The Pace of Life Drop-outs.........

                                             THE LOOPY PEOPLE CLUB

Sometimes, on my not reasonable days (like today), I feel the whole world has ADD (and not just me) and can't tell the difference between a poignant moment of real human contact and a sitcom. Between, as my favorite author Ursula Leguin wrote, "blue mud and the true azure".  At least, I worry that such has been happening to me as I speed up, multi-task, and fracture my consciousness daily to keep up.

Everyone is so very, very busy.

Or maybe the "pace" of our "lifestyles" has continually become more intense, and I'm just one of those who are falling through the crevices of modernity.

Could it be possible there are other people like me, fraying, unraveling, beginning to say strange things to electronic answering machine menus that get longer and longer and more labyrinthine........lingering for meaningful conversations at checkout counters........mumbling Rilke or Lessing while ordering coffee at Starbucks drive thru......are they quietly wondering if they really are becoming invisible, and they do these things just to test the waters?

If that's so, maybe we can find each other, start a secret society maybe.

We'll become people who have fallen outside of the loop. Loopy people. We'll have a drink and some of those long, long soul satisfying conversations that went out with the '70's and the invention of laptops and cellphones.

Our membership will include people who were geeks but they reinvented ourselves to become something else, and are now regressing back to our earlier geek template because we're in various stages of breakdown, confusion, exhaustion, overweight, or just waiting for rebirth while still inhabiting a body - all ages, sexes, races and economic backgrounds welcome.

We can have comfortable campouts (in places like the Berkshires in July, when there are fireflies, and with hot showers and barbeques).......or go to Sumatra economy class and stay in a home stay for $3.50 a night, and drink rice wine and bat at mosquitoes and talk about art, or crumbling temples, or Hindu mythology, or lost loves, or spiritual ecology, or petroglyphs, and live in ways that are frugal.

We will talk at length.  Leisurely, encircled conversations that wind and spiral around themselves, with memories that are really stories with no particular beginning, and no particular end, and all the lovelier for a little embellishment.

We might burn little oil lamps to read cheap paperback books by, and fall asleep without clocks or cell phones or bras. We would allow each other our delights, and our melancholies.  Exaltations and Maudlins  are welcome as well.

I won't apologize for "creating my own reality" in ways that leave me sad or discouraged sometimes. If any other aging geek in the bunch has a rough time of it, I won't promise I can make things better, or even that I'll always be able to listen. But I won't expect them to apologize either. And we'll never, ever talk about "money" or  our various bodily complaints, unless it's absolutely necessary.

We might, however, remember people we've loved, loved in all of its forms and fashions, agape, eros, hot or cool, and how privileged we were to have loved them, more so, if they loved us back, for whatever moment or place or time. We might contemplate the real value of things, sweet things, hard things, natural things, vivid things, sad things, but all valuable things because they opened our hearts, and made us not only feel alive, but be alive.  The threads in the tapestry that you notice, that stand out in the warp.

We might write poems no one else will ever hear, and it doesn't matter.  If we're feeling risqué, we might talk about Dionysus and the mysterious Eros of nature.  We might remember  more personal examples worth sharing.  We might talk about books. We might talk about Georgia O'Keefe and Stieglitz. We might talk about jazz, we might listen to jazz.  We might talk about children, or the names of our mothers.  We might ask what god a gamelan is speaking about, or is it a river, or is the god or the river, or both, speaking through the musicians?

We might come up with reasons why Beethoven wrote the "Ode to Joy", we might toast to every beach and river and forest we had the privilege and pleasure of walking in and talking to. We might.

SPRING, by Mary Oliver

 

Spring

by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her -—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

From: 

 New and Selected Poems

Copyright ©: 

 Mary Oliver

 

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.

Pay attention to everything in the world,  as if it's alive. 

David Whyte

 

Persephone (2016)

The Big Thaw

starts with a trickle

water running through silence

as innocuous as breath

a slight relaxation

at the corners of the mouth.

Just when winter

has become a habit.

An old coat the sun peels off 

with just  a touch,

your foot

leaves a signature

in new mud

shiny as  new skin

or fresh, primed canvas

You notice a blade of grass

green, defiantly green.

Inhale,

you take your coat off

a crocus opens

in the blue iris

of some one's glance.

Lauren Raine

Vermont, 1982

Spring

by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her -—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

From: 

 New and Selected Poems

Copyright ©: 

 Mary Oliver

The Tucson Sculpture Festival!

As always, it's a privilege to participate in this beautiful show with so many extraordinary sculptors.  If you live in the Southern Arizona region, come and visit!

https://www.sculpturetucson.org/sculpture-festival

A Spider Synchronicity..........

  

I've been feeling depressed of late, certainly uninspired, and troubled so often by those internal voices that say "why bother, no one cares about (art..........the environment.......my written meanderings.........me).  Those inner voices are sure a show stopper, and sometimes, it is very difficult to turn them off.  When that happens I usually just let my life be taken over by mundane chores.

In traffic yesterday I noted a car in front of me that had a liscence plate that said "ARACHNE3".  I reflected on all the years I "followed the trail of Spider Woman", the revised book I just finished called "Spider Woman's Hands".  All the synchronicities I've recounted over the years..............

When I moved into the turn lane that car moved into the turn lane too, right ahead of me, and I had plenty of time to look at that plate.  It preceeded me all the way to the small street I live on, at which point I had to turn.  I don't know what this means, but it seems encouraging somehow.

I reflect on this, from the previous post of a poem by David Whyte:

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need

to be explained.