Note from a Cosmic Dust Mote

Photo by Stephane Guisard
found here

Just when I reach the point where I question the value of going on, a friend sends me a link to a wonderful video (from which I found a second one) that knocked me out of the downward spiral and took me out of myself for a few moments.

Hope you all enjoy the videos. I found them delightful and uplifting. Thanks, Ken.

I'm just saying...

Owwooooooowooo

...sometimes the only thing you can do is howl.

I'll be back.

I have a number of things to sort out; need to focus my attention on them. Will visit other blogs when I am able. Take care, friends.

CRIKEY!

I've been keeping a photographic tank watch log, to try to monitor how fast I'm going through heating oil. Snapped this one early this morning, before the oil man arrived. Didn't notice my nemesis until I was cleaning up the picture for my log. Look at the size of that spider! For comparison's sake, that oil gauge is about 6 inches high

This is why I don't like going to the cellar.
(c) 2009 Martha McLemore

Hey, God! I Have a Question.

(Post removed by author upon reconsideration of content.)
(c) 2009 Martha McLemore

Ten Commandments

Good morning! I found the essay below by following my nose from Whiskey River, that fount of wisdom and profundity I visit each morning. Although Franck has written specifically about artists, I think this has application for all those who create. I hope you enjoy Franck's Ten Commandments.

Martha

Franck

These Ten Commandments on seeing/drawing were revealed to me on a mountain, but also in a meadow, on a beach and even in the subway. For their revelation did not come all at once, but in installments, as it were, over the years, and always while I was busy drawing, and invariably on holy ground. But that may be because, while drawing, all ground is holy: unseparated from the Whole.

1 You shall draw everything and every day

2 You shall not wait for inspiration, for it comes not while you wait but while you work

3 You shall forget all you think you know and, even more, all you have been taught

4 You shall not adore your good drawings and promptly forget your bad ones

5 You shall not draw with exhibitions in mind, nor to please any critic but yourself

6 You shall trust none but your own eye, and make your hand follow it

7 You shall consider the mouse you draw as more important than the contents of all the museums in the world, for

8 You shall love the ten thousand things with all your heart and a blade of grass as yourself

9 Let each drawing be your first: A celebration of the eye awakened

10 You shall not worry about “being of your time”, for you are your time

And it is brief
- Frederick Franck

Long Ago, and Far Away

Corpus Christi, Texas 1952

Judging from two photographs of myself, taken 37 years apart, I have always wanted to be a cowboy (cowgirl, for those who insist upon gender-accurate labeling). When I was five, in the 1952 photo, that amounted to sitting on a pony, wearing chaps and a Stetson. My daddy had Stetsons, so that red felt thing on my head was a Stetson, too...had to be.


By the time I was 42, in the second photo (face added to John Wayne movie poster in PhotoShop), I had further defined my desire, moving from range-riding, cattle-driving cowboy to Sheriff, champion of law-and-order, defender of Truth, Justice - and the American Way (whatever the hell that means.)
...
I don't know what happened to those two people, but I can't find either of them today. Maybe I'm evolving; maybe I'm lost.
(c) 2009 Martha McLemore

Good Morning!

Welcome to this world!

"We all enter this world in the same way: naked, screaming, and soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn't have to stop there."- Dana Gould

Courtesy: Whiskey River

Another Jazz Sunday Morning

Good stuff

Following my nose around YouTube this morning, I found the following works of art:

Five pieces from Miles Davis

From Dizzy Gillespie

From Stan Getz

Charlie Parker

Chick Corea

and Thelonious Monk, with Coltrane.

Been to the River

Vagabond

We live unsettled lives and stay in a place only long enough to find we don't belong.

- Mark Strand

PS: Thank you, Jim Penny, for the reminder.

Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen, whose song, Suzanne, was the source of my daughter's middle name, sings to my heart, especially now that his voice has gotten older, less perfect, more moving.

I have nothing to say today that is worth sharing, except that I hope you enjoy his songs. Two more.

...

Cohen had this to say about the song in the third to last link above:

...

"'Dance Me To The End Of Love' ... it's curious how songs begin because the origin of the song, every song, has a kind of grain or seed that somebody hands you or the world hands you and that's why the process is so mysterious about writing a song. But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt.

...

So, that music, "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin," meaning the beauty there of being the consummation of life, the end of this existence and of the passionate element in that consummation.

...

But, it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved, so that the song -- it's not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if the language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity."