Sunny bursts of foliage like this, in easternmost Maine, remind me of the aspen of the Far West. Oh, the memories.
As if it makes a difference
In the fine arts and likely elsewhere, is it genius or rather madness we admire more?
How deeply were we, as a worship group, committed?
In reviewing these journals, I’ve been surprised how much earlier spring came there than it does in northern New England where I’ve lived the last four decades.
4:VI:78
While the rest of Friends were off camping, Kitty and I spent Saturday at home: sunbathing nude in our yard. Then Sunday, off to join them at McDaniel Lake / Meeks Table.
Ward raised the question of where our Meeting’s going and why it seems lacking … and became clerk, with a desire expressed for weekly worship … and discussion …
So that we may all grow together, share together, focus together, learn together \ Sangha de Sacre Sangre.
Ward admitting that in trying to live life fully, deeply, he has so much trouble in knowing and expressing his deepest self clearly …
Ivar hoping the men of the Meeting can get together once a month or so for a meal or whatever to share ourselves as men and get to know each other far better (the women, said he, seem able to do this where men usually don’t) … perhaps a work party, rotating among households?
Going up to the Table, Nancy asked about my beads, opening up a whole ashram rap … [was I still wearing these to the office, under my tie?]
Near Horseshoe Bend (something becoming 1/3 of the horseshoe it was before the highway department cut it short), there clumps of blooming prickly pears were blossoming — incredibly beautiful — thin, waxy, pale yellow large petals enclosing large red stamins having yellow tips = amid flat-leaf oblong cacti with long spikes “deadly as a rattlesnake” — the buds are pink, for some reason. [It remains one of my favorite flowers.]
After a year of drought — driest year on record — rains came and the desert bloomed brighter, deeper than anyone could remember …
~*~
Sunday night, Quaker Meeting at the Grows’. Ward wondering if he can take on clerk responsibilities now that he’s been named chief-of-staff at the hospital. Today Kitty sez she thinks I’ll wind up as clerk this year. [Which is what happened. The only technicality was that I’d have to be a formal member of the Society of Friends, a step I hadn’t yet taken.]
In the latest 4th New Age Directory, I found nothing listed for Stroudsburg PA — is the Poconos Ashram experiment over? Old New Age people get thrown out or for a loop? Or has the ashram closed to outsiders (as per plan)? Now is not my time to break the silence with Swami. Or had I been ostracized?
Trying to write a Crossroads piece on Quarterly Meeting realizing how many simple words have taken on complex meanings only Friends can understand, including the overtones of “Meeting” or “Friend”
That session of QM was then held at Clear Lake, on our side of the Cascade Crest … first time ever that far east.
When the decision was made with trepidation to hold the QM session outside of the Puget Sound area, they feared low turnout — instead, had the largest attendance yet: 150 in a camp with 92 beds …
Kitty remarking later how many people she met shined.
~*~
Rippled by reaction to movement toward preparative meeting status. We’re been crying out for help but only to ourselves. We’ll see if I become clerk, as Ward has proposed. (Kitty wishes someone would simply take charge and do it.)
The QM gathering gave me faces for names I had heard.
~*~
Sunday, I was approved as clerk … still as junior swami, right?
~*~
Zenny, visiting over the weekend with a cider press: “salvation” akin to Zen “kensho,” a rebirth of spirit or awakening.
Next QM at Fort Warden: should I arrange a reading that Saturday night in Port Townsend?
The state ferries on Puget Sound were a highlight of many of our trips to the “wet side” of the Cascades, especially when we were going beyond Seattle. I’ve long considered such ferry rides as a “poor man’s cruise.” Here’s one with the Olympic Peninsula’s Mount Pershing, Jefferson Peak, Mount Cruiser, Mount Skokomish and Mount Stone in a photo by Tiffany Von Arnim. Often, though, clouds, rain, and fog obscured their appearance. Port Townsend was a repeated destination.
~*~
How hard it is to dwell in my own heart, keep peace, radiate from there. How hard to “know my own landscape,” my own resources, to “live at home” and not “go to town for stimulation.”
Or is it simply that I’m trying to cover too much ground?
~*~
Mtg, First-day, seems we’re getting a “2nd group” in contrast to the original “evening group” — morning core of Truebloods, Jean, Barbara Rankin, Becky, Cathy, Eric, and me. Perhaps now our “Brothren” Friends Emily and Roger, too.
We were on a schedule that alternated Sunday morning worship at the YWCA, same time and place as the Unitarians on one week with Sunday evening gatherings in homes the next. The morning’s were downtown, easily accessible for newcomers. The evenings included potluck dinners and a more social setting that also gave us the earlier part of the day to explore the outdoors, as we were inclined to do. Or, if needed, to sleep in late.
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
Oh, no, not me
The secret to getting ahead, in one list: the ability to say NO.
Every circle, organization, office needs somebody in this role. Few people want to have the responsibility. They’d rather be liked.
“Let me check with Joe,” also works.
Poets and more poets
In E’burg, met a poet — Richard Danner — who couldn’t put his wife in a poem until they split, after 12 years of marriage, allowing him to write a book, Single Space. And how jealous they became of the other’s writings.
There’s a dilemma of consider her as an objective subject to be, um, exploited.
Maybe some things deserve to remain private.
Pflum said the words he likes to use are the conditionals: if, then, because, ad infinitum: the words of logic, of possibility, of thought itself …
Yet they often dilute the action. Somehow, they work for him, though.
Kentucky Fried Movie opens with the line, “The popcorn you are eating has been pissed in,” and deteriorates from there.
I have so many overdue books from the library yet don’t want to return them just now.
The Ellensburg library has a whole set of early Cetra opera LPs. Unlike Yakima’s.
20 Apr
Finished the longpoem.
Kitty phoned, depressed, wouldn’t say why.
Why do I put up with it?
Off to the office. [Was I journaling early a.m., after meditation etc.?]
Flow of revisions, largely the Leonard Springs pieces …
Cherries deep red, about to be picked …
Perfection versus sterility
The bounty of the prairie: abide in it
Milton! Getting down to him at last … his head and heart going in opposite directions … damn theology but his heart betraying that in the few moments it can. He was blind to more than vision.
Ideas for revising Native tales: use Bob White or even Rbt. White for quail. Logger, Cutter, even Sawyer for beaver. Cops, FBI, CIA, spooks for monsters or evil spirits. Lawyers for lazy characters or blue jays. Jesus for coyote. Update and urbanize, satirize modern society. Consider quaint spellings for Wyatt, Philip, Sidney, William, Dunbar, etc.
Weave in some glare and grime.
In English poetry, the weight of Christian doctrine closing the range of thought and sensibility to a single, predictable line. Thus, the wonder of Blake’s singular accomplishments.
20:VI
A letter from Copper Canyon Press, wanting to publish my book if “patronly folks” will come through with “essential cash” … great letter, exciting potential (retitle and some revising) …
Also, from Celeste, a tearsheet from a Seattle weekly reinterpreting the Mexican movie Chac, about a “diviner” who carves out his own heart at the end: this piece now viewing the events through Native perspectives … {We had seen the movie at one of Seattle’s art film houses.]
My compulsive reading, a suppressed hunger
Revising poems with a tape recorder … a whole new perspective …
24 Sept Sunday
Heard Bill Stafford read last night in E’burg at Washington State Poets Assn or some such … Grimes and Bodeen were there to sell Yakimas that had just come out the day before. Audience mostly elderly, stout ladies who sighed over lines and applauded single works. I get tired of so many short pieces that fail to break through the prose barrier and do the magic in the backcountry of so much of today’s verse, the realm so few have entered. Grimes said Stafford had done an amazing reading at Cedar Falls, hardly said a word except for what he read, but here he was explaining each one or offering some kind of patter for it. I said he was playing to his audience, and BG agreed fully. Two pitchers of beer for Grimes and me, Bodeen ordering root beer — “this tastes like tomato juice” — getting red beer instead, finally settling on strawberry. First time since he was 17 he’d gone a week without alcohol — “ttat’s seven days, not five,” Grimes explained.
The owner said he had hired Kitty “to give the joint some class”
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
Reach for the heights
There were no mountains where I grew up, but even then, they rose in my imagination.
Here are ten related perspectives.
- “The summit is what drives us, but the climb itself is what matters.” — Conrad Anker
- “There’s no glory in climbing a mountain if all you want to do is to get to the top. It’s experiencing the climb itself — in all its moments of revelation, heartbreak, and fatigue — that has to be the goal.” — Karyn Kusama
- “I learn something every time I go into the mountains.” — Michael Kennedy
- “Going to the mountains is like going home.” — John Muir
- “Fresh air is as good for the mind as for the body. Nature always seems to be trying to talk to us as if she had some great secret to tell. And so she has.” — John Lubbock
- “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” — Henry David Thoreau
- “It is in the wild places, where the edge of the earth meets the corners of the sky, the human spirit is fed.” — Art Wolfe
- “Birds have always had the ability to bring me out of a dark space and provide relief in bad times.” — Jason Ward
- “Not just beautiful, though — the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me.” — Haruki Murakami
- “Embrace your local nature — it’s not necessarily going to look like these mountain-top moments. There’s so much more than just the baseline of what you think exists. You probably know the biggest park in your city, but you probably don’t know a park that’s within a mile of your house that would blow your mind.” — Pattie Gonia
Adding Oregon to our orb
Picking up on my old journals:
A month of rain: 2½ inches in December: snow, then melt. Our view of Rattlesnake Hills (rising behind our shack) washed out in fog. Ground soggy, making up for drought.
Vol. 50, 11:II:78
(first trip to Portland, a city that would become our alternative to Seattle, though we never got to know it as well)
longhorn steer on Satus Pass Highway
a longhorn?
Yakama Reservation
Quaker meetinghouse in an old storefront
Service Committee on one side
First-day school upstairs
or a Friends’ apartment? (caretakers
overwhelmed by the Native display at the art museum but not the rest of the collection
- Tlingt Cannibal Society dancers, long-beaked masks opened by strings
- (bird that eats human brains, serpents that swallow whalers)
- mountain sheep horns turned into spoons
- halibut fish hooks with intricately carved animal-peoples as bait
- or a life-size cormorant, hook sewn on with sea lion gut
Portland-town, calm as Philadelphia
Asian and Native
with an Anglo overlay
afternoon, clouds cleared
revealing Hood, proud and pink over all
– Rainier and St. Helens in the soup
but where, oh where was Adams?
Still so ignorant regarding this land
- Haven’t yet seen rattlesnakes beside the rocks
- Survived avalanches
- Fished for salmon, ridden a horse, felled Douglas fir or hemlock
- Sailed out from the coastline
- Crossed wrinkled glacier
- Stood atop Rainier, Adams, Hood, or Baker
Much of the Columbia River runs through desert before getting to the lush greenery in the Cascades and on westward to the Pacific. Much of the route forms the border between Oregon and Washington state, Here’s a taste of the eastern Columbia River Gorge downstream from the Dalles, Oregon, looking into the “Evergreen State,” photo by Chris Light via Wikimdedia Commons.
As for the more common impression, consider this photo by Lena Chang/USFWS, also via Wikimedia Commons.
~*~
14:V
Climbing Clemens in fog and rain, encountered my first rattlesnake, dead in the logging road; five rattles. They gain a new one every time the shed their skin, usually three times a year.
Old-timers saying this is greenest, mostly intensely flowered spring they can recall.
17 june
Slept till 9, met Whiz and drove from the Nile to Tieton ranger station, then out, in six-foot snow pack to the Timberwolf Lookout — the forest fire watch building is gone but great panorama of Adams, Goat Rocks, Rainier, the Stuarts — Mount Glacier clear, a ghost of Baker, and crown of St. Helens. Plus Aix, Bismarck, Nelson, Butte, Shellrock, Ironstone, and others.
Kitty, off to Seattle with Michael. Platonic, she insists.
Stratocone volcanic mountains poking through clouds are Mount Rainer, center, Mount Adams, left, with a very tiny Mount Hood appearing halfway between if you zoom in; St. Helens rises to the right.. Photo by Dllu at Wikimedia Commons. A distinctive feature of the Cascade Range is stratocones about 50 miles apart from Lassen Peak in California to Mount Baker near the Canadian border.
~*~
20 Aug, Sunday
Entries lately: weekend to weekend
Sweet smell of conifers in the passes — rain at White Pass
everything clouded in
U.S. 12 still showing washout debris
wrecked guard railing
and other signs of last winter’s thawing and rains
4 Sept, Labor Day
Ginko Petrified Forest (at Vantage, where Interstate 90 crosses the Columbia)
Once, 10 or 15 million years ago, 200 species of trees grew here … the Cascade Range, not yet up, left ocean rains to come far inland (mahogany, maple, magnolia, Douglas fir, spruce, elm, ginko, box elder, beech, butternut among the common examples)
When the lava flows rolled over all, only the waterlogged trees didn’t burn … thus forming this site, one of seven major ones in US, and the one with the most species.
Wanapum tribe, peaceful, never declared war on USA and thus no treaty: and thus, alas, no reservation, no land = seems to sum up too much of Amerikan political and economic system, including judicial-legal mysterium frateritas …
~*~
Sometimes — no, too often — I feel or am wrongfully identified in a situation, perhaps because I do not submerge myself solely in a field — so that within a convention of journalists I may seem to be too ethereal, artsy, not politically-addicted enough, a health-food addict, whatever — yet among poets not hip enough, too square, too wealthy (!) or whatever: even too success oriented.
[Success? Guess that rules out poetry.]
A drive today, up into the Horse Heaven Hills … no irrigation system in sight, a few trees by the gully …
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
Kinisi 264
am
erica
ema
rica
Fallen, floating
I can’t imagine living anywhere that doesn’t have four distinct seasons.
Apart from fame or fortune
Found myself thinking about pastors laboring much of Saturday to craft a sermon heard by a congregation and then likely forgotten, something that was a more common occurrence when I was growing up and everybody went to church on Sundays, back when Blue Laws were in effect. It was “important” and discussed over the dinner table.
It also had me also thinking about long letters, back in the day, the kind that are more likely to get published as a book today.
So here we are in an era when going viral or having blockbuster sales or ratings is the goal of so many. What a contrast to work that’s done in loving detail for a limited audience. Not just that Sunday sermon. A passionate teacher within a classroom. A doctor, just one patient at a time. A concert performed for a few hundred people. (Perhaps after months of rehearsals.) A single piece of art, to be prized by a single collector.
It sets a different measure of success, along with self-worth.
Now add to that jobs done one-to-one, say caretaker in a seniors residential facility. Or even gardening, with only the universe as a witness.
These don’t reflect in economics reports or, when they do, they’re discounted as marginal. Not so, I’ll argue. Besides, how much does joy weigh?
