Where do we stand in changing conditions.

Standing in the flow of sticks, I wonder.

Where do we stand in changing conditions? Those ones that continually challenge our trust, our knowledge, and our conscience from the changeling aspects of human politics, ongoing shift in seasons and growing climatic impact of weather across our lands to the environmental pain of war across our planet?

Do we stand with the alignment of the never ceasing forces, the undercurrents of greed and fear that pull us into darkness? Or, are we more the driftwood amongst the watery currents looking like a Louise Nevelson sculpture of found objects, all in alignment with the flow of time, a passive resource waiting to reach the Ocean? Then of course, we could be the shadow play, the spiritual embodiment, that like a projection onto the physical realm is a reflection of the unending Universe?

Traveling Light

We are creatures of habit, of desire, of place; we are a bundle of nerves. We follow the sun whether looking for heat or shade; we are diurnal beings even as we live and work beyond the timeclock of our lives.

With changing daylight hours and seasonal hints of colder weather, a day full of sunrays attracts and brings us out into the light. Death, and war, and floods, and fires are pervasive; they are defining this age… Yet a day can be peace, a day can be breath, a day can be all we know….

We can Know two things - the immensity of the Universe and the individuality of our lives. They are not be exclusive realms. They are in fact one and the same. They exist individuated just as we see waves are made of the ocean, and ocean is made visible by the waves. So are we… a ripple, a tsunami, a rogue wave, all of it, together in a vastness of ocean? We are That. We are ocean even as it crashes against the shores of humanity. We are both wave and ocean.

The Diamond Sutra

The Diamond Sutra was printed over 1,100 years ago by Wang Jie. According to an article in the Smithsonian by Jason Daley in 2016, Jie commissioned the block printer to create a 17-and-a-half-foot-long scroll of the sacred Buddhist text on the 13th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong (ie 868 A.D.) Today the scroll is at The British Museum.

The Diamond Sutra is a Sanskrit text translated into Chinese and hidden in the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas around the year 1,000. It is called Diamond as “the sutra helps cut thru perceptions of the world and its illusions” explains Susan Whitfield. “We just think we exist as individuals but we don’t, in fact, we’re in a state of complete non-duality: there are no individuals, no sentient beings,” she writes.

Just as snowflakes are individually unique, they are made of the same water, and these water vapors pass through the same process of freezing around a nucleus turning into the six-armed crystalline form of snowflake. And then when each melts and joins the others, they flow together to the ocean, melding into one, into the source of all we know.

I am working on my grandmother’s archives. Stashed in boxes rather than caves, they carry a family trajectory across time and place. They talk of lineage and exploration, of daily details and social order. They bring me to a time of writing and reflection. Each letter, article, journal is unique but the same; they are mere words on a page. They are not illuminated manuscripts, yet they do stand for a moment in a life, a full life…. one full of storytelling, adventure, good humour, and elegance. And so we create the path we walk.

Mary McGinniss & The Selkies

JOIN US - Sunday August 4th an afternoon of music and friendship … 4-6pm. Parking at the Town Library (of course).

Living on Earth, on Water

When the first simple flower bloomed on some raw upland late in the Dinosaur Age, it was wind pollinated, just like its early pine-cone relatives. … Nevertheless, the true flower—and the seed that it produced—was a profound innovation in the world of life.

By contrast, the true flowering plants (angiosperm itself means “encased seed”) grew a seed in the heart of a flower, … the seed, unlike a developing spore, is already packed in a little enclosed box stuffed full of nutritious food.  Moreover, by featherdown attachments, as in dandelion or milkweed seed, it can be wafted upward on gusts and ride the wind for miles;…

The ramifications of this biological invention were endless. Plants traveled as they had never traveled before. [From Loren Eiseley The Immense Journey pp70,71]

And this traveler story of seed opens Joe Roman’s book Eat, Poop, Die 2024.  The first life to colonize Surtsey, an Icelandic island formed by volcanic eruptions in 1963-67, were plants.  The island is now legally protected from “contamination” by humans in order to study the evolution of life on an “inhospitable” landmass.  Have we already dropped seeds on the moon?

Taking a closer look at Lake Champlain, I read from Lake Champlain Committee “Lake Look” that the first photosynthetic life on Earth, nearly one billion years ago, is cyanobacteria. [www.lakechamplaincommittee.org]

Cyanobacteria—our current “nemesis’ in Lake Champlain.  I use this word only after having looked it up and finding that I am very taken by the definition.   From Wikipedia: 'the goddess of Rhamnous'; Nemesis was the goddess who personified retribution for the sin of hubris; arrogance before the gods; Goddess of retribution.  So are we paying for our environmental arrogance on the land with the cyanobacteria blooms across our lake that impact the safety of our water uses?

The Yellow Pond Lily (Nuphar variegata) is among the first flowering plants on earth (well, floating on water. Fossil records show them when dinosaurs roamed and non-flowering plants covered the landscape.  We found them happily basking in the sun while kayaking in Carry Bay.  There are 70 species of Nymphaeales and about seven are native to Lake Champlain Basin. 

Other flowering life in Carry Bay includes the intriguing Pickerelweed (Pontederia cordata) which has unique triple flowering technique to prevent self-fertilization across a single population as the bees and butteflies collect the pollen.  And Bladderwort (Utricularia vulgaris) a carnivorous plant that lives submerged under water.  The bladderwort leaves are interspered with tiny sacs that digest prey such as insect larvae by sucking in water at about 10 milliseconds, thus trapping minute aquatic organisms.

 Out of the mud,

we flower.

Time to blossom!

We are here waiting to blossom, as little buds needing to flower out of the mud and swamp of human machinations. The misery of war and politics thrive around us as endlessly as time does for Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot.

The spring beauty wakens our hearts, yet we so easily forget the eternal guru of knowledge as we follow the ephemeral. We are never satisfied with the gift of life, as we struggle against ourselves causing all realms of trouble.

embracing entropy

Heavy snow falling

silently

birds chirp all around

The words “embracing entropy” come to me from a recent conversation with a friend at the Co-op and remind me of another conversation long ago about architecture.  With everything we build we engage in entropy, and each structure begins to decompose even as we dream it up.  I now grasp entropy, the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe, the sense of disintegration, the melting of the winter snows into muddy earth, as I sense my aging body, see the grey hair, and hear the voice out of time with my city. 

This is a time when Japanese women of yore retreated to hermitages, to nunneries, to live out their lives in art, poetry, and meditation.  Not a bad thing to consider… a retreat from the vagaries of the world, a place to invest my existence, my knowledge… but before long I’d be building a sauna or tea house! 

How shall I move from active participant in the ways of the world, to an in-between-time, a time of limbo between life and death?  We are told that we live in a constantly changing world, but I see it rather as some sort an infernal stasis of reoccurring human machinations.

If we are projections from that eternal immensity we cannot name and cannot describe, so are we complete with a life force (however temporary) that animates us and engages us in the physical realm.  We are the beauty and drama of life that sees itself unfolding before our own eyes.  We are at a time of dissolution that we do not understand… despite having a millennia of intimate Knowledge.  The entropy that we know is only the chaos and disorder we feel at the dissolving of our physical and emotional and mental attachments.  We must turn the wheel of the universe toward a deepening awareness.  The ultimate embracing of entropy is our return to the Source, to the uncovering our own True Nature.

"Writing down the Bones"

"Writing down the Bones" title of Natalie Goldberg’s 1986 book on writing, on getting to the core, striving for the essential awakening… I am using it to describes my art books. These are full of content, but not words. The books are made of recycled materials and embodied energy. Each material and/or image inspired its own book form. Thus Bird Flights is shaped as an unfolding book that takes flight; it is full of bird photographs by JD.

The Book of ‘Ours is a play on the medieval Book of Hours that were prayer books carried by women along their pilgrimages. MSF is a case with enclosed booklets made from recycling a mailing bag plus a mix of Japanese paper saved from the trash. Other books are Boxed Light, Folded Gold, and Cuba Journal—this one integrates bits of Cuba.