More Riot Squad

"When you wake up
in the morning, Pooh,"
said Piglet at last,
"what's the first thing
you say to yourself?"

"What's for breakfast?"
said Pooh.
"What do you say, Piglet?"

"I say, I wonder
what's going to happen
exciting today?" said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
"It's the same thing,"
he said.

--A.A. Milne

Three, Two, One, See Ya

A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was "comfortable" with Britain, the expatriate American said no. And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands,
I wondered what it was I loved. The places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through dry lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron's wings
when the storm is about to break.

Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say
the opposite: we're rootless except we're also the Hopi, who haven't moved in several centuries; we're violent except we're also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nuclear weapons out here; we're consumers except the West is studded with visionary environmentalists...and the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely.
--Rebecca Solnit
Storming the Gates of Paradise

Walk Like A Giant

Neil Young: Walk Like a Giant

In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinship.
--Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian,
or the Evening Redness in the West

All Nature Is Your Congratulation

Raiph Vaughan Williams: A Pastoral Symphony

If the day and the night
are such that you greet
them with joy, and life emits
a fragrance like flowers
and sweet-scented herbs,
is more elastic, more starry, more immortal---that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them.
They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real
are never communicated
by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible

and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.
It is a little stardust caught,
a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
--Henry David Thoreau
Walden, or Life in the Woods


pelicans at Pyramid Lake

sage and friends

Thumper surveys the harvest

giant delphinium

The IBKC*


*Itty Bitty Kitty Committee
(An abandoned cat had her kittens in the storeroom on Labor Day weekend.) See also "Project Mayhem".

He Dances At Daylight

Billy Bragg/K T Tunstall: This Wheel's on Fire

the little red fox dances,
and here's a song for him.
between the traps and rifles,
he leaps on the white hill.
beneath the crowding snowgums
and the moon's thin smile,
he dances at daylight
with ten dollars on his hide.
--david campbell

Le Bapteme De Solitude

Augustus Pablo: Valley of Jehosaphat

Augustus Pablo: Rising Sun

Immediately when you arrive in Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness.
An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns;
and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem fainthearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting into light section and dark section.
When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never really goes dark.
You leave the gate of the fort or town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call le bapteme de solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears. A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it takes its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.

Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is:
Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can't help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast luminous, silent country,
no other place is quite strong enough for him,
no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in time or money, for the absolute has no price.
--Paul Bowles

For Want Of Wisdom And A Few Dollars More

But for the man who watches the leaves trembling in the wind’s breath, the rivers meandering through the meadows, life twisting and turning and swirling through things, men living, doing good and evil, the sea rolling its waves and the sky with its expanse of lights, and who asks himself why these leaves are there, why the water flows, why life itself is such a terrible torrent plunging towards the boundless ocean of death in which it will lose itself, why men walk about, labor like ants, why the tempest, why the sky so pure and the earth so foul – these questions lead to a darkness from which there is no way out.
--Gustave Flaubert
Memoirs of a Madman



Golden Palominos: For A Few Dollars More


Unit 3 at Fukushima Daiichi Open Air Nuclear Power Station 9/12/12

Practice Resurrection

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have
a window in your head.
Not even your future
will be a mystery any more.
Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government
and embrace the flag.
Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance,
for what man has not encountered
he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions
that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable.
Be joyful though you have
considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women
more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

--Wendell Berry

Straight Into The Storm

there's a dark cloud rising
from the desert floor
I packed my bags
and I'm heading
straight into the storm
gonna be a twister
to blow everything down
that ain't got the faith
to stand its ground
blow away the dreams
that tear you apart
blow away the dreams
that break your heart
blow away the lies
that leave you nothing
but lost and brokenhearted
the dogs on Main Street howl because they understand
if I could take this moment into my hands
mister I ain't a boy no I'm a man
and I believe in a promised land

petroglyph with pepper spray cop
Bruce Springsteen: "The Promised Land"
angry guy with empty chair
whirlpool galaxy
Last Stand at Fukushima

A Mote Of Dust In The Morning Sky

Henry Jun Wah Lee: Ascendance

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding.
Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is
our tiny planetary home.
In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty.
And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise.
In the last few millennia
we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder,
that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival.
I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.
--Carl Sagan


Frying Dutchman: Human Error

The Journey And Other Poems

Mary Oliver reads three of her poems

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

--Mary Oliver
The Journey