RAINY DAY DOG

 

rain all day

This week of continuous rain has been wearing on my nerves. I'd be fine with it were I not sharing indoor space with a dog that wants to be outside, and I want to go walking with dog. Dog hangs about the house restless, staring at me, wanting all my attention. Can't read for her squealing. She'll squeal wanting to crawl onto me and when I don't let her, she'll go to the bedroom and jump on the bed. A few minutes later she's at the door squealing to be let out. I open the door and she backs up due to the rain. I sit down to read and she squeals. I tell her it's enough squealing for the day. She goes and jumps on the bed and the cycle begins again. She's in the reading chair now twisted into a knot, chewing at her back like she's covered up in fleas when she is not, stares at me between chewing spasms, panting, tongue hanging out from the breathtaking effort. It looks like she is using her teeth to comb her hair. She's grooming. Later, I'll make a town run for carrots, coffee, prescriptions and a dog harness. I don't like choking her when I walk her with a leash. She pulls so hard against her collar she chokes herself, either doesn't get it or doesn't care. Plus, she can slip out of the collar. I need control when she's on a leash.  

 

happy to ride with the primate

 

A week ago I renewed the car's license tag. Every year the State requires I stick a little rectangle on top of last year's rectangle with month and year it is next to be renewed. The little rectangle, about an inch by an inch and a quarter, in the past has stuck as irremovably as the old duct tape before they changed to the cheaper glue formula they use now. I could not make the little rectangle stick. I dried the old surface with shirt sleeve, cleaned it as clean as  it can be without taking Dawn to it. The new rectangle would not stick. I could move it easily with one fingertip. Corners lifted easily. My first thought: Revenue. Low bid contract for the glue this year. I lifted it off easily and brought it to the house. Last time in town I bought some Krazy glue. Now I'm waiting for a day without rain. By revenue, I mean a large number of the stickers will fall off after weeks or months and car owners won't notice. Law Enforcement will notice. In this time of zero tolerance it will cost several hundred dollars in fees per incident. I am not leaving mine to chance. I've learned from four decades of experience the state of North Carolina is not my friend. No new taxes means increasing our value as targets for the highway patrol by running up their quotas.

air bellows gap road going down the hill

 

Took a break here, made a run to town in the rain. Came home with some necessities from grocery store and found a harness for dog at Farmer's Hardware. I can already see it will be a trial getting the thing on her, fitting it, while she squirms like a worm I'm attempting to skewer with a hook. The trip to town amounted to a dog squealing all the way to town and all the time in town. I was wondering if she needed to pee, but the squealing started before we got in the car. It began the moment she saw I was going to take her. At the stoplight in Sparta I'd had enough of the squealing. I hollered, Stop it! That was it. All the way toward town I was saying things like, You've squealed enough for the day, Enough squealing, The squealing is rubbing my nerve endings the wrong way. I don't know if this is new or simply her nature. Whatever it is, it will be changing soon. It's like having a kid in the house and no television.

yellow light in sparta

She still could not hold the squealing back. Before going into the grocery store, I attached the leash to the headrest post on the back of her seat. Upon return, she was quiet in the seat and stayed still all the way home. I wondered if she'd choked herself to death. I saw the leash had gone all the way around the seatbelt that was vertical inside the door. She'd pulled the leash to the furthest extremity she could pull it, given the tight rein she'd given herself, and stayed there with the leash pulled tight. I thought, we've got some conceptual issues here. I left her like that all the way home with the attitude she knows what she's doing, and if she doesn't, it's hers to figure out. Don't worry~be happy. I remind self that all her habit patterns from her recent past are broken. Everything is different. My nature is different from the primates she knew before. The house is different, the furniture different, the outdoors different, the food different. And a cat rules. It's not easy for her. I would so love for the rain to give it a rest, give dog and me some outdoors time to walk together, explore dog's new territory, work on our communication signals, find our language and learn it. We were strangers thrown together by fate. We will be awhile learning to know one another. It's fun getting to know somebody new. I need to learn dog as much as dog needs to learn primate. We'll get there.

 

squeal squeal

 

 

*



FOGGY MOUNTAIN TOP

A beautiful foggy day. I call fog beautiful for the way it gives the natural world a sense of a Japanese screen. Rhododendron leaves glossy wet, the crooked limbs in the foreground darkened by the mist of rain. Last year's leaves cover the ground, a soft carpet speckled in shades of reddish brown from light tan to dark like a pointillist painting. Green spikes of daffodil leaves, six to eight inches long, point straight up in clusters, poking through the carpet. Snowbirds and chickadees peck among fallen pine needles, reddish brown. The birds hop and run about, slate-gray and white, quick bird movements. The female cardinal wary, pecks a seed and raises her head to nibble the seed out of the shell, looks in all directions, flew to a rhododendron branch. I suspect a psychotherapist would call the birds hyper-vigilant. The squirrels are too. Heads darting back and forth, looking in all directions, each eye covering half the way around. They appear to shift attention from eye to eye while seeing from both. The cautious bird survives. They have predators in the air and on land. A momentary lapse of attention is all it takes to be snatched out of the air by hawk talons or from the ground by cat claws. That's ok, too. They go on to their next lives and the hawk or cat has a good meal. The cycle of life. Hopping and flying candy bars. Out another window I see Jack grazing a mound of hay in the fog.

Talked with friends on the phone twice during the day. Both complained and drooped to the ground within over how boring it is to have a wet, overcast day. And I was enjoying it, admiring the richness in colors on a wet, overcast day, the windows Japanese screens. The sunlight bleaches colors, while rain and fog bring out the colors, make them shine. I don't understand seeing a beautiful day like today dreary. It wasn't even bad to go out in. Walked to feed the donkeys and back. Walked to the mailbox and back. Did not get wet either time. It was as beautiful to me out in it as a sunny day. I live simply because I want to be close to the elements, the weather, the seasons, day, night. All the green things were perked up and cheery, feeling good, glowing on a warm day above freezing, wet on the leaves and the roots. Winter grows wearisome after several months, heat going all the time, cold floors, but it's not a problem. My car drives well in snow and mud. I have sweaters, coats, heavy socks and hats. As long as I keep the electric bill and the kerosene bill paid, I'm ok. Winter is the time for feeding hay to the donkeys and extra seeds for the birds. Whatever the weather, I go out to take hay to the donkeys and think nothing of the weather. If it's zero, I dress for zero. It is a love gift I'm taking them, so it is not an inconvenience for me. It's what I do. Rain, I wait til the rain calms down. The donkeys stay in their shed during rains. The rains don't last long. It's not like the donkeys go hungry. They stand in their den, side by side, and gaze into their meadow in rain.

photos by tj worthington

*

     

BALANCE: SUNLIGHT AND RAIN

A quiet rainy day. It started overcast, then sprinkled and steadily more until it became a full rain falling straight down. The wild violet leaves covering the ground outside the window dance, randomly touched by drops of water dripping from leaves above. The rhododendron leaves catch a falling drop and dance in their random patterns too. I hear in my head voices complaining about the rain. I thought about giving a friend a call, then revised the thought: not while it's raining--he'll complain about it raining as long as I'll listen. Everywhere I go on a rainy day, somebody is complaining about the inconvenience. I just write it off as a case of somebody who wants to be spoiled and have everything just right all the time. I find it refreshing when somebody speaks in favor of rain, its nourishing quality, its ability to keep drought away. I'm recalling someone I knew in the early 1980s who said of a hot, dry summer, God is tired of hearing tv weathermen wanting clear, sunny days. OK, you want sunny days, you got em. You want everything in your life cheery and bright, here it is. Don't forget to enjoy the drought that follows. The sun is nourishing and the rain is nourishing, each in moderation. Too much sun and life forms wither. Too much rain and life forms wither. In my first years on the spiritual path, I found from going to special spiritual places and getting into the swoon of the spirit that later at home I come down from the lofty height and drop way down into depression, minor despair for at least the same amount of time. Balance. In my early years with Meher Baba, others would say to me, You gotta go to Baba's center in India. You'll love it. It's the best feeling. You gotta. Fortunately, I never had the money to go spend a couple weeks in India. A time came when I had the money and the time, but I remembered every time I experienced a spiritual high, next thing was spiritual low for the balance. I'd rather give up the high to avoid the low that follows. I don't want a bi-polar spiritual life.

Later, after several years, I'd hear, You haven't been to India yet? You gotta go! My thought I kept to myself, if I really gotta go, it will happen. It hasn't happened yet, so I must not gotta. Then it came to the place I am now, don't want to go to India. Don't want to deal with airports and sitting strapped in a seat with a window that looks onto the wing for endless hours, the Mumbai airport and the city with throngs of bobbing heads, stepping over the dying and the dead, the scent of old urine everywhere. Massive, intense poverty, arrogant Brahmans, humble Untouchables, racism that makes our racism look casual, chaos that makes our own look like order. Americans go to India to swoon in spiritual emotion and Indians come to America to swoon in money. So I go from a country that is only interested in money to one that has so little that people are only interested in money. Why spend a couple thousand dollars to go from one form of loving money to another form of same? Hindus and Muslims hate each other murderously. Hindus slaughter Muslims and Muslims slaughter Hindus at any provocation. A neighborhood of Hindus with machetes will run through a neighborhood of Muslims slashing everybody they see. It happens the other way around too. I have a problem with the hate in the American air, so why go someplace where they hate even more vehemently? Yes, I know, ignore all that and feel the spiritual high at Baba's tomb. Maybe I could, but why? I go home by way of mechanical flight, endure airports, grow weary of reading and look out the window at the wing for hours, feeling wow I did something big. Get home, cat is depressed and mad at me for being gone so long, everything in my life is on hold, a stack of bills and trash in the mailbox, then fall into depression for six months in grief because I can't have a spiritual high all the time, poor me. I must not be very advanced. I'm a slow-witted dolt who doesn't get anything, trapped in a limited body and mind, woe, aint it awful. Months of addressing this issue in self and reasoning self out of this thinking. 

I'd rather stay home. God, the spirit, the way, creator-sustainer-destroyer, is not localized in India. It's not localized in tombs, shrines, naked men covered with ashes in long beards. I'd just as soon jump into the local waste-water treatment plant for a swim as to bathe in the Ganges. I keep an African mask on the wall that for me is an emblem of balance, a visual reminder. I prefer the waves of my flow to stay at moderate levels, not too high, not too low, a slight pendulum swing, not the full arc. A nice rainy day reminds me that rain is always something to welcome, even when it's too much and the water runs in torrents out of the creek beds. Too much wet, even unto monsoon, is better than too much dry. I've come to a place in the life where I would rather have warm, sunny days and overcast rainy days in waves of moderation that keep the green world happy, and through the green world everything else. I don't want the rush of a spiritual high. There was a time I craved the spiritual high, because I thought I was supposed to. So many people were into the high I felt like it was the real deal and I need to get it too. I don't think it's the real deal anymore. I don't think it has any real importance. Living my life has become my spiritual practice. I have come to see that at least in this phase of my inner growth, everyday life is the shrine I worship at, my home my mosque. I used to feel like I could find that woo-woo feeling in the woods among the silent trees. I can recall a few times in the past that woo-woo feeling took me over for a day and made me believe I was doing something really special. Then I crashed for a period of time. I don't like the crash. And I don't believe the high is all that important. This summer has been a good one of balanced weather. Three days to a week of sunny days, then three or so days of light rain and overcast. The temperature has mostly been in the lower 70s during the day and lower 60s, sometimes 50s at night. This is the balance I've come to like in my spiritual life. Sunlight and rain in balance, keeping my interior life lush and green sparkling with wildflowers.

I don't want to go to church to hear a self-called preacher bombast about Satan. In the course of a phone conversation with my Christian mother, she'll say Satan a dozen times and never the name of Jesus once. She warned me a couple years ago that I'm not afraid enough of Satan, "You better watch out." My thought: I'm not the one paying attention to Faux news and giving my power to people spewing hate. She's never one time said to me anything about the power of love, but multiple, multiple times stressed the power of Satan. It tells me her "Christian" church is awfully dedicated to the dark side. OK, they like the dark side. It's good for them. I grew up in that inner darkness that called  itself Christian and ran for my life. I like to go to a Primitive Baptist church from time to time, primarily for the singing, and the Primitive preachers are true to the spirit. However, when the expectations begin, I'm gone. In church, expectations start immediately. My last visit to a Primitive church a man said to me, How long's it been since we seen ye last, brother? I said about a year (actually 2). He said, You need to do a little better'n 'at. My unspoken thought: I will do much better; you'll never see me here again. In my own personal belief system, love is not about intimidating others into believing what I believe with the threat of hell if you don't see it my way. I call it arrogance, not love. The Lord told them to admonish the ones that don't walk the line. And the Lord told me to go my own way, bye-bye. I like to maintain my balance doing right by others and myself. I don't even want woo-woo spirit in my life anymore. I've come to where I see the spiritual path is right here at home in my own life among the people I live among. No need to seek enlightened masters to make me spiritual. No need to observe any ritual or belong to a group, abstain from liquor, read scripture, or anything. A brief visit with someone I see in town by chance can be as great a spiritual experience as praying at a tomb in India.          

photos by tj worthington

*

AT HOME IN THE TREES

 

baja rock

Listening to the sounds of the rain falling on leaves, dripping from the roof. It's a light rain. This is one of many aspects I love of letting trees grow up around the house. I walk to and from the car under a canopy of trees; wild cherry, red oak, white oak, maple, mountain dogwood, white pine, and closer to the ground, big rhododendron, jewelweed, varieties of ferns, wild violets, jack in the pulpits, turk's cap lilies, spring beauties, goose neck, bloodroot, goats beard. Some I have planted, most I let take up of their own accord. I've heard jewelweed is invasive, but I don't care. It has a beautiful orchid-like flower designed specifically for hummingbirds. They're called touch-me-nots for their seed pod that springs open when touched and flings the seeds in all directions. Donkeys love jewelweed. Sometimes I give them each a jewelweed plant for dessert after carrots. Its comic to watch them eat the plant. Every munch pulls it further in like Jabba the Hutt chomping on Princess Leah in his dreams. A crow left a wing feather for me yesterday on the rock walkway half way between door and donkey gate. Donkeys in the meadow attract crows to eat the larvae growing in old donkey droppings. I put sunflower seeds out for crows near the mailbox in a place they can see up the road in both directions. I like having crows around. I like hearing them, seeing them, watching them. My impulse is to want to tame them not to fly away when they see me, but we live in a world of people with guns that use crows for target practice. I want them to maintain their wariness about humans. My crows know I'm their friend. That's good enough to satisfy wanting to know them like I know donkeys. In the morning I throw the seeds over the gravel area at the side of the road and call them with two caws. The donkeys hear it and gather at the gate, knowing carrot time is next.

 

squirrel run

 

The beings of what we call the natural world, like we're not, like we think we're separate from it, delight me. My grandmother taught me to take care of goldfish, guppies, canaries, parakeets. In childhood time we had "dime stores," like Woolworths, TG&Y, Kress, and so on. They sold parakeets and fish in the late Forties and early Fifties. The times I went in to buy a parakeet, I asked to be the one to catch the bird; the people working in the stores didn't know anything about birds. I knew how to get the one I wanted easily, pick it up with its wings folded at its sides, hold it gently without pressure, but don't let it get away. I did the same with fish. I could easily net the fish I wanted. Guppies gave me my pre-pubescent sex education. Before I came to the mountains I kept two aquariums with lights only. No water filter, none of the colored chunks of coral. Only sand on the bottom with water plants growing in the sand. Each aquarium maintained 23 swordtails. The plants cleaned the bottom and made oxygen. Only added water, never changed it. I netted a mosquito fish male and several hundred mosquito bites in a roadside pond near Georgetown, SC, and put him in with the swordtails. He bred several generations until I had an aquarium of mosquito fish, swordtail crosses. When one of the females had babies, most of them were eaten, though some survived to fill in for old ones dying out. They, too, would be eaten. The mountain home is not a good one for keeping a constant temperature year round. I don't keep indoor plants or fish or birds anymore. Brought a couple of parrots that lived quite awhile here. I called them The Flying Wazos. Made a big cage for them. Plants are growing all around the house, everywhere. I don't need house plants. Birds are everywhere. My windows are loaded with birds. Now with donkeys in the meadow I can see crows out the window too. Caterpillar is not a threat to birds anymore. She just lies still and watches them.    

 

donkey fence

 

I'm partial to my crows. I've learned that crows live in family groups. When you see a small group of crows flying, half dozen, more or less, it's immediate family, mom, dad and the sibs. Crows don't wean their babies. They stay together in a family. When a young crow finds a mate, they start a new family. Several families make a tribe. You see the tribes in late summer and fall gleaning corn fields after harvest. It's quite amazing to drive around a curve, come into view of a huge mown cornfield and see hundreds of crows fly into the sky. I've listened to different friends tell about shooting flocks of crows with a shotgun, shooting the crow standing in the top of a tree on lookout, and another will take its place, shoot it, another takes its place. Laughing telling these tales of target practice, killing nigger chickens. Yep, that's another name they have. I don't call them that. But plenty of my friends do. I don't run with a bad lot, all together, just country people doing what country people have always done, killing everything that's living. I came to the mountains what James Dickey called a rural romantic. I'd just realized God is, and wanted to live rurally in a living world where everything, almost, was growing, had life in it. By then I knew that God was in the leaf and in the raindrop that made it dance. I knew God was in the brick and glass city, too, but in a more inert form. I wanted to live in a world where everything around me was alive. I like having bears and mountain lions, bobcats, copperheads, blacksnakes, watersnakes, coyotes, coons, squirrels, birds, crows. Country crows are different from city crows. I'm surprised in a city when I see crows walking around where people go. When you come into sight of a country crow, it's gone with a call to its relatives: CROW KILLER ALERT. If I let the thought carry me, I can become ashamed easily in the face of the wildlife around me. Everything is mortified of me for being a human. I open the door at night and a possum runs for its life. They can scoot, too.

 

rocks at the base of a maple tree

 

Squirrels used to dash up a tree, run through the canopy to trees the other side of the house. Now, a squirrel will sit in tree fork five or six feet above the ground and watch me go by while nibbling a sunflower seed. Chickadees chirp to me from branches just out of reach. Hey, Ice Cream Man. How you doin, Ice Cream Man. This is how I want to live. This is how I love living. During times when a coon throws the top of the birdfeeder to the ground in the night, I don't wait for it with a shotgun the next night. I just put the lid back on in the morning. It's just a piece of board. No problem. My birdfeeders are communal. Anybody passing through can have a snack at will. Squirrels dine at the feeders, but they don't dominate. Big birds, little birds, all have their moment. The "natural" world I've noticed believes in sharing. Left to themselves, without attempting to prohibit squirrels or night marauders, bluejays get along with the smaller birds, nobody hogs the feeders. I don't leave anything in a squirrel-proof apparatus to get mad about in the morning when I see a coon destroyed it. I put out a day's supply every morning. The squirrels and chipmunks have enough middens of sunflower seeds for several winters. The seeds are for the well-being of my neighbors. Good oil for their joints, their feathers and fur, which they're all vain about as we humans are our hair. This is why I'm never lonely at home. I have friends all around me from wild violets to donkeys outside, cat and facebook inside. There are times I need to be around people, and I do. Get in the car and go. Over years of adhering to my spiritual purpose of being in the mountains, I have trimmed down the people I spend time with to people I care about who care about me. That leaves me quite a large number. Many I seldom see or never see. Facebook helps keep me in touch with friends in Florida, New Mexico, Georgia, California, New York, all over the place, people I can't see. I've surrounded myself with an outdoor aquarium in the place I call the home of my soul.  

 

the view out the front door

 

 

*

      



HALCYON DAY

Another wet Monday with dim light all day. Not many squirrels and birds at the feeders. The traffic at the feeders is so slow in the rain, a coon climbs the post, maneuvers over the squirrel guard that only keeps chipmunks out, throws the roof off the birdfeeder and finishes the day's unfinished supply. I've put hook and eye at both ends of the roof, but raccoon hands have no problem unhooking them. The hooks are primarily to keep the tops on in a big wind. Raccoon throws the roof to the ground and has plenty of room to sit down and have a snack. I don't care. It's easy enough to pick up the roof and sit it back on. Squirrels climb a tree nearby and leap to the roof of the birdfeeders. It cracks me up to see one leap through the air twisting the tail for balance. Like a coon and a possum, squirrels have hands for all four feet. I've seen them leap through the air at the birdfeeder and often in the canopy of trees, from a branch of one tree to a branch in the next tree. The squirrels travel through the trees almost like monkeys. They catch the branch with all four feet. When they land on the birdfeeder, it is all four feet at once. I see a nuthatch darting about.

I enjoy seeing the rainwater drip from leaf to leaf through the rhododendron and leaves of an oak sapling. By this time of summer, the leaves everywhere in the mountains are lush green like in June. Everyone who has seen as many summers in the mountains as I have knows that no two summers are alike and no one of them was predictable. It's the same with winter. People are talking about what this summer of wet shoes almost every day means for winter. I heard my first folk-report yesterday that we're looking at a hard winter. What does hard winter mean? A lot of snow? A lot of cold? A lot of both? Or maybe a not very cold winter that rains as frequently as this summer so we have freezing rain almost daily, ice. If it rains as much in the winter as it has this summer, we'll have ice regularly. That's the worst case look at it. Winter is never the worst or the best. It wavers between the two poles all winter long. I have no argument with the rain because it is bringing the water table back up, which was sinking fast, more springs drying up, due to the new houses all over the mountains, each using an electric pump to get their water from a well and returning it to a septic tank. I suppose the water table by now this summer is up to where it was maybe fifty years ago. I call that a blessing for the mountains and for the people living in the mountains. When fracking comes here, that's it for the water.

I see a towhee at one of the feeders. I go out every morning to fill the two feeders with black oil sunflower seeds. More than one pair of towhees is nesting in the grove of trees around the house. One or more of the towhees will make their distinctive whistle, and I respond with my poorly executed imitation of their whistle. We get a call and response communication going on while I'm visiting each feeder with the day's serving. At the place across the road where I throw seeds on the ground for crows, I call to them with a caw-caw, again, my version of it, which to a crow is obviously not a crow. It tells them it's the giant that puts out snacks for them making an attempt to speak Crow without knowing the language. In the old days when a farmer went out to call the cows, he didn't holler Moo. Come to dinner can be understood in any language once it is established. The towhees know the giant has a terrible accent, but they know what it means when the giant responds to them. Come and get it! The bird chirpings are quiet when it rains. The rain is merely sprinkling all day. I can walk to the mailbox and not get wet above the knees. Jewelweed on both sides of the path to the mailbox soak my pants from knees down and shoes. I don't care. It's summer. If the sky were not overcast, the temperature would be in the nineties. It sits on seventy today.

A moment of stillness outside. The sprinkling has let up, leaves are no longer wiggling, no birds chirping, so quiet I hear the clock ticking off the seconds. It is a momentary calm in the air that brings to mind days at sea when twice I have seen the ocean mirror smooth, not a ripple all the way to the horizon all the way around. Clouds reflected on the surface of the ocean exactly as above. It was one of those perfect as-above-so-below moments. The ship's prow did not break the surface. That point was where the great V of ripples began that spread out from the ship all the way to horizon. I believe such days were called halcyon days. Ships with sails sat in place waiting for wind to stir. Even with the rain I think of today as a halcyon day. Quiet, calm, at peace outside and inside. A day of stillness. A good day for reading and a nap. A fog is coming in, a low-flying cloud crossing the ridge here in slow motion. Silence but for water dripping from leaf to leaf, and visual stillness but for one towhee on a rhododendron branch grooming itself. It's a day that makes me think of Toru Takemitsu's compositions for piano. I don't want to put one on the jukebox, don't want to break the halcyon nature of the moment. I can hear him good enough in my mind.

 

 

*

RAIN AND TORU TAKEMITSU

Light rain all day. The world outdoors the lush green of late spring heading into summer. The green world is radiant happy, the leaves of jewelweed between a foot and two feet tall dancing as they're struck by drops falling down through the leaves of the trees. They're not so much struck as tapped, like tapped on the shoulder, not to jolt them, but to set them in motion like music. The West African balafon comes to mind, the wooden vibes that have their special tone. I think of it as a honey tone. Like Thornton Spencer has a honey tone on his fiddle, to my ear. The sound of raindrops on leaves is a softer sound, but reminiscent, including drops of water striking water, striking rock, softly, quietly. I'm hearing someone like Steve Reich amplifying the sound of water drops touching jewelweed leaves, making them dance. Reich could find the music in repetition sequences, the rain. The sound of rain brings Japanese composer, Toru Takemitsu to mind. He's made compositions of rain in a Japanese garden. Not the literal sound like recording it, but the sounds he found in the piano that best evoke the sounds of the rain falling from leaf to leaf, to falling on the surface of a pond.


I've put some Takemitsu compositions on. Robert Aitken plays a flute, David Swan the piano, with viola, harp, guitar and clarinet. Lovely music. Takemitsu composes water themes frequently. How could one not become so fine a composer studying water so closely as to make music just right for a day of gentle rain exercising the leaves in dancing motion, A relaxing day, a day that says I don't want to go out the door. The pictures above were taken standing in the doorway with screen door pushed back enough to allow visual freedom. Outside, the rain on leaves; inside, a flute playing a composition about rain. What I see in my mind's eye is a Japanese garden of moss, large rocks, trees, water, big rocks standing in the water, red leaves, yellow leaves, evergreens, a mountain in the distance, clouds flowing across the sky like boats seen from below. This has about it something ideal seeming. Summer rain, Takemitsu music to hear in the near distance strolling through a Japanese garden, gazing out the open door and two windows in mild wonderment seeing one of the more subtle manifestations of beauty there is. A gust of wind flew by rattling the wind chimes that sounded like they belonged in the music.


The present composition is Rain Spell. A vibraphone played like wind chimes in a gust of wind soon after the wind chimes outside rang.  Piano notes punctuate the soft tapping of water drops on the leaves of dancing jewelweed. Inside and outside have become one, the music inside and the music outside like one playing rhythm and the other playing melody, both softly at the same volume. The music inside has stopped, the windchime outside the door rings a leisurely ting-ting in the soft percussion of raindrops splashing on fresh leaves, an orchestra of random water drops striking random leaves. The windchime sings a melody, the wind increased the rhythm of percussion from the ground, from above, from all around. What an experience. I've never listened to Takemitsu so in tune with the subtleties in the sounds he makes with piano and flute bringing forward the music he heard in the rain. The rain outside makes the original sounds he recreated on piano strings. On a day such as this I feel like I'm in a Japanese poem.

             An old pond---
         
          a frog jumps in:

            the sound of water.

                            ---Basho


*
         

STEVEN SEAGAL THE LEGEND

found art

Here comes the lightning, thunder and rain. Every day we get thunder and lightning and rain. Not complaining, though the lightning sometimes is something to complain about when it hits close to the house. Caterpillar has gone to one of her hiding places. We need the ground water. The rain is splashing on the stone walkway along the house. The sound of rain in the leaves and splashing on the rocks brings to mind flames we can watch in a fireplace all our lives and never see one split-second pattern repeated. No split second of the sound of rain is ever the same as any other. It's this infinitely non-repeating pattern by sound or sight that relaxes us. This is God's way of doing things. The way of the human mind is repeating patterns like techno in music, the metronome, the beat in about all music. The steady repeating sound or visual tends to charge up our nervous system and make us want to get in motion. Move around the floor in a loco-motion.



We like both. Where sound is concerned, the repeating sounds mixed with non-repeating sounds makes music. Visually, disco strobe lights make a repeating pattern with the repeating patterns in the music. It's pretty cool first time you see it. Movies too, repeating patterns and non-repeating patterns, both. There is always a disco/strobe moment in a Steven Seagal movie. Like there is always a moment of tits and a moment of ass. The mandatory T&A in an action movie is always in his films. A checklist item. Making an action movie? T&A any way you can get them in and multiple big explosions. The purpose is to avoid such summations, 'Nah, man, that movie wasn't any good. I didn't see one tittie. Did you, man? When I watch a movie, man, I gotta see some titty. Know what I mean?' I think the punctuation of American films by explosions is to wake the audience up periodically, attention aids. Hollywood knows very well that after half a century of television the average American attention span is about the same as a cat's. The rest of the world too. The whole world loves American movies. They don't make you think.



Speaking of Steven Seagal, I saw his movie THE KEEPER the third or fourth time last night. It's one of the dozen or so of his 30 or so movies I like the best. It's fairly recent, 2009. One of the repeating patterns from one movie to the next of his would be rescuing a daughter from danger, most often his, but this time the daughter of a friend. And/or a good looking woman is being rescued. That's an oriental theme that I'm sure he repeats for the oriental audience, perhaps his biggest. He is non-racist as a man, as is his character. Girlfriends will be of any race. Seagal is not one to hold the white race up as superior, rather it's just another possible skin color to be born with. One of his producers is Thai. In this film, he was being told about somebody, one of the characteristics being racist. Seagal shook his head and said, half to himself, 'That's stupid.' Another repeating pattern, consistent from movie to movie, is he doesn't kill anybody that isn't trying to kill him.

He also plays a repeating character from movie to movie, a different name each time. Only in 2 movies did he use the same name, Jonathan Cold. The first one happened in Poland where he was what was called in the movie, a Foreigner, meaning CIA they didn't claim if something happened. The ultimate rogue. A master martial artist too. The next time he was Jonathan Cold, he turned up by surprise in LosAngeles, a man who will walk into a gunfight rather than away from it. He goes into every situation with full confidence he will survive it. In another 09 release, DRIVEN TO KILL, he demonstrates to a girlfriend how he does a trick with a spike under 3 tall paper soft drink cups. She shuffled the upside down cups, one with the spike under it, while he closed his eyes. When she was ready, he opened eyes and slapped one of the cups flat to the table. It didn't have the spike. She was impressed and asked how he knew. He said, 'The trick is not to give a fuck.' It explains how his character enters any dangerous situation. It's not that he's fearless, not that he knows he will come back all right. It's that he doesn't give a fuck. The international macho man, "I don't give a fuck!"



He uses a different director in almost every movie. And they're all good directors from all over the world. Different photographer and always ones with a good eye for urban and interior compositions per film and frequently the same script writers, Joe Halprin, Steven Seagal, and others. This one, The Keeper, had interesting visuals all the way through. It opened with the credits on Los Angeles at night with all lights on from a helicopter flying among the skyscrapers, each one a work of magnificent 20th Century architecture, a huge city,  carbon footprint. Most of the camera work was interiors and enclosed outdoor areas. Seagal has a friend in this movie, somebody from his past he'd known long enough that the man told the sheriff regarding Seagal, "I trust him." That was spoken from a world of men where the law is trust no one. It's not just rule of thumb. It's absolute. He and the sheriff knew each other, and the sheriff knew what he was saying. That was all he needed to hear.



I hear complaints about Seagal films from all quarters. They're not this, not that. He can't act. He doesn't really do martial arts---because he doesn't do cheap frilly martial arts of slinging feet around like ballet dancers. I don't agree with any of them. These are people who have seen one or none, maybe a preview, putting all the action movie heroes together in one bundle, which can't be done. I've seen them all but a few. They're called adolescent, etc, but please remember boys didn't pay attention in school. Intellectual films don't reach them when they're grown up. They're a valid audience. I like a Seagal film for the same reasons I like a movie of Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman. In the same way, it's not realism so much as legend. Seagal's character is a legend who reappears in each film in a new way, new name, new place, new maiden to save and protect. He defined himself to a priest in Pistol Whipped, a bad man trying to do some good. Then he said to the priest, 'You know, that's what I like about you. A good man like you got time for a bad man like me.' It's the legend in the stories that keep me going back to them, and Seagal the martial artist who choreographs the moves in a martial arts bout. He doesn't do flashy martial arts, but quick moves and dirty fighting. He does whatever it takes. And he knows how.



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RAINY DAY

september goldenrod



Rain today and temperature down to 60. Good day for a sweatshirt. Spent the day napping and painted a few hours. The rain is good sleeping weather. Light fog with the rain.

EVENING RAIN

The wind is blowing, rain is pouring, lightning flashes followed by thunder, sometimes the long, rolling thunder sounding like an F15 that's probably over Kentucky by the time the sound fades out here. The rain in the trees sounds like tires on the highway. The trees dance like big mama hula girls shakin that thang to the rhythm of thunder and lightning. Aw baby, it's so frightening.

I suddenly felt compelled to go out to the porch and get some rain pictures. Also, I was wanting more pictures of what I see out this window, the landscape I view daily. Jr is quite a bit better today, up this morning, coherent, liberal with the word no. Jr is back. He was up long enough for me to change the sheets and vacuum in the bedroom and bathroom, which I can only do when he's not in bed resting or on the phone. All the time I was at it he was concerned I was working when I hadn't oughta be working. I told him I'm having fun. I've been at a project going over the most worn trails that have flattened the carpet over the years of no woman living here. I'm going over them, fluffing them up a bit at a time. It takes awhile, but when I keep after it, they start loosening up and looking a little bit like the carpet around it. There are not many chances in a day to get at the project, and when I get a good rhythm going, the phone rings.

By now, the wind has ceased altogether. Stillness in all the leaves. Not a leaf twisting the least little bit. Pale gray sky, thunder over the horizon, far away, rain falling lightly, cars sizzling by, slow, distant rumbling overhead. The sound outside is a steady sizzle of rain on leaves and the periodic sizzle of cars. Light rumbling. No threat of a power surge frying the computer's insides, I'm using a laptop powered by battery when it's unplugged.

On the road to and from town, I heard the news today (oh boy) about Obama putting 2.4 billion toward grants to create electric vehicles. Isn't that about what it costs to make a B1Bomber? B for Billions. Make one less and look what can be done with the money. I heard McCain say that for qualifications, credentials don't mean a thing. I'd have never thought of that on my own.

Some really good minds are going to be coming out of the shadows in the race to explore electric vehicular possibilities. We had it going once, but a certain "Revolution" squelched all that absolutely. Now that the 30 year setback is over, we can get back to moving ahead. Hard times can be a good thing. It makes us think creatively. Curious how the pendulum swings from the worst administration in our history, and the most threatening to our Constitution and Democracy, to a creative approach by a guy who went through Harvard Law School on scholarships all the way, whose focus was Constitutional law. I have a fair idea of what that says about a man's intelligence, and can't help but appreciate it and feel assured that our navigator can guide us better than a Yale grad who never had to go to class or take a test if he didn't feel like it.

The whole sky is full of crackling thunder running all over the place like electrical charges in the cranium, dancing all over the massive spread of gray cloud in no hurry. Rain on leaves and passing tires the only sound outside, mixed with the refrigerator motor running inside. One complements the other. Just now saw Dean Richardson sizzle by in his brown land-yacht Cadillac. Dean is one of the characters in the county. He went his own way all the way through his life. He loved to drive, still does, and worked as a Parkway Ranger chasing boys running liquor in really fast cars. Dean loved the chase. In his later years a runner he chased many a time and never caught lived only a few miles from him. They talk about some of their races like you had to be there. Each respected the other's driving, and that was what it was about. For them, it was a race. One having a ball legally, the other having a ball illegally. White knuckle flights. Dean listens to blues and Louisiana zydeco, is a news junkie and loves a good cartoon. His generation, also Jr's, is the transition generation from hillbilly times to modern times. Dean liked to drive fast cars and Jr liked to play fast bluegrass.

I just now spoke out loud, "I don't understand an awful lot." There's no two ways about that. Now I wonder why I spoke that in particular out loud and no one here to hear it, though I do have you to tell about it. It wasn't because it's a new insight. I've known that a long time. Perhaps what brought it through the vocal chords was realizing that I really don't understand anything, especially what I think I understand. I can connect the dots and make a picture, but there's no understanding in that. I think I'm gradually learning that it isn't necessary to understand anything, just go with the flow and don't question how it works, just allow the flow and do my part. Like Jr says, God puts things in front of him to go through and he does the best he can with each one as it comes along, like a mechanic with a new job coming in every day.

The rain has passed. A stillness is in the air. Not a stirring leaf. The only sound a car passing and the crickets in my head. A couple of crows up the hill behind the house had a bark fest, barking back and forth at each other. Your mama wears high-heeled Army boots. Your mama's so ugly she has to pull the sheet up over her face so sleep can creep up on her. Now, you aint talking about my mama like that. I'll talk about your mama any way I want. She's your mama too. That's what I know.