welcome the wild

This is me. Not very wild looking am I. But it's not just my fault. I'm sure it's partly my environment that helped make me this way. There are certain restraints on preacher's kids. And well, such kids either comply or break free. Example: I never went to high school prom, or any other dances for that matter, much to the consternation of my football player boyfriend one year: "What! No prom??" I offered that he should take one of his friends who happened to be female, which he did. Magnanimous of me, no? To be perfectly truthful, I went to dances in the high school cafeteria a few times after football games, but I stood in the darkness at the back, away from the rotating disco ball above the dance floor and watched, smelling the weed on my friend Jeff's breath as we talked. Jeff didn't dance because, I don't know, maybe because he was high, too shy or too cool. We in my family weren't supposed to dance as it was too worldly. So, I've got Baptist feet. (The Methodists, in their church across the street from ours, danced right in their basement!) Happily, dancing commenced when my nieces and nephews started getting married. We Baptist-footed siblings have tried our best to move and not embarrass our children too badly at those weddings. I don't think we've succeeded at that, but we sure have a good time. (Sadly, this came after my parents had left the earth. I think they would have enjoyed watching us, and maybe dancing themselves too, in another life/world.)

I've been learning to put my arms around chaos for a while now (yay Beato! yay chaotic oscilations! yay Bishop!), to be more uninhibited, reckless. Since moving to the farm, I feel myself aligning more with the cycles of Nature. But outwardly, I don't seem to veer much from disciplined order and self-control. What's up with that? It's time to start some Druidic jumping over bonfires!

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"a carpet, rich and rare"

Today is Sunday. Looking out the window I saw gold leaves that needed to be photographed. I went out into the November Michigan air, which was dark, chilly, damp and about to snow.

I heard my pal Bishop meow.

In spring 2004, when she was a kitten, I had to close her up in the garage while I planted seedlings, because she wanted to cuddle with me and the plants. She'd paw those tender little seedlings like they were the most fun toys ever. Especially herbs, which no doubt had some relation to catnip. She wanted to tear them apart in an orgiastic frenzy. I'd get so aggravated that I'd grab her, put her in the garage and not so gently close the door.

She can cuddle with leaves all she wants, that's fine with me.




"Isn't this a pretty leaf on my paw, Ma?" (below - Thank you to Mary for template help, and how to make photos bigger here. Yippee!)

Today it wasn't too long before Bishop and I were lying on the damp ground together, and she was nuzzled up inside my coat. We had a good, long relaxing November pause in the leafy grass. We almost fell asleep.

An hour later it was snowing. Which brings to mind this poem:

Leaves

How silently they tumble down
And come to rest upon the ground
To lay a carpet, rich and rare,
Beneath the trees without a care,
Content to sleep, their work well done,
Colors gleaming in the sun.

At other times, they wildly fly
Until they nearly reach the sky.
Twisting, turning through the air
Till all the trees stand stark and bare.
Exhausted, drop to earth below
To wait, like children, for the snow.

- Elsie N. Brady

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replicating Beatrice

photo by William Gray Harris

I first heard of Beatrice Wood ("Beato") after buying Chris Casson Madden's 1997 book A Room of Her Own (about women's personal spaces). I fell in love with her and her work from seeing this self-sculpture, shown in the book's photo, below. Such ingenuity of the artist to have her face and hands coming out of the wall!



It's impossible to summarize her - thinker, potter, sculptor, artist, writer, lover. If you don't yet know her, think of this as an introduction only. You can explore the web site embedded in her name, above, to learn about her story and her earthy art.

Beatrice lived to be 105 years old (b. March 3, 1893 - d. March 12,1998).

She was called "The Mama of Dada" because of her participation in the Dada movement in New York, which rejected conventions in art and thought. When asked what Dadaism is, she replied:

"What is Dada is that I know nothing about what is Dada."

I know less than that obviously, but one thing I like about the Dada movement is that it began in protest of WWI and its stupidities. Below is a litho she made for an avant garde journal Blindman's Ball she helped edit. It's a guy thumbing his nose. Maybe "Blindman's Ball" is a good name for the days in which we live, and maybe it's time to start a national "Thumb Your Nose" day. Thumb your nose and say dada.

Beato was influenced by Eastern thought, she was a follower of Krishnamurti - so much so that she followed him to Ojai, California and set up residence there. You can see her in a sari, below. She always wore saris.




photo by William Gray Harris
She said:

"Women are the strength of the world."

And: "to women who have diamonds – it can’t touch the joy of opening a kiln.”

Her pottery was what she spent her last 50 years doing. Incredible! She created her own glaze recipes, making such play with light that the luster becomes ethereal.

“I never meant to become a potter,” Beatrice later offered. “It happened very accidentally… I could sell pottery because when I ran away from home I was without any money. And so I became a potter.”

Drinking vessels like this are hallmarks of Beato's work:



Her art, she said, was not replicating nature, but "replicating Beatrice."
She died just after turning 105, in 1998. She had said:

"In Heaven, I’m going to be married to five wonderful men: Gorbachev, Prince Albert, Bill Moyers, Charlie Chaplin, and Trader Joe.”

I think she would be woman enough for that. I guess she's in training for it, as she's still waiting for Gorbachev, Moyers and "Trader" Joe Coulombe. Can you picture her and her studio apprentices Prince Albert and Charlie in the meantime? "A little more cobalt, Al!" - "Charlie, quit drinking the barium!"

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letting out a sigh for these centuries

“We ain’t what we ought to be, and we ain’t what we want to be and we ain’t what we’re going to be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr., quoting a former slave, as quoted in Kristof's piece last night

This election was not about race for me, but today, this is what I'm relishing and crying and gushing about. I'm not blind, I know he isn't perfect, and I know the ship of our country might have only turned a degree or two last night. But it's an incredible moment that I have to mark here, almost 400 years after a Dutch slave trader exchanged his cargo of Africans for food on our shore in 1619, and I can't help but weep, along with ". . . the souls of black folk, living and dead, [who] wept – and laughed, screamed and danced – releasing 400 years of pent up emotion."

From his victory speech last night:

That’s the true genius of America: that America can change. Our union can be perfected. What we’ve already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight’s about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America — the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

AUDIENCE: Yes we can.

OBAMA: When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

AUDIENCE: Yes we can.

OBAMA: She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that We Shall Overcome. Yes we can.

AUDIENCE: Yes we can.

OBAMA: A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

AUDIENCE: Yes we can.

You can read his whole speech here.

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starling symphony

Serendipity led me out to the garage to fetch my camera from the car. I was going to take an indoor photo for this blog, so I slid open the deck door and was immediately amazed by a phenomenal sound: a starling symphony. Not a startling symphony, although I guess you'd have to call it that too.

Once before, Don and I heard the starlings flock and gather in the trees around the farm. The blended assortment of squeaks, whistles and squawks is unlike anything else I've experienced. As wiki says, their song is a mix of "mimicry, clicks, wheezes, chattering, whistles, rattles, and piping notes." Imagine that times a thousand.


Starlings are famous for traveling in flocks, even when they're not migrating. They are not native to North America, and my father-in-law tells me they are a problem because they have few predators. Apparently they don't taste good, and hawks don't like eating them. So their numbers continue to grow, making these flocks more and more vast.

click on the photos to enlarge and see the birds just a little bit better

Within five minutes they were ready to leave. I'm assuming they were migrating south, although they disappeared into the northeast when they flew away beyond the poplars.

Common Starling

Sturnus vulgaris

Please watch this five and a half minute video of starlings at Ot Moor, England, by Dylan Winter, in aerobatics in which they miraculously form a moving fabric of birds undulating and maneuvering without colliding. My experience this week did not quite get to this expanded dance:

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art: a gallery of favorites

I'm posting this mostly for myself, to document some favorites of the art works I've collected in computer files. If you're interested, please click on the collage to see them better, and then you can come back and browse the virtual museum, below, by clicking on the titles of these beautiful works to see them bigger and learn more about them. Also, click on the artist's name to find out more about her or him, or the link following their names to see more of their work.

Top row:

1. Succulent Eggplants, Beatriz Milhazes. See more of her work here.
2. Parrot Vase with Tulips, Gwen Buchanan. See more of her paintings here.
3. The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1835. The link in his name also shows more of his work.
4. Clouds and Water, Arthur Dove, 1930. The link in his name is his home page, showing more of his work.
5. The Siesta, Vincent van Gogh, 1889-90. A seemingly exhaustive catalog of his paintings is here.

Middle Row:

6. St. Mary Magdalen, Gregor Erhart, 1510, and at my Paris blog
7. Prelude to a Kiss 1, Denis Fremond and at my Paris blog * Please click on "Denis Fremond," and then click "Huile" to see more of his phenomenal paintings.
8. Portrait de Jacqueline Roque aux mains croisées, Pablo Picasso, 1954. At my Paris blog. Here is a comprehensive catalog of Picasso's work.
9. Peace: Burial at Sea, Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1842. The link in his name shows more of his work.
10. Jeanne Hébuterne in a Yellow Sweater, Amedeo Modigliani, 1918-19. See a gallery of his work here.

Bottom Row:

11. Keelman Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1835. The link in his name shows more of his work.
12. Jean Monet, Claude Monet, 1880. Here is a searchable gallery database of 300 Monet paintings.
13. Le Lit, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1892. Pages and pages of Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings can be found here.
14. Woman Bathing in a Stream, modelled by Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt van rijn, 1654. This site gives Rembrandt's biography and a complete catalog of his paintings.
15. Norham Castle, Sunrise, Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1845. The link in his name shows more of his work.

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Happy Halloween Oct. 31: spooky Dansville

When we moved to the farm in 2003 we didn't know about a certain local spooky story.



We had heard the true story of the Burning Bed, revealed to the world in a non-fiction book by Faith McNulty, and then made into a 1984 TV movie with Farrah Fawcett about Francine Hughes, the abused wife who set fire to her house in 1977, killing her husband, and getting away with it by "reason of insanity." I don't think she was insane, and I guess I'm glad she got away with it. I had seen the movie back in '84, but when we bought the farm I had to be reminded we were going to be living in the same town where the Burning Bed happened.

Well, one day after moving to the farm, I was browsing books at Schuler's, and there was a book of haunted stories from Michigan. Intrigued, I picked it up and leafed through, finding one from Dansville! The story goes like this (found here):

The Witch of Seven Gables Lane

"The adventurers who tread the back lane called Seven Gables near Dansville in Ingham County still sniff the air to see if they can smell the acrid, burning flesh of the witch who supposedly lived there in years past. . . .

. . . As the legend goes, local marauders locked the woman into her house, which was then set on fire. She perished in the flames, but the stories say she remains to wreak vengeance on those who still dare to venture near her property. . . .

. . . The place became such a teen mecca that a fence was erected to keep snoopers out of the area. The effort proved fruitless as thrill seekers still found their way back to the deceased woman's old place. But they didn't get away scot-free. It was said that the ghost would scream at trespassers and that the scream meant instant doom to its hearers if the premises weren't cleared immediately."

Every day on my country ride to town where I work, I used to drive by Seven Gables Road. It gave me the creeps, let me tell you, just seeing that name "Seven Gables" and remembering the story of that poor woman wreaking vengeance on anyone who goes near her property. But one day I worked up the courage to drive down Seven Gables Road and see if anything would happen. It is a very lonely, quiet dirt road with a few houses near the main road, but soon becomes abandoned and then a dead end. I parked my little Aveo and got out slowly with my camera. I looked across the fence where the house had been, toward the dead tree and cloud in the photo I took, above. Suddenly through the whispering wind someone yelled in the distance! It was a man's voice, not a woman's, but what did that matter! Heart thumping, I jumped in the car, turned it around and made dust fly as I tore back to the main road. I take a different route to work most of the time now, not that I'm afraid or anything. I just like driving through town.

One last eerie thing: Yesterday when I bravely changed my route to work again so I could stop and snap a photo of the Seven Gables Road sign, below, I was angling for a shot and suddenly there in the frame was "my tree" - the tree in my profile picture. I never noticed that it sits right at the foot of Seven Gables Road. You know I quickly scrambled back into my car this time too, my heart thumping again. Oh, and you know about The House of the Seven Gables too, right? Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel about a house haunted by witches and spirits? I mean, how much more spookiness do you want?

(I carved the two jack-o-lanterns in the photos, above, a couple years ago. I used to love carving different things every year when the kids were growing up. I remember doing Carebears one year. Unfortunately, my wrists are too weak to carve through that thick, hard pumpkin flesh now. Plus, we don't have kids at home any more, boohoo - BOO! hoo.)

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