A two-month old baby who had a rough entry into the world was in the arms of foster parents at lunch today. She slept through a lot of it, and then quietly sucked down a bottle of formula offered by her foster dad. Mom and dad couldn’t take their eyes off her, even though they’ve had her for some weeks and have three other girls at home. Her welfare at noon was their number one priority.

Yesterday, we celebrated the 23rd anniversary of the first moment we held our adopted son. That was a crazy beautiful night.

I too was adopted some thirty-plus years before that.

Some parents because of illness or youth or other big troubles have difficulty functioning as parents. It can be an act of love and great sacrifice to acknowledge that in an attempt to get adequate care for one’s child. Adoption has its own quirks and issues that arise, but isn’t it an act of beauty that we can deeply recognize family in those who do not share our genes? Be loved as son or daughter, mother or father regardless of DNA?

Blood may be thicker than water, but love trumps all that.

art by anonymous 4th grader
Athens, Alabama

I'm a tap dancer.
I'm a random-number generator.

The original image in my mind was a nest of glowing filaments, like tangled curly hair conducting light/energy. A wild, multidimensional grid. Chihuly's Sun looked like an approximation.

I'm paying attention to all the Y's.

Three years ago on this date I was introduced to Shintaido.

"Sun"
Dale Chihuly
Smithsonian
April, 2007

(I took a photo of Lynne Sladky's magazine photo of Chihuly's glass sculpture.)

nativearthling
8oranges

8oranges






8oranges

At last we let go-
the leashes, the ties that attach us-
and laugh about the whole thing-
all that urgency-
how serious we were-
it was just a game!
all rivers flow to the sea-

Suzy the puppy hated the leash. A sweet, docile animal, whenever the leash was hooked to the collar, she would growl, roll over and over, and try to chew the leash in two. Didn’t work, and she couldn’t convince the human to get rid of the leash.

But she likes to walk.

Now she walks holding a loop of the leash in her mouth, as though she were walking the human.

Maybe she is walking the human.

Is this the nature of all relationships? Who’s got the leash?

Just like a clock with rusty mechanisms, one’s body, if allowed to get creaky and stuck, may not give accurate time. Between yoga and Shintaido practice, I’ve experienced and observed that freed of kinks, relaxed and warmed up, our bodies can tell us more truth than active thinking. It’s a marvelous instrument with so many sensory modes for receiving data: eyes, ears, skin, nose, tongue. And when the brain is well oxygenated, it can make better, speedier sense of all the information the rest of the body is perceiving.

Our connection to others and to our environment becomes better timed, more fluid and intuitively responsive. When the body is relaxed, its pathways open and unblocked, we can better perceive who we are and what we really want.

First it was the crazy composer, then 2 guys and a gal who took care of the piles of storm debris, then a dad bearing sushi and focaccia, two former roomies, a yoga teacher, astrologer, a couple of relatives, a couple of people IDK that they like to hear from, email, chat, facebook, everybody showing up, boom boom boom, happy energy, the grid lighting up all at once, intersecting at one point in time, conducted by some Crazy Composer.

I'm rewriting last night's post:

The concept I wanted to convey was how we can get so hyper-alert to those things that hurt us (like mosquitoes) that we apply the same defensive actions without awareness to those things that are harmless (like lovebugs). This was hard for me to express.

Then there’s the human tendency of responding defensively to change, change that may be good for us, but drags us out of our comfortable structures: our houses and hang-outs, our routines, our systems of belief, our emotional attachments.

Nothing to do with mosquitoes or lovebugs, just a thought.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_bug


(art by anonymous 4th grader, Athens, Alabama)

The moon a pearl
in a sea of clouds
high above the pines;
All is still.

It’s very dark. The rain is steady, the wind unsteady, gusting.

Ike is here. He wasn’t supposed to affect us, but then his path crept closer and closer to Louisiana. We’re getting just a taste of the ferocity the low-lying coastal areas of Louisiana and Texas are experiencing. I'm concerned for those who stayed behind.

Early this morning I walked around and around the yard. Even though Ike was coming, I picked up sticks here and there from Gustav, and tossed them onto the brush piles.

Someone said the hours of cleanup this past week were 'futile' now that another storm was on its way to blow away our efforts. Though this is true, the clean space this morning was bright, beautiful, even more so in the knowledge that it was so, so temporary.

I thought about the Tibetan Buddhists who spend many hours making intricate mandala from colored sands, then blow it all away.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sandmandalas13.JPG#file

Grids have been popping up lately. The word Lincoln, the concept of river.
Last week it was carousels and pieces of weedeater line.


art by DeAnna McNeill
"Happy Dee"

Yahoo! headline tonight: Teacher OK after crashing into bear on a bicycle


Living the bewildered life...


waiting for the bewildered to write about bewilderment...

Gustav wasn’t as bad as predicted. We had learned that from the news. So on our return yesterday, the destruction we witnessed was rather a shock. Baton Rouge was hard hit: large trees crushed like match sticks along I-12 and I-10. I was driving, but Dad said he saw numerous places with missing roofs. Lafayette fared better, but still, there are huge piles of debris in front of almost every yard. Our own place was carpeted by fallen limbs, some as large as trees. It was a big storm.

I started the clean-up this morning. Hardly made a dent in it. My clothes were wet with sweat, and shoes soaked and jeans drenched to the knees. My plan was big limbs first, but some -as long as a van- were beyond me. I kept tripping on the little limbs. Sometimes y'have to take care of the small stuff before you can get to the big stuff.

We thought we were going to have to leave again this week because of the threat of Ike. Another road trip with a hundred thousand others! I’m very relieved Ike changed his mind about a visit to Louisiana -- and I know I'm not the only one.

But, I feel for those in Cuba today, and I hope west Texas and northern Mexico get some of the rain they need without coming to harm.

We're leaving the house of roses, dogs and trains where we have been well loved and cared for.

During our stay, I've been listening to train horns.

There is more than one call (and many codes and sequences depending on what's being communicated, train company, country, and operator style and technique). There is the traditional sweet lonesome. There is a more raucous, dissonant call. According to a Wiki article under 'train horns', horns in the US have been made by various manufacturers, each offering different notes and equipment. Some are sounded using cords, some with levers. Those recently manufactured have push buttons that give less control to the operator. Train horns are air horns, with a 'bell' like a bugle or trumpet. Each train horn has one to five horns, a single note to a full chord. I suspect doubles are most common, though I think I've heard a single-note horn and a three-noter. Fives are rare because of the prohibitive size and weight of the equipment. When alone, I like to try to tease out and reproduce each note being sounded.

(A young woman studying music at Texas State told me about individuals from other parts of the globe who can, with much practice, sing two notes at once. She said there are some who can sing three notes at one time. Human train horn.)

Sometimes others don't take a shine to us right away...

At the bookstore's cafe, the soup of the day was potato-vegetable. My dad and I both ordered soup, then sat in a booth. A woman with short dark hair was waiting for take-out. A group of three adults approached the counter to order.

We overheard that the woman waiting for her food was originally from Lafayette, Louisiana. My dad spoke up: We're from Lafayette. She approached the table, and they ran through names and locations to find out who they knew in common. We learned she's a local artist.

The artist had just spoken with the other three customers. Turns out they too were from Lafayette. (They seemed a bit dazed, little eye contact, perhaps because of the storm.) All six diners at Pablo's in Athens, Alabama at 2 PM today were from Lafayette, Louisiana, over 400 miles away.

We're in Alabama and have had only a taste of the sea winds from the storm, which weakened quite a bit before reaching land. Hope Gustav hasn't been too severe on those still remaining.

Driving north on 55 in Mississippi on Saturday, we were part of a great flow of vehicles with Louisiana plates. Cars filled with people, trucks packed with belongings, campers and Winnebagos caravaning in the right-hand lane.

Many stopped in Jackson as their destination. Our first night was farther north in Memphis, Tennessee. Even there, motel parking lots were filled, and trains could be heard through the night. We were told the extra trains were part of the New Orleans evacuation effort.

People, both evacuees and hosts, were very nice. Restaurant and motel workers with full houses went out of their way to be accomodating to stressed travelers, including helping the lost, and offering use of an empty restaurant office to keep a puppy safe and out of the Memphis heat during a meal.

Other evacuees, in the parking lots, in the foyers and halls, asked, you, too? And we nodded.