“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it’s not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.” ~~ The 14th Dalai Lama
What more can I add? I’m an inveterate worrier, determined to change that undermining habit. Words of wisdom like this help keep me afloat.
A report from Edward Mazria, an architect who turned to spreading information about global warming and the contribution to it by the building industry, has produced a set of images showing what he predicts some large coastal cities in the US will look like in 2030, with rising water levels due to global warming. His work is featured in an ABC news report, What Global Warming Looks Like.
Meanwhile, arctic ice melt has opened a Northwest Passage.
Thanks to The Daily Grail for the links.
I wonder, because reading
so inevitably
pushes me to write.
I wonder, and I even worry.
What if I’d never seen a poem?
Might I burst apart one day
from the pressure of too much
held in too long? Could I have learned,
even as slowly as I do, how to
forge words into a proper
plough to break the heart’s earthy
crust? Could I witness the drop
of soft rain on edgy leaves of thought, see
sun poured on a cloud and stars suspended
in a faint array, high and deep in a black sky?
Would I sense the ruddy pulse of Mars?
What if I’d never known a poem
can sing me to sleep at night,
can single out the imperfections
and perfect whole of a lily pond?
Who would I be, or what?
Where could I go? Who started this?
I want to send the first poet flowers and
lily dreams, across the bridge of time.
Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser
This has been a good summer for butterflies in my little corner of the world. I’ve seen a lot more variety this year than in past years, and yesterday I sighted a Western Tiger Swallowtail in a pepper tree in the yard behind ours. It surprised me, and at first glance I thought I was seeing an oriole making like a butterfly, it was so large. I haven’t seen many swallowtails since I was a kid, and then I usually saw darker, smaller ones, maybe the Anise Swallowtail, which looks more familiar to me. I think the most common butterfly of my childhood was the Mourning Cloak, but I rarely see those now.
We had to say goodbye to our little gray cat Emily today. We think she was about 20 years old, but we’re not sure, because she adopted us just over nine years ago, appearing in our back yard to steal our puppy’s food. She had a lot of problems, resulting from having nearly starved on her own without front claws, and having possibly been abused. She was missing half her teeth when she found us, and we think she suffered the cat version of PTSD. But over time she warmed up to all of us and became an integral part of our family. We like to think we were able to give her a nice retirement here, after all her troubles. She helped us say goodbye to another dear cat friend, Merlin, in 2000, and today we said goodbye to her.
I’ll miss her purrs, her silky, silver-gray fur, and the gentle tap of her paw when she wakened me in the mornings.
Just a few nights ago, The Lord of the Rings trilogy played on television again. We didn’t watch, because I intended to watch our DVDs again soon, but we caught the tail end of Return of the King, and the final song.
For days that song has stayed in my mind, popping into consciousness at odd moments. Today it did again, and I wondered about it, because I couldn’t recall the singer’s name, the name of the song, or the lyrics. The music just kept haunting me. So I looked it up, and remembered as soon as I sat down to do a search that it was Into the West. Annie Lennox sang it for the film. I love this song. Right now it’s helping me say goodbye to Emily. I learned that it was partially inspired by the death of young New Zealand filmmaker, Cameron Duncan, and first performed in public at his funeral. That makes it seem even more appropriate as Emily’s song of passage.
Safe journey, little friend.
The song is available as part of the soundtrack from the film: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King [SOUNDTRACK]
“Be the change that you want to see in the world.”
— Mahatma Ghandi
Growth
9 x 12 watercolor collage (click on image for larger view)
This painting’s background sat in my file cabinet for over a year, a cast aside experiment. I reworked it a little, adding bits of blue, and I nearly threw it away. But I have trouble throwing anything away. This summer I found a fallen avocado leaf I’d saved from a young tree. Its stem, when dried, curled into a spiral on its own. At first the actual leaf was part of the collage, but it proved too fragile, so I settled on a painted one. The abstract leaves were also scraps I’d painted, thought I’d never use for anything, and almost threw away.
I’m such a packrat, I’m not sure it’s good for me to get so much satisfaction from using my discards this way. Maybe it would be better not to encourage my hoarding. But I can’t argue with the sense of effervescence and growth this gives me personally. Some clutter is worth saving.
In this world, growth begins in shadow. Incubation, gestation, germination, all take place out of sight. We shelter and protect our young. As we grow, it’s a relief to duck back into familiar shadows now and then, or to at least be aware of them still behind us, to honor their place in our lives, the impetus they provided for growth, as well as a resting place at each stage of growth. Our shadows are part of our whole, they add perspective and depth to our existence. They’re a refuge when sunlight blazes too brightly and radiates summer’s heat. It’s easy to burn out under too constant, too bright a light. The cool, darker reaches sustain us and remind us that night time will come again, that winter will roll around. Everything lives and dies according to its cycle. In growth, that cycle is a trailing spiral, ever working it’s way both outward and inward, branching out, taking root, opening, closing, curling, unfurling, expanding, contracting. We come to know ourselves by incrementally opening, coming to know every self in existence, and recognizing our tiny niche in the greater whole, by seeing how the whole constantly shifts and changes, and by constantly shifting and changing ourselves as integral parts of that whole.
Fear resists change, holds it back, cutting some parts off from the whole until they wither and die. Love — loving unconditionally, embracing the whole in all its diverse elements and forms, both light and shadow — is the key to unlocking resistance and letting growth happen. Love is water dripping or condensing on leaves, trickling down stems or falling in drops to penetrate to roots. Love is water rising in vapor and mist, transpiring, evaporating to moisten other life. Love is movement, pushing its way up and out, toward the sun, stretching toward nutrients, nurturing the self, flowering, fruiting, and nourishing others, leaving seed behind to repeat the cycle.
While I mulled over various blog topics, including the essay I planned on honeybees, my husband sent me a link to an environmental article about pollinators and the recent scares regarding disappearing bees, Are the Bees Dying off Because They’re Too Busy? The article offers a slightly different answer to the puzzle than that of GM crops, but one every bit as indicative of our artificial modern food production methods. It surmises that bee colony exhaustion, due to overuse as pollinators on factory farms, is the cause of disappearing bees. Small beekeepers who let their bees live a more natural life cycle don’t seem to have the same problems as commercial beekeepers who lease hives to one large monoculture farm after another, almost year round.
That made a nice segue into another topic I’ve planned to write about, the importance of family stories. A few weeks ago I came across a brief memoir my mom wrote of her childhood in San Diego during the Depression. When food luxuries were tough for my grandmother to come by, she would sometimes visit her father’s ranch in Potrero, just this side of the border from Tecate. She’d bring home fresh eggs and honey, and presumably milk and butter, since he also kept dairy cows. The trip took a vehicle and gasoline that were often scarce, so there were times that those trips didn’t happen as often as she would’ve liked.
The honey came from my great-grandfather’s bees. My mom recorded no details of the process, but mentioned watching her grandfather extract honey from his hives. My grandmother wrote that at one time he had “90 stands of honey bees” in his apiary. No doubt the bees kept his orchard and garden well pollinated, as well as those of his neighbors. My great-grandfather was from the Danish island of Læsø, famous for its Northern brown bees, among other things. I don’t know whether he learned about beekeeping as a boy. I know he used to herd geese, and he left home at fourteen to sail the seas for ten years, made three trips around Cape Horn, and once almost got stranded in Antwerp. I also remember Grandma telling how he’d hitch a team to a wagon and make the trip from Potrero down to the shore in San Diego, two days there, and two days back. He’d load up with kelp to use as mulch in his garden after washing the salt out. I wouldn’t be surprised if he learned that use of kelp back on his island home.
What should’ve remained a pleasant excursion into my family’s past is blighted by recent news. The tiny community of Potrero, with its valley’s quiet agricultural history (Potrero is Spanish for “pasturing place”) was once home to Kumeyaay tribes, who subsisted on acorns and game from its oak woods, and carved metates into the nearby granite hills to grind meal. Potrero’s pastoral peace remained intact even when Pancho Villa’s rebellion took place just across the border. But the valley’s serenity may be about to change.
Blackwater USA wants to build an 824 acre training facility in Potrero, called Blackwater West. People in the community, the county, and the entire state who know of this plan are horrified.
There’s already fierce debate in Illinois regarding Blackwater North, an 80-acre facility there, as well as troubling reports of its response to wrongful death suits by families of its employees who fell in Iraq.
One has to wonder what the impact would be of such a facility, near environmentally fragile oak tree stands already threatened by Sudden Oak Death, and to the golden eagles that nest there. What about the fire hazards and the noise? The quiet little communities and single outlying residences near Potrero are some of the last true countryside settings left in San Diego County. Will they soon be shaken by the sound of weapons fire and helicopters resonating off nearby granite boulders?
Blackwater in Potrero is a bad idea.
I found a couple of videos about Blackwater at YouTube (warning, these are disturbing):
Blackwater, America’s Private Army
Here’s another video, Blackwater Invades Illinois, with Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army
I’m on Internet overload at the moment. Does that happen to you? I kept this (my Internet computer) turned off for a while and only checked email once a day. I wanted to focus inward a little more. Now I’m back, and it’s like drinking a lot of coffee when you haven’t had any in a while. It’s easy to get carried in many different directions and have trouble settling on one thing. There is so much here! Blogs I like to visit, books to research for my reading list, and lots of reading material right here online, not to mention artwork, people, and news. We are incredibly busy people, and it shows online more than anywhere, I think, because it all bottlenecks right at our screens. Once I settle down again I’ll write a real post for this blog.
What I’m thinking about, and may write about:
But it’s hot right now, and that’s just one more excuse not to be at this computer very much.
I’ve never found a way to enjoy the taste of soy, and goodness knows I’ve tried. I’ve only been able to bring myself to eat it in the relatively tasteless form of tofu, or as soy sauce, which I like. I’ve always wondered if soy is really as good for me as I’ve been led to believe, or if there’s something else my body is trying to tell me. In any case, the taste just doesn’t do it for me.
Here’s an interesting article on the possible health risks of eating a lot of soy:
old thoughts sometimes
wear grooves so deep
they bury themselves before
new ones can rise
the buried old ones
make good fertilizer
Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser
Poetry turns
an unshuttered eye
on beauty, on ugliness,
and everything between.
It translates the profound
through focus on
the loved, the reviled,
and everything between.
Not the driest news, nor
the most turgid
melodrama
have anything on this
passion expressed
in objectivity,
objectivity
in passion.
Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser
Slick roads. A thousand tires stir the water
in a broken rhythm echoing off concrete.
Brakes squeal, a helicopter passes overhead,
not the first or last today.
All around me people start another work day
that begins, and will end, in traffic.
People say this is the country,
but in the rain I hear city.
So where’s the country?
Is there any left?
Now I hear the gentle tap of rain on roof and leaves.
Cat purrs, washing beside me. Dog snores. Husband stirs
in the other room, at rest in our island of peace.
Birds sing as the sun lightens clouds in the east.
I think about planting seeds and pulling weeds.
Oh — the country is here.
Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser
When you’ve lived near the sea
you notice its scent each time
you return from far away.
Fifty miles from home
I’ve caught wind of it.
Once, driving west
across the desert
from Arizona, still a
hundred miles inland and
separated by mountains,
we hit a bank of
salty air thick as fog.
The sky was clear. Stars
appeared one by one.
Their pin pricks lit the faint rose dusk
all around a slender cup of moon.
We lifted our faces to the heady
breeze and traded looks that said,
"We’ll be home soon."
Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser
Just some thoughts I’ve had while in the middle of reading a book titled, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality
In this book the Dalai Lama explores parallels (and differences) between science and his religion, Buddhism. I particularly like how this religious leader is willing to adjust his beliefs according to what science has proven, rather than trying to twist science to fit his beliefs. At the same time he recognizes that science can’t tell us everything, and that one’s personal experience, observation, and intelligence are valid to take into account when determining what to believe. This book is deep, abstract, conceptual, and difficult reading for me because I have trouble wrapping my mind around concepts like relativity and superstring theory. Give me good old gravity. That I understand. Sort of.
It’s good reading, though, and especially good for me, in my non-scientific but more creative and spiritual nature. It gives me more of a handle on what science and belief have in common, as well as that overlapping territory in between and beyond, which we’re sometimes reluctant to face if we let our minds get too set in one pattern of thinking. I refer to the unknown, and our ability or inability to find peace with the fact that so much is still unknown. As knowledge changes, we must in all honesty be willing to take on the new known, adjust the old known, and change our view of possibility, just the way we change clothes with the seasons. It does no more good to believe faithfully in something disproved than to believe that because my coat kept me safe and warm in winter it’s a good idea to wear it on the hottest day of the year. This book is also careful to point out that just because something isn’t proven, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Disproof and lack of proof are two different things.
I’m also reminded by the implications of this book, of a documentary about Alaskan fisheries that was part of the Nature series on PBS. The closure of pollock fisheries several years ago was intended to protect the environment. Later, scientists came to realize that the herring declined even more rapidly once pollock was protected. Herring was found to be a more important source of critical nutrients for marine life than was previously known — a better source than pollock, which constituted a veritable junk food in comparison. Endangered Steller sea lions were forced to fall back even more on pollock once it began to repopulate, while still hungering for their necessary herring.
Even well intentioned science can be a kind of religion, where people (not scientists perhaps, but people) hold too fast to discoveries and continue to defend them, when a wider-angle view is needed, or it’s time to move forward because more is known. When we combine with that the intransigence of government that causes regulations to lag behind each new discovery, we can see that clinging to any beliefs, scientific or religious, can have disastrous effects. One must wonder, for instance, about future effects of genetically modified crops, and the fact that there may soon be only one company supplying most farmers in the world with their seed — much of that genetically modified. How many people’s quality of life could be salvaged by stem-cell research? By more research into natural alternatives to pharmaceutical drugs or surgery? If we can be wrong about sea lions, pollock, and herring, what else might science be wrong about, or simply not yet know? What might religion be wrong about that’s holding its followers, and possibly whole cultures and governments, back? Are bio-fuels better for the environment than fossil fuels, or do they harm the environment just as much in their production, and at the same time threaten world food supplies and distract us from finding or developing more viable energy solutions? What good is knowing how to do something if one doesn’t also know when or if it should be done?
I’ve rambled on. The main lesson I’ve gotten so far from this book is that no source of knowledge or wisdom is sacrosanct, that there are few known absolute truths, and that flexibility and a healthy skepticism are necessary in all areas of study. It’s important to believe that we can do better, that we can know more, that we can think for ourselves, that we can take better care of the planet and each other. It’s also important along the way to acknowledge our limits and exercise humility regarding what we don’t know. What we don’t know may be the biggest vacuum in the universe.
Can I still believe in love, in spite of you?
Was it a Pisces thing, you loving
so much? For nineteen years
I’ve swum slow circles around your death.
I rarely speak or write of it.
People tend to turn away,
afraid to touch my pain, fearing
a touch will make it theirs. Even I
feared to swim this way again.
On jury duty, two years ago, I was
excused because I’d think too much
of you, who shared the barest thread of fate
with a man who’d been shot dead.
You’d be fifty-six and still I swim
against the pain, inching myself
your way again. Did I love too much?
Can one love anyone too much?
The oldest sister, a Pisces like our mom, and
shy yourself, you seemed to understand.
You dished out love, but did you claim
your share? Did we return enough to you?
How can one love so much? I try to think
of love as holy fish and bread, divided, multiplied
’til all are fed. But if that’s true, how is it
one you loved so much could harm you?
Was it a Pisces thing, your love? You were
no cold fish. Sometimes I think you loved too much.
My Pisces Mars dampens me into a steamy
bog for love. Your Pisces Sun was light.
Was it a Pisces thing, you loved so much—
so much, no holding back—so much it melted
ice—a river overflowing so with Pisces
love it made a flood? Even so, was it enough?
I should not think that I can love too much.
A fish lives, once entombing ice melts down,
and you were no fancy goldfish drifting delicate
as feathers in a glass bowl. You would’ve laughed.
When your body fell—then did your love
swim free? A wild salmon, did you bunch red muscle,
at white water, over rocks and logs, leap up falls,
spinning unending love back to its source?
Were you the first to forgive? Before God, even?
I still believe in love because of you.
Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser
With a few clicks I hang words here
faster than ink could dry. Quick speech
cast on the winds may evaporate
to half-forgotten recollection,
but this is more permanent.
Poured in careless streams with little
edit, boldly the slant and kilter
of unfiltered thought sinks deep
into real time. Collective thoughts carve
a virtual Grand Canyon online,
with little grounding or meditation
in the haste for expression.
Elders paused, honed tools, crushed pigment.
No delete key forgave errors in execution.
They chronicled tales pre-told and re-told,
their gradual unfold governed by slow prudence.
Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser
Today I did something I never did before. I asked a stranger to turn down his music. I didn’t want to do this, but there’s a threshold beyond which desire, reason, and tolerance clash and all inhibitions fall away. Action must be taken before the senses are taken leave of.
I’ve put up with loud noise before. I’ve made some loud noises myself. But I don’t think I’ve ever had another’s noise assail my senses in quite this way. Not without being paid to endure it, and even then protection or escape was provided.
It was so loud the walls vibrated with each bass pulse. This went on for a while, and I tried to ignore it, put it out of mind, thinking any minute it would stop. I finally went out and shouted to the person to turn it down. I was four feet away and he didn’t hear me until I waved my arm and he turned and saw me.
All day I’ve contemplated why anyone wants to listen to music at that volume. A volume beyond which nothing else can be heard. A volume at which it seems to me hearing loss isn’t just a threat but a certainty. With the bass turned up so high that anything but that part of the sound is lost beside the assault on every cell in one’s body.
The reason I thought so much about it is that I like to live and let live. I don’t like to ask that anyone change how they live, be it appearance, behavior, or tastes. And it appears loud music is a taste. But I was given no choice. Sound doesn’t stay on a leash like a dog. It crosses boundaries. I wasn’t able to go about my business without him changing his. I couldn’t keep my hearing healthy and intact, keep my blood pressure down, while putting up with his choice of loss and overexcitement, the price for his immersion in explosive sound.
Why do some people like their music so loud? Or anything so loud? Are some ears, some sensibilities, more sensitive to this? Or have the less easy with loudness simply not lost as much, are we less impaired as yet, so we hear it more acutely? I too want to hear all the notes, but I didn’t hear all his notes. I didn’t hear any notes, only noise. It wasn’t music to my ears. I wonder if mine would be music to his, or if they’re already deadened to it.
I have no answer. But in searching for one I came across a Stephen Dobyns poem online, on this very topic, Loud Music, in which he examines the difference between his favored volume for music (loud) and that of his four-year-old stepdaughter. Some compensation, at least. I got a good poetry fix out of it.
I watched a mourning dove
fly up with such slow beat
of wings, it seemed barely
enough to make it fly.
My heart, a free thing, loose
and at odds with itself,
longed to fly with it, to be
its mate, to nest—to raise young—
to free young things in flight
in time, to stand at the edge
of a nest, full-fledged,
and push lovingly from behind.
Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser
Another passion of mine besides poetry is clouds, and recently I discovered a web site dedicated solely to clouds. The Cloud Appreciation Society has published a book titled The Cloudspotter’s Guide
I don’t know all the scientific names of clouds, and I’m not a very skilled photographer. I can’t even apparently be bothered to find a better location to shoot from than straight through the power lines. But when armed with my digital camera and faced with a spectacular sky, sometimes I just start turning knobs and pushing buttons and get lucky. (One of these days I should read the instruction manual—that’s sure to improve my luck.)
This was a special sunset last January when the clouds became streamers of burnished gold:
The following cloud seemed to come to life and dominate the sky one afternoon last February like a great fluffy beast:
Closer up you can see how it reached a furred arm for the telephone pole:
I sometimes wish the telephone pole wasn’t there when I’m taking sunset photos, but then where would the crows sit to do their bobbing mating dance? Where would the mockingbird do whirly-gigs in the air, flashing the white bands of its wings? Where would the red-tailed hawk perch to survey the hillside while every other bird falls into breathless, waiting silence? The cloud didn’t snatch up the pole and run away with it after all, so at least the birds are happy.
This fiery sunset in November 2004 made me want to run for my watercolors, but using the camera was quicker:
While not a cloud picture, this was another stroke of luck, taken when our dog treed this little guy in the palm tree in our back yard. He patiently waited for me to snap a couple of shots, preferring the camera to the dog’s barking. He peered first from one side of the tree, then the other. Finally we went our peaceful ways, except the dog, who returned grudgingly indoors, thinking humans don’t know how to have fun. He grumbled for a while, but got over it.
A poem is violin song.
It asks only that you let it play,
even as it sings your life back to you,
and rends your heart to hear it
and do nothing
but listen.
Copyright © 2007 Barbara W. Klaser
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