Summer Pond Notes

“A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.”

-Walt Whitman

 

What a beautiful planet I live on! 

I admire the beauty of this early summer evening with the sunset sky colors reflected in the pond, and set like a fire opal in a foamy flower bracelet. We mowed around the pond in early spring and now the white daisies ring the pond. They stand waist high, forming a solid white carpet of velvety petals trembling in the breeze. Quite suitable for fairies to dance upon! The deer mill around with their heads sticking improbably up out of the flowers.

 

I've noticed that when you scrape around on the earth, things grow back after a while. But what exactly grows back depends on the place. In some places you get blackberries, thistles, or even a big old crop of poison oak. But here, you get a whole lot of daisies!

 

The herons still visit. They stop in for fast food. I see one swallowing a large goldfish and then lifting into the air on great blue grey wings.

 

The El Niño wetness that breaks the drought a bit brings wildflowers twice as tall, three times as diverse, and four times as numerous as usual! I see them everywhere on my morning walks. 

 

Sometimes I feel so depressed about the ongoing damage we are doing to the natural world. But a spring like this one lifts my spirits, because I behold also the resilience of this highly tuned, self balancing system of nature that we humans have evolved up within, and are waking up to. It is as if the flowers have been waiting for a year like this, and they spring up in joy when the rains return.

 

I wonder if, a hundred years from now, we will see a world that is a garden planet, like we could create here, or a technological prison planet of control and repression. The choice is ours...

 

"The universe is not a hierarchy. It is a jungle wild fractal swirliarchy." - Omni

Fiber Art Matrix

 

 
 

 

My room sized loom went away last year, along with my art studio. 

 

At the time this seemed fine. I was in love with my ipad art and did not expect to want to do any other kind of art ever again. (Just like that time I got toe shoes and had to buy toe socks to go in them. I thought I would always wear toe socks so I got rid of all of my regular socks.)

So the fiber art stuff simply decants into the entire house. Somehow, instead of going away, my art studio superimposes itself out into the whole house. It surrounds me in baskets of yarn and fleece all over the place, and I seriously expect to not be interested? Actually, I wanted to use it all up, remember, because it is so....physical? 

I want to Simplify.

But of course as we know now, Real Stuff also has a place and does sometimes call me. Maybe I'm just downsizing. I am intrigued with the way that looms work. In previous projects I explored peg looms. Now I wonder about tightly warped,  but still super simple looms. 

 

I order an inexpensive tapestry loom and put it together. It fits beautifully onto my wooden painting easel. But after assembling and warping up this new loom, what do I do, weave something? 

 

No, no, no! I build more looms! A couple of even simpler looms, from yardsticks, paint stir sticks, and picture frames, which I pick up by the roadside trash/free pile on my morning walk. I want to pare it down to basics.

 

Now, I have a nifty quick and easy loom that takes up no more space than a book to replace the room sized loom. One that can do the same, albeit much smaller, kind of tight warp weaving I was doing on the room sized loom. 

 

Instead of making a commitment to a big project, this loom is more like sketchbook loom, portable and quick. Instantly, two weavings pop right out of the new little loom I have made. 

 

The loom is a matrix, a new tool, like the studio itself is also a matrix, a tool. Or even the idea of studio, all the way to the artist As matrix. I wonder what magical fiber art will emerge next from this constantly shape-changing art studio.

 

 

 

 

“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

― Richard P. Feynman

The Dog Gets a Companion Human

Each bite of food contains the life of the sun and the earth. The whole universe is in a piece of bread. —Thich Nhat Hanh

 

Now that we have a granny living with us, the dog has adopted her as his best companion person. Both of them like to sit around a lot, and both enjoy someone warm to cuddle up next to. It's a good thing all around, so it is worth encouraging. The key is to have the granny feed the dog, thus establishing said granny as a human with benefits.

 

This particular granny is so old that when she was a child, kids were heavily outranked by everyone. They were treated like little devils who needed to be trained and punished so they would grow up into good adult citizens.

 

One day Granny does not like what was for breakfast, and does not care to finish eating her food. But she remembered being a little child who was punished for not "cleaning her plate".

Granny begins to cry! When we find out why, we tell her everyone eats as much or as little as they like here. Besides, the food left over from what she did not want is by definition the doggy's food. She can't eat that. That would be stealing!

 

What a relief! That fixed it. Doggy and granny have been the best of friends ever since.

Speaking of Chartreuse

Charlene, Charlene, I don't mean to be mean, 

But you're the gaudiest thing that I've ever seen! 

Chartreuse, chartreuse, since I've turned ya loose,

 You stick out more than a red caboose!

Now that my pond pearl piece is sporting a new pearl of electric chartreuse, I contemplate this extreme and (to me) distasteful color. When I weave rainbows, this color is a real stumbling block to a nice smooth color transition from yellow to green. Chartreuse really stands out. No wonder we use it for safety signs and reflective gear.

  

One problem is that this color reflects so much light that it outshines the light green on one side and even yellow on the other side. Chartreuse is the color of your glow-in-the-dark cardboard Halloween skeleton, and of ghosts. It looks slightly radioactive.

Chartreuse lichen is the only color the bare trees around here wear all winter, but it is also the first color of spring. Soon it matures into a deeper summer green, of course, unlike reflective safety gear.

 

 Chartreuse stands in the center of the rainbow, the brightness midpoint of the spectrum of visible light we can see. We are calibrated by evolutionary design to navigate in the light of our yellow green sun. Chartreuse stands as the absolute zero point between warm colors and cool colors. Everything to the right of chartreuse is cool, everything to its left, warm.

 

Chartreuse is pure mentation, devoid of feeling, an almost overpowering binary or alternating current of dry information. If pure mind is like the clear light, chartreuse is like pure data.

You can learn a lot about a thing by considering its opposite, or complementary color in this case. Deep blue-indigo-violet holds this pole, ranging off toward the deepest most mysterious vanishing point. This indigo-ness pursues an infinitely receding but ultimately nonexistent concept of black. 

 

The lightest color balances the darkest one. Indigo goes until no light can be seen, while chartreuse goes on until there is no dark left, competing even with white.

I wonder if anyone ever feels warm and fuzzy cuddling up to chartreuse.

 

"Spring quickly growing

alive in the water

the weeks of rain infusing

all the land with color

the softness of the new leaves

the buds unfurling

chartreuse greening

into deeper hues

the spectrum expanding

the forest still alive, open

sharing hidden treasure"

- Chartreuse Greening by Raymond A. Foss

 

Charlene, Peace, and Pond Tales

"Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes and grass grows by itself." -Zenrin Kushû

Tales from the pond:

The multitude of goldfish survived the winter and then had a big spawn party a month or so ago, during a heat spell. Now bright orange fish flash and glide around in the shallows.

 

You have to sneak up on the pond or sit quietly for a while to see them. Or hide behind the ferns like I do. These fish are very cagey. Instead of darting away, they have a way of just sinking down imperceptibly until they disappear.

 

The wood ducks still swing by, flying low through the woods from pond to pond. Fat polliwogs wiggle in the sandy edges but most have hopped out of the pond to join the fully populated tree frog chorus performing every evening now.

 

Wetland plants are steadily creeping into the water and the pond lilies made it through the winter even though they aren't supposed to in this climate zone. They even have big round flower buds. Wildflowers are having a great year at the pond too, with more kinds blooming all around me than I can mention today.

 

The pond has a new pearl. Her name is Charlene because she is chartreuse. Here is a picture of Lon performing the formal rite of tossing in the new pond pearl:

I wrote a little poem about her:

 

Charlene, Charlene, you outshine the spring!

You're brighter than yellow, and brighter than green.

You get my attention, I cannot refuse,

that's why I've named you after chartreuse!

Chartreuse is the first color of spring. Everything seems to be a month or so early this year. Already we have had many record breaking high temperature days this year, same as you, probably, wherever you are. Global warming seems to be now passing the point of deny ability, even here in the land of denial.

Still and yet, spring is glorious. Meditating by the pond on a lazy warm day might seem to be the very idea of a peaceful spot. But peace and quiet are not the same! Even out here in the country where human made sounds are a bit fewer and far between, nature is roaring with the cacophony of the season.

I relax into the sounds and try to pick out the various birds voices from one another. Gradually the voices emerge of fauna and machine... I think of the fellow who roams the world searching for the sound of silence. But there is no silence, and peace is dynamic. I realize peace is a relationship web, and there is no more any silence in the universe than there is such a thing as the color black. All is light, all is vibration, all of creation sings. Peace is the sound of the song it sings.

Really? Isn't this pond a seething cesspool of contentious evolution, with fish eating fish, and I'm just romanticising the whole scene? I look out at the surface of the water. It is not a placid mirror, but a hundred moving circles. As I watch the water bugs skate around, I feel the joy of their adventure. I just know they are having fun. I wonder if most of the time, most of us, bugs included, are just bopping around being beings around here.

I give up trying to mediate with closed eyes or ears. Peace, I conclude, is some sort of intricate state of harmony we can tune into, or uniquely to us humans apparently, tune out from.

 

 

Sparkles in the Dust

"To survive today, other animals must endure global warming, pollution, and fewer habitats. More tragically, they must endure the silence of human hearts." -A. D. Williams

 

Every day I go for a morning walk, sometimes on the soft trails, sometimes along the road. I never can resist stopping to pick up sparkles on the ground that catch my eye. You never know. Once I found a muddy diamond bracelet in the gutter by the road.

 

The most exciting color of sparkles for me to find is blue. Isn't it interesting that a thing on the ground that turns out to be a beautiful blue flower is lovely to behold, but if it turns out to be a bit of rubbish, say, some blue candy wrapper tinfoil, the same exact sight is now ugly?

 

Today I see that little glint of blue, stop to carefully pick it up, and it turns out to be a rare treasure indeed. A dead blue butterfly. I look it up, and just as I suspected, this is an endangered species, the Fender's Blue, so rare that it was thought to have been extinct for decades. Or maybe not.

 

Then a small population was found living in a wetland ten miles away from where I found this one, thriving on a certain kind of wildflower. People began to plant these wildflowers, which themselves had dwindled in number as their habitat had been taken over by development.

What are the odds?! That I find this tiny chip of shimmering blue, only an inch across, from such a minute population that I could hold all the members of the species in the whole world folded up in my hand! Only the males are this bright blue color... And the animal exists in the butterfly form for only ONE WEEK! And they were early this year apparently, as it is not even the middle of April yet, and they usually come out in May!

I found this precious sapphire close to a park that runs along a creek. For years the volunteers who love the park have been pulling out invasive plants and restoring native vegetation there. Now I get it. For the shiny little treasure and thrill I got today, I just want to say thank you, volunteers!

"The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough."

-Ravindranath Tagore

 

 

 

 

Pond tales: the Demise of Grey

"An election is coming: Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry."-George Eliot

For the last year and a half, Grey, the Pond Pearl, has floated blissfully around in the pond. His adventures include getting blown out of the pond a few times, getting blown back in, losing his partner, Pearly, and many interactions with ducks, fish, deer, herons, pets, and..... foxes. Typically, critters respond to the shiny silver orb drifting toward them in the pond with suspicion that gradually changes to indifference. But not today.

Now, Grey is gone. And I get to see the whole thing! Like prayer flags designed to fly in the wind until they fade to white and shred to tatters and blow away, my awesome landmark work of art, "Pearly and Grey, the Pond Pearls"(pictured above) an eco interactive, kinetic, sculptural performance piece, has a beginning and an end. Today is the end.

When I first see the fox down in the pond meadow I think it's a German Shepard pup. It is large compared to the other foxes I have seen here, which range from eleven to fourteen pounds full grown. I would guess this one to be twice that big.

It walks slowly and stiff legged as it approaches so I think it is old and arthritic. I sure am wrong about that! Turns out it is carefully stalking something... And it pounces! Next it digs with its front paws, then another pounce! Now it is running with something in its mouth, now it shakes the thing vigorously back and forth in its mouth, and throws it!

Now the fox runs back and forth, swiping at the thing, counting coup, picking it up and tossing it into the air. At first I think the fox has found a bit of trash, it looks like it has a plastic bag. Then I burst out laughing. The Grey fox has slain Grey, the Pond Pearl. Grey is now just a limp flap of plastic riddled with puncture holes. The fox circles its prey, warily creeping up to sniff at it, then leap back, as if not sure if it was still alive.

After a while the fox leaves the deflated heap of plastic and approaches the pond. Apparently, the fox believes that Grey may yet get up and come after it, because halfway to the pond it goes back to check if Grey is still dead. Finally, the fox comes to the pond for a drink. This is followed by another round of running, pouncing, leaping into the air, and Grey tossing, just for good measure. The fox plays just like dogs do, with maybe a few cat moves thrown in; it's sort of a cat-dog dance.

Our local foxes are unique in that they can climb trees. Grey foxes can shimmy sixty feet or more, straight up a fir tree with no side branches. They can leap from tree to tree. Their nests can be thirty feet in the air! They eat rodents but are just as happy to live on fruit and bugs. My fox likes to spar with floppy rubber spheres.

"Find gratitude in the little things and your well of gratitude will never run dry." - Antonia Montoya