My Back Yard

This is a picture of my back yard, taken a few days ago. The lupines haven't quite opened up but they have today. Lilacs are spotted around the yard, white ones, red ones and of course the lilac ones. Some day they will be big old things and the yard will smell of their flowers. Up towards the top you can see the gate to the veggie garden but you can't quite make out the line of tomato cages along the path to the gate. I put in Oxhearts separated by amaranths and basil. This way I can walk out to the garden to collect lettuce, onions, spinach and then walk back and pick big orange tomatoes and maybe some basil to make a nice pesto. Oh I do like to eat my yard.
If you look at the crook with the bird feeder hanging from it you can see the suet on the other side complete with woodpecker digging away. The path through the wooden arch goes to the studio and past the berries and grapes. The herb garden in the stone circle started out more herby but now has a mix of flowers and herbs. Ornamental onions, lavender, oregano and sage all have bluish-purple flowers so it works well. Violets are mixed in everywhere. The flowers and leaves can go into a salad and they have a nice relaxing chemistry. Oh yeah, and by the right of the gate you can make out the white plastic tub I made into a compost bin for things like squash to grow out of. It's very nice out there. Many a guest has remarked on the quiet and calm in the back yard. Some have come back several times just to walk around. I wonder if the pheasants and foxes actually intend to come and get stuck in the garden? Maybe it's in some animal version of AAA tour books.

Pheasant Afternoon

Well, here's a pheasant that wandered into the garden. We watched him walking around the same corner of the garden for about an hour and then we decided to show him where the gate was. It took a few minutes for him to work up the courage, especially as Mok the cat kept walking over for a look-see, but finally he walked out through the gate and took off running. Mok gave a little chase followed by Margaret but the pheasant made it across the street without being hit by a car or caught by a ninja cat. This is just another reason I love living where I do. We got foxes, deer, racoons, possums, coyotes and all kinds of beautiful birds. Life in upstate New York.

The times they are a-changing

When Jon first got hurt I thought I was in some sort of deep dark well. I knew there was light somewhere, some answers about brain injury and coma but I didn't know where to look. Now if you do a Google search for traumatic brain injury you find all kinds of articles and stories and web pages. It's a lot easier to find things out. I think a lot of it is due to the people coming back from the War with various degrees of brain injuries. With a sudden upswing of people needing to know more about what to do the MSM is sniffing up a good story. After all, it's insidious. You never know what symptoms might pop up. On the support group I read about a man dealing with his wife's tendency to bite him when he tries to help her. There's always the sudden personality changes that happen with TBI, like the church going kid who suddenly starts shoplifting and swearing. Now multiply these problems by tens of thousands and you get an idea of what is happening in American families all over the country.

We're getting ready to start making more soaps and taking them down to Lake Katrine to try to sell to Jon's nurses. I figure I need to get my back to a place where I can drive down again with minimal pain. Hell, just sitting here typing is hurting me pretty bad, but I want to try to lay out the basic story here and then take the posts and compile them into a book on the family, assuming my big sister will finally honor her promise about sending me those diaries. Otherwise I have to just write about Jon and frankly there isn't a lot to say after the big seizures he had. He hasn't moved much at all since then, except for those occasional rare episodes that get me all excited again but never happen for the doctors. It reminds me of a paranormal problem I read about years ago: what if ghosts never can appear in front of somebody who does not already believe in them? What if your locked in loved one only moves when it's just you and he? Well, then you sound like an idiot when you try to explain the look on his face or how this movement was more obvious and deliberate. Yeah right.

Well as I said in the previous posting I'm trying Scribefire for Seamonkey and it seems to work pretty good. Oddly enough, though, "Scribefire" is not in the dictionary. Now let's try to add a picture and see how well that works. This is mom's puppy "Mighty Mouse".

Trying something new

This should be exciting if it works. I'm just checking in briefly with the news that I added an add-on to Seamonkey and the crocuses are up in the front yard. This add-on is called Scribefire and I am hoping it will make posting to my blog that much easier. Let's just see.

Nearly Spring

Alongside the path between the frozen garden and the frozen studio door, a maple leaf-shaped tunnel bores into about eight inches of snow. At the bottom, seen best by aligning your eye with the direction of the leaf-shaped hole, you see a small maple leaf, plunging toward the ground like a paraglider in free fall. It's a distant brown, a far cry from the bright red it was a few weeks ago, maybe more than a few weeks ago. This skeleton of life has but one job yet to do before disintegrating into compost and giving up all the parts, all the elements, all the love. So she sails down through a slowly melting patch of snow and ice, frozen water, little interrupted raindrops yet on their way to the ground, kinda like those slow-motion scenes on TV and the computer as the camera pans 360 and the drops are frozen in mid air. Now, if you saw everything in infra red how odd wouldn't everything be? Same frozen bundles of water, same slow motion paraglider, same soil beneath awaiting, but now it's all in red and black and shades between. In the summer there will be yellows and whites, but for now the world is in darker tones. The sun in the sky is a white dot surrounded by a orange haze and trees still cast shadows. The face of the man in the black jacket is yellow with a white gob in the lower middle, and plumes of slowly fading yellow coming out of the mass. The man would appear to be a specter, glowing in the shadows of winter. And you know some poor slob of a life form gets that as it's main visual input. Maybe rattlesnakes get their attitude from that viewpoint.
The maple leaf has no reason to know that the water alongside it is at 32 degrees or that water at this temperature expands slightly and with great concentration since it has no water to speak of to worry about. So it just catches what light streams down the hole behind it and aims for the earth, an easy target. The drops of water may be distracted by their frozen condition, but the important thing is that they are on their way to the earth, to sink into her skin, explore the dark unknown and return to the air as the breath of a maple tree.
For Her part, what does the Earth think of all this? She must be itching to get going with all that growing stuff She does so well. Still, if each season was an eye blink to the Great Mother, then a year might be a few seconds. Maybe She pays more attention than that. Maybe each day is like a heartbeat, a second of Her time. So sixty seconds, a minute is about two months. A season would be a minute and a half, a year is six minutes more or less. She sees us for eighty years or so which translates into 480 minutes or eight hours. One day of sunlight and then we pass into the dark night. Well, you can certainly see how the Great Mother might have Her favorites from time to time, but by and large we must look pretty much the same to Her by now. For our part we should pay attention to the brilliant metaphor offered by an Earth-centered paradigm.
Our day upon the Earth is starting when we are barely more than a drop of squirming chemicals and tissues. We can't feed or protect ourselves, we can't communicate our needs and we wipe ourselves out fussing so much that we sleep most of the time. Our potential does not appear for quite some time, about noon I guess. But in the Dawn of our day when all is dim and quiet, we are helpless. Only Love preserves our life, and Love is one of Her great epiphanies. When we are capable of doing something noteworthy to our Mother most of the time we do something in the way of changing something into something else and or moving something from one place to another. We dig holes and stack rocks, sometimes lining them up. We kill far more than we can eat and we do it when we aren't even hungry. We do this under a hot noon day sun, working up a sweat, moving air and water around. We plant things, we let them grow, then we kill them and
eat them. We are just like all the other living things that move across their Mother under the Sun. She shines down upon us, She supports us with Her form, She feeds us from Her flesh and Her blood. There's more than enough of Her to go around if we just respect Her and not screw things up.

Immanent Flight

I was talking with a friend of mine yesterday and we got to the point where books were mentioned. I'm reading Joseph Campbell's “Oriental Mythology” at the moment. They started to explain some of the issues they had with this “God” thing, this Deity-Creator. A lot of people have issues with that, insofar as there are so many options. With globolisation we have access to many cultures in details which weren't possible before. I bet a lot of people didn't know that the Muslim faith has several dialects. For that matter I suppose most Americans don't know that about all religions. There's a kind of thought process which deals with proof like a poll, with a histogram of the details providing a Truth or strong evidence anyway. So if you find that lots of people have issues with God and the strongest common denominator being “if God is all knowing and all powerful, then why does He make mistakes? If they aren't mistakes, then He allowed them to happen and then why does he punish us for them?” Examples are given, like the Serpent in the Garden, Cain killing Able and so forth. It seems to involve “free will”, is part of the usual explanation. None of seems to stick, though and I think the difficulty lies in the fact so so few of us are taught in logic. We think we know how to think logically, but it's more like appropriately. If it were logical we'd know why we did it, besides perhaps that it often works. Like praying for a miracle. According to the Bible, Koran and other scriptures, it seems to work, sometimes. Trouble is, except for emails which are hard to confirm, it's not happening in the same way anymore. Like getting a busy signal all the time. Eventually you wonder if it's the phone, or the line, or are a lot of people calling the same number? But the fact is, you thought it was a telephone and you thought it worked a certain way, maybe because you were told it did, or you think you were told so at some point. It's all very disheartening.

The main issue people have with the concept of a deity is not the deity part at all. It's the kind of deity. Specifically what happens is they get stuck in a matrix of their culture regarding such topics. Europeans and Americans invariably have to think about a Creator, male, one each, elsewhere in space and time. This kind of thinking is what causes wars. If you have a Big Daddy kind of God you get lots of conflicts, especially if you try to reconcile the idea with the history of the faiths out of the Mideast, at least the recent ones. How to be all-knowing and yet caught by surprise? You can't, morons! Your major premise is bogus. As children we were told that the Bible is history and of course it can't be, unless history has loopholes, wormholes and some kind of secret language we just don't understand. Maybe God is up there in a limited, self-contradictory manner, but would you want to "worship" such a limited deity? One who makes mistakes, says one thing and does another? Not me. If I am going to contemplate a Creator I want one whose substance became the Universe, whose intellect can include both the human animal and the bacteria human. I want one who does not say one thing, like "do not kill" and then turns around and sends armies out to do just that. Technically I think you could go through the Bible, include the "Lost Books", and carve out the crap and propaganda and end up with a nice little religion. It wouldn't say one tribe is the chosen one destined to rule over all of humankind, but it would explain some social rules, some faith rules and a few guiding principles which would enable people to get along. I might yet do that. Get rid of all the "begets and begets" so people don't think sex is everything and spitting out the faithful is a good thing. More like taking care of the planet is a good thing, then you can have healthy children. This idea of a transcendent Creator is very basic and is mentioned in the Bible but then abandoned by people like George Bush, who thinks he is like Joshua, anointed to go to war and kill all the sinners as well as take their land, rape their women and sell the children. I would also have to eliminate the "stone them to death" kind of punishments. If the Creator wants to erase a mistake They will have to do it themselves. My Commandment specifically states: "You shall not kill. Period" No give backs, no exceptions. You need to edit the Bible out of it's historical stores which do nothing but claim the Jews are God's chosen. Not because Jews are evil people, they just follow the rules they wrote themselves a few hundred years ago. But these were rules written by screwed up people a lot like the American President. He thinks Congress can write laws and he can ignore them. Heck, his mother made rules around the house and he ignored them so why not now?

In point of fact it isn't the priests who screw up religions, it's the lawyers. They parse things so thin. Like in American English the term "kill" can be parsed to include eating animals, plants, having a healthy intestine, walking on living things.... all of which cause you to kill something and conceivably all prohibited. But the original word was something more like "murder" which means killing your own kind deliberately, and not during war or as the result of a judgment. But that makes a long rambling Commandment. Moses was looking for something easy to understand because he thought his followers were stupid or something. You should recall that Moses wasn't Jewish, he was Egyptian and had little love lost for the Jews. He also wasn't very smart, since by making a short, easy commandment he also made it easy to confuse the masses. Witness the Second World War. We killed millions and all the murderers were Christian. We vaporized Japanese babies to protect a way of life whose God prohibits killing babies, mostly because the Japanese babies were "godless pagans". If God wanted us to not drop the A-bombs He would have made them bounce instead of explode. Clearly we had a partial suspension of the Commandments to take care of the Japs and Nazis. Clearly a politician was in charge, not a priest.

The main difficulty with war is that we accept the idea that occasionally we can suspend the rules and still be Faithful, still Chosen and destined for Heaven. Of course we can't, because a rule suspended negates the rule. If it's okay to sometimes kill then there is no commandment to not kill, or we'd hear about it from above. We never do, so it's okay to kill, even murder, even torture. You can go on down the list of ten and suspend them all all some point and still be a good Baptist, if you are an American. The problem being a pagan is that we have only the one rule to live by: If it harms none, do what you will. It's hard to parse that. If I want to have sex with a married woman I can't justify killing her husband, or raping her just to satisfy my lust. Obviously rape hurts lots of people in lots of ways. Yet our God-fearing Marines have been raping kids for years now and getting off without a lot of flack. They go home and take communion and settle back with a beer. Well, truth be told, they probably also take a handful of meds since no sane person can rape and kill without suffering. Look in George's eyes and tell me he is not suffering somehow. If he believes in the Bible he knows he is going to Hell. If he doesn't then he knows he is a liar and hypocrite. So he's boned no matter what, unless he quits and joins a monastery and prays all the time. Frankly I'm thinking sepeku is the only path to salvation for him, I mean after all, he's killed close to a million people! By now I think the White House is so polluted with bad vibes and lost souls that we should close it down and lock it up and build a new Capital somewhere in Oklahoma or Missouri. Use no white marble, make the buildings solar powered and have lots of orchards and gardens, places to meditate on the meaning of life.

In two days I fly to the West Coast to help Mom recover from pneumonia. We need to find a person to stay with her during the day so she'll be sure to take her pills and get up from time to time to walk about. For two weeks I'll be staying in the Bubble. I'll take lots of pictures, take Mom up to the redwoods and the ocean. For two weeks she'll get home cooked meals and away from the Television Channel. I wish I could convince her to fly home with me so we could take care of her, but I can't lie and tell her that it isn't cold here. It's 10 degrees this morning and only 70 in the house, but she could wear mittens and booties. She'd miss her sunshine and the flowers and by the time spring came she's be bundled like an Inuit in the living room, sitting on a radiator. Well, this should be interesting, especially if my Lyrica script isn't filled before I leave. I ran out too soon and now the old nerve pain is starting to attract attention. Timing is everything, says Musashi. Now it's time for coffee and a meditation on the rising sun.

Sometimes at night when everything seems like hornets inside the walls of my body I suit up, shoe up, go outside to the night air and I just look up and let the night beam down on me for a change. You can see your words in the still night winter air hovering just outside your reach. In the night there is just one monolithic block of darkness and it is the studio, the workshop, and it's black as any night need be. I walk ahead, scrunching through the ice-snow-ice layers of the path. Somehow I get a kick out of ducking under the grapes as I approach the door to the studio. Once inside I know I have some dozen steps up to the ceramic studio, the "thinking area" with it's wingback chair and little rugs spread out to catch the winter ice. I shake them out now and again, beat them on the sides of the garage/studio and then slap them back down on the floor in case I caught the dust thereby that caused the cancer or infection that takes me out someday. Ya never know.

The first thing to do in the studio at winter-night is to light the kerosene heater, that toxic nasty smelly thing that makes the fingers warm. Then sit back on the chair and stare at the masks on the wall. All those faces. I remember every emotion that went into them, every one. Sometimes I wonder if I have the right idea, this baring of the raw emotions in clay, but I love irony so what else can I do? Each face is a moment in emotion, delicate as fire hardened clay can be, yet you can take it up, look close at the lines and hang it on a wall for dozens, hundreds of years. Such irony and yet so neccessary because otherwise what would be left? If I didn't explain to thousands of generations yet to come how I felt at such a date what kinds of things would they think up to fill the holes? No, you have to lay it on the line, tear the shirt open and let them see that 25 watt red painted bulb shaped like a heart. Yup. That would do it. But all in all I guess I'll just shmeer it all together and nail it to the wall and shine what light I have upon it and let the chips fall as they may. It's all mud, people. All mud faces on mud walls. The thing is, as you look upon their muddy faces you think about what kind of kind of face you would want to see and Lo there it is upon that muddy wall, that wailing wall built on blood and sand. Maria Matinez's DNA is inside every single shiney black pot she ever made. Her soul lives on in so many ways. Suppose every random soucre of your DNA dried up and you could only save one, where would you want your genome published?

Suppose one night you woke up and at the foot of your bed was a man standing. You sat up, not in fear yet, but disturbed. Then he walked around to the side of the bed and sat down beside you, you heard the bed creak and felt the sheet slide. You knew who it was, he's been dead for days, but words were not enough to speak, so you said nothing. You sat and watched and he sat and watched you watching while pictures and words swirled in your head. Suddenly, it's over. You are in the studio, looking at the faces on the wall. Each one seems to be speaking something about some point in time but it's all so hard to hear. You look at one face. It winks at you. It's okay, it's just a cosmic joke, just some fun. You can go back to the rest of your life and figure that something got done, something lasting. Something made of dirt, made of water, shaped by mind, changed by fire yet still retaining a bit of the Maker, some Maria. The Desert taught me a lot, it taught me to know when something was dry and dead, or just being there in the sun, waiting to move. Nothing on those walls seemed dry and dead, yet at the same time, nothing seemed ready to move.

Groundhogs Day Retrospective

I know I do go on about this myth, but bear with me. Grey February is the month associated with the ground hog. The ground hog, earth pig, is a neolithic epiphany or vision of the Goddess. Remember that the hog, hedgehog etc are all associated with the Goddess. In other words you'd find a preponderance of sculptures, drawings, and maybe sacrificial bones of those animals in a temple area sacred to the Goddess. They are the little mothers who feed many, often coming up from the earth in time to let us know there is hope for a return to the warmth and light of summer. Groundhog's day and it's attendant ceremonies (Ceres-monies, Ceres being the mother of Persephone) relate to a very early form of the Goddess faith and the rituals going on this month go back that far. They are burned into the brain stem. We look for Spring in the dark of Winter, not as a rejection of Winter Herself, but out of love for Spring and Her bright energy. And it gets manifested as a pudgy little critter, blinking nearsightedly at the world, which is yelling and showing devotion, feeding and stroking the sweet thing. But we know in our brain stem that somehow life emerging from dark, cold earth gives us hope that everything won't just keep getting colder and colder, like it did for our ancestors, following the glaciers and painting on cave walls.

Even the one about Jeshua emerging from the tomb after three days goes back to the Persephone archetype. The moon stays dark for three nights and then emerges, grows larger and larger until you can read by Her light. On the face of the full moon you can make out the shape of a rabbit, another symbol of the Goddess in neolithic times, not real common in Europe, and there it gets weird (wyrd, as in fate)having the male rabbit, the Easter bunny dealing out eggs, another ancient symbol of the Goddess. Easter, of course, is a very old name of the Goddess. All of this deals with something like salvation from within the Divine just when you were getting real down. Mother spit out Her child again, a rebirth for a Goddess. Persephone before the trip down was more like Diana, not very empathetic, preferring wild animals to men. After the journey she is a mature Goddess, her hair is bound up and she takes to drinking. So imagine if Jeshua was a woman emerging from the tomb to a bunch of men in top hats and ribbons across their chests, cheering and showing Her off to the crowd. Then everybody dances to polka music and eats sausage, made from ground up pigs and spices. Jeshua doesn't like pork, it gives Her gas, so she goes away. Some time later somebody claims to have seen Her in Reno, singing lounge but the story is suspect.

But this is February and we're deep into it. I took some photos during a trip from Hoosick Falls in a fog shrouded valley with corn stubble arcing off and a nice line of telephone poles for perspective. Everything is tan, black and white, except for the occasional cardinal and sumac, oh, and the pines. I guess actually there's a lot of color out there, it's just the sky is mostly grey and blotchy looking. I suppose the fact that I generally had a good time in Everett, Washington back in high school and it was pretty grey there, that I kind of like the grey sky, for a few days at a pop anyway. I do like a bright blue day over a snowy white world. But you don't go into a new year with the winter you like, you go into the new year with the winter you get. And red bark osier, yellow willow, highbush cranberry, I guess there's piles of colors out there, what the heck was wrong with me thinking it was dull? Attitude, I guess I had the wrong attitude. That's what days of no sun will do to you. By early February you're so bored and so cynical that the only thing to do is pull a woodchuck out of it's hole, point at it and cheer and laugh and then go barbecue some links and wurst, drink a pile of beer and fall asleep for six weeks, or days or hours, it all seems to repeat itself around here lately. Must be the rain. Of course it's been four days since Groundhog's Day and you'd think I would be getting on with it by now. I just keep wondering if they ever make groundhog sausage if the little varmint sees his shadow or vice versa?

Super Bowl, Super Tuesday, Superman

We were invited to a Superbowl weekend party by a friend of Margaret's at work. Last year we went and I wandered around this guy's house trying to enter into a conversation with somebody. Naturally, I didn't know anyone there and they had no idea who I was. I could have been from down the street and just wandered in. But we tried to connect.
"Hi, I'm so-and-so. You're...?"
"Hi, I'm William, Margaret's husband. Margaret works with Name"
"Oh. So, what do you do?"
"I'm sort of retired. Disabled. Got a bad back condition. So I'm a house husband, but I'm also an artist."
"Oh. Yeah I gotta bad back. I take Tylenol."
" I take a lot of things for pain. Makes me sleepy and clumsy."
"Hmmmm."
"But in good weather I sculpt."
"Hmmmm."
"Mostly ceramics."
"Yeah, hey Sue pass some of those chips over. What's the score?"
"Hmmm. Yeah."
"Oh geez, go, go,go!! OH I can't believe he dropped the ball!"
"."
"Hey, don't hog the dip!"
"."
Then I wander into the next room with similar results. I watch the little kids play outside. I straighten the pictures in the hallway. I take more pills and pop my back a few times. I glance at the football game with no idea how to play football or what are the names of the teams or the cities they come from. I eat some pasta salad and some barbecue chicken. I take a walk around the block. Eventually we go home. I am so relieved to pull up into the driveway. While Margaret goes inside I check the chickens and sit awhile by the bonfire pit sipping my Fosters. The wind through the pines makes it sound like ocean waves if I close my eyes.

This year we took a pass on the party and instead we're going to another friend's house out in the country where we will talk about chickens, gardens, how the work around the farm is doing and other related stuff. The hostess is into religion so I can chat about my readings. Her husband is a cop, so we can talk about interesting things he's been doing. When my back starts to spasm I'll go find a corner in that big old house and drop to the floor and do back stretches, take some pills and sip on a Fosters.

I'm in a cocoon, not really paying attention to typical society. I'm waiting for seasons and changes. I want my country back. I want my son back. I'm greedy for conversations about Life, the Universe and Everything. What makes a mind a mind? Where does thought come from? Why do so many Presidents send out soldiers to kill and maim while maintaining their Christian credentials? Why do so many Americans know so little about the rest of the world? Why are they so proud of their ignorance? Why do we teach football in high school, but not ethics or logic? Why do so many Americans support new atomic bombs costing billions but not free laptops for every child costing similar billions? Why do Americans not know their own history? Why do most American blacks believe themselves to be descended from slaves without actually researching their family tree?

I'd like to be able to go to a party and meet average Americans and have something to say that was interesting to them. I'd like to be interested in football and baseball, but somehow watching millionaires pumped up with chemicals play a kid's game just leaves me cold. I'd like to watch network TV and be able to follow a show like Lost or Sex in the City without feeling pandered to. I'd like to talk about my son without sounding like I'm lecturing. I'd like to talk to someone about my son without having to hear about how sometimes it's better to "pull the plug". Jon has no "off" button. I'd like to slowly ascend to about treetop level, then rotate to a horizontal position and then with dips and swoops build up speed until I was soaring above the woods and mountains, higher and higher until the roads are thin lines and the cities are patterns in the dirt. I'd like to fly so high that the air burned my throat with the cold and my bones ached, then swoop down over an ocean and follow whales for a thousand miles. I'd like to sleep on a cloud near Nepal and listen to the tectonic plates moan and groan like whales of earth and stone. I'd like to wake up someday and find that nobody could think of a single bad thing to say about anybody else in the world. I'd like to have a single wish from a spirit in a bottle so I could ask for perfect health and sanity for all the people watching football games, reading books about chickens, emerging from a coma or suddenly finding themselves cancer free. I'd like to sit out by the bonfire pit and listen to the sounds of a world no longer angry, competitive or ignorant. It would sound like waves on the shore, like whales beneath the earth, like children laughing.

Jon's Bad Day

When the Prescott police told me that Jon had been flown to Phoenix by helicopter they said they weren't sure he'd survive the trip. He'd been torn up pretty bad. The Prescott hospital hadn't been able to do much for him. The extent of the brain injury was too severe. Jon's legs had been broken, both thighs. The big toe on his right leg was split. His left arm had been wrenched from the socket. The bone around his left eye was broken and his scalp was peeled back. The doctor at Barrows Neurological Hospital told me he was in a coma, that his brain had been severely damaged and they had place a shunt in to relieve the pressure from the swelling. I later learned that in a traumatic brain injury quite frequently this secondary injury from pressure building up in the brain cavity is the worse. Putting a shunt in most likely saved his life. He told me that Jon would not likely wake up and if he did wake up he would be profoundly injured, most likely never speak, never walk and would in all likelihood never open his eyes. But the probability was such that if I wanted to see him I should come immediately.

I phoned the airlines and found that there was no help in such a situation. It would cost me over a thousand dollars to fly to Phoenix. I used a credit card to get a flight but it would be another day before I could get a flight. I spent the next several hours online learning about TBI, shunts, cranial pressure and other facts. I learned how little chance we had of ever seeing Jon walk or speak or understand the world around him. The next morning, the day before my flight was scheduled I got up, fixed coffee and breakfast. Margaret and I talked about things, trying to be sure we had not forgotten anything important. I had arranged to stay with friends in Phoenix. I went to the bathroom and collapsed on the floor with incredible pain in my gut. I felt myself losing consciousness and tried to call out. Margaret was walking by the door when she heard something like a whimper and opened the door. That afternoon in the emergency room I came to. There was nothing wrong with me, no reason for the collapse. We told them about Jon and they said most likely it was just stress and probably I would be alright. The next morning I was flying to Phoenix.

Jon in the ICU was like a Frankenstein creation with wires and beeping machines attached. His skin was slightly grey and the scars on his face were still bloody and terrible. They told me I could go in and see him. I managed to draw close to the form on the table. The nurse told me I could touch him. I found it hard to move but I reached out and laid my hand on his shoulder. Suddenly one of the machines began beeping loudly and I jumped back. The nurse ran over and found a wire had come loose, nothing to worry about. Inside of me was a tiny man racing in circles, bouncing off the inside of my head screaming. I walked out of the room into the hallway and slid down to the floor. The nurse asked me if I needed anything. I told her "I need my son back." There was nothing to do and I was not in the way so they let me sit there for a few minutes. I talked to the neurologist who told me all the things they do in times like this. No hope, no chance, no future, no son. I talked to the Chaplin or minister or priest, whatever. He gave me his card. I have it somewhere.

Jon's Bad Day is white stoneware with mason stains, fired in an electric kiln, about life sized.

Fear

A little more than seven years ago I was working in the yard raking leaves and burning brush. It was a beautiful November day as I recall and I walked back to the house to get a drink. As I came into the kitchen I heard the beep from the phone indicating a missed call. I played the message. It was Jon's room mate telling me that Jon had been in an accident. He'd been badly hurt and was in a coma. They had taken him to the hospital and it wasn't sure if he'd survive. I needed to call Prescott Hospital or the Prescott police. I was stunned and for several minutes I simply sat on the floor wondering what to do. The next time I was in the studio, some weeks later, I picked up the clay and in a few minutes was looking at the Mask of Fear. This was the first of the series of masks I've done about Jon's trip through the underworld of traumatic brain injury. It's a little less than full sized, white stoneware with mason stain and iron oxide, fired in an electric kiln.

Grand Dad

You should click on this to see the details. Grand Dad Riley was a marble cutter. He carved angels, babies, flowers. In the 1970's when his old employer needed somebody to carve something that was not in the cataloged, something that required actual carving, they called Grand Dad in and he dug out his old chisels, some of which he made himself. This piece was carved out of a 4x4 pine scrap. The model was a tiny frame from a Sunday comic. You see Abner is aware of the snake crawling up his leg. The ivy winds around to the back. You can see some of the nice details like the shoelaces and the hair, but his left hand was also fully detailed as were the eyes. Lil' Abner is less than 6 inches tall. This was carved with an x-acto knife and a #1 blade. He would stop and sharpen the blade, shave a hair off his hand and carve off a few wood cells at a time. I would grab my knives, whack away at my piece of wood, break a few blades and end up with crap. Took me years to learn that in wood carving fast is slow and slow is fast. I take my time and hopefully I will someday be able to carve as well as Grand Dad. He could just as easily have carved this out of white marble but he said it was hard to get good marble these days, the 1970's. He died before completing the sculpture so one shoe and one hand are not finished. He never signed any of his work but certain details, like the form of the leaves and the bit of humor he always brought in might make it possible for me to guess at which monuments are his in the big cemetery in Louisville. I hope to be able to determine the years he worked there and then search for monuments that were put up around that time, then check for those ivy leaves or a snake in the grass. One piece he described to me had a little detail in the back of a full relief spider in its web holding down a bound fly! Now if I spot something like that I'll know it's his. He told me he made the chisels for that out of some little screwdrivers and a nail. Dad has told me about blacksmithing some with his father but he didn't do much but draw the details out for Grand Dad to carve. Daddy didn't have the patience to carve marble. I hope I do someday. You know, it would great to be an old coot sitting out back showing a little boy how to carve very slowly so that even with crappy pine you could make a masterpiece. That would be swell. I have about 35 years left to train. I hope you enjoyed the picture.

In the middle of winter
in the middle of the herb garden
three stones wait for Spring
Each dawn they look up
and note the sun.
They watch it climb
across the sky
It's highest post and then
Down to the red horizon
Not yet
Not yet.

The Girls

There's a show on Cartoon Channel about a home for imaginary friends. They all look weird, of course, being cartoons and the star of the show is a little boy. Now in my universe I have a home for Retired Chickens. Audrey and Goldie here are best friends. One's a aracauna and one is a gold laced wyendotte. Audrey Beardsley used to lay the nicest eggs, light green or sometimes pale blue. They call this breed the Easter egg chicken. Goldie just laid brown eggs but they were nice brown eggs. Neither hen was terribly productive as hens go, but few hens can beat the record set by Big Red. Now there was a good hen, usually laying 4 ounce eggs and the occasional double yolk. One of these days I will get a video of these girls and post it, but that might have to wait until the website I create. You'd think an artist would have one of those things, especially when you consider that I am trying to sell my work to raise money to help pay off these student loans. Trouble is my art tends toward the figurative and websites are not figures. They're more like spread sheets and not a lot of fun to design.

The first flock of hens we had I made a coop from old shed wood with a smallish hen yard. You got the eggs by opening the door at the back of the coop, which was elevated about four foot off the ground for some odd reason I no longer recall. If the nests were not near the door you had to crawl in and reach to where the nest was. They ignored the boxes I had in there and lay on the floor of the coop. Eventually that flock of some two dozen got old and started not recovering from their moulting so I'd be dragging out water and food to some 24 hens that did nothing but try to fly out over the fence so they could go eat my hostas and any bird food under the bird feeders. So, we decided to turn the hens into food. There was going to be a slaughter and I was going to take lives. I never do that well, never comfortable with the idea, but if I was going to live in the country and grow things to eat I needed to know how to kill chickens.

Dad used to take a bird and tie it upside down to the clothesline. Then he'd take a really sharp knife, pull the head of the hen down and cut it off. The hen would spasm and blood would spray all over and several small kids would begin screaming at the top of their lungs. See, Dad was very popular with the kids in the neighborhood. He had funny stories and he had a ferret in a cage and chickens out back and this was in a John F. Long subdivision. So while he was tying up Eggberta the little kids would wander over quietly and stand just off to the side. Dad was probably not entirely comfortable with killing the hens, if only because they had names now. He'd be focused and intent and when the kids yelled it would scare the pee waddling out of him and he'd chase them all away. So you get this image of my Dad with a bloody knife in his hand chasing four little screaming kids out of the yard. Blood is dripping down his apron and some on his face and he's nervous-mad. Idiot ran with a knife, no offense Dad but really...

We didn't have clotheslines so I got hold of a buddy of mine who swore he knew how to do it by watching his Dad kill their hens. I got the big pots together with boiling water on the barbecue. We got a log with two nails in in and a hatchet and a butcher knife and just for fun a machete. The idea was to place the hen's neck between the nails and gently pull to stretch the neck out. Then a whack of the knife or axe would do a quick kill and the silly corpse would flop around, just like in the movies. The hens did not like having their heads laid on the stump. Like the flamingos in Alice's Looking Glass Land they would turn their heads to look you right in the eye. Chickens are masters of irony and they have an excellent accusatory look. After several tries one of us got to kinda hold the head down while the other tried to cut only chicken neck and not fingers. My friend(who shall remain nameless for this anecdote)did poorly on the quick kill he had promised me. Seems, like me, he had never actually killed a chicken before and he wasn't happy with the concept. The first bird was almost beheaded and the grossness of the floppy head and the blood squirting was too much for us and there followed a silent film gag of me, my buddy and the mostly dead chicken running in circles with limbs flapping and nobody flying, blood everywhere and a boiling tub of water on a barbecue. In the end we got the chicken back on the stump and properly beheaded. Then we threw the corpse into the water, held it under (maybe to drown it as well) and then pulled out a steaming, moulting, bloody dead chicken. With my fingers burning I pulled the feathers off. Where the bird was good and hot they came off pretty good and elsewhere I had to struggle. Now it's a dead, greasy, bloody chicken. In a few terrible minutes we had a scrawny old chicken carcass worth maybe a couple of dollars. It only took a total of maybe two hours and two grown men to accomplish this. I began to have some very powerful emotions when thinking of Col. Sanders.

By the end of the day we had done in seven hens and roosters and made a huge mess of feathers and blood, cut ourselves in several places, although we both had our fingers intact. Ironic that last part, eh? I suppose in the end we could have said that we saved money but certainly if you factor in minimum wage we lost a lot of money and took great risks for a fairly inferior product. It was around this time I determined that I was a lousy serial killer and if I could not do at least a mediocre job I should not do this again. I built a bigger, more comfortable hen house with a nice metal insulated door for me to walk through. I kept my flocks down to a dozen or so. And when they stop laying, when they evolve into a flock of philosophers and open mike poets I continue to feed and water but I do not kill. I see no need to slaughter living things simply because they have stopped doing what I brought them here to do, ie lay eggs. It's part of Nature, part of the Great Plan that hens will lay for a few short years and then retire. In much the same way I have retired and nobody wants to cut my head off, as far as I know. I have to go out there every day, twice a day usually, and see that they are okay for food and water and no fox has found them. It doesn't always work out, which is why we have but four hens. Hawks and foxes and coyotes have benefited greatly from our retirement home and I get some exercise I wouldn't normally get. So it's a win-win for us all, feathered and not. This spring we may decide to go ahead and bring a dozen more hens into the yard. Then I'll be once again able to justify the hauling of the food and water out back to a bunch of critters who will give me that squinkey eye and make some sarcastic remark about the hairless ape.

Snowshoes

The greatest full moon is the January full moon. For several nights the snow has been taking on that great blue color and then on the full moon, since this is upstate New York, we got some clouds. Still, through the clouds now and again this great beautiful face peered out. I love that moon, I get to see it when I go close the hen house. At night I don't even need to use my penlight, it's like daylight with a black sky and brilliant stars that are really planets.

With my snowshoes strapped on and my wooly coat on and my silly elf hat that covers my ears, I go out into the yard. Once I'm around the corner from the porch light I pause and look up. The air feels like a pressure against my cheeks, pushing and intruding. But if you look up at where the moon is, even with the clouds covering most of her, the clouds part and suddenly you're looking her right in the face and it's easy to forget the cold then. Sometimes my feet get hot and I see my breath and try to blow smoke rings, but on a clear January night with the ice blue crystals glancing light off all the surfaces, I don't do much but watch the light from the moon, see it land in the yard and sneak off under the pines, no doubt to take a short break after such a long trip. The berry patches are full of light, like tiny lanterns shutting on and off, like frozen lightning bugs. I stand and watch and slowly breathe in and out. Then, with my snowshoes swishing and crunching through the crystal lanterns I stride without a word to the next awestruck clearing where I stop and look up again. I do this until I can stand no more beauty like this. I shut the hen house and walk back along the path toward the house. I can see the arch before me in the moonlight. As I turn again the clouds are moving like madmen escaping a jail and I get the feeling that I am moving too, but slower and more thoughtful. There she is, the January moon, so bright, so white and yet so cold towards me. I pass through the arch, the porch light spots me and comes on and I swish my way toward the lights.

Village Stream- Ballston Spa

While waiting for the Volvo to be repaired I wandered around the village and took some pictures. I will upload some more later but I thought this one was pretty nice. The colors under the ice and the patterns of the swirling water are remarkable. Larry used to take a lot of water pictures, in fact he took a few of this stream before flying back to Washington state. I'm still using his camera, the one he gave me. It was his first digital and at 2 mp it's almost an antique, but it serves me well enough. Nothing shows the seasons like water. The colors change more in water than they do in trees. There's life in there as well. Trout and little shiny fingerlings, frogs and beetles all gather around the shore and sing or gurgle. In the summer the fireflies are so intense you think the Milky Way has come down for a drink. In the winter you hear the water flowing and the soft tinkle of ice on ice. It's reassuring to know that the Goddess has so many voices and so many forms. I feel surrounded by life even on the coldest day or the darkest night. Hope you like this one, Allison. Feel free to share anything you like.

River Picture

This is what the Hudson looks like from Roger's Island, about 8 miles from my house. If you click on it you can see it full size. It's like the anti-Arizona. I've been taking pictures from this spot for almost 7 years now. I go visit during the four seasons and watch the river flow. This is approximately where they will be dredging up the PCB left over from GE's decades-long dumping. They claim it will not disturb the beauty of the place, but I suspect they lie, so I try to record the passage of time in this wondrous place. I moved from Phoenix around this date back in 1978. Big culture shock, but I fell in love with the river. When the Witch of the East, my second wife, was screwing every old boyfriend she could locate, this being her home town, I stood on the bridge overlooking this spot and considered dropping in. The cold water would have enveloped me, chilled me, put me to sleep and the pain would have stopped. I watched the water for several minutes and then a car pulled up and a man opened up the passenger door and asked me "Going somewhere?" I told him "Not really." and he sat there with the door open. I climbed inside, embarrassed that he most likely knew what had been in my mind. We drove around that night while he told me about how his life had changed some years ago. Seems his wife had been cheating on him openly and all his friends knew it. He had been pretty down then, he said, but in the end he had decided not to "let her win". He'd gone home, gotten his things and he left her. He said things got better in time and now it hardly seemed like such a big deal. She was just some slut he had had the misfortune to believe. When he was done with his story he pulled over and let me out. We were back at the bridge. Not the first time a stranger had saved my life. I survived, I left with my things and I concentrated on my artwork and the beauty of the river.

Over My Head

Now I'm going to take a couple of minutes, finally, to write some and wouldn't ya know it I pick something so deep I might be smart to let it be. But who ever accused me of being smart, eh? Here's the deal: I recently sent some money to a group which works to free Tibet and protect the people there from the Chinese crackdown/genocide. Normally I would send money to people like this, progressive political groups, women's rights etc. I'm a dewy eyed liberal in social matters. Somebody has to be. Well, this got me on a list and now they are offering me lots of liberal magazines at 90% price breaks. Not bad, I subscribe to Nation and I'm happy with it. Sometimes it's a good idea to surround yourself with positive reinforcement of your deeply held beliefs. That's why Christians go to church dinners and Buddhists chant in groups. Actually there's a nuance of reasons for these things but let's not go there. I got this nice invitation to subscribe to Shambhala Sun, a Buddhist magazine. I was myself a practicing Buddhist for many years, chanting in an incense scented room, meditating and so forth. Not eating meat. It was nice, like dating a beautiful woman, but we grew apart and agreed to be friends. So I'm thinking about tossing in $20 for the magazine. Why not? In this packet of reasons for getting this thing was a commentary by Pema Chodron. The "o's" have double dots over them but I can't find that font so bear with me. This commentary has "four reminders" that they suggest you think about and make part of your life. Very nice.

On reading the commentaries I discovered that I just could not quite wrap my head around some of the points. Let me explain.
"Maintain an awareness of the preciousness of human life..." the first one begins. As Jess would say, "This smacks of speciesism." That is to say, why "human life"? Isn't animal and plant life the same part of Creation, a bit of manifestation of the Cosmic All? Then I wondered, "Preciousness? What means this term?" Why is any life to be considered precious? Oh yeah, valuable to those impacted by it, sure. Living grains are important to living omnivores and living plankton certainly precious to living whales, but overall it seems to me that preciousness is a bit over the top. Hell, there's something like 6 billion people living right now and many of them are busy dying, like all living things must do. I would expect something precious to be more rare than that. I immediately thought of an Ocean of Life and each wave comes and sparkles in the light of the Sun, and then it falls back into the Ocean and never comes back quite the same way. So in that respect you might say it is rare, but then so is any one individual grain of sand. Never two alike, right? So individual human life is common as sand and rare as a sparkle of light. But "precious" I am not sure about. Is it me or is this somehow a bit arrogant to suggest that human life is precious and not mention the rest of life? Then to say Life is precious indicates that somehow life goes away. Life is part of the Great Circle, it never can go away. The body fails, the worms feed on your nose and they fail and bacteria or birds feed on them and so on and so on. Life never leaves the building, it just puts on a new suit. So I can't say I would be able to carry with me the idea of the preciousness of human life.

"Be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone..." Well I think I covered that above. Life never ends, it just begins again. Yes, the illusion of death comes to all that lives, the curtain comes between you and your past life, but you are still walking along the Path, you just don't look the same. That's my take on it and certain dead people have indicated to me that I'm not off the mark. I'm not using a revelation here, just cold logic. Everything that ever lived is still here, it just looks different. Like a nice berry pie... you got a bush with green fruit. They turn red and fall into your hand. You have ground up grains in a sack and some oils from another plant. Mix it up and partly oxidize it in an oven at 350 for a few minutes and you got a pie. A man eats the pie, relishing the sweet berries and thinking of that summer afternoon with his sweetheart, laughing and picking berries and eating the big ones. Next day some brownish, smelly crap leaves the man and is flushed away to the septic tank. The smell is that of living bacteria eating the rest of the pie. The septic tank moves the berry residue into the leach field where it transpires to the soil and is sucked by roots into the vines of a grape. A year rolls by and the man is sipping wine and remembering a summer afternoon.... it goes on and on. I repeat: Life cannot ever stop, it can only change.

"Recall that whatever you do, whether virtuous or not, has a result, what comes around, goes around." Well, ya want to argue about the definition of "virtue"? No, that term is so subjective the phrase has no meaning. Actions have results is a shorter version, but what else is new? Show me how an action in the field of Being could be so isolated as to have no result, even on the actor. Really, this is meaningless, except the part about going around is close enough to my previous rant about life that we can make it part of that "reminder". Then the piece goes into karma and such, which is a vastly different concept from cause and effect. Many faiths do not have karma, Christians deal with sin instead, and judgment. I think it's all hooey. You do things that have results. You die and become immaterial-spirit. You decide if you want to go down the chute again or stay where you are. Maybe you'd like to be a better human, like maybe not a war criminal this time. Maybe you'd like to be a bird and get that flying thing worked out. Heck, you have an infinite amount of time to try, why not do something novel next time? It seems so logical to me you could say it's a no-brainer. Why would my son decide to come back as a brain injured individual with not a lot of future and maybe a lot of pain? Who knows, I'll ask him if he dies before me. I'm sure at some level he had a plan. Just off hand I think I'm going to have to come back as an innocent gal so I can see what it feels like when some horny meatball guy lies to get into your pants and then never calls back. I have done things like that and it hurts my head to think of it. I'd like to contact them all and apologize for being ruled by my cock instead of my brain, but as I said to Jess men have a limited amount of blood and it takes a certain amount to think and a certain amount to get a hard on. It's an either-or situation. Not my fault, I knew better when we started flirting but by the time we kissed I had the IQ of a Cro-magnon and the willpower of an opium fiend. I'm really sorry, I feel terrible about it and I have tried to do better as I aged, but Karen, if you are out there reading this, please understand that when I was 19 and you were 16 I did the best I could with what I had to work with. It wasn't up to the task.

"Contemplate that as long as you are too focused on self-importance and too caught up in thinking about how you are good or bad, you will suffer. Obsessing about getting what you want and avoiding what you don't want does not result in happiness." Okay, let's wonder here about the term "too focussed". When is enough too much? Not sure based on this reminder. Is she saying we should not think about being good? Why not? I try to be good every day, with the caveat that as long as I don't get a hard on I should be able to think of good things to do. Seems reasonable to me or I would not be trying. Thinking about being bad? Like Cheney can see his badness? He shot his "friend" in the face and got the victim to apologize to the family of the shooter! Oh, I have to call that bad, not good. Focusing on some quality you feel would serve your loved ones and humanity at large seems to me to be a good path to follow. That's why I send money we need for beer and sweets to children in Tibet for band aids and butter. Extremes of any kind can be bad, but that is, after all, the meaning of extreme. So don't obsess about anything. It's not easy when your dick is hard, so men have to try to catch the good ideas before checking out the cute red headed chick in the hot pants. But it can be done. I hear Buddhists make excellent lovers. Lastly I note that if we fail to avoid that which we do not want, will we not be surrounding ourselves with things we do not want and therefor we should not be very happy (happy being a good thing in this argument)? I don't want a metal screw in my finger, I don't want my finger to not bend any more. I obsess about the fact that if I am not focused on the damn thing it rises straight up on it's own like a 19 year old cock looking at a Playboy spread. I have to focus on getting it back in place so I can try to stretch the freaking tendons and gain some control over it. As of now the tendons are winning the fight, but I have an appointment for some occupational therapy and maybe they can talk to it.

A friend of mine suggests i place crystals on it every day and chant the chakras. I have chanted the chakras at various times in my life, because I wanted to be a good Buddhist and I wanted to be good. The net result was that I felt very enlightened and good while I was trying to convince a 16 year old girl with a truly good heart that it would be good for both of us if she allowed me to violate her special purpose. Chanting doesn't help if down deep inside you have chemicals flowing about that reduce your mind to a neolithic level. Jon could have chanted all morning seven years ago and still without the seat belt he still would have flown through the windshield and shattered his links to a functioning human life. That life is precious to me and I obsess about it, I focus my energies on how to make things better for him, and while I obsess on that I see my finger slowly lifting up, pointing towards heaven, or possibly asking for permission to leave the room. I don't know, I only can wonder. It's a karma of some kind, this world we live in and we should be satisfied that right or wrong, good or bad, when we divest ourselves of this mortal coil we will feed some other life and pass on the virtue of living.

Be careful flying over water, but don't obsess about it. Focus on the ride and enjoy the good view.

Studio in Winter

This is the studio a couple of weeks ago when it was pretty cold outside. I thought I'd show you why I don't sculpt in the winter out there. Note the thermometer on the wall sitting at a cold 20 degrees. All the clay is rock hard frozen, the water is crystalline, even the plastic bags are brittle. I sometimes go out there to work on what I can do, like straighten up the tables, arrange the greenware, or unfired sculpture and sometimes, amazingly enough, I sketch. Of the three masks on the wall two relate directly to Jon and our terrible TBI experience. The bottom one is titles "Fear" and represents the first day I found out that my son was in a coma down in Arizona. Above that is "Jon's Bad Day" and it kinda speaks for itself. I'll post a good sized pic of the whole series later. The idea is to have a display of the masks in order with a written explanation of the subject below. Fear is how I started out. At various points in our journey Jon changed and my reaction was to go into the studio and work it out in clay. I suppose I could also sketch, maybe watercolor but I haven't done that much lately. I used to watercolor a lot, going back to schooldays living with Mom and Dad. I never could do portraits very well, seems a shame too. I have a couple nice ones that happened almost by accident, one of Margaret, one of a girl named Yvetta, one of Annie. I have an oil of Mom... come to think of it all but one is of women in my life.

I guess a lot of things can effect my art: weather, illness, comas. Right now I am suffering through an upper respiratory infection making it very hard to breathe. I used to get that a lot more often, especially as a kid. That was why I studied yoga, actually, that and seeing Dad put his ankles behind his head and walk around on his hands. Breathing was tough for a kid with asthma so I learned prana breathing on my own and expanded the volume of my lungs. It also helps to correct spasms, which I got a lot. It's a curious thing but Dad used to mock Yoga as a fraud, because when he was in India he learned the postures, but being an atheist he never tried to study the philosophy behind it. I recall him telling me that even they knew it was all a fraud because they even called these guys "fakers". He didn't understand they were called "fakirs" and it meant something entirely different. When he found that he could acquire the postures and yet he was an atheist he figured that meant it was all a fake. The sad thing is that if he had studied the philosophy behind Yoga he might have cured his alcoholism, migraines and lots of other things that troubled him all his life. Maybe not, maybe the lessons there could not have prepared him for pulling boiled bodies out of the bay. He saw death, touched death , smelled death and it made him know a fear that never left him. He was confronted with his own mortality and the knowledge of his own humanity, that he would rot like the rest of them. Oddly, he arranged to have his mortal remains dissected and burned. A medical school studied the old fart, cut open his chest and looked at the scars and tattoos and then when they were done they burned the flesh. If he had stayed in India, somehow, he might have been burned at the shores of the Ganges and his ashes floated into the sea. So in the end we don't have his ashes and we don't have a gravestone. I suppose it's up to me to make a centopath for him, maybe out back. I did a mask for him, part of the DeathMask series. I'm not sure he'd like that, he used to tell me I should carve more wooden horses and sell them. He liked my wood carving, although he said it was a far cry from Grand Dad's skill and I have to agree on that, but in time maybe I could have gotten better. I'm not so sure now with only nine working fingers.

I'm reading Joseph Campbell's "The Masks of God" series. I'm up to "Creative Mythology" and it's pretty exciting stuff. I wish Dad had found Campbell, I think it would have answered some of his questions. Most Westerners fail to understand the rest of the world about religion. The Yahwehists teach that their stories of creation and Moses are historical facts that happened in real places and dad knew how much of that was bullshit and reached the conclusion that all religion thought that their stories were based on history and so were bullshit. Let's face it, people being created from the sweaty armpit of a sleeping giant is a stretch. But of course they thought no such thing. Those stories were metaphors and understood as such. They helped you get past some basic questions and on to the harder ones. It does not matter in religion if we came from dust, clay or armpit sweat because we are here now and we have to get on with it. Dad limited himself but it was largely because he came from ignorance and was self taught and so he missed a few lessons, like Joe Campbell's excellent books on how religions came to be, how they work and where they can take you. For instance, Dad taught himself to raise the temperature in his hands by a few degrees in an effort to control his migraines, but not knowing the concept behind the act he failed. Oh he could do the tricks but he didn't try to understand the essentials. To him a black rock was a black rock and those who taught it had a soul were fools. He didn't make the leap to the idea that every black rock has a soul because every black rock was as much a creation of the Deity as we were. Since Dad did not want to believe in souls he refused to accept the rock as brother. He didn't want to believe in souls because he was raised in a Southern Baptist environment, and in that environment he was a sinner doomed to Hell's fires. Please note that in the end Dad did in fact burn, just not the way the preacher said. Western religion is like a practical joke that the victims just didn't get. Oddly enough, living with a drunken atheist who read aloud from the Egyptian Book of the Dead made me eventually a believer in souls, just not Christian souls. I became something like a Shinto, believing that all of creation was soul. It seemed, and seems, so logical that if I had a mind the universe must have a mind. The logic was that a mind and a soul were related like a rainbow was related to the sun. The mind was just a color in the rainbow, split out from the source by the material world in which it found itself. Maybe Dad should have read more Byron or something.

Well, in the winter I can write and take pictures. Even with a broken finger I can type, with some misspelled words but thanks to spellcheck even those can be fixed.

One thing that worries me a bit is having come from an incident wherein a finger was eaten by opportunistic bacteria I am trying to breathe while opportunistic bacteria mess with my lungs. We have to hope they aren't related because those bastards ate my finger joint and if they ate my lungs I'd be as alive as Dad much faster than I am prepared for.

I can see where someone might get into having their spoken word transcribed so they didn't have to worry about spelling and pauses and such, the actual scribe would fill all that in. That skill would be so valuable, so many people could benefit from having their words put down to paper just the way they said them. Of course, to be really valuable the people would need to read, and writing would have to be somehow understandable across the board, across the lines of class and time. I mean, to be really useful, how nice it would be to know how and what Ramses I said while puttering around His capitol. I have a DVD of my dad chatting with some of the family, some cousins, I believe, and his cadence and laughter would be lost in a simple transcription, but maybe the wisdom would not. Maybe what he said would have been handy sometime to read. I know just for a chuckle or two I recall some of his stories. I think I have better stories as far as humor goes, but his are certainly better for being real, assuming most of them are. If they aren't then there's thousands of people who would be disappointed to know. I personally love the one about him tiger hunting in India. That would be a shame to lose that one to our great grandchildren. Of course, by then the tiger will be extinct because of people not very different from Dad except they shot the tiger and Dad drove away. But I like Dad's story better because it's just like him not to hurt an animal when sober. He liked animals, and that's kind of interesting when I think of it. Not the usual stuff about the hard guy having a soft inner life, Dad wasn't soft anywhere except his gut and that was later on. No, it's that he had to have an empathy for the beasts he raised, cured, helped or saved. He had to feel as if he and the beast were somehow worthy of equal respect and succor. So he bound the wing of the same dove that he might have been shooting at before. But he was shooting to kill, not to hurt. He was shooting to eat. He wouldn't have eaten the tiger if he had shot it, so it would have been cruel, and more importantly, unethical. Ethics requires a relationship between the parties that is somehow equal.

Then there are Archetypes. These are People who stomped the earth, who made the valleys and seas. They invented Tools, or Mead, or Death. You can deal with a man walking into a jungle, drunk and wild, looking to shoot a huge animal and bring the skin home. That's a wild, really great story, but if the tiger is Tiger, then the man dies and never becomes a hero, not even to his son. But Hero, the Great Man who dares and dies (or doesn't die but who will in Time), have to die or he's just another immortal and there are so many Gods. Every freaking piss ant Pharaoh was a God. Volcanoes were gods quite often, although their idea of creation was often making a great vineyard on top of a civilization. You had all too often a God who blew His stack and buried a People, or at least a Tribe. In western Europe there is a kind of shaman called a Magi, which is not to be confused with the Three who were One. A Hierophant is another example of the same. Certain levels of archetypes can have multiple names right from the start. So you have this Merlin-Gandalf archetype of the Magic, all-knowing one, waving, speaking, doing something otherwise pretty common looking and then everything gets better. We win, our side goes home with the pig. But, in the valley below are the bones of those, just like us, who went home with the pig, too.

I have a pile of bones in the studio, most, I think, are deer. When Jon got hurt I went out to the desert and found them there. I think I wrote about it before. I've been moving them around, looking at patterns, making designs and meditating on them. One thought that came to me when I first found them in that wash was the wash itself. There are bright iron oxide colored stones everywhere in Arizona and every wash is a tonal poem of muted red and orange and brown. The bones are red, too, like some kind of chalky red. The stones broke off into reddish sand and washed around the bones of the red deer that fell into that wash. Or the young redhead who went out to party and never came back, but whose ribs and leg bones were mistaken for an animals by a man blinded by grief. Or they were just the bones collected there from a deer or a pig or a person and there are no stories, but only patterns to see in the way they move around on the table top. I have flint tools, stone hammers, bones, horns and skulls. All the things you'd need to make an altar or a bonfire(bone-fire) or if you wre a scholar maybe you find out something about a whole People and how they came to be where they were doing what they did. Great stuff, bones. Some of the earliest human art is scratches on the leg bone of a pig. Nobody thought to ask why a pig would carve up his own leg, or have it done on a bet. They just assume one of Us did it.

I'm quite sure I have seen a few gods/goddesses in my time here. There's that look about them, they can't hide it. The thing is, seriously, very few of them are Creators, so how can you blame them the way things go? You gonna get pissed at Mars for the Iraqi Occupation being a complete bust? First, it's not his domain, and second, if there was a Deity of that Problem I am sure they would take the side of the Iraqi Insurgents because we are the ones who started dropping bombs on sacred ground. Sacred to the Babylonian gods, the Sumerian gods, Assyrian... you name it. We did the Shock and Awe bit on Babylon. So when you wake the really ancient Gods and Goddesses of War you have to expect to take a few hits. They are right, though, that by and large we can just keep sending bodies to the altars of war and we won't get much backwash here at home, not from those Gods. Our Gods of commerce are capricious at best, and these ain't the best of times.

Having taught the ancient armies of the East how to defeat the young upstart empire of America, the Merchants of War sell the People to their new masters. Comes of re-reading the Book of Five Rings and watching a fine Kurosawa film. Kurosawa was well versed in Archetype theory when he directed Seven Samurai and the rest. Rashomon is a fine testament to the Trickster as any I've seen. So in all things the concept of Honor is brought up, the concept of Ethics, is brought up, as if these were so common they didn't need much definition, just some filling in the spaces. Like which People is it that the Hero is sacrificing himself for, or nearly if he has another miracle to perform? There's a lot of people and a lot of tribes, more, I think, than the number of Gods if you include Corporations. Here in America we have a myth that a Corporation is the same as a Person, that is they have the same rights and even sometimes, more rights. Because Corporations are like lots of People and so they have Lots of Rights. But still, in the end a corporation can only be a person and absolute power corrupts any person, always, by definition. Only a Hero or Magi is safe from ego and we don't have one of those handling things in our world today. We have Lawyers, and Corporations, and Pundits... all kinds of new Archetypes designed to fill in the gaps between the Gods and frankly I don't think it's working.

You know why I don't think it's working? Because people with machetes are cutting people's arms off, even when the people in question are very young and defenseless. People are blowing themselves up, flying into buildings, standing up in a crowd. That's how I know it's not working. This is why I go back to the earliest Archetype and see where We went wrong. It's Mama. Her and Her big Tits and Her eyes. The first Mama was a Bird Goddess. She took care of Her young, even throwing Herself in front of a Hunter to save Her children. The hunter remembered Her flying up at him when he found the nest, and how She tried so hard to protect Her young. Mama Pig was also very soon a part of our pantheon. She with Her numerous babies and Her numerous tits. She provided for all. But those who watched closely saw the Turtle snap up the ducklings, or the hawk snatch the chicks of the Mama Grouse. It confused a few, for why would Death so easily defeat Mama? A closer look reveals all the Mamas in the soil, the bodies, the water and the air. She's freaking everywhere! So Life goes on and Mama goes on, but She can be very disappointed in her babies. And Mama disappointed can be Dark Mother, the Crone, taking us down. If you are going to wake up your mama, you might want to do it from a safe distance. Now ask yourself, where is it safe to be from the Mother of Life? Looks bad for the miscreant.

So I plan my garden, collect the seeds and make sketches. If the spring is dry enough, we'll have new kilns and we'll start on some wood carvings, all of this in spite of the Recession, the War or the Other Crap. You still have to gather seeds and plan or the Garden goes to Shit.