another helping

How about them caruncles?

I didn't like to think too much about the hard looks that turkey was giving me, and anyway, I was too blown away to think about anything at all besides how something like that could exist outside of Hollywood. Ok, and whether or not this is a domestic or wild turkey. Either way this bird had such a dignified presence and surprising almond-shaped liquid eye that I was overeager to feed it corn from my hand, which it pecked at fairly mercilessly. Luckily its snood kept coming between my hand and its hard, pointy beak. I was also surprised by how much this bird, which we visited at Penning's Orcahrd, reminded me of a condor. I wonder if, at some point in its history, the baldness helped to keep traces of carrion from festering on its head too. Tofurkey this year?

Orange Country Apples

We took a trip to Penning's Orchard in Warwick, NY. My children wondered why we left New York and went to New Jersey to get to somewhere in New York. The answer is we like it complicated. The drive through the forests of Northern New Jersey was an unexpected pleasure and had many familiar segments - one part near looked exactly like the road my father lives on in Virginia, a route that snakes along Passage Creek in a narrow valley between Blue Ridge upheavels. Another stretch looked exactly like a familiar place up in Maine. Everyone seemed enchanted with that road, route 23, and we hadn't even seen the apples at the end of it, the small Braeburn trees heavily loaded with the last of the season.

ashes ashes

On the West side of my street grow many ashes. The ones closer to my house have leaves that turn yellow, and most of these trees have lost their leaves already. Farther down the ashes are still thick with petticoats of yellow leaves while the leaflets closer to the crown are sun caramelized to a deep red. To see these trees' flaming bleed once every year is worth the wait.

blunt objects

Grown on the East End of this island at the Garden of Eve Farm, which supplies the Kensington CSA in Brooklyn. You may be happy to know that these caused me no harm whatsoever.

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."

Talk about a birthright

Can you imagine a world where mainstream medicine is so arrogant that new born babies are inadvertantly denied the very blood nature intended for them? Of course you can, this is it! My mother Judy Mercer's motivation to research the effects of delayed cord clamping was inspired by the common practice of cutting a baby's umbilical cord before all of the blood cycling through the placenta has found its way to the child. Why would anyone do something so unfathomable as deny a baby its very own birth blood? Well, I asked our former pediatrician, who was once head of neonatalogy, who responded "we thought babies' blood was bad for babies, it's too thick." Another practitioner told me similar nonsense. How could anyone think a baby's blood would be bad for it? The blood bank business is another danger to babies. Parents, in fear of "what might happen" deny there babies up to half of their blood, blood they need to fully saturate and stimulate their lungs and brains and every other vital organ. My mother was recently at a birth where 5 oz. of the a baby's beautiful blood had been banked, just in case. Fear is often vampiric.

In recognizing the need for study of these trends in childbirth, NIH funds the research my mother conducts at The Hospital for Women and Infants in Rhode Island where she monitors the effects of delayed cord clamping in preterm infants. Many other researchers around the world have grown interested in this question so my mother is one in a community of very thoughtful practitioners and scientists restoring a great deal of wisdom to the birth process. It's sensible to let the umbilical cord stop pulsing before it's cut. That's the body's signal that the baby's good to go. Patience please. Below, an excerpt from an interview with my moms from Science and Sensibility.

In 1975, I vividly remember reading Frederick Leboyer’s book Birth Without Violence in which he advocates not cutting the umbilical cord until the infant has successfully completed her transition between her two worlds – the fetal world of water and placental respiration and the neonatal world of air and breathing. He says “For a few minutes the baby straddles two worlds…then, slowly, slowly she can cross the threshold from one to the other peacefully and easily with safety…as long as we don’t interfere [by premature clamping of the cord].” I adopted the practice of delaying cord clamping to ensure a more gentle birth and have used it for more than 30 years.

I had an epiphany at a home birth in 1979. An infant was born very rapidly with the cord 2 and 1/2 times around his neck. He was as pale as the white sheet his mother had on her bed and limp and breathless. I was very afraid that I would not be able to resuscitate him. I placed him on the bed and immediately unwrapped the cord from around his neck and dried and stimulated him with no response. His heart rate was well over 100 and the cord was pulsating vigorously. I noticed that his color was changing from the pale white to pink as his body gained the blood back into it. His heart rate was always over 100. In about 1 and 1/2 minutes, he flexed his extremities, opened his eyes and took a gentle breath. He looked at us like “What is the fuss?” and never cried. I tried as hard as I could to get him to cry as I believed at that time that he should do but I could not get him to. He nursed very well and was a normal child at one year of age when I last saw him.

Blood for babies, OK, Brooklyn? OK, Brooklyn hospitals? What better gift for future generations. Now back to our regular nonsense programming here at Brooklynometry...

beautiful monster

At the Aquarium, a chambered nautilus.

already, the keys!

Red Maples seem precocious.

round one

And we've still got a ways to go.

The Flava is Pink

Some people don't do pink, I understand, or only certain shades, maybe some veer towards the magenta but feel stifled by rose tones, others, like me, drool over the softness of shell pink while others never wander far from the warmth of coral. The boys in my son's Pre-K class don't go anywhere near any kind of pink, and made my son's cheeks pink with shame when they learned that he'd gone around as the Pink Power Ranger the previous Halloween. I had done nothing to warn him that this might happen when he'd expressed his desire, in fact I was delighted with a boy who was drawn to the feminine. I can't imagine what could be better in a world short on softness.

Amazing isn't it how in our esteem, respect and even love for our peers we sometimes lose ourselves bit by bit, sacrificial victims to belonging, tearing off pieces of our own essence in respect for the strength of another's opinion. We will never know all that's been lost in the game of pleasing parents, pleasing peers, pleasing the love interest. Even in marriages we lose pieces of ourselves for which the "better half" has no room out of general disinterest, outright dismissiveness, distrust, arrogance, or enculturation.

Long before there were therapists the kinds of people we now call shaman practiced the art of Soul Retrieval, journeying into astral worlds to retrieve pieces of people who'd grown ill because of soul loss, who had lost zest for life having given up parts of themselves that didn't hold up to that which threatened, shocked, suffocated or neglected them. I once watched a shaman performing a soul retrieval on a man from the middle east, a man who as a child has been aware of the presence of nature spirits and other ethereal being no one else saw. When he was told that in fact he could not trust his experience, he must have been only dreaming, he lost that piece of himself, just offered it up like that in order to sustain the bond with people he loved.

Years later while separated from them, living in New York, on meds for depression, I watched a shaman work on the man. People do shape shift depending on what nurtures or strangles their souls from moment to moment. Under the sway of the shaman's intense commitment to his authenticity and freedom I saw this man's soul start to flower, I saw his skin grow pink, I saw a sacred little boy return to him, a boy that no one wanted. I want that despised boy around, that boy who sees nature spirits, who doesn't threaten me even if he may have access to more wisdom than I. And I really want that boy around, that one who likes pink. But what can you do? So many shame-infused beliefs prey upon our most tender, inscrutable, innocent and vulnerable parts, and there is no shortcut to learning to protect them, to sensing their loss, much less finding a way to reclaim them. I was moved this week to read my friend Joe Monkman's blog entry about this sort of thing. It inspires me to find sufficient room for my obnoxious parts, the embarrassing parts, the ones still pink at the roots, the ones I suspect some people I respect would have contempt for. BTW, Joe is the shaman I describe above. I am thankful that in this age of materialism, atheism, and heavily mediated "spirituality" I've been able to learn from a man as intuitive, sincere and careful, a soldier of love.

Ambassadors of Yes

It's nice to see Ganesh around at work in the form of statues for sale as well as in altars kept behind the scenes by Hindu employees, like Nankoo the elevator man, for instance. Ganesh, son of Shiva, is revered as a Remover of Obstacles, and from my understanding humanity is faced by a few of those.

Because I work at a furniture store there's a lot of heavy lifting that goes on, and from what I see the men who work here have each other's backs, literally. And this has taught me, an overly self reliant person who'd rather keep her troubles to herself and settle for unsatisfactory results, what can be accomplished when you ask your brother or sister to help you along. From no traction we get the strength of elephants, strength that's only possible after overcoming shame and admitting failure and casting off personal preciousness.

We sure have our failures on our lap, these days, don't we? Out in the open now, clear to all. And we have the call of "Yes We Can." We can and will do better. Maybe Neitzche was correct in the opinion that "When virtue has slept, it will arise all the more vigorous." But the first necessity is sloughing off pride and letting the sun shine turn the mountains of shit into hills of sacred fertilizer. After that, who knows how much better things can get?

Please forgive me, I don't get to write about Brooklyn much these days because I don't spend my days here. But at least here's a thematically linked item about Queens, to be enjoyed by fans of miracles, Ganesh and Amaranth.

red and white

Mr. Indigo's trip back to Mali began in the fuschia lit elevator, which someone labeled the sexevator last night. I'm not sure who to thank for the fact that the menial elevator ride has become something so pink and rotisserie hot in honor of the Holy Days. Everyone looks fabulous under the fuschine veil.

Silver dollar flakes, my exact words. I was thinking of pancakes, and a sign of the heavenly pillow fight that got out of hand, Hollywood style. None landed in my mouth even though I was hungry and it was lunch time, but a fatty lobbed me right between the eyes.

white, blue, red, brown

While I was riding the elevator yesterday with a few others a man got on pushing a shopping cart containing a tray of white paint and a roller. For a second I thought he'd start painting the elevator and everyone on it. I was going to tell him "Don't bother, I'm already white" but bit my tongue until the delusion passed. In reality I'm really not that white. Not white like Teotihuacan in its heydey, before the denizens deforested the area in supplying firewood for the production of the lime plaster with which they fastidiously manicured the city's surfaces.

Mr. Indigo, Aboubakar Fofana, who I met today at work, is not too white either. There was some kind of hubbub which I learned was someone conducting an interview with this Malian textile designer and indigo artist. He is described as the heir to his culture's ancient expertise in creating all manner of blue from the exceedingly honorable Indigofera Tinctura, so I think it's fair to call him the Prince of Indigo. He's very tall with soft skin and a few very soft, long dreadlocks, wears a large ring on his right hand in the form of two very pointy breasts which symbolize fertility. He looks like the kind of man who does not wake up but is born every morning. I needed to know if his hands were permanently dyed blue so I could add him to my growing internal gallery of men with blue body parts, including Barack Obama with his bluish lips and Lord Shiva with his throat dyed blue from swallowing poison. Aboubakar's fingers weren't blue, but his fingernails had streaky patches of blackish blue that were permanent, the Prince's stigmata.

I can't say where I got the red stain that's under the surface of the toenail on my left big toe, but it also doesn't seem to be going anywhere. For sure I never plunged the toe in the Gowanus Canal, not when it was Lavender, not now. But my fingers may be reddish by Monday if I follow my whim to dye this slipcover I have a color called "soft orange" or the other called "light red." It's going to take 20 cups of salt, a handful of soda ash, and a half a cup of procion dye. Unless someone can loan me some indigo, which I hear doesn't bleed. Instead it grows richer with age. Or maybe I'll just spare the local waterways any more questionable effluvia and leave the cover dull Sparrow brown, and imagine it's red.

By the way, the textile above is not part of Mr. Fofana's oeuvre. I think his pieces have a more wide open feeling.

twist, again..again...again....

The knackered Rose of Sharon's still got me magoogled.

It Mocketh Me

I should be glad when reality spoofs my nightmares, right? But I do feel a little foolish...

A month or 2 ago I dreamed that our neighbors who smoke and hang out with their puppy on the stoop had taught my 6 year old son to smoke. There was my son, smoking away. So I went up to the neighbor, the same one who was arrested for having a box cutter in his pocket last year when shopping at Key Food, and told him "listen, you just can't do that!" I was incredibly earnest, but felt I wasn't really finding the words to express the breadth of folly that had occurred, and anyway some things are just so damn obvious they don't need saying!

The same neighbor came over to me (in reality) last week to tell me something my son had done. My boy and 2 older girls had been playing water bottle baby, and at some point my son ran out in front of the house and exhibited the water bottle above to the smoking man, exclaiming "look what smoking did to my baby," and then squirreling back into the house.

When my neighbor offered the anecdote I appreciated it, as I always appreciate the interesting stories they tell me about their lives and things that happen to them at school and at their crappy jobs. They ask me how I am as if they really want to know. When their cigarette smoke wafts in the window, it comforts me like a smoke signal telling me "it's ok, we've got your front." It even occurs to me that one day they'll move, or I'll move, and I'll miss their smoke and well chosen words.

Rhode Island Red

Too bad we couldn't crawl in there with those guys. They've got it made. For now.

On the outside we were being attacked by the most vicious mosquitos I've ever encountered. It was more like being bayonetted than bitten. Mercy! 

Them New Hampshire Apples

Can you believe that when I went back to sink my teeth into one of these apples for sale at the excellent Canobie Lake Amusement park in Salem, NH, they were all sold. That'll teach me to delay gratification.

They have a flume ride there called the Boston Tea Party, which makes quite the splash. The log craft hit the water making such a large plume that it seemed to spend an impossible amount of time in the air before making a descent and drenching anyone who stood under it. I can't remember ever laughing at a wave before.

Corner of Smith and 9th

From the 3 blocks of cement piled in front of this door I would guess that no one has entered that way for a while.

Citgo on 4th Avenue

Not only is my lifestyle petroleum dependent, but this logo is crack for my eyeballs. What am I gonna do?

The arrangement bears some similarities to this Marsden Hartley painting from 1914, Berlin Abstraction.