Fiddle Serenade for Mothers Day

Nelly Bly fiddled by me, guitar by my daughter. Chatter by the neighbor's boy.

Violet May

Violet April

The lovely sight just out the window since mid April, declining now. So close, inner and outer seemed to overlap in a halo of lavender light. I'm told to be careful, that this aggressive beauty, Wisteria, can force it's iron tendrils into the mortar and damage the house.

Prospect Park West and 18th

fishful

I came across a new way to enjoy a pile of old Aquarium trade magazines someone left on the curb on 17th St. I hope you enjoy them too.

fast and slow clocks

gutter party

key

parrots in the dairy section

lady hair

abandoned tulip

looking down

taxes and sugar

Lying face down on 17th St. I found a copy of the The Odyssey with a ripped cover. At home, I opened it and heard a crack as old glue snapped and the spine split. It opened to Aeaea, the island of Circe, where the most lovely of witches instructed Odysseus on finding his way home. Reading her words helped soothe the burn I'm feeling from chopping off the limb we owe the government. Ouch. It is really not easy for people to give up what they have. I'll take my spoonful of sugar from that old home boy, who has increased my ability to see the spiritual nature of the mandated offering. Just in case ethics weren't enough.

There in Acheron the river of pain two streams flow, Pyriphlegethon blazing with fire, and Cocytos resounding with lamentation, which is a branch of the hateful water of Styx: a rock is there, by which the two roaring streams unite. Draw near to this, brave man, and be careful to do as I bid you. Dig a pit of about on cubit's length along and across, and pour into it a drink-offering for All Souls, first with honey and milk, then with fine wine, the third time with water; sprinkle over it white barley-meal.

And that was only the beginning of the sacrifice. For All Souls? Yes. To get home? Yes.

gesture

molecular oration

Bibliomancy relating to the drunken ecstasy of matter, shifting from one shape to another, matter drunk on spirit, spirit on matter. A book I found on 8th Avenue, James Joyce's Ulysess, a Study by Stuart Gilbert, offered these lines on the subject.

In esoteric writings the name Proteus has been aptly applied to the primal matter, the Akasa of the Brahmins, the Iliaster of Paracelsus.

"The nature of the universe," Marcus Antoninus has observed, "delights not in anything so much as to alter all things, and present them under another form. This is her conceit to play one game and begin another. Matter is placed before her like a piece of wax and she shapes it to all forms and figures. Now she makes a bird, then out of the bird a beast--now a flower, then a frog, and she is pleased with her own magical performance as men are with their own fancies."

"Ineluctable modality of the visible," Stephen's monologue begins; "at least that, if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, blue-silver, rust; coloured signs.

Here though, it seems that matter is only a plastic substance passively altered, but I enjoy thinking that matter itself enjoys the workings of the principle of reconfiguration as much as you and I might enjoy a long overdue makeover, and the ecstatic purpose of creation is to let these crazy journeys of transfiguration free wheel through the universe.

the intimacy of decay

washing dishes

Innocence

One thing just became clear to me about meditation and meditative prayer. Speaking for myself, when through chanting and meditation and listening I am try to silence the mind, what I am really doing is seeking my innocence. Because it seems my thoughts are almost always lying to me and I am almost always believing those lies. I am almost always asking my soul to wear a garment that doesn't fit. My soul seeks its innocence, I seek to lay down the weight of lies. My soul wants no gift more than the gift of its own innocence.

The primal "sin" is the lie the mind tells itself, and while the lie is empowered it poisons our relationships with creation and we are cast out of paradise. I don't presume to speak for everyone, but I know there are many like me, who have the same sickness. Our souls were turned against themselves not long after we were born, indoctrinated into the habit of oversimplification and an excessive lust for the security of the literal. We've been believing lies so long we don't know what's false and what real, we don't recognize the difference between belief and knowledge.

God speed the moment when our spiritual immune system is strengthened to the point where it won't tolerate for one second the lies we tell ourselves and the soul's innocence is our life's work.

Immaculate: unable to utter a lie, unwilling to listen to the ego lying to the spirit. Something like that.

more of the spring snow

Spirea in March. I wonder if we'll see another Praying Mantis on this Bush, or if it will once again be Witnessed.

apricot blossom redux

It's already time for the annual apricot blossom promenade here at Brooklynometry, 3 weeks earlier than 4 years ago, one week earlier than 2 years ago.

odd sounds

I pointed out the noise in the wall to my husband so now he has the creeps too. I noticed the other night that it got louder as I prayed. It's easy to imagine it as a cicada that has prematurely sprouted wings and attempts to fly within the wall, but my husband heard something different; a rat crunching away on its stores down in its nest. It brought to mind his dislike for the sound of the dog's footrpints as she trots across the parque floors, her toenails adding clatter to every step.

Another troubling sound; the whine we've had in the kitchen ventilation fan for the last year. I had someone come and try to fix it last year but we got a bad repairman who just insisted that it was working normally even though the high pitched straining sound was not what the machine came home with. Today we got another repairman to address the problem, about a month before the warranty of the microwave hood expired and we were on our own. I was expecting the worst - another repairman who denied the problem, or someone who blamed the situation on the installation, which is not covered by warranty.

Nothing happened like I expected it to, our repairman was competent and decent, and there was no argument over who was liable for the cost of the repairs. As he dissassembled the ventilation pipe he moaned softly to himself, in the vent he found the remnants of a sparrow that had gotten in the shaft.

So now here's the first order of business: place a large gauge screen over the exhaust vent. This time I can't complain about
"how they make things these days."

Green and Purple Experience

the heather on the hill and the whistle in the wall

I walked by a house where a neighbor is growing heather, what a beautiful thing. I don't know about you, but I'm having quite a green and purple-pink experience lately.

Meanwhile, there's been a strange sound in the wall by my bed at night, it's been eerie. I came across this passage today regarding the spirits of the departed who take on worldly shapes. It has me thinking, snipe, maybe? "A wicked sea-captain stayed for years inside of a cottage wall, in the shape of a snipe, making the most horrible noises. He was only dislodged when the wall was broken down; then out of the solid plaster the snipe rushed away whistling." W.B. Yeats

forget me not

Well I thought that's what these were, they grew thickly on the lawn on the South side of the Bishop Boardman Apartments, a local home for the elderly on 8th Avenue in South Slope. I crouched there for a long time reaching through the fence trying to get the right focus and stay out of my own shadow but there was little I could do. I had parked there to bring my husband's box of zappos shoes to the post office, to spare myself the misery of the misery that typically befalls the household when, on Saturday morning, the day requires waiting in the long post office line on top of everything else Saturdays require.

An elderly woman was looking at me and muttering under her breath about how New Yorkers only help New Yorkers when I passed her with the box, it seemed like she was talking about me, but I imagined she noticed I was carrying a large box that rendered me unavailable to help her. I suppose everyone has had moments when it seems like no one is willing to help.

On the way back from the PO I saw her again, standing there in nearly the same spot, asking me to walk her the rest of the way to the facility because she feared the strong wind might cause her to lose her balance. With my arms free I was more than able to help and happy to, because I always wondered about all the people that live there, what it's like in there, what their stories are. I also marvel at the trees that grow on the grounds, one large oak with an astonishingly solid collar of hefty branches coming from it, it seems magically strong, as well as the white maple that stands tall on the other side of the entrance. Trees so enchanting they manage to evoke a sacred grove right there on 8th Avenue.

I spoke to the woman as we walked. She spoke of how she was leaving Bishop Boardman, how it had gone downhill since taken over by HUD. She felt the woman that runs it, someone named MCcuin, shows little kindness to the elderly that live there, answers them with sarcasm as if she forgets their humanity. It is so easy for humans to lose the sense of another's humanity, I've done it and it's done to me all the time. I know when I'm being inserted into protocol. I oughtta know. I also see the suffering or vacancy in the eyes of those who feel they have to emotionally abandon us and themselves.

If my acquaintance is right about Bishop Boardman, I hope it can recover its dignity, dignity like the dignity of those grand trees that shade its West facing entrance. The place has potential.

good to be home

angels remind me

About a month ago my reflective daughter remarked that the only perfect thing in the world is that everything is imperfect. It seems like it's taken a month, a thousand mile trip, skirting the unforgiving cliffs of California's Route 1 and some very bad news for her statment to cure to full flavor, because recently life became saturated with the exquisite magnanimousness of hopelessness. We're all in it together. No one wins. We're all beset by insanity, short sightedness and absurdity, futility. We chronically undermine our best interests. But that doesn't mean there's no one to love. It means the opposite.

Somehow without remembering this, and maintaining expectations about what life "should" be like, it is impossible to remember what kind of astonishing gift life is, an aesthetic stream of richness and complexity that marries our souls to the world. It doesn’t matter how long it is, or how short, what priviledges one was granted or how one struggled, whether one was pleased or dissapointed, who loved us and who didn't, it is in essence a gift. Most days I let resentment over disappointing circumstances cloud the clarity of that point. It is a rare and astonishing moment when I am redeemed by the angel of pure unadulterated hopelessness.

I think this is another way to view the statment I was considering in a previous post: "There is nothing as whole as a broken heart."

The sun setting over the Pacific at Ragged Point, with clouds fittingly blurring the horizon. I had a terrible night trying to sleep there, yards away from the drop off. It was weird.