Old Town Saturday

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Saturday was perfect walking weather.  Me & Clay went down to Old Town: it’s one of our favorite spots to hang out  in.  I had two pieces of old, broken cemetary glass on me, one brown and one clear.  The brown piece was my star tool for the day: brought home a lot of groovy shots thanks to its company.  I flitted around Old Town with one piece of glass held in my mouth and one in my hand, switching them out according to need. 

These pictures were taken around the church in Old Town.  I cropped a couple shots here & that’s the extent of  editing.  I like how these are coming out with the glass, the way the pictures are making their own way through the camera.  I feel like I’m watching someone else at work.  It’s a groovy cool feeling.  I’ll post more of the pictures from the Saturday walk this week.

Happy February, ya’ll!  Watch for little happy surprises all around you this month.  Enjoy being YOU.

Interstate 5

 

 

 

I signed up as a subject for mind research at the university a while back and today I went in for an MRI in the name of medical science.  Yesterday I had an MEG.  After two days of various tests and scans, I am finished: until they call me back for more in a few months.

I rather enjoyed myself.  I like the MRI best: that womblike machine, nice and safe feeling.  Noisy, but I managed to fall asleep until they woke me up.  I’m really glad I could say this was an enjoyable experience for me.  I know it isn’t that way for some people who go in there.  I know I’m blessed.

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After me and Neil moved back to the mainland in 1997, we got into roadtripping between Tucson and northern California.  This shot was taken on Interstate 5, the main pipeline that runs through Cali, late 1997.  Neil was asleep in the back seat of our ‘69 convertible Buick LaSabre.  I was tripping on my thoughts and the scenery, glad to be back home again.  The Big Island is a place unlike any I’ve been to, but it’s not where my heart is.  I belong in the land of coyotes and rattlesnakes and red-tail hawks.

Amen.

The Ruffians

 

 

 

Eating Crow

 

 

 

     “OUCH!”  I stick my finger in my mouth as soon as it touches the red-hot iron.  Bettina looks up from the grimy floor of the police station.  A sooty black smudge of boot polish is smeared across her face.  I glare at my finger. 

     “Kick something and swear,” says Bettina.  “That always works for me.” 

     I’ve been pressing shirts for three hours and four minutes.  Uniform shirts, Sunday church shirts, flannel shirts, white t-shirts, cotton undershirts.  Now, I know the sheriff doesn’t iron anything past his shiny brass buttons, but since the fiasco at the town council meeting last week, he’s out to grind his revenge into all of us.

     I grab a No. 2 yellow pencil and crush it between my teeth.  The blister on my finger is the size of a green pea.  Bettina starts polishing the third colossal pair of Sheriff Proud’s boots.  He’s made sure we understand the damage he can mete out to us with those steel toes by kicking a dent the size of a hula hoop into the side of the trash can.

     “Welcome to your new lives, cupcakes,” he told us when we arrived yesterday morning to begin five tragic days of community service.  “When I say “jump” you say “how far?”.  When I say “donuts” you say ”bear claw or jelly roll?”.  When I say “Rumplestiltskin” you say nothing—Got it?”  And then he kicked the trash can.  And now it seems like we’ve been shining shoes and ironing and scrubbing for an eternity.

     Tucker says that since we made our formal apologies to the sheriff and his deputy yesterday first thing, the worst is behind us.  But then, he’s not the one getting neck cramps over an ironing board.  Bettina sneezes so hard she tumbles back onto a stack of ancient newspapers.  She sighs and smiles.

     “I’m really starting to like this place.”

     I grin.  “I hate this place and I’m thinking about a jail break in about two seconds.”

     “Uh, Sheriff says you two can go to lunch now.”  Deputy Dick’s wild eye fixes on the ironing board while the other eye looks at us.  “He says for me to call you back in one hour.”

Crossings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love this piece of plastic hanging off the cross.  I’ve been watching it slowly tear away and change how it moves in the wind.  Something about the way our illusions are torn from our eyes and the way we go to great lengths to avoid seeing what IS.  I think there is a quiet, nearly silent, beauty to this cross and it’s veil.  It’s brought me closer to the vulnerabilities I feel right now.  I am appreciating how many ways there are to seeing a particular thing.  This week I am learning the benefit of simply being with something and doing nothing more than calmly observing.  It seems that so much of what we are meant to experience is subtle, low-key:  when we slow down we can catch those moments and watch them like fireflies in summer twilight.

Tiger Tiger Burning Bright

 

  

 

 

 

Here are a few shots from this afternoon.  I dusted off a papier mache tiger mask my son made when he was a little boy and tried it on for the first time. 

The Year of the Tiger begins on Valentine’s Day.  I was born in the Year of the Tiger nearly 48 years ago.  Every time it’s been a tiger year, I’ve experienced drastic, though not necessarily unpleasant, changes in the way I live.  The last time Tiger showed up, me and Clay became a couple and I began college: two miracles in my life that remain outstanding highlights of this Earth journey so far.

I pulled the mask on today and ran out into the afternoon light to get an idea of how a self-portrait could work.  I’d really like to shoot with some old cemetary glass over the lens, only I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.  I’m thinking I could use a blob of modeling clay to hold the glass for me.  One bummer about the camera I use is that I have to reset it to shoot self-timed each time.  That means I have to run back and forth.  Kinda of a pain, but I will find a way to make it work. 

I never see the details of what I shoot because I never wear my reading glasses while I’m using the camera.  I can see shapes and shadows and colors.  Maybe my poor eyesight is the reason I feel this urge to purposely blur and distort images lately.  The flaws are more like how I see things naturally. 

What I hadn’t expected was for the images to create something on their own, totally apart from me.  I have become a conduit for visual expressions that belong to something else, very much in the same way I am a conduit for the book that is being born through me.  I mostly show up and mostly I have fun. 

It is a good year to throw out everything I thought I knew about myself.  I shall give those things up to the spring winds this time around.  I will step willingly into the fire of aliveness and let it devour me.

Adieu

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve been letting go of January all day: editing photos I shot in the bosque yesterday, looking over what I’ve done with the camera this past month.  I had a turning point recently with what I want to do in photographs: thank you for that, January.

Thank you for bringing my friend Jeff back into my life.  Thank you for the wild and vibrant abundance of love that has saturated every particle of my existence for these thirty-one days.  Thank you for the warmth that kept me going and for the new yoga practice.  Thank you for helping me get to 142 pounds. 

Thank you, January, for helping me cry out those old heavy tears I’d been lugging around.  Thank you for the smiles of friends like Elaine and Robert and for the way they inspire me to try new creative things.  Thank you for all the good thoughts you put inside my head and for the good feelings you filled my heart with.

Thank you for turning my niece to 28.  I love that girl!  Thank you for whispering secrets into my ears at night when I slept.  Thank you for tucking me in for all those hours of peaceful slumber.  Thank you for hope, January.  For renewal.  Thank you for ten thousand tiny happinesses.

Bless you, January 2010.  Bless you on your way to becoming something else.  Glide peacefully into the Great Unknowable Weird.  I wave to you in Love and Light…

Bosque Porcupine Day

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An incredible thing happened today in the bosque:  we found a porcupine sleeping way up in a cottonwood tree next to the Rio Grande river.  We’d passed it on the way up the trail and I thought that shape might be a porcupine and on the way back we checked it out.  Yep.  A beautiful, pudgy, sound-asleep porcupine.  The  crouching sunlight lit its hollow quills and made them glow. 

I took several photos, but they all turned out blurred.  The zoom on this camera is super-touchy and I guess I was so excited I wasn’t watching myself.  The top pic here is the porcupine.  Not great, but you get the idea of how it was sleeping up there with it’s tail stretched out and its sweet face pointed down.  God, what a sight!  This is the first porcupine I’ve ever seen in the wild.  I hope it won’t be the last.

I’m on a kick right now of putting transparent and semi-opaque glass between the camera lens and what I’m aiming at.  The rest of these photos were taken through pieces of broken glass I’d snagged from the old cemetary across the street before we left for the bosque.  The shot through the bottle neck was taken in the Santa Barbara cemetary, looking down into Martineztown;  the last shot is without anything fancy. 

It was a stunning day: warm, peaceful, glowing with blues and golds and rich earth colors.  There were people all along the trails, on foot and on bicycle, taking advantage of this springlike day in the midst of a cold winter.  Everything lovely, just as it was.

Where is Terlingua, Texas?

 

 

 

Me & Clay & Annabella just polished off a whole duck and a wok-full of veggies—divinity!  It was illegally delicious. 

Today…..dark, cold, somewhere between light rain and snow.  We opted for a date with Barnes & Noble for chai lattes and new magazines.  It was brilliant fun.  The only flaw was reading the new John Mayer interview in Rolling Stone.  I don’t like to badmouth people who aren’t able to defend themselves, but I have to say I now find him creepy and digusting.  I can’t fit that person with the one who wrote those beautifully sensitive songs on “Heavier Things”.  I need some time to heal before I listen to his music again.

 

A full day, a fine day.  Eventually summer will be here again and my bones can stop aching.  All I want to know now is where the hell is Terlingua, Texas?

 

 

Mosaic

 

 

 

Shot this on the way back from the library today: the sky was as gray and thick as a flannel blanket and I hurried home as quickly as my legs could move.  I ran by the mosaic mural, clicking as I passed.

When I got home there was a phone message waiting:  I’ve got a gig next week!  Research subject for seven hours at twenty bucks an hour.  It was the best news of the day.  At least until Clay made seafood pasta for supper.

My world is a quilt these days, each moment of every day being stitched together as forms come and go. 

 

 There is no other life.

 

Fishy Rhymes With Squishy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love Clark’s Pet Emporium.  We went over there today to pick up dog chow.  It’s a great little pet shop, just like the kind I used to go to with my dad.  I enjoy the birds and rodents and bugs and snakes, but the fish room is my favorite.  It’s walking into another world then.  Most of the fish were camera shy today, but the goldfish and those white fish in the 3rd photo were perfectly happy checking me out. 

I would love to have a tropical tank again.  My father created the most amazing ecosystems in his tanks: I’ve never seen any as beautiful as his were.  He knew which fish to bring together and he always used real live plants, lava rocks he picked out at the rock yard, sand from the California coast.  He said those tanks were our teevees, and they were, only better.  At night we’d sit on his lap and pile around him while he fed his fish and taught us their names and habits. 

I remember watching the mating courtship of the pair of Kribensis who lived in a lava cave, how their colors grew intense and vibrant.  And when the female laid a batch of eggs in the cave, she and her mate tended and guarded, fiercely running off intruders.  It was a thrill when the babies hatched.  We got to watch the parents raise their young.  When a little one would stray too far, one of the parents would vacume it into its mouth and spit it back with the other babies.  It was incredibly cool.

I remember those times when I’m @ Clark’s in the fish room.

* here’s a nice weblog with great pics and facts about Kribensis, in case you are curious to see them:

http://aquariumlore.blogspot.com/2006/04/kribensis.html