dandelion gestalt

This week,
dandelions thrust from their crevice between street and concrete sidewalk -
a bright splash, happy faces of color -
where there hadn't been any for months.

We've been craving spring, it's at least a month behind last year (which was also late).

So stark in that moment when I first saw them -
I was a wreck, it was the only joyous thing I saw that day,
and almost an insult to my grief and anger.

Now they're scattered throughout the neighborhood, probably shivering on every windswept lawn,
but there nonetheless.
Already I'm looking past them, reducing their status from: exuberant harbingers of spring to: weed.

My grief has healed, too, dried up abruptly with some timely news.
Already I'm racing forward, but I'll keep those bleak images to ward off the inevitable:
abundance breeding carelessness.

Untitled.

Porcelain babies, all of us
What do we know of the light as it shines through us?
Opaque to ourselves, we are not even filters, not even prisms bending light.
No dimness of soul or mind will throw a shadow.

We are not the chosen; special, specifically
- except as we are here on this well-lit orb,
all soaking in the rays,
quietly glowing together.

Massage is eloquent silence

Your animal body has brought you here.  My hands are full of you.
This is what I know when I massage you:

that your feet have carried you a long way

that your back is strong despite its aches

that your arms have carried many things for others

that the delicate curve of your neck is tested daily by the weight of the things in your head

that your body is beautiful, and capable of healing itself, you, the world

that you are worthwhile

(I will watch your corrugated brow smooth, the corners of your mouth tick upward, your belly rise higher with each deeper breath.  My heart will be filled as yours is, cradled beneath our ribs.)

...that you will leave this place, step back into the world, and go on.

Jim Henson and I have the same birthday.

When I was little I most wanted to be Jim Henson, to play with all those fuzzy and warm Muppets who told jokes and never fought without humor and had fascinating guests come visit them, and who had plenty of colorful friends to sit next to in the theater.  What a great job, I thought as a college student, to be surrounded by all that soft, bright fabric, building puppets, imagining creative ways to blow up chickens, picking great songs for puppets to parody.  It must be fun to work with an entire group of creatives, and have spans of days where your biggest challenge is how best to flatteringly light a diva Piggy in a ball gown.

Later I wanted to use puppets for peace and things got more complicated.  I wanted lots of people involved, and they needed to be trained.  My puppets needed to say something, have a purpose.  I don't think my senior show had any intentionally funny moments.  I wanted my puppets to touch people, to reach across from their inanimate and symbolic state and infect the hearts of unsuspecting adults, to break those hearts with a surprising visual, something that resonated deeply, and shatter them.

I still want to build a giant ethereal turtle and float it gently, iridescently, over the heads an audience, to have all the adults feel small and blessed, like a tiny hopeful community.  I'm not interested in the hippies - they already get it - it's the folks who think they're too busy, who grew up without noticing, whose skull sutures are too tightly fused, that I most want to dazzle with colors and movement.

I saw a show in San Francisco once that was internationally renowned for some fool 'art' reason, in which the puppeteers waved bits of gauzy fabric around synchronistically in a glorified fish tank.  I thought it was crap, an hours-long, slightly-more-interesting-than-a-TV-test-pattern excuse for a puppet 'show', and I was embarrassed to have subjected my friends to it.  I felt tricked - puppets do not belong in the post-modern medium.  Puppets are supposed to convey some story, some shared bit of humanity, and those bits of fabric which moved like banners in the wind spoke for no one, said nothing, and meant nothing.

A few days later I saw a kids' show at a local library, and fell in love with a tiny caterpillar whose body was inched along via attachment to a clothespin - absolute genius.  In that inanimate object was a soul, a story, something to get attached to.  That show was free, and the puppeteer stayed to talk with the kids, and me, afterwards.

Claes Oldenburg said, "I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent... I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself."  I find myself nodding vigorously in agreement.  What is puppetry that doesn't make us wonder and laugh at ourselves?  The beauty of puppetry is that it can embody that coarseness, bluntness, and sweet stupidity so clearly, that it can bring us face to face with our various essences, that it makes us laugh at ourselves.  Puppets are embodied object lessons, and puppeteers are messengers, seers, wise women and men.

Tony

What were you doing writing me poems as you stood on the edge of life and a death only a year or so away?  Your poems were full of light, and humor, and sexiness.  Once you wrote about my belly, how unlike that of the muse that inspired the Song of Solomon, it was not a bowl of wheat.  I could feel the heat of your fingertips on the paper, reaching through to touch my belly, felt myself rising to you, a few miles away, safe and celibate in your parents' house.  You were a joy to them, and everyone you met - that bouncy smile, upturned, petulant face, silliness ever ready.  Who were you with that face, and then the one you kept turned away like the dark side of the moon, infrequently considered, and known only because there must always be an equal and opposite.  That opposite turned out to be an extreme none of us would have dreamed existed.

I am still writing to and about you 17 years later.  Every day is a lesson in how long loss, and loneliness, and wretched, vomitous missing can go on.  What a bizarre never-ending for a first love.

a friendly creative spirit up in the eaves

A joke you told fell on
friendly ears, all
creative types who get your crazy free
spirit.
Up they soar, away with you.
In the end, I'd so much rather have a goofy artist husband
than some genius, hunkered like a paranoid owl, up in the dark
eaves.

Ashland in photos

We ran off to Ashland last year during spring break, and couldn't think of a good reason not to go back this year.  The flowering trees and milder climate are a relief from the wintry mix of Bend in March.  Here are a few of our favorite things...  I'll publish more when I figure out how to download photos from my phone!

Dinner at Gogi's in Jacksonville.  That's a local wine, and a beet and herbed chevre salad with a tasty fried basil leaf.

Flowers. everywhere!

The sign says, "Ashland Home for the Easily Amused".

Whew!  Glorious sky, and budding trees!

The next few were just fun for our eyeballs...