ambiguous object

I'm not sure what this is... maybe a gall? My son found it by the hammock in Maine and broke it open. Looking inside, I got the impression that something had gone wrong. On another level, I got the impression that something had gone right.

rainy day highlights

The Game of Life board looked a lot like the cover of the book I was reading, Healing with Light, Energy and Form by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. As for air hockey, I was hoping to make my blog into a hovercraft.

Portal land

Well, if I ever thought a children's museum had nothing to teach me that notion has now been silenced. The display about Navajo constellations at the Children's Museum of Maine would have been enough, (there are interesting overlays between their constructions and the ones I've grown up with) but also the museum houses a camera obscura that views the city of Portland though a cupola on its roof. We were there on a gloomy day so the image reflected down onto the screen, a white round table about 3 feet across, was murky but still intriguing, and the actual cars that drove down Free Street became toy cars the children picked up on notecards.

Sitting in the small theatre it was easy to imagine being inside an eye, perhaps your own eye, the image casting down onto the retina from the lens above. It resonated, it still does. I learned from a fellow blogger that Prospect Park once had a similar structure on a hill somewhere near the Boathouse. Say we bring it back? What could inspire contemplation better than a silent boat ride followed by time in a vision closet?

Kin•aesthetics

We are in a small house under a large oak tree. During the night acorns fell on the roof, bouncing from one plane to another. Today, while raindrops soak every inch of earth, I imagine I absorb the wetest wetness into the subtlest ground. This restoration of fluidity is a method of soul retrieval.

Venus over Maine

Crab Shell Constellations

Perhaps a Peekytoe.

headlight

Goldenrod adds another light to the rocks of Two Lights, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

White's Pt. Rd

I went for a run along White's Point Rd in Standish Me., a road that follows the shore of a sector of Sebago Lake, the deepest lake in the state. The air here smells like pine needs and wherever I look I see big blue-black birds, crows, often in triads. Just out the door I scared a crow, it flew up into a pine on the other side of the road. It wasn't too scared of me though, it registered its protest against my presence by hopping up to slightly higher branches. I imagined holding the beautiful bird, I could feel its weight and strength in my hands, the soft firmness of its feathers, its delicate solidity, the warmth of its beating heart.

I passed a house where I heard hammering, and on my way back, the hammering persisted and another bird was scared by my footsteps. I saw what at first appeared to be another crow because of its darkness and size, but then I saw the tufted red head. The glamour of Piliated Woodpeckers is inesteemable, weren't runways invented for those igneous top knots? People I later saw walking down the road were perfectly color coordinated with the bird's red, black and white color scheme so I suppose it's a conspiracy. And that hammering? Most likely not human at all.

Last year when I was here I discovered the story of the Tarboxes. Could that really have been their surname?

watery in central park

The struts of schist that rise out of the soil in bulkheads are the bones of the Manhattan, visible in Central Park. They also make tension points for parents with small children who insist on climbing them. I wasn't going to let Nora climb down when I first got there, so she remained at the top, squatting and glaring at me where I stood at the bottom. Then it became clear to me that there was a path - sort of -and she could do it, and preventing her would mean thwarting her self discovery, so I gave it up and just followed her around the craggy heap like a goat mother, sometimes nearly pitching myself headfirst over the edge.

The block of schist was gray and black, some areas smooth as a whale's skin and others filled with chunks of quartz that resist erosion - either by the behinds of park goers, or rain, or the occasional grit strifling. Part of it stretched out into the lake where my son discovered that a dropped cheese puff is a challenging snack for a turtle that isn't used to especially buoyant food. Then the children bickered amongst themselves, some unable to stop feeding cheese puffs to the turtles, others deeply concerned about the inappropriate nutritional content and turtle longevity. When the rain picked up the kids were distracted and pitched umbrella camps between the exposed ribs of stone, but soon bickering over umbrella size called for a change of scenery.

A Catalpa tree on the walk over East had an unusual features - a 2 foot wide disk of concentric circles surrounded by a thick flange of grey bark. It looked like some sort rustic radar screen. It stopped us in our tracks and we awaited the beam that it seemed it would emit at any moment. In a hole underneath it, the kids stuck in their hands, pretending that they were being bitten by something that lived inside. Once yards away we could observe the long pods that cascade like haricots vert among the large heart shaped leaves.

Bethesda fountain gave me chills. I didn't realize that, in spite of incessant photo shoots, it is a global holy place, one of those transcendent hubs for world travelers. While my daughter circumambulated the fountain my son fished some money out of the water and later spent it at a candy store. I apologize for him, citizens of the city. I would have supervised him more carefully but the dangerously gorgeous violet shade of a lotus growing in the pool put me in a trance, and I noticed that even the hand of the angel of the water looks like it's readying to fish coins out of the fountain, but perhaps it's some other very small thing it reaches for. When I go back, I will repay the fountain. I had some garnet-red corn kernels in my pocket, a present form Ecuador, and I thought about tossing them in as an offering, but I found I couldn't part with them yet.

dragon fly mudra

This dragonfly kindly posed for me, but before that, it stood on the gourd bud perch and steadily alternated various wing positions like a flag signaler. What was he telling me? That I was next up on the runway?

So do they speak to one another like that or was he just working out some kinks in his wing muscles? Double click image for closer view.

Immaculate Mary

I was stunned to notice the spooky way this Madonna goes from 2 dimensions to 3 over the entrance to a church, The Immaculate Heart of Mary. I've walked by several times but I never took this detail in, never realizing how this icon represents both immanence and transcendence.

'Matter' sounds like it comes from a root similar to 'mother,' and 'maimon.' In Western societies matter is overly hoarded or condemned as the source of impurities and putrification. Matter may decay, but the real decay happens in the mind that misidentifies itself, spins endless self representations, chronically avoids its vulnerability, and grasps at straws endlessly in fear of falling (again). It is hard to fall, but it's not a hard fall. It's cottony and soft and filled with warm currents.

corn after all

6 small ears. One is a red head. It's pretty amazing how the little cobs emerge so suddenly.

At a great used book store in Dumbo, P.S. Bookshop, I came across "How to Tell Corn Fairies If You See 'em" by Carl Sandburg. It states "All corn fairies wear overalls. They work hard, the corn fairies, and they are proud. The reason they are proud is because they work so hard. And the reason they work so hard is because they have overalls."

Now I think it is too hot for overalls. Maybe the fairies can work in loinclothes and relax a little bit.

Governor's Island in August

Yesterday Governor's Island (once Nut Island) seemed to have been haunted by delicious smells. There was the smell of the harbor, which blew in strongly from the West, where waves crashed in thwarted expectations against a retaining wall. Maybe it wasn't delicous, but I'm told it smells much better than it did in the 70's before the clean water act gave it a new life. There was a burst of licorice air over by the ferry to Brooklyn, but strangely my friend smelled beef jerky at the same spot. Later a waft of apples there restored to apples any scrap of lost glamour.

This old house, one of the few smaller wooden structures on the island, had that old house smell, even on the outside. I remember that smell most from adventures in a ruin down where I grew up in Virginia, we hoped to find interesting things but what was it? Just old papers.

Floethe

Last Sunday my husband and I were down in the trenches together, that is, we were cleaning out the boiler room. We survived, barely. I got really upset that he has to continue to keep his jumbo rococco lamp that we have no space for, he contested my attachment to the extra large wooden salad bowl we never use. But we made it.

In the process I rediscovered a children's book called A Picture Book of the Earth, published in 1949, written by Jerome Meyer and illustrated by someone named Richard Floethe. What a hand.

day's work

IQ Test

Another feature at Pier 6 in the Brooklyn Bridge Park. I stood there in the heat trying to count the sides but they kept shifting on me. It's good to see my parking tickets are paying for something so geometrically sophisticated. Who could make that?

kusama forever

via ii-ne-kore

Lost Brooch

I just found this on the corner. Picking it up, I was scared that it could still sting me. Somehow I managed to carry it home balanced on my key, as if it were magnetic. I guess there's little wind today.