Songwriting: Happy to be under the influence

Little fits of snow a-fallin'
and I'm tired and cold and ready for spring
Bigger changes are a-comin'
and it's time to let them come on and sing . . .

I'm ready for spring. I'm tired of shivering all the damn time. To speed things up, I gave myself a Southwestern moment for midday meal and made gluten-free (brown rice tortilla) chicken and three-cheese quesadillas. Something I haven't made since I went mostly low-carb, so about a year ago now. Very satisfying.

And as I ate I sat there reading a long article about songwriter Kris Kristofferson. Lots of younger folks only know him as an actor, but it Nashville he's revered as the songwriter who had an impact on how to write country songs the way Dylan did on other kinds of music. Yes, that important. Didn't know that, did you? Kristofferson changed everything, starting with what you could write ABOUT in a country, making things a lot more honest and realistic than they had been at the time.

I put Kristofferson's songs up there with any of the best of the twentieth century. Some of them you already know, although you might not know it because some of them were hits by other singers first. Kris was good friends with Johnny Cash, who had more than one hit from a song written by Kristofferson. So did Janis Joplin.

I will champion Kristofferson as a songwriter forever. I have learned a great deal about writing songs from him. See, he always wanted to be a writer first, which is why he went out and lived a lot of different kinds of life, in order to feed his writing. Back before MFA programs, that's how you became a writer: The Jack London School of Doing a Lot of Jobs and Gathering Experience. It allows you to write with conviction, honesty, and experience. It's still a better way to learn to become a writer than going to school. School has its value, don't get me wrong, including going to school for writing, but it can also be pretty inbred.

So today I think I'll listen to Kristofferson songs, and things like that. And then I think I'll sit down and write something. Maybe a new song. If there's an influence there, it's one I would be proud to acknowledge.

Poster Fun

Making a new poster for a fundraiser event, to be put on by Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, featuring home cooked comfort food and musical performances. I didn't take the photos used, but I did do the graphic design and finished illustration. The idea was to evoke the old Norman Rockwell covers from The Saturday Evening Post, in style and mood. I'm pleased with the results. It does indeed evoke Rockwell.


(Click on image for larger view.)

I'm told that the guys modeling for the photo shoot also got to enjoy eating the props afterwards. Lucky guys!

The logo for the poster was my idea, and it was a fun piece to pull together. I found a typeface that closely matches the one used for the old magazine, then added the musical elements to evoke the nature of the event. So far the feedback has been all positive.

Meanwhile, hope some friends can come to the event. Not only will it be lots of fun, with lots of good food: I am premiering a new song that I recently finished writing.

Gratitudes 2011

I'm struggling with feeling gratitude, here at the end of a very harsh and bloody year, at the end of a long decade of things always getting worse rather than better. I'm at the point where I have doubts things ever will get better. Some things are getting better for some of my friends—and for one or two, abysmally worse. I just want 2011, the Year Of Hell, to be over at this point.

Christmas was good in that I spent it with a couple of close friends, but otherwise I just wasn't in the spirit of things. Life has looked bleak for a long time, and things keep happening that seem designed to break you. Call my Christmas mood, if you need a marker, somewhere in the middle of A Christmas Carol, neither the sentiment or joy of the ending, nor the bitter comedy of the beginning. A dark time in the middle of the story, that's all.

I just want the world to stop getting more vicious and fascist and bitter, cease its plummet down the steep incline of the black hole of self-destruction, pick itself up, and turn things around. Of course, it's people who make up the world—kanjo,the warriors are the castle—so it's up to us to turn things around for the better, and make a finer world. You. Me. Everyone you know. Everyone you care about. The responsibility and the task and the blessings are all of ours.

I'm having a hard time, after the Year Of Hell, finding much to be grateful for. Of course, I could start with the big and obvious one: I'm grateful to still be alive. In the past two years, as the chronic illness I had (mostly unknowlngly) suffered from for two decades deepened and worsened, I almost died a couple of times, I had some near-death experiences, and in the surgery that culminated as well as arrested the long slide, I genuinely felt like I had died and been reborn. Only now my body doesn't know what the rules are anymore, the old blueprints don't seem to work, and I keep stumbling over unexpected and unplanned changes. Things I used to like my body no longer likes, or tolerates. My diet has become so restricted that most days eating is not the pleasure it used to be. I end up breaking dietary rules simply because I can't stand going on. It's not about discipline or willpower—if health was subject to power of will alone, there wouldn't exist a billion-dollar industry supporting cures that don't work. It's sometimes about endurance, about doing everything right and still nothing works. Then what do you do? You can keep practicing the ascetic self-denial of self-flagellation, or you can live in denial, or you can fall into despair. Are there other choices? Nothing off-the-shelf does any good. Some nights you wonder why you've bothered.

For the first time in years, I find myself questioning my own practice of writing gratitudes. I find myself often unwilling to show up at the gratitudes dojo for practice, because it just feels like slogging through meaningless sludge. Wisdom both conventional and unconventional suggest that's just when you need to keep going, that maybe the very next repetition will be the one that turns things around—if you stop at 99 when it takes 100 repetitions, of course you won't see the end result. But many days it feels like you passed 100 a long way back, and still nothing has changed.

It's also true that lots of more shallow pundits in the self-development movement use the guilt-tactic of blaming the victim to motivate. Have you ever noticed that the entire weight-loss industry is based on the language of scarcity, and uses language that is uniformly negative and self-punishing? It's no wonder people suffer from abysmal self-esteem. Who wouldn't, when told again that they're "failures" unless they "lose." Look at the words: that's a double negative that leads not to a positive.

I guess I'm grateful I'm still alive. Most days, anyway. Some days, it's hard to get up enough strength to care.

I am grateful, genuinely, for the support of friends and family through all this, even when it's been tough love rather than emotional support. I struggle mightily with being grateful for the bad advice that comes from good friends, sometimes: well-intentioned, but not really helpful because not really taking into account the entire constellation of choices and challenges facing me. One big piece of clichéd conventional wisdom I've been confronted with since my surgery is that if people haven't been through it, they often really do not get it. They can empathize, and support you, and mean well, and love you—and, still, sometimes they don't really get it. That's a truth I've never liked to face, since I am someone who has experienced the power of imagination and empathy to connect. But I guess it really is true, at least sometimes.

I'm finding it hard to be grateful to some friends, therefore, who mean well but really don't get it. I don't want to be a cur, and tell them to their faces that they don't get it. I don't want to seem surly or ungrateful. I do know that it's possible to be grateful for someone's well-meant intentions to help you, on the level that they obviously care for and worry about you, and still not want to hear their advice. I'm sorry, sometimes it's just not helpful.

The event and process I feel the greatest gratitude for, this past year, is being commissioned to write music. Getting paid to exercise my creativity. That has meant more to me than almost anything else. It has turned my attitude around for months, by giving me something to do other than brood on my misfortune, or engage in a self-pity party. I am also grateful for one lesson learned from having successfully completed the new music commission: Always have another project to engage in right away. Don't allow yourself any down time.

It's when you stop and have nothing to do that the bad voices start to manifest again in the back of your mind.

So begins my churlish and wounded little heart, and scarred belly still worried about its future, to discover gratitude. I do have big things to be grateful for this year—and there are no doubt smaller, simpler things as well, if I can but examine myself to tweezer them out of stasis—yet I find myself not wanting to do this. I have been too wounded, in some cases literally, to feel confident of my own spiritual ambitions anymore. I am too uncertain of outcomes. Another big lesson, this year, wisdom that cements another common spiritual law that you already knew, but now you really Know For Sure (and for which I am grateful): There are no guarantees. Life is uncertain, and not always user-friendly. Any of this could all come to a brutal end, at any moment. Do not take lie too seriously, but don't take it for granted, either. Enjoy what you have while it endures. There may be more, but you can't count on that, so don't take this moment for granted. And don't be cheap about it, either.

Maybe I'll have more to say soon, more gratitudes to write out. I'm really struggling with this. I just want this awful, awful year of bad things to be done with. Gods bless us all that the coming year is a better one, a finer one, a kinder one.

Fancy Peppers

fresh produce from the local farmer's market





morning stroll swarms
with onion pepper radish smells—
farmer's market

Transformations

Cooking is alchemy.
Ingredients are combined,
heated in a crucible,
and are transformed
into something else.

Thus we get pancakes.

Advantages of Being Stuck at Home Post-Surgery

from the Surgery Diaries

Despite a little cabin fever, my mind is pretty clear. I'm on pain meds, but a very mild dose. The first night home was really bad, I couldn't figure out how to sleep without a lot of discomfort. Since then, though, I've been getting better sleep, and the occasional nap, in my big overstuffed recliner. It's not like I never slept there before, either. It's a good chair for it. Last night, in the cool night, I also slept for an hour on the porch recliner. I find myself waking a few times during the night, but move around a little then can get back to sleep. That first night home I had vivid nightmares; but I know from experience that general anaesthesia can do that to me, till it fades off.

So yesterday I sat down at the computer and a huge amount of file management that I've been putting off for awhile. My desktop is the most organized it's been in months.

That's one advantage of being back at home but mostly resting: lots of free time to do the little tasks one never seems to have time for otherwise.

Later today my sister and I are going to rearrange the kitchen pantry much more efficiently. A family friend has gifted me a Cuisinart food processor. How did I manage to survive this long without a food processor? One wonders. Last night we made scalloped potatoes, and they were fantastic.

My sister and brother-in-law are both foodies who love to cook, and are really good at it. I've learned a lot from them over the years, and become a pretty good cook myself. Last night we made scalloped potatoes from the Julia Child recipe, and used the new (used) Cuisinart to slice everything perfectly and practically instantaneously. This will be a big boon to me from now on: no wasted energy in the kitchen, especially now, when I need most of my daily strength for healing and recovery. I'm still not allowed to use the stairs to the basement, or to lift anything heavier than twenty pounds.

I walked around my garden last night, at dusk, with my sister. My lilies are amazing this year, now that they're all starting to open. They're huge and colorful. I took some fresh photos as I ambled, neither pushing myself too hard for walking, and not trying to bend over at all just yet. Unfortunately I don't know if the morning glories are going to make it. And it needs weeding, which I'm not able to do. So the front garden, the flower garden looks terrific, while the back porch garden could be better. Oh well. If I miss a season, it's for a good reason.

So the main advantage of being stuck at home post-surgery is that I'm getting some organizing done. Things that I wanted to get done earlier, but had neither the time nor the strength to do.

Yesterday the incision itched all day, but it was that kind of itching that means healing, not infection. Everything looks clean and fine. I spent time last night with no dressing on the incision, letting it air out, and this morning it looks really good. I'm going to keep covering it till after the staples come out, though, to avoid any irritation, or catching on clothing.

Yesterday morning I felt a little emotionally and mentally fragile. Today it's a clear, breezy summer day, and my mind feels clear. I'm going to make art today, one way or another. I'm finding myself having more energy than I expected, certainly this early in the recovery process.

I owe my surgeon an apology. When he first told me that some patients immediately feel more energized, after surgery, than they had in years, I found that impossible to believe. But that seems to be what's happening to me. I am surprised and pleased. So my apologies and my gratitude to him. I'll say as much to him next time we meet.

This morning I'm also aware of how much we take for granted in life. We are so fragile, and yet to resilient. Little things are what remind you of what in life really matters. The first real food I ate after surgery was like the first meal eaten in the Garden of Eden: revelatory, delicious, overwhelmingly tasty (even with some taste bud issues caused by the anaesthesia), and sublime. Each new post-surgery First Time has been feeling that way. Each day something new. I might have taken it for granted before, but I never will again. I appreciate every moment of every day like I never have before. What a glorious morning.

Entering the Matrix

Consider creativity as a matrix of possibilities.

Visualize, if you can, a multi-dimensional grid, with various loci on the grid being locations of different types of creative action. You can add as many dimensions as you can work with. I do a lot of 3D geometry in my mind; I have a knack for spatial geometry, I've always been able to do it. (It took me longer to absorb the algebraic equations that describe spatial geometry, not to mention nonlinear dynamics, but being able to visualize everything is a big help.)

At the moment, I'm idly watching woodworking shows on public television. Or listening, mostly, as I slice red potatoes chip-thin to fry them up in olive oil and spices. I like them extra crispy, so I get the potatoes going before I throw the Angus beef burgers on the grill. When the potatoes are three-quarters done, you throw the burgers on the already-heated grill. Don't need anything on burgers but a little sea salt, but I like to spice up the potatoes. Not eating a vegetable tonight, mostly because I didn't get to the store earlier. A glass of one of my favorite wines from Paso Robles, CA, J. Lohr Wildflower Monterey Valdiguié, and my evening is complete.

Earlier today, at sunset, I was on the public park docks at the Rock River north of town, making HD video of the sunset, gold past the bare trees, the thin pinking clouds, and a hundred Canadian geese on the river, drifting, calling, sometimes taking off in flights of a dozen, heading west. Other flights come in for a landing. The geese follow the light west, as the sun goes down, till they cannot see, and rest for the night.

The woodworking (or other craft) shows have become something I leave on the TV in idle moments, if I have nothing better to do while cooking and eating, because of my own deepening interest in woodworking. I don't have the shop full of amazing tools that they use on these shows, nor do I have the tools to make some of the custom tools they use; but I'm learning. And I'm getting ideas. I love the look of laminated woods, layers of color and texture. I will work up to some larger projects someday, but I have become interested in making small wooden boxes, as parts of larger art pieces.

Think of a shadow box, which has an image or a small sculpture on its face, perhaps a relief carving or a glued abstraction. Then you open the box, and inside discover another mystery. An image, a smaller puzzle sculpture within, who knows. All of it themed to an idea, or a cluster of ideas. Imagine a wall filled with art, including boxes, photographs, triptychs, and pieces that break the frame of assumptions around both 2D and 3D art.

At some point I'd like to get a woodturning lathe, and turn some bowls from tree logs, using the grain and faults in the wood as features. Natural woods interest me for woodcarving, because of their irregularities and flaws, which bring character to the piece.

I feel myself entering a new phase of creative productivity. As if I wasn't already productive enough. I am gradually recovering my strength and health. (The IV drug therapy treatments are working, although from my perspective it seemed to take a long time to notice real results. But I'm a lot less anemic than I was, and that takes at least a couple of burdensome stressors off the list, now.) I am gradually improving my outlook on life. Even though my body is still tired much of the time, it's not all of the time, they way it had been for over a year now. Not to say there aren't still the occasional setbacks, the days where you have to take the day off and rest, and the times when you still feel like crap. Yet I feel myself more able to do things, even on those days, because my mind is clearer now than it has been in many months.

Some good things have happened, creatively, these past few weeks. I have my new piano, and have been playing regularly. I am starting to compose a new piece. I played the Monster Jam gigs for Hallowe'en in Madison last week, even though I had walking pneumonia at the time, then came home in time to give out treats to the kids. And even though I'm tired out, I'm not so tired out that I'm dead on my feet. Nothing that down and out. So I guess that's another sign of improvement.

I've made a lot of visual art this past month. October has always been a month of unusually high artistic productivity for me. I first noticed this when I was in college. Something about October always makes me extra-productive, extra-alert. There's a quality of light that's unique, a smell of autumn in the cooling air. There's the thinning of the veils between worlds coming up to Samhain. There's the sense of the Yearwheel turning, the old year ending and the new one beginning. And there's often the first tentative snowfall, which doesn't endure for now, but crisply chills the air with prescience of winter.

Creativity is for me a vast underground river of black water, which can rise up to be tasted from many wells. I don't just write words, I make visual art, and I write music. In fact, writing words is not even my principal means of artistic expression. I know I've said this all before; I'm restating it to make the case for another kind of analogy about creativity.

My purpose here is to demonstrate that creativity is not a scare resource. It's infinite. One can always tap in.

I recently read some commentaries on fine art by critics who, it seems to me, don't really understand the creative process. One of these opinions was that anything that isn't recognized as fine art is not art. Another opinion was that artists should be in a vacuum, with no consideration of the rest of the world. Both of these opinions are incredibly wrong-headed, and no working artist would agree with them.

Dealing with the second opinion first, it's not possible to be a human being, making art or not, and be totally isolated from the world, from the need to make a living, from relationship, from contact. HIstory has proven that total isolation is liable to drive one crazy. Of course it's also been proven that too many distractions interfere with getting the work done. So the truth, as usual, lies in the balance.

Now, I might actually agree that fine art is art, and that many things that are called art are not. But creativity is not restricted to the fine arts. Anyone who states that creativity is only in the fine arts knows nothing about creativity. Creativity can be found anywhere apply imagination, intuition, ingenuity, and heart to whatever they're doing. Creativity can be found in cooking, in woodworking, in photography and videography, in winemaking, and almost anywhere else that people apply themselves. In my experience ,creativity is the most available thing in the universe, as abundant as hydrogen. The only thing that blocks you from applying your creative process to whatever you're doing is your own inner idea that you can't. Or some critical idiot telling you that you shouldn't. Both of these voices are just plain wrong.

So consider creativity as a matrix of possibilities. Visualize those possibilities as points in space on a multi-dimensional grid. Some cluster close together; others are farther apart, some quite far off by themselves. Each locus is a way of being creative. Not all of them are fine art. But all of them are true.

Uphill Struggle Against All Odds

Most people don't realize how much your health colors your perceptions, much less your ability to be creative. Most people don't ever think about it, until confronted with it. Most people who are generally healthy, barring the occasional cold or flu virus, have no clue how those who aren't feel, day to day. They take for granted that normal activity means you can do just about anything you want to. There's nothing intentionally malicious in this, yet things assumed in ignorance can be just as hurtful. One thing healthy people don't ever think of: there are days you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel, and you have no belief whatsoever that you'll ever get well again. Another thing healthy people never seem able to understand (perhaps till they get sick themselves) is that each day can be an uphill fight, and they take for granted that you can do things that maybe you can't. When you're enduring a chronic illness, having to spend a lot of precious daily energy budget on educating the ignorant can be frustrating, taxing you beyond endurance. But you're stuck with it: education is the only way to get folks to comprehend. (Empathy is usually too much to hope for, but you have to start somewhere.) You're not allowed to just complain, though: you have to be stoic, righteous, and teach. Pity and sympathy are offensive: they're shallow, sentimental, and self-serving, and do not evince real understanding. A lot of the time in life, people listen to your words but they don't hear you.

The past few weeks I've been so weak and sick I've only been out of the house a few times, and never for a long time. For someone who loves spending his time in the outdoors, camera in hand, that can be pure torture. Thank all the gods for my garden. One of the reasons I've been developing a dense, lush garden since I bought my home is to use it to make photographs. But another reason is to be surrounded by half-wild greenery, so that even on a day when I'm too weak to do much I can still walk around the house and get lost in the greening. Gardening is a ripe spiritual practice, full of potential and healing. The lilacs are in full bloom right now; I trimmed a few flowers and put them in a vase in the dining room, their scent permeating the air, the scent of May Day, of Beltane, of spring. Yesterday, before it began raining again, I did some weeding. A half hour of intense on-your-knees work and I was panting hard, heart racing, and had to stop: such is the curse of a chronic illness that produces debilitating tiredness. Any exertion, literally any exertion, can leave you panting.

A few months after my father died, and a few months before my mother also died, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis coupled with irritable bowel syndrome. (Principal side-effects are debilitating tiredness, a lot of colonic bleeding that can produce anemia, and a severely touchy digestion.) Those are all literally life-changing events; if you think they don't affect how you make art, or affect the art you make, you're fooling yourself. (Medical trivia: if your doctors call it a "syndrome" that means they recognize the symptoms, but they don't know what causes it, and they don't know how to cure it.) I also went on a gluten-free diet at that time. That's all tied together: a very touchy digestive system, with the goal to still eat well while at the same time removing as many irritants from the diet as possible. I also had to cut way back on certain vegetables that are irritants, like broccoli. (I won't miss cabbage; I hate cabbage anyway. The only good cabbage is that which is placed in a clay pot with peppers and other ingredients and buried in the ground for weeks or months, to make authentic Korean kimchee.) There is a stress component to ulcerative colitis: high stress can bring on a flare-up, or relapse, or whatever you want to call it. It's no wonder an attack came on after Dad died. Last fall, a flare-up which is still in progress was brought on by the stress of dealing with my uncle's death, and my aunt's very nasty passage into Alzheimer's. I was able to build up enough strength to go on a roadtrip to California and Oregon this past February, but since I got back home I've been mostly sick. Chronic illness means you can be sick for months at a time; I'm going on seven months of illness right now. It's hard to feel like it will ever stop. I've learned not to talk about it, even when asked, because people want to hear that you're doing fine, not that you're not. No one likes a complainer.

Your appetite goes away, but you might not lose any weight, because you're unable to undertake even normal exercise. You're just too weak. Sometimes I live vicariously. I often enjoy watching Anthony Bourdain's television show No Reservations, which is sort of a punk-foodie show. If Julia Child was the classic American foodie show, the very first foodie show on US television, the equivalent of classical music or French accordion restaurant music, then Tony's show is the foodie equivalent of punk rock, with maybe a little heavy metal thrown in. Even though I'm classically trained, a composer with degrees in music, I've always been more of a punk rocker in attitude than a music-conservatory high-art snob. All music is good, though—as are all things foodie. (Is Alice Waters the Chopin of foodies? Is Ferran Adria more akin to Charles Ives or to Olivier Messiaen? Are raw-food ideologues more akin to bad hip-hop or to bad lounge music? I merely speculate; just because it's fun.) What I love about TV shows like No Reservations is that Tony Bourdain loves life, loves food, isn't afraid to be wrong or look stupid, and lives life at full speed. There are days when I can barely get through the day's chores, and it saves me to be reminded that you can still life with relish, with gusto, with joie de vivre! even when you're not able to do much more than boil rice and fry bacon. I have a small shelf of cookbooks, which I love to keep on hand and sample from with sensual pleasure, even though most days I don't have the strength to cook anything very fancy. Some days plain-and-simple and well-loved beats any four-star restaurant.

There is eros and thanatos in every life experience, including that of being ill. Some things that have no cure come to be recognized as bearing gifts. Focus too much on pathology and you become pathological. (You cannot look into the Void too long without the Void also looking into you.) It's not a matter of trying to figure out the "purpose" or "meaning" of an illness, as though it were a puzzle to be solved; rather, it's about learning to create meaning within the sphere of having to cope with and endure your illness. In other words, how you continue to live life with pleasure and love even when it's a constant uphill battle and you often feel like you're sliding back down no matter what you do. Find "meaning" in that. There are those among the generally-healthy who will try to encourage you by telling you to seek the lesson in the wound: a new age quest for meaning in all things. But such pseudo-wisdom ignores the dark gods, the dark night of the soul, acedia, and the as-yet-untransformed aspects of deity. There are other who quote the Nietzschean doctrine of "Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." I knew a cancer survivor once who rephrased that, with delicate and forceful relish, as "Whatever doesn't kill you, missed." Period.

Living is not just an act of will. Nor is it a purely intellectual exercise. (Well, I suppose for some writers it is, those whose lives are tepid and lukewarm and untroubled by actual sorrow, for whom is more virtual than real. Long may they wave.) Being sick brings you into an intense awareness of your body unlike any other process; except perhaps open-hearted, little-toe-curling, fulfilling, tantric sex. Healthy people take for granted that they can have sex any time they want to, that the flesh will always be as willing to perform as the soul is to contemplate. Sensual pleasure, even sexual arousal, is available to me even in my nights and days of debilitating tiredness—eros is always present—but fulfillment may have to be postponed. I tire out more easily than I used to; I need to take pauses to get my breath back. I'll state for the record this truth about love and sex, which I have learned from being sick and tired all the time: lovers who expect me to go out of my way, and do all the work of relationship, will no longer be placed first among equals. If you can't do at least half of the work to meet me halfway, you cost me too much effort, and I can't afford to waste my time on you. Period.

I pause for a moment to make something iconic. A piece of digital art, perhaps, or a literal icon. Yesterday as I was out driving around town doing some shopping errands, an idea for a multimedia series of images came to me. All the same image, but presented in several ways, showcasing the various media I work in. A series of small icons, to be tucked away in the corner of the gallery, where some might not even notice. People ordinarily overlook the small corners, anyway, and focus on the oversized, prominent, gaudy big art in the middle of the wall. Big and loud is better, they say; even when it's not.

I know I'm still alive, despite all my worries about not having the strength to work for a living, despite whatever internal bad weather my body is putting me through today, despite shivering on even warmish days because I'm anemic—despite all that, I know I'm still alive because I can still make art. I can still write something, whether a poem or a small rambling essay. I can spend a few hours seated at my worktable transcribing, proofreading and correcting a musical score. I can get out the Dremel rotary tool and carve something, an icon, or a symbol, or a simple picture, into a slab of wood. I can garden as much as I can till I have to stop. I can draw something. If I've become a better writer, more fluid and focused, it's because I've had a lot of practice from having nothing better to do on those days when I've been forced to sit on my ass all day. Of course, now that I've been booted out of, or chosen to leave, every writing community I've ever participated in, I could also be going down a dead-end path in my writing, and not know it. On the other hand, those who booted me out displayed exactly the same sort of intolerant, judgmental ignorance that the worst of the generally-healthy display towards the chronically-ill: since we're not supposed to "dwell on" or otherwise talk about being sick, we get blamed for being unable to live up to the ignorant expectations who don't want to know what's really been going on. Call that judgmentalism whatever you will: some psychologists call it pathological narcissism. Everybody has a shadow side.

One other aspect of this chronic illness is that it's not blatantly obvious. To most people I don't look like I'm disabled, or sick. It's largely invisible to them, until I get into a situation where I really have to sit down, right now, and then they get alarmed. But that's how it is: you can be going along fairly okay, and suddenly you hit that wall of exhaustion, and you have to stop, right now. There's no choice. It's not something you can just push through or tough out in some macho-man fantasy of playing through the pain. For one thing, if you try to just push through it by sheer force of will, you make it physically worse, and you might need two days to recover rather than one. There are always consequences. For another thing, you have to learn how to manage your daily energy budget, or suffer those consequences. So you have to learn to say "No" to things that you do want to do—there's no getting around it, you have to say No sometimes to one thing so that you can say Yes to something else. It becomes a matter of forging priorities.

I pause again to necessarily visit my most familiar walls in the house: the bathroom. I'm thinking about installing bookshelves. Maybe a favorite photograph or two to look at. Perhaps a small self-contained stereo with a CD player. Things to keep the mind engaged while you pass the time where out of necessity you must pass the time.

You have to talk yourself into doing what you want to do. It's an uphill struggle to hook up to that inspiration, to keep your life positive and affirming. Making art is one of the few things I know to do which never fails to improve my day. Even on my worst, most challenging days, making some kind of art, making anything, keeps me feeling like life is worth living. Perhaps most generally-healthy people don't understand how important even such a small thing can be, to give you a reason to go on living. When the quality of suffering is high, the mercy of small gods is deep.

Is it worth it? It can be. It can be worth it just to have gotten through the day feeling reasonably okay about yourself, ready to wake up tomorrow and see what's changed. The uphill struggle against all odds can be worth it, even on those days when you feel like you've just been treading water, not getting anywhere, if you can remember to look back on the day and say: look, an icon; a poem; a piece of music. I bloody well did that! That's good enough.

Thanksgiving Day and Night

Intense, vivid dreams last night. Dreams with family, memories, in familiar places and also in places never seen before. A large house in summer time, my family there; cousins and aunts coming to visit, after some funerals before the dreamtime; did you meet that one relative before? yes, at my grandmother’s funeral some years ago; a house like a version of my old house in Ann Arbor, but larger, distorted, harder to get around in; yet my room was like my old room; talking with my Dad at the breakfast table, before everyone arrives, then going back up to my room to change from my casual non-dress into real clothes, as the family members pull up in front of the house, in a giant red convertible; my one favorite cousin has come to look much like her mother, but softer, more open, and she is driving the convertible. So, dreams of family and friends, dreams of gathering together for a social occasion, to eat a meal.


Dreamwhale surfacing, Pinole, CA, 2005

Today’s Thanksgiving Day. I had plans, but they’ve all fallen through, and I’ll probably be spending the holiday alone. I’ve been too sick, too poor, to do anything different. I’m not really up for a long drive or other travel plans, anyway. Just as well, probably, to stay home and rest, have a quiet day.

So. All my plans for Thanksgiving fell through, and whatever other plans might have developed, too, as no one called me back. I'm too sick to travel without exhausting myself, yet everyone seems to expect that I'm the one who always has to do that work of travel, in order for us to get together. So I've been alone all day. I have been having a mostly quiet day, listening to some music, and reading and writing, although once the sun goes down here, all too early, I plan to do some baking, and make myself a small exotic feast. Why not? I love cooking, and I love eating, and tant pis if none of my friends could be bothered about getting together this year.

Late last night, before going to bed, I got to watch it snow for the first time here this fall: wet heavy snow that whitened everything, but was gone by the time I arose again in the late morning. It’s windy, cold, and blustery out there today. I may stay in all day, or I may go out and do a little stonework in the garden. I’ll see how I feel in the next few hours.

•

I just got back in from working a little in the cold, wet garden. I did some stonework gardening, finally, that I've wanted to do for about a week. It felt good to get my hands into the dirt. Always very healing to connect to the earthmagic. Now I'm sipping Prince of Wales tea on the porch, and warming up my bones again.

Now the light is fading. It’s getting dark, and I’ll turn on the houselights soon.

I made a large double spiral at the northwest garden corner of the house, where I haven’t been able to get anything to grow yet. There are those wild bushes there, and groundcover, but that patch has been bare. Maybe I’ll try to plant some lavender there, in between the spiral arms, come spring.


Spiral in sand, San Gregorio Beach, CA, 2005

I also spontaneously did more stonework in the bedded garden on the east side of the house. The usual feeling of being called to make a land art sculpture, which happens at certain sacred places when I’m traveling. The spirit or energy of a place calls to me. After I made the large double spiral that I’d envisioned making since last week, I had more stones in my pail, so I followed my feelings, and went over to the east side of the house. I’ve been putting different kinds of groundcover in there, to merge between the bushes. It’s very bad soil, but certain kinds of groundcover, such as periwinkle, will thrive and spread there anyway. I also transplanted some chives in there this past spring, and they’ve done well. I made a little stone path from house to wall, near the water faucet, and two stand alone spirals. It felt good to work in the earth today.

If you can’t garden with plants, this late in the year, you can still garden with stones and earth.


Turtle Creek tributary upstream, WI, 2009

I was thinking about land art sculptures, the past few days. I need to go down to the river later, down to Turtle Creek, maybe tomorrow, in the afternoon. I can make art along the river banks there. I can gather some wood for carving later, fallen debris or whatever. I’ll dry it over the winter in the garage, as I am drying the wood from the tree branches that fell down in the windstorm a couple of months ago. I had been thinking that I couldn’t make any land art around here, and I realize now that I can. I just have to go down to the river path and do some exploring, walking, and making down in there.

•

As the sky darkened, I lit candles in several rooms, and turned on only a few of the electric lights, just the minimal.

I baked white chocolate scones while I was making a reduced glaze from the juice of two fresh-squeezed oranges. It takes about two hours to simmer the orange juice down to a thick, gooey glaze.



Then I pan-roasted long strips of breast-meat chicken in olive oil and lemon pepper and spices. When the chicken was cooked through I laid it on a bed of fresh baby spinach over rice. I glazed the chicken strips with the reduced orange sauce, and ate the meal with a couple of glasses of wine.



And that was my feast for the day. I made it for myself, and ate it myself, and felt good about it all. I actually have a bit of that eaten-too-much overstuffed feeling you're supposed to get on Thanksgiving Day. So that feels good. I might have a pie of apple pie with vanilla ice cream before going to bed, later on. Meanwhile, I'm sitting wrapped in blankets with another cup of tea.

And that was my solitary feast. Shared here, now, and thus made less solitary, and more convivial.

Wolf Rules: Attending the Bones

I discovered this printed piece on the General Wolf Rules for Life, 25 years or more ago. I don't remember where I found it; it was a flyer, or an advertisement, or an article reprint. I was so captivated by it, it made so much sense to me, it was so right and true in an almost totemic sense, that I cut it out and saved it. I remember that at one point I made my own artwork around it: a flyer with clipart illustrations and this text; I may still have a copy of that somewhere, although it's probably 15 years or so ago that I made it.

Last week I was going through my box of old journals, looking for something else—looking for my poem journal from my teens, wherein I wrote my first hidden, furtive homoerotic poems, when I was 16 or 17 years old—and I found the Wolf Rules again, tucked inside the endpapers of one of my old journals.

I have thought about these Wolf Rules over the years. I look back on my life, and I realize that the Wolf Rules express my core values better than any formalized doctrine from any institutional religious tradition I've ever known. They resonate with those decentralized, informal, nature-centered religious traditions that I have been attracted to, at various times, from Native American paths to Taoism to Wicca to post-Christian creation-centered spiritual traditions. The lineage is Paleolithic. I hold very old values, not new ones. Not pre-human values, but values grounded in the earth, in living on the earth as part of the earth, not separate from it. These take us all the way back to our unitary consciousness, to the epoch of the bicameral mind, to the sacred heart of the shamans doing their healings by firelight, starlight, and moonlight.

The Christian doctrine of the "Fall" into "original sin" paradoxically raises many humans in their own esteem as placed above the Earth, separate from it, not part of it. It is this separation that many eco-centered poets—the bards of the earth herself—have rejected, from Robinson Jeffers to Gary Snyder, among others. Jeffers reminded us that our place in existence is not at its pinnacle, but among its creatures; Snyder reminds us that Paleolithic values of interdependence and husbandry are not radical, but ancient. If poetry is a way, which it is, then poets such as these are its way-keepers.

These Wolf Rules for Life make more sense to me, even now, than many other formulations. There is a no-bullshit logic to them about what really matters. (The rest is mind-drama.) I realize that in my own way I've been living by them. I rove often, I cavil in moonlight, I attend to the bones, I make love, and I howl when I need to, sometimes from loneliness, other times from joy. Howling is a connection, a way of communicating. What is singing in a chorus but enacting the howl? What is writing but the howl? Tuning my ears has always come natural and easy—both in terms of literally tuning my ears, as a musician whose sense of pitch and timbre have always been precise and accurate, and also as someone who listens. I have always been hypersensitive to my sonic environment, aware of every sound, aware of their signal-to-noise ratio.

Attending to the bones means remembering my history, remembering where I've been. It also means knowing what lies where. Where my caches and special places are. I rove between my personal sacred places every time I get in the truck and do a roadtrip. My caches of bones are scattered far and wide, and I attend to them each time I travel, as well as when I'm at home.

Rendering loyalty is so fundamental to my worldview I rarely talk about it. it's just assumed. If you're my true friend, my have my loyalty, and I'll do anything for you that's within my power to do. I remember once, in a sweat lodge, when all the people in that dark and hot womb were invited to speak out loud the qualities we wanted to invite into the lodge, I remember speaking out with a voice much bolder than usual, "Come, fierceness and loyalty!" That outcry rippled around the lodge, with something more than usual force, it felt to me. I knew I was speaking a profound truth from a profound, ancient place within myself. A totemic place, a Wolf place.

Loving the children is something I've always done, even though I have no children of my own. I like kids, and kids seem to like me. Even kids shy around strangers often come up to greet me, at dinner parties and gatherings of family. Kids have pretty good radar about who they can trust, who genuinely cares for them. I remember a time when a friend's child came up and sat in my lap as I was working on the computer; just quietly sat there, asking nothing, just being present. I continued to work, and he just sat and watched for awhile, then eventually wandered off. I felt fiercely protective in that moment; a feeling I don't often get to feel often for specific people, but which I generally feel about the clan-circle of people who I care about, who are my adopted families, who are my close friends. And I feel protective of those my circle cares about, including the children.

Eating. Well, I'll come out of the closet, finally, as a foodie. I love food. I love all kinds of food. I love cooking, and I love eating. I have dietary restrictions now, because of my health, and I have known foods that I'm allergic to, or that trigger bowel irritations I'd rather avoid. I've been enjoying reading through roving chef Anthony Bourdain's books, and quite enjoying them. I know that I can't eat half of the foods that he loves to eat, because of my health issues; but what we have in common is a lust for life, a lust for good food, and a love of great cooking, no matter where we find, no matter who does it. I have memories of great meals at roadside foodstands in central Java, where I was the only foreigner eating amongst the neighborhood locals: saté-skewered grilled meats and tubes of sticky rice wrapped in a banana leaf doused with ketchap sauce. My own neighborhood in central Surakarta was renowned for its many foodstalls, and I knew several of them intimately, or at least had tried everything on their menus. I love to cook, and I've become a pretty good chef. I have no pretensions to being a chef, and I have not the technique of a culinary institute graduate. But I love to cook, and that's what it's all about.

The Wolf Rule it's taken me the longest time to learn was to rest. It goes against the grain of my natural impatience, which is driven by the anxiety I've always felt that time is running out, and there's so much more I want to accomplish before my time is up. A sense of mortality I've always had, from a very young age. Perhaps it came from seeing dead bodies when I was a boy in India—those images of bodies being burned on the ghats at the side of the sacred river; those beggarfolk in the street who finally let go and pass over—perhaps it came from seeing my own grandparents pass over in my teens. It doesn't really matter. I've always been impatient. I deal with it all the time. And I've learned a great deal of patience, especially in certain arenas, and it's taken me a long time to learn it. I remember the "Weird Al" Yankovic ant-mellow parody song, "I'll Be Mellow When I'm Dead." That could have been my theme song, at one point in my life. I still appreciate passion, the lust for life. Sometimes I've only learned to rest only because my physical body forced me to stop, and rest, and take care of myself: take a pause. In recent years, though, I've learned the value of rest. Of sitting in the morning sunlight, sipping my orange juice, not thinking about anything in particular, meditating, whatever. The virtue of doing nothing. Rest is recharging, revitalizing, refreshing. What a wolf knows that we could all stand to know is how to rest, in the moment: to take any opportunity for rest, and inhabit it fully, before getting back to roving. Just stop. My chronic illness has one symptom, a debilitating fatigue, which I've had to learn to manage, and the Wolf Rules have been invaluable for this. When you're tired, sit down and rest. When you get going again, you'll have more of your strength back than if you'd kept pushing yourself so hard that eventually you splatter yourself against a wall of exhaustion—and then you'll be forced to rest, whether or not you wanted to. I'm learning to just take lots of little rests—lie down, pant, pause for awhile—before getting back up to rove on.

So the Wolf Rules have served me very well in life, and continue to serve. I realize that these little values, these ways of looking at the world, are core to my attitude. I might forget them for awhile, but they're my touchstones. I always knew and believed them, even before I encountered this formulation, on that old flyer or ad or whatever it was. I felt so charged, so alive, when I first read the Wolf Rules—such a feeling of innate recognition—that it seems obvious in retrospect that what happened was my recognition of an elegant formulation of something I already knew to be the way of life, deep down in my bones. There's a very Zen aspect to the Wolf Rules: a wolf can teach you many lessons about living in the Now, in the present moment, and not getting caught up in worry and mind-drama. Of living completely immersed in the experiences of the moment; of full commitment to whatever one is doing at the moment, and living it fully. Then being able to let go of the past, and shift immediately to the next thing that needs your attention. No clinging, no hating what's gone, just the Now.

The wolf eats the monkey-mind. Zen Master Coyote Roshi smiles slightly, leading the dojo in zazen, a few bright canary feathers still caught in his mustache.

I attend to the bones by looking again at the Wolf Rules, and finding them still an accurate summation of my core values, what I know in my bones to be true and real. All the rest is mind-drama, which can be healed and undone simply by returning to being in the Now, to living by the General Wolf Rules for Life.

Inventing Dinner

I'm the type of kitchen-witch cook that rarely plans out a huge and complex meal to make and serve. I do love cooking for friends, hosting dinner parties, creating a convivial atmosphere for talk and laughter. I like a good glass of wine with dinner, and my tastes in wine incline towards two regions: Tuscany in Italy, especially the Orvieto special district; and the Paso Robles district in central California, which to my taste produces much more interesting wines than Napa Valley, the most well-known wine region in California.

I do like to cook the occasional elaborate, complex meal, following a complicated recipe, as a complete dining experience. Sometimes hosting a dinner party is an excuse to make a more elaborate meal, just for fun; the occasion is an excuse to celebrate life in all its sensual aspects. I make a Thanksgiving turkey, compleat with all the trimmings and home-made mashed potatoes and drippings gravy, that folks tell me is pretty sublime. But a lot of the time I like to invent dinner on the spot.

Invention. I look to see what ingredients I've got lying about, I look in the fridge to see what's there, what might be left over from some previous meal preparation. I check out what I might have lying about that I haven't used up since my last trip to the grocery store. I make up a dinner with whatever lies at hand, rather than needing to pre-plan a meal then go out and shop for it before coming home to make it. Sometimes the simple plain food experience is the most rewarding and enriching.

Tonight, just before sunset, I started dinner by grilling some asparagus shoots in lemon pepper and butter. I also added a bit of paprika. While the asparagus was cooking, I diced some potatoes and stir-fried them in olive oil until they crisped up golden, even black in spots. Then I added chopped green onions. When the potatoes had mostly browned, I added some diced chicken breast strips, and stir-fried them all together in the same pan, adding a dash of lemon pepper and sweet black pepper, till everything was cooked evenly through. Add a glass of Campogrande Orvieto Classico (a light white wine from that favorite region of mine), and dinner was perfect. I sat down in the last light of the day to eat with gusto, enjoying every moment, smell, and bite.

When you write a poem, or an essay, this is a good way to start out: Look around you and see what's available to write about. Don't have a pre-planned idea or theme, a pre-existing supposition about what you want to write about, or some Grand Theme to add your voice to. Just look around and notice what's there in front of you. Start from there, and let the poem expand outwards from observation. A lot of good haiku start in observation, in noticing what the world around one has to offer, and lift off from the specific to the universal.

Cooking is alchemy. It's chemistry: the ingredients are changed by being heated, and some chemical transformations happen. Cooking is a kind of earth magic, that both raises the spirits and grounds the soul in the earthiness of everyday like, of daily pleasure and the joy of self-sufficiency.

Poetry is alchemy of the self. The magical aspect is the that writer can be chemically transformed by the process of writing; and at poetry's best, that transfers to the reader, who shares the writer's experience while inhabiting the poem. Poet is not necessarily self-expression, because poetry is not only the ego talking to itself about its daily life. Poetry can be the transcription of the process of personal transformation. It can be that which takes us out of the self entirely, or connects us to our larger, usually concealed Self. You might yourself ending with a poem that has been transformed from being a combination of different ingredients into being a new synergistic unity. The dinner is more than the combination of the ingredients, it's their blending, their transformation, their effect upon each other as each releases it essence into the overall matrix.

A lot of writers tend to choose sides about their writing, and choose to believe that great writing is more cooked than raw. Cooked, in the sense that culture is more habitual, more developed, with societal rules and tendencies more or less codified into accepted channels of conduct. Raw in the sense that anything goes, there are no preconceived notions of how one might evade detection from other predators, and alertness is one's best defense. In writing, the cooked approach to working implies lots of revision and rewrite, a struggle to get things just so, perfectly framed, said, and embalmed. Rawness in writing evokes spontaneity, passion, even those passions we don't often admit to, and possibly an environment of orgiastic play and innuendo. Raw and cooked aren't mutually exclusive, and each style or viewpoint can be balanced in mutual support, when the ships' commander calls you on the carpet to report, justify, or partake of a possibly illicit liaison.

In writing as in cooking, in poetry as in wine selection, I use what's in front of me, what I can discover, and what my gut intuition tells me to follow. The spirit of haiku writing is to observe and respond, encapsulated as art, poetry, or haibun.

In writing as a kitchen-witch cook, planning tends to be set aside in favor of spontaneity, strict formalism tends to be abandoned in favor of emergent form, and one uses what is lying at hand. Classical allusions and literary allusions, tropes, and quotes were one problem with the first generation of Modern poets: they read a great deal of literature, and they referred to it often; classical allusions and symbols in their poems could sometimes overwhelm their other insights. One reason the early Modernist poets were often confusing to their readers is because the poets were so very well-read, and assumed their readers were even when they weren't, and couldn't make their allusions natural and smooth. No wonder the readers couldn't keep up with them, leading eventually to our current state of many insular poetic islands talking only to themselves, rarely to each other, and almost not at all to the general reader. Or in some cases, talking apparently clearly to the general reader, but with a tone of condescension that at times seems like the poet is slumming rather than being authentic.

The natural voice, the rhythm and tone of speech, the poet's plain personal voice. These have analogies in cooking as well, with the current very important return to simple plain foods gathered fresh and cooked simply and well. I'm thinking of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, founded by Alice Waters, a showcase of good simple food bought locally, organic and fresh, prepared well, and served fresh. I'm also thinking of the Slow Food movement and its emphasis on creating community and sustaining the environment.

What are today's Poetryworld equivalents of Slow Food and the Alice Waters style of plain and simple, fresh and good? Perhaps this isn't a good analogy, between poetry and eating, because it's hard to find direct comparisons, examples that make the direct connection. But perhaps the problem is that Poetryworld lacks what the cooking world has, or rather has rediscovered: a set of values that involve pleasure and sensual living, simplicity and taste.

Perhaps Poetryworld's dominating Literary Establishment is over-cooked, and lacks freshness. It seems to me that few poetries can be more overcooked than Language Poetry and its cousins; such poetries disassociate from the soma, and emphasize cerebral pleasure and meaninglessness. They are the opposite of plain and simple living, and that is perhaps why they are so disconnected from having an audience of general readers rather than poets who are professional peers. Yet there are poets of the earth, who write plain and simple, and who share the Slow Food values. Gary Snyder calls them Paleolithic values, and points out their environmental sustainability. Wendell Berry discusses living on the land in partnership rather than in domination, and the contrasts between effective husbandry and rampant exploitation. But this isn't merely a "Nature Poetry" phenomenon, I don't think. I see some kind of grass-roots changes, mostly still nameless and undefined, beginning to emerge from behind the edifice of postmodern poetry's dispersing mist of relativism, solipsism and narcissistic self-regard.

Lately I feel like there's some kind of poetry emerging that might use all the crafty tools of post-Modern avant-garde poetry, but do so with the intent to connect with the land that sustains us, rather than continue to float above it. I can't put a name to it, and I don't think it's a formalized movement, school or -ism. It may be nothing more than a rebellious dissatisfaction with the dead-end corners that poetry has painted itself into over the past half-century or so. It may be that some poets have simply started to go off in search of something more satisfying and belly-filling than what we're told to like by the whirlwind of literary fashion, and the vaporous poetries that now dominate the scene. Certainly an aspect of this is conservative, in the sense that it's a reversion to being connected to soil and ground and basement of being; but it's not, I think, reactionary. It feels indifferent to rather than forcefully rejecting what poetry has become. It's an old-fashioned brand of conservatism, akin to a farm family's husbandry of their acres; it is neither the neo-conservativism of the poetic neo-formalists, nor the pandering of the plain-speech, prosaic small-scale observations of the reactionary simplistic poets who who reject more complex poetics purely on the grounds that they make the average reader think too hard. Both the pandering populist poets and the avant-gardists (all avant-garde, all the time) are dead ends. My sense is that this emergent poetry, still largely unnoticed and undefined, is searching for alternatives that are neither reactionary dead-ends nor attached to the values of alienation and heroism broadcasted ever since the Romantics became the Moderns. Neither of those stances are satisfying any more. I'm stumbling around trying to articulate a sense of something that hasn't declared itself yet in anything like manifesto, but which is quietly percolating along its own paths and trails, charting a new way through the brush.

What comes after postmodernism in poetry? I doubt it's a simplistic return to older styles of poetry, or a reversion to neo-conservative neo-formalist reactionary back-stepping. I doubt very much that the old patterns and forms really can be revitalized in any meaningful way; a great deal of neo-formalism is after all just a clinging to familiar well-known brands of pattern-spinning. But something is coming, and perhaps has already started to bloom, all unnoticed. Something more raw, more spontaneous, more connected to the earth, the body, the tongue, and the scents and sights of life. Perhaps it's poetry we can learn to savor again, poetry that has body and sensual taste in it, that reconnects us to those parts of our selves and our experience that all these fashionable head-poetries have disparaged for so long. Perhaps it's a poetry we can keep on tongue, with aftertastes of a full-bodied vintage that complements the lingering tickle of paprika on the edge of the tongue.

I don't really know. Desire and invention are the tools of new creation, it seems to me. The actions of will and dominating control that a highly-planned recipe-based meal require take a lot of effort and planning. Perhaps a kitchen-witch, slow-food poetry need only resort a renewed and vigorous involvement with observation, spontaneity, and somatic, sensual engagement.

The Purpose of Waffles

What is the purpose of waffles? or, for that matter, pancakes?

Of course, everyone knows the answer to that.



The purpose of waffles is to be a delivery mechanism.



To carry maple syrup to the mouth, and the taste buds.



That is the purpose of waffles. Of course it's nice when the waffles themselves are delicious. As these were.



In the meantime, they also serve who pose for still-life photographs. In the sunlight on the kitchen counter, in my sunlit still-life counter studio, this was an irresistible opportunity. Enjoy the waffles. I certainly did. (And, they're gluten-free.)

Zingerman's Deli

I was in Ann Arbor, MI, my old home town, around the turn of the year, a few weeks ago, and I did what one must do every time one visits Ann Arbor: I stopped in at Zingerman's Deli. Here's a photo:



Well, okay, that's actually a photo that I've heavily worked over in Photoshop to make it look like a watercolor painting. I'm always exploring new techniques in Photoshop to make pure photos look more like paintings or drawings. This is a new watercolor emulation process I'm trying out. (Click on the image itself for a larger version.) I've developed one or two original filters and processes in Photoshop that are good for pen-and-ink looks; this watercolor look is still a work in progress, in terms of dialing in the settings.

One thing that must be remembered is that every image needs individual tweaking. Even a standardized look is never identical from image to image, but has been slightly customized in each case to maximize the look for that particular image, with its individual color balance, lighting, and contrast.

In some cases, I've printed Photoshop images out, worked them over with paints or colored pencils or technical pens, then brought them back into the digital realm for finishing touches. It's interesting to work back and forth in both analog and digital media, and find a good blend of the two. It makes for some interesting effects. I'll be experimenting more with this anon.

Of course, if you want to just go visit Zingerman's directly, which I highly advise everyone should do, you can start by visiting the Zingerman's website.