2011-10-30

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Feel I lead a charmed life after being spared the early snow that has buried the east coast. Treated to a light rain and upper 50 degree temps, the outside experience can be done sans coat, gloves and winter boots - for now. May all who have snow see it melt before the next winter dumpery.
Eric Rondepierre - the Moires collection

Found at Mossbone

James Rhodes - captured my soul with his playing.

2011-10-29


Excessive Cuteness Alert!




"There are suspect places
I must live in my lantern"

— T. S. Eliot, from “Love Songs” in The Waste Land and Other Poems

Karen and the Bird


I live here when the desert freezes.


My Meds



Paul Gauguin at the harmonium in Alphonse Mucha’s Studio, Paris 1893

me



A Pygmy Marmoset (Callithrix pygmaea) among of the hairs of a keeper at a primate rescue and rehabilitation center near Santiago, Chile on August 3, 2010. The Pygmy Marmoset, known as the world’s smallest monkeys and under danger of extinction, was confiscated after being found inside the clothes of a Peruvian citizen during a highway police check at the northern city of Antofagasta. (REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado)

In Praise of Daze

I once spent a lovely spring day traipsing through the woods with a dear soul friend who had saved my life by existing.

Fellow survivors look as each other and wink - they too have been to hell and back. Hells built and filled with hot hate of others dark realities the world offers on paper plates that can't hold the weight or those silent, dark hells we create for ourselves. The silent ones; the ones with the hidden crevices, the veiled river of memories, the places we go to sulk or scream but only inside for outside is gray order. NOTHING out of place.

We had met there, on the edge of the gray. That day was to take us from there to the life, the colors, feelings dug up on sandy bottoms of deep lakes and brought up for a view of the sun held in a perfect sky. We hid in the woods for weeks, at first, bonding with conifers, sleeping on their discarded foliage. Mornings were brutally bright but full of promise. Escaping to the beach one day, we saw our next refuge.

The lake had hauled great branches from distant shores and strewn them about the soft white sand in cavalier piles.  To us they were the remains of great, majestic beasts that were no more. Creeping among them, caressing their worn limbs, we could see stories of lives longer our mere craniums could conceive of. The wooden bones of once vertical wonders were our kin. And we honored their passing.

As we walked along the beach so soft and so white we had no choice but to be swept up in full daylight and being alive. A parade of green grass called to us and we ran like children.

Green.

All greens.

Every green.

On each blade of grass within this cloistered lawn was revealed the pageantry lady nature presents to those who bend low and look through lysergic eyes. Every blade was it's own shade of green. The color of life. The color of wellness. The color of my eyes. As we lay with our backs crushing the soft blades, the sun danced above us and the trees sang, each it's own voice but in harmony. Their voices soft whispers that could rend a soul sane.

The sanity was more than I could take.

On the edge of our glade, a sculpture had been erected. A crude thing. No art to it. No song. Metal jutting out of the earth at painful angles as chains hung in ordered rows. The chains had their own burdens. Burdens I happily placed my ass on and my angel and I began to swing.

The trees thrummed a new song, the sun did a jig and we swang until we grew up. But as we now walk the land among you, know that our bones are made of stories. We still pull the occasional resinous needle from our hair. We hear the trees wondrous songs play ever on. And the gray silent hell can not call us back anymore.

What my dreams have been doing with me of late.


"You, too, seeping memories, as we spin in place. An epiphyte: a love nest. Inextricable, shadow for shadow, rhyme for rhyme."
— Aaron Shurin, from “Steeped”






"Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite."
— Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

2011-10-19

"I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. "

- Kurt Vonnegut to the Paris Review



2011-10-18

TEM olfactory epithelium epithelial cells nose nasal cavity cilia

Smell receptor. Colored transmission electron micrograph (TEM) of a section through the olfactory (smell) epithelium of the nose. At center (orange) is an olfactory receptor cell body. At its top two long, modified non-motile cilia project into the liquid lining of the nasal cavity. The cilia are thought to be the sites of interaction between odoriferous substances and the receptor cells. Surrounding the receptor cell are the supporting cells with surface microvilli (finger-like). Within the cells, mitochondria (purple) & endoplasmic reticulum (flattened sacs) are seen. Magnification: x2,130 at 6x7cm size. Magnification: x7,300 at 10x8 inch size.

2011-10-08


Peleş Castle, Sinaia





Peleş Castle, Sinaia, a photo by bob9billion on Flickr.

Selective viewpoint





Selective viewpoint, a photo by shiraz anwar1 on Flickr.
The large forest gecko (Gekko smithii) is a lizard from the forests of South-East Asia. In bright light, the blue-green iris of the gecko’s eye constricts to form a slit-shaped pupil featuring four tiny pinholes.

from Electric Orchids