Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Marlboro


Portland ME

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Hey Yourself


Hey Yourself

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Excruciating


Portland Museum of Art


The point of nearly touching.
The point of almost understanding.


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Monday, February 20, 2017

If I Knew My Kind


Parker River Wildlife Refuge


If I knew my kind
I would stand with them
like sassafras trees.

~


Saturday, February 18, 2017

Dissolution


Self portrait

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Look Closer


Look Closer

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No Escape


iPad Images

Many of my liberal acquaintances struggle to make sense of the rise of the current administration - the pussy-grabbing, white-supremacist, anti-science, anti-fact, authoritarian regime currently at the helm of the Empire. Often, their struggle is posed from the point of view that they are innocent by-standers to the great unfolding.

How comforting that would be if the notion of innocent by-standers was in the least bit true. Unfortunately - it falls on the same error that my conservative brothers and sisters make when they exclaim "I built this blah-de-blah all by myself!  I am a self-made man/woman! My success is my own! It's because of me and only me that I am where I am."

The error is the illusion of separation.

There is none.

This world is a vast interconnected web of cause and effect. Because there is this, there is that..

Because there is no separation - there is no 'safe space', no sunny high ground where the 'not-my-faulters' can rest - protected from personal and corporate responsibility. It's all a stinking swamp. We're all knee deep in it. In fact we may well be 'waist deep in the big muddy' as Bruce likes to sing.

While this may seem an unsatisfying collection of opinions to those who are energized by outrage over current events - in the end it is the only way things will move forward in a productive manner. There can be no good result in trying to stand outside, hands on hips, clucking, tsk-tsking, and breathing out 'oh-my-god-did-you-hear-what-they-did-now?'

There is no outside. There is no 'they'. 

We all did this.

We are all doing this.

Moment to moment - we co-create our shared lives.

If there is a mess - it is our mess.

No escape. 


"They're ain't no one leavin' this world buddy 
Without their shirttail dirty 
Or their hands a little
bloody"

~ Bruce Springsteen ~

~

Friday, February 17, 2017

Hubris


Hubris


~

To Hell With Heaven


Untitled

Hammer is the Prayer

There is no consolation in the thought of God,
he said, slamming another nail

in another house another havoc had half–taken.
Grace is not consciousness, nor is it beyond.

To hell with remembrance, to hell with heaven,
hammer is the prayer of the poor and the dying.

And the wind in some lordless random comes to rest,
and all the disquieted dust within,

peace came to the hinterlands of our minds,
too remote to know, but peace nonetheless.

~ Christian Wiman ~

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Thursday, February 16, 2017

Much worse offense


Free Lunch

“Christianity stands or falls by its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power, and its apologia for the weak. I feel that Christianity is doing too little in making these points rather than doing too much. Christianity has adjusted itself much too easily to the worship of power. It should give much worse offense, more shock to the world, than it is doing. Christianity should take a much more definite stand for the weak than for the potential moral right of the strong.”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer - via Danny Coleman ~

Bonhoeffer does not say that Christ stands or falls - but rather - Christianity - the flawed attempt to be followers - to be practitioners of the way - along with the accompanying clawing cloying "Christian" institutions - that whole mess stands or falls by way of actions played out in the world.

Bonhoeffer prescribed more shock, more offense - in effect proscribing polite, bland civility.

 
 
 
 
~





Monday, February 6, 2017

Ugly knitting


Ugly Knitting


Pretty ugly knitting.

Dropped stitches.

Uneven stitch size.

Split yarn.

Gaps in the work (See "Dropped stitches" above).

Still - believe it or not - it's nicer than the first two trial squares I did. Those looked orders of magnitude worse.

Jumbled.

Tangled.

Confused.

They looked like someone spent more time wrestling with the yarn than knitting it - which of course - is exactly what I was doing.

Wrestling.

For one thing I was holding the needles too tight. I held them so tight that my right thumb had a deep valley where the knitting needle had been pressed into it. You're not supposed to clench when you knit. Your thumbs aren't supposed to be grooved - or numb...

And still... this little bit of ugly knitting is not nothing.

Although I've been crocheting for decades, I've never been able to learn to knit until now. My neighbor taught me. She's a great knitter who knits in the continental style... I sat down at her kitchen table last week and in about an hour or so I was "knitting."

At this point, I am trying to focus on "enjoying the journey" rather than on any specific outcome. "Enjoying the journey" means not constantly enumerating all the things I don't know about knitting.. It means just doing it.. Whereas crochet makes complete sense - knitting is still mostly mystery. I 'kind of know' the hand motions that will result in a knitted stitch. Kind of.. My left hand really (really) wants to interact with the work as it would do in crochet.. not helpful. This'll change over time of course - for right now though - telling my left hand "no - don't do that" is part of 'enjoying the journey.' That - and not holding onto the needles like grim death.

Hah.

They say that you should go through a skein of yarn before you try and do a real project of any type.. even something simple, like a scarf. The way things are going, it may take two practice skeins or three skeins or four skeins or....

~


Sunday, February 5, 2017

The Contradictions of Your Life

Addison Gallery of American Art


Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.
Watch the people succumb
To madness
With ample cheer;
Let them look askance at you
And you askance reply.
Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
Or line the crowded
River beds
With other impetuous
Fools.

Make a merry gathering
On the bank
Where thousands perished
For brave hurt words
They said.

But be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.

~ Alice Walker ~ Be Nobody's Darling



~


Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Your Very Own Chain of Sorrow




"Bruised Orange (Chain Of Sorrow)"

My heart's in the ice house come hill or come valley
Like a long ago Sunday when I walked through the alley
On a cold winter's morning to a church house
Just to shovel some snow.

I heard sirens on the train track howl naked gettin' nuder,
An altar boy's been hit by a local commuter
Just from walking with his back turned
To the train that was coming so slow.

You can gaze out the window get mad and get madder,
Throw your hands in the air, say "What does it matter?"
But it don't do no good to get angry,
So help me I know

For a heart stained in anger grows weak and grows bitter.
You become your own prisoner as you watch yourself sit there
Wrapped up in a trap of your very own
Chain of sorrow.

I been brought down to zero, pulled out and put back there.
I sat on a park bench, kissed the girl with the black hair
And my head shouted down to my heart
"You better look out below!"

Hey, it ain't such a long drop don't stammer don't stutter
From the diamonds in the sidewalk to the dirt in the gutter
And you carry those bruises
To remind you wherever you go.

~ John Prine ~

~

Pilgrim #42 out now..


Road1


The most recent edition of The Pilgrim has dropped.

From the website:
"The Pilgrim is a ten-times-a-year literary magazine from the homeless community of downtown Boston, edited by Atlantic columnist James Parker and published out of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, on Tremont Street.

Since its founding in December 2011, The Pilgrim has featured the work of more than 150 homeless, transitional or recently housed writers. All are part of the Black Seed Writers Group, the literary body whose local, temporal manifestation occurs every Tuesday morning at 9.30 a.m. on the Cathedral’s second floor.

Embedded in the Cathedral's MANNA ministry, The Pilgrim features poetry, protest, memoir, prayer, reportage, jubilation and despair. The master metaphor of the magazine is pilgrimage, and its proposition to the reader is that homelessness is a state of acute pilgrimage – a condition of material and occasionally moral emergency, and thus a place where the world reveals itself under the pressure, or the pouring-in, of a higher reality."
The Pilgrim is one of the places on the internet where my images live - happily nestled amidst the "poetry, protest, memoir, prayer, reportage" of The Pilgrim's writers - known as The Black Seed Writers..

Subscription information can be found here.

~


Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Very well then...





"Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am vast. I contain multitudes."

~ Walt Whitman ~

In the beginning - there was this.

But then the newly elected administration went and declared January 20th, 2017 as a day of National Patriotic Devotion.

Amidst the slop of greasy political pandering and vague longing for a whiter America, there was this line in the proclamation which I found myself to be in complete agreement with:
"Freedom is the birthright of all Americans, and to preserve that freedom we must maintain faith in our sacred values and heritage."
Since the beginning of our Empire, the most important sacred values and heritage the people have are the ones that have been passed down from the Tea Party to this very day: resistance and dissent.

So - I thank the incoming administration for reminding me - for reminding all of us - what needs to happen today, tomorrow, and for years to come.

~


Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Maddening



2014-06-13_1402625143

I went to see Martin Scorsese's film "Silence" which is in large part, about a favorite topic, the silence of God in the face of great suffering.

"Silence" is a long, beautifully shot, meditation on the silence of God - or the deafness of humans (depending on your viewpoint). It was also brutal and in large part a showcase of Buddhists acting poorly - torturing and killing arrogant and incurious Jesuits and their faithful, good-hearted flocks... The film also deals with the issue of what is sacred - another favorite theme of mine.

There are no easy answers in this film - but one quote from the character Father Rodriguez did pierce me:

"But even if God had been silent, my life...to this very day...everything I do...everything I’ve done...speaks of Him. It was in the silence that I heard Your voice."

Now - I am not an educated, ordained cleric and never will be. I am the furthest thing from a saint - and most times - I completely deny God.  So clearly - not everything in my life speaks of Him - but then many things do - the Rosaries, the Malas, the Jizos, the artwork, the photography, the books I choose to read, even my denial speaks of God - or if not God - the idea of God.

It's maddening. 

~
 

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

No words


2014-05-21_1400641415

No bullshit

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