Tumbleword

   Spending hours at the computer looking at a year's worth of snapshots my eyes are about to vibrate out of my head and roll down the street for a dark gutter--or even the neighbor's cat's mouth, anyplace it might be dark and there is nothing to see. I have looked and judged; seen thousands and deleted surely almost a thousand or more.  Why do I feel like sticking my face into a bowl of ice water just to get a clean perspective.  Color.  Shape.  Bright monitor light.  Flicker, flicker--oh, isn't that the name of a web posting site?

I could just as well go for a walk, like last night, around midnight, strolling with a friend the sky so clear, the stars bright.  The moon itself swollen and low behind a neighbor's house.  I imagined my neighbors sitting in their upper rooms looking out the window, the whole moon framed for them, just really present there.  It was cold, my breath smog mocked my inner heat, my hands wanted mittens, shivers for the first time in a long time.  This summer hit high 90's and 100 plus for so many days, it seems colder now in average cold.  My good Yankee blood ruined. 

Odd how looking at this summer's images (they are stored by date digitally) I could relive the heat--see it in the things I took photos of.  It was one hell hot month after month, and still dry and still drought here, though I saw in the paper yesterday images of the flooding in Indonesia, men carrying children through water up to their chests.  Everything seems tilted, out of balance.  Warped.

The image above was from one of those hot days, the little bee thing on a cactus flower that only lives for a day.  I looked at the year in images and I know now something about a day--how on those days when I took those images there was nothing else in the world to me during those particular moments of attention.  This is the first year of my digital camera, so my first experience of looking at an organized year of images in this manner.  Its already making me think differently--I mean about the little moments that make up a year.  The digital storage method comes with the camera, it shows me click-by-click what I took when I spent my time looking throught the lens. These were the choices of a fragment of a life.  Mine.  In the same way my heart and my eye goes click-by-click forward into the day, a month, a life.  Look, its almost December. The past, through linear fashions of time, ordered by the photos, spreads before my eye the hours; reviewing them my life passes before my eyes like paging through a book of days, months.  Those moments behind me now, but in front of me on the screen. 

I think the bee above caught me because its leg was so small, so thin.  I though what if my leg were that frail.  I saw the pollen on its wing and that pollen is used up now.  That flower opened for one day and I didn't even pluck it off, it got little tending.  The whole world spreads out beyond that flower, tended and not tended, noticed and not noticed, rained on and not rained on.  All the hearts, all the hands, all the minds, all the hungry mouths and eyes beyond mine, all year long they spread out wide and far beyond me and my small snapshots.  Yes, they (you) all lived that one day the flower lived.  This is life, a billion little flashes of thought, actions, doings, etc.  This momentary impulse, to be, to do, to think, act, love, choose--it happens to spead through the world, through all the people in all the yards, their lips, hearts, minds; through all the animals domesticated and raw; maybe they too were tended or not tended, looked at or not looked at, loved or fed or whispered to.  Its so Big.      In relative terms my life is just as small as this little bee and just as busy in the moments I am caught in the act of doing what I have done, tending to a flower, collecting my pollen, feeding on nectar.  Loving and eating and dreaming and watching a show on tv... whatever it is that "adds up" to a day, week, month, year, life.  I am as the bee, its leg, that frail.  And I am strong, and available to the flowerings of life.  Own the right to bury my head in, to partake the way the bee clings and nestles the nurishment of the flower.

The phone just rang.  My sister called from Massachusetts while at work, to read me a poem.  One of the girls in college brought it in and felt muddled by it.  At first I didn't think it was a poem, and judged it, after hearing only one line, but then it was actually rather excellent.  A satire, social criticism... the man who wrote it is John Tranter, an Australian Poet and the title of his book is Urban Myth.  My first impulse was that the poem was written by the University of New Hampshire poet Charles Simic who uses a similiar style and won the Pultizer Prize.  I met him once and found him a real human person, a great teacher, funny, relaxed.  

This call was a nice surprise. To find a new poet.  Now I am going to see if I can find the poems on Abe.com or someplace.  This is how the moments of life get spent, even in interruption.  While spending my last few moments I learned, I was given to, though the girl on the phone feels I gave to her.  It was me with the gift in my hand again.  Mansuetude, it is like clapping, laughing, giving one small gesture towards one small second in another and look!  Look at the dominoe effect.  I am suddenly added to, complimented, changed; by chance. 

A million thanks to all of you here and elsewhere who in a lifetime have been kind to me, or anyone.  

The November sky mingled; breath in a box of light.

Tonight, thinking about what matters.  The light, always the light.  The color splashing in the eye.  Laughter that comes from the small text of associations we all keep within us, the small comic book of little comments that kept, evoke a larger OTHER time when we laughed together.  How a person can say one word, and all the hours and hours of whatever weird magic happens when we laughed before opens up in us, replayed in the feeling centers.  One right word, one gesture, and the whole soul could probably open up, flash light.  Unravel all the things it knew or thought important, or even possible.

Memory, where are they hiding in us all the subtle aspects of the dream? 

Memory--for some of us we chase the old happiness and the known and never get to a new explosion; of flowers; of color--witnessed in another. Have you ever dreamed so vividly you wake up terrified or in passion for some other worldly concept of an other?  You were just kissing the most amazing light in-dwelling person, you wake up and its late, you missed breakfast and all you want to do is go back into the place where that vibration of joy within wrestled with your ideas of reality. 

Have you ever dreamed and been in war or found blood on your hands and woke with your heart sounding in your mind so loud you think someone is breaking in the house?  What layers the soul must keep, locked mostly, out of some mercy to us. 

The soul is wealth and we glimpse it in a squinting eye, half afraid to overwhelm the current circuitry.

What good is music without silence in between the notes?  Its like writing turned into a big blop of ink.  Maybe we can project onto the blop and see other things, suggestive, but its not that zen writing. The letters don't open up and breath on the page.  I love white, linen paper.  Ink.  Pencil.  I have been listening to a zen master flute player lately, its old school stuff, very simple, but you would swear the guy could blow his soul into your heart space and open it up. Stretch its current boundries.  Listening, I feel like a kite being flown by another soul's song, I go up and over, and then glide on a string of his notes, then I am dropping fast, devastated in heart, lost in his intake of breath.  It might be the closest thing to experiencing mouth to mouth resusitation--I mean like something else, something profoundly other, larger--is actually breathing me.  

It takes attention, to listen; then its like being lifted again, higher, faster by a gust of strong gentle handed power--a form of mansuetude in action--this flute blower.  Its something people who ride roller coasters might get from their thrill seeking selves.  I on the other hand will stay off those things.  I am not one to be taken by friends (or sisters who plead... ahhmm) to places like that... no not a second time or a third or a sevententh..  But I will ride my flute blower's song, his ... essence of practicing quiet to offer song.  (I don't have words for it exactly) but I am not sure the roller coaster riders I know will ever understand, I mean if they could separate the apperatus of the rollercoaster's bulkiness and its mechanical weight, to see that for me, the ineffible Yes that rides up to me is a rollercoaster, pure sound its only structure, asking, wanting me to flow with it.  To be carried... away.  A lover's phrase.  Yes.

Like a great bird this one man with a flute makes this soulful music, it comes to carry me, weightless across the balmy clear-through-blue ocean--just while the sunset splashes colors I have yet to dream of or see combined across a horizon that yes, could be, just another dream scape in the inner mind's eye.  Absorbing me.  Absolving me.  Of all that I have held, or willed, or grudged...in myself or another.  All of it--lost and I am carried off, into the light.

Wonder. Imagination.  It's what's for dinner.  (O/K. I stole that part from a commercial, but It had to be.!) I love that guy who does that voice.  Sam Elliot.  Chance.  He's in one of my favorite movies... Off the Map.  See it.  Its not one of those action films, more like a play, and its got a great narrator.

 

This little bug casing reminds me of a puppy, for whatever reason.  Maybe it’s the way it lays sideways, similar to my beagle who daily suns himself in window light.  The ribcage is like my own ribcage, and the eye is so like a plastic window something once dwelled behind, looking out at life.  The way I have felt most of life, like something looking out of the window of me (eye, feeling centers, heart sensitivity, taste, touch) looking into and at this thing called world, life.

 

The earth is so encrusted here, on this bug’s given shape, it says to me something of archeological digs where objects of art are exhumed and wait cataloging.  It says to me that I too have a shape, an exoskeleton and will, yes, just like the embedded earthiness of the image above, as flesh I’ll turn to dust.  Then what?

 

I feel like we all leave these little exoskeletons around ourselves.  We move onward, day by living day we outgrow a shell of who we think we are; we stretch out of a formed conception and escape into future.  We excavate ourselves through time, moving from the earth to the air, to song, to light.  Progressively. 

 

Look at it.  How many little object type hollow or soulful exoskeletons do we each leave behind, inside others, and in our own and the larger social life?  We leave little gifts shaped in our image; little token aspects of our self.  Some will remain, some will mulch.  The way this was left and found by me, are there not kindnesses and art, poetry, notes, whispers and hopes we have offered to others? Passed on silently, purposely, and later picked up and found important. Thought provoking.

 

To some this little bug is ugly, to me it represents breath, an escaped exhale from the ribcage of life.  In other photos this creature has whiskers like an old woman, wizening.  It becomes me.  You.  My sisters, my mother, my life.  Your father, his brother, the queen of England, the president of history.  All things.

 

Today, even tomorrow and the day after is like a bug casing I will live in and leave, with my shape impressed in it, and what I do there, with that time, may or may not be found, or found worthy by another.  But I am made to live through it.  To try it. To try making something worthy in my image, my now.  Which is also always ever changing.

 

This image has become a new representation of thanksgiving—it reminds me to be thankful for life; for breathing, for moments that escape into new moments, for yesterday and all the experiences I have left, and yet impressed with my shape and my touch, my design. 

 

It tells me of time, reminds me that yes, I have a mortal coil, and do leave it.  In our culture we don’t sit and contemplate human corpses—because we (unlike the Buddhists who actually meditate on the decaying body) we try to tidy up our lives and pretend there is no death.  Antiseptic America, dustless, pageantry? 

 

I am no Barbie doll, I am no Mother Theresa, not even a Martha Stewart want’abe …and yet I am.  Maybe we are bound in language, as Aristotle said, the soul only thinks in images—but unlike the bug casing I still have an animate body and will, I can still move my hand in the world… how I chose to use this gift is daily, important… gentle.  Private.  I still have a voice and even if others find it shrill, it has to exercise, to use its power while it is given a breath.  Owned.  While I exist, I mean.  Hum, deep from the back of the throat.  Yes, try it.  Hum-hummmm within your warm throat right now… what is that power to shape words, to say a thing that sounds in another, beautifully or harsh? To sing?  To call a mother or friend, a lover? 

 

There was a time when women were not allowed to speak in public, or enter a library.  As long as I can hum, as long as you can, being of any sex as long as you can move your exoskeleton around in time and space, you too have something to do.  Do it—in the daylight, the night, in dreams on paper.  Whatever that is, may it help find you and by grace and the power of what we all just indulged in during our Thanksgiving, may it become a bounty to your (our) world. This is my Tumbleword, in Mansuetude, with gentle strength, do the thing you can do while it is yours.  Honor it.

Condensation on a plastic cover for "left overs"

This morning the deck had been drenched with a an evening rainfall that took the leaves and their orange golds reds down from the trees.  I really enjoyed waking to make coffe and seeing a new carpet of color out by the kitchen table.  It almost took my breath away.  Then my best buddy (PIE) called from Ashville to tell me he was freezing and it was actually snowing in the NC mountains.  Yay!  Snow.  

I bought two small blue hubbard squash yesterday. Its absolutely rare to find them here in the south. They two are good sized but for a hubbard squash which grows rather large, they are really like overgrown mellons. It is nice to have two so I can look at them (photograph their battle scars) and also when I cut into one for Thanksgiving I can still own one for later, to make a nice creamy (sour cream and milk and Regianno Cheese sifted in) hot soup with.  The giant size hubbards are impossible to cut into without letting half of it rot.  Around here, the yard critters get a lot of leftovers from my yard, like carrots and apple peels, stuff others might chuck in a trash barrel or mulch.  Its probably illegal in a city like this, but I toss scraps over the deck rail into the small plot of woods all the time.  Don't tell on me nosy neighbors, the racoons and the possums have lost their habitat because of us.

Concepts of Heaven are still calling; coming around, asking me to define it, but I told it "Don't mess with me, I got other things to do."  Should we talk to heaven that way? No.  For those who don't know, I posted back around Nov 9th about heaven and we got a good conversation started about what heaven is, where it is, etc.  We were studying the word itself.  

I am way behind on my proposition to write 5-10 pages a day for fiction but I know better (excuse, excuse) than to force garbage when I don't feel like writing.  If I write garbage it will end up chucked over the back railing and the racoons will have to suffer through it.  We actually had a squirrel break into boxes of books in a shed back there and eat novels and a few small boxed bibles stored there.  They are enlightened now, we joke.  

Have been sifting through lots of images, so that takes the psychic energy--am working on making light visible, though that sounds childish... with photography and I have a whole years worth of stuff to evaluate. 

Oh, and YES!  Happy Birthday today to Boston Billy!  TO know Boston Billy is to Love Boston Billy... You can't deny his charm.  Thanks for visiting NC this year Mr. B, even if you couldn't choose a spoon to eat your apple pie with; you were tired-funny and we love you!  Here you are a few years ago... hiding from the paparazzi again.  Does that dude Mr. TJ still drive you down the river in the boat?  I hope you pay him well.



Enjoy the new year!  I know you're all going out tonight, so have a margaritta for me when you toast to your new year... May it be full of blessings.

Also Happy Birthday (belated) to ms Ladyhawk who just posted a new batch of wonderful spiritual poems here. 

Almost had my Christmas card designed.  I would probably rather not send them, but people expect them and there are some people who it is nice to please, who won't be around forever.  Am using an old image of my grandmother (the lighthouse keeper's daughter).  Then this computer went black and ate her and its design up!  That's not nice.  Blog has been acting all winky all day too.  Must be in the air... in Mansuetude, peace to all and stay warm to those of you in the beginning of a chilly season.  Stoke the inner fires.  Spark kindness everywhere you go, this is my Tumbleword: pass out sparks of hope when you go out today, start fires in other people's eyes.  Do it before Christmas starts, before Thanksgiving... before the high holidays .. before tomorrow!  Be bold.  Spread kindness. Don't wait until "the season" and hypocracy sets in like a chill.  We're all guilty of it!

The bushes are shaking outside my window... the wind blows in... chilling the mercury--it dropped about 20 degrees today.  How much firewood is in the woodpile?  Now, that would be nice tonight. hmmm.