Sax like a trail of seafoam as the voice murmurs, clearer less clear, between realities...

The voice, almost inaudible at times, murmuring, just under the waves, rises up and pulls back, almost taking me to what is between worlds. The words murmur all around me. They become distinct, then disappear into the sweetness of the sax, a sax become like a deep calling home. This morning I read a poem, 'Talking to Ourselves,' to which Orchestra Sekra's 'The next life' seems a perfect accompaniment, and as I read and listened, yes, our thoughts are often in that place between worlds, following our loved ones into the ocean wake, waking on the shore, with and without them, carrying on with our lives:


Talking to Ourselves

by Philip Schultz

A woman in my doctor's office last week
couldn't stop talking about Niagara Falls,
the difference between dog and deer ticks,
how her oldest boy, killed in Iraq, would lie
with her at night in the summer grass, singing
Puccini. Her eyes looked at me but saw only
the saffron swirls of the quivering heavens.

Yesterday, Mr. Miller, our tidy neighbor,
stopped under our lopsided maple to explain
how his wife of sixty years died last month
of Alzheimer's. I stood there, listening to
his longing reach across the darkness with
each bruised breath of his eloquent singing.

This morning my five-year-old asked himself
why he'd come into the kitchen. I understood
he was thinking out loud, personifying himself,
but the intimacy of his small voice was surprising.

When my father's vending business was failing,
he'd talk to himself while driving, his lips
silently moving, his black eyes deliquescent.
He didn't care that I was there, listening,
what he was saying was too important.

"Too important," I hear myself saying
in the kitchen, putting the dishes away,
and my wife looks up from her reading
and asks, "What's that you said?"

"Talking to Ourselves" by Philip Schultz, from Failure. © Harcourt, 2007. Reprinted with permission.

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with thanks to Balthaz for recommending this single

This album was recommended to you by:
brendaclews

It's not that I'm absent. I'm always here. There's so much I cannot speak of. Before it was different, I was able to weave things into prosepoetry that obscured while clarifying, you know how that is.

I am doing things I want to be doing, though. Today I had my second hour editing a manuscript. I have to go to a coffee shop, be trapped with nothing else to do; it works. On this mms I give myself until the end of June, that should be amble time.

At night I spend a minimum of an hour painting. To do that has its odd requirements too, but I am able to settle myself enough to enter the paint.

There is duress. Energy, focus, not easy. Yet I am doing it - with a few tricks. Since I know myself so well I know what'll motivate and what won't.

We are our last mysteries, aren't we. Though after many years of living as who we are, we become accustomed to ourselves, and our idiosyncracies. We learn how to negotiate our devious psychic terrains, how to point ourselves in a direction, how to stay on track.

_
Wind Over Grass, 28"x22", 71x56cm, 2010, blocking shape and  colour. Photographed at night with flash, two photos merged to make it appear as it is (so far - still far to go).

Visit Backing Jamendo

Jamendo is community, Ai!R is right. I'd like to remain part of this beautiful community of music lovers and keep sharing our discoveries, keep sharing our music. Jamendo is not, and most likely never would be, a money-making venture. But the musical discoveries are awesome. I listen everyday to artists who've uploaded to Jamendo. Sometimes I pair songs with my prosepoem readings. I can't imagine life without this community. If we can't save Jamendo, which might be gone by the end of February without financial backers, let's save our community. Where the heart is. Our love.

From Wind Over Grass, a painting

Wind Over Grass, 28"x22", 71x56cm, 2010, first wash of colour. Click for larger. Photographed in shadow on a sunny day. The texture of the brushstroke and colour is quite good. This painting is going to take awhile - still far to go.

Jamendo is a community of free, legal and unlimited music published under Creative Commons licenses. It is a site where you can share your music, and freely download albums that appeal to you.

Jamendo was a discovery in the Summer of 2008 when I heard about it from a music-lover. Since then I have found much beautiful music, begun to write reviews and become part of a music community of artists and reviewers. Recently I uploaded a short album of poems, two of which had songs from albums musicians were offering through Jamendo and have been delighted and inspired by the support of this community.

I don't know how the owner and managers of Jamendo have done it, but they have created a site that is a creative symphony in itself.

Not just the music, but much of the writing I've seen at Jamendo is superlative.

Jamendo is not just another music site. It is grounded in a fair ethic towards artists, and has enabled a mutually supportive and strong music community to develop and flourish.

Jamendo's only been in existence about 8 years, and profits from licensed music is growing, as is revenue from the 'stores' artists can opt to offer along with their music. A second round of capital has not materialized. Jamendo is just beginning to fly, to really take off it needs backers.

Without solid commitment from its previous backers, and in need of two million dollars to survive at this juncture, Jamendo will disappear.


We, the users of this beautiful site, can make a difference. Let our voices be heard. Many of us are willing to pay a small yearly subscription to maintain Jamendo so that there can be continuance, so that our musical arts can flourish amidst a changing global economic model.

Let it be clear: we do not want to lose Jamendo.

Kinesthia: awareness of position, weight, tension and movement.

The unseeded seed, unflowered flower, is without consequence, easy, undiscovered, resting in the future.

Quiet in the husk, shell, unrooted, unopened. Genius of possibility, profound. Before the strength of the tendril, what opens, reaches, sensitivity, the grounding, earth, nourishment of soil. Or the unfurling of promise into stalks and leaves and fragrant colour of soft petals fertilized by bees, the wind.

In the flowering, my hands beside my face, fronds, follow the sun from dawn to mid-day to dusk, twisting stalk to drink the light. At night the head of petals rests. Or it rains, cup of petals communing.

In the flower, survival of beauty.

In the flowering, nourishing fruit ripening the future.


Detail from The Lady and the Chimera, 2010.

I liked this so much from today's Writer's Almanac that I thought to post it. Isabel Allende is one of my favourite writers, though I can only read her in translation.


Today, writer Isabel Allende (books by this author) is starting a new book, just as she has been doing every single January 8th for the past 29 years. On January 8, 1981, when Chilean-born Allende was living in Venezuela and working as a school administrator and freelance journalist, she got a phone call that her beloved grandfather, at 99 years old, was dying. She started writing him a letter, and that letter turned into her very first novel, The House of the Spirits. She said, "It was such a lucky book from the very beginning, that I kept that lucky date to start."

Today is a sacred day for her, and she treats it in a ceremonial, ritualistic way. She gets up early this morning and goes alone to her office, where she lights candles "for the spirits and the muses." She surrounds herself with fresh flowers and incense, and she meditates.

She sits down at the computer, turns it on, and begins to write. She says: "I try to write the first sentence in a state of trance, as if somebody else was writing it through me. That first sentence usually determines the whole book. It's a door that opens into an unknown territory that I have to explore with my characters. And slowly as I write, the story seems to unfold itself, in spite of me."

She said, "When I start I am in a total limbo. I don't have any idea where the story is going or what is going to happen or why I am writing it." She doesn't use an outline, and she doesn't talk to anybody about what she's writing. She doesn't look back at what she's written until she's completed a whole first draft — which she then prints out, reads for the first time, and goes about the task of revising, where she really focuses on heightening and perfecting tension in the story and the tone and rhythm of the language.

She said that she take notes all the time and carries a notebook in her purse so that she can jot down interesting things she sees or hears. She clips articles out of newspapers, and when people tell her a story, she writes down that story. And then, when she is in the beginning stages of working on a book, she looks through all these things that she's collected and finds inspiration in them.

She writes in a room alone for 10 or 12 hours a day, usually Monday through Saturday from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. During this time, she says, "I don't talk to anybody; I don't answer the telephone. I'm just a medium or an instrument of something that is happening beyond me."

She's the author of nearly 20 books published since 1982, among them Paula (1995), Daughter of Fortune (1999), Portrait in Sepia (2000), and the recent memoir, The Sum of Our Days (2008). Her work has been translated into 30 languages, and her books have sold more than 51 million copies. She continues to write fiction in Spanish though she's lived in the United States for decades. Margaret Sayers Peden has done the English translations of several of Isabel Allende's books.

direct link: Wherein the Bunny Comes Back to Life -a cell phone video :)))

My dog suddenly began chasing a rabbit in Christie Pits Park in Toronto, back and forth across the hills. Never seen a rabbit in all the years we've gone there. It was buck wheat coloured and squealing in fear. A high speed chase. My dog appeared to catch it. The rabbit went dead. I ran over and put a leash on Keesha, my Springer Spaniel, a retriever. Then, being a metropolitan woman of the 21st century I turned on my cell phone video... :)))

Music- Not Forget Me by djbouly, Creative Commons licensed.

From Wind Over Grass, a painting

Wind Over Grass, 28"x22", 71x56cm, 2010, underpainting, on canvas.

Underpainting- an acrylic base, a chalk drawing that instead of erasing I painted over in 'Bone Black.' Difficult to photograph! Click for larger size that's easier to see (you'll go to Picasa, to the album for this painting-to-be).