Hibernation Therapy

Cold feet,

The symbol of hesitation.

The Time for Sitting.

Feet against the heat,

Careful not to burn myself.

Coming is more darkness.

Coming is more cold.

Coming is an inner spiral,

Spinning out the new

Web of my paradigms.

Hibernation isn't necessarily,

Sleeping.

Sleeping isn't a coma.

Off comes all the camouflage,

The inner genuine me rules.

Thinning

     Thinning the lettuce, radishes, beets, and the other excesses of growth in the garden is a very challenging job.  Deciding which plants are healthyest, which ones need more room to grow, and which ones are the likely Darwin losers takes a lot of thought.  In this realm of my own Garden of Eden, I become the overlord that decides who will live and who will die.  Perhaps there should be an overlord for our planet as well.  Certainly, there will be no lettuce on the table if the remaining plants don't have all they need.  It's a little eerie to make these life and death decisions.

Poking Through

Poking through the debris of the past, leathery veins of a former year, dried cells once transforming sunshine to vitality of matter.

Easter has passed, I've only associated it with spring, flowers, egg hunts and a sense of renewal, while many see it primarily as the resurrection of God's offspring.  

Clutter in my house, clutter in my mind, past realities clinging like cobwebs and leaf skeletons make it harder to sort the electrons from the clutter in the closet.  Hard drives full of jpegs, files full of tax forms, closets full of clothes no longer apropo for the current lifestyle.  

But, inspired by spiky red shoots ripping through the  blanket of duff, ready to test the air and the season for another turn at the horizon.

About Scale and Size, about water and air, and motion.

Looking closely, I see 1/2 bubbles, domes of air and water floating on water...and though this is as temporary as ten minutes or less, time itself has scale as human lives are less than centuries, while butterflies have but a day.  So I see the "reality' before me through my eyes and my mind's interpretation, and I know these are air bubbles surrounded by thin layers of water due to the cohesive quality of water seen in surface tension...I'm sure a physicist could tell me why, but the witness in me questions what is happening at the next scale up....what bubble are we all riding on the surface in some galaxy....are they, too, just domes of matter floating on space? 

The Blues

                        

The Blues

Eying the blues pulls at my soul,

Those shades of waters and precious stones

Intriguing my eyes to want to penetrate the barrier. 

The boundaries of desperation and hope.

Of light and dark.

Of man and nature

Of creation and destruction

The curse of believing we know what's coming,

Is that we're not prepared for what is coming.

There is more light in my darkness at this age,

Than I was expecting.

I used to say that as long as the darkness was warm

I would't mind the passage over,

And now I see there will also be some light....glory be.

The Black Hole

     The black hole, the concept of the black hole, the mystery of some barrier of time space, some boundary of reality as we can know it...something almost dark and, dare I say it, evil?


This actual scan of a sand dollar shell, in the sea urchin and starfish family with it's pentagonal tentacles all emanating from a central opening between the hard and the soft, the exoskeleton and the layer of 'skin' and the protected viscera inside.


This scan shows nearly infinite 'tentacles' or 'branchiating' etchings in a calcified 'shell', and when one looks at this 'non-living' specimen we can see how the entrance, the gateway, so to speak between our internal organs and our external needs of food and energy create a 'skeleton' of how living things interact with the planet...


Could the black hole of the universe be merely a sand dollar skeleton, could the calcified remains of a universe without an undulating black hole even have the potential for infinite existence?

So run my thoughts as I ponder this imprint of the tao, of the morphic resonance of life.

Fighting off Winter Funk

     Just when I had last year's leaves raked, just as I saw the first snowdrops start to bud, almost bloom, just as the first seeds were sprouting in the Plant Nursery, the weatherman announces that we'll have a few inches, updated to four inches, downgraded to about an inch...but as the night progresses, and I plow away 4 or 5 inches every few hours, we wake up to nearly a foot of snow in the driveway, and huge icicles hanging from the eaves.(Yes I know, it's a run on sentence)  So I asked friend Ed to model me fighting off winter funk, only to look into a mirror and find a fat greenie who was already to plant in the garden, only to find that this March is coming in as a lion...hopefully depart as lamb.
     Waves of Gadaffi blend with the grey clouds and waft through my soul looking for a light at the end of this tunnel called winter, and the beginning of a new world of spring and light and flowers, and a new generation of repressed but intelligent hard working region of the world can have some control over their resources and lives.

Wheatland Abandoned School on Highway 2

Somewhere in the middle of  a plateau of snow and wheat, stands an old school.  For thirty years or more, I have stopped each time I came by and photographed the graffiti on the walls, watched the deterioration of the building, and wondered where our sense of history went.  I have never had a clearer image of what childhood out here was like for the early settlers, than to read on the wall that a teacher had molested a student in the closet.  Look out these windows, nothing but an expense of white in winter, an empty landscape where horizontal takes on a whole new dimension.

Then what would a student do?  And with bitter cold, and a wood heater, a mix of all ages, no doubt...the one room school.  No book could have given me an instant sense of the karma and character bred under these wheat land, remote landscapes where blizzards and snowdrifts divided these people from the rest of us in winter.

The Smell of Old Pencils

     Open a cigar box with old lead pencils, and a mysterious odor from another age wafts below my nose.  My engineer father before CAD Machines actually drew blue prints with pen and pencil, and even in post-war Amsterdam, where everything was sparse after the war, my father would bring me some of these pencils to play with, and I'd color while he drew hexagons and pentagons with his compass and ruler, or he would draw perspective in such things as ships.  We bonded around these pencils, we were at our best together...he the engineer, I the artist but both of us loved to play with the pencil, and I, a lad of 6 was permitted to be free to draw and color as I wanted.   The memories that moment of opening the box, the ambiance of 1950 in the room, the ambience of my father, the mood of the moment, for a deep sniff into the box that all came alive...now I know how the dog experiences the moment...and then, from a drawer slips an old stamp album, and the many letters from my grandfather to remind me of them, and The Low Countries of my birth and early upbringing. 

          

In Praise of Snail Mail

     Envelopes and Postage Stamps went with childhood for me...as a young immigrant in Canada, my Grandparents would write me in Dutch, and to keep me interested, my grandfather would collect as many stamps and send them on.  Holding some real paper in my hand with the pictures and history of my homeland, and the countries we had immigrated to and from made it real for me.  I became interested in Geography, and History seeing the colonies and the heads of various European Kings and Dictators as they controlled Africa and The Middle East.  Recently I read that the post office system will probably be gone in 10 years, with UPS and Fed Ex taking over.  The era of affordable mail brought about by the Universal Postal Union which allowed people worldwide to send paper, handwriting and pictures that could be held, read, savored, and stashed for the children, will probably cease, as Facebook Accounts and e-mail substitute for real paper, a pen, a stamp and a legacy.

     I remember my folks complaining that since the phone came into the world back in the 40's, people no longer came to visit as often, and since TV, people didn't eat meals together as often, and on and on.  I'm sure one day an envelope with a well crafted stamp will be as rare as the antique washboards and the horse and carriage...but I shall miss them...miss counting the Christmas cards, where the number meant how much you meant to others, miss soaking stamps and looking in the catalog for its companions, seeing drawings of history before Wikipedia could answer all your questions.  I know, at 66 I'm history, too.

The Motions of the Moment, The Forces Dancing

  

Freezing and Thawing and Freezing and Thawing 

     More and more I am awed by the miracle of the moment when I go to places like the edge of a wild river on the morning after a freezing cold night, the rise and fall of the water due to contraction and ice formations lowering it at night, and the meltdown of the afternoon when the sun barely melts the edges of winter.

    Gratitude for the mind and awareness my soul has granted me to exercise and the encouragement of the many in my life who saw something worthy in me that the would encourage...my artistic mind, my fluency in thought, and my expression of my fundamental values.

www.flickr.com/photos/pictoscribe  michademia@yahoo.com

Honoring My Grandfather

Windmill and Dutch Landscape by Andreas W. Prehn Sr.

     Back when I was a 'jongentje' in my Native County, this type of scenery would be the high point of a day.  Natural forests were pretty much non-existent, and only on the beach would you find dunes and natural textures and shapes. 

     My grandfather would take me out to places like this, and his garden also inspired me later in life.  The quality of this inherited drawing still stuns me.  I feel honored to have had such an artistic craftsman as a relative, and while my own skills are very limited when it comes to representing reality in pencil or paint, I've taken on the role of the artist through digital imagery.

Morphic Resonance - More Branching Out

Morphic Resonance, a concept by Rupert Sheldrake 

http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/morphic/morphic_intro.html 

     It asserts that the present is very much determined by the forces of the past and has become my foundation for understanding the world.  This concept, which, in short, suggests that there are 'fields' underlying the material world which tend to shape our world beyond just the physical atomic, molecular explanations we have learned, suggests that the patterns of the past very much influence and largely determine how things will be and look in the future.  In some ways, to me, they are an avant garde scientific meeting of the Tao and Science, though still very controversial.  Shapes and forms are, in some way predicable, not only because of genetics and DNA "off and on" switches, but also by the force fields of our universe at many scales from micro to macro, from microcosm to macrocosm.  

     I chose this picture of trees on a promontory at Dinosaur National Monument because these shapes, are no doubt formed by the combined force fields of the dna of the species, the climate, the location, the eons of weather patterns, insects and other animals who interacted with it, and no doubt many other forces which we don't even understand.  A sceptic of the linear cause effect world of science, I am reminded that we still really don't know how a cat purrs, and Quantum Physics has brought us to a multi-universal threshold, all of which allows me to speculate that Mr. Sheldrake is on to something profound, and has given these matters so much thought, that I wish to credit him.

Morphic Resonance - Branching Out

Morphic Resonance, 

Like fields of energy, 

Mathematically measurable as fractal geometry,

Living water branches out like veins and arteries,

Growing fromthe anchor of a branch of Osier Dogwood

The perfect attractor for these floating crystals.

These rare fragile conditions,

  Aha moments,

Like a rare brilliant conversation with a friend,

 Or the right flow of notes on a keyboard. 

      One has to go out and freeze to get these, and tripods are required, and then processing software, like a conversation of pixels and digits so they can represent what I saw...and, then take it home to deepen my relationship.  The relationship of man and winter, or hand and ice, of dark and light, of warm and cold, the contradictions of seasons, yet the resonance of the branching out, first the molecules as crystals, then the water as streams, then the streams as watershed, then the evaporation and the return to nourishing the little branching Osier Dogwood bush by the riverside that brought these all together.

Inspiration for a New Cycle of Numbers representing years of life, 

and may we have an Aha New Year with new ideas.