Summer Solstice
posted by Art Durkee at 12:43 AM
2 comments
Friday, June 22, 2012
Monday, May 28, 2012
In the Garden: Purple Hearts
Purple-hearted flowers, in my garden. Chives and columbine. Large clumps of each.
Columbine flowers are fascinating. They are layered, complex shapes, with different colors. This pale purple and white on some, deeper blue and white on others. I had three or four clumps of columbine this year, that exploded with color and lasted a long time.
This last photo of columbine is my favorite of this group of photos. It shows the design of my little garden to advantage. Even though I don't have a lot of space for my garden, I have been strongly influenced by Japanese Zen gardens in my planning, and this shows that well.
Columbine flowers are fascinating. They are layered, complex shapes, with different colors. This pale purple and white on some, deeper blue and white on others. I had three or four clumps of columbine this year, that exploded with color and lasted a long time.
This last photo of columbine is my favorite of this group of photos. It shows the design of my little garden to advantage. Even though I don't have a lot of space for my garden, I have been strongly influenced by Japanese Zen gardens in my planning, and this shows that well.
Labels: flowers, gardens, Japanese gardens, photography
posted by Art Durkee at 1:04 PM
0 comments
Saturday, May 12, 2012
In the Garden Grows the Heart
This spring I've been too distracted, too busy, occasionally too tied up in knots medically, even depressed, to give my garden much attention. Suffice to say that I have been challenged, unhappy, and mostly not having a good time. I haven't been physically sick—this is the first winter in almost twenty years that I have not been stricken with a cold or flu. I got through the entire winter with no illnesses, no walking pneumonia, nothing. That's new since the surgery.
I do love getting my hands in the dirt: it's very healing. But for one reason or another, I haven't had much time for gardening this year so far. That's okay, though, because over the past few years since I bought my house I've been planning and panting a garden that is mostly self-maintaining, mostly perennials, and can tolerate neglect.
The garden is designed so that some flowers are blooming, giving color and light to my home, from early spring through the first frost in autumn: there is always color, always fragrance. When the crocuses fade, the daffodils and tulips begin. At the end of the season, after the lilies have gone, the chrysanthemums reach their peak, sometimes lasting till All Hallows.
This year my crabapple tree was astounding. Just bursting with colors, and full of very happy bees.
In addition to the idea that something should always be in bloom, I planned my garden to inspire me photographically. I make new images every year. Even when I neglect my gardening duties, it mostly takes care of itself, and surprises me. This year the lilies have split again and in a month or so I will surrounded by literally dozens of lilies in several varieties and colors. Come July, the perfume will be overpowering in the evening, just as I desire.
This year the columbines have exploded, bursting out in huge bunches of blue, white and purple.
at sunset the bees
hover fitfully over stars:
blue columbine
The bleeding hearts lasted a full month, due to the initial warm days followed by weeks of cool and wet. The garden looks a little wild and dense this year—more English country garden than Japanese Zen garden—and the little dry sculptures I've made out of rocks gathered throughout my travels are mostly hidden by green growing things.
I admit it. This garden has taken me years to plan and assemble, but I love it. It's the talk of the neighbors, who complement the garden every time we meet on the street by the mailboxes, or just to chat.
Labels: gardens, haiku, nature, Pan, photography
posted by Art Durkee at 12:48 AM
0 comments
Monday, September 12, 2011
Smile on the Void
A certain lushness in the field of remembrance, before
everything else kicks in and you're brought back to ground.
It's been a long time since Europe called, with scent, sound,
and long summers. Land so long inhabited by humans
that it sometimes loses its own way; but all you have to do is
scrape down to the lime bedrock, the acid soil under the vineyard,
magnificent pink granites of those hills, and it returns
to its own character, its rhythms indifferent of ours. Its own
way and blessing. Today after months of inner gouging
I feel for the first time scraped over, the top bitumen
of scar and sacrifice backhoed loose, exposing the granite under.
Normally I'm unsentimental regolith: where did this filigree
patterned topsoil come from? How long has it been
accumulating in my valleys, behind my curves and waysides?
How long have I been being eroded?
Backlit at dawn, ultraviolet morning glories creep up the windowpane.
There's something tenacious about the riot of color promoted
by flower gardens as riotous as Monet painted in his tilled
back yard. Something permanent in spirit if never in fact.
Always growing, the way you have to grow into a life, cultivate it,
master your own tendency to over-monitor, over-weed.
Let it be a little wild, that's best. The letters I'm writing
these days don't have much more to say than, I'm still here.
That might suffice, as much as I want to write in the margins,
I've survived, yet I need contact, give me constant reminders I live.
Breeze stirs two arbors, one wrapped in vines exploding with
ultraviolet flowers, the other with pink-and-white. Behind the flower
there's a mysterious green force. Lorca said it: Only mystery
allows us to live, only mystery. I cannot fathom this rich
floral bomb blast. I can only touch it, with eye, camera, memory,
while it never ceases exploding. Every day a different mystery.
I look through new glass at the world.
Under the house's foundations, soil slowly concretizes. It could
take me a million years to grow back what I lost. An eon
of grieving. Can you break free the stones in the dirt, fuse them
into a cemented mass, till they too find mountain streams
that will erode them? It all lies in those unfathomable shadows
under the seal, where sunlight never rows. Exposing the house
bedrock seems a blasphemy; although I constantly expose my own,
no, it's stripped away by time's bristled friction, faster than memory
can build calluses or scar over old wounds. Trace a line where flesh
has been erupted, blood seeping as slow as glowing molten rock
emerging at night from a shield volcano in the pelagic Pacific.
We conceal our hurts with florid lines like that. We use all our
verbal ecstasy to cover up one central frightener: it just hurts.
Agloom on Dover Beach, dodging between the legs of the ignorant army,
we weave a pattern into the sand that if we're lucky we can
memorize long enough to recreate in wool, or yarn, sewn squares.
Abolition and acknowledgment: coexisting cicatrice and cure.
Meanwhile the shadows lengthen on their own.
What salvages the summer from its long unavoided wasting
is the return of the year of the cicada. All night in the trees
surrounding the house, their long rise and fall of thrum, rasp,
and creak becomes a lullaby to soothe. This has been a peak year
for insect love. Walking at midnight under a moon trying to make
an imitation of a Japanese ink-case by flirting with cloud wisps
and the tree-line over the river, constant cicadas deafen.
In bed, later, window open, fan on, their clicks still dominate.
In the morning, a neighbor sweeps her driveway, an identical rasp.
Things fall silent when the thrum gets this loud. The noonday demon
emerges from chrysalis, climbs high, sonars. Inside this vast noise
there's an unquiet silence, an echo inside a cave, a whirled skirt of duende
inherent in van Gogh's crows over a wheatfield as the storm comes in.
Near the end, he stopped painting: the world became too vibrant,
an assault rather than a balm. Inside the summer he died, the summer
I too died, that insect hum fills all the world, while emptying it.
Beauty is only the beginning of terror, after all.
How do you back away from this constant re-emergence of void?
This morning I sense even inside the backlit flower a vast gap between
particles: even what we see as solid is more space than matter.
Light reflects off it, it seems determined whereas it's all just
indeterminate electron whorls, like van Gogh's skies, night or day.
You can see too much. The cicada rise and fall is the sound-call of
that very void, its own voice. I'm reminded perhaps too personally
of almost dying; then of actual dying. This reborn morning life
still uncertain, mapless, inexplicable, impossible to explore.
I'll wear a flower in my hair, attracting lifegiver bees, and hope
that's enough. Sing on, locust, sing.
everything else kicks in and you're brought back to ground.
It's been a long time since Europe called, with scent, sound,
and long summers. Land so long inhabited by humans
that it sometimes loses its own way; but all you have to do is
scrape down to the lime bedrock, the acid soil under the vineyard,
magnificent pink granites of those hills, and it returns
to its own character, its rhythms indifferent of ours. Its own
way and blessing. Today after months of inner gouging
I feel for the first time scraped over, the top bitumen
of scar and sacrifice backhoed loose, exposing the granite under.
Normally I'm unsentimental regolith: where did this filigree
patterned topsoil come from? How long has it been
accumulating in my valleys, behind my curves and waysides?
How long have I been being eroded?
Backlit at dawn, ultraviolet morning glories creep up the windowpane.
There's something tenacious about the riot of color promoted
by flower gardens as riotous as Monet painted in his tilled
back yard. Something permanent in spirit if never in fact.
Always growing, the way you have to grow into a life, cultivate it,
master your own tendency to over-monitor, over-weed.
Let it be a little wild, that's best. The letters I'm writing
these days don't have much more to say than, I'm still here.
That might suffice, as much as I want to write in the margins,
I've survived, yet I need contact, give me constant reminders I live.
Breeze stirs two arbors, one wrapped in vines exploding with
ultraviolet flowers, the other with pink-and-white. Behind the flower
there's a mysterious green force. Lorca said it: Only mystery
allows us to live, only mystery. I cannot fathom this rich
floral bomb blast. I can only touch it, with eye, camera, memory,
while it never ceases exploding. Every day a different mystery.
I look through new glass at the world.
Under the house's foundations, soil slowly concretizes. It could
take me a million years to grow back what I lost. An eon
of grieving. Can you break free the stones in the dirt, fuse them
into a cemented mass, till they too find mountain streams
that will erode them? It all lies in those unfathomable shadows
under the seal, where sunlight never rows. Exposing the house
bedrock seems a blasphemy; although I constantly expose my own,
no, it's stripped away by time's bristled friction, faster than memory
can build calluses or scar over old wounds. Trace a line where flesh
has been erupted, blood seeping as slow as glowing molten rock
emerging at night from a shield volcano in the pelagic Pacific.
We conceal our hurts with florid lines like that. We use all our
verbal ecstasy to cover up one central frightener: it just hurts.
Agloom on Dover Beach, dodging between the legs of the ignorant army,
we weave a pattern into the sand that if we're lucky we can
memorize long enough to recreate in wool, or yarn, sewn squares.
Abolition and acknowledgment: coexisting cicatrice and cure.
Meanwhile the shadows lengthen on their own.
What salvages the summer from its long unavoided wasting
is the return of the year of the cicada. All night in the trees
surrounding the house, their long rise and fall of thrum, rasp,
and creak becomes a lullaby to soothe. This has been a peak year
for insect love. Walking at midnight under a moon trying to make
an imitation of a Japanese ink-case by flirting with cloud wisps
and the tree-line over the river, constant cicadas deafen.
In bed, later, window open, fan on, their clicks still dominate.
In the morning, a neighbor sweeps her driveway, an identical rasp.
Things fall silent when the thrum gets this loud. The noonday demon
emerges from chrysalis, climbs high, sonars. Inside this vast noise
there's an unquiet silence, an echo inside a cave, a whirled skirt of duende
inherent in van Gogh's crows over a wheatfield as the storm comes in.
Near the end, he stopped painting: the world became too vibrant,
an assault rather than a balm. Inside the summer he died, the summer
I too died, that insect hum fills all the world, while emptying it.
Beauty is only the beginning of terror, after all.
How do you back away from this constant re-emergence of void?
This morning I sense even inside the backlit flower a vast gap between
particles: even what we see as solid is more space than matter.
Light reflects off it, it seems determined whereas it's all just
indeterminate electron whorls, like van Gogh's skies, night or day.
You can see too much. The cicada rise and fall is the sound-call of
that very void, its own voice. I'm reminded perhaps too personally
of almost dying; then of actual dying. This reborn morning life
still uncertain, mapless, inexplicable, impossible to explore.
I'll wear a flower in my hair, attracting lifegiver bees, and hope
that's enough. Sing on, locust, sing.
Labels: duende, gardens, geology, Letters poem series, poem, surgery, void
posted by Art Durkee at 9:46 AM
2 comments
Monday, September 05, 2011
Resurrections
from The Surgery Diaries
I spent too much money on a short trip to Minnesota this past week. It was the first time I have been away from home any length of time since the surgery. It was partly a test: to see if I was up to traveling, to dealing with changing the ostomy bag when away from home, with lots of physical exertion when on the road, and so forth. I stayed at a best friend's place in Minneapolis, which was a safe place for all this pushing at my limits. I spent one entire day at the Minnesota State Fair, walking and making photos, and taking in the sights and sounds. And a bit of healthy eating; which you can do at the Fair if you pay attention and take your time. I spent another afternoon wandering with friends around the Renaissance Festival outside of the Twin Cities, which was another test of physical prowess. I got home after the long drive, and only then was I really exhausted. So this was a good trip, I enjoyed myself for the most part, I had fun with friends, and I wasn't overly tired. If anything, my energy is returning strongly enough that it's getting harder to tire myself out. And I spent too much money.
But then, it was one of those trips where I knew I would be going to places where I would be tempted to purchase, so I did budget for the spending. And some of that shopping was every-two-years shopping, not on impulse but planned. I needed a new belt for my pants, which I like to get at one particular leather-work vendor at the Ren Fest, for several reasons, mostly because of quality and durability.
I did a little thrift store shopping on the trips up and back, as I knew I would have to stop regularly when driving to give my body a chance to stretch and relax. I haven't driven like this for months, and I knew it would be a good way to unwind. So I stopped at some places I used to frequent, and didn't stop at others.
One of the books I found on one of my stops was The Wild Braid: A poet reflects on a century in the garden, by Stanley Kunitz, with Genine Lentine. This is a poet who has always gardened, who ahs lived a full century and more, who has always written poems in and about the garden, and who I feel has often had wisdom to pass on. Wisdom not only about writing, but about life.
During the preparation and process of this book, which was instigated by Genine Lentine as a series of interviews and excerpts from Kunitz's published and unpublished writings, Kunitz fell mysteriously ill, and as mysteriously recovered. This is what he says about that episode, words which resonate strongly with my own recent experience of surgery and recovery:
The garden instructs us in a principle of life and death and renewal. In its rhythms, it offers the closest analogue to the concept of resurrection that is available to us.
I feel I experienced a kind of resurrection and I'm absolutely grateful for having emerged and yet I have no delusions I've been promised anything but a period of survival, that's all. There is no pledge of survival beyond that.
—Stanley Kunitz
No pledge of survival. I have if anything become even more conscious of my limited time here in this incarnation, of how much I want to get done, of the limited time that is mortality, and that I am aware of my own mortality as never before. No time at all, it feels like some days, to get enough done.
I look for ways to revitalize myself right now. Some have to be new ways, because in some cases the old ways just don't work anymore. I look for a way to come back to life. With the help of some neighbors, I was finally able to thoroughly weed out and mulch the back gardens, where the plants I want there are few at the moment, but very much alive. Earlier in the year, I had thought the morning glories I had planted weren't going to make it; but now, not only have they come back to life, they're exploding with it.
I feel as though I'm a traveler exploring territory that may not be wholly new, but it has reverberations and images that seem to have a collective presence. It's still a feeling, a sensibility that is mysterious in many ways because I don't know exactly where I am at this moment, in terms of the imaginative, the creative process, but I know I am searching for something different from the terrain I was familiar with. And yet, it isn't simply a new landscape. When I finally come to grips with my night visitor, I'll know more clearly what it is I have in mind, which seems to be a new set of images, but connected very much with my whole history.
—Stanley Kunitz
That disorientation, that not-knowing where you are right now. There is a distinct before and after to my life, now. I find myself grieving for the person that I was, who is no more; grieving as well for the parts of my body that were taken away, but also for the vanished sense of integral wholeness. I constantly stumble, fog-brained, around my days and nights not knowing what to think: everything is new, there are no rules, I don't know what's the same and what's changed till I encounter a situation and find out by doing. It's all still very mysterious. Why is recovery so mysterious? I suppose because rebirth is, too, like birth itself.
Certainty is once again dissolved. All the old maps are useless. We seek new terrain to explore.
I've been through this before, in the dark night of the soul, when everything I thought I knew and believed was taken away, leaving a void in me that stayed empty for years. Every time you try to fill that void inside you, it dissolves back into hollowness, because it's a void that can't be filled with belief, only with experience. I've filled that void two or three times since that first voiding, which was the dark night of the senses, the first stage of the dark night. The kenosis of emptying came later, in the desert.
And now I am emptied again. Grieving again. Feeling often lost. As more than one friend has pointed out to me, even at my current diminished capacity I am doing better than most people do at their best. But it's not my own best, and I know it. I can tell I'm functioning well below one hundred percent. I strive in frustration to improve my functioning, and most days cannot. Moments of revelation happen, when suddenly my mind clears, my eyes clear and I see sharper, hear sharper, than I have in a long time. Everything comes into focus. But such moments are not enduring; I am constantly dragged back down the gravity well into rebellious solace.
Everyone seems to think I'm doing very well indeed, but I don't feel that way at all. I still feel very messed up, very uncertain and insecure. I feel sometimes very abandoned, analogous to a person who has been widowed, and is comforted by all her friends for awhile, but all too soon her friends want her to get on with life, stop mourning her loss, and resume. That can make you feel even more alone than you did before, because the support you still need isn't there any more. People think you're fine now, and they can go on. Often enough this isn't really about you. There are two kinds of support, or solace, that people give: the first kind is the support and comfort they give you when you really need it; the second kind is the kind they give themselves, because they're not comfortable with your process. As though grief had a timetable or schedule to be followed.
I find solace for myself in fewer and fewer things. Some days it's hard to find any solace at all. Sometimes you survive purely by distraction and escapism—for once, escapism is not pathological because it's in support of your survival, not an avoidance of engagement with life. I constantly seek new strategies to find and maintain meaning and purpose in my life, which for now remains uncertain and insecure and mysteriously difficult to like. I've heard that some people who go through an near-death experience are troubled by being brought back, they don't want to be here anymore, and sometimes it's just not a very nice place to be. Pain hurts. Some days it takes all my energy to maintain anything remotely near a positive attitude. It can be a real uphill struggle.
Most days, lately, making art does help. Taking a short roadtrip up to Minnesota did help.
But then I had to come home. Right back into the old patterns and enables. Getting pulled right back into the bucket, surrounded by useless black crabs who won't let go. It's depressing just to have to go home when being away is much more life-affirming. It's cabin fever, to be sure, but it's also knowing how easy it is to let discipline and practice slide when lounging about at home. Days you don't feel motivated become an excuse to do nothing. But forward momentum is necessary, if I'm to get anywhere. I need to break out, I need to make this work somehow. Right now, it's not working. I have to find a solution. But all the old maps are useless. I don't know if I have the strength yet to make yet another new map, fill the void one more time. Only time will tell—paradoxically, since time is also the hell we live in, some days.
What's the point? What purpose is there to any of this? I read Stanley Kunitz's book of poems and thoughts and garlands from his garden, and near the end of his book I find this sublime paragraph, and somehow it all seems to make sense, for now, and to give me reason to go on, for now.
When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.
—Stanley Kunitz
I spent too much money on a short trip to Minnesota this past week. It was the first time I have been away from home any length of time since the surgery. It was partly a test: to see if I was up to traveling, to dealing with changing the ostomy bag when away from home, with lots of physical exertion when on the road, and so forth. I stayed at a best friend's place in Minneapolis, which was a safe place for all this pushing at my limits. I spent one entire day at the Minnesota State Fair, walking and making photos, and taking in the sights and sounds. And a bit of healthy eating; which you can do at the Fair if you pay attention and take your time. I spent another afternoon wandering with friends around the Renaissance Festival outside of the Twin Cities, which was another test of physical prowess. I got home after the long drive, and only then was I really exhausted. So this was a good trip, I enjoyed myself for the most part, I had fun with friends, and I wasn't overly tired. If anything, my energy is returning strongly enough that it's getting harder to tire myself out. And I spent too much money.
But then, it was one of those trips where I knew I would be going to places where I would be tempted to purchase, so I did budget for the spending. And some of that shopping was every-two-years shopping, not on impulse but planned. I needed a new belt for my pants, which I like to get at one particular leather-work vendor at the Ren Fest, for several reasons, mostly because of quality and durability.
I did a little thrift store shopping on the trips up and back, as I knew I would have to stop regularly when driving to give my body a chance to stretch and relax. I haven't driven like this for months, and I knew it would be a good way to unwind. So I stopped at some places I used to frequent, and didn't stop at others.
One of the books I found on one of my stops was The Wild Braid: A poet reflects on a century in the garden, by Stanley Kunitz, with Genine Lentine. This is a poet who has always gardened, who ahs lived a full century and more, who has always written poems in and about the garden, and who I feel has often had wisdom to pass on. Wisdom not only about writing, but about life.
During the preparation and process of this book, which was instigated by Genine Lentine as a series of interviews and excerpts from Kunitz's published and unpublished writings, Kunitz fell mysteriously ill, and as mysteriously recovered. This is what he says about that episode, words which resonate strongly with my own recent experience of surgery and recovery:
The garden instructs us in a principle of life and death and renewal. In its rhythms, it offers the closest analogue to the concept of resurrection that is available to us.
I feel I experienced a kind of resurrection and I'm absolutely grateful for having emerged and yet I have no delusions I've been promised anything but a period of survival, that's all. There is no pledge of survival beyond that.
—Stanley Kunitz
No pledge of survival. I have if anything become even more conscious of my limited time here in this incarnation, of how much I want to get done, of the limited time that is mortality, and that I am aware of my own mortality as never before. No time at all, it feels like some days, to get enough done.
I look for ways to revitalize myself right now. Some have to be new ways, because in some cases the old ways just don't work anymore. I look for a way to come back to life. With the help of some neighbors, I was finally able to thoroughly weed out and mulch the back gardens, where the plants I want there are few at the moment, but very much alive. Earlier in the year, I had thought the morning glories I had planted weren't going to make it; but now, not only have they come back to life, they're exploding with it.
I feel as though I'm a traveler exploring territory that may not be wholly new, but it has reverberations and images that seem to have a collective presence. It's still a feeling, a sensibility that is mysterious in many ways because I don't know exactly where I am at this moment, in terms of the imaginative, the creative process, but I know I am searching for something different from the terrain I was familiar with. And yet, it isn't simply a new landscape. When I finally come to grips with my night visitor, I'll know more clearly what it is I have in mind, which seems to be a new set of images, but connected very much with my whole history.
—Stanley Kunitz
That disorientation, that not-knowing where you are right now. There is a distinct before and after to my life, now. I find myself grieving for the person that I was, who is no more; grieving as well for the parts of my body that were taken away, but also for the vanished sense of integral wholeness. I constantly stumble, fog-brained, around my days and nights not knowing what to think: everything is new, there are no rules, I don't know what's the same and what's changed till I encounter a situation and find out by doing. It's all still very mysterious. Why is recovery so mysterious? I suppose because rebirth is, too, like birth itself.
Certainty is once again dissolved. All the old maps are useless. We seek new terrain to explore.
I've been through this before, in the dark night of the soul, when everything I thought I knew and believed was taken away, leaving a void in me that stayed empty for years. Every time you try to fill that void inside you, it dissolves back into hollowness, because it's a void that can't be filled with belief, only with experience. I've filled that void two or three times since that first voiding, which was the dark night of the senses, the first stage of the dark night. The kenosis of emptying came later, in the desert.
And now I am emptied again. Grieving again. Feeling often lost. As more than one friend has pointed out to me, even at my current diminished capacity I am doing better than most people do at their best. But it's not my own best, and I know it. I can tell I'm functioning well below one hundred percent. I strive in frustration to improve my functioning, and most days cannot. Moments of revelation happen, when suddenly my mind clears, my eyes clear and I see sharper, hear sharper, than I have in a long time. Everything comes into focus. But such moments are not enduring; I am constantly dragged back down the gravity well into rebellious solace.
Everyone seems to think I'm doing very well indeed, but I don't feel that way at all. I still feel very messed up, very uncertain and insecure. I feel sometimes very abandoned, analogous to a person who has been widowed, and is comforted by all her friends for awhile, but all too soon her friends want her to get on with life, stop mourning her loss, and resume. That can make you feel even more alone than you did before, because the support you still need isn't there any more. People think you're fine now, and they can go on. Often enough this isn't really about you. There are two kinds of support, or solace, that people give: the first kind is the support and comfort they give you when you really need it; the second kind is the kind they give themselves, because they're not comfortable with your process. As though grief had a timetable or schedule to be followed.
I find solace for myself in fewer and fewer things. Some days it's hard to find any solace at all. Sometimes you survive purely by distraction and escapism—for once, escapism is not pathological because it's in support of your survival, not an avoidance of engagement with life. I constantly seek new strategies to find and maintain meaning and purpose in my life, which for now remains uncertain and insecure and mysteriously difficult to like. I've heard that some people who go through an near-death experience are troubled by being brought back, they don't want to be here anymore, and sometimes it's just not a very nice place to be. Pain hurts. Some days it takes all my energy to maintain anything remotely near a positive attitude. It can be a real uphill struggle.
Most days, lately, making art does help. Taking a short roadtrip up to Minnesota did help.
But then I had to come home. Right back into the old patterns and enables. Getting pulled right back into the bucket, surrounded by useless black crabs who won't let go. It's depressing just to have to go home when being away is much more life-affirming. It's cabin fever, to be sure, but it's also knowing how easy it is to let discipline and practice slide when lounging about at home. Days you don't feel motivated become an excuse to do nothing. But forward momentum is necessary, if I'm to get anywhere. I need to break out, I need to make this work somehow. Right now, it's not working. I have to find a solution. But all the old maps are useless. I don't know if I have the strength yet to make yet another new map, fill the void one more time. Only time will tell—paradoxically, since time is also the hell we live in, some days.
What's the point? What purpose is there to any of this? I read Stanley Kunitz's book of poems and thoughts and garlands from his garden, and near the end of his book I find this sublime paragraph, and somehow it all seems to make sense, for now, and to give me reason to go on, for now.
When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.
—Stanley Kunitz
Labels: gardens, kenosis, poetry, resonance, Stanley Kunitz, surgery, void
posted by Art Durkee at 12:32 PM
11 comments
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
In the Garden
sullen summer heat
days of droning cicadas—
flowers exploding
Labels: flowers, gardens, haiku, photography
posted by Art Durkee at 8:23 PM
2 comments
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
An Invocation for Healing
This Photoshop montage superimposes a clutch of marigolds with my own most recent EKG.
(Click on image for larger version.)
Marigold is an ancient healing herb as well as a common garden plant. Marigold is good for the blood. It's good for cuts and bruises, and can be used as an antiseptic. It can soothe bee stings. It's good for skin conditions of various kinds.
Marigold is good for wound healing. I will invoke the essence of marigold to heal the surgical wounds I am about to receive. I will ask to be infused with the essence of marigold to protect myself against infection, to reduce inflammation, and stop bleeding.
Marigold will help me heal faster, and more effectively.
(Click on image for larger version.)
Marigold is an ancient healing herb as well as a common garden plant. Marigold is good for the blood. It's good for cuts and bruises, and can be used as an antiseptic. It can soothe bee stings. It's good for skin conditions of various kinds.
Marigold is good for wound healing. I will invoke the essence of marigold to heal the surgical wounds I am about to receive. I will ask to be infused with the essence of marigold to protect myself against infection, to reduce inflammation, and stop bleeding.
Marigold will help me heal faster, and more effectively.
Labels: blood, digital art, flowers, gardens, photography
posted by Art Durkee at 3:40 PM
1 comments
Monday, May 30, 2011
Process of Writing 11: the Push
This past week I went up to visit my close friend and fellow artist Alex in the Twin Cities for four days. He is moving to New Mexico, and this was my last chance to see him in person, hang out, go out to dinner, lie on the couch together, before he leaves. It was a good visit, albeit intense and a bit of a rush. I helped him haul a load to give to the thrift store, and a few other errands.
I was tired when I got home, as it's a six hour drive, and so I spent a couple of days recovering and resting. Today it's gloriously, summery hot, with bright sunlight. I've been out in the garden pulling weeds and trimming back some overgrowth. My tulips are done; there were intensely beautiful this year. The lilies are about to start, and other things are also starting to flower, and will flower all summer long. I've designed the garden so there is color from spring through autumn. I was tired and dizzy earlier today, but then I realized I hadn't eaten yet and I also have been taking an antihistamine that might contribute to the dizziness. So I got some gardening done, and made a good dinner, and went to the store and got more of the other brand of antihistamine that I use.
I noticed that where I planted a patch of wildflowers last year, some have already returned. You have to be careful not to pull wildflowers thinking they're just weeds. So you have to wait an extra week, sometimes, to be sure. Which I waited till this week to weed the garden. Today I noticed that I have a beautiful columbine flower blooming in the wildflower patch, and the alyssum "carpet of snow" flowers are already coming up and starting to bloom. The lilies are huge and ready to bud soon: everywhere I had one or two lilies last year, they've split, and I now have four or five. It's going to be a glorious, colorful summer in the garden. I've already made several good flower photos from my garden this year, and I anticipate a very good summer for making new images.
When I was in the Twin Cities, then home afterwards, resting, I got almost no writing done. I did a lot of thinking about the new music commission, but the only real writing I got done was in the truck, while driving. As usual, being on the road loosens things up. I finished off the lyrics for two songs that had been waiting to be finished. I also got clear ideas on a couple of other songs, and made some notes, which I'll get back to later.
Distractions.
Since yesterday, though, I have been working hard on one song, which finally came into focus this week, and it's almost done. All I have to do is fill in the gaps in the piano and choral parts, the overall shape and frame is already there. It's an angry piece. It's the dark side of being born and raised in the Heartlands, where the shadow side of the tribal message is to stay in the closet, "conform to the norm," and engage in repression and self-censorship.
I am pushing hard to get as much of this commission done as I can in the next two weeks. I have a long list of things I need to get done before the surgery, which is now only a month away. Getting a lot of the music done is my main goal, secondary only to the goal of getting ready for the medical journey I'm about to go through. I feel a bit scattered, with a long list of Things To Do. If I get a little bit done every day, though, I'll somehow muddle through.
•
Somebody asked me recently how I write, and in thinking about it, I clarified the point that I don't write in a linear fashion. For example, for this commission, I don't write the first song start to finish, then the second song, etc. I write wherever I feel like writing. It's typical to work on up to three songs at the same time, for this commission project. It's typical to switch back and forth, and write all day on the one that most catches my interest that day. I will write a section first that might come near the end of a piece. Then other sections.
The process of finishing a piece in final score sometimes means copying it over one last time, and stitching all the pieces together into a coherent whole. Nobody ever seems to see the seams. Some part of me knows all the pieces, has an overview, even if I mostly focus on the sections at first. Usually the piece in the end is coherent and unified, as it should be.
Breaking it up keeps me fresh. I might jump around between three pieces, writing parts of all of them in one session. It's only when I'm really one a role, and a single piece has developed its own momentum that I find myself giving it all my attention. What catches my interest on any given day is what I work on. The rest will be there waiting when I get back to it.
I find this way of working congenial in part because it minimizes blocks, or moment of getting stuck. if you're stuck and don't know what to do about one section, go off an work on another part of the piece. Many times, the "problem" solves itself, and I suddenly see (it feels like being gifted) how the problem section is supposed to work, how it fits together, and I go back to it to finish.
Some artists find this method of working chaotic and unsystematic. It's not truly unsystematic, it's just a different species of system: nonlinear rather than linear. Some writers of fiction work this way, too.
The only artform is which I do seem to start at the beginning and work through to the end is poetry. But the poem itself might be nonlinear, jumping around as the lamp of consciousness and awareness jumps around. I do write poems from the first line through to the last line, most of the time. The nature of the word-based artform of making a poem seems to call for that. But the mind within the poem, the lamp of consciousness, may be quite nonlinear. I do get criticisms about doing this from the left-brain poets, those who think that writing is an act of will rather than of listening. But such criticisms mean less and less to me every year, as time goes by, and experience shows that my way of creative writing actually produces good results.
More than one linear-minded poet has told me that they cannot understand or approve of the way I write poems, but they cannot find any fault with the resulting poems. (A sideways compliment if ever there was one: that we can't find anything to complain about, even though we believe we should have found something. Such criticisms are to laughed away into the wastebasket they deserve.)
The bottom line in your own creative process is really very simple: If it works for you, if it produces the results you want, or better than those, there's nothing wrong with your method, no matter how eccentric it appears to others. The creative mind is often an unconventional and rule-breaking mind. More precisely, a rule-ignoring mind. It's not about "thinking outside the box," it's more like not even noticing that there was a box. "There's a box?" The most creative people I've met in my life have all been of this type: "There's a box?" it's good example to keep in mind on those occasions where you start to second-guess yourself, or doubt your own creative process. If you trust nothing else, trust your creative process.
I was tired when I got home, as it's a six hour drive, and so I spent a couple of days recovering and resting. Today it's gloriously, summery hot, with bright sunlight. I've been out in the garden pulling weeds and trimming back some overgrowth. My tulips are done; there were intensely beautiful this year. The lilies are about to start, and other things are also starting to flower, and will flower all summer long. I've designed the garden so there is color from spring through autumn. I was tired and dizzy earlier today, but then I realized I hadn't eaten yet and I also have been taking an antihistamine that might contribute to the dizziness. So I got some gardening done, and made a good dinner, and went to the store and got more of the other brand of antihistamine that I use.
I noticed that where I planted a patch of wildflowers last year, some have already returned. You have to be careful not to pull wildflowers thinking they're just weeds. So you have to wait an extra week, sometimes, to be sure. Which I waited till this week to weed the garden. Today I noticed that I have a beautiful columbine flower blooming in the wildflower patch, and the alyssum "carpet of snow" flowers are already coming up and starting to bloom. The lilies are huge and ready to bud soon: everywhere I had one or two lilies last year, they've split, and I now have four or five. It's going to be a glorious, colorful summer in the garden. I've already made several good flower photos from my garden this year, and I anticipate a very good summer for making new images.
When I was in the Twin Cities, then home afterwards, resting, I got almost no writing done. I did a lot of thinking about the new music commission, but the only real writing I got done was in the truck, while driving. As usual, being on the road loosens things up. I finished off the lyrics for two songs that had been waiting to be finished. I also got clear ideas on a couple of other songs, and made some notes, which I'll get back to later.
Distractions.
Since yesterday, though, I have been working hard on one song, which finally came into focus this week, and it's almost done. All I have to do is fill in the gaps in the piano and choral parts, the overall shape and frame is already there. It's an angry piece. It's the dark side of being born and raised in the Heartlands, where the shadow side of the tribal message is to stay in the closet, "conform to the norm," and engage in repression and self-censorship.
I am pushing hard to get as much of this commission done as I can in the next two weeks. I have a long list of things I need to get done before the surgery, which is now only a month away. Getting a lot of the music done is my main goal, secondary only to the goal of getting ready for the medical journey I'm about to go through. I feel a bit scattered, with a long list of Things To Do. If I get a little bit done every day, though, I'll somehow muddle through.
•
Somebody asked me recently how I write, and in thinking about it, I clarified the point that I don't write in a linear fashion. For example, for this commission, I don't write the first song start to finish, then the second song, etc. I write wherever I feel like writing. It's typical to work on up to three songs at the same time, for this commission project. It's typical to switch back and forth, and write all day on the one that most catches my interest that day. I will write a section first that might come near the end of a piece. Then other sections.
The process of finishing a piece in final score sometimes means copying it over one last time, and stitching all the pieces together into a coherent whole. Nobody ever seems to see the seams. Some part of me knows all the pieces, has an overview, even if I mostly focus on the sections at first. Usually the piece in the end is coherent and unified, as it should be.
Breaking it up keeps me fresh. I might jump around between three pieces, writing parts of all of them in one session. It's only when I'm really one a role, and a single piece has developed its own momentum that I find myself giving it all my attention. What catches my interest on any given day is what I work on. The rest will be there waiting when I get back to it.
I find this way of working congenial in part because it minimizes blocks, or moment of getting stuck. if you're stuck and don't know what to do about one section, go off an work on another part of the piece. Many times, the "problem" solves itself, and I suddenly see (it feels like being gifted) how the problem section is supposed to work, how it fits together, and I go back to it to finish.
Some artists find this method of working chaotic and unsystematic. It's not truly unsystematic, it's just a different species of system: nonlinear rather than linear. Some writers of fiction work this way, too.
The only artform is which I do seem to start at the beginning and work through to the end is poetry. But the poem itself might be nonlinear, jumping around as the lamp of consciousness and awareness jumps around. I do write poems from the first line through to the last line, most of the time. The nature of the word-based artform of making a poem seems to call for that. But the mind within the poem, the lamp of consciousness, may be quite nonlinear. I do get criticisms about doing this from the left-brain poets, those who think that writing is an act of will rather than of listening. But such criticisms mean less and less to me every year, as time goes by, and experience shows that my way of creative writing actually produces good results.
More than one linear-minded poet has told me that they cannot understand or approve of the way I write poems, but they cannot find any fault with the resulting poems. (A sideways compliment if ever there was one: that we can't find anything to complain about, even though we believe we should have found something. Such criticisms are to laughed away into the wastebasket they deserve.)
The bottom line in your own creative process is really very simple: If it works for you, if it produces the results you want, or better than those, there's nothing wrong with your method, no matter how eccentric it appears to others. The creative mind is often an unconventional and rule-breaking mind. More precisely, a rule-ignoring mind. It's not about "thinking outside the box," it's more like not even noticing that there was a box. "There's a box?" The most creative people I've met in my life have all been of this type: "There's a box?" it's good example to keep in mind on those occasions where you start to second-guess yourself, or doubt your own creative process. If you trust nothing else, trust your creative process.
Labels: creativity, criticism, gardens, lyrics, music, songwriting, writing
posted by Art Durkee at 6:17 PM
2 comments
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Poet and Priest
It would be a realization of that which as yet we glimpse from afar, if a priest were also to be a poet, if a poet were allowed to be a priest, if the life of a priest and that of a poet were to intermingle and be woven one into another. . . .
It is time that we asked: what has become of the times when great theologians also wrote hymns? When they could write like Ignatius of Antioch, compose poems like Methodius of Olympus, be carried in hymnody like Adam of St. Victor, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas? What has become of those times? Has theology become more perfect because theologians have become prosaic?
—Karl Rahner, "Priest and Poet," essay from his collection Theological Investigations
There's a long tradition—bardic, skaldic, shamanic—of the priest being a poet, of the poet being a priest. It's tied directly to the ancient Paleolithic conception of spirituality as animist, nature-connected, mystical: the world is divine, and the Divine is the world. Not "in the world," but "is the world." The ancient figures of the Green Man, of the Great God Pan, of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn: all masculine images of the fecund and fertile cycles of the living world, which dies every autumn in the harvest, and is reborn every spring with the return of the Greening. A truly agrarian cycle. Lived in miniatures in the house gardens we keep in our window-boxes in our apartment windows overlooking the streets of our cities that we imagine are somehow divorced from nature. "Pan" means "everything," after all, which by implication means all of nature itself, all of the cosmos, all of the Universe.
We live in a very left-brain, rationalistic, materialistic, Apollonian culture. The solar god Apollo symbolizes light and consciousness, reason and commerce and rationality. The agrarian, fecund, earthy god Dionysus welcomes spontaneity and irrationality, the wildly creative and the sensual, somatic, sexual body. The sun god is in the sky, detached and rational, giving light to the world but removed from it. The earthy god is the Earth itself, its cycles of seasons, climate, violent and benign weather alike, tethered by gut-level emotion, feeling, and (right-brain) intuition to the physical and dark: the darkness of shadows, soil, and the grave. No wonder the priests of Apollo fear the revels of Dionysus: the celebrations of life that no do not ignore the reality of death, of the limitations of life, of the body. The detached mind prefers to believe it's immortal and unchanging, and events rational religions with philosophical theology to explain and affirm its immortality. Theology, however, is talking about God, rather than being a direct experience of God. When theology becomes too rational, too prosaic, the direct experience of God, which is often a disruptive experience, is given to the poets, the artists, the mystics, and the drunken (unmanageable) ecstatics who follow Dionysus.
Apollo fears Dionysus—but both are necessary, two halves of a whole that must be integrated, to become fully human. Organized, institutional religion prefers Apollo—a god who manages, and can be managed—while spirituality, individual, anarchic, based on experience rather than theory, prefers Dionysus.
We manage our art: we turn it into entertainment, thereby denature its potency, and then pat ourselves on the backs for being meaningless, for making poetry that has no impact on the world, that is in fact completely divorced from the world. But entertainment is death, precisely to the extent that it is not life-affirming. So much of popular music presented to us as entertainment is narcissistically anthropocentric to the point of nihilism. Where is its social consciousness? Where is its connection to the function of prophecy? of being the words of the priest?
I don't really believe in "American Idol." First of all, you would never find Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan on "American Idol." They would never have won.
—k.d. lang
Poet-priest k.d. lang once again speaking the truth no-one else has bothered to mention. And she's absolutely right. She articulates my own feelings, which I'd never put so clearly into words: why I don't watch "American Idol," and never have. The model of the music business that "American Idol" portrays is bitterly accurate in its fickleness, harshness, and supportive moments alike—both good and bad. There's a lot of that in real life, off course, but when you take bards and turn them into entertainers and then do your best to make a profit off them, it brings out the shadow something fierce. Many of the more independent-minded bards get out, or fight through on their own terms, and refuse to be broken. (Which is the theme of Tom Petty's song "I Won't Back Down.")
Can you imagine a recorded music industry if it was run not by non-creative business managers (who can be correctly perceived as parasites living off the creative gifts of others) but by poet-priests?
In fact, I can: it's what happened in the 1970s, when practically anyone who could put out a self-produced vinyl LP of their own, idiosyncratic music; and it is what is happening right now, when composers and songwriters can connect directly with their listeners via Internet downloads and direct album sales that do not pass through the gatekeepers and managers of the music industry. (Something which greatly upsets the managers, who fear losing their parasitical profits.) The managers are also no longer the gatekeepers of taste, deciding what gets released to the public and what does not. When artists can sell directly to their public, without going through the middle-managers, it's direct democracy in action: one person, one vote. (Which is theme of the song by Johnny Clegg & Savuka, "One (Hu)'Man, One Vote.")
So, what's wrong with self-publishing a chapbook of your own poems? Nothing. The big publishers would like us to believe that unless they retain their status as gatekeepers of taste, a lot of bad poetry will get published. The truth is, though, that a lot of bad poetry was published even when they were the de facto gatekeepers. Their track record on publishing quality is random at best, fouled at worst.
There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait awhile..perhaps a generation or two..dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place....the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place. A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find their inspiration in real objects today, symptoms of the past and future....They shall not deign to defend immortality or God or the perfection of things or liberty or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.
—Walt Whitman, "Preface" to Leaves of Grass (1855 edition)
It is time that we asked: what has become of the times when great theologians also wrote hymns? When they could write like Ignatius of Antioch, compose poems like Methodius of Olympus, be carried in hymnody like Adam of St. Victor, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas? What has become of those times? Has theology become more perfect because theologians have become prosaic?
—Karl Rahner, "Priest and Poet," essay from his collection Theological Investigations
There's a long tradition—bardic, skaldic, shamanic—of the priest being a poet, of the poet being a priest. It's tied directly to the ancient Paleolithic conception of spirituality as animist, nature-connected, mystical: the world is divine, and the Divine is the world. Not "in the world," but "is the world." The ancient figures of the Green Man, of the Great God Pan, of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn: all masculine images of the fecund and fertile cycles of the living world, which dies every autumn in the harvest, and is reborn every spring with the return of the Greening. A truly agrarian cycle. Lived in miniatures in the house gardens we keep in our window-boxes in our apartment windows overlooking the streets of our cities that we imagine are somehow divorced from nature. "Pan" means "everything," after all, which by implication means all of nature itself, all of the cosmos, all of the Universe.
We live in a very left-brain, rationalistic, materialistic, Apollonian culture. The solar god Apollo symbolizes light and consciousness, reason and commerce and rationality. The agrarian, fecund, earthy god Dionysus welcomes spontaneity and irrationality, the wildly creative and the sensual, somatic, sexual body. The sun god is in the sky, detached and rational, giving light to the world but removed from it. The earthy god is the Earth itself, its cycles of seasons, climate, violent and benign weather alike, tethered by gut-level emotion, feeling, and (right-brain) intuition to the physical and dark: the darkness of shadows, soil, and the grave. No wonder the priests of Apollo fear the revels of Dionysus: the celebrations of life that no do not ignore the reality of death, of the limitations of life, of the body. The detached mind prefers to believe it's immortal and unchanging, and events rational religions with philosophical theology to explain and affirm its immortality. Theology, however, is talking about God, rather than being a direct experience of God. When theology becomes too rational, too prosaic, the direct experience of God, which is often a disruptive experience, is given to the poets, the artists, the mystics, and the drunken (unmanageable) ecstatics who follow Dionysus.
Apollo fears Dionysus—but both are necessary, two halves of a whole that must be integrated, to become fully human. Organized, institutional religion prefers Apollo—a god who manages, and can be managed—while spirituality, individual, anarchic, based on experience rather than theory, prefers Dionysus.
We manage our art: we turn it into entertainment, thereby denature its potency, and then pat ourselves on the backs for being meaningless, for making poetry that has no impact on the world, that is in fact completely divorced from the world. But entertainment is death, precisely to the extent that it is not life-affirming. So much of popular music presented to us as entertainment is narcissistically anthropocentric to the point of nihilism. Where is its social consciousness? Where is its connection to the function of prophecy? of being the words of the priest?
I don't really believe in "American Idol." First of all, you would never find Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan on "American Idol." They would never have won.
—k.d. lang
Poet-priest k.d. lang once again speaking the truth no-one else has bothered to mention. And she's absolutely right. She articulates my own feelings, which I'd never put so clearly into words: why I don't watch "American Idol," and never have. The model of the music business that "American Idol" portrays is bitterly accurate in its fickleness, harshness, and supportive moments alike—both good and bad. There's a lot of that in real life, off course, but when you take bards and turn them into entertainers and then do your best to make a profit off them, it brings out the shadow something fierce. Many of the more independent-minded bards get out, or fight through on their own terms, and refuse to be broken. (Which is the theme of Tom Petty's song "I Won't Back Down.")
Can you imagine a recorded music industry if it was run not by non-creative business managers (who can be correctly perceived as parasites living off the creative gifts of others) but by poet-priests?
In fact, I can: it's what happened in the 1970s, when practically anyone who could put out a self-produced vinyl LP of their own, idiosyncratic music; and it is what is happening right now, when composers and songwriters can connect directly with their listeners via Internet downloads and direct album sales that do not pass through the gatekeepers and managers of the music industry. (Something which greatly upsets the managers, who fear losing their parasitical profits.) The managers are also no longer the gatekeepers of taste, deciding what gets released to the public and what does not. When artists can sell directly to their public, without going through the middle-managers, it's direct democracy in action: one person, one vote. (Which is theme of the song by Johnny Clegg & Savuka, "One (Hu)'Man, One Vote.")
So, what's wrong with self-publishing a chapbook of your own poems? Nothing. The big publishers would like us to believe that unless they retain their status as gatekeepers of taste, a lot of bad poetry will get published. The truth is, though, that a lot of bad poetry was published even when they were the de facto gatekeepers. Their track record on publishing quality is random at best, fouled at worst.
There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait awhile..perhaps a generation or two..dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place....the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place. A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find their inspiration in real objects today, symptoms of the past and future....They shall not deign to defend immortality or God or the perfection of things or liberty or the exquisite beauty and reality of the soul. They shall arise in America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.
—Walt Whitman, "Preface" to Leaves of Grass (1855 edition)
Labels: gardens, music, nature, Pan, poetry, spirituality, Walt Whitman
posted by Art Durkee at 12:01 AM
4 comments
Friday, May 13, 2011
Process of Writing 9: A Day Off
After two days of hot, humid weather, including major thunderstorms ripping through the area, the first big t-storms of the season, today it's cloudy, cool, bleak, wearying, oppressive. I've just been out in the garden, making more photos, and also some HD video, trying to catch the last of the spring blooms, especially the daffodils and tulips. Other flowers are just starting to bloom, and the hosta are still emerging from the mulch. The lilac bush is covered with purple buds that haven't opened yet: one of my favorite scents of later spring and early summer.
The wind and rain and thunder are shaking down the spring flowers. The pear tree is shedding snow across its skirts. The neighbor's crabapple tree has shed most of its profuse clutch of white blossoms in last night's wind and rain, and now several square yards of lawn and garden are covered with bright white petals, making it look as though there is snow upon the ground. A whole field of flowers and grass emerging from petal-snow, making a confusion of seasons, and some beautiful images.
More storms are coming, it's been promised. I try to capture what flowers I can, in the cameras, before they are all gone.
The world seems shaky right now. Cyberspace is acting stupid and unreliable today. The weather is unstable, neither warm enough nor cool enough to be comfortable, and with a restless breeze that is the foretaste of more storms yet to arrive. It reminds you how fragile everything is, from cyberspace itself, which has always been a friable medium, to physical and social infrastructure, to life itself. I can’t get ignore how fragile life seems right now. Everything can always spin apart. Everything is delicate and ephemeral, to be savored for the moment, for it will soon be gone. These flowers that have been glorious all this past month will soon be gone. They are already ragged around the edges; although there are new buds still to open. The day will soon be gone. Everything could fall apart, and that’s it.
I feel like nothing would be better for me, this moment, than to be in the desert. In the heat and sunlight. D.H. Lawrence wrote that New Mexico forever changd him, once he got past the surface of things. I have to agree. My time living in New Mexico forever changd me, too. And I keep wanting to regain what I first found in the Southwest, and in Wyoming: A kind of openness, of liberation, of carelessness, that I can’t forget. It has become part of living day to day, for me, now. I surround myself with reminders, like my own photographs, but really I want to be there. I think I’ll spend some time today going through photos from recent roadtrips out West, both hot and cold days, to remind myself of what really matters. It’s certain that little that I can see that “needs to be done” right here, right now, really matters.
So I'm taking a day off. A rest day. A vacation day, from everything.
I’ve taken a mental break from the writing of the new music. I needed a day away from it. Ao when I went down to Chicago earlier this week, for a night in the studio working on video and other music projects, I did not take the new music notebooks with me; I left them here, on the worktable. It is one good reminder that a day or so in Chicago gives me: working on other music, other creative projects, reminding myself that the world hasn’t really narrowed down to only one project, one medical situation. I have other things I need to make, even if they’re not all highest priority right now. They need doing, and I need to do them. A mental break. Today I want to work on photography. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get back to writing the music. Tonight, who knows, I might do some more papier-maché: a friend of mine who is moving gave me a thick roll of hand-made art papers. I want to see what's in there, and it might inspire me to make some new papier-maché pieces. I have been thinking about doing a much larger art bowl, with many layers, using fine art papers over a stronger matrix. So, who knows. The day is nowhere near over.
•
Later:
I've spent a couple of hours filming HD video in the garden. The second session was as rain was falling gently, wetting the leaves and the flowers on the trees. The pruneria tree in my front yard is so thick with pink flowers overhanging the garden's flower beds that it looks like a giant pastel explosion. The raindrops slick the branches in close-up images, reminding me of Japanese paintings of cherry blossoms. The light is cool and steady, making all the colors vivid and bright.
I've spent the evening watching inspirational moments on TV.
Tavis Smiley interviewing Bill Moyers, about Moyers' new book of selected interviews: "This is no longer a society that honors the evidence, that honors the facts." —Moyers, who has made a career of speaking truth to power.
I watched a political commentator speaking the truth that no one wants to admit to: that to call oneself a Christian while living a hate-mongering, hypocritical life means that you're not really a Christian, because you're not walking even your own talk. That's what's wrong with the evangelical political right wing: they don't even listen to the teachings in the book that they hold up when they're shouting out hatred against gays. You're not a follower of Jesus if you don't live by the words he spoke, you're just a fan.
And I watched the finale episode of the series Smallville, in which the young man who is Clark Kent at last grows into the man we call super. It was actually inspirational; but what made we most appreciative was when, in the last minutes of the show, when the mantle was finally assumed, the musical score started quoting, first in bits and pieces, then in a full quote, the famous "Superman" them from the movies, written by John Williams. What a perfect way to connect those versions of the story all together.
Soundtrack music has the power to make such connections, both by association and quotation, but also by creating emotional resonance. The "Superman" theme by Williams is a genuinely inspiring melody: it makes you look up in the sky, it lifts up your heart, it excites your expectations of being both entertained and inspired, and it is on top of that an eminently hummable tune.
This makes me think of my own songwriting at the moment. If I can do half as well, even one-quarter as well, in a song I am writing for this new music commission, in uplifting emotions and inspiring people to both feel better about their lives and to go out humming a tune, I will be a very happy composer indeed.
The wind and rain and thunder are shaking down the spring flowers. The pear tree is shedding snow across its skirts. The neighbor's crabapple tree has shed most of its profuse clutch of white blossoms in last night's wind and rain, and now several square yards of lawn and garden are covered with bright white petals, making it look as though there is snow upon the ground. A whole field of flowers and grass emerging from petal-snow, making a confusion of seasons, and some beautiful images.
More storms are coming, it's been promised. I try to capture what flowers I can, in the cameras, before they are all gone.
The world seems shaky right now. Cyberspace is acting stupid and unreliable today. The weather is unstable, neither warm enough nor cool enough to be comfortable, and with a restless breeze that is the foretaste of more storms yet to arrive. It reminds you how fragile everything is, from cyberspace itself, which has always been a friable medium, to physical and social infrastructure, to life itself. I can’t get ignore how fragile life seems right now. Everything can always spin apart. Everything is delicate and ephemeral, to be savored for the moment, for it will soon be gone. These flowers that have been glorious all this past month will soon be gone. They are already ragged around the edges; although there are new buds still to open. The day will soon be gone. Everything could fall apart, and that’s it.
I feel like nothing would be better for me, this moment, than to be in the desert. In the heat and sunlight. D.H. Lawrence wrote that New Mexico forever changd him, once he got past the surface of things. I have to agree. My time living in New Mexico forever changd me, too. And I keep wanting to regain what I first found in the Southwest, and in Wyoming: A kind of openness, of liberation, of carelessness, that I can’t forget. It has become part of living day to day, for me, now. I surround myself with reminders, like my own photographs, but really I want to be there. I think I’ll spend some time today going through photos from recent roadtrips out West, both hot and cold days, to remind myself of what really matters. It’s certain that little that I can see that “needs to be done” right here, right now, really matters.
So I'm taking a day off. A rest day. A vacation day, from everything.
I’ve taken a mental break from the writing of the new music. I needed a day away from it. Ao when I went down to Chicago earlier this week, for a night in the studio working on video and other music projects, I did not take the new music notebooks with me; I left them here, on the worktable. It is one good reminder that a day or so in Chicago gives me: working on other music, other creative projects, reminding myself that the world hasn’t really narrowed down to only one project, one medical situation. I have other things I need to make, even if they’re not all highest priority right now. They need doing, and I need to do them. A mental break. Today I want to work on photography. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get back to writing the music. Tonight, who knows, I might do some more papier-maché: a friend of mine who is moving gave me a thick roll of hand-made art papers. I want to see what's in there, and it might inspire me to make some new papier-maché pieces. I have been thinking about doing a much larger art bowl, with many layers, using fine art papers over a stronger matrix. So, who knows. The day is nowhere near over.
•
Later:
I've spent a couple of hours filming HD video in the garden. The second session was as rain was falling gently, wetting the leaves and the flowers on the trees. The pruneria tree in my front yard is so thick with pink flowers overhanging the garden's flower beds that it looks like a giant pastel explosion. The raindrops slick the branches in close-up images, reminding me of Japanese paintings of cherry blossoms. The light is cool and steady, making all the colors vivid and bright.
I've spent the evening watching inspirational moments on TV.
Tavis Smiley interviewing Bill Moyers, about Moyers' new book of selected interviews: "This is no longer a society that honors the evidence, that honors the facts." —Moyers, who has made a career of speaking truth to power.
I watched a political commentator speaking the truth that no one wants to admit to: that to call oneself a Christian while living a hate-mongering, hypocritical life means that you're not really a Christian, because you're not walking even your own talk. That's what's wrong with the evangelical political right wing: they don't even listen to the teachings in the book that they hold up when they're shouting out hatred against gays. You're not a follower of Jesus if you don't live by the words he spoke, you're just a fan.
And I watched the finale episode of the series Smallville, in which the young man who is Clark Kent at last grows into the man we call super. It was actually inspirational; but what made we most appreciative was when, in the last minutes of the show, when the mantle was finally assumed, the musical score started quoting, first in bits and pieces, then in a full quote, the famous "Superman" them from the movies, written by John Williams. What a perfect way to connect those versions of the story all together.
Soundtrack music has the power to make such connections, both by association and quotation, but also by creating emotional resonance. The "Superman" theme by Williams is a genuinely inspiring melody: it makes you look up in the sky, it lifts up your heart, it excites your expectations of being both entertained and inspired, and it is on top of that an eminently hummable tune.
This makes me think of my own songwriting at the moment. If I can do half as well, even one-quarter as well, in a song I am writing for this new music commission, in uplifting emotions and inspiring people to both feel better about their lives and to go out humming a tune, I will be a very happy composer indeed.
Labels: art, creativity, flowers, gardens, music, personal essay, songwriting
posted by Art Durkee at 12:25 PM
2 comments
Sunday, May 01, 2011
Merry Beltane
I can't get to any Beltane gatherings this year, but I did go out this afternoon, while it was still sunny, and stick my hands into the garden dirt. Planted calla lilies and tulips, weeded some pernicious scrub grass, cleaned out and mulched the hosta bed, generally spent time connecting with the renewing and healing earth. Daffodils exploding everywhere, the tulips about to bloom, too. Possibly even tomorrow; there was one tulip whose bud was reddening all day, visibly changing during the day. Lilies emerging from the earth. The bleeding heart bushes have spread, and are nascent with pink flowers. I should probably transplant a few of them to the back garden, to thin them out. The rose bushes are all coming back to life, with small red-green leaves clustered around their bases, and some of the last year's stems greening up again. Robins in the crabapple trees that are just about to flower.
The Great God Pan, the Green Man, all coming back to life now. Reminds me to feel alive, even when I'm not at my full strength.
So, Happy Beltane to those who celebrate the return of spring to the land. And happy spring to everyone else.
Blessed Be!
Labels: digital art, flowers, gardens, Pan, photography, spirituality
posted by Art Durkee at 4:06 PM
2 comments
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Papier-Mache Art Bowls 8: Further Experiments
A mixed bag produced this past week, with some mixed feelings. Not every piece came out as well as I'd hoped.
This time out, I tried using a little more glue in the papier-maché matrix of white glue and water. I am still trying to find the exact right proportions of glue and water—and frankly doing it by feel and eye rather than measuring cups—and I think I may have erred on the side of too much glue this time out. I'll show the results of this possible error, below.
I made this group of decorative papier-maché bowls early enough in the afternoon, on a warm day, that I was able to put them in the sunlight to dry for part of the afternoon. Drying them in the sunlight made for good results with the black paper bowls, but the other bowls still needed to dry out overnight.
Black Bowl and Vase
These two black bowls, or rather bowl and vase combination group, came out fine. They are a reproduction in heavy black torn paper of the bowl and vase I had made earlier out of a similar weight of torn purple paper. (I have since gifted the original purple bowl and vase to a friend.) I am now contemplating doing a series of bowl and vase combos, like these, in a rainbow of colors, as a set. It could be an interesting large set, with possibilities for arrangement and display in various groupings.
I think the particular success of these combos is the vase, which, if you put some small stones in the base, is very stable and doesn't tip over. I imagine one could put small stones in the accompanying bowl as well, and put dried flowers or some similar decorative touch in both, and use them as a designer centerpiece. The unique aspect of such a decorative set, of course, is that you made the containers, as well as the arrangement. There are several possibilities here yet to be explored.
•
For another new group of decorative papier-maché bowls, what I experimented with was making an original illustrated paper to use. I have been experimenting already with making bowls illustrated with my paper prints of my own photographs—for example, the Stone Circle Nest Bowl—but I've been using existing prints from my back catalogue. This time out, I wanted to try creating a paper specifically intended for making into a papier-maché project.
Crocus flowers, Beloit, March 2011
This photograph of blooming crocus is my personal favorite photo, and possibly best photo, this year so far from my garden. Since spring was in the air, I decided to use this image as the basis and inspiration for a larger, designed art bowl.
So I took the crocus photo and ran it through Photoshop, creating a distressed-paper look that I intended to appear, when finished, like hand-made paper incorporating the flowers into its texture. It's an illusion made entirely in Photoshop, of course, but it looks like some of the handmade papers one can find at fine paper stores such as Hollander's, that mecca of book design and decorative papers in Ann Arbor, and that was my intent. Here is the result of this paper-imaging experiment:
I then laser-printed several sheets of this designed paper, and used it to make the larger bowl I had envisioned. I had enough left over to also make a smaller, square bowl.
Crocus Paper Bowls
Both bowls use the Crocus Paper on the exterior, leaving the interior plain. I envision these bowls being used as containers for cut flowers, later this spring, as part of a decorative table display.
Crocus Paper Bowl II
This is the smaller of the two Crocus bowls, and perhaps the more successful. The problem I mentioned with the glue earlier is visible here, on the bottom of the bowl. There was so much glue in the matrix, that the two Crocus Bowls took a long time to dry, and when I pulled them from the mold, each was mottled on the bottom. Imprints from the plastic wrap I use to line to molds were clear in the base, making for a roughened texture I hadn't anticipated. That isn't so visible here, in this photo, but one can still feel the wrinkled texture. What is visible here is the shiny, almost plastic-coated appearance of the base of the bowl, after the bowl had completely dried. It actually looks okay on this smaller of the two bowls. It might also make the bowls slightly more waterproof.
Crocus Paper Bowl I
The larger bowl, approximately nine inches in diameter, had similar issues with extended drying time, wrinkled texture caused by the glue, and shiny appearance. In addition, the plastic wrap tore the paper in a couple spots when I removed the bowl from the mold, leaving a couple of visible imperfections. Maybe it's just my perfectionism striking a muted tone against my expectations, but I was a little disappointed with the end result here. It looks better in the photo than it does in the hand, to be honest. it doesn't look bad, it just wasn't quite as good as I had envisioned.
As a technical point, you can see from the group photo above that I lined the inside of the larger Crocus Bowl with black paper. This is the same heavy black paper that I used for the bowl and vase combo above. Inside this larger bowl, I made a spiral of small black triangles that spin out from the center and halfway up the wall. This was done mostly for structural support, to give the bowl some extra heft. As a structural element it's quite successful; as a design element, less so. The spiral itself looks pretty good, reminding one of organic plant forms, but the black paper darkens the bowl's appearance from the outside, because the printed Crocus Paper is not completely opaque. Fortunately, the black interior will be mostly unseen when the bowl is filled with objects, for example cut flowers. I think that next time I try this structural support idea inside a bowl I will use either more complementary-colored paper, or pure white watercolor paper. That will give a lot of strength without color-shifting the bowl's appearance.
So, these were experiments with, in my opinion, mixed results. In some ways, the purely black bowl and vase are the most satisfying pieces this time out, because of their simple purity of color and design. The Crocus Paper bowls were an experiment in making an illustrated image bowl, with more mixed results. I've learned from the process, though, and will probably try to make better objects later using this same Crocus Paper. What I think works here is the original design and illustration, the concept of custom-making an image intended to be made into papier-maché. The execution was not as good as I had envisioned, however, and I'll do better next time, having learned from my errors.
I readily admit that this is the artist's expectations in play, here, and others may find these "imperfect" objects to be beautiful and pleasing just as they are. When you're experimenting, you have to expect a few "mistakes" and "failures" to occur, as an artist. Then you learn from the process, get better at what you're doing, and experiment anew. No artist ever gets it right every time—and the audience almost never gets to see the mistakes made during the creative process, or the process of learning to work with new materials. I'm being pretty open about my feelings about my art, here, as a way of both recording my learning process, for myself, and as a way of passing on what I've discovered along the way. Thus, I'm documenting the process as much as the results.
•
As a lagniappe, I am offering for download, for free, the original full-resolution print-size JPG version of this Crocus Paper here. (Just use your usual browser download procedure to download the JPG file to your desktop.) You can use this as a stock image for a poster or other piece, or for your own papier-maché projects, or even as your computer screen backdrop. Please, if you do use this Crocus Paper image for a project you've designed and/or illustrated, send me a JPG of your work, just for my own pleasure. I always enjoy seeing what people come up with. Thank you.
This time out, I tried using a little more glue in the papier-maché matrix of white glue and water. I am still trying to find the exact right proportions of glue and water—and frankly doing it by feel and eye rather than measuring cups—and I think I may have erred on the side of too much glue this time out. I'll show the results of this possible error, below.
I made this group of decorative papier-maché bowls early enough in the afternoon, on a warm day, that I was able to put them in the sunlight to dry for part of the afternoon. Drying them in the sunlight made for good results with the black paper bowls, but the other bowls still needed to dry out overnight.
Black Bowl and Vase
These two black bowls, or rather bowl and vase combination group, came out fine. They are a reproduction in heavy black torn paper of the bowl and vase I had made earlier out of a similar weight of torn purple paper. (I have since gifted the original purple bowl and vase to a friend.) I am now contemplating doing a series of bowl and vase combos, like these, in a rainbow of colors, as a set. It could be an interesting large set, with possibilities for arrangement and display in various groupings.
I think the particular success of these combos is the vase, which, if you put some small stones in the base, is very stable and doesn't tip over. I imagine one could put small stones in the accompanying bowl as well, and put dried flowers or some similar decorative touch in both, and use them as a designer centerpiece. The unique aspect of such a decorative set, of course, is that you made the containers, as well as the arrangement. There are several possibilities here yet to be explored.
•
For another new group of decorative papier-maché bowls, what I experimented with was making an original illustrated paper to use. I have been experimenting already with making bowls illustrated with my paper prints of my own photographs—for example, the Stone Circle Nest Bowl—but I've been using existing prints from my back catalogue. This time out, I wanted to try creating a paper specifically intended for making into a papier-maché project.
Crocus flowers, Beloit, March 2011
This photograph of blooming crocus is my personal favorite photo, and possibly best photo, this year so far from my garden. Since spring was in the air, I decided to use this image as the basis and inspiration for a larger, designed art bowl.
So I took the crocus photo and ran it through Photoshop, creating a distressed-paper look that I intended to appear, when finished, like hand-made paper incorporating the flowers into its texture. It's an illusion made entirely in Photoshop, of course, but it looks like some of the handmade papers one can find at fine paper stores such as Hollander's, that mecca of book design and decorative papers in Ann Arbor, and that was my intent. Here is the result of this paper-imaging experiment:
I then laser-printed several sheets of this designed paper, and used it to make the larger bowl I had envisioned. I had enough left over to also make a smaller, square bowl.
Crocus Paper Bowls
Both bowls use the Crocus Paper on the exterior, leaving the interior plain. I envision these bowls being used as containers for cut flowers, later this spring, as part of a decorative table display.
Crocus Paper Bowl II
This is the smaller of the two Crocus bowls, and perhaps the more successful. The problem I mentioned with the glue earlier is visible here, on the bottom of the bowl. There was so much glue in the matrix, that the two Crocus Bowls took a long time to dry, and when I pulled them from the mold, each was mottled on the bottom. Imprints from the plastic wrap I use to line to molds were clear in the base, making for a roughened texture I hadn't anticipated. That isn't so visible here, in this photo, but one can still feel the wrinkled texture. What is visible here is the shiny, almost plastic-coated appearance of the base of the bowl, after the bowl had completely dried. It actually looks okay on this smaller of the two bowls. It might also make the bowls slightly more waterproof.
Crocus Paper Bowl I
The larger bowl, approximately nine inches in diameter, had similar issues with extended drying time, wrinkled texture caused by the glue, and shiny appearance. In addition, the plastic wrap tore the paper in a couple spots when I removed the bowl from the mold, leaving a couple of visible imperfections. Maybe it's just my perfectionism striking a muted tone against my expectations, but I was a little disappointed with the end result here. It looks better in the photo than it does in the hand, to be honest. it doesn't look bad, it just wasn't quite as good as I had envisioned.
As a technical point, you can see from the group photo above that I lined the inside of the larger Crocus Bowl with black paper. This is the same heavy black paper that I used for the bowl and vase combo above. Inside this larger bowl, I made a spiral of small black triangles that spin out from the center and halfway up the wall. This was done mostly for structural support, to give the bowl some extra heft. As a structural element it's quite successful; as a design element, less so. The spiral itself looks pretty good, reminding one of organic plant forms, but the black paper darkens the bowl's appearance from the outside, because the printed Crocus Paper is not completely opaque. Fortunately, the black interior will be mostly unseen when the bowl is filled with objects, for example cut flowers. I think that next time I try this structural support idea inside a bowl I will use either more complementary-colored paper, or pure white watercolor paper. That will give a lot of strength without color-shifting the bowl's appearance.
So, these were experiments with, in my opinion, mixed results. In some ways, the purely black bowl and vase are the most satisfying pieces this time out, because of their simple purity of color and design. The Crocus Paper bowls were an experiment in making an illustrated image bowl, with more mixed results. I've learned from the process, though, and will probably try to make better objects later using this same Crocus Paper. What I think works here is the original design and illustration, the concept of custom-making an image intended to be made into papier-maché. The execution was not as good as I had envisioned, however, and I'll do better next time, having learned from my errors.
I readily admit that this is the artist's expectations in play, here, and others may find these "imperfect" objects to be beautiful and pleasing just as they are. When you're experimenting, you have to expect a few "mistakes" and "failures" to occur, as an artist. Then you learn from the process, get better at what you're doing, and experiment anew. No artist ever gets it right every time—and the audience almost never gets to see the mistakes made during the creative process, or the process of learning to work with new materials. I'm being pretty open about my feelings about my art, here, as a way of both recording my learning process, for myself, and as a way of passing on what I've discovered along the way. Thus, I'm documenting the process as much as the results.
•
As a lagniappe, I am offering for download, for free, the original full-resolution print-size JPG version of this Crocus Paper here. (Just use your usual browser download procedure to download the JPG file to your desktop.) You can use this as a stock image for a poster or other piece, or for your own papier-maché projects, or even as your computer screen backdrop. Please, if you do use this Crocus Paper image for a project you've designed and/or illustrated, send me a JPG of your work, just for my own pleasure. I always enjoy seeing what people come up with. Thank you.
Labels: art, creativity, design, gardens, paper, papier-mache, photography, Photoshop
posted by Art Durkee at 10:38 AM
0 comments
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Rumours of Spring
Our first really warm spring day here, the bulbs emerging and exploding into color. First the crocus, which already started a week ago and are almost done by now. Then the daffodils and tulips and lilies coming up in the front garden. The back porch garden, which gets the most light, the tulips already going.
In the morning, still foggy, the tulips not yet open. By afternoon, when the sun burned off the fog, these exotics were already fully open, fully colored, spread wide.
I have a lot of standard, familiar, red chalice-shaped tulips. But my favorites are these exotics. Tulips that are different from the norm. I have some fringed varieties, also, that will open soon. I like the varieties, and I like the unusual flowers. My garden as ever is planned to be a riot of color, with blooms opening and blasting out their colors from now until autumn. Always something in bloom, always something giving out color and life.
•
And then, of course, there are the lawn sculptures in the stores they're trying to sell you to make your garden even more "beautiful." Nothing I would ever buy, or ever put out. I love the natural beauty of my garden, these hilariously kitsch items would do nothing to "improve" it. But they're fun to look at in the store.
Labels: flowers, gardens, photography
posted by Art Durkee at 2:02 PM
3 comments
Friday, December 31, 2010
Wintergreen
A week ago, two or three fresh inches on the ground, on Xmas Eve, making for the traditional white Xmas. Deer tracks in the snow in the morning, with reflections from the glass windows on the house, and shadows of the trees.
Two days ago, a thaw began. Warmer weather, even some fog. I just came indoors from the garden. I was planting purple iris and Darwin tulip and Asiatic lily bulbs in the front garden—on New Year's Eve. The lawns are green, there was fog before the sun came out later in the day. It's 50 degrees or more—shirtsleeve weather for those of us who survive these annual winters. Here it is, in the middle of winter, and I worked in the garden for an hour.
Snow will come back, of course. There was a wind today, indicating a change of weather. No doubt in a day it will be frigidly winter-cold again. This is just the usual midwinter thaw. It will only last a day or two. But for the moment, just for this afternoon, a rumor and hint of spring.
Labels: gardens, photography, winter
posted by Art Durkee at 3:35 PM
0 comments
Friday, October 01, 2010
In the Garden
I shall go to the garden and meditate.
I shall go into the garden, and sit beneath
the short maples and tall cedars,
koi at my feet, and rain kissing my brow.
I shall not notice the rain
as I meditate, its kiss or its promise.
I shall let the rain come, let it snow,
let it snow, let it come unto me that
the garden is never empty of rain.
I shall sit in the garden and clear my mind.
I shall go into the garden and empty self to
become true self, emptied, whole, full of
the clear white light.
I shall go into the garden, and return.
I shall come out again from the garden,
kissed by wolf and eagle, alive to the dew.
I shall return from the garden not alone
but surrounded by invisible garlands of snowflowers.
I shall stand beneath the palms in the garden
and dwell amongst their shadows as though made lion.
I shall make a flute of my bones, and play.
I shall return to the garden as though never leaving,
never remaining, in constant motion yet
eternally still.
And there shall I rest, in time, in slow time,
eternal rest shall be mine, in time, eternal,
to rest inside time and out, never ending,
and rest in the hand and heart of each darker pool.
(images from the Japanese Garden and Glass Palace, Como Park Conservatory,
St. Paul, MN, September 2010)
Labels: gardens, Japanese gardens, monochrome photography, photography, poem
posted by Art Durkee at 1:32 AM
2 comments
About Me
- Name: Art Durkee
- Location: Nomadic, Western and Midwestern, United States
A wandering musician, artist, and writer, traveling across the face of the earth and sharing what is encountered. Has won awards for music composition, visual art, and creative writing.
Paths & Places
- Liquid Crystal Gallery
- Road Journal
- Road Journal Podcast archives
- www.arthurdurkee.net
- Photography Portfolio
- Music History
- Frank Wilson, Books Inq.:
The Epilogue - Jerome Rothenberg's
Poems & Poetics - Samizdat Blog
- prairiemary
- The Truth About Lies
- Ron Silliman's Poetics Blog
- Shameless Words
- About Last Night
- Mark Vernon's Philosophy & Life
- Nigel Beale's Nota Bene Books
- UbuWeb
- The Allen Ginsberg Project
- The Walt Whitman Archive
- Wordle
- Cosmoetica
- Heretics, PhaZe 2
- Stick Enterprises
- Will Cruttenden
- Sage Fusion Art
- Pat Jones' ImagineII
- jim Brandenburg
- Madison Music Collective
- Alex Grey
- Zach Pine's Nature Sculptures
- Zac's John Cageblog
- White Dragon Type Foundry
(my original fonts) - P22 type foundry
- Emigre type foundry
- Chank Diesel's type foundry
Wowzio
grab this · photography blog
Wowzio
grab this · photography blog
Previous Posts
- Supporting the Artist
- Struggle to Find Hope
- Why Do You Write the Way You Write?
- Gratitudes 2016
- QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology
- Playing and Making
- Pacem In Terris
- What I'm For, or How To Discover Your Purpose In L...
- Trapped in a motel in Escanaba
- Winter Waters
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