Duncan on 17th

Coming home I noticed someone has conspicuously propped a book against their fence, singled it out for free taking. I didn't want to pick up another street book, really, I always do that and then they gather dust around here. But it was hard to walk away from the face that stared out in black and white from within a red border, the face of Isadora Duncan, the famous portrait that too prominently features her neck.

I was going to walk by, but I had been reading Chögyam Trungpa on the train, poetry he'd written to the Dakini in all her forms, the universe animated by dancing dakinis, mandalas of them spinning through his dreams, in various forms: "Among them, there is one dakini with a single eye, her turquoise hair blown gently by the wind," others in the red that marks all emanations of Vajra Yogini "When I met you yesterday, you wore red clothes..."

So it was hard to pass this dancer by today. I didn't know how red she was. I opened to a passage where she is teaching Russian children the language of gestures, language that floods beyond the limitations of concept.

Children, place your hand here, as I do, upon your breasts; feel the life within you. This means man. Chevolek. And now raise your arms up to the heaves. This means universe. Vyselenaia. Now let your hands fall slowly downward to the earth. Semlia. Now hold your hands toward me in love and this means Comrade. Tovarish. Isadora Speaks, page 86

What is red anyway? Of course we know that true generosity and compassion is a personal intent that can't be state mandated, so lets remove red's superimpositions and let it remain as hidden as blood. According to Trungpa, within the vehicle of Vajrayana colors eventually speak for themselves.

Here colours speak through, as do shapes and movements, until the point is reached where there is no room for a speck of dirt. The perception of the energies for the first time is so intense and overwhelming that one is tremendously impressed by their purity. Here you regard yourself as a servant for the very reason that you are overwhelmed by the purity of the universe. So you employ thousand of ways of communicating to the universe in terms of bodily purity, mantras and mudras. Mudra, page 69.

I wonder if Duncan's talent involved some sort of similar perception that had to be expressed, that moved the world, that drew people into its orbit and allowed people to lose themselves as she did in her dance, as Sandburg wrote in her honor: "The wind? I am the wind. The sea and the moon? I am the sea and the moon. Tears, pain, love, bird-flights? I am all of them. I dance what I am. Sin, prayer, flight, the light that never was on land or sea? I dance what I am."

new old shape

The wonderful slide at the new Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 6. Looks like cover art for a vintage polynesian sci-fi novel. Very Fast! And on a hot day, sears back side. Fun!

well wilted

More gourdumentary. Tenderer tenders have I never seen withered before.

What a dump!

Signage on the fencing around the new visitor's center construction site at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden informed me that the garden was once Brooklyn's place of refuse. Something tells me that the philanthropist Alfred T. White had something to do with the parcel's staggering transformation into its current form. How often do such complete reversals happen? Now the lotuses that rise out of the murky pools there have added significance.

I wouldn't put this sort of miracle past White, but I can't say for sure because I haven't read the book about him, The Social Vision of Alfred T. White, published by Proteus Gowanus. Last time I checked the Brooklyn Public Library didn't have it in circulation.

This plant somewhere between the Tamarisk and the Butterfly Bushes swarmed with so many stinging insects I got a little queasy. There were wasps of diverse waistlines, various communal and solitary kinds of bees, several bee imitators, tiny bees the size of seed beads, diminutive butterflies and this Ermine Moth with whom I was very proud to share the refuge of a very lovely dump for a few minutes.

still under the spell

cloud land

Longchenpa's trilogy Kindly Bent to Ease Us, Written in the 12th century and translated by Herbert V. Guenther. Part Three: Wonderment contains a chapter called "Cloud Land" which begins as follows:

Again, listen to my explication of the Victorious
One's Statement that
(All that is) is like a cloud-land, so that (this
topic) also may be experienced.

In the sky (-like) space of primoridial sheer lucency
An ornate city, (Being's) spontaneous capabilities,
appears and
Is present in what has neither beginning nor end
nor a center nor a periphery

Out of dynamic reach and range of this (openness
and lucency) there arise in the sky of the mind,
which is the loss of pure awareness,
The cloud-lands of the six kinds of beings that have their origin
in the subject-object division.
They are present without having a founding basis of
their own, and their manifold forms
Have been born from subjectivity gone astray in and
through inveterate tendencies.

When this is understood, it is the primordial reach and range of
Mind-as-such;
When it is not understood, it is the present mind
(having become mistaken about itself and) gone astray.
Since it cannot be grasped in any way that would do justice to it,
What other analogy than a cloud land could be found for it?

What are those inveterate tendencies? If I know anything about Buddhism, the core issue is mistaking appearances for things, attributing the quality of one's experience to an outside object or set of circumstances. Lucid in a cloud-land, one doesn't have to loosen the harness of attribution, it's clear there was nothing but vapor to harness in the first place. Still, winds are blowing, strong ones, and who can say why?

conspicuous lair

The Eagle Warehouse harbors a dragon. I never knew.

ssshhh! it's a gourd!

Is it unlucky to photograph vegetables before they're picked? This one hangs out on the sidewalk side of our fence so I don't know how long it will be around.

My kids found their fetal sonograms this week and were fascinated. This is what summer is for, that and freezing your underpants. I keep finding the pictures around the house, worrying that they'll get lost forever or mixed up so I can't tell who is who. But it doesn't seem like the sonograms were inauspicious.

If you look closely in the picture below, you can see a small gourd developing along with the flower. This goes against everything I know about developing fruits and pollination. Is this immaculate conception?

play this

people of the corn

Back in Brooklyn, I decided to go to J&A fabrics in Bay Ridge to buy muslin (where it cost only 2.50 per yard.) Afterwards we came across Sally's Coffee Shop on the corner of 3rd and 85th. Oh the smokey baba ganoush was satisfying! Our waitress appeared to like children and asked us where we were from. (Is it possible she misses the school kids who come up from Ft. Hamilton High when school is in session?) When I replied "Windsor Terrace" and told her where we lived she made a surprised face and seemed to know exactly where it was. It turns out the waitress lives in our neighborhood and has been growing corn in her side yard for years. She was the first person I'd seen do that, and I think she definitely influenced me in my attempts to grow it this year. But it seems I could use a lesson from her. She's already harvested and eaten the 5 ears her 2 plants grew, and mine don't look like they'll yield at all. Too little sun in the alley.

This had me thinking, next year, why don't I just clear out the front yard for corn. In my mind's eye I can imagine it, a surprise mini cornfield in a little square lot. It turns out this has been tried before. My neighbor told me Old Man Joe Rappa, who used to own this house, had the yard planted entirely in corn one year. Just before he was able to harvest his crop, someone somehow got over the high, sharp metal fence and picked it all. He didn't try it again after that, the next year he put in a single tree. That was the tree that was here when we moved in, a weeping birch full of the moonlight and I'd say more than a hint of the melancholy, silver standing in after all the corn's sunniness had been kidnapped. It's probably time to try the corn again.

drum

souvenir

It took me a while to land here after returning to Brooklyn. It has nothing to do with Brooklyn, it has to do with all my memories of dunes, marsh, sand, and tide pools being stirred up by our recent trip to the Delaware shore. I remembered being very small, along as my family dropped someone off at Ocean City, MD. For some insane reason, we weren't staying there, I guess we had somewhere else to get to but I don't remember where. Briefly I got to look in a gift store at the end of a pier. I remember becoming enchanted with an aquatic diorama modeled with sandy lyricism within a large scallop shell, feeling not only did I have to have that but I had to live in it. There must be a way to shrink oneself. I've never seen a souvenir I liked so much. Sadly, I didn't get it, that's life, it was too fragile for a child.

Traveling seemed to scatter my soul among numerous vignettes and forgotten memories of sea side vacations (and souvenirs). I think my father was especially happy at the beach, and me, never happier than toddling into a tide pool and melding with its topography, its shallows and tiny currents, in some way. It is the apotheosis of puddle allure. It feels as if there is a part of me that will always be there waiting at some welcoming shallow pool for my return.

Such fragmentation is a danger of tourism. I recently met a woman who seemed remote and distracted at a workshop with medicine man Vernon Foster. She volunteered to be a subject when he demonstrated a healing ceremony. The ritual went on for a while Vernon worked with astonishing generosity and tenderness, dancing with passion and compassion around her, sometimes cleaning the air around her with feathers or using them to unbind currents of energy. At the end of it the woman's face was full of color and her eyes sparkled. "I didn't realize I was gone", she said, full of shock and relief to have herself back. "I left my soul in the Amazon, I didn't want to leave there. My friends have been asking me, what's happened to you, you're not yourself...."

My little one whimpers to go back to Arizona sometimes- she was pretty keen on the red rocks. I doubt will get back there for a while. Wrongly, I took one or two river-smoothed hunks of sandstone. Perhaps to coax a soul home along with the luggage. Wholeness is constant work.

corn's rows

I have never grown corn before this year but for some reason I was seized with an impulse back in er, April, I think, and found a pack of kernels. Corn is so ubiquitous it's easy to take for granted, but up close I find myself impressed with its strength, latent sweetness and those hypnotically undulating two-tone parallels. I never knew the leaves bore these stripes, a motif I would have associated with the fields the plants are grown in, not the plant itself. This one already has what I think is the pollen dusty male flower emerging from the top sheath of leaves, but I don't see any sign of the female yet, which appear lower on the plant, the silky-tassel topped nubs that become those astonishing cobs.

It's been good to get to know this plant a little better, this generous, elegant plant whose graciousness is somewhat exploited in the contemporary trend of oversweetening.

Vigil for Euthanized Geese

There's a vigil at 6:30 by Prospect Lake tonight for the 250 Canada Geese rounded up and gassed by the USDA in order to avoid collisions with planes. I would like to go and say my respects, especially for Half-Beak, the only one I got to know close up since I used to feed it from my hand on account of its broken beak. I hate to lose an opportunity to make the most of a vigil, though, so I might say a prayer or two for humanity with all our misguided and self-sabotaging indulgences, the uncountable animals who meet their demise in slaughter houses as well as the people who've become inured to cruelty by working in these death factories. And for all species viewed as infestations on account of the success of their adaptions. It's not their fault. Nature's a handful.

man and nature

garden pals

It appears the carrot is much more excited about this relationship than the beet. What was the beet hoping for? Meanwhile, my daughter is writing a letter to my sister's dog, and if I'm a good mommy, I won't neglect to mail it, and if the dog is a good doggie, she'll write back.

winding, unwinding

Do my gourd flowers bore you out of your gourd? The buds unfurling are choreography to me - twist, point, flare, flair! (stuff, broil....) The meandering spirals of tendrils that support the plant by weaving themselves around the neighboring plants have me wrapped around their fingers. Now if only it would produce a gourd - so far I see no sign of any developing fruits even after the flowers fall off. I suppose I'll have to make a maraca out of a tin can.

curiosity

My daughter harvested this at the Children's Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The slogan over the doorway at the Children's Garden comes from Mary Howitt: "He is happiest who hath power to gain wisdom from a flower." No wonder Buddha found the Boddhi Tree to help him dispel delusion. As for this radish, I am attempting a translation.

views

At the Delaware shore, my mother-in-law didn't know what the very large bird she'd seen looking in the bathroom window was. I told her it must have been a crow but she seemed unconvinced. Later I saw it too, clearly not a crow. Not a grackle, a starling, a raven.

Everyone who used that 2nd floor bathroom encountered the vulture peering in the window or strutting around the adjacent rooftop. It started to seem like one of the family, and happily, no one mentioned Edgar Allen Poe. Not that I have anything against him, but he no more invented or defined birds of somber feathers than Proust invented or defined memory.

yellow to purple

For a while people were speaking in colors, but then some got annoyed. What I loved about it was that, for a fragment of a second, it boosted the mind of pure, immediate awareness up above all the internal voices arguing in favor of one interpretation or another. There is no presumption in color.

13th St. sample