It’s best not to pay attention to most lyrics of nursery rhymes and, if you do, it is wise not to ask, “What does that mean?” Just sing to your little babe the words that reach into a far distant past so that someday, your baby all grown up might hum the sweet tune and also stop and ask, “Wait! What does this mean?”
It may not be immediately apparent, but this is a video of a solution. It is a celebration of non-resistance in the face of a force of nature. DogDog (also known as Tripper, also known as Dogga, also known as Don’tDoThat!) is a backyard killer. In his enthusiasm for life he runs circles -or – more accurately, he plows circles. No plant is sacred, no patch of grass is safe. For a few seasons we tried multiple strategies to achieve some semblance of backyard order only have Don’tDoThat! plow a new circle.
One morning, watching the madness, Kerri sipped her coffee and said, “Why fight it?” She went in to the house and ordered a round-a-bout sign, careful to get one for left lane drivers so it would indicate the correct direction of his travels. DogDog is, after all, an Aussie. We planted his sign in the center of the velodrome, added a bit of wild grass around the sign and VA-WA-LA! Order (or, at least, the semblance)
On Two Artists Tuesday, a DogDog inspired reminder to lay down the fight; sometimes you can define the desire lines and sometimes you have to let them define you.
It used to make me profoundly sad when students would look at me in resistance and fear, saying the double-whammy, “I can’t! I don’t know how!” My next question always remained unvoiced: what have we done to you?
Curiosity is human nature. We are born hard-wired to sail toward scary edges, tinker with inventions, and attempt to grasp the un-graspable. It takes a lot of work to blunt a child’s curiosity. It takes a concerted effort to transform vibrant imagination into fear of reprisal/shaming.
The good news is that curiosity might be contained but it never goes away. Chicken is here to remind us to step out of the cage, pick up the brush and splash the paint just to see what happens. His invitation is to to go do it – whatever it is – precisely because you don’t know how. The path to center leads directly through I Don’t Know How.
Kerri composes on scraps of paper. Her notes are unintelligible to those of us outside of her mind. Lyrics peppered with mysterious hieroglyphic symbols and magical music notation that skips across multiple napkins and old homework assignments. What’s more amazing to me: she can play perfectly beautiful pieces of music as she deciphers her random-note-trail.I’ve accused her of being like John Nash, the character that Russell Crowe plays in A Beautiful Mind. “You’re not a paranoid schizophrenic are you?” I ask, scrutinizing her for clues.
“I don’t know, I’ll ask myself,” she replies. I am out-gunned at every turn.
Recently she pulled out a plastic sleeve stuffed with wrinkled paper, post-it notes, and random scraps of scribbles and jots. “This is the song They Way You Move Me,” she said.
Amazed. On this KS Friday, take a moment, put down your scraps of paper, and follow Kerri through hers. Give over and let her beautiful song, The Way You Move Me, move you.
THE WAY YOU MOVE ME on the album AS SURE AS THE SUN is available on iTunes & CDBaby
My sketchbooks are peppered with landscapes. I call them my meditation drawings because I do them as a form of meditation – to quiet my mind. I am kinesthetic so quiet comes to me through movement. Drawing is one of my favorite forms of dance.
One day, a few years ago, I decided to experiment and paint one of my meditation drawings. I like it but have no idea what to do with it. I’m not a landscape painter so it exists as the ‘something-different’ in my studio archive. Someday, maybe, I’ll do a few more of them and mount a show of meditation-drawing-inspired-paintings. Until then, it lives as a morsel for this weeks melange. Kerri calls it White Sun.
The moon over Benziger Winery
White Sun. 18 x 48 IN. mixed media on two panels. It’s not listed on the gallery site so contact us if you are interested in purchasing it.
Of this snake Confucius might have said, “Swallow the hydrant, expect the firetruck.”
John, a master carpenter, used to say of my theatre construction techniques, “Penny wise and pound foolish.” I built things to last for the run of the play. He built things to last beyond the nuclear winter. I told him that the cockroaches would have really nice furniture. “And Twinkies,” he’d add. Too true. A Twinkie, like his furniture, was made to last forever.
My favorite aphorism of the year comes from Master David Miller. He was preparing to direct a play called The Arsonists, so immediate and relevant for our political times. When I asked him to sum it up he said, “If you invite an arsonist into your home you shouldn’t be surprised when your house burns down.”
We are, after all, what we eat. Narratives and Twinkies alike.
I love this image. It is a visual of the burning point. For me, it captures a singular truth in life. You can’t control the wave, but you can learn to ride it. So, be in it. Ride it.
I can already hear Kerri in my mind saying, “What the heck does that mean?” Go outside tonight and look at the night sky. If you understand what you are seeing you might realize how little in this life you actually control. Mostly, in this moment of life, we surf the unknown, whether we recognize it or not. We can deny it or we can learn to ride the wave of constant change. Trying to control it is a recipe for misery.
Happiness ensues when you learn to distinguish between what you control and what you cannot. Surfing life is the art of riding the uncontrollable wave and enjoying the ride.
Saul taught me to look beyond the obstacle and, instead, place my focus in the field of possibilities. How I experience my life is largely a matter of where I decide to focus, what I choose to see.
Life, I’ve learned (or finally accepted), never stops throwing new things at me – challenges & opportunities. And, when looking in the rear view mirror of my life , I am generally hard-pressed to distinguish between what was a challenge and what was an opportunity. The challenges became opportunities, the opportunities brought a basket of challenges.
The winds of change blow all the time. As Chicken, like Saul, reminds me on this Chicken Marsala Monday, the winds of change are never an obstacle. They are a constant force (called life) moving you, moving all of us, to learn, to grow. They are an invitation to turn our faces into the wind, look to the horizon and appreciate the ride.
We just passed an anniversary of sorts. Five years ago, en route to a consulting job, I stopped for a few days to meet a woman. We’d never met, but for the previous five months had exchanged daily emails. It was a surprise correspondence, a deep diving conversation about art and love and divorce and aging and…life. We called our correspondence The Roadtrip. I thought it was about time to meet my Roadtrip partner. I stepped off the plane, met Kerri, we held hands and skipped out of the airport, drove to her place, sat on the roof and drank wine. And, my entire life changed. I felt as if I’d finally come home.
So, this past week, five years down the road, we’ve been taking stock of all that has happened, all that we’ve experienced together. We are telling each other the story of us. So much extraordinary life in all of its color, bumps, losses, discoveries, illnesses, good coffee, frustrations, delights and small moments of appreciation.
I sit next to H in the choir. He is 92 years young. He inspires me. I told him about the week of taking stock. He nodded. It’s good to look at where you’ve been. It’s the only way to know where you next want to go. I told him that it seems to me that life moves really fast and he laughed and said, “You got that right!”
On this KS Friday, take a moment. Take stock and tell yourself the story of you. Let this beautiful composition, Kerri’s Taking Stock from her album RIGHT NOW, inspire you to look back and, as H said, “Touch the riches.”
TAKING STOCK on the album RIGHT NOW is available on iTunes & CDBaby
I’m reading a book by Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words. If you google him you will read that he is “hailed as the philosopher poet of the environmental movement.” He is also described as a “radical environmentalist.” He is thoughtful. He is well researched. He asks very big questions. Agree or disagree, he has strong, clear opinions and reasoned beliefs. Step back from his environmentalism and you will find that he speaks directly into the layers of shadow and denial that wrap our national narrative. He isn’t afraid to call a lie a lie. I suspect he is considered radical not because of his beliefs but because of his insistence on bringing into the open what the national narrative would rather keep hidden.
Lately, this word, radical, has become curious to me. Like so many of my friends, I have felt our community is the rope in an angry tug-of-war. We plug into news sources tailored to our political leanings that seem dedicated to reinforcing our divisions. Dedicated to keeping us angry. And, we know it. And we eat it up. We tear ourselves apart, define ourselves too narrowly, and that is not understood as radical.
For example, we do not consider it radical that there have been 22 school shootings this year alone (at this writing). We do not see our utter inability and/or unwillingness to address it as radical. That more American school children have died of gunfire this year than soldiers in combat is astounding. Or should be.
What should be radical is now the new normal.
A few decades ago, Neil Postman wrote that we were in danger of amusing ourselves to death, that we were going down a path that would render us incapable of discerning between what has gravity and what is concocted. More to the point, we would invert the two, investing in the dross at the expense of the substance. It seems that we have arrived at the doorstep of his prediction.
Our acceptance of the radical is radical. And what is the cost?
This is the meditation behind Earth Interrupted VI: News. Worthy. and this week’s morsel, Scattered News.
It is, after all, how traditions are passed.
The Direction of Intention 