111214 07:52
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” 
--Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

At one point Randy asked; “Can I stop this?” Meaning stop the medical intervention struggling to get him into remission with Leukemia. The survival rate then was five in a hundred. Susan and I agreed. He had several good months. I now remember better his riding a bicycle no hands through rush hour traffic laughing. Trapped between cars I was helpless to do anything but admire his panache.

I continue to smoke cigarettes having long ago decided that should I get the Big “C” I’d not accept anything but palliative  care. Suicide has been a life-long study. I’ve even considered keeping a gallon of gasoline for self immolation instead of being subject to what I, humorlessly, call medical care today: ‘Going to the Midas Muffler Shop.’--up on the rack so to say.

Been there, photographed it, walked to the bitter end with and carried people who died in my arms. I’m not trying to be a ‘tough guy.’ Women being tougher than men go more gently into that good night than we.

I cried this morning when I discovered the quote I opened with. Remembering the gift of his works given by Delouse Palmer and his wonderful female lover. At sixteen I met them through curiosity about who, how and the way they lived. I was once a painter wannabe myself. When Delouse died I put my head upon his hallow chest in homage at the funeral parlor. 

I won’t say I settled for photography since it has been my magic carpet to all that is good and holy in life. Without photography I’d be a snuffling beast residing in a cafe or under a rock in the desert. The desert that’s where my dust will be even if I have to crawl into a rattlesnakes home to get there.

I cannot emphasize how highly I regard this article: http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?sid=136

111213 05:35
Sometimes, more often than not, God speaks to me through the quotes I collect. She whispers endearments for the glory of all Personhood. Whops! Nearly said the “M” word and implied Mankind or HuMANkind.

Whops again! God, at least what I love as God, is binary man/woman, light/dark. . . . Now I’ve really stepped in it!

Flowers cannot be -- at least I don’t think so -- exclusively male or female.

--Georgia O’Keeffe
    "I hate flowers - I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move."
    "To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage."
. . . I was envisioning her tree painting rendering cracks in the starry night sky
. . . and thinking of how touched I am by Tom’s brush drawing & then I thought The Tree of Life
Trees are as much about the sky as the earth enveloping their roots. The reason for posting this lays deep in my shame implied by mother’s choice to take my six year old sister to a gynecologist . . . maybe that’s why I’m a life-time member of The Society of The Virgin Mary and eventually my shame/guilt informed me that virgin birth has nothing to do with maidenheads but more to do with the virginity of one’s soul. . . .And it follows that we are both male and female; Carl Jung’s thesis. Most people, not in equal measure but some are, or become so by choice. Which in Jung’s wonderful imagining implies becoming Whole as in Holy as in Jesus and or Mary.

Mended things are often stronger than that which remains whole from the potters hand. So too with people who become more loving than destructive or vindictive. Love trumps destruction as in Georgia’s case; abused by Stieglitz she equaled his memory in history and in this child’s mind (growing younger every minute) trumped him.

We are all broken in one way or another. Get over it--move on. Go into your heart you’ll find the Tree of Life there and know peace eternal for the first time.
God loves every fallen leaf.

PS Yesterday, at hospice, I was asked to stay with a new admission. He was agitated kicking, grabbing, pulling his diaper off etc. We do not restrain people like in the loony bin, neither chemically nor physically. I stood by his bed in my heart of hearts thinking, “that could be me.” Vallory walks in, young-black-gorgeous, looks at him, looks at me; “I could be there as well as he.”
“Yeah I’m going to buy a hand grenade and wear it on my belt.”
When you walk to the bitter end with Parkinson, Alzheimer yada yada you don’t see people the same way ever again. . . .We all die. Be Kind!

As for Vallory: she’s bright: all diamonds, lasers and needles, intelligent; wants to be a L.N. or R.N. Me too but there is so little time left. . . . She should become a doctor. If I had the money I’d give it to her. Gratis.

Memorial for our children who died

111210 05:41

Remember “ROCKY” ‘. . . its Thanksgiving to you but just Thursday to me . . . “

This date thirty-five years ago broke overcast cold and typical of Rhode Island in winter it had been so for days and would continue as such. I don’t remember the day of the week but somehow I knew it would be today that our son Randy would die. I intuited his leaving long before,  at his diagnoses (Leukemia @ four) yet in this instance while cradled in mother’s arms. Remembering the pietà I photographed them together and it was in that capture the pain roared into consciousness. Sometimes, especially when I photograph the people I love, or even those I care deeply about, I see things I don’t want to know.

This is just one of several reasons I’ve trashed or abandoned all my work prior to 2000. That is instead of simply killing my self in grief. It wasn’t just December 10th 1976 but the day is memorable for Thomas Merton’s death, different year, and now for the astonishing discovery that it is Emily Dickinson’s birthday.

I was working as a carpenter then and tarried the day longer than usual; last man on site. He waited and I am forever grateful that he did. He hugged my legs and said; “I love you Daddy” then turned, lay upon his bed and twitched as he drown in his own blood. I’d heard the Dragon of Terror all my life, burping noxious gases and occasional belches of flames searing my eyes into blindness but especially so that black Advent day.

Everyday has become Nativity, Crucifixion and, now, Resurrection. What will we call this ‘resurrection’ day, Epiphany!? It just now occurs to me that our resurrection, or that of the great teachers whose lives incarnate The Collective Consciousness of enlightenment for which some were murdered by their culture while most passed of old age. They did not “Preach” so much as teach. Jesus was called Rabbi in his time, not Christ, a latter title and not his surname.

Recently I discovered a quote, one of hundreds collected, that suggest and defines a personal perception, or concept, of a Collective Conscious Mindfulness we all need attend. First in our hearts experience, then one-to-another that we survive as a species. The quote--I will not give you verbatim--since it suggest that I attempt to voice my own “Preaching with a paint brush.”

I loath being preached at. The “Shoulds & Oughts” infuriate me so I’ve hidden behind a camera and the images begot. All the while weeping inwardly for the joy of soaring through the stars alone with words, theirs and mine. Thank you Emily D!

Robert Frank said it best; “It’s astonishing all the crap you have take to make a living.” Politicians, Bankers and Stock Brokers have stolen all my money and retired I subsist on sub poverty social security . . . yet am happier and richer than anyone else I know in the entire world.

Poetic! Isn’t it!    Think about all the rich folks who profit from the sweat of your brow while stealing the future for our children.

I digress, it is the nature of my mind: The relates to that and implies . . . etc.

The tragedy of my children’s deaths--not at the same time--is now--as it should be--eventually, celebrated as were their births and lives. Here I am tempted to pitch volunteering at hospice, a primary source of my healing/reconciliation, but I am too consciously aware that charity and love are synonymous.

We all die, it is dying we fear, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jesus come to mind--St. Francis (imagined) too. Faced their passage with equanimity leaving the world as they would have it not as their executioners desired. The love we give to those who cannot, or will not love themselves, is our truth and our greatest gift. Be fearless in that beloved.

New Dimensions Media : GETTING DIRTY: THE JOY OF GROWING FOOD IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD with Rachel Kaplan

New Dimensions Media : GETTING DIRTY: THE JOY OF GROWING FOOD IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD with Rachel Kaplan

synchronistic events , , ,

100209 06:54
Gazing Balls & Lawn Ornaments: a visual metaphor for our inability to receive love that is real, since we don't believe we are worth it. {Please click the link below for a visual reference}
Gazing Balls were a common item decorating the homes of people to whom I delivered newspapers in my youth; along with bird baths. Later on I came to intuit that my parents were like Gazing Balls and my love fell upon their indifference to me, like rain uselessly running off.
Imagine my stunning horror when I realized that I was describing myself as well. But that occurred too late in my life to do me any good with those who, in fact and deed, did love me to the best of their capacities and ability.
My feeling was rejection and abandonment.
I do not celebrate my intransigence and self-loathing so much as note, and move forward through, the many, signs, myths and omens of my life towards a goal I cannot now fully know.
Think synchronistic events.
Healing others was suggested to me by a friend, who in fact had saved my life from suicide. . . . essentially making available a reason not to internally--within myself. The suggestion then became a bewildering challenge to understand how, and by what mode, that might happen. It was later defined as being a resource hidden within my empathy and intuition; perhaps equally though my hyper-vision developed into a near malady in childhood and a peculiar ability to witness in others their denial and indifference to themselves . . .
“The neurotic is nailed to the cross of his fiction.” --Alfred Adler
Admittedly I was neurotic until recently, in the following sense: I was constantly filled with apprehension and anxiety for all the messages I’d lived by given to me by authority beginning with my parents. These then expanding outward into society, government, religion and finally the world-at-large. In a gross generalization it was simply being told that I cannot be worth anything: “You can’t do it!”
The “YOU!” messages were deafening, and became the historical “tape” I replayed everyday.
I had no foundation of personal value to process any conflict and so retreated from everyone and everything. The experience was a kind of death and I don’t want to go there ever again. There is no need to since I have, as Carl Jung stated it;
'Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart . . . Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.'
If you inter your feelings and experiences holding you in bondage, you can find peace. To know and respect yourself is to be respected by others. And in the end you will accept and love yourself as you are and are becoming. In loving ourselves we become love for others; a source of healing; no longer part of the problems and chaos of the world.
. . . oddly I often lose my way but in being lost am found.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Gate

Who we are internally . . .

100208 06:20
I am not what I do, and have never been that, but something more like what I am now; stripped of my professional identity and join a growing population in poverty regardless of age. Some days I awake from dreams that inform me of what I might write about. In writing up my dreams, and other issues of interest/concern, I find myself self-defined and discover a new joy for life, photography and writing .
I experience, with sadness, the idleness of those who were once-upon-a-time defined by a vocation, now retired. In a profound sense many are now retired prematurely since the economy, as it was formerly defined, is now undergoing adjustment to new realities.
To pretend otherwise is impossible except for those who caused the alteration of our daily reality. Towards them I could, but refuse, to be angry even though our bankruptcy may mean that we may need the herding goats and living in found material shelters similar to those in Haiti.
The absence of anger and fear is a better measure of my wealth than my bank account. Anger and fear can own us if we allow it to, and by those reactions are we manipulated and controlled personally and collectively.

Change is the only absolute of life.

100207 06:08
Change is the only absolute of life.
However there is a place of safety and stability for us within ourselves. A place from which we can flow into the course of our times and not be destroyed through rigidity. It is immeasurable by standards institutionalized “for us” by those who purport to lead.
I live and speak from experience hard won through failure, chaos and pain. All three of which we are lead to ideally avoid.
By-and-large everything is packaged as ideal yet is, in fact and experience, delusional; all smoke & mirrors. By which we attempt to live our lives through and for. We are the State & Church not the other way around.
The days of our lives fall away and the end draws near. I have no interest in “The End Times” so much as I have concerns for our qualities ignored now. And I ask what will we leave our children? At that, I must then ask who would want to live in such a world? After all we have means and motives to render mankind extinct and have set about doing that with a vengeance.
We all have a vested interest in the present and future, yet refuse to take responsibility for it. I would have you take ownership of your inherent dignity; a wealth that cannot be worn, or displayed through any costume of badge rank or symbol. But through interaction with life and others. Your life, like mine, is mortal played out upon the stage of eternity.