Tuesday, July 31, 2012


photo taken May 31, 2012
Austin, Texas

Science and magic danced arm in arm.
Theories rose and tumbled.
how marvelous the mechanics
of a whale's breath

Sunday, July 29, 2012










the raven flew
far beyond
the glacier-studded peaks.

the breadth of
the raven's wings
stretched
larger than the mountains
larger than the earth.

the distance of the space
between the molecules
that made up the raven
expanded -

thus so large,
the dark raven was
so very light.

no matter how far he soared
they keenly sensed
his luminous scent
his raven presence
within them.











Saturday, July 28, 2012


I was sitting in the middle of the apocalypse, having a cup of coffee, when a big commotion came my way.

I listened to my breath, and raised the cup very, very slowly.

The phone rang faster, the blender whirred louder and louder, like an angry toddler. The building was grumbling, rumbling.

Then it all stopped, as though a tsunami had rolled over and passed on through.

I heard a voice ordering a breakfast taco, and a chair scraping against the floor. I took a sip, slowly sat the cup to the table, and read the funnies.

Sunday, July 22, 2012


Like children, we took delight in the creatures and spirits that inhabit the night.

Friday, July 20, 2012


To make this bit of digital art, I started playing with a poor exposure, nighttime photo image for my 'canvas', adding ornamental color and shapes using digital 'paint' tools.

I rarely doctor photos except to adjust contrast and brightness. The few times I have, it's been to produce something that is obviously manipulated art, such as the above.

I was reading about James Whistler tonight (the painter of what's popularly known as Whistler's Mother) and learned he experienced art as music, and used terms such as 'nocturnes', 'harmony', and 'symphony' to describe his work.

I also ran into the artist Edouard Manet on Wiki, and stumbled upon his sketch of Edgar Allen Poe's poetic raven.

I read about compasses, both the magnetic kind to indicate direction and the mechanical kind (two-pronged tool with a point and an attached pencil) used for drawing circles, arcs and maps. The former points out actual direction, like a pocket compass for hikers. The latter may be used to indicate orientation in a map or drawing, and is popular as a symbol, perhaps most familiarly, the Freemason emblem.

I struggled as I have since a schoolgirl with the differences between the different kinds of 'north', including true north, magnetic north, and the celestial north. GPS north has been added to the fray. There should be a simple way to discriminate among them, but the comparisons always seem a little garbled to me, and I get fuzzy-brained.

Looking for photos to post, I came upon the one above that I played with some time back. I don't know why I wrote macadam on it, except that it's an interesting sounding word. I knew the word had something to do with paved surfaces, but nothing more than that and so I looked it up tonight. I was surprised to find it's pronounced Mac-Adam and not Mac-a-damn. It makes sense since a man named John Loudon McAdam invented this road-making process. For road-making, he insisted on the use of small rocks of relatively equal size, best achieved in his era (early 1800s) with hammer applied to stone. Finally, I learned that Tarmac is short for Tarmacadam which was coined when tar was added to the process and ingredients for creating macadam. Both are sometimes used inaccurately out of custom to describe more modern asphalt paved surfaces.

Thursday, July 19, 2012



To see the invisible
they let go of grownup
worries. They let go of schedules
and numbers,
clocks
and diets.
They played with their kids,
chewed bubble gum,
read the funnies,
and, their eyes adjusting
to the dim gray light,
began to see again.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Lamar Street Bridge, Austin, Texas, Monday, 16 July 2012


excerpt from 'Navajo Land'
by Joan Swift
(formatting not true to original)
Southern Poetry Review
Spring 1990

... I see how we make what we need -
silver, turquoise and jade,
jewelry on velvet black as a wild night sky
above the mesa.

A raven floats over.
"Nothing around here," says the Indian boy,
"but rattlers and jackrabbits."

And the ageless glyphs of the Anasazi:
sun, quail, spider,
scorpion, turtle, deer...


What they say is clear:
We loved the land, but had to leave.


Saturday, July 14, 2012


fabric from the 1960s, or earlier







she lived for several weeks with the bathroom mirror covered, and was freed.

Friday, July 13, 2012



Humans are ergonomically designed for walking. I'm travelling, and have little opportunity for walking right now, and boy, what a mess I become. Walking - and for me, that means being outside - clears my head and puts me in touch with reality. The weather, the phases of the moon, the time of day, where I am, what's happening in the neighborhood, how's everybody doing, greetings to the cats and dogs, listening to the birds and frogs and bees and cicadas or whatever's about, what's in bloom, what's not. Meaning, walking keeps me sane, and not walking, I'm just a notch above insane....

Wednesday, July 11, 2012






a postcard image of Einstein in Berlin, 1932.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012





I've lately heard cicadas singing from the trees, and there have been crickets about, which may have fed the birds.

Haven't seen any familiar bees lately, and haven't seen many unfamiliar ones. A month ago (June 10th, 2012, north central Austin), I came upon this individual. It was a challenge to photograph, but thought I'd share nonetheless.

Monday, July 09, 2012







They saw that time was malleable. It wasn't constant.

This was neither good nor bad. It just was.

Sunday, July 08, 2012
















They were not suffering from poor health;
they were suffering from physics.

Saturday, July 07, 2012




with shared breath
- the peaceful mind -
we sailed the rugged waters



Thursday, July 05, 2012









crepe myrtle
June 14, 2012
Austin, Texas

I love these photos, their humor and the detailed faces that show up among the petals and twigs. But I've hesitated to post them tonight because they are rather strange. So I've taken pause to consider other options. In the process, I was looking again at old magazines from the 1990s. In many of the photos, there are similar embedded faces within the foliage of the trees, the movement of a swimmer, and even in the rumpled fur on a horse's face. Once you start looking, you start finding these little cousins everywhere you look! And though some of the faces can have rather goblin-like features, I've never known one to say as much as Boo! much less cause any ruckus.

Wednesday, July 04, 2012



These little wildflowers are friends from way back. Known locally as 'Texas Frog Fruit', they are hardy in the driest of weather and make a great native ground cover. They seem to survive winters enough to regenerate each spring.

Tuesday, July 03, 2012


Still on a rambling tear regarding trees: I was thinking today about an article I once read about the building of ships for the British navy in its heyday. The British navy had the largest and most powerful fleet in the world during the 1700s and 1800s. The ships were finely constructed and designed. However, they were built at a cost to the nation, not only financially, but by the end of the era, most of Britain's oldest forests had been sacrificed to the building of ships.

It seems humans on all continents (except perhaps Antarctica) take the value of trees rather lightly considering how integral they are to life. Not only do trees provide customized homes and food to numberless mammals, birds, insects, frogs, they provide a lot of the oxygen we breathe. But when there's a decision to be made between changing a building plan or the location of a power line, and the sacrifice of a tree, it's the tree, and all the creatures that rely on it, that usually loses. Multiply that by tens of thousands each year, and you get a system that is breaking down.

(Another bit of truth came to mind today - a pinch of the debris off the kitchen floor [excluding floors treated with pesticides] is likely less harmful than a drop of the detergent by the sink.)

On a lighter note, I was reading another old Smithsonian magazine today, the November 1996 issue. (An image of the whimsical cover is at the top of this post.) There was an article written by Rudolph Chelminski on French cheeses. The following are a couple of quotes:

'...a rebel priest from the Brie region had taught Madame [Marie] Harel the secrets of cheese-making while, according to legend, he was hiding out from Parisian revolutionaries or his own ecclesiastical authorities in 1790. Such a triumph was her unctuously potent variety of Brie that Camembert soon became a thriving industry and the pride of Normandy.'

'[Dr.] Joseph Knirim's attachment to Harel [over a century later] grew from his discovery that patients with stomach disorders, unable to keep normal food down, flourished when he put them on a diet of Camembert and Pilsen beer. Medicinal benefits were not what the plucky milkmaid intended, but never mind, the good doctor was determined to honor her anyway. He launched a subscription drive for a statue, and two years later his efforts were crowned with success when a likeness of Marie Harel, standing steadfast with a great jug of cholesterol-laden Normandy milk on her right hip, was dedicated opposite the Vimoutiers town hall. The statue was beheaded in 1944 during an Allied bombardment, but a new one was soon substituted, and it stands there today as proud as ever.

'I'm sure that right about now you're wondering: Does the work of a mere cheese-maker possess sufficient gravite and grandeur for her to merit elevation to the status of national hero? In France, it does.'

The first time I went to Europe, celebrating my 43rd birthday, it was to France, and I was taken by the experience of trying the local cheeses, unlike anything I'd tasted before. (A list of authentic French cheeses may be found here: My favorite was called picodon.) I later tried to find it in specialty shops in the US, but it was unavailable. Some of the French cheeses rely upon raw, unpasteurized milk products, which could not be imported into the US. The article states that even with the great attention to sanitary conditions that came in the factories of modern cheese-makers, the French had to struggle to get the European Union to accept the centuries old tradition of selling cheese made of unpasteurized milk.

If there's a trend in my chain of thought here, it's that, like with trees, the bacterial and fungal life that are integral to well-being are often misunderstood and under-appreciated. Not only do they provide food and food enhancement (mushrooms, beers, ciders, cheeses, yogurt), but they are of integral importance to the function of our bodies, including, yes, digestion and elimination. Most bacteria are our friends, and quite a number are essential, a basic truth Dr. Knirim tried to commemorate with a statue of his heroine: the creator of Camembert.

Monday, July 02, 2012



Zilker Garden, Austin, Texas, January, 2012
Zilker Garden, Austin, Texas, January, 2012




Back in the late 20th century (some time ago) a program called Eklektikos was playing on a public radio station called KUT in Austin, Texas. The host of the show broadcast a whole record album, a recording of frogs and toads. One after another, from the swamps or the woods or the desert, the specific call of a specific amphibian called out through the car speakers. Funny, deep, quick, slow, croaky, whistley - each one was different. Listening to the frogs' voices, so primordial and wondrous, touched something deep in me.
This is a sketch I drew in 1977. The tree was in our yard in Pullman, Washington. But it reminds of a weeping willow.



When I was a kid in Louisiana, there was a great weeping willow in our yard, its trunk all twisted and gnarled. The long dangling branches with small narrow green leaves made a whispery sound in the breeze. And, yes, the tree did weep - flecks of water weighty like nectar, sometimes in the middle of summer.

Once I saw a small snake gliding down a vertical yellow stem, the leaves as bright green as the snake. Had the snake not been moving, I never would have noticed it.

We also had a wild cherry tree that the birds enjoyed. We heard that people made wine from wild cherries. There were two large pecan trees in the front, the one to the north was especially productive. An odd tree that was perhaps a conifer had flat needles arranged like a bottle brush and small soft spherical cones; it stood near the base of the driveway. And there were two circular stands of very tall pines that stretched skyward, at least three times the height of the house. Each follicle contained three needles. I remember this because we used to braid the needles. (There was a local tribe of American Indians who weaved sturdy bowls out of the needles of the piney woods of central Louisiana.) Squirrels would strip the cones to get to the pine nuts, and toss the spiny tabs of the cone on our heads below. After a rain, the air would be poignantly scented by the pines.

I visited our former home in May. The weeping willow and the cherry tree are long gone, broken by storms, weakened by unwitting use of herbicides. One stand of pines disappeared across the years, and the other is losing about a tree a year for unknown reasons. Only four or five remain. The pecans and nameless conifer were taken down this last winter by the highway department for a road expansion.

There are newer trees there - a healthy orange tree and a grapefruit tree. An old pair of Magnolias continue to endure; flowers grace the low-hanging branches, their limbs entwined.

Sunday, July 01, 2012


18 May 2012, Arkansas













midnight wasn't far;
except for us
pouring from the car,
the street was unpeopled.
From the sidewalk,
we heard laughter trickling from
the brightly lit hall.
To leave the dark sidewalk
step up three painted steps
into light framed
by street-side windows
was to enter a zone
separated from that of the town,
as though clocks ran at a different pace
within this magic reception hall.

family clustered at the little dance floor,
father of the bride stood
on a new metal ladder
hanging a chandelier.
the glass disks dangled
light bent and voices echoed.

staff bearing vases and cloths
floated from table to table;
their feet didn't touch the ground.
the bride and groom arrived
to check on the preparations
they reported they were not nervous