred spirits, I know, as each new chapter of Ratty's and Lily's story unfolds, the best of all years. From our Los Angeles childhoods, here is Sheriff John with a portion of his unforgettable birthday song. May you sing and play the day away.

Discord and harmony

2011-12-03T12:04:00.000-08:00

There are 1,551 words about Robbie Robertson's song, The Weight in the Wikipedia entry. Robertson has a fan site that details the beginnings of The Band, origin of this classic.

Beyond having loved this song for years, hearing it performed by this group causes me to think more of the word harmony, and, by association, discord. The following fact will reveal me as the para-amnesiac I am. I forget to listen to music.

There is a history behind this which is complicated and of very little interest. Though I do sing when my tasks don't require all of my attention, I've grown away from a habit of intentionally brightening my life with music. I am working on doing that differently.

A friend's mention of Gillian Welsh led me to YouTube just before sleep last night, and I found the blended voices created a sense that was soothing, stilling, like a laying-on-of-hands. So much of what simply comes at us without our consent results in an effect so contradictory it seems almost too simple that, under the right conditions, with proper input, we can feel some of our overload drain away.

Doing Christmas, for that is how it feels, in a fashion that comes close to matching what is in my heart and not that toadstool-sprouting part of my mind, is a process of ignoring, avoiding and dismissing all that gives me the December whim-whams. It is a process of pruning, selecting, identifying and savoring, not getting caught up in what could set my hair on fire or reduce me to tears. The fact that the NBA lockout is over and Christmas day will include BASKETBALL is no small joy.

That this is no longer the 1950s, that I don't have, really, such things as Christmas wishes that involve gifts, that many pieces of the coming few weeks are very different than they once were do not grieve me any more. I have almost come to tolerate my indecision and pokiness about the gifts I make which are often delivered late. Christmas waits on the other side of a narrow plank that I cross with great care; care enhanced by harmony, by willfully remembering about music (not Christmas music), by taking suggestions from trusted friends as to what are reliable sources of peace, lowerers of blood pressure, raisers of spirits.

Discord can be measured by how far we tilt away from what is nourishing and mistake the mediocre - or worse - for a prevailing norm. We are intended, I absolutely believe, to be as unjangled as possible in each moment. The firm, gentle banishment of frenzy is to be sought not only in the midst of other people's aggressive jitterbug competitions, but daily, year 'round. It is a word upon which to ponder: harmony. Like any old friend, we will know it at once, no matter how long we've been apart.

Conjurers

2011-11-30T12:15:00.000-08:00

Among my sister's gifts, received over the years, is a handmade wooden sign, suspended from a length of barbed wire, that says:

EXPECT

MAGIC

I forget how prevalent true magic, the magic of poets and poetry, of everyday life, of simply being and breathing and staring for a long time at the sky, is.

We are, in any moment, creatures bewitched. Without spells, without potions. What greater conjuring than to take the alphabet, shape it into words, the words into images, emotions, landscapes, journeys; the soaring and plunging of human - or not-quite-human - experience. Is there any source of wonder to equal the power to sift and sort what our hearts and minds contain and make it manifest, give it form, remove its invisibility? On the previously bare page now rests a thought or insight or attempt to interpret the ineffable.

A friend/angel/guide sends me a poem every day. Today brought this:

PENNILESS LOVERS

They had faces open to whoever passed.

They had legends and myths

and a chill in their heart.

They had gardens where the moon strolled

hand in hand with the water.

They had an angel of stone for a brother.

They had like everyone

the miracle of every day

dripping from the roofs;

and golden eyes

glowing with

a wilderness of dreams.

They were hungry and thirsty like animals

and there was silence

around their steps.

But at every gesture they made,

a bird was born from their fingers

and dazzled, vanished into space.

Eugenio de Andrade

"...at every gesture they made, a bird was born from their fingers..." was the phrase that reminded me of our ability to embroider what we consider ordinary, based entirely on the intensity of being here now, into something richer, finer, transcendent.

Our walls are leveled when we root among the tricks in our roomy satchels of self to pull forth something clear and true, not before spoken or told. We levitate, assume unfamiliar guises, expand, burst forth like a bouquet from the magician's sleeve, when we surrender and follow where the words lead.

They belong to a club of masters of the craft, those who allow their souls to materialize as we look on. I would remind myself more often to expect magic, were it not for the delirious pleasure of coming upon it by chance.

Just me standing here shouting RUBBERMOON

2011-11-28T09:47:00.000-08:00

Over at the Rubbermoon site, the new collections of unmounted stamps are available. From their Facebook post, the following offer:

A very special "Special". The new sheets are up on the website www.rubbermoon.com and can be located under "November 2011" There is one unmounted sheet from Gretchen Ehrsam, one from Daris Judd, and 6 small ones from Marylinn Kelly (four of them are in the photo that Marylinn colored for us) The special is from now till Nov. 30- if you order 5 of Marylinn's new sheets I'll give you the sixth one free! Just type in on the order section for special instructions to merchant "Facebook special."

FYI.

Below are my final two sheets, color versions, obviously. It would be lovely if you took a few minutes to visit and see all the new images, browsed the samples and looked around. I think you'll enjoy the animated home page...the flying, disembodied color pencil captures the spirit of Rubbermoon perfectly.

Big NASA love

2011-11-25T13:39:00.000-08:00

We need to remember the significance of proportion. NASA's next mission to Mars is scheduled for launch on Saturday, Nov. 26. I have new rubber stamp designs. Thank goodness the two are not mutually exclusive. I am just as happy not to have quite so much invested in nor depending upon the success of my endeavor. However, I remain a believer-in/fan-of any voyage we undertake that tells us something we didn't know yesterday. Sending unlimited favorable aspects to NASA and everyone who has worked on this project, for all who watch and wait and hope. Yes, all is not as one might wish here in America, here on planet Earth, but exploration operates by a different set of rules. If we stop looking, stop reaching, stop learning...well, those are simply not options. I'll likely be out in the yard, throwing confetti at the sky, murmuring Bon Voyage.

Further revelations

2011-11-23T06:58:00.000-08:00

Fans of the old "Rocky and Bullwinkle" show may recognize the borrowed Fan mail from some flounder. Note, if you will, that the Bat, when given a simple black line as a waistband, is able to wear pink tights with his ballet slippers.

Adjustments and revisions

2011-11-22T09:32:00.000-08:00

Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations. ~Faith Baldwin

The ability to change our minds has to be one of the great gifts of being assigned life in human form. There is no rule or requirement that we continue to be who we were yesterday. If we can't change our spots, we can alter the way in which we judge them.

Revisions, adjustments, reconsiderations and about-faces are not signs of uncertainty but of awareness. I know discomfort is quantifiable and our wish to escape it, universal. Nothing else works quite as well as doing something - or everything - differently.

Think of these words as kiss on the forehead, a blessing to go forward with a growing suspicion that not all of this is engraved on non-returnable marble. We are allowed, without being fined for littering, to leave ill-fitting notions, opinions, by the side of the road. Many of them will reappear to haunt and hector when we are vulnerable, but their visits will grown less frequent, their forms less substantial.

It may be foolishness taken to the extreme, but I have grown to believe that life, and our untidy, idiosyncratic ways of living it, are not meant to be sources of chronic disappointment. Whether we find happiness because of or in spite of our circumstances, a measure of peace and optimism is the goal.

Regardless of what you've heard or where you heard it, there is no such thing as too old to change. A feeble excuse at best, I can no longer even sell it to myself.

Bonus post

2011-11-21T17:23:00.000-08:00

From Debra at Rubbermoon, her sample posted to Facebook today.

A second peek

2011-11-21T12:50:00.000-08:00

If you are on Facebook, you will find Rubbermoon, where owner Debra Valoff posts samples from near and far...colorful, inspiring.

If you were wondering, that is Screaming Donut Girl in the lower right corner.

A first peek at what's behind the curtain

2011-11-20T11:49:00.000-08:00

One of six, 4x5" sheets of unmounted rubber stamps, part of Rubbermoon's newest collections, a regular design bonanza. If the notion of "unmounted rubber stamps" is new to you, leave me any questions in the comments section or email me.

As soon as the sheets are available for sale on their website, I will let you know. You can also check the site from time to time for the newest supplement. While there, you may enjoy cruising through the images "by artist" to discover new-to-you art from this quietly whimsical, enduring company.

As the infomercial concludes, we move on to other matters.

-------

Our flights to the moon occurred incrementally. System by system, stage by stage, unmanned craft, orbit, landing, return. Earthbound dreams are no different. Hollywood's fabled stories of overnight success involved a lot of invisible footwork. Even if all the actor needed to do was get here from some futureless there, somebody had to pack a suitcase, purchase a bus ticket, watch America roll past from the Trailways' window and find the right lunch counter at which to loiter.

The wish to create something that finds a home in the consciousness, preferably the hearts, of strangers is a pretty cheeky dream. What a blessing then that success comes in all sizes. There is the Steve Jobs/Apple success and there is the success of chatting in a Palm Springs hot tub with a woman who just happens to have read your book (a friend's, not mine) and it happens to have changed the lives of her entire family. There is the success of being remembered and revered for a concert your long-parted band played nearly 40 years ago (and you thought no one was paying attention). There is the success of someone saying, "I love your work."

Success by any definition or measure is an against-the-odds proposition. How many manuscripts, portfolios, demo CDs, reels and prototypes are created every day, every moment? Meeting the exact someone who wants to publish, produce or manufacture what you've created is beyond luck. Some doors will never open, no matter how long we knock. That the finished product finds an appreciative audience of any size has to be categorized as miraculous.

America went to the moon, we got there first. I hold that as a model of what can happen when all the work and talent and desire and pieces come together to make what seemed a fantasy become real. I have been fortunate in seeing creative whims turned tangible.

For me, the dream itself is nearly as thrilling as its realization. Beginning a day with the thought of wonders rolling in my direction is enough to let me, in spurts and longer, more focused segments, continue to believe in the unlikely, the impossible. Without dreams, there is no carrot, no fire, no need big enough to make us give up sleep, bathing, eating and showing up where we are expected.

I am nearly in the shade of the awning that is 70, or well along the sidewalk that leads to it. My dreams only increase. In addition to doing whatever real life footwork is necessary for their manifestation, I think speaking of them, where they will be respected and supported, lends power to the process. New stamps - I could not be happier. Maybe someday, there could be stickers, too.

A slightly rubbery day

2011-11-19T11:45:00.000-08:00

M. Kelly for Rubbermoon

Perhaps snowmen attract me for having so little real-life experience of them. The family album has a couple snapshots of my mother and me next to the one snowman we constructed from the one snow that ever fell in recorded history on Baldwin Park, CA. It was in 1949.

While it is no longer part of their on-line catalog, the image above (the coloring will be up to you) does exist as an unmounted stamp. You may learn more by sending an e-mail to owner Debra Valoff at rubbermoonmail@gmail.com in Hayden Lake, Idaho, where they are much more familiar with snow.

To let you know, there will be more rubber stamp talk around here in the coming weeks. I began working with Rubbermoon more than 17 years ago and in early December or sooner, will have my first sheets of unmounted stamps released by them, in company with collections from two other artists, Gretchen Ersham and Daris Judd. I will begin sharing the designs soon, maybe even tomorrow. At the same time, I plan to continue the written posts which I have missed while my head was off somewhere else thinking other thoughts.

Yes, I guess you could call it a crush

2011-11-14T09:57:00.000-08:00

If there is an unseemliness to women of a certain age going full-on fanatic, then I am guilty once again of the faux pas. I am not the equivalent of tent-dwelling outside the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles where the newest TWILIGHT feature will debut, for a list of reasons so long it might never end. I am quietly cruising around with my computer keyboard while a squirrel eyes me from the nearest palm tree. He can't possibly know there were walnuts in the oatmeal. It is not any of my doing that a random phrase or notion launches a John Prine song in my head.

Each week I write an introductory paragraph to the e-newsletter for a local rubber stamp store. Today I thought of life as an adventure, of escaping the mind-anaesthesia that is the Republican debates and other national debacles and, of course, heard the advice to, "...blow up your tv."

Mr. Prine, as the New York Times would probably still call him in civilized fashion, and his music landed aboard my wobbling raft - best guess - in about 1971. My then beau, later husband, then not, wrote music reviews. He played JOHN PRINE for everyone who stopped by, made them listen. Mr. Kelly was adamant about his music. Soon the album was in the collections of most friends. The words from those first songs and the ones that came after reside in my trunk of "This makes me think of that."

It is a bright morning in Los Angeles County. Peaches, as sung about in the following video, are no longer in season but the brilliant orb of an orange sits on my kitchen counter, symbol of California dreams, of sweetness, of plenty. My siblings and I always found an orange in the toe of our Christmas stockings. If you feel ill-matched to your life or your skin today, it is not too late to change or at least think about doing some part of all this differently. Pyrotechnics optional.

Missing

2011-11-12T10:29:00.000-08:00

M. Kelly for Rubbermoon.

Somewhere between the designations of matron and crone, my right eyebrow mostly disappeared. Thyroid is the best guess anyone can give, but is it too much or too little? I see myself having two choices: grow long bangs or find glasses that mask the deficiency. This is not complaint, for to whom would I complain, but merely observation. It seems we leave bits of ourselves in our wakes, the parts that fall off or erode. If only we could follow that trail of breadcrumbs back to the restore point, lessons learned. Let me close with Grace Paley's apt, memorable title, "In time which made a monkey of us all."

Veterans Day

2011-11-11T10:57:00.000-08:00

Veterans Day brings with it thoughts of my grandfather. He served in France in World War I and sang the songs of the day to me so often and for so many years that I knew them as well as any rock and roll that was to come. YouTube, for all its resources, did not seem to have a version of "There's A Long, Long Trail A'Winding" that did justice to the yearning the troops must have felt, thinking of the homes and loved ones they might never see again. Instead, you'll get the trailer for A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT which tells some stories of that war. Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, starring Audrey Tautou, it is a movie in which I become lost, for the visuals, the story itself, the fact that our "war to end all wars" turned out to be only a preamble.

For Dad, Charlie and Gertrude, Uncle Charles, for Jack and Jay and all who serve. I wish we didn't have to keep asking this of you.

Focus is wherever we find it

2011-11-05T15:37:00.000-07:00

M. Kelly for Rubbermoon

Two new chair stamps are part of my in-the-works collection for Rubbermoon. Keeping them company will be the phrase, "When in doubt, sit. Sit and Color." It all comes down to the point of a pencil.

Unlike writing, which usually gives me a stiff neck when I use the computer, which I mostly do, coloring, drawing and eraser carving send my mind and body to different rooms. Bickering children, they need to be separated to chill out.

When first creating samples for the stamp company, I worked with fine-tip brush markers. Coloring the images went quickly and shading was possible thanks to Marvy's extensive palette. It was a peaceful occupation, quieting thought, slowing heart rate.

When I switched to pencils because the colors were even more plentiful, the shading and layering possibilities more abundant, I smoothed out like a freshly ironed shirt. Later I realized this must be a meditative state, as everything beyond the tip of the sharpened pencil faded, caught the next bus out of town.

The doodling aspect of drawing produces the same effect. It feels like giving the Big Thoughts mind a paid holiday. All is reduced to one non-thought. Yes, the mind roams and rambles but doesn't latch on to anything, doesn't go dig up the bone it buried yesterday near the azaleas. Without its feet touching the ground, it muses upon the memory of the garden, recalls the verses of "Oh, Sussanah" and sees the forgotten, unforgettable drawer where it left the yellow, leather-bound journal five years ago.

I've been doing that kind of coloring for more than 17 years. To achieve a state even distantly resembling real peace demanded incorporating other philosophies, becoming more intentional about disengaging from my fret-prone self. I have learned that a spiritual practice take unanticipated forms.

As the mania, my slavish devotion to the cult of the color pencil, has held steady for all these years, through personal and world changes never imagined, I think we have what my sister would call A Keeper. For today, I sharpen the pencils by hand, though that color-core-chewing, battery-operated model has not be abandoned. There is even contemplative satisfaction to be found in turning the pencil just enough, while knowing the job will have to be done again in a few minutes. In the days when I wanted to believe that self-help books were my path to enlightenment, there was one, unread, called Chop Wood, Carry Water. At least its title helped put small, ordinary tasks in a greater context.

Some rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen

2011-11-04T20:56:00.000-07:00

Pretty Boy Floyd
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie

If you'll gather 'round me, children,
A story I will tell
'Bout Pretty Boy Floyd, an outlaw,
Oklahoma knew him well.

It was in the town of Shawnee,
A Saturday afternoon,
His wife beside him in his wagon
As into town they rode.

There a deputy sheriff approached him
In a manner rather rude,
Vulgar words of anger,
An' his wife she overheard.

Pretty Boy grabbed a log chain,
And the deputy grabbed his gun;
In the fight that followed
He laid that deputy down.

Then he took to the trees and timber
To live a life of shame;
Every crime in Oklahoma
Was added to his name.

But a many a starving farmer
The same old story told
How the outlaw paid their mortgage
And saved their little homes.

Others tell you 'bout a stranger
That come to beg a meal,
Underneath his napkin
Left a thousand dollar bill.

It was in Oklahoma City,
It was on a Christmas Day,
There was a whole car load of groceries
Come with a note to say:

Well, you say that I'm an outlaw,
You say that I'm a thief.
Here's a Christmas dinner
For the families on relief.

Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.
© Copyright 1958 (renewed) by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc.

Dime store days

2011-10-31T09:19:00.000-07:00

Neither my brother, sister nor I would know how to do Halloween if we found ourselves as children in 2011. In the 1950s, Halloween began at the dime store.

Several years ago, I participated in a Halloween-themed collaboration for Somerset Studio magazine. My contribution was memoir/fiction, illustrated with watercolor vignettes of childhood Halloween highlights. The elementary school carnival with its cake walk and cascarones (confetti eggs), the five-and-ten wax lips and masks, our mother's enthusiastic costume creation, all run together, one year indistinguishable from another, all happily revisited.

Whether or not what I remember is the literal truth of the moment, I trust the feeling that I've carried forward, certainly about Halloween. Yes, a huge bag of candy was an enjoyable pay-off, yet the heart of the holiday was more nuanced, more affectionately recalled. I hope the sight of jack o'lanterns and aisles of miniature Snickers put you into a state of smiling reverie.

Watercolor-illustrated trick-or-treat bag, from a collaborative project for Somerset Studio, several years ago.

Borrowed beauty: Sherry O'Keefe

2011-10-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

The following is a reprint, with permission, from poet Sherry O'Keefe's blog. Rather than a link, I wanted to share its fullness and add the mentioned song, which continually repeats itself in my head since I read this. When at her site, please explore the categories atop the page. I apologize that the formatting here varies somewhat from the original. About that, I share my grandmother's saying, "It isn't Boston but it IS Massachusetts."

Thank you, Sherry.

-----------
abundant

He is not the sort to say It is raining on my windshield. There is a difference between that and: Will that truck need our help getting off the sandbar now that it is raining. And this matters in a vast, desolate country. Desolate being the word we use for the way any beauty hurts.

Forty-five miles past this point is the valley’s airport: a strip of prairie grass, mowed; a length of cones, white; a small 1960′s camper serving as the tower, one red hanger providing shelter for one blue prop plane. Open range country means the cattle are not fenced off the runway.

Not five miles west of the truck almost stuck on the sandbar, serious mountains redefine the landscape. We count the cords of wood (six, seven, eight) stacked near each homestead we pass on the way to the cabin we’ve rented for the weekend. There are seven cabins in this hunters’ camp and this being opening weekend for deer season, the rates are $1 higher than they were this summer: $36.00.

I point out a salmon-colored shack set in a russet-colored meadow. How odd, I say. He says, all chimneys are that way up here. What way is that, I wonder, realizing again I am slow to see past the obviousness that is me. I hadn’t even noticed (yet) the chimney.

Didn’t you notice chimneys rise higher above roof lines here than at lower elevations?

Um, no.

Long winters, deep snowdrifts on rooftops.

I smile. He smiles. We are both feeling warm and round: Earlier we’d caught eight large trout. Such a blessing, such a gift from the waters! We kept four and returned four. This is what abundant feels like, I tell him. He mulls this over. What is it to say: enough or many? What is it to feel: plenty? A word to measure the difference between how much we want and how much we actually need.

And from there, we move into deeper conversation. A rustic cabin, complete with a propane stove, but no running water is just a few minutes ahead of us. Steamed trout, fresh tomatoes. Brown bread from a can! And Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash dueting, North Country, on the CD permanently stuck in the CD player of his borrowed car. Whose voice is worse than the other, we debate. Worse being the word we use for what is most stirring.

(Thanks to "Muchtutty" on YouTube for the perfect video.)

When lost...

2011-10-22T21:02:00.000-07:00

Found on Kelly Kilmer's blog this week, where she offers a bright, enlightening post on artist Mary Blair, a quote from Henry David Thoreau which tells some of my story: "Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves."

When lost, panic is pointless. What serves us is a version of treading water, staying in place, yet not idle. And companions, as they might be called, such as flat tin boxes of watercolors or polychromos (is it not a graceful word?) pencils. As I became lost while going about my life in my own home, I, in the only true preparedness I can claim, had emergency supplies on hand, including, in no particular order: a blank envelope, a pencil, a very fine-line waterproof pen, scissors, a glue stick, a sheet of white card stock, a Prismacolor Sunburst Yellow pencil, something red, glitter, color photocopies, paper for drawing, a good eraser, a rainbow ink pad, alphabet stamps. Bottled water and dark chocolate are also recommended to keep one company for the duration.

If there is a trick to what Thoreau described, it is to be lost long enough for awareness to wander along and sit down, let us get caught up in its story and realize that lost is not who we thought it to be.

Flash Fiction Challenge: Lifeguards

2011-10-18T00:05:00.000-07:00

At her blog, Pattinase invited readers to create flash fiction, 1,000 words or fewer, based on a painting by social realist Reginald Marsh. For each entry, she pledged a donation to Union Settlement. My first flash fiction challenge.

Reginald Marsh, Lifeguards, 1933

“Rainwater collects in the dents of my car hood. That is, the ones that don’t slope. A few, perhaps three, remnants of a fearsome hail storm, are perfect little craters. Yet I believe tomorrow will be sunny.” Yr. friend, Warren.

For more than three years, Warren had sent a postcard each month, the card always arriving on the day of the full moon. He wrote letters, pages of precise and immaculate self-taught calligraphy. If he had illuminated the first capital on each page, she could imagine them as work from an ancient monastery. His stationery was rich without opulence, creamy in color, high rag content, a good tooth yet smooth enough to cause no unevenness in his penmanship. She savored and saved each bit of mail.

The postcards began with this message:

“Though Morris died 41 years ago, I have the feeling I need to find some place where I can go and talk about him. That he is gone does not unwind the tangle in which he left my life. As I am the only one remaining, it seems up to me. The other knots will not be undone. Perhaps some of mine will.” Yr. friend, Warren.

His cards, which she pictured him choosing even more carefully than he selected a peach at the farmers’ market, were photos of writers or actors or scenes with bodies of water, if a river may be called a body of water. She thought that really described a sea or a lake, something that stayed in place. She wasn’t sure that bodies meandered. Other months, he chose the reproduction of a painting, something she would lean on her desk where she could look at it, turning it over occasionally to study what he’d written. It wasn’t hard to memorize the few sentences.

“As I hear the stories other family members tell in these meetings, I am relieved to know I was not alone with such thoughts. Yet I still struggle to keep hold of a belief in love that can emerge from the wreckage I know. Perhaps I will ruminate upon a word that could rename a love so battered.” Yr. friend, Warren.

Of course every postman who ever brought one of his cards, and every post office worker between him and her mailbox, read what he wrote. She could never leave that sort of information out for her neighbors to see or for her mailman to know. Warren mentioned that he always delivered them to the post office. It allowed him to hold on to some of his anonymity. Still.

“They have ceased the manufacture of my writing paper. It feels like having to find a new therapist, something perhaps more trouble than it is worth. Though I do not believe I am so fixed in my ways that change is not an option, to weigh the balance of cost and quality, to search and experiment, holds no thrill. Would you recognize me in drugstore ballpoint on a lined yellow pad?” Yr. friend, Warren.

She wrote to him in response to all his letters. There was not one specific product she preferred to another, though she could not abide a pen that skipped. At times, she sensed her handwriting was becoming less legible. Even she was unable to decipher notes written quickly. She thought, “I am becoming my father,” whose brief addenda to long-ago typed letters remained mysteries unsolved.

“It is a fellowship here, as they describe it, in these community rooms and church halls. Transgressing what I presume to be written and unwritten rules, I have identified favorite speakers whose words invariably echo recent awareness of mine. I feel less like a dazed fish who flops on the pier, less like one whose lungs cannot draw enough from the atmosphere to sustain me.” Yr. friend, Warren.

Left to make whatever she wished of the coinciding post cards and full moons, she saw it as a way of keeping track, for someone who found no beauty in dates or weeks or ordinary measures of one’s life. Where she once noticed the moon’s phases by the light cast through her east window, she now sensed the rhythm of time, felt more aligned with its flow. It did flow, as those pictured rivers, not taking its own pulse constantly.

“After speaking of Morris last night, our final moments, my helplessness and despair, a young woman touched my shoulder as I was leaving. I recognized her but could not remember the sound of her voice, which must mean I had not heard it before. The word she chose to call me was lifeguard, one who watches over those for whom the water becomes too turbulent. After tonight, she told me, I know I will be able to stay afloat.” Yr. friend, Warren.

Revisited: Post from March 10, 2010

2011-10-17T10:45:00.000-07:00

OUTSIDE THE LINES
In the foothills above Pasadena, hiking trails either slope or climb quickly, delivering adventurers to nature's version of quiet - songbirds, raptors, running streams. A reverie, not quite a dream, during the night took me to a long-ago afternoon in the headland of the Arroyo Seco; it must have been spring for the water ran clear and fast from bank to bank. We crossed it on rocks as we found them for it was too deep to wade.

The picture I retrieved was of a moment when the stream paused, fallen limbs created a pool before the run-off picked up speed once more. On the grainy bottom, amid pebbles and spotty plant life, a coral-colored salamander or newt lay in the shade. It was bright and warm of hue, an element of fire that shone its small light upward through the dimness. I remember surprise at discovering the amphibian; that land spends most of the year with few options for a water-lover to dampen its skin.

Soon that memory shifted to another, yet the day had been returned to me, filling my cells with the information they absorbed, afoot for a only and hour or so with my father and brother, just out of view of neighborhoods, roads and outward signs of civilization. It did not feel random, the gift of moments from a much earlier time. Was there a message and, if so, would I be able to decode it?

As I considered the pieces, collectively or sequestered as their separate parts, I made the hasty leap to a dismissive attitude I often have regarding dreams: it was an entertainment, an amusement, just an anonymous offering my brain decided to bring forth. Yet as I also find with dreams, the awareness of journey was strong. When your senses tell you that you've gone to a place other than where you began your sleep, believe them.

Operating on the assumption that our first sincere take is the true one, I found myself thinking of hidden jewels: the half-dream, the salamander on that day, all the clips from all the years that hold blessings unacknowledged. I had asked for inspiration and illumination yesterday and here was a story, breathed in my direction like a dandelion wish. A barrier had fallen, a path had been cleared. Having lived more of my life than not with a mind that selectively offered grim and discouraging thoughts or images, what a reversal of fortune to be shown the peaceful and lovely.

I will pay attention today to the ghosts that stop by, willing myself to embrace scenes from the shadowbox past. I will welcome the unexplained and know it is here for a reason. The gleam on the creek bed may be fool's gold, yet if what matters is the glow it casts and not its worth at the assay office, I'd say the effort has been rewarded.

2 comments from original post:

Erin in Morro Bay said...
And how interesting that the fire element shone through the crystal clear water. I love that imagery - it must mean something. I think you should run with!
Erin
March 10, 2010 10:29 AM

michael jameson said...
so your marylinn im michael jameson oldantiqueguy@hotmail.com , im the misguided philosopher and the thoreau translator/commenter, you made a comment after me,i smiled so curiosity bit me and i looked,i too have to write!, mind and memory! i enjoyed some of your stuff! so a note was in order! stay safe and happy and jot an email when it moves you to do so! michael
April 1, 2010 10:23 AM

Nothing Is Impossible Thursday

2011-10-13T08:38:00.000-07:00

Go on with your miraculous selves. Everything awaits. xo

Rubbermoon image, copyright M. Kelly

When you care enough to send the very best...

2011-10-11T11:42:00.000-07:00

Send Mail Art.

Mail art by A. D. Eker (Thuismuseum), 1985, from Wikipedia article.

Once I discovered rubber stamping, I found mail art. It seems the definitive text from the 1980s is still available. The Rubber Stamp Album may yet be found, along with newer books, many focused on using recycled material.

In Southern California, Anne Seltzer's "Postmarked" shows raised funds to purchase books for prisoners through auctioning donated art. If you Google "call for mail art submissions," you will find current opportunities to take part in larger projects. What I still like best is sending - or receiving - something that gives them something to talk about at the post office and along the routes between here and there.

Rubber stamp images, copyright M. Kelly.

Otherness

2011-10-08T13:41:00.000-07:00

One of the tells of otherness might be cutting one's own hair. Which I have done for nearly 32 years, this go-round. A natural curl is very forgiving. I'd much rather, if there were the funds, pay someone to houseclean than to cut my hair. Yet I know I am a minority voice here; and, thus, know this inclination to be part of my own brand of otherness. Well, it wouldn't be otherness, would it, were it being practiced in the same way all over town?

I wonder, do we recognize it in ourselves first or does it scream at family members and schoolmates? Regardless, we know it soon enough and then, oh, joy, get to spend the rest of our lives growing into a state that looks eerily like acceptance of it, of us. Bless its pointed little head.

There is otherness in each of us, only some received larger portions. I suspect it is most clearly exemplified by states of mind and heart, conditions best known to ourselves, not as screamingly public as the wildly gesticulating hands or the breathless rush to describe a just-seen photo of the dream box of cheaper-than-cheap watercolors in 36 named shades. But there are further giveaways: vocabulary, the diverse categories of arcane gleanings we share too willingly in conversation, our passions, our pasts.

When I asked my son what the word otherness brought to mind, he reeled off two of my favorite things: a parallel universe and astral projection. That is atomic otherness, or simply, purely, other. In my dreams.

As the news continues to show footage of Steve Jobs and recall his life, I feel we are observing otherness in full flower. Unassigned territory is where all about us that is not sameness gathers its strength and gets to practice its best parlor tricks. I put more faith than is probably wise in what we each bring that is unique, for who can know where our one-of-a-kind brains will take us, possibly take us all.

Where I lose patience, and try to know as little of these matters as possible, is with bullies of all ages whose own inescapable otherness is so unbearable that someone must be punished. It is a world full of weirdos; we're all bozos on this bus. My former in-laws, people of superior-to-extraordinary intellectual gifts, were once denied the Checker automobile they wanted to purchase, told by the sales person that they were "not self-realized enough" to drive such an other car. I think he misread the signs.

My favorite show on broadcast tv is FRINGE - they still have dirigibles in the alternate universe! And they/we have Walter Bishop, played with such range by John Noble, who has my vote as poster boy for everything that is other. That the character was institutionalized for 17 years has contributed to his inability to blend, yet he would be exotic, unidentifiable and far from ordinary had he somehow managed to run the toy department at a Target store for that vanished span of time.

While the sense of being the one thing that is not like the others may have felt like a pox on your life since you began to think for yourself, it, too, is something so different from what it seems. Strangeness, oddness, peculiarity, individuality, all are really synonyms for special, wondrous, rare, unique. Each of us, whether it can be seen by the masses or requires a closer look, a more intimate knowledge, is in some way or multiple ways as other as it is possible to be. There are very few who can disguise it forever, and who would choose to spend so much energy for so long trying to pass for normal, a state which doesn't even exist.

What is great in us comes from our otherness. It is the compost in which we bloom and thrive. It will carry us past our imagined limitations. All we have to do is scratch it behind its curiously-shaped ears and love it.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (aka: Happy Birthday)

2011-10-04T08:49:00.000-07:00

There were showers this morning, just after dawn. Actual early-in-the-season rain is forecast for later, tomorrow and, perhaps, beyond. We have also entered a big month for birthdays. Sincerest happy wishes today to Jean, and for tomorrow, to Alia and Morgan. Before the week is over, Joyeux anniversaire to Dana. Ah, Libra, fellow air sign, fellow troublemakers. Blessings, all.

Sunday tune

2011-10-02T16:04:00.000-07:00

What was playing on the mind radio this afternoon.

(P.S. Happy Birthday, Wallace Stevens)

And then it was now...

2011-10-01T16:01:00.000-07:00

Rubbermoon stamp images, copyright M. Kelly.

It is a Rip Van Winkle day, this first of October. If I had thoughts, and I did, I do, of making Christmas gifts or cards, it is already what I think of as "too late to be early." October doesn't dither about, though in LA it may bring our hottest days; no matter what, no one can pretend it is still summer.

Here, at 3:15, a warm (high 80s?) breeze rustles the palm trees and sways the curtains in light that would signify, on a true summer day, that it was around 5:30. With no effort I could swivel my chair and commune with air and sky. Which is how I end up sitting in October in an August state of mind.

One can grow weary of self-rebuke, of always at least half-assuming the label "fixer-upper" applies. But, argues that prissy Puritan Ethic, there is evidence. Yes, and perhaps there will forever be.

My affliction today seems to be Autumn Fever. It has nothing to do with baseball play-offs. It certainly is not connected to professional basketball, which may have gone the way of Kodachrome, just when I was beginning to know the who and what of it. I believe that some of us, for I cannot be the only one, have a touch of benign narcolepsy. We fall asleep, not behind the wheel of a moving car, but while punting on the slow-moving tributary of a larger, swifter channel. We drift...I see willow branches trailing in nearly-still water...for what we think is an afternoon but awake to realize it has been a month, maybe more. It is an enchanted state in which thirst, hunger, appointments and obligations are erased, until the spell ends.

And then, as a friend once said so precisely, it was now. I am not prepared to say what any of this means. The best I can do today is tell you that it IS. Once again, time and I have turned in opposite directions, to meet later by the Union Square flower stand that sells gardenias year-round, blinking at each other in happy though faint recognition. At what point must I admit that my fluid relationship with time is the real thing, not some dalliance, and simply surrender to it?

READ

2011-09-30T08:27:00.000-07:00

Poster/Lee's Summit High School, Lee's Summit, MO

Crying: for many reasons or no reason at all

2011-09-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

Stampington & Co. image, M. Kelly.

Back to high school music, back to the oddities that loop through my brain. When I found the Everlys, young and harmonizing on Ed Sullivan in their Marine Corps uniforms, well. Even if there hadn't been a crying theme, I had to invite them over. Regardless of the lyrics, the sentiment today is not loss, nor heartache, nor being a fool.

Sometimes we cry with relief, when a great wrong has been righted, when a long-awaited solution appears. We weep with gladness at weddings, births, events of intense, overwhelming happiness. We cry for reasons we cannot name but know the tears do not represent sadness. We cry because we can, because we have a language that transcends words, heart language. Once upon a time, ladies carried hankies tucked into their sleeves, at least the ones I knew did. This is a day of promise, a day for doing the dance of joy and I believe I will just have myself a cry. Meanwhile, the Everly Brothers have something to say. I couldn't think of a song about crying in quiet gratitude.

Samples, just a few samples

2011-09-25T16:00:00.000-07:00

Eraser-carved stamps, original, copyrighted work by Marylinn Kelly, stamped with Kaleidacolor rainbow ink pads.

The samples shown are my original designs, copyright protected.

Somewhere, near a river in Egypt...

2011-09-24T09:41:00.000-07:00

Felted crocodile by Kerry O'Gorman.

Her name is Masika, created by Kerry O'Gorman whose profile page you need to visit to see her picture of Mole and Ratty, of Wind in the Willows fame, sharing tea and animated conversation. This is the link to Kerry's blog...please linger and soak up her photography of British Columbia, then click on her etsy site and learn more about Masika; learn enough to cause you to click that PayPal button and call her home. Last Christmas my gift to myself was a wee elf named Frode, one of five, I believe they are brothers, smaller than a golf ball, full of magic and ancient intelligence, more of Kerry's enchanting wool felting. Discovering Ratty and Mole, their enduring friendship, absolutely made my week. There are those among us who say, "Step away from the computer. Go do something real." And miss all this? Are you mad?

Who will speak?

2011-09-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

Rubbermoon image with color pencil. Not currently in catalog.

Today I may have a new aspiration: to become a Professional Stink-maker. Can you see the buisness cards?

I learned advocacy when my mother went through heart surgery 23 years ago. Following what was diagnosed as a transient ischemic attack, she was admitted from the ER to the closest our neighborhood hospital had to an Intensive Care Unit. Not all that close.

She soon began hallucinating, which I learned in the middle of the night when they called and told me someone would have to come and stay with her in the room. Not one professional on duty was willing to take that assignment. My training had begun. I don't think I've ever been without a notepad or pen since. You never know when it will be necessary to document or quote or preserve essential facts.

Diminishing health is not the only reason behind a reluctance to confront. Many of us are simply too battle-scarred, too weary for the toe-to-toe combat needed to see our rights protected. Years ago, a friend whose job was as a court advocate for children in the foster care system suggested that to me as a career option. And at that time I felt I was too leaky a vessel to speak convincingly for any child whose trauma and abuse were likely more horrifying than my own; my skin was impossibly thin.

The aftermath of my son's illness required putting on my step-up suit again. Eventually we were strengthened by a lawyer on the front line to help secure benefits, since a civilian, even a persistent one, can only achieve so much. Today I was reminded how thick the underbrush has grown, like briars around a fairy tale castle, to keep as many of us as possible separated from what is our due as aged or disabled, in financial distress or without resources of varying descriptions.

Whether you believe in astrology or not, Aquarians, myself among them, are the zodiac's champions of the underdog. I feel the need acutely to see justice, or simple fair play, prevail. Good luck with that, right? But even in my state of limited mobility, tucked back into my reclusive and daydreaming tendencies, I have a voice, I have words and I still possess a bit of fire. As a teenager, I admired Upton Sinclair - all the more when I learned he had run for governor of California as a Socialist - and believed in muck-raking, fuss-raising, stink-making. Not on my behalf but for others.

We don't even need to explore tasks assumed during the Vietnam war. I am one of those who knew we were seeing a revolution. While visions of torches and pitchforks have faded, the awareness remains that many of our brethren would benefit from a reasonably sane, decidedly insistent voice speaking for them. There are times when thinking the call might be for me makes me cranky, but I turn my head with the secret smile, for it feels good, the chance to be of service.

This may be merely today's fancy, especially the conjured vision of business cards, or there may exist a niche in the bureaucratic maze for a creature with my specific combination of pluses and minuses; I am not afraid to look a fool, actually posses a minor talent for diplomacy and can be found, loitering at the station for the good outcome to arrive, when everyone else has gone home. At the very least it is something new to ponder. I wondered how I was going to fill all those idle hours.

On Raglan Road

2011-09-19T11:06:00.000-07:00

We are fortunate in living across from our town's high school, a school so known for its music and scholastic achievements that families move to our town so their children may have the benefit of a superior public education. Then, as the sons and daughters go off to college, the adults return to their homes, often in other countries.

The marching band practices at least twice a week, that we hear, beginning well before the start of the fall semester. Before football games they smooth out any imperfections in their best numbers. As the team is the Tigers, I'll let you guess what spirited song is their rallying tune.

This Saturday morning, as we could hear a soccer game in the background, the sound of a single bagpipe - something new - floated to us between apartment buildings. Then it was joined by others and my son, who can stretch himself to see the campus better than I, reported a group in full regalia. They did not need warming up for very long and I forget, at this moment, their first selection.

Ah, but the second, easily recognized and unforgettable, was On Raglan Road, based on the poem by Patrick Kavanaugh, the source material introduced by a dear friend for whom Monday is not going as might be hoped. With her in heart and mind, I offer two versions of the work. While its gist expresses loss, the beauty of the poem and the music it became are worth holding close. (My blog format cuts off some of the lines on the spoken-word video. I don't know how to change that.)

Falling back on what works

2011-09-17T14:03:00.000-07:00

Shy suitor, remorseful friend, low-key celebrator of diverse tidings, he was raised well and does not arrive empty-handed.

What to bring, what to send, what to say...I think some among us have an intuitive gift for comfort, encouragement, support, a true form of grace under fire. I say bring love. We can get squirmy, judge a sentiment as inappropriate, get knotted up in our own shyness or discomfort, but the truth of it is, what works is love.

A kind word, a cookie, time to listen, a hug. We forget how much we have to offer. The eloquent bouquet or the last summer flower from your garden, bring it. Say what is in your heart. Laugh or weep or both. Show up and be you, the real you. No matter what, do it, speak it. This may well be your turn to be the last ray of light in the world. Go.

Compartments

2011-09-16T09:56:00.000-07:00

Portion of a page from journal fiction.

In the 1980s, I was part of two (well, really three) different fiction workshops and because of that was motivated to write fiction every week. For the first group, which held together for about a year and a half, we had assignments and I used that as the weekly task.

There were also in-class exercises and reading aloud, something which I had never done. Finding that my voice gave further dimension to my voice transformed my view of self. Reading my work made me happy. It still does. A wall slid away and someone I had not known was there stepped forward.

With each day measured in finite hours and myself no longer - if I ever was - seen as any version of a dynamo, I find limits of time, focus and energy, versus the list of what might become real by my hands, frustrating. I do my best to think in reasonable compartments, yet the past few nights when I woke up, instead of just going back to sleep, I turned on the light, found my glasses and drew. This is not time stretching to accommodate my needs, I realize. I will called upon for a payback later in the day when I fall asleep like a narcoleptic at the computer.

Life as a bento box: in theory, a portion of fiction, non-fiction, correspondence, conversation, chores (though truthfully, with the exception of cooking this finishes a distant last to all other options), aspects of art, time spent with my son. Yet if I set a timer for, say, writing a blog post, the bell would ding and I'd either hear it and wonder what it was or it would whistle past like a night train as I slept.

Slow, I feel that I am slow, yet also know that the wish to achieve renewed goals, to breathe life into more of my ideas, tugs at me like an impatient child. "You promised..." she says, pulling my hand. What I know that she does not is that life drives this car, not I. The bigger picture, the broader agenda, things happen as they do. The same unseen conductor who summons me and what I hope I possess has also set the pace. For now, I am a very old tortoise with just the one speed. But trust that my mind is spinning, or at least whirring, with each jolting yet firm step.

Still know all the words

2011-09-15T08:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's mail brought the official registration form for Pasadena High School, Class of 1962 Reunion a year from now. Among the many questions - will we be refused admittance if we fail to answer? - is a line that asks, Songs, Groups? May I have a second sheet, please?

Today's stamp illustration called one favorite, certainly one favorite singer, to mind: Sam Cooke. If I start on the list now, I may be done in time for my early registration in November. Will you find something today to call wonderful? I promise to do the same.

Birthday card

2011-09-14T08:05:00.000-07:00

Even though her September 14 birthday was always squeezed up close to the first day of school, my sister Laurie never wanted for friends, old or new, to invite to the party. Being the only child who did not have a winter birthday, her parties could be held outdoors; in the patio or, in the case of a remembered pony ride (it was a long driveway) in the front yard. Our three tortoises enjoyed the patio gatherings and became curiously fond of strawberry ice cream.

Happy Birthday, dear Laurie. Here is to your best year ever.

Be happy in your work

2011-09-13T08:06:00.000-07:00

There is an ever-shrinking chamber of mind that still carries doubt and dread. It is where the notion of life as a balancing act resides. However, there are other rooms that house contrary notions and when my hand draws, these opposing factions try to occupy the same space. With no conscious intention, FishHatUnicycleBoy appeared to embody this conflict: yes, it is a teetering ride and isn't it a lark, being fully foolish as we pedal?

Carapace

2011-09-10T15:38:00.000-07:00

The word carapace visited me yesterday. It stirred the image of a greeting card found, purchased in multiples, more than 20 years ago. I wondered if I could summon the illustration via Google. Then in another reading today, carapace, sly creature, appeared again. That the word was also used in reference to the painting, once I found it, tells me I am onto something. The only question is, what?

The blog site at which I found the carapace work, Yvette's in so many words... would keep me fascinated and linking for hours, probably days. So many favorites, such a kindred spirit. Here is her link to the Sept. 10 post, equally illuminated and illuminating. And a clue: Chinese lanterns and vintage detectives. With grateful thanks to Yvette at in so many words... Do, please visit and leave a comment.

Image by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale from The Book of Old Songs and Ballads. The knight's armor looks like some strange carapace, doesn't it? The painting is an odd mix of the ominous and the innocent.

The British artist Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale (1872 -1945), though born a bit late, was a Pre-Raphaelite painter known for her luscious use of color. She was also, as you can see a brilliant designer. Her paintings tended towards the allegorical and the medieval in subject matter. Later in her life she also turned to working in stained glass.

Primarily I'm drawn to these paintings by the way Brickdale uses color. It's interesting to me that she manages to use such a bright spectrum yet her work though hardly subtle, somehow, remains fairly soft-spoken.

I'm fond of Victorian painting with all its rich detail, especially when it's this colorful and full of story telling.

To read more about Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale please go these other blogs and pages:

Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood and Victorian/Edwardian Paintings.

(Painting, text, research and appropriate links courtesy of Yvette at in so many words...)

Angels incognito (and you know who you are)

2011-09-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

This dolly with the linebacker neck - which I hadn't noticed, or so I tell myself - is a vintage Rubbermoon stamp image. She sprang then, and reappears now, as a reminder that blessings arrive in disguises that would scandalize Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. As I remember the details, her original inspiration was a borderline enraged air conditioner repairman with zero people skills who woke me up to...something. Incognito, duh.

Sometimes we have the glad assignment of being the instrument; sometimes we are chosen to receive the gift. In either role, we, often without knowing, breathe life into hope, participate in and bear witness to the miraculous, the impossible.

Today I dedicate this abbreviated post with its muscular angel, and if I am allowed angels, I sure as hell hope they continue to be muscular by some definition, to a friend who appeared with spools of ribbon and shelves of poetry to expand my knowledge, enrich my life. It is not her natal birthday but if I had the necessary volumes of arcana, I bet they would tell me that today is her name day, her saint's day, her Botticelli's Venus rising from the sea day.

I would be the first to demur any likelihood of my own role as gift, yet I have been told such is the case by those I trust. In mismatched tops and bottoms, crunky hair and drooping eye pouches that suggest post-Civil War carpetbaggers, I apparently possess not only the possibility of being a camouflaged fairy godparent, you AND I absolutely ARE those rare, fluttery, benevolent presences to each other.

Look not askance at whatever crosses your line of sight today. Be attuned to the most hushed and coded whisperings of the unseen. Embrace what may seem unlikely and pay attention, with suspended disbelief, when it seems your most immediate wish has been granted.

We, angels one and all, might be well advised to organize, develop secret Masonic-style handshakes (oops, have I said too much?), bear some identifying lapel flower or carry a folded copy of Rolling Stone (Annie Leibovitz cover) in order to know who-is-who without a lot of dithering about.

But that would remove some of the luscious mystery, wouldn't it? And besides, with the key phrase "pay attention" in mind, we already know, we always know.

As I've written before, like seeks like; like finds like. The universe is one vast network of matchmakers, only, unlike some questionable on-line services, the universe gets it right. We are, at least in my case in utter imperfection, introduced to each other at the perfect moment, with the supreme extra bonus prize of having the rest of our days to celebrate, to bask in, our extraordinary good fortune.

If dreams were lightning...

2011-09-05T20:15:00.000-07:00

Just saying, I will never weary of John Prine. Hope the same is true for you.

Following the morning of The Snap (see previous post), Sunday arrived with clouds and rounded out the late afternoon with a bruise-colored sky, thunder and lightning.

Los Angeles can go, I have no doubt, years without a thunder storm. This one was strange for having given forecasters the slip, for arriving in early September and stranger still for being dry. When the pyrotechnics were over and it was fully dark, then we had some rain.

Not every dark cloud that drifts across my sun is invited to these posts. It is just not my way. Those are not, or not yet, the stories I come here to tell. It was synchronicity, as I understand it, being true to itself that sent discordant. curious, anomalous weather, big and loud, breezy and chilly enough for me to notice so I could write about order displaced. Maybe someone has a quote somewhere that tells us, when saying what is true is too alarming, write about the unpredictability of nature.

Worry is time and energy ill-spent; it makes us sick and that is all it accomplishes. Every day I peel worry off like nail polish, which I really cannot wear without becoming a 10-year-old but that doesn't keep me from stockpiling it in the make-up drawer. I might mature.

Worry used seem like a tattoo, a spreading birthmark from which I thought I'd never be free. Some things, when practiced, become easier. If I can unlearn worry, perhaps one day I will play a stringed instrument, a ukelele if not a mandolin. Impossible things happen.

I will pay attention when weather speaks to me, trusting it has just offered itself to stand it for truths that still seem beyond my reach or capability. Or it may be the tool for augering, hinting at favorable outcomes or reminding me that sometimes a cloud is just a cloud.

Weather wonder

2011-09-03T22:29:00.000-07:00

Cropped version of Cheryl Lunde's photo "Sunset at Ventura Beach," a look at Autumn, California-style. Link.

My sister, a Californian for 37 years, with brief time-out to attend college in Seattle, has a theory about the arrival of Fall in this sunny land. Even with the past 23 years spent mostly on the East Coast, she remembered and boiled the shift of our seasons down to two words: the snap.

The (captial T, capital S) Snap, as I'll call it, happens one morning when those of us who wondered if we'd ever want to see a sweatshirt again wake up and know something is different. We shiver in our tank tops, or even ordinary tee shirts. There is the mildest bite to the air. The digital temperature on the clock above the computer registers somewhere below 73 degrees at 6 a.m. It happened today.

In my memory, there has never been a hint of The Snap earlier than mid-October, and usually later than that. For even a faux, teasing snap (and there has never been such a creature) to arrive on September 3 is unprecedented. Our school used to start around the middle of September and all those new, heavy, frequently itchy clothes had to stay in the closet for ages. Some years, September is the hottest month.

I did not dream or imagine it this morning. It was not the marine layer as our tv newscasters have taken to calling ordinary fog, for in South Pasadena the sky was clear. And there WAS snappy air wafting through the open windows. Pasadena's Sunday forecast, somewhat warmer, generally, than our small town to the south, calls for a high of 94. Nothing cool about that. But as I gathered evidence to support my own personal barometer, downtown Los Angeles this morning was a mere 57 degrees at 6:l5 and was only 70 at 4:l5 p.m. Something, I swear, is afoot.

Since I began waiting, watching for The Snap, I have never known it to arrive, then depart, returning finally six weeks later. The pattern has been, once here, it is here for the duration. I don't know what this means. Our squirrels, as they scale the palms and run the utility wires, look particularly scrawny, their fur far from lush, their tails mere shadows of ordinary fullness. There are no wooly caterpillars for me to observe, classic harbingers of chilly days.

Tomorrow morning I will take another reading, sniff the wind, squint at the sunrise, let my skin inform me. The Snap has been such a reliable sign ever since I was made aware of it, I am disheartened to think it may have turned fickle. The number of things on which we can depend shrinks by the day. I cannot bear to think our stalwart Snap may follow other vanished certainties into oblivion.

Speaking only for myself, confusion is nothing new

2011-09-01T10:47:00.000-07:00

To all talented young musicians and their passion, with special good wishes to the Gosnells Primary School Recorder Ensemble** and their performance on Sept. 2. I hope we'll have a video of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" to share here soon.

**CORRECTION: The whole school will be performing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," costumed to follow the Yellow Brick Road. As I said, confusion is nothing new.

Hold Page One: Woman Earns Money With Blog

2011-08-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

My friends at Amazon had a surprise for me today, the reward for belonging to their associates program and linking mentions of books, mostly, in my blog to their products.

I have an Amazon credit for $1.63. As this is a cool $1.63 more than I had when I sat down at the computer, I really do consider myself ahead. I am not being sarcastic. My blog, or my blogging, has, against all odds, earned income.

In my world, things stand-in for other things. My vibrational frequency is metaphor, sign and symbol. A dollar sixty-three today, tomorrow...ten thousand.

Everything around me that works the way it is supposed to, or better, is a gift. Anything that one would like more of that becomes more is a gift...a new blog follower (there should be tokens of appreciation), a hidden box of erasers to carve, an Amazon greeting and gift card.

A family friend claimed there was money for her in the desert and every time we met at the edge of nowhere, shared our picnics in the sand and reconnoitered the area, damn if she didn't find at least $20 caught on the only shrub in sight.

Unless we've traded our wits for reality tv shows, we have the ability to recognize patterns. Jackie noticed the desert wind blew cash in her direction. That Amazon email with the bright subject line may be more about a perceived assurance that the good does come, in the forms and increments it chooses, than about quantity or substance.

Increase is increase. I am patient. This will do.

Choose your own adventure

2011-08-30T12:16:00.000-07:00

Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides.
Junichiro Tanizaki

Without shame, I have hijacked Susan T. Landry's idea of shadow visuals for my own, not-clearly-thought-through purposes.

Anthony Pham's copyrighted photo of a polarized filter casting a shadow heart.

Shadows and the sense of weather leaning in with too much weight; a drunken suitor, a tense salesman short of his quota. Today it all seems to be symbol and metaphor. Projections and predictions.

And a heart-shaped shadow, cast by an object nothing like it.

So THAT'S where that went...

2011-08-29T16:51:00.000-07:00

Happiness can come from anywhere. A scrap of paper for scribbling something important is priceless at the right moment. Finding what I hadn't known was missing makes me feel abundant.

Color pencils are my favorite art tool, tied for first place with very fine point, permanent black pens, like Sakura Micron .005. They work well together. Yesterday, involved in the virtuous activity of trying to reclaim my life and indoor space from the brambles and nettles that had taken over, exiling me to a dusty corner, I discovered the box of shrink art pin leftovers also had clutches of color pencils. So that's where all the shades of brown went. No wonder I could never find the Peacock Green.

Depression, a life-long condition, can foster a specific sort of amnesia. We forget who we are, we forget what simple pleasures make us happy, we lose track of accomplishments or endurances and undervalue the challenging voyage we seem to have been shanghaied into. I am not complaining. Nor am I, to the best of my knowledge, depressed now or even in the recent past. I'm just saying...Actually, I'm expressing thanks for illumination, the wind that lifted amnesia's veil and reminded me about a body of work done with color pencils, though it is dispersed across continents and few of its components reside with me. But the tools still do: both the color pencils and the rubber stamps they brought to life.

If our history is tucked away in boxes, we (of a certain age) may forget some of the good parts. As I related the find of the pencils, the illustrated pins, to a wise friend, she suggested I assemble my rubber stamp catalog and line the 400+ images across a table top. We have a built-in buffet cabinet in the dining room that would serve well. Without visible evidence, I allow myself to assume that I have been absent-mindedly twisting my hair around my finger for the past 17 years, even though I have increased my stamp lines in this century, if not this decade...yet.

What I mean to say is that if I can find myself to be richer in much of what matters than I thought, the same is very possibly true for you. At the risk of sounding like a new-age sap, I confess to keeping, from time to time, a journal of gratitude. Daily, I speak out loud appreciation for the gifts of my life. As my reclamation project chugs along, I add to the list.

There is nothing too small to be acknowledged when it comes to being thankful. In fact, there is nothing small when it comes to good. Seeming evidence to the contrary, I have not become the old desert rat who buried her treasures in abandoned mine shafts or under anonymous boulders, then lost the map she drew so she could go back and dig them up. Part of me always knows where they are, it is just that the other part remembers so inefficiently.

Photo from funnychill.com. GOOD fences make good neighbors.

Hatches battened: check

2011-08-27T11:33:00.000-07:00

For today, perhaps the next few days, what I want is to wish safety to friends and family in the path of Hurricane Irene. I know you are all wise, will be careful and take whatever precautions you need to. How odd it is/will be in New York with no transportation, no Broadway, no anything, from the sound of it. I can only imagine.

As the politicians are saying, Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Be well. We in other regions are thinking of you with great affection. xo

Building

2011-08-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

Once again I am unsettled by this pesky, seemingly unbreakable habit, thinking about life and wondering of what is it made. Yesterday I knew it wasn't bricks...too large and solid. Legos, especially those 1x1 tiles, would provide a long and either tedious or enjoyable trajectory of construction, similar to building a human existence.

Then I discovered Stan Munro, architect and mayor of Toothpick City.

Photo, with thanks to Solent News and Photo Agency, art by Stan Munro.

We, I will say we though my only point of reference is I, wish to see the sturdy, not wobbling towers of our lives rising floor by floor, milestones one atop the other, the random setback appearing only as a few dropped stitches in the sweater's design. The key phrase is "wish to see."

Some scientists have come to believe the pyramids were built, not from stones but from composite material, molded in place as the tombs grew. The matter is still in dispute. Regardless, we, our own monuments to genealogy, family folklore, DNA, experience and imagination, while Wonders of the World by some standards, were not fashioned from rocks of mythic proportion. When I peer, squinting, at my personal timeline, my strata, with periodic scrapings transferred to specimen ziplocks, I find the structure is pure toothpick, growth often imperceptible.

As I experience it, more so as I pay better attention, life evolves one thought, one seed, one moment at a time. With his painstaking, scaled-down recreation of temples, skyscrapers and sailing ships, Mr. Munro reveals a parallel universe in which the process is more easily understood. Slivers, slender renderings from birch logs and glue, lots and lots of glue...it is a day's work, day after day.

There it is: life is a daily, hourly, one-second-to-the-next business. It is our choice whether we approach it with quivering eagerness, apathy or dread. I have begun to see my questions as answers; allowing them to remain questions is pointless. I have actually, and against all expectations, fallen in love with the Mystery.

Before sleep each night, I peel the metaphoric glue from my fingers, check to be sure stray toothpicks aren't stuck to the soles of my feet. Mr. Munro is able to see his progress as the Taj Mahal, the Chrysler Building, grow beneath his hands. The rest of us are left to faith, that what we have wrought invisibly will stand. When I wake, I trust the day will sweep in, tide-like, my next assignment in a secret language spelled by its foam.

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

2011-08-22T08:56:00.000-07:00

by John Singer Sargent. The Tate Gallery, London. Purchased from the artist, 1887.

Paper lanterns, whether illuminated by candle or bulb, cast my favorite light.

And the President said, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

2011-08-18T22:47:00.000-07:00

Intro theme song by John Boutte (accent on the "e")

We just finished watching season one of the HBO series, Treme on DVDs from Netflix. The title is pronounced treh'may. On cable, the second season has finished, its ETA on DVD unknown. The story is set in New Orleans some six-months after Hurricane Katrina, beginning shortly before Mardi Gras. I have never been there but my heart broke then and I found that it is a long way from healed these several years later.

Trying hard for no spoilers, what I can say is: music, family, food, music, tradition, injustice.

Indifference as a life theme recently insinuated itself into my consciousness. We do, shockingly, perpetuate what we know. That is a flaccid segue to my continuing, reignited, fury at the response of government on every level to the catastrophe in Louisiana. We do not even possess instruments to measure a system's indifference to the city and people of New Orleans in Katrina's wake.

The show was recommended by a friend, kindred spirit and also great fan of The Wire, whose creators are responsible for Treme. When Angella shared her recent NO visits in narrative and photos, I hadn't seen all the episodes. I didn't know what was coming nor how I would weep. By the way, the link will take you to one day's post but if you go to the her main blog address and scroll down, you will find others, as well as additional subjects worth exploring.

I, in turn, recommend the show, which gathers force over time. Throughout, the music and musician characters seem to be surrogates for the place itself, which stands outside time, tragedy and bureaucracy in some respects. Mythic and misbegotten. The sound becomes richer with each episode, the stories deepen and darken. I soon recanted my wish for some unspecified sad fate to be visited upon Steve Zahn's scruffy DJ, Davis.

In other posts, I've said I am not a reviewer. When something get hold of me, I'll tell you about it. What's not to love about a show with all that brass? The trombone has as substantial a part as some of the actors.

The season's final episode includes an extended sequence of mourners taking part in the second line behind musicians who play - I could not find a comparable version on You Tube - "I'll Fly Away." But over the closing credits, Steve Earle, who appears in the series, sings "This City," composed for Treme.

-------------------
Apropos of nothing I can point to, this quote turned up in my email today. It may become my mantra.

"Rilke said it best. 'We must assume our existence as broadly as we
in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of must be possible in
it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to
have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable.'"

Community theater

2011-08-14T10:13:00.000-07:00

In The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography, Richard Hugo wrote:

"I often found the sources of poems in the lonely reaches of the world, the ignored, forlorn, and, to me, beautiful districts of cities, like the West Marginal Way area in Seattle, the sad small towns of Washington and Montana, the villages and countryside of Southern Italy, wherever I imagined life being lived as amateurishly as we had once played basketball."

Until reading that, I have never considered life being lived amateurishly and immediately thought, how else could we do it? Let me rephrase that. How else could I do it?

My best guess is that I have not been here before and if I had it was not in this form, not with this particular set of variables. Hugo's words help support my belief that (and I will keep this in the first person) I make it up as I go along. Each moment calls for the weighing of possibilities and options. I am able to make some choices based on past experience, prior knowledge, but the present, no matter how accurately it mirrors another time, remains unexplored territory.

Amateur. Of course. And with that status comes a forgiveness for blunders and missed cues. I interpret Hugo's phrase to mean he believes or imagines there are places, not his lonely reaches, where life is conducted more professionally, full of style, grace, aplomb, never a false step, never a wrong fork. I assumed, though may not any more, there were teeming islands of sophistication and insider coaching where life skills were honed and graduates set on a path of sure success. All steps firm and certain.

But that is simply polish, a sheen, a veneer. Etiquette is no preparation for crises of the soul. If you listen closely, as we watch those who promise us they have it all figured out, the sound you hear, and I'd know it anywhere, is whistling in the dark. I'm not convinced that any of us know how to do this.

To live the uncertainty without wailing, flailing, slobbering and needless drama is an art; some have an intuitive knack, may have managed to acquire a modicum of skill or restraint. Still, whatever the situation, we are probably all first-timers. The ragged, messy imperfection of honesty appeals to me so much more than false insistence of rightness.

In a long-ago life, married to the managing editor of a small town newspaper, I attended - front-row center - most community theater productions. Yes, from those seats I could see faint make-up smudges on the costumes. At times the dancing was more enthusiastic than precise, but like the earnest cast and director of Waiting for Guffman, heart transcended training.

I realize as I inexpertly tap-dance my brains out in what Mary Oliver calls "...my one wild and precious life," that amateurishly is my adverb, my level, my speed, my truth. Remember in The Avengers how they referred to Emma Peel as "a talented amateur?" I can only aspire.

The verb, to unknow

2011-08-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

List of some things I don’t know how to do:

Fly an airplane
Kung fu
Repair a car
Compose music
Unknow dark somethings once I know them

It has taken me at least a month to write of this. The idea came from a tropically large bug, a singleton who shall remain nameless, seen and dealt with by my son - and not by me - in my room immediately before I planned to fall asleep. Of course I was no longer sleepy. Of course I left the television and the reading light on and imagined stealthy guerrillas from its bug clan invading my sanctuary and my peace. Two evenings later I was finally able to sleep with the light off, but now turn it on if I have to get up during the night. No barefoot surprises, thank you.

Once I knew it had been there, nothing was quite the same. It could have been a recluse, a hermit in some dim corner for weeks (though not likely) that only began to plague me once it revealed itself. Bob Seger wrote, “...wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.” Boy howdy.

Other unwelcome knowings have been imposed upon me over a lifetime. Some were too first-person to evade. Others were blurted for another’s unburdening. They change everything. That they existed sub rosa while I pirouetted through my days with innocent trust makes their revelations all the more shocking. And there is no going back.

Denial is, I suppose, the popular response to unmanageable information, pretending, playing ignorant. That lid won’t stay closed for long. There can never really be enough of any substance to keep truth fully hidden once it is glimpsed leering through the window. Our hearts no longer beat with the same familiar rhythm. We grow haunted, our notion of safety shattered. We dream of taking the secret and casting it into the flames, anything to be free of its curse.

Our best hope is forgetting, or a form of it that permits a dimming of impact. Spiritual teachers express the belief that what has passed may be surrendered, leave and gnaw on me no more. Many of our adaptive skills result from having to invent ways to keep moving forward when the first choice would be to sit, weeping, until we turned to dust, to grit, which the wind would take.

Dark knowings embezzle from our stores of sleep, of serenity, of trust. Some are thugs and thieves, smacking us around and running off with our valuables. We are left trying to put the pieces together, wondering who we can call. I need to report a crime.

All this from one anonymous bug, who thought, if bugs think, that it would make its way from this shadow to that, remain unobserved a bit longer, live to scurry another day. Instead it became my reminder of spaces we have to clear when the uninvited decide to visit, the processes we learn to keep from tipping over. If any of you composing, airplane-flying kung fu master mechanics can tell me how to make knowing less grief-filled, I believe I am ready to learn.

An unattractive dependence

2011-08-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

...and then the modem expired.

That was late Sunday morning. It is now Wednesday. I await the imperfectly-executed, no-longer-express delivery of a replacement modem and reflect upon my life before a reasonably high-speed internet connection.

For a Monday writing job with the general theme of discovery, I wanted to be certain the man who located King Tut’s tomb was Howard Carter, but couldn’t look it up. I might have phoned someone in whose world Google was alive and helpful; instead I made my best guess. Then I phoned in the article, just like the old days.

There is no need to list the ways I felt adrift without this seemingly essential link to the wider world; you all know the discomfort. We were dial-up people well past the year when that became outre. Dependence crept up on us like the pounds from putting cheese on everything.

When you read this, you’ll know we are restored to our medium-tech complacency. The pathways of commerce and communication are freshly wired. We can resume research, locate photos and pile, with abandon, multiple items in shopping carts as long as we don’t actually order them. I could never have imagined so many possibilities.

My impatience now embarrasses me, grumbling about a trivial inconvenience, about being deprived of something that did not exist such a short while ago and whose absence or presence, in honesty, does not affect our livelihoods. Too many on the planet are without food and water. The sobering effects of perspective don’t allow much room for squirming.

My vocabulary contains a mocking gauge for self-absorbed disaster: my hair didn’t turn out in the back. It refers to a form of teen angst long extinct, or so I hope. Under harsh light, many concerns become equally adolescent. In metaphor, the solution is the same. Put on a hat and go anyway. This, too, will pass.

Blog turns three

2011-08-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

My thanks to justjennrecipes who shared King's Hawaiian Paradise Cake with us.

Though it is, without question, an extension - or at least an expression - of self, this blog seems to be its own creature. It is an entity. If I were a gardener, I don't suppose I'd think of my garden as part of me but rather something of which I was a steward. Whether it flourished or withered would depend on me. From either perspective, the blog began three years ago today. August 7, 2008. How unfortunate that the word blog sounds so much like blob. I would probably celebrate The Blob's birthday, if I oversaw its development.

For everyone who has ever read a sentence here, thank you. I would like to know you better, to have an opportunity for exchange, yet am grateful if you find something here that has ever caused you to return. To those who volunteered as followers, to those who comment, thank you. Through the words you leave for me, what may appear to be typed letters on a flat screen have, in garden fashion, bloomed into connections, friendships, an awareness of and caring for you, your passions, your well-being.

As an aspect of what I will call senior awareness, I have learned that consistency challenges me. At times, being reliable is a struggle. These are not character traits with which I am happy; they are vexing, to say the least, to whatever parts of me do meet deadlines and keep commitments. That I, and my blog sidekick, have managed to show up here for three years, following a slow and spotty beginning, gives me hope that I can build and sustain a less mercurial identity.

There is a trajectory to this blogging life, one that has the feel of gathering momentum for a destination unknown. The word grace comes closest to naming the wondrous - and free - vehicle I have been given to carry me and my thoughts out into the world. That many of you choose to pile on board and ride back with me exceeds my deepest hopes.

Now, about that Paradise Cake. Blog and I are fools for whipped cream.

After the light

2011-08-06T10:05:00.000-07:00

The fog is here this morning. No sunbeam had a chance at 7 a.m. After the fact, I'm even more grateful to have seen the glowing band I wrote of on Monday. As the week, possibly the month, set about revealing their distinctive characteristics, a finger of light pointing to my neglected studio (thoughts of Indiana Jones in the Well of Souls...I make no apologies) seemed to be an even stronger push than I'd first thought.

My life is moments. Some stand alone as though in soliloquy, a scene from OUR TOWN. Others attach themselves to similar events and form a chain. All have meaning, if only to say be, or be here, try to learn the secret of not squandering any part of now. Among the parcels that arrived with the sun-sent message is an awfully large serving of very old business and its near-death grip on a portion of my spirit, trying to defend its spurious claim on me like the fool who decides to be his own lawyer.

That fairy tales might be teachers is a recent awareness. Some of us fell asleep long ago, the briars grew thick and choked off knowing, presence, participation. We wake up, if we are fortunate, as soon as we can but need a bit longer to gain our bearings, then additional time to grieve for what we lost or missed while under the malignant spell. I keep thinking the hard work has been done and I keep being surprised. This may be a day to reread some Joseph Campbell and remind myself how the hero does survive the journey.

Ill winds and other forces

2011-08-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

Telling the story backward, here is the outcome, followed by the events which led to it.

LIBRARY by Lori Nix

During my years of network television employment, Let's Make A Deal was taped in the studio building across from my office. People dressed as servings of french fries lined up with the hope of getting to choose among doors 1, 2 or 3. Because I've learned that most days tell me what they will become, I remain watchful, alert, to the way one plan quickly reconfigures as another. I pick the first door and the third one opens and there you have it.

The early morning - by my definition, 7 is early - text from the bank warned me of something stupid and messy. In preparation for our government's potential abdication of all fiscal responsibility - the threat of unpaid military salaries, Social Security benefits and the like - our apartment manager had deposited the rent check with horrifying swiftness and our already iffy house of cards had become a vortex of slippage.

To entertain and perhaps calm my mental/emotional turmoil as the bank debated whether or not to pay outstanding debits before funds arrived on Wednesday, I thought of my childhood model of financial abundance, Scrooge McDuck. Diving into his pile of money, he could headline my carping blog post. Through Google I found an image which, when I clicked on it, took me, with awareness that providence had stepped in, to artist Lori Nix, who constructs miniature dioramas for the purpose of photographing them. As she explains in this link, the photographs, the two-dimensional pieces, are the art; the dioramas are the vehicles which carry her there.

Lori Nix saved me from whining. She and her recreated scenes of Kansas disasters from her childhood restored me to center. Whatever the actual cause of what seemed like the ill wind of August, it no longer mattered. It will either be resolved in my favor or it won't. Irene at the bank was kind and helpful.

Here is what I know right now: all is not as it feels, appears or claims to be. The layers of possibility have been patiently and skillfully applied. Don't be fooled by the obvious. What is real is as subtle as the wafted hint of night-blooming jasmine. I thought the plant had died, yet there was its gift as the thinning fog drifted in. We stumble on in the midst of magic. Stardust, indeed.

Light

2011-08-01T08:27:00.000-07:00

If I circle today's date on the calendar, I will need to write myself a note as to why.

For several weeks our mornings have been foggy or, as yesterday, clouded with what local weather gurus call monsoonal flow. It is tropical air with a penchant for turbulence that is pushed and pulled our way from Mexico thanks to a clockwise swirl of high pressure somewhere over, roughly, Colorado. Today the sky was clear.

What clarity brought was an awareness of the sun's shift. And an illumination that I would like to remember and, if I remember, track for no reason at all. Our simple interior geography features one window on the apartment's east end, a smallish slider in the bathroom wall. Today, at about 7:30, undimmed by pebbled glass since the window was open for breeze and sky, a band of sunlight spilled across the bathroom floor, ran the length of the hall, through the living room and up the west wall next to a bookcase. Now, a bit after 8, the band remains though its earlier brilliance is diluted.

We have lived here for more than nine years and somehow I never noticed this glowing phenomenon before. By paying attention for the next few days, assuming fog and clouds don't return, I can observe how long all the elements align to make this happen. I can be easily amused and light attracts me above most things, especially light that streaks all in its path with golden warmth.

To find newness where all was assumed to be the same, day upon day, makes me feel alert, aware. It is cheering to discover one's wits have not been so dulled that an electric swath of August sun across the carpet went unnoticed. I have no excuse for all those previous years.

Assume that one was waiting for the light, for a sign, a pointer, a path. There is now a circle on the calendar to say, wait no more. It is here.

Somewhere in time...

2011-07-30T10:46:00.000-07:00

Looking at a calendar doesn't change the feeling. I have trouble fitting myself into the fact that the 1970s are, simply, gone.

Steve Earle and Kris Kristofferson were on Austin City Limits Thursday night. Our non-cable existence fills with more than we can possibly watch from Netflix and the choices arrayed like a trick card deck by a video game console. Simple joy in the form of public television folk music is a throw-back pleasure.

I don't know when the Earle-Kristofferson program was taped; the mood was pure 70s. In my transported state, I yearned to be young enough or cool enough to wear a bandana tied on my wrist like Earle and have it be an authentic statement, not the act of a mimicking wanna-be. I wanted a do-over, and the talent to support it, as a solo act, there with my wrist bandana and guitar.

No doubt there is a scientific term for the rooted stance my brain has taken, freezing a portion of it somewhere between the ages of 27 and 34. I seem to have staked a claim there and will not be budged. I can't explain why. It is not delusional, though of this I have only circumstantial proof, for I do know my age, the year and that it seems to be a very altered world than that of more than 30 years ago.

Assuming I am not the only one with a portion of self that resides elsewhere in time, I wonder is this a trait we all share, a way of holding onto a more youthful outlook, a more flexible and energetic way of thinking? Does this keep us from becoming stodgy? Do we ever outgrow entirely our earlier passions or will I be singing along with, heaven help me, the Kingston Trio or, less dated, Dylan into my dotage the way my still-youngish grandfather sang his World War I songs in the 1950s, the way, at her request, New Orleans jazz was played at my mother's memorial service? We love what we loved.

Not that I can claim true innocence at those ages, but I certainly was considerably less time-worn and scuffed than I am now. So many sobering events waited around the corner of those intervening years. Bob Seger wrote, "...wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then..." Is it about reaching a mental peak at a specific age and being allowed to perch there, as though we have achieved some goal and will not yield the ground to reason or time?

Having lived with this - is it a phenomenon? - for a few decades I see it as a niche. Once a pocket of what feels a match for our combined heart, spirit and mind is identified, unconsciously, we are allowed to remain, at least that part of us which does not age or evolve or deteriorate. We are permitted to be of both then and now, never unclear that we inhabit bodies of a certain age, yet still influenced by the preferences of an earlier version.

It casts the whole matter of "good old days" in a very different light, doesn't it? It may be argued that this is simply nostalgia, longing for what we think has been lost. I return, again, to one of my wild-eyed, hair-on-fire theories that we are still all the moments we have lived; some of them just seem to welcome our lingering more than others.

I am most grateful that all of this goes on without having to dress the part, at least in the real world. That wrist bandana will not turn up at the high school reunion or any public venue. I can't promise, though, that I won't see how it looks with my tee shirt and house pants, or that I won't browse on-line to see if there is something in a multi-color floral pattern that would still qualify as a bandana. It is all castles in the air, anyway. Why not have them draped with what we find suits us best?

A story in three words

2011-07-29T18:16:00.000-07:00

It doesn't take a paragraph for you to see the sorry road ahead. You can point to the moment when illusion triumphed over the clear knowledge of throwing it all away and seemed like a reasonable option. "Took up with..." guarantees folly. If one has a first step on the road to hell, these words are surely etched there. There is little chance that taking up with will end well. Once we hear that James Taylor's Millworker "...took up with a no-good millworking man from Massachusette..." we know not to hold our breath for triumph.

A snippet from Google: Interesting Facts about World Writers ... Catholic mother's death, James Joyce took up with a chambermaid, Nora Barnacle. ...

It may be that we only take up with someone during a fugue episode or a failure of self-esteem or a reckless lack of caring about the future, even as close as tomorrow. The whole noir genre is fueled by bad ideas which often involve being dazzled, seduced, misled, fast-talked or come-hithered into dangerous liaisons with persons of the opposite, though not exclusively, gender.

But I suspect - though it could be, by loose definition, a bewitching - some of us have been sent into the world with key mechanisms in less than good working order. There is no difference between having arrived on earth that way or having been substantially, almost fatally, altered by circumstances of abuse, neglect, trauma or loss. Bad experiences turn some of us cautious and others of us indifferent.

When I thought of the phrase as one which has not been replaced, let alone improved upon over possibly a few centuries, give or take, I wanted to throw my arms around it as a model of verbal shorthand. If I sat and pondered, and my pondering skills right now seem at low ebb, I could possibly list other examples as succinct as these three words, but possibly not.

We will leave it that it is not only as a student of fiction that I know the nuances of "took up with." Short term, longer term, being the taker or the, very seldom, one hopes, takee, this is life as an object lesson. When your parents, who played a significant part in the origins of such heedless behavior, point you out to younger siblings as the creature they do NOT want to grow up to be, the cycle of defeat is nearly concluded.

But what surprises life holds, what redemptive nets somehow appear beneath our most dizzying falls. That some of us survive our worst ideas, or complete absence of ideas, is surely miraculous. I am ever drawn to tales of rebirth and transformation, of what was lost being found, the missing restored, what was broken repaired. Whether I escaped through luck or providence, I know how close I came to being trapped by all those words foretell. When I read or hear them, I know to cross my fingers and wish for good sense or rescue to arrive in time.

The world is so full of a number of things...

2011-07-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

Acting on the hope that it is not bad blogging manners to post two links without first asking permission, I wanted to share visuals found at Denise's blog.

The first is her Tumblr site, a place to stop and allow the bright pretties to sweep you along.

From there I found Mr. Finch, via this work. If you link to him, please do look at the "Beasts." I am still reeling with what is possible from human hearts and hands.

My thanks, unbeknownst to them, to Denise and Mr. Finch for allowing me to share their art and inspiration.

Travelogue

2011-07-24T07:39:00.000-07:00

When I logged onto our computer earlier this week, the above illustration had become my son's desktop wallpaper. This is a cropped version of it, a scene of the underwater city of Rapture from Irrational Games' BioShock, a video game. I was startled, then ensnared by the detail and what I could imagine as the backstory for this group of swells, looking out upon, or possibly too involved to notice, their underwater world. I noticed.

With infinite detail luring me in (I cannot resist an underwater world), I thought of fantasy realms, make-believe destinations and real places that seem so remote or unattainable they might as well be fictional. In the way that words or subjects have of arriving in clumps, I let my mind roam and thought of my artist mother, who was determined to visit Spain and see the architecture of Antoni Gaudi.

She not only endured but transcended a divorce after 28 years of marriage, began a cottage business with ceramics and those ceramics sent her first to Greece and the Greek islands, then later to Spain and her dream tour of the Gaudi sites. His Casa Batllo in Barcelona may illustrate why video game alternate reality could have called him and my mother's realized dream to mind.

Two days later, in the closet plunge, I found an envelope containing photocopies of all the local obituary notices of my father's passing, sent by my step-mother. In rereading them, I was reminded of his ties to the South Pacific, where he had served during World War II. His biography gave greater detail than I remembered about his assignments. But I always knew he wanted, above everything, to see the Fiji Islands again.

Places unknown give our expectations an aura of magic; places experienced call to us with the imperfection of memory. We expand and romanticize them, assign them virtues which perhaps stretch the truth, hope to return in the quest for intangibles we fear may have been lost forever. My father did return to Fiji, with my step-mother, on their honeymoon. He never spoke to me of that trip, nor did he write of it in any of his papers I've found. Perhaps even for a man of words, his reclaiming of that place, of those life and world-changing times, was beyond explanation.

While writing this, Leon Russell was singing in the background.

My journeys have become interior. I will never miss a chance to watch Venice or Paris on screen, still allow myself temporary residence when following Donald Sutherland and the red coat he pursues or riding in the 1950s-vintage Citroen of a French noir classic. Should the means and opportunity ever materialize, I would not say no to such an adventure. Yet I have gained more than I could have hoped by exploring the inner landscape.

When I stopped being resentful of circumstances which dictated a quiet, contemplative existence, I understood that I had been delivered to my true destination. One can, I'm sure, ponder as well at distant sites as at home, but my assignment seems to be about finding my own heart and translating that into a wider knowledge.

The shores are generally sunny, each day delivers its own, varied treks. Morning reveals new paths, provides new encounters. The food doesn't vary much, but I hold the cook responsible for that. Attire is casual and surprises never fail to appear. It is a crossroads at which home and away intersect. Boredom is never an issue and I get to sleep in my own bed. I may want to design some postcards, local highlights, but I suppose, in a way, I already have. You are reading of them now. No need to say, wish you were here.

What shall we call you?

2011-07-22T12:54:00.000-07:00

In some arcane volume, marbled endpapers, pages thin and crackling as onionskin, I wonder if there exists a list of rules for writer's etiquette, protocol. It would, ideally, specify the requirements for calling ones' self a writer, setting fire to the uncertainty of whether or not one has the goods.

Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, translated into a movie which I love with adolescent excess, includes a scene at a writers' conference in which "Q," played by Rip Torn, addresses the academic audience with a speech that begins, "I (beat beat beat) am (beat beat beat) a (beat beat beat) writer." Hoots, shrieks, applause (possibly fainting, which would occur off-screen) result, and among the movie watchers, especially those with "writer" tattooed on the secret, hidden side of their hearts, explosive laughter.

On some mornings, showing up at the keyboard has a Little Engine That Could aspect of, "I think I can, I think I can." The best days are the ones that feel like being dropped off by a Sikorsky S-76 for the next leg of the journey to find Coronado's cities of gold. You don't want to take time for breakfast, you've made notes on anything at hand before getting out of bed, you worry that the words will leave you if you move too slowly.

In order to claim the word genius, I think it is necessary to be so designated by an outside party. The rules for a writer title are less clear. I have read that one needs to be declared a poet and ought not to self-bestow the name. Poet is specific, creating the expectation of one having composed poetry. A writer could, in theory, be someone who sends letters to the editor.

There may be a fear that too many writers in the universe thin the broth. Especially in Los Angeles, where a car salesman used a test drive to pitch his script to a television executive of my acquaintance, we are abundant as recycled cardboard. Is publication the minimum requirement, or publication of a certain caliber? In the new, the seemingly expected and acceptable world of self-publishing, who is or is not a writer, or is the word available to all?

Because writing is something I have actually done for money - those were the days - and because it is now, as a volunteer, something I do seriously and with intention, I accept that I am a writer. There may be days when I am not clear about how successfully or brilliantly or voluminously I practice my craft. Those are the days I wonder about requirements, though I don't wonder for long.

Which brings me to dreams, the waking visions we have of ourselves and our lives. Is there harm in someone saying, "I am a writer," when the truth is they want to become a writer? If we cannot see ourselves moving gracefully, fluidly through the life, the receptions, signings and readings we imagine, I'm not sure we will get there. We also need to do more than fantasize about doing the actual work. No piece of writing has ever been wished into being.

There are writers whom I read on line, some with published books I buy and read and am made light-headed by the wonder of, and others whose daily, or almost daily, posts are so bright and suffused with feeling and truth, clarity and imagination, that I see it as an honor to be allowed, invited to ease into the worlds they share. Most of them also appear in literary journals, discriminating on-line magazines, invitational group ventures, public readings and performances. Yet if they have not yet been granted membership in that more limited club, I find it difficult to think they are anything other than writers.

Such a roomy planet, on which generosity is a replenishable resource. As long as authors who have no business being there end up on best-seller lists and brilliant word romancers who waltz phrases across the page in ways that make us weep are found in what the world considers small publications, the word writer seems free to land where it will. If this is your first day writing anything that wasn't a school assignment, if you are skipping around the blogdom, scoping the lay of the land before hitting "publish" for your first post, you've taken one giant step toward your city of gold. Dress the moment up with bunting and confetti, let the balloons cascade, declare victory and start calling yourself a writer.

On the road to order

2011-07-20T18:18:00.000-07:00

This information has come to me before. I repeatedly forget it. It is similar to "...a long journey begins with a single step." Boiled down, it tells me that all I need to do in the process of restoring order is one thing at a time. One. Thing. Not conquering NOW the vast, chaotic disarray in the midst of which I shuffle along, not all in a day or a week or a month.

Today I opened half of the double accordion door to one closet. My knees didn't allow me to do this work standing up, so I sat on a folding chair and did a lot of reaching. Please believe me, I have pockets of out-of-sight, out-of-mind. The benefit of this is the surprise of finding goods of which I had almost no memory until I saw them again. As a drawback, I have unknowingly and on occasion replaced items that were not missing. In my defense, I am not prone to blackouts or amnesia. I endeavor to be frugal and wise and unconfused. But life comes and elbows the non-essential matters aside.

I retrieved the pillow that sent me, filled with hope, to the closet in the first place. The surprises included summer-weight shirts, many of them linen, others all cotton, contrasting companions for bright tees or tank tops; photos of my son when he was two or younger, some including loved ones no longer with us; origami papers and handmade paste papers; a notebook which contained the list of names we were weighing for our unborn child and a page of illustrations related to the first time the Pasadena Playhouse closed. It was done, based on its proximity to the names, in 1979. I thought I started drawing in 1994.

My son rolled his eyes at most of the choices we managed to avoid, saying they sounded like the names of serial killers. About the Playhouse drawings, he expressed wonder that ink was available back then.

Revised biography, enlarged portfolio, an unanticipated step forward. Tomorrow may be a rummage through never-worn shoes (don't ask) to see what else can upgrade my summer couture, the sorting of color pencils and shelving recently read books. I anticipate a better sleep with my plumper pillow. Perhaps it will signal increased energy, more sifting, fewer naps. Then, finding a spot for a gift typewriter due to be dropped off at the end of the day. The moment is racing toward us in which we will have to divest ourselves of something before anything new can move in. One of my things to do is develop a more rational attitude toward that edict.

Notes from the field

2011-07-16T15:53:00.000-07:00

Melissa Green sent this poem yesterday, another voice for memory affirmed, for continuity.

DURUM WHEAT

Memory at its finest lacks corroboration

—no photographs, no diaries—

nothing to pin the past on the present with, to make it stick.

Just because you've got this idea

of red fields stretching along the tertiary roads

of Saskatchewan, like blazing, contained fires—

just because somewhere in your memory

there's a rust-coloured pulse

taking its place among canola yellow

and flax fields the huddled blue of morning azures—

just because you want to

doesn't mean you can

build a home for that old, peculiar ghost.

Someone tells you you've imagined it,

that gash across the ripe belly of summer,

and for a year, maybe two, you believe them.

Maybe you did invent it, maybe as you leaned,

to escape the heat, out the Pontiac's backseat window

you just remembered it that way

because you preferred the better version.

Someone tells you this.

But what can they know of faith?

To ask you to leave behind this insignificance.

This innocence that can't be proved: what the child saw

of the fields as she passed by, expecting nothing.

You have to go there while there's still time.

Back to the red flag of that field, blazing in wind.

While you're still young enough to remember

a flame planted along a road. While you're still

seeing more than there is to see.

LISA MARTIN-DEMOOR

Earlier this year, there was a post called, "Just say you're with the band." By whatever means it has come to be, I found this two nights ago:

It is a one-inch, pin-back button, offered by Portable Graffiti. Cost: $2.50 plus shipping. I know I must have it. Wish I could send one to each of you. Know that I do so in my heart.

If you have not discovered Jayne's blog, I will just say that she is a better source than my favorite, extinct, Saturday morning FM program for finding, knowing and sharing new music which usually involves stringed instruments.

Last night we watched, on Instant Netflix, AMERICAN: The Bill Hicks Story, about the brief life and career (1961-1994) of the controversial comedian whose final performance on David Letterman was pulled, only to be played some 12 years later, with an apology to Hicks' mother.

This is from one of the clips shown in the documentary, the one I found most moving and most closely aligned with how I see things. If you don't know his work, he continues to be relevant and hilarious and insightful:

"I'm gonna share with you a vision that I had, cause I love you. And you feel it. You know all that money we spend on nuclear weapons and defense each year, trillions of dollars, correct? Instead -- just play with this -- if we spent that money feeding and clothing the poor of the world -- and it would pay for it many times over, not one human being excluded -- we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace. Thank you very much. You've been great, I hope you enjoyed it."

Continuity

2011-07-15T10:17:00.000-07:00

And then it was now...

My neglected blog fears that I've developed carpal tunnel syndrome or joined a cloistered order.

A thuggish cold/virus, with malice aforethought, set upon me and stole not only my breathing but any clarity of thought I possessed. I have been muddled and hazy since Sunday, about which I wanted to report. On Sunday morning I got to talk with the woman who became my first school friend when I joined her kindergarten class mid-year. As I was being introduced to the line of other end-of-the-war babies, I remember her stepping forward and offering me a piece of candy. We have known each other for 51 years; our birthdays are two days apart.

What hopscotched around in my head following our talk was the word continuity. Like Charles Baker "Dill" Harris coming to visit every summer in To Kill A Mockingbird, like knowing there would be Cornish pasties and sweet mixed pickles at any picnic my grandmother planned, like shopping for school supplies at Kress five and dime, certainties make us feel less adrift.

I am fortunate in having as a constant presence in my life since junior high, a friend first met in the fifth grade. She has seen and aided me through my worst moments, her mother's was the only adult voice to try and talk me out of a doomed first marriage at 18, and we still laugh (or cry) together every week. An ocean has separated us for more than 30 years but her gift for remaining in touch and her uninhibited willingness to travel...wherever...have given us grown-up adventures not too unlike our adolescent forays.

In the Sunday phone conversation, hearing someone speak of my parents as she knew them then, still young, gave credence to my memories. Which is not to say I had forgotten anything about them, it was simply confirmation that, I suppose, I didn't dream my life: it happened. It was not so much any specific event but the fact that we had been there together, that we could, hand over hand, rewind that ball of yarn and find ourselves at the same spot. Her recognizable voice and recollections helped anchor my tent so, rather than worrying that it could be carried off by some rogue gust, I could sit calmly and contemplate my world. A real world.

Thanks to Best Cupcake Recipes for the photo, not our Brownie troop but close enough.

That I also can depend on my somewhat younger brother to verify recollections has steadied me again and again. In a mind prone to fabrication, as the process for building a sentence or an illustration, questions naturally murmur...is THIS as invented as THAT, is there more embellishment than fact in this scene I think I recall?

Continuity means not only substantiation, it means exactly what it says: that in some form whatever was has support to continue. Back to the belief that we contain all our younger selves, that we are the aggregate of all moments, and, as a friend calls them, enlightened witnesses shore up the belief that we are who we think we are. As I write this, I feel I would give anything to have my less than five-foot-tall grandmother beside me, testifying, by her presence and arm around my shoulders, to the truth of souvenirs my heart carries from our hours and years together. Continuity is the difference between being the escaped helium balloon drifting toward the sun and the bobbing Mickey Mouse head tied firmly to my wrist.

In a life which now dances on without so many of the people who have mattered, to be affirmed as something greater than a ghost of my own imagining by someone who was there carries a gift I didn't know I was missing. Age does run its sly con game on us, it can turn us around and undermine our knowing, especially if some of our real history has elements of the fantastic.

Knowing too little about, I suppose the field would be physics leaves me defending on one leg the wonder of human life which is both the vessel carrying all previous moments and the unseen force of continual change; our two halves, conjoined twins, what was and is and what is becoming. That any of us blunders on in a state other than confusion is the miracle. Or maybe other people don't see it this way. That once caused me mild concern. Now I seem better equipped to embrace my unprovable theories. I've given up trying to pass for normal.

The lazy susan turns

2011-07-08T14:14:00.000-07:00

With thanks to Chef Norm Services for the photo.

As the lazy susan of my mind twirls, what, I wonder, do these dishes contain?

Must I accept the last flight of the Space Shuttle, possibly the last American-directed manned mission into space? Am I futilely wedged in the past, wanting us still to be the fearless, imagination and science-fueled pioneers we once were? I heard John Glenn on the radio the other night: I want our astronauts to ride in OUR rockets, too. Something feels deeply, dangerously wrong about this.

Reading for the first time E. M. Forester, beginning with A Room with a View and only in Chapter 2, I marvel at the fact civilization survived those stiff-necked times when persons of a certain station could not speak to strangers, or be spoken to by them without collective gasps and intakes of air. Think of the blogging world under such constraints. We are only strangers until we speak, then our words and thoughts allow us to flow into one another. We step away, altered and enhanced.

I am capable of being the most stifling, inhibiting, spirit-crushing party-pooper to my creative, especially my artist, self. Luckily I lunged for this particular dish as it nearly swept past: I have, oh reincarnation of the scowling, scolding parent, kept myself from reclaiming my drafting table from disorder because there is other disorder in our midst and someone who is doing it right would take care of the other messes first. Art is play: no work, no play. (sound of screaming) In that dish, along with mixed sweet pickles which I thought they didn't make anymore, I found the note that reminded me - assume the whole castle has fallen into a fugue state, a Trance of Forgetting - that when I let the art come first, everything, repeat everything will be better. How easily I/we slip away from our centers and mistake ourselves for unhappy drones in human skin. I do not assume that mechanical devices are non-sentient beings.

For the past two nights, my son and I have watched, on Hulu via the PlayStation, samurai movies from the 1960s. They are part of the vast catalog of titles Hulu offers from The Criterion Collection. Conclusions we have reached through our extensive research of these and previous subjects: Japanese filmmakers in the 60s, likely reflecting what would have been sentiments of the time in which the films were set - say, the 18th century - had no respect or anything close to it for quasi-government functionaries, cruel warlords, their toadies and people who were likely to ride in sedan chairs and collect taxes. It causes me to wish we had movies with such themes today, and the impoverished, vagabond samurai who seem to have been placed on earth to champion the underdogs and send evil fleeing. In my fantasy, enough of these roving swordsmen might, just might, turn things around. I have taken many steps back from politics, feeling that any emotion I put into even thinking about health care or education is energy wasted. Ah, but with the samurai on the side of what will benefit the people most...They seem to enjoy wine, when available, and may be content with porridge when that's all there is. It is not an unpleasant dream.

A demonimation of one, Re-posted

2011-07-06T14:16:00.000-07:00

August approaches and, with it, the three-year anniversary of this blog. Because I am still fitting together my next current post, I am falling back on the expedient re-post. While the two visitors who commented originally are friends and readers - thank you for steadfastness - it may be new to some of you. I know that, as much as I anticipate your new posts, there are not enough hours for me to mosey through your archives. Today is about all any of us can manage today. So I will drag a bit of yesterday into the humid light.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

A friend recently told me that she has, once again, official status enabling her to perform marriage ceremonies. She had been ordained in a particular denomination which, over time, became less and less a good match for her liberal, inclusive beliefs and she left that church for equally hands-on work in aspects of social service. She is my model as the first person I ever heard speak of being called to her training and eventual ministry. Since those days a few decades ago, I have come to believe that, if we pay attention, each of us is also called to whatever assignment requires our unique combination of gifts; I believe we each have a ministry.

In no way do I wish by the use of those words to diminish what has been known traditionally among our people as ministry, an over-simplified definition of which might be bringing the citizenry and a specific notion of God together, using biblical text and learned interpretation of God to give comfort in rocky times, steering us all the while along a path of discovering the best versions of our human selves. This is the ideal.

But take the premise that each of us is here, now, in this form to bring comfort or light or a sort of awakening to those we encounter through whatever it is that we do - how is that not a calling? Could a ministry not be art, music, kindness, the ability to listen, empathy, writing, acting, patience...anything which would fall into a category of gift or virtue? To reach others and ease their sadness, suffering, fear and alienation by whatever means sounds like a ministry to me. Do we have to speak OF God to speak God (or what my notion of godliness is) over one another? Isn't Love a fair substitution for a concept that many find unworkable? I have, after serious attempts when I was younger, to acknowledge that organized religion and I are not soul mates. Whatever ways I choose to commune with all that is Divine are my own; they work for me and include vast amounts of laughter, a delight in the absurd, an uncomplicated and unconfused identification of what is magic and miraculous, faith in beauty, goodness and things which somehow turn out for the best, even including bumpy, uncertain middle parts.

It is my unshakable belief that we are here for a reason. If that reason is not to make better the lives of people around us, what other possible reason could there be? I am no theologian; I don't know that there is a name for the handful of truths I cling to but my trust in those truths is sufficient to carry me through today and into tomorrow, endowed with grace that I hope has enlarged since yesterday.

Unless you object openly, I'd like to continue this exploration in the future. For those of us who have reached a certain number of years, we grow more conscious of our days being finite. The greater purpose to be found in them, the greater the joy.

Labels: ministering to each other, Purpose of life
2 comments:

Erin Perry said...

"vast amounts of laughter, a delight in the absurd, an uncomplicated and unconfused identification of what is magic and miraculous, faith in beauty, goodness and things which somehow turn out for the best, even including bumpy, uncertain middle parts" -
I have never heard a more wonderful definition of living a true spiritual life. Having been raised Catholic back in the '50's and '60's - I now stay as far as possible from organized religion - which I find has a lot to do with the people who run it and very little to do with a higher power or human compassion.
Yes, let's hear more!
Erin in Morro Bay
July 6, 2009 7:40 AM
Marta said...

You have certainly found a ministry with your words and artistic way of putting them into paragraphs...Minister Marylinn and her words of wisdom. Thank you.
Marta in Sherman Oaks
July 6, 2009 4:16 PM

Ode to the wandering mind

2011-06-30T16:32:00.000-07:00

I am trying to think my way into an exploration of what is a defect, what is an attribute, and how can we tell the difference. One of my rigidly-held beliefs is that we all learn to live adaptively. There may exist the perfect specimen of humanity, at ease in every situation, able to complete each task without misstep or delay, possessing unshakable mental clarity, a model of light-hearted spontaneity. I am not that creature.

My history, my present, even with years of attempts to correct them, are issue-riddled. There has been progress, but on first glance it may seem otherwise. I have yet to acquire the habit of order, which does not get easier with age and decreased mobility. Accomplishing things in a timely fashion, always a challenge, now feels like someone untied the mooring line and the dingy has almost reached the horizon.

In the past few days, two women I admire for their honesty, insight and mad writing skills, have mentioned parents who disparaged their minds, their thought processes. Always remembering to clean the lint out of the dryer screen is no measure of talent or intellect. A so-called wandering mind may be a sign of genius. In fact, it has not even really wandered, it just hasn't stopped for very long in the place someone else thought it should.

Nothing I've heard has convinced me that there is such a thing as normal. There is desirable, there is generally acceptable, there is trouble-free and agreeable. But within the privacy of our very separate processes, based on all the factors that make us something that is not them, who is to say we are doing it wrong. Each of us comes at life from a distinct direction...who knew there were so many compass points. What was packed into those bandanas tied to the sticks resting on our shoulders has never been seen before. Even we may not know what to call the oddly-shaped novelties as we unwrap our bundles. The ones with the least appeal, the lumpy, scary, not-so-pretty ones we toss aside, only to find, somewhere along the road, they have found and claimed us.

What I seem to have come to, in this segment of musing on a topic that, like the parts of ourselves we try to elude, will not go away, is that when what we have are thoughts that refuse to stay in their narrow channels and instead flow across the landscape, we need not become alarmed. I am developing this theory that we grow into our minds. Some may find them comfortable, an easy fit, from the beginning, but others of us have a good bit of debris to shove aside. It can be disorienting, finding all that space, room for big thoughts, the teachings of small minds no longer sucking up all the oxygen. Feather-headed, ditsy, spacey, forgetful, absent-minded, dreamy, unfocused, undisciplined, yes. Yes I am and thank you for noticing.

What I find true about TRUE GRIT

2011-06-28T10:38:00.000-07:00

The language and story of True Grit captured me in equal measure when I first read the book. What the Coen Brothers did with that material on screen is honor and preserve it, demanding that we let out the seams in our minds to accommodate the larger vision of what Charles Portis' novel only allowed us to imagine.

Its first chapter closes as Mattie recounts her father's death, how he is robbed by Tom Chaney while on-lookers simply watch, then scatter. "...when he finished his thieving he raced to the end of the street and struck the night watchman at the stock barn a fierce blow to the mouth with his rifle stock, knocking him silly. He put a bridle on Papa's horse Judy and rode out bareback. Darkness swallowed him up. He might have taken the time to saddle the horse or hitched up three spans of mules to a Concord stagecoach and smoked a pipe as it seems no one in that city was after him. He had mistaken the drummers for men. 'The wicked flee when none pursueth.'"

I am not a reviewer. I am able to say what I like and why but have no capacity for detached evaluation. This is the comment I left to Antares-Cryptos' post about the dearth of foreign, independent and original movies such as we once enjoyed in profusion. To write about True Grit had been on my mind since seeing the DVD several weeks ago. Boiled down to comment size, it says what I intended. Further expounding seems almost unnecessary.

Even though it had Academy Award nominations, the remake (yes, I know) of TRUE GRIT had so many elements that attract me to a film...the cinematography/direction, the way the landscape becomes a character, an integral part of the movie; Carter Burwell's music, which weaves old hymns with new composition, gives a sense of an unstated yet abiding peace while the action is far from peaceful. And intelligent, uniquely phrased language spoken by actors who clearly understood what they were saying. I intend to do a post about it, but perhaps that ship has already sailed. I never defend remakes. This is, for me, rare and exceptional. 

Much of my knowledge of the west comes from movies, the ones directed by John Ford in particular. The Searchers, released in 1956, while told from a viewpoint of the time regarding who were the good guys and who were the bad, communicated the vastness, the loneliness of what is still, in part, untamed land. Cinematographer Winton D. Hoch, who won three Oscars for other films, seemed ideally matched with Ford in letting the camera tell so much of what motivated, or drove, the characters, especially with the scenes in Monument Valley. I follow one Montana blog writer, whose photos and text convey how little-changed some of this country remains. I do not know those spaces, nor the prairies, first hand.

What I do know, or should I say believe, is that character is shaped by place. The people we meet in True Grit, for good or ill, are the products of their roots in the land and the lives it prescribed for them: politics of the Civil War, crops and livestock, encroaching civilization, expedient and lawless paths, terrain-specific wisdom, and courage. Director of photography, Roger Deakins, was also D.P. on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford , another example of the camera giving voice to its own narrative on the way of things.

Stand by me

2011-06-24T21:12:00.000-07:00

With a new-to-us DVD of Stand by Me, we made that our Friday night viewing. Neither my son nor I had seen it in at least eight years. With my recent thoughts about childhood and the friends thereof, when the title song began just before the end credits, I saw myself and Kathy at a campfire, singing it, with at least Ben E. King's phrasing if nothing even approaching his voice.

During the previously-mentioned correspondence about fellow classmates, I learned of Kathy's death. We had known each other through all our school years. Three specific memories hovered as the music played. One was my surprise (I can't say why) at her fondness for the song and the fact of our breaking away from whatever was going on at the Girl Scout campfire to immerse ourselves in it for a few minutes. Another was the revelation, made I don't remember how or when, that on the day of any birthday party to which she'd been invited, she would feign illness, stay home and get to keep the present for herself. The third was a party - either her birthday or a Christmas exchange for our troop - at which I'd given her barrettes. Her exclamation on opening the package was, "Barrettes! I hate barrettes."

Not being a 12-year-old boy in rural Oregon in 1959, I could appreciate the story as I watched but not relate the time as they experienced it to anything I knew. Suburban Southern California and parents who would have noticed if several of us had been unseen for more than 48 hours is not comparable coming-of-age material. There seemed no place at which to connect. Until the first distinctive beats of the song. Then the losses, the changes, ground gained only to slip away, came into familiar focus. Time finds a way to roll our stories into one. Tonight, I think I cried for us all.

That was then and this is then

2011-06-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

Marty used to scream over the back fence, "Damn it, Bab'r, has you got a cookie?" Bab'r was Barbara, my mother. Marty was three years old. My mother had an aversion to country music and anything she thought trashy.

Once we'd moved away, we heard that Marty, by that time a a scofflaw of five or so, had climbed into his father's gasoline tanker truck, released the hand brake and collided with the dairy at the end of the street. The good news, no explosion or great bodily harm to himself. The not as good news, there was nothing in the story to reassure the neighbors that whatever came next would not be worse.

At our new house, the one I lived in until leaving home at 18, my closest friend had two brothers, considerably older than we were, one of whom got into a scuffle at the local Bob's Big Boy Drive-in and ended up grabbing a deputy's gun out of his holster. No one was shot but what a lot of gossip at school and on the block. The same brother was later in a nearly-fatal motorcycle crash and used to scream at me about how he was almost "...pushing up daisies." I was glad not to have an angry, outlaw sort of brother, yet the time came when that was exactly the kind of man to whom I was doomed to be attracted. I am grateful to report surviving and recovering from that affliction.

Recently seeking a long-time chum, I visited the website dedicated to our high school graduating class. Our 50th reunion will be held next year. The looking resulted in an exchange of e-mails with one of the organizers whom I've known since grade school. He had information about students and staff from Longfellow Elementary. It was a pleasure to remember with him our town, our friends, the streets they used to live on...the first girl he kissed, a dog that bit me, when we discovered rock and roll. In the give-and-take of those memories, I felt my external self to be home to all the younger versions of me whom I could see clearly going about their six-year-old, eight-year-old, ten-year-old lives. I could feel in the center of my chest a connection to those not-vanished, nested like Russian dolls, variously-sized girls that I had been and, somehow, still was.

What to make of it, I'm not sure. For now it is enough to sit with the knowledge as I try and gain a wider perspective. It feels significant, the awareness of both holding and being our memories. There is an element, like a sacred trust, the grace of which allows us to act as both curators and exhibits in the museum of self.

One of the reasons why I am glad today...

2011-06-21T08:15:00.000-07:00

Among my various incarnations is life as a designer of rubber stamps. This card, with many thanks to its creator, Diane Lewis, uses some of my designs for Rubbermoon. On Facebook, Rubbermoon posts new arrivals and pieces from the archives, as well as maintaining a photo gallery with samples that represent stamps from all their artists. What a happy start to the day, seeing the life Diane gives to these images...including the head transplant, from dog to cat. Like seeing hatchlings take flight.

May your day be filled with color and humor.

Replay

2011-06-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

It seems that I am running behind on holidays and other matters. With the exception of my brother, we are a bit short of fathers in my immediate family and Father's Day trundles past without mindfulness. Because this reprint of an early post refers to a phrase my father used, I will let it be my card to all the fathers among us and what they have passed along that retains its value, its meaning. From August 20, 2008:

Where We Meet
My father was a writer. He treasured history, nature, words that had fallen from popular usage and the printed page. He would sometimes end a phone call or letter with, "Leave a note under the rock," which I always took to mean regardless of events, we would devise a way to be in touch.

Today, my second day of reading and responding to comments from kindred spirits met and unmet who have found this blog, I thought of the phrase which has stayed with me these many decades. What we are doing, as I interpret it, is leaving each other notes under the rock. As each one passes by, she picks up the message, reads it, adds whatever thoughts or images it has sparked and puts it back for the next pilgrim. And the words or their intention circle back to us, whether under the rock, over the wires or through simple telepathy. It took me some time to understand how a blog, unlovely as the word is, might enrich my life and expand my world and, I can only hope, allow me to do the same as I leave my rock-weighted note and walk away.
Posted by Marylinn Kelly at 7:30 PM
6 comments:

inge said...

as one of my new internet friends Kathryn Antyr says : " comments are like little package you leave at someones door "...

I like the image of leaving a note under a rock and comments on a blog leave the same feeling of being connected.

I learned commenting thanks to Michelle Ward, Tim Holtz, Kathryn and I'm so happy that I did, cause I made closer contacts with some people I've never heard or seen !

greets
Inge
August 21, 2008 12:31 AM
sf said...

Marylinn, my love!
I am so glad to find "you" here, thanks to the comment on my Colin post. I'll be back soon.
all love,
sarah
August 21, 2008 7:16 PM
Patti said...

I am honored that you visited my blog - it's so nice to hear from you. I love your idea of the note under a rock. I've had the same reaction to blogging (and as writers, we would probably choose different words:) in terms of the many blessings it has channeled through me and, hopefully, on to others, as I try to leave more notes than I read.
Congrats on your new stamp line; Stampington is a regular haunt so I'll be watching!
blessings and hugs,
patti
August 22, 2008 11:48 AM
Stamp Your Heart Out said...

Thank you for sharing these wonderful thoughts with us. I've added a link to your blog from the SYHO blog, so our friends can enjoy your words.

Michele
August 24, 2008 8:01 AM
Linda N said...

at 9:10 pm CDT, I'd not heard of you...now I'm contemplating leaving a notepad and pencil next to a rock by the back door. Thanks for your beautiful and inspiring writing.

Linda N.
September 9, 2008 7:32 PM
Marylinn Kelly said...

To Linda N -
Thank you for your note. I didn't know how to reach you. Hope you come back and find this. Marylinn
September 13, 2008 2:09 PM

Where the time may have gone and why

2011-06-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention, said to be from 1968.

When something is askew with me, my first thought is character defect, followed by general disintegration. It was not until learning last week that I seem to have been overdosed on thyroid supplements that I could make a new assumption.

One of the primary symptoms of excess thyroid, either on its own or via supplement overdose, is confusion, reduced ability to concentrate. Also high on the list are fatigue, anxiety, heart palpitations, tremors/shaking, elevated blood pressure, fever, joint aches and the oh-so-unwelcome thinning hair. Doesn't this paint a lovely picture?

When change in function creeps in slowly - especially if that change involves a somewhat wandering mind - being able to say what, exactly, is wrong is like trying to make a fallen souffle rise again. It did not involve memory, that has a category of its own, reserved for all after a certain age. Nor was it about loss of intellect. The closest I can come to a word is not even a word. The unword is drifty.

That this state of thyroid excess had been present for some time before the lab detected it is something only I know to be true. In medicine, numbers rule. There was no verifiable indication six months ago, but some of the symptoms have been with me for a few years. However, the drifty state was newer. It manifested, along with the fatigue, as difficulty sustaining focus. It explains why I have not been able to keep up with the writers whose blogs I follow, nor to comment very much when I visited. After a decent interval, I'll go back and read my posts of the past few months to see if they hold up.

There is an esoteric side to this, being that I have come to know myself as being inclined to a natural state of mental, let us say, float. From a lifetime of wondering why I either wandered - in a state of no-time - through meadows of my imagining, or wished that I did, I have begun to recognize this as me. Like once trying to wear too-small shoes because they were adorable and on sale, I have soul bunions from ways of being that did not fit the matrix.

Easy to understand that, as the drifting increased, I assumed that, rather than being authentic, I had tumbled over into sloth. The thin lines we allow ourselves, the rigid expectations. When I needed to do nothing, to nap, to simply be, I rarely allowed myself to do so without guilt. Consciousness, if it arrives at all, is the product of a lengthy gestation.

It is the fifth day of a reduced dose and, placebo effect or wishful thinking, I am less shaky and more present. Relief is my only response to learning the source, as best we can guess, of my symptoms. I am too happy to know that I have not been carried away from myself on some unexplainable tide, that this isn't a sign, not a permanent affliction. I may even be able to go about in the world without thinking I should spray my visible scalp with some gimcrack, tv-offered product supposed to cloak baldness. That my twitchiness, result of my particular life, will probably remain is something I can live with, if the shaking hands become still.

Reprieves, in my experience, are granted when we have no idea they are possible. Events combine, information comes to light, people appear. I am grateful to be sailing home to my real self. The reunion celebration has already begun.

Additional support needed for Christchurch

2011-06-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Christchurch, New Zealand, experienced two powerful aftershocks which brought further destruction to the already besieged city. For any readers here who are not familiar with New Zealand writer/artist Claire Beynon, she began a fund-raising project to assist the people of Christchurch after the initial earthquake. Her site, Many As One, accepts donations of any size, offering in exchange the chance, through a weekly drawing, to win work from artists and writers throughout the world. Please visit, let the power of the donated work convince you to assist in this effort.

Reading...reprinted from Jan. 27, 2010

2011-06-13T10:12:00.000-07:00

Because I am, at this moment, under the spell of Dickens' David Copperfield and am still digesting Great Expectations, unready yet to write about such total captivation, I resort to the expedient trick of the re-post. Apropos of nothing, my favorite quote of the weekend came during the Miami-Dallas NBC Finals game when one of the broadcasters referred to Jason Terry, he of many 3-point miracles, as a "crafty veteran." I would be happy to be called the same.
---------------

Good fortune is what I would call the diverse, textured, possibly unmatched segments of my life. While in the living of them they more or less flowed into one another, there is also an element of separate chapters, compartments, with few threads connecting them. Still those sturdy fibers endure.

It was not my intention, this sampler of costume changes, mobile scenery. And by many standards with which I am familiar, my story likely seems rooted and static. I have never lived in another country, have only flown across one ocean, have seen my name in print but never in lights, have yet to visit anything but a few of the edges of America and have mostly lived within a two-hour drive of where I was born. Yet even those limitations provided opportunity for what feels like an existence in which boredom was never an option.

My belief is that if we love to read, we will never be bored; we will never feel time weighing upon us as something to be gotten through but rather something of which there is too little. As they used to tell it, my parents - mad readers - had begun to doubt that I would ever be their TRUE child and take up the book as best friend. Their deliverance was Miss MacPherson, third grade teacher and tide-turner who, though she wouldn't permit Nancy Drew stories for book reports - and our library didn't stock them (think pulp fiction) - she didn't discourage her students from reading anything that called to them and it was the same in my home.

So we have reading as one of the threads, mysteries as genre of choice though nothing was ever rejected without inspection. I still haven't found my way into, let alone through, Proust and the list of haven't-gotten-to-yet...well, back to that notion of too little time. In my most hopeless moments - and years - it wasn't difficult to read a book a day. Not much else was achieved but the list of titles consumed grew longer. In a period of compulsive spending, bookstores were always my destination. At that time I worked in Burbank and had the luxury of two of the now-vanished Dutton's stores within lunch-hour distance. Then it was poetry and contemporary fiction. I still can think of no greater indulgence than a bag of new books.

Once I fell under the influence of Miss MacPherson, and Carolyn Keene's spunky characters, a stack of Nancy Drews, individually wrapped, was the hoped-for sight on birthdays. It is easy to picture my Aunt Dot walking up our long driveway with such a gift in her arms. My mother had been a follower of the girl detective and in second-hand shops we'd find editions from the twenties and thirties, more exotic and enigmatic than the fifties versions with their "modern" dust jackets. Not so long ago I read some of the newest incarnations and was shocked, not like Claude Raines in CASABLANCA, but truly stunned, to find murder in a Nancy Drew plot. Some things are just not done.

As I write this and realize it is determined to be what it wants to be, not anything close to what I'd had in mind, I feel the stability of what remains consistent. I thought I would be writing about a range of disparate experiences over the past six decades and end up, instead, celebrating word on printed page, a phrase for which I feel much affection, recalled from Van Morrison's song, "Rave On John Donne." It would not be a hardship to have every entry here, at the very least, reference reading, authors and titles and, at most, having that be the main theme. When I read reviewers whom I think find their way to the heart of things and use language that lets us know what is true, I acknowledge that I am not destined to write reviews for all the things I love, for I would be dragging in vague references (oh, she asks, are you not doing that already?) and being entirely consumed by what I like and unable to speak with any intelligence or impartiality about something I don't.

Maybe it would be wise to permit myself to praise books that stay in my mind and simply say why. But that would mean having to go back and read them again, fresh information and not slightly foggy memories. Darn. In my experience, we are nudged or frequently shoved into a direction other than the one we intended. What a gift, what an adventure. No, you didn't take the wrong bus, you just didn't know it was the right one until now.

1 comments:

Erin in Morro Bay said...

A woman after my own heart! Voracious reading has been the constant in my life throughout almost 60 years of changes, permutations, and re-births. One of the most exciting days of my life was when I began working for the library system here in San Luis County 20 years ago. First crack at all the books!!
Erin
January 27, 2010 11:00 AM

Dear (enter name here),

2011-06-07T16:05:00.000-07:00

To all of us who wonder if THIS is really our life and, if it is, why does it chafe so, why does it feel held together with rusty safety pins, gum and Scotch tape, why do we seem to be what is wrong with the picture?

There are activities, events, I avoid, even when I might enjoy them, but the pain of preparing myself emotionally to get there, then to be there without shriveling and writhing, is too high a price. Maybe I have a deficiency of essential amino acids or bear invisible scars that have scratched the matrix, left gaps in the continuum. We are not all designed to fit, with ease and elegance, into every situation; we have regions of screaming discomfort and it is important to let that be acceptable. My absurdist mind is really churning this morning: would you take a harbor seal to the Burning Man Festival...I wouldn't take myself there...such extremes are distressing, impossible for me. Anyway, we have environments that support us and others in which we would truly perish, or at least suffer greatly. And for what?

I think we are all wells of loneliness. It is myth that we are truly and fully completed by another or others; it always comes back to being singular. We spend some of our hours carrying, wearing, being, unless we don't have the wits to perceive it, cave-ins. We sink, we falter. Who people appear to be and who they truly are generally do not match all that well, which is why so many of us feel like aliens left behind. The poets tell us what a grief-filled and lonely experience this is and there is such truth in calling it what it is and not pretending it is one long Hokey-Pokey of happiness.

What I think we are called to remember, and not to diminish anyone's experiences or disappointments, is that, whatever our life has been, it has been, if nothing else, a rich source of material for our writing or other art and in that it has been a gift. I often think of cooking as a metaphor...anyone can make a feast out of top quality ingredients; the skill comes in making whatever is left in the cupboard into an equally fine meal, full of nourishment and flavor.

Will you come and sit with me for a time every day and find a speck of life to claim as, if not enjoyable, then at least as bearable? It is, I know what I'm talking about, a process of exchanging rejection for acceptance, for what is, is. Yesterday I would have condemned myself for not having made the most efficient and prudent use of a store-bought roast chicken. Time, as we know, escapes me in its very fluid state. The chicken, which could easily have been devoured when my son brought it home, was enjoyed, a bit here, a bit there, but the majority of it being saved to use in a few dishes I had in mind.

Then time acted as it does, flowed along, with the remaining chicken past its prime and unused. I am so unforgiving with myself that I was weeping over not doing better for us with the CHICKEN. Oh My God. As I tell about it now it has a bit less sting but I swear my mind had turned it into a capital offense, myself into worthlessness. Our survival, our usefulness to ourselves and others on the planet, depend on not letting those hands reach up from the graves and grab us by the ankles. Just think: chicken.

Our minds and our worlds do not turn around over night. The learning curve is long but it is essential. To allow ourselves to be here, in peace, savoring the good parts, to laugh, even if hollowly, at our foolishness and our misinterpretations of self then and now, is a blessing we can access, one wee speck at a time. We can look at years of disappointment or whatever word one chooses but if we can find, say, 15 minutes out of those years of untainted, pure living, we have made progress.

The less energy we give to the lack, the more pleasure we can find. It is truly a pinch, a second, at a time. Find one vignette from memory that is not pain, one moment we can travel back to from which we return not as less of ourselves but as more. They are there, I swear to you, the bird whose song you heard in the midst of terror or pain. Life is goulash, everything thrown into the pot together and even if the sauce has a slightly sour after-taste, there may be a fine bit of carrot that still retains its sweet flavor. We cannot be all things to all people. What can we be to - and for - ourselves?

See how you help me solidify my own philosophy? Talk myself into better states of mind? Without our exchange of words, I could have thought these things but not written them down and, by not doing so, left them to be less memorable or real. That all of this may sound like foolish, wishful thinking is fine. But I am content to be here, formulating and holding these gleanings from my, shall we say, considerable experience of what I judged to be joy-deprived days, saving a place for you while you are about the business of being and feeling exactly as you do.

And I will continue to hold this for you, even if it never matches what you know, what you believe. It is a thin but not fragile thread tied around a medium-sized rock, hopefully of sufficient weight to keep you from floating off when that seems the next likely thing. Someone who has your back - as well as they can at a distance of a few thousand miles, someone with a hold on your hand. Wander about as you need to; camp is set up and will be here when you stroll back. God...could I think of any additional metaphors to mix here? I sincerely hope not.

With love,
Your friend

Class, our guest today is Fred Babb

2011-06-06T19:51:00.000-07:00

Fred Babb's art makes noise. In a lock-step world it is subversive. He, and all of his ilk, the troublemakers, give hope to us who grow furrowed and tense, seeing creativity leached from our schools and the once green fields of our lives.

Though he died in 2006, he and his work remain vibrant and essential to any who fear we may have bureaucratic laryngitis, the silencing of voices which even hint at freedom of expression.

His only, as far as I know, book is a collection of posters called Go to Your Studio and Make Stuff. It is available at Amazon, at prices rather higher than the $15.95 - new - I paid for it, and worth, pretty much, whatever it takes.

At one time he had a gallery/shop in Cambria, California, called What Iz Art? where the white paper bags into which one's purchases were tucked had Babb's words and images stamped and drawn on them. His book, subtitled "Paintings and Essays," seems aimed particularly at children or the people who have power over their destinies. Its messages are equally fierce, too, for all of us who ever pull back into our caves of reticence, of uncertainty, of not feeling courageous enough to be as odd on the outside as we feel within.

I find similarities between his views of what will create whole children and those of Lynda Barry. The illustration which leads to the book's section called "Kids and Art," says, "Art is what kids do to survive in an authoritarian society." Being grown-up does not, of itself, make us free; sometimes what is does is shrink the box into which we have tried to fit.

Babb wrote, "I once read in a short story, 'Time is an abstraction devised by man to regulate the illusion he calls reality.' If this is true, we should be able to unmake time. The ARTs provide the means for this un-doing.

"Many artists appear to exist in a different time zone than other people. We are accused of being 'spaced-out' and detached. But in reality we suffer from a permanent case of jet lag."

The term "art," as I use it today, means anything that allows access to what has been trapped in our minds and hearts and has started kicking out the windows, trying to escape. Fred Babb has gathered piles of old sheets for us and knotted them together. The drop is not as far as it looks.

(Art and quotes are the copyrighted property of Freb Babb.)

No zombies

2011-06-02T07:52:00.000-07:00

Conversation, immediately upon waking, semi-shouted down the hall to my son, past the noise of wild parrots and departing commuters, "I had an apocalypse dream last night."

"Were there zombies?"

"No, just weather. I was watching the apocalypse in Idaho with Val Kilmer."

"That would be a great name for a band...Watching the Apocalypse in Idaho With Val Kilmer."

Fireballs burst over the mountains, wire-thin lightning ran horizontally through the sky. Idaho was illuminated only by the storm. I was down to two bars on my cell phone.

---

The image of my mind and its information storage/retrieval system resembles old library card catalogs. But the drawers are metal, not golden oak, sized to fit small manilla coin envelopes. The gummed flaps on the sealed envelopes have become brittle, no longer closed. Their contents fly, in no apparent pattern, to the front desk and form stories. Or so it seems.

Showing up late for Memorial Day

2011-06-01T21:39:00.000-07:00

For her Memorial Day post, Melissa Green shared a poem, The Rain, by Zbigniew Herbert. What I found in it was a reminder of a friend who had been best man at my wedding, had the office next to mine when we were reporters, wrote the script and scouted locations for the video we made to celebrate my then-husband's 40th birthday.

Both my maternal grandparents served in World War I on the battlefields of France, my father in the South Pacific. My family was shaped by war, grandparents meeting on the troop ship to Europe, mother and father meeting at the University of New Mexico, she a fine arts major, he in officer's candidate school.

With my grandparents, I grew up in the front row of every event that celebrated veterans. Both were American Legion, almost as a religion. Once their children were grown and married, their vacations were summer tours of Legion conventions. On many outings and Sunday drives, Grandpa's Mercury filled - since why would you go somewhere with a nearly-empty car - with fellow Legionnaires, I was the only one without a cap. (President Carter will stand in for my grandparents as cap model.)

Because of Herbert's poem, because of all the departed or lost and because he is my favorite ex-mailman/poet, I will let John Prine sing for my friend Jack.

By our rags you will know us

2011-05-28T17:49:00.000-07:00

In an email yesterday, my friend Lynne wrote about a community-wide tag sale going on in her Hudson Valley town. Today she added to the narrative, sharing what she had put aside to purchase. One item she mentioned but did not buy - as we on her mailing list wonder how it was priced - was described thus: We also found a very tiny slim volume, with a rubber stamp inside that read "From the Library of Anais Nin". Well! If you visit Lynne's site, please click on Fine Art and look at the paper quilts.

Paper quilts seque into fabric arts, as revealed in new wonder by Denise who just gave me the word "boro" which is Japanese for rags. The worn, the discarded, feel like extensions of my thoughts.

---

The California deserts, in the late 1950s, early 1960s, had not yet been over-run by anyone with off-road capability. They were, with few exceptions, places only real desert rats would seek out. In our forest green, new-to-us Jeep station wagon, my family had access to the previously unreachable ghost towns whose sirens sang to our father. Most of our trips, out and back home in one long day, were made with older friends whose experience in that unwelcoming country, and whose winch, saved us...from being stranded, from being sealed in with the angry tension that always traveled in whatever car we took. They brought cake and humor for our picnics.

The unexpected made a cozy home for itself among the rocks, steep dirt roads and flat expanses of Death Valley or the Mojave...the surprise of coming upon the fellows who gathered in the desert because they liked to shoot at stuff or the recluse with the alarmingly disfigured face who helped us find the highway late one Sunday afternoon, our father alternately thanking and apologizing to the man who clearly just wished to be left alone.

Too much quiet still causes me unease, empty quiet that is the sound loneliness makes. I wonder at childhood hours transported from our well-behaved and frequently silent home lives to the solitude, even with five of us together, of so much nowhere. I wonder what energies, what spirits, may have lingered near the ruined towns, the shells of homes, the abandoned mines of unknown depth; what emotion clung to the discarded egg beater or cup, the faded shreds of wall paper in rooms that once held such promise, the sink, the bedstead, the iron-fenced cemetery.

We carry our boro packs, bound with twine. Rags are remnants, not useless, not at all. I see my life as a series of compartments, not always connected, not always a common thread to tie one to those before or after, other than whatever has been salvaged from each leg of the journey. Our rags, fragile souvenirs, evidence, sometimes held only in the mind. We are each the quilt, the patched scraps of all our moments, all the places, all the hearts and hands, bleached rectangles of loss stitched next to moments of bright triumph.

No cake, just music - Dylan Turns 70

2011-05-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

That today is Bob Dylan's 70th birthday is, by now, news you have probably heard at least four times. That some of us of certain ages find this worthy of note is not news at all.

If you haven't seen them, the Martin Scorsese documentary, NO DIRECTION HOME, or the D. A. Pennebaker-directed, DON'T LOOK BACK, offer a lot of Dylan as he spans the years.

His third album, THE TIMES THEY ARE A'CHANGIN', was released after I'd left home. It was not one I would play on the living room stereo while I sat on the floor, trying to learn the words. The title song still reaches me. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

What's all this then?

2011-05-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

As I thought this morning of the universe, churning and thrashing and kicking some (or all) of us in the head as it seems to be doing of late, the visual that appeared was of George Clooney from the Coens' Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? His Ulysses, startled, mystified and unprepared for the events which overtake him, expresses those emotions as they rampage through me.

My state-of-mind veers from peaceful and reasonably content to confused and distraught, without apparent cause and definitely without warning. "Boys, we're in a tight spot," Ulysses says on more than one harrowing occasion. It is just that I'm not sure what the tight spot is.

Mixing protagonists, I would say it seems the game is afoot, but again, what game? Going where and for what reason? Is it just me, a wonky chemistry, a wobbly constitution, or are these unsteady times, uncertain in a way that eludes capture? Things feel jittery around the edges, a bit carsick at the core. Then it subsides. If I am in this alone, I've made a low-grade spectacle of myself here. There are times when a modest readership is a good thing.

Ulysses, as he and his fellow chain-gang escapees wrangle with each other over who will lead their trio, says his vision is for someone with, "...the capacity for abstract thought." May be there is such a thing as too abstract.