Memoir: Leo Kottke, "Pamela Brown", and Serendipity

 

I am going to do "Memoir" quite a lot now in this Blog, re-visiting older posts and older "bread crumbs" along the pathways of my past.  So here is a funny story about the "accidents" that end up changing our lives, and sometimes  the lives of many others as well.  Here's from a 2020 post:    

"I was surprised when I found myself humming a song by Leo Kottke that I haven't thought about since the 70's, as my first husband took the album when we divorced in 1979! For that matter, I haven't thought about Paul in a number of decades.  We parted young and amiably, and not too long after I was gone he met his life partner, they got married, and we long ago fell out of touch.  But thinking of serendipity, and  Leo Kottke's homage to  Pamela Brown,  there is a story worth telling.    

Paul and his best friend Peter were from Canada, near Toronto, and after graduating, decided to take his Volkswagen bug and go to Mexico.  They drove down the California coast and visited the famous political hotbed of Berkeley, where their car broke down. 

I was living in a warehouse with a lot of artists in Berkeley then.  In those days if you had a volkswagon  it was politically correct to fix it yourself with do it yourself manuals for "The People's Car" .  In Berkeley there was a garage where you could also rent space and tools to work.  So Paul and Peter decided to hang out in Berkeley for a while while they fixed the Volkswagon.

Meanwhile, I and my artistic comrades were planning our Warehouse Halloween party.  I had a date who was going to join me at the party, and on the other side of town,  Paul met a woman who invited him to come with her to the same party.  The party was a great success, but both of our prospective dates didn't show up, so Paul and I got together out of sympathy.  

In the course of our time together in Berkeley, Paul's brother, David, came to visit and decided to remain in San Francisco, where he became a photographer.  His younger sister, Pat, also came to visit, and became a nanny and ended up meeting a young man from Sri Lanka there.  They married, and she moved to Sri Lanka with him, and they had three children.  And Peter, Paul's travelling friend, met Belinda while in Berkeley - they married and had a son.  Paul and I left Berkeley, and moved to Wisconsin, where Paul remained after we separated, met his future wife, and they are still together.

So............Paul, Peter, David, and Pat never went back to Canada.  Marriages happened, and children were born.  New careers.  All because a car happened to break down in Berkeley, and I and Paul got dumped by our dates for a Halloween party.  Serendipity!

https://youtu.be/9cweBs-tdaA

Found Poetry

 

The Barbed Heart

Takes Refuge

In a hidden Grove

of Palos Verdes

Trees

(2009)

Mary Oliver & My Laptop Remind Me

 

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you're in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately. 

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened.

Or not. 

 

I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be as urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

~Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses 

 

 

 

Pollinator

 I've been having a lot of fun painting these days.  It's been such a stressful, if creative, year.  The Visionary Arts Show at Stevens Gallery was a great success, highlighting the work of 20 of Tucson's visionary artists along with the Red Book of Carl Jung,  as were the talks by Charles Gillespie, Kathy Keler, and myself.  But it was a lot of work!  And I was delighted that my workshops were so successful too!

But for the first time in many months, I've had some time to myself to just go in the studio and play.

I decided to just paint whatever I felt like painting.  No post modern angst, no effort at deep meaning either, I would just paint.  What arose immediately was the desire to fill my walls with more Butterflies.

And........... this image, which has haunted me for years, and finally I was able to paint a new variation on it.

I call this the "Pollinator".  In truth, it's actually a Prayer, a visual Prayer I make for myself, and for other creatives.  It goes something like this:

"May the works of my hands, words, and creative mind emanate from me,  like butterflies,  pollinating the flowering imaginations of those they touch".

So may it be.

White Sands, and the Malpais, New Mexico

Some photos from a visit to White Sands with my friend Georgia about a decade ago.  Another mysterious place, one I particularly would have liked to visit by moonlight, the glistening white sands reflecting moon shadows.

White Sands National Park is in the Tularosa Basin, a vast field of white sand dunes composed of gypsum crystals. Approximately 12,000 years ago, the Tularosa Basin featured lakes, streams, grasslands, and Ice Age mammals. As the climate warmed, rain and snowmelt dissolved gypsum from the surrounding mountains and carried it into the basin. As the lakes dried up selenite crystals formed, which broke up and were transported east, producing gypsum sand.  About 45 species live only in the Park, and 40 of those are moths. Given the high heat in the summer, most of those are nocturnal, illusive "moon moths".   It's believed that the oldest known human footprints in North America are found at White Sands.  These are fossilized footprints found buried in layers of gypsum soil that can be dated to  21,000 and 23,000 years ago - remarkable, as the present consensus for human arrival into North America is placed at 13–16,000 years ago.  

Legend also has it that there is a ghostly woman who wanders among the sands at night, mourning her lost children and her lost life. 

The nearby "valley of Fire", a vast volcanic field called the Malpais ("bad land") is also fascinating and darkly beautiful.   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sands_National_Park

Persistence of Butterflies (part 3)

2026

Back in 2007 I began to paint butterflies, inspired by the amazing book "Butterfly" by photographer Thomas Marent.

2026

I began mostly because my brother, Glenn, was on life support (he has since passed away). The Butterfly is such a perfect and literal symbol of ultimate transformation, from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to beautiful ephemeral flying creature - a living work of art, each one. The little paintings were a kind of prayer for my brother, and I vowed to make at least one each year. I've more or less been true to that, and I have quite a collection now of butterflies over my door!

Which, now that I think about it, is another fitting metaphor. Lately, with everything going on, I have the compulsion to make lots of butterflies, here's a few new ones.

2026

What Happens When the World Is Motherless?

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