Projects – Page 101

Diversity and Car(ry)ing Capacity

According to Wikipedia, the term “biodiversity” came into popular usage in 1985 as the 1986 National Forum on Biological Diversity was being planned. A decade earlier in scientific studies, the term “natural diversity” was the expression used to describe the variety of different types of life found on earth, and “species diversity”, “species richness”, and “natural heritage” are even older terms. The same Wikipedia article goes on to describe how biodiversity benefits humanity. This is where I want to jump off the Wiki-wagon. I have a diminishing tolerance for anthropocentric thinking. Diversity isn’t important because it’s good for us. Diversity is important because it IS.

Where diversity exists, you know the carrying capacity of the environment is at a high level. This means that there are enough resources to support a large community of biota. There is abundance and health….for everything. There are food sources, water sources, shelters, places to meet others of your species, safe habitats in which to reproduce and raise young, and plenty of predators, large and microscopic, to keep the population in balance. Where diversity is threatened, you see widespread extinction, the development of large mono-cultures, and the altering of climate and landscape. (For a fascinating example of this, see this story on how the re-introduction of wolves into Yellowstone Park changed the course of a river. How Wolves Change Rivers on youtube.com.)

Diversity and abundance or extinction and scarcity. These are snapshots on either end of the spectrum of possible futures for our planet…or for any small subset of it. My question isn’t about how diversity benefits humanity. My question is about how diversity feels. Not only to you, or to us, but to the Universe. As Eckhart Tolle would say, think beyond the Egoic Mind. What is diversity to the Power and Source of Life? It is essential; it is essence poured out on reality. You might say that the Divine is manifest in diversity. What is diversity to the Ego? It is a threat. It is Other and Dangerous. I’m sure you can see how this plays out across different parts of history in different parts of the world. Where mono-cultures restrict diversity in the human community, what is the effect? Take a moment here to think of all you’ve ever read or heard, seen or felt about genocide, extinction, ‘ethnic cleansing’, segregation, persecution, and intolerance. The human Ego fighting the reality of diversity is a war that makes no sense to me. There is no possible victory in it anywhere, for anyone.

My final questions are these: what is diversity to the Person you want to be, in the world where you will live? How is your carrying capacity, your caring capacity, today?

Mine (yours, ours)

My child…my world…

My wish is for her to grow up in a world where people are judged for who they are, and not by the color of their skin, not for who they love, who they worship, by their gender, or the size of their bank account. My wish is for this world to become our world, where ‘live and let live’ is only the starting point, and where my children, your children, all children become ‘ours’ to educate, to heal, to care for so they are prepared and able to help make our world a better place.

And because it’s the right thing to do.

That is my wish.

All words and images c2012 Naomi Baltuck

Time Lapse

“An ugly dream is still a dream
Supposed to make you stronger.”

***

You left today, and words don’t seem
To suit me any longer.

You didn’t say a thing, just stared
Through mists of salty dew –
My lips were sealed, my pupils glared.
Our silence, soaked in blue,

Was much too hard to break in shards
By wills too stiff to bend.

***

“When living in a house of cards
The wind is not your friend.”

***

One month ago you turned your back
And walked outside this door –
I redefined my white and black
And started to explore

The luring shades of gray behind
The silence of the walls.
My nights were sleepless, long and blind,
My days were empty calls.

***

“Beware the sand – it’s not the same
To be time’s slave or master.”

***

One year already…can you blame
The heart for beating faster?

Today I saw the sun again
Despite the cloudy veils,
While tender drops of falling rain
Erased the salty trails

Upon my face. A glowing beam
Then kissed me, slightly longer.

***

“An ugly dream is just a dream
Supposed to make you stronger.”

Musical Meditations

Qanun like a zither plucking
running goats from a carousing stream,
Saz strings singing each water drop,
Oud shaking the rainbow from the mist,
Kamanjah—that other name for a violin—
surfing along the ultraviolet waves,
while a Russian Balalaika taps
its toes frenetically and
the Darbuka keeps them in time
and sometimes Bongos serve
for Tablas—all a whirling meditation
chorusing the heavens in hopes
that one day their peace will come
as Arab and Jew play a concert together
on a mystical mountain in the Upper Galilee.

– Michael Dickel

Borrowed Sugar, Borrowed Time

Sunshine scrapes rust of rod iron railings
shimmers cobwebs on balcony plants
and what doesn’t spill on cobblestones below
streams through open windows
stretches on waking bare limbs
dries dreamless nights’ last drop of sweat
dewy stance poised on threshold of consciousness

a Mediterranean sky absorbs the city’s vibrant colors
scent of the sea in blooming trees, in sun kissed hair
on young girls’ skin glazed with a hint of Bain de Soleil
home as sweet and safe as God’s lure of heaven

street vendor’s voice calling price of peaches
insulate the morning a familiar soft hue
rituals of coffee and idle gossip trill
the humid air in narrow alleys
radios blare love songs through shutters
on yellow walled buildings
diffused in city noise and coo of doves on ledges
they fade in wall crevices storing a city’s secrets

bounce of gold crosses between breasts
colorful hijabs ’round others’ bare face
friendships seeded in borrowed sugar, borrowed time
she, unaware of borrowed wailers on their way
makes plans on a sunny balcony as she hangs
her blue jeans on a clothesline
moments before war drums ripple through crisp calm

– Silva Merjanian

dancing toward infinity

each lively soul
worlds contained
a galaxy of one
our gases, our dust
our gravitational pull
our weak wills
our strong compulsions
our stark shadowlands
our gaudy stars
dancing toward infinity

– Jamie Dedes

Prelude, Voice Aquiver

I am not content
to fade into yesterday’s
almanac, landing on a
shelf of dusty dreams,
fading to sepia tones.

I am not content
with a ribbon of gray
threading through the
needle of my existence,
stitching my life
into a burial shroud.

I am not content
to leave words unturned,
eroding into fragments
of ash gray limestone.
White chalk smeared,
scattered on a blackboard.

I am not content
with splinters of dripping
flaxen honey, wrestled from
the comb, stuck in webs
to my right hand.

I am not content
to leave syllables unheeded,
whispers from sage in twilight sleep:

“I carve on cavern walls
hieroglyphs of moonblood, birth.
I paint meringue clouds
rocket fire, blue mayhem, fossil butte,

speak my signature,
voice aquiver.”

– Sharon Frye

As with any war …

As with any war, there is a very big difference between watching it on a TV screen
on the evening news, from a recliner in your living room ( and forming opinions) and living it with all your senses; the smell of gunfire and explosions burning nostrils, the sound of bombs piercing vital organs inside you, the sight of destruction and death, the terror of everything you’ve known disintegrate into a new reality, one so unbelievable that you have to remind yourself, yes, you are awake. And you wonder where did all these people come from, where were they just yesterday when the streets were so safe, the kind of safety you feel with familiarity, when you brought with you home only the smell of flowers from alleys you walked by, when the biggest worry you had was Algebra.

I believe for civilians there is a tipping point, after which one doesn’t care who is right and who is wrong, who did what to whom first, when majority of people want their everyday stressful life to come back and give them ulcers because that was heaven and this is hell.

I was lucky to call Beirut home, a city on the Mediterranean sea, rich in color, rich in culture and history, with its beautiful boulevards, the stone buildings with the shutters inviting all to experience the love and friendliness that the local people held in their hearts. A place, tourists called heaven.

Yet, a place so beautiful, became the playground for powerful forces turning it into rubble in a few years, during the time I was growing up with such a rosy view of the world, no knowledge yet of what evil is, or how easy it is for humans to morph into savages. We are a violent species; we cover our nature in clothes. Those who survive wars carry the scarred memories in their blood, circulating like a chronic disease. We live cautiously, we live a day at a time, and oh how we accumulate things we think we might need one day. Nothing is taken for granted. We live with the sense that the other shoe might drop any moment, so often we are on guard, carrying in our eyes a different understanding of the fragility of life.

So here I am today, safe on a recliner, in my living room, watching on a screen others in that region live a war, turmoil, displacements, uncertainty, and destruction. And the lesson learned is that there is no lesson learned when it comes to violence, if there is, it is short lived in our memory. And the nostalgia hits me in waves, for a time when I hung clean laundry on the roof of a five-story building and looked over a city throbbing with beautiful energy, soaked in the Mediterranean sun, without any knowledge yet of peace or war, just a normal life with no lines drawn either side.

– Silva Merjanian

The Clearest Way Into the Universe

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” John Muir (1838-1914), Scottish-American naturalist, author and nature philosopher

If Not For His Wife

Scientists say that 55 to 65 million years ago, the North of Ireland was subject to volcanic activity, and that molten lava cooled rapidly, creating fractures in the rock that looked like giant stone pillars, some reaching a height of nearly 40 feet.

It made a vivid pattern in the rock…

…and was such a unique natural phenomenon that in 1986 UNESCO named it World Heritage Site.

But if you ask me, that’s a bunch of blarney. Better yet, ask any local. He’ll tell you what really happened is that a giant named Finn MacCool was building a causeway to Scotland.

A Scottish giant named Benandonner tracked Finn to the causeway, looking for a fight. He wanted to prove he was the greatest giant of them all. He had already tracked down and beaten every other giant in Ireland, and Benandonner wanted to serve up Finn with the same sauce.

He hurried home to his wife Oonagh. “Don’t worry, darlin’,” she told Finn. “We’ll serve him up as good as he brings.” She dressed Finn in a baby bonnet and put him in a giant wooden cradle. Then she baked 27 loaves of bread with 27 iron griddles baked into them, and one good loaf of bread. When Benandonner arrived looking for Finn, Oonagh said, “He’s off to the Giants’ Causeway, to make paste out of some buffoon of a giant named Benandonner. But come in and I’ll feed you the bread I prepared for Finn.” Oonagh gave Benandonner a loaf with a griddle baked into it, and he broke three teeth on it. “Take it away or I’ll not have a good tooth left in me head!” he shouted.

“It’s just the way Finn likes it, nice and crunchy,” said Oonagh. “Perhaps that one’s stale.” Then she gave ‘Baby Finn’ the one good loaf. When Benandonner saw him gobble it down, he shouted, “Sure I haven’t a chance against the giant whose baby can eat the bread that nearly broke my jaw!”

Oonagh smiled as she watched Benandonner racing helter skelter down Knockmany Hill. “When brains are called for,” she told Finn, “brawn won’t help.”

If you go to The Giants’ Causeway in Antrim, remember that you are walking in a land where giants once tread.

And never forget that many a man besides Finn MacCool would find himself in a pretty scrape, if not for his wife!

Still Here: Blogging Against Disablism

Disabilism is a Gimp term for the ideology and practice of discriminating against people with disabilities. Discriminatory practices of all forms appear to be on the rise in North America. In the U.S., where all programs that protect minorities are under attack, there has been a growing chorus of calls for the dismantling of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Contrary to much of the Disabilist propaganda, life remains very difficult for most people with disabilities. Much architectural infrastructure remains inaccessible, and the unemployment rate for persons with disabilities is double the rate of the non-disabled. It is likely most people with severe disabilities have given up looking for employment and are thus not counted amongst the unemployed.

The 90’s were, throughout the Western World, a time of disability activism. In the U.S., many of the activists were Polio survivors. At the time, the everyday world was, far much of the disabled community, simply inaccessible. If one used a wheelchair, one simply could not get on a bus! (The playwright and disability theorist, Kaite O’Reilly recently discussed both the disability civil rights movement in the U.K. and the workings of Disabilism in a marvelous lecture. I encourage you to watch.)

Until our civil rights movement, people with disabilities were largely invisible. When I am in a wheelchair in a crowded space, say a museum, I remain invisible, as people literally trip over me. When I am in India, I am a very visible anomaly: a professional person navigating the world on crutches. (An Indian colleague recently told me that disability cannot be discussed at the moment in India. It is too hot a topic.) Most disabled people in India stay home.

Back in the early 90’s Bill T. Jones, the MacArthur Award winning choreographer, created a piece entitled, Still Here. The dance gives expression to the lived experience of persons with life threatening conditions, including disabilities. It created a furor! In 1997, Bill Moyers interviewed Bill T. Jones about Still Here. It is one of my favorite hours of t.v.. Not long ago I wrote a post about Still Here and its continued resonance for Native people and folks with Disability. The sad thing is that there are a great many people in North America who would like us Gimps and Natives to be gone, or to at least stay home and out of the way.

Beyond the idea of Disability as label or stigma, is Disability as lived experience. I have spent much of the past few months addressing Polio related issues. Working with a Polio knowledgeable therapist has helped me revisit the illness and its aftermath, understand some of the new challenges I, and other Polios, face, and acknowledge some of the losses associated with Polio. The therapist has given me information to read and poked sore areas of my psyche with skill and kindness.

I am deeply appreciative of the resources, kindness, and training she, and other Polio clinicians have showered on me. I am also grateful to all those who helped me understand the ways the trauma of Polio, and the able-bodied gaze, have shaped my thinking and life. At times. I find myself both relieved and filled with sadness and grief; there are so many losses.

There was a time when I was able, a before and after Polio, although that was many decades ago. My therapist likes to remind me that those without disabling conditions are temporarily abled; disability is always possible. Perhaps that possibility keeps many anxious and avoidant of persons who are clearly disabled. One may pass but probably one cannot hide from one’s disability or from the losses it brings to life. Nor can one hide from Disability itself; Disability stalks everyone.

Oddly, I have the sense of Polio as present and immediate, even in a world where it is thought, like winter’s snow, to have melted away almost to extinction. Polio is a virus, a piece of RNA that infects cells, reproduces itself in enormous quantities, and leaves the cells weakened or dead. It can present as little more than a stomach upset, or leave a person paralyzed or dead.Whether we acknowledge it or not, Polio remains an active presence in our world, especially in the lives of survivors and their families.

As I write, a flock of geese flies over, headed north, and the radio news announces a polio outbreak in Afghanistan in which at least 25 persons have been made ill. I have been rereading Anne Finger’s Elegy for A Disease, and the book lies open on the sofa. It is both a personal and a social history of the disease, an illness with a long history of influencing human lives. I have the sense Polio is sitting with me as I write and ponder, an alive, thoughtful presence, vibrant and well in spite of our efforts to eradicate it. Polio doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

We Gimps are Still Here as well. We, too, are not going anywhere.

– Michael Watson, Ph.D.

At Model Nails

In early morning light, large black
eyes stare from his shower-fogged mirror.
He compares his profile with worn photo
of his father. Once, his mother stitched
it in a secret panel of her tunic,
hiding her lover’s face from Viet Cong.

His mind wanders back to days of childhood.
Cruel taunts prattle from Vietnamese tongues,
chattered whispers return, full volume…
“You children without fathers are like homes
without roofs. Ugly bastard left-over!
Child of dust! Who’s your Daddy?”

At Model Nails, he scrubs dead skin
from feet, infuses lavender into cracked soles,
trims toenails on hundreds of phalanges.
More than two decades he’s worked,
stooped over, bending, twisting
from a red three-peg stool.

He greets customers with a smile,
massages legs in a habitual rhythm
that reminds him of an ancient song
his mother often sang, washing clothes
along muddy banks of the Mekong.

If she were here, he’d paint stars
and stripes on her nails, perhaps
fireworks or a blood-red flag
with a sinking yellow star.

– Sharon Frye

No Child Is Safe

In the year 2015, I would expect that we should have mastered loving one another by now. After all, we have had 6,000 years of practice! Unfortunately, this is not true. And it is the reason that we need to focus on things such as diversity and inclusion.

Recently, this was brought into focus in the area that I live. You see, I live in a super white area of the world. Washington state has about 4% African Americans. It is over 80% white. Seattle is on the list of the whitest cities in the US and I don’t even live in Seattle! I live in the privileged suburbs.

In these privileged suburbs, racism recently reared it’s ugly head. At the very same school that my son went to, 3 African American youths lives were threatened. Why? For being black. Simply being a person of color made these youth a target.

My son knows something about being a target just because of who he is. He decided to share his testimony with the local school board to talk about the issues he faced and what is and isn’t possible. And so, I share with you Colin’s testimony to the Northshore School District.

This is why we need to practice diversity and inclusion at every turn. This shouldn’t happen in 2015.

No child is safe until every child is safe. (written testimony below video)

Hello, my name is Colin Stewart, I’m nineteen, transgender, assigned female at birth, and I was a student of the northshore school district during my elementary and junior high school years. I decided, my sixth grade year, that I no longer wanted to deal with the seclusion and name calling I dealt with because of the intersections of my quirks, and interests, and decided being at a school the rest of my elementary class was not going to be at, was better than being at a school with the three friends I had. My logic being, at least the bullies that call me clown, freak, weirdo, and so on, wouldn’t be there. I could start over. I started my seventh grade year at Northshore junior high school, with high hopes of the friends I had always wanted, in an environment that was safe.

But nobody knew me, and I didn’t know them, and outside of a friend I made in choir within the first week of school, I didn’t talk to people much. I’m loud and outgoing, I love talking to people, but nobody wanted to talk to me. It didn’t happen instantly in this case. People slowly started repeating the phrases I was far too familiar with. Freak. Weirdo. Abnormal. Annoying. Lesbian. Bumblebee, because I happen to like the color yellow. I learned what it felt like to be tripped in hallways, and have our teacher hall monitor tell me I was in the way as I picked up my belongings, be slammed into walls hard enough that it left bruises, and to have a teacher tell me that he couldn’t do anything if he didn’t have names. I learned to say thank you to being treated cruelly, and that if I volunteered for lunch detention and then sat in the library during the rest of lunch, I could usually avoid a confrontation.

At the end of the school year, I didn’t rewaiver, and went to timbercrest junior high school for eighth and ninth grade. My experience wasn’t much better – with a week of school somebody asked me if I was really a lesbian. My life started to fall through the cracks as I struggled to maintain my studies and the few friendships I had. The last place I wanted to be while I was at home was school, not because I dislike learning, but because I was nervous of the next name, the next jab, the next time somebody decided they had the right to push my body around. I told a teacher at one point that I was being bullied and didn’t know what to do, and he told me, kids will be kids, and nothing happened. As I continued to struggle with keeping up with school while this was happening, a teacher pulled me aside, and told me, I was a failure, and that I wouldn’t go anywhere if I continued like this. Like it was all my fault.

In tenth grade, I left the school district after a few meetings with the school counselor at Woodinville high school, and told me there was no way she could make sure I was safe, even though that was the first year I was publically transitioned to Colin, presenting with my name, pronouns, and identity. I went to that school for three days, and within then, got called names I won’t repeat. I wavered into the Seattle public schools district and attended nova high school on capitol hill, which has a zero tolerance bullying rule. They make activism into a way of life, making sure that no comment about your appearance or gender or race, is just shrugged off like my experiences repeatedly were. The one time I was called a name at that school, I told a teacher, and within the day, the student was pulled aside and spoken to. He apologized to me. He had repeated scheduled meetings with a counselor about his standing with the school, and I never had a problem with him again.

The bullying and cruelty that is happening in the northshore school district currently, is not new, nor is concentrated to one environment, one group of people, or one school. Something needs to be done. Because I survived long enough to run away. But not everybody is that privileged.

No child is safe until every child is safe.

by Bronson Boehmer Flickr.com CC (BY-NC-ND) — by Bronson Boehmer
Flickr.com
CC (BY-NC-ND)

Shalom,

Turtle Speaks

Painted Turtle by Gretchen Del Rio c 2010, rights reserved — Painted Turtle by Gretchen Del Rio c 2010, all rights reserved

we live on Turtle Island and turtle is my totem ~
she speaks in the easy way only turtle can,
as one who is at home in herself, at home between
her plastron and carapace, wisdom in her measured
gait, her introversion a model for freedom, for cutting
the nets spun of wars and deceptions . . .

she is the everyday re-enchantment of my solitary
cosmos, my solidarity with life, i read her pastoral
letters in green on green, the sweet grasses and seas,
she speaks of connectedness, the basic constituents
of enigma, wizardry; and in the insanity of the times,
how best to journey and retrieve this world’s soul . . .
she is the unrushed cure for nature-deficit,
that consuming affliction, the spawn of culture’s
back-lighted screens and advertising of every bilk

turtle healing is simple peace and master lessons in
self-containment, she draws me into my meditations
and back along the first path of Maka Ina, the forgotten
primal path of earth ways and feminine energies and
the rhythms of grandmother moon whirling me heavenward.

– Jamie Dedes

Turtle ~ totem or power animal representing earth in Native American tradition
Turtle Island ~ in Iroquois tradition, when the earth was covered over with water, sundry animals attempted to create land by swimming to the bottom of the ocean and hauling up dirt. Muskrat succeeded. He placed the dirt on the back of Turtle, which grew into the landmass known today as North America.
Maka Ina ~ Lakota (Sioux) ~ “maka” is earth and “ina” is mother, so Mother Earth. Earth teachings were/are considered a path to wholeness (heaven).

The Inside Story

When my daughter Bea was studying at the Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts, I went to visit her. We zipped down the turnpike to Old Sturbridge Village.

The village is a living museum including 59 restored buildings, a working farm and water-powered mills. There were craftsmen…

…artisans…

…tradesmen…

…and re-enactors.

We were invited to look through a window in time…

We saw village life as it was lived between the 1790s and the 1830s.

I enjoyed the opportunity to see the old buildings from the inside out.

Everywhere we went there were whispers, hinting at the inside story.

Upon reflection, one thing was clear…

Just as we do today, those people worked hard…

…fell in love…or not…

…cherished their children…

…and valued their friends.

Some things never change.

All images and words copyright Naomi Baltuck

To See the World

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower…”

–William Blake, Auguries of Innocence—

…or in one click of a camera.

One picture is worth a thousand words. Some pictures lay out the facts, like a road map.

But others have all the elements of a great novel, crammed into one quick snap.

Danger…

Mystery…

Character…

Adventure…

Desperation…

Romance…

Greater purpose…

For me, the best stories raise questions as well as give answers.

They present universal dilemmas, and show us how people learn to cope with trauma or loss.

A disaster becomes a compelling tragedy, although the victims lived two thousand years ago, if we can relate to their suffering. And who can’t?

We like to tie up our stories in neatly arranged ribbons and give them happy endings. Who doesn’t love a happy ending?

But that’s not always possible. Perhaps the best stories–and photographs–just remind us of what it is to be human.

All words and images copyright Naomi Baltuck.

Rather Than Curse the Darkness, Light a Tiki Torch

We love to share the occasional Murder Mystery, D&D adventure, or Sci-fi party with friends, not to mention New Year’s Eve, Christmas Eve, Hanukkah and Lincoln’s Birthday. But it was our first Valentine’s Day without the kids to help plan the party, and share in the fun.

Bea was away at school.

…Eli was visiting her in California…

…and poor Thom was too sick to venture out of the bedroom.

Romance was out of the question, but that has never been the sole focus of our Valentine’s Day. Thom and I find many days and ways to express our romantic feelings for each other. Valentine’s Day has been a day to share with our wider circle of loved ones, and especially our kids.

I worried that instead of this…

…the party would look like this.

Rather than curse the darkness, I lit a tiki torch…

…and celebrated Valentine’s Day with an Aloha Party!

Aloha is difficult to define. Literally it means ‘divine breath.’ But it can be used as a greeting, a salutation, a farewell. It is also used to express ‘love,’ ‘sympathy,’ ‘compassion.’ It’s as versatile as ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,’ but I like it so much more.

So I tossed the invitations up into the air, lit the tiki torches, set up a goody table, and here’s who the trade winds blew in.

Jim and Aarene came bearing papaya, pineapple, and delicious homemade plum wine. They are horse lovers, storytellers, and co-hosts of Global Griot, a storytelling program on 90.7 FM KSER. Aarene is the author of two very well received books, Endurance 101 and Sex in the Library. Jim served in the navy as a submariner before becoming a professional Santa. (Which explains the chapeau, and perhaps also why he’s drinking a Bosun’s Mate.)

The party was in full swing when Rick and Sue arrived with a huge Pineapple Upside Down Cake! I was filling orders for drinks and couldn’t get to my camera, but here they are in their Hawaiian plumage at our 1950s New Year’s Eve party. They are some of the most creative people I know. Rick is the art director for WildTangent Studios, and an amazing artist/cartoonist (I own a copy of his book!). Sue is a prizewinning baker and my exercise buddy, which is only fair, since I have to work off the wonderful treats she brings. For our sci-fi party, it was an ice creamy concoction they called Ketrecel White, which was tasty but potent! I can’t believe my good fortune in having so many friends who are unabashed geeks.

See that beautiful cake, just left of the pineapple? It was delicious!

The best parties start in the kitchen.

Seattle storyteller Norm Brecke and Portland storyteller Anne Rutherford caught us up on their news. Norm spent the week performing “The Lighter Side of Lincoln,” while Anne had just finished a run of a show called “Scenes From the Future” at The Fertile Ground Festival of New Works in Portland.

What a lovely mix of family, old friends, and new friends too. My cousins Nancy and Ian…

…brought a carload of people, including my brother Lew…

…and their neighbors, Joanne and Ian, who I met while walking around Green Lake with Nancy and Sue each week. Joanne seemed always to be walking around the lake one way, and we were always walking around the other way; somehow it seemed natural to just start walking in the same direction. Joanne is an artist, a quilter, a jewelry maker; every time we talk I find another shared interest. Her husband Ian has been everywhere, and I particularly loved hearing about his travels in The Galapagos. It was their first visit to our home, but I hope it will not be the last.

Jim and Megan are storytellers too. They arrived with their daughter Tara, who I was very pleased to meet (she loves games and is quick to catch on!).

Many of the stories Jim Douma tells are the ones he sings. He is a folk musician and played for years with the Celtic band, Clay Pipes. He gave me a copy of his new CD, Flying Blind, which he made with the help of my friend Rob Moitoza, who also produced and engineered my CDs.

Jim wrote the music and words to this splendid heartwarming collection. It has brought more than one tear to my eyes.

His daughters Tara and Meredith sang backup, and Meredith designed this striking CD jacket. Jim and Megan have clearly nurtured and passed on their creativity to the next generation!

I was glad to welcome Gene Gousie and Kathy McMullen. I did my very first professional storytelling with Gene Gousie thirty years ago! He came to our wedding with his baby daughter Brie in a snuggly and I swear, he hasn’t changed a bit since then! Gene’s wife Kathy is a writer and blogger.

The party spilled into the living and dining rooms. People visited, played games…

…and once again our home was filled with music and singing.

I was painfully shy as a kid. I always had a special friend or two, and my sister is and has always been my best friend. But it has taken me years–decades–to build such a lovely circle of exceptionally kind, funny, creative, and pleasantly quirky friends. What I love best about a circle is that there is always room for one more. It gives me such satisfaction when two of my friends who don’t know each other ‘click’ and thus the circle grows.

On Valentine’s Night, the wind was blowing and the air was crisp, but the aloha spirit was alive and well, and kept the darkness at bay.

null

‘Kākou’ is the word that represents the Hawaiian value of inclusiveness. ‘Aloha kākou’ means ‘May there be love and kindness between us all.’

Aloha kākou, dear friends!

Milk Bottle

Rinse one and you’ll be rewarded with a winking lacery,
spherical gas masses:
globe balanced on ballooned globe,
floating fragilities,
each begging to inhabit the imagination.

Precise chambers with slanting walls come to a point
in the bottle’s depths.
Their curved roofs cling together, make
the structures definitive
as cut glass, insubstantial as castles in the air.

And these architectures shift, could be beings
poised like oursleves
on the edge of tremor. But they don’t have aspirations,
attitudes, passions,
don’t carry spiritual beliefs, a fear of death.

Soon they’ll collapse or explode in silence
and nothing will remain
but a bottle in the sink, a sill with a cracked tile,
darkening windows. Don’t
weep because you can’t re-create this weightless now .
Enter and exult in it.

– Myra Schneider

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

– Michael Watson, Ph.D.

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration:

Thank you for sharing the beauty and inspiration: