elephant pearl

One down, eight to go.

the golden apples

Ok, they are pears, grown on the Garden of Eden farm in Eastern Long Island. They taste amazing, like cream soda and pineapples, and sadly, these have all been eaten.

I keep convincing myself that they are apples even though I should well know they are pears. I was standing in front of a box of them for 2 hours last Saturday while on my CSA distribution shift. It's a little awkward, standing there with a dry erase marker and a laminated list of who has singed up for a fruit share. Standing there under a tent under a crabapple tree while the sun beats down on those in line waiting to weigh their plums and pears. Unlike me they don't have a view of the monarchs on the butterfly bush backlit by the sun, black-lined russet panels enflamed with sunlight. The people stand there in silence, mostly, navigating the terms and conditions honorably. Lucky for me everyone who started to take fruit had actually signed up for it, accept for one family who I was too clueless to bar from that which they were not entitled.

That's always the way with golden apples, there's always someone stealing them, and someone letting it happen. Has to be. I suppose the apples symbolize perfection that doesn't seem to be in the cards for us humans, and maybe not for the Gods, either. The apple Eve bit was not golden, but still she did good. No folly, no life, no triumph.

Conditions

Effort is good and bad. The thing about effort is that those things that we work at, perfect hair, skin and teeth, fancy vocabularies, slender limbs, snappy grammar, tight asses, impressive achievement, impeccable ethics, peer approval, astonishing recall, immaculate hygiene, pristine logic, flat abs and charming humor, we put effort into in order to belong. I keep looking for the person /in me/ who still loves when everything has gone wrong. This person is worth waiting for. This person is the point of life. All the boundaries of all conditions, BLOWN OUT.

From Columbia St.

The sun setting on my birthday eve, or what I could capture of it by standing on my toes in front of a Red Hook construction site. By this I mean to say "Thank You For Life."

budgerigar

Passed by this bird of the tropics scrounging near the 10 Av/PPSW entrance to Prospect Park. I took it for one of Brooklyn's wild Monk Parrots which apparently it is not. Someone's lost pet?

birthday smoke

For my birthday I wanted to give myself a giant sloth, but it was not possible, so I burned a leaf of sage and enjoyed the way the smoke made the currents in the air visible, currents that danced and twisted with hypnotic eloquence. These little clouds we make teach us about the grace of impermanence and the untraceable workings of the unseen.

I know many abuse the strong medicine Tobacco smoke offers, but I was a little struck by legislation recently introduced in NYC to ban smoking in parks and beaches. Some see it as merciful, but I feel uneasy about a government that revokes the rights of its citizens unnecessarily. Banning smoking in a restaurant or bar makes perfect sense to me as a protection of rights, but seriously, there's enough air out there for everyone, isn't there, or will sanctimony rule the day? Will we one day ban the most dangerous thing of all, life itself, and imperfection? I agree addiction is unfortunate but people shouldn't be forced out of it by government (although caring friends should give it a try if the situation gets dire.) I also hazard a guess that this public harassment will target people too poor to own private terraces and roof gardens to light up on, or to relax on property upstate.

lattice

15th st. waxing moon

kite flyers underground

On the F train, a Mother and child returned home from the KiteFlight event held annually on the roof of Penn Station, another one of the visionary events New Yorkers have cooked up. Nothing could rival kite flying in earthbound open air events, except maybe this Sukkah City in Union Square.

subway grid

Magic square puzzles, aka Sudoku, date back 4,120 years and occur as talismans in a wide range of cultures. Maybe I should take them up. Maybe by doing these, as this woman on the F train was, we bring the world, or the small clump of earth we call "I", a fragment closer to balance. According to Chinese legend, the square was brought to the people by a turtle emerging from the sea after a huge flood in the Lo River. Perhaps the puzzle programs the subconscious to know and to seek balance, and to avoid flooding. Who knows what numerical qualities make possible. As physicist Heinrich Hertz put it, "We cannot help but think that mathematical formulae have a life of their own, that they know more than their discoverers do and that they return more to us than we have invested in them."

Vehicular Beauty

Sitting in the pews at the Atlantic Center Department of Motor Vehicles I got a quick sermon as a quote from Confucius ran across the flat screen TV hanging above the cues. "Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it." It was an amusing thing to read sitting there a block away from the devastation of the Atlantic Yards construction site, a stone's throw away from the arboreal carnage this week's tornadoes wrought, in a place often associated with bureaucratic sadism.

The beauty at the DMV was not hard to see, though. Not only was I in and out in under an hour, but the two women who took my case guided me with uncanny acumen and restraint. I felt they were the kind of people that could easily take on my personal brand of folly and straighten me out permanently. Perhaps excellent people to have as backseat drivers, maybe, like my daughter was once in my dream. I don't know if you've ever had any of those automobile dreams where for some reason you can't quite control your vehicle? I used to have them from time to time and they made me feel horrible. As time went by they started to resolve better; in one of the most recent ones the insane vehicle I was driving led to a courtyard in which grew a small tree of life laden with fruit reminiscent of tiny spiraling galaxies.

In another my daughter sat in the back as I tried to drive a straight line down the center of a residential street but for some reason kept loosing control and driving up on the curb. My dream daughter spoke to me: "Mom, just SLOW DOWN." She is not named Sophie for nothing.

contents under pressure

I had a dream that I had some kind of a cut on the side of my head that was under the skin. I wondered what had happened to me, if I was having a stroke. The next day I woke up and saw that the line on the melon in the fruit bowl looked just like the line that I had found on my skull in the dream.

The melon hung around the house for a while and then it suddenly dawned on me that it wasn't going to last forever, so I found a knife to cut it. The rind on this fruit was much thinner than I expected, and just as the knife began to make its gash the melon starting tearing itself open along the line of the knife's cut. It practically exploded open.

I wonder about those moments when life has us cornered so we have no choice but to tear open, to bleed the truth, to ask for help. When suddenly there is no more need for all pretenses of control and pride and what proccupied us an hour ago seems insanely unimportant. These are the times when we are truly together with another in the common ground of the heart and truth, when we no longer fault reality but only express our vulnerability. At these holy times, the earth is sanctified by tears, by blood and its passion. Thanks to the melon for its lesson. I get it now. No wonder Cucurbitaceae blossoms are ruthlessly beautiful.

double trouble

I spent the weekend making Lakota style drums and rattles in a workshop led by musician and healer Steven Blue Horse. When it comes to drum making, I still have much to learn. A good drum requires ample tension, and for someone who would rather have things a little slack the making of drums comes as a challenge.

Like the back of these drums, life is a web of tensions, and the fearless thrive on that. Each tension has the potential to draw one into becoming more alive and multi-dimensional. That is life. Each de facto teacher who poses a challenge creates tension that draws an individual toward efficacy, towards enhanced relations, around dynamic corners. These drum principles are a good practice for this predominantly reluctant one, and have starkly altered my way of looking at life, but I never intended to learn this and this teacher never promised any grand insights. He kind of embodied the fortune I wound out of a cookie a few months ago: "Be smart, but don't act like it." Huh? That's possible? You don't see that so much around here.

multivalent cardboard

Shana Tova!

I am pausing mid reading Rabbi Bachman's Roshashana 5771 sermon, motivated to write by something he has written there. Not far in he writes "We think of those not with us tonight, and beseech their souls to intercede on our behalf with God; and we ask God to remember us, for life, and another year written and sealed in the book of life, the implication being that in forgetting, there is death, a terrifying thought indeed." My first thought: the dead may try to intercede for us, but sometimes we are so thickly in our entrenchment that it takes a pretty hard blow for them to get through. The second thought: Here it is again, the Book of Life.

I have noticed that I am not as lucid as I think I should be about the random details that catch my eye as life speeds by, and far less inclined to weave them into any sort of tapestry, because I don't really trust my motives for weaving so much anymore, since much of the weaving is a kind of soft armor. And anyway, what stands out to me now, I hardly understand why. There was only one thought today that seemed to take root in my heart and cause some sort of intellectual short circuit. That was the obsercvation of how soft the clouds are. I know this is a platitude but sometimes you feel the softness more vividly because for some reason you need it to balance out all the hardness you're steeping in, one's own hardness, the hardness of the unrelenting demands of life, and the hardness of all your hardened pathways. Today the sky appeared to wrap this city in a thick blanket of soft clouds as delicately and gently as you'd wrap an infant. For each day and each person, a new medicine.

Other strange and random inspirations that for some reason seemed marked with a highlighter in The Book, the way my son tried to sweet talk the waitress into coming up with some caramel sauce for his ice cream, the wilderness of weeds on top of Lookout Hill, a catbird with little in the way of a tail that seemed to make a social call as I was leaving the park, the strange enchantment the fell on me while eyeing a bowl of opalescent water left over from cooking corn, and this idea that somehow, you can talk to G-d and s/he hears you, has no objection to the misery you might very well need to express, and wonders what took you so long to speak up.

shadow rays

It was supposed to rain this morning. One break recieved by those of us who took our kids to school today in spite of the bizarre scheduling (there's only one day of school this week, and it's Wednesday) was that it didn't rain after all. Another was the perhaps slightly reduced bottleneck experienced on entering the building. As far as the choppy scheduling goes, the Dept of Education and the Teacher's Union are pointing fingers at each other. Perhaps we'll get the real story someday.

Terrace dwelller

I have begun calling this the Kimono Plant because of the grace of its cascades of spikey orbs, but would like to know what it actually is. Passed by it at the terraced garden built on a substrate of tires West of the Seeley Bridge on Prospect Avenue.

lull

Local Okra

I grew up with okra, my grandmother was from Louisiana and taught my father how to make gumbo, I dish that yearly gave the leftover Thanksgiving turkey a cajun flavor. This grows a few blocks from my house, seeded by a mystery gardener whose plot lines the grounds of an old service station. I read that okra is extraordinary at withstanding heat and drought and grows in poor soil. As for the mucilaginous sap, a little lemon juice cuts the slime.

Back in Brooklyn

It's good to have friend in high places, or friends who have friends in high places...

segue

A few minutes after my son revealed the gall he'd found my beautiful aunt came in the house and offered me a book with this motif on the cover. A spirit gall? Nice splice! Such an introduction makes it very likely that I will read the book, Anastasia, based on the life of this perhaps fictional wild woman reported to be the "the new heroine of the Russias."