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.