Looking in the mirror, he noticed the wrinkles around his eyes, reminding him of a river journey with a friend, laughing for days and seeing white wrinkles amid the tan lines. Today, my face is tan and rounded somewhat, perhaps from the beard, going gray around the edges. There is that combination of youth and age that defies our usual indication of time in a body. A smile is often present and there is something about brown eyes that can tighten into a focus when speaking directly to someone. My niece was at a family reunion that I did not attend and she told me my grandmother’s last name meant bent willow, which I find interesting. There is a northern European look about me, heavy set and I think short, or stout might fit. Am I pleasant to look at? Only when I am fun to be around. But my portrait is not that, it is in my song: I’m a child of the desert, hot burning sand And a friend to the buzzard circling the bleaching bones of a man I spent my contemplation under a pinyon tree And a nut fell down and hit me and that’s what [...]
It is night here. I had a dream that I was listening to music at a concert and the music finished. It had been instrumental music with drums and percussion and other sounds that I can’t remember. A musician spoke, saying the concert was over and that he had not said much with words because the music spoke for them. It has been over an hour since that experience and I am awake, still. My mind is overactive, running through a range of thoughts that I can usually avoid in daylight. i think about being unemployed until I can “officially” retire. I think about my part in what we have done to our environment and our world. I think of the worry and fear that permeates our existence, and how much of that is our own doing, our own actions, that we followed so easily. I think of the anger and rage that I see in so many places in the different media, and how easy it is to step into that state of mind. I think that Loving Kindness is a means to overcome all that I find to be negative in my world. In my dreams, I have [...]
What is the true cost of driving twenty miles in your car? Remember there is the cost of the energy, resources, and all the time it takes to make every coin spent.
What is the real cost of the fast food “happy meal’ on our bodies? Do we add the cost of subsidized agriculture when we count the cost?
The world is full of conveniences, packaged and processed. What is the end cost of the product from beginning to its end?
What is the cost of endless war, of oppression, of injustice and the social confusion of poverty amid wealth? What is the way these debts are to be payed?
Ask yourself another question: What would be the cost of not having endless war, oppression, injustice, and poverty?
We’re not the plants that you, ichabod, and I love to tend. Plant humans in perfect conditions and they won’t grow except in numbers.
It is hard to imagine how we might behave under different circumstances. The number of Europeans that left their countries due to lack of opportunity, or overcrowding makes me wonder what might have happened had there been no “New World”.
The apple trees that grew so well when first introduced to this area were ill prepared for the coddling moth. I think humans would easily suffer the same fate, initially living under perfect conditions, then unable to change under new circumstances.
I spent a small part of the day emptying a box of paper from my parents I found sheet music from a number of songs that I don’t know, maybe I have never heard any of the songs, at this time I don’t know.
I found spelling sheets from mom’s elementary school years. I found three high school yearbooks, or albums that were from the time before my father’s high school years, but from his school. I found a newspaper headline of FDR’s death and Kennedy’s death. I found my parent’s Social Security cards. I bought a 4 CD set of Bob Dylan songs, covers by others.
I came home and eventually a friend came over and we played three sessions, one, a Jimi Hendrix’s song.(The Wind Cries Mary), and two ideas that lasted more than ten minutes.
I watched a show about a painting that might have been painted by Da Vinci a few nights ago. The value crossed from thousands to a hundred million, and I thought… a painting considered to have a value of a hundredth and more of the American debt. Who is deciding value here? Who works at a value of ten million dollars, even over a year’s worth of time? Who’s thoughts are worth more than fifteen minutes of music that no one ever hears? Who can beat Leonardo? The chairman of Goldman Sachs, shithead that he is, next to Leonardo, and who can doubt that? What is the value behind that? The ball dribbles over the net, rolling across the flat surface, into the lap of Jesus, as he picks it up and declares a mistrial.