Tenacity

Tenacity!

Tenacity! Determination. Stubborness?
Perseverance. persistence, defiance?
Longevity, longsuffering, loneliness?
chutzpah, gumption! isolation?
Lost Cause?
Never!
Tenacity!

Glass half-Full

The Interface of Light and Matter in Costa Rica

In my freshman philosophy class, Dr. Henderson used the word "anthropomorphic" to describe Man's tendency to form a notion of God into his own human image. That is to say, we make God out to be human, or like a human, because that's all we know.
After 44 years later of pondering this and living the wonderful life God hath provided, I prefer the Torahic approach to conceiving what God is like. Torah, or Genesis, says God made Man in His own image. God was expressing himself when created all things, including humans. If we see human characteristics in his handiwork, it's because God intended for us to see that he was expressing himself through creation, just like we do.
God is an artist, like me.
Those artistic tendencies that he developed within me are what enable me to appreciate the Artist that He is.
Here is an example:

Nice work, n'est ce pa? I like this better than, say, Mondrian, Pollock or Warhol. And it's almost as interesting as Wyeth or Monet.
Here's another, with a little more background, like DaVinci adding background to Mona's portrait:

Sometimes, God takes his brush and turns it downward with a little perpendicular slash, like Van Gogh:

Other times, God uses his electromagnetic energy to separate Light from Dark, like he did in the Beginning:

Every now and then, we see a microcosmic image that resembles a larger microcosm. Here's one that reminds me of an airplane view I got once, over Utah, or maybe it was Nevada.

Another good thing about the Original Artist: He like to use his critters to help make the work interesting. Here's one where the sand critters do their thing:

Pretty interesting, n'est ce pas? That's enough for today's gallery. Time for dinner. I think Pat's throwing a salad together with celery or broccoli, maybe parsley. (wacplnts)

But listen! What Victorious hailing rings from yon beach bar? It is celebration! Costa Rica has defeated Greece in World Cup soccer! That "V" in picture above takes on a new meaning here in Costa Rica. Viva Costa Rica!

Glass Chimera

the Defender of the Faith

'Z'ounds!

What's this!
What bellicose shell?
What Defender of the Molluskan realm?
What Challenger from Sands and Seas?
What El Toro wielding horns to gore yon matador?
What defensive reflex hath raised such pointy provocation?
What genetic arsenal from the clammy Deep hath constructed such antlerian Defense?
Why, the Defender of Life Itself, the Great I Am, the One Who IS--
The One who wrote the Code.
He defends his own!
Stand aside, all ye challengers of the Faith!

Glass Chimera

A Strand of Providence

One of my favorite things to do in this life is visiting the sea strand. The beach. While growing up in Louisiana and Mississippi, our family had many excursions with fond memories to the Gulf Coast at Mississippi and Florida.

After graduation from LSU in 1973, I took a job in Florida and moved to St. Petersburg.

In my year-and-a half stay there I spent many days and hours at the beach, becoming intimately familiar with that setting--that expression of nature's wonders.

Through many hours of studying the interaction of tidal water and surf-sand, I noticed a few things about the cycles of our life existence.

In the forty years since that Florida time I have visited many beaches throughout the world, from Calabash to Rockaway to Dover and Calais, from Hawaii to China, from Tel Aviv to Cayman to California and Carolina. I love experiencing beaches. Doesn't everyone?

Today is our first morning in Costa Rica. We got into Liberia airport, then drove to Tamarindo, on the Pacific. So of course I got up early and walked a few hundred yards to the beach. Perfect beach: wide, flat, smooth with very pacific waves, arranged in a classic half-moon arc with nearby low mountains in the distance. Clear morning, not yet hot.

As has happened on may beaches before, the first thing I notice while approaching the surf is that cycle of dark and light bands of sand at the water's edge, where the waves roll in gently and do their artwork in the sand. My favorite beach characteristic to notice and contemplate.

I consider these waves, their perpetual rearrangement of the sand grains, and it takes me back to the time when I first began to notice this universal cycle, back in St. Petersburg. A meditation on nature to revisit. I think I'll linger for awhile.

Being a civilized animal, I prefer to sit in a chair while thinking. So I go back to the condo and get one.

A few minutes later I am sitting in the chair at the water's edge, considering the ocean, the sand, the wave motions and their visual record of rearranging dark and light bands of sand, the cycles they indicate or perhaps represent, the universe, God, and ignorant armies clashing by night and Dover Beach and all that stuff.

I think the first level of such thought/meditation is analytical. Is that natural to me as a man, or is it an acquired habit? just something I was taught to do in school? I don't know. Put that layer of analysis back in a file somewhere in my head and wait for the deeper, experiential level. I am looking at the Pacific beach, which is right in front of me now.

Wait a minute. What about all the stuff of my life that came before?

Now I am a Christian, have been since 1979, or maybe even before that when I was raised Catholic. So, to base my analyses and judgements about life, its consequences, priorities and outcomes, etc on an ancient Revelation, the Bible, the church--what is that? How does that affect any objective analysis I may attempt? Well, sure it does.

Hey, It's what I am. I was born into a specific place and time, with all the cultural baggage thereof.But let's not get too analytical. By grounding my judgements on my own experience as well as ancient Revelation that was handed down to me through the ages, I am utilizing the best of both worlds-- the experience of those prophets of old, primarily Jesus himself, as well as my own experience.

Now, back to the here and now. Over here in the sand, dark bands are alternating with light. There is some kind of cycle going on here, some kind of process. Been going on a long time, seems to be universal. Seeing that cycle of sand bands with my eyes is objective. Relating them to other life cycles is subjective. Can I do otherwise? No matter what theses, hypotheses, or conclusions I come to, I am a subjective man, and I will make use, in this life, of both the objective truth that is really out there, the cumulative wisdom of other men/women, and my subjective experience and evaluation of it. I'm going for the best of them all. Do I have any other choice? My options are limited.

To be human means to understand that our options are limited, so we would do well to make the best of them. Rather than dwelling on what we don't understand, consider and act upon what we do find to be true and workable.

By the way, and I didn't tell you this before. Yesterday, I experienced the worst pain I have ever had in my life. This was no small thing for me, although in the big picture it is insignificant. It's over now. That's the main thing. But the pain experience has produced an aftermath.

How did this pain happen? I had had a bout with walking pneumonia or something like it before we left North Carolina. My head was all stopped up with mucous or sinus fluid or whatever that stuff is that's stuck in your head when you've got a cold. While were in the plane descending to Costa Rica, I had the most terrible half-hour of pain in my life, because I had not done the cold medications effectively.

Now this is getting pretty dam subjective, talking about pain and my health condition, like the 62-year-old-geezer that I have become. I hate it, don't want to go that route. I'm not stuck in the wheelchair at the nursing home yet. So fuhgedaboudit.

But I do have to say something about all that physical health report stuff, because there is a lesson in it.

So I'm sitting here on the strand with my old thoughts about the universality of the surf and sand, and my right ear is still clogged with that stuff from yesterday's struggle against walking pneumonia. I've been trying for days now to get rid of that mucous.

I tilt my head to the right. Something--a liquid--shifts inside my head, and suddenly I can hear more clearly.

Thanks be to God!

Maybe you think that crediting God for such deliverance from pain is a naive assumption. Who cares? It's my life, my ear, pain. I will deal with it. I am not only going to thank God for this little relief that came in the tilting of a head,in the blinking of an eye, but I am going to use my God-given hands to begin to solve the problem.

What will happen if I gently put my little finger in my ear and manipulate that ear canal ever-so-slightly while my head is tilted? Could such intervention, perhaps, release some of the fluid from the ear and thus alleviate some pain? I'll try it.

I do it.

It works! Clogged ear now clearer than it was.

Praise be to God. Thank you Jesus!

Pretty subjective response, I know--this burst of grateful praise, but I'll gratefully accept the little strand of divine deliverance, even though I was the one who administered it.

Now, as for conclusions and evaluations about this insignificant event while contemplating sand, waves and the universe:

The cycle of pain and absence of pain--it comes; it goes. When the pain comes, it's hell on earth, but when it's gone--Thank you, God. A man's gotta roll with the tide. I'll take it. Not bad for a Friday morning.

Glass half-Full

Chicago

I say

America moved, I say, back in the day.

She just came bustin' out from the East.

She came rolling in on wheels, gliding through ship-tossed spray.

She was blowing past some old dearth, yearning some new feast.

We heard her skimming' o'er Erie, Michigan, and along the deep blue sky,

plucking plunder low, grabbing gusto high.

And when the dust had settled,

after Illinois mud had dried,

when ore'd been changed to metal,

while papa sweated and mama cried,

the new was born; the old had died.

Where dreamers come and workers go,

't'was there arose:

Chicago.


Born of rivers and the Lake,

she was cast in iron, forged in steel,

bolted fast as rails n' timbers quake,

careening then on some big steely Wheel

making here a whippersnappin' deal,

and there a factory, a pump, a field,

o'er swamp and stump and prairie

tending farm and flock and dairy

in blood and sweat and rust

through boom and blust and bust.

They carved out block, laid brick and stone;

our groundwork for America Midwest they honed

with blade and trowel and and pick and shovel.

They swung hammers through dust as thick as trouble.

They dug a canal there that changed

the whole dam world; they arranged

to have goods shipped in, and products go.

Reminds me of Sandburg, and Michelangelo.

Many a man put meat on the table;

many a woman toiled, skillful and able.

Thousands of sites got developed, selected,

while many a factory got planned and erected.

Many a Chicagoan had a good run,

caught lots of ball games, had a whole lotta fun,

while working, playing, praying and such

with friends and families, keeping in touch.

In all that we do, the plans we make,

there's forever more going down than we think is at stake.

When people wear out, they sit around and play cards.

When widgets wear out, we pile them in scrap yards.

If we're lucky, or resourceful, or blessed,

we'll end up with a little something at the end of our test,

a hole in the wall, or a piece of the pie,

maybe a nice little place, by n' by.

While Democrats convened in Chicago in '68,

antiwar protesters got stopped at the gate.

Mayor Daley sent his men out to poke 'em in the slammer.

'T'was Chicago style justice: no sickle, just hammer.

Today in downtown, Chicago Mayor Daley's name is all over the place,

though about those radical protesters you'll find not a trace.

So what does that tell ya about Chicago, or America, today?

We're like the Cubs' in the Series; that's all that I'll say.

Glass half-Full

The Possum

Nowadays, survival involves knowing how to handle modern inventions, like money and machines, electrons and data and car-washes and stuff like that.

But In prehistoric times, stayin' alive meant something totally different. It probably meant that somebody in your tribe was pretty deadly with a bow and arrow, or a big stick, or some such implement for killing animals so you could eat them. Hunters hunted, gatherers gathered, and life goes on.

Survival for cave men wasn't as easy as it is now.

We know a little bit about this from seeing cave-man paintings that archeologists have discovered and brought forth into the great legacy of human experience and expression. If you've ever seen-- in an encyclopedia, or a masters thesis or a coffee-table book-- a picture of a cave-man painting, maybe you noticed it probably involves killing an animal, like a mastodon, or a saber-tooth tiger or maybe, a possum.

Some things never change. Men still have, with their impressive array of implements, the power of life and death over most critters; this lowly slow marsupial is no exception to the rule of ultimate human mastery.

I thought about this when I encountered a possum this morning. He was suddenly displayed for me to see easily and up close, like a museum painting, or sculpture. But this was in no gallery. It was on a sidewalk where I just happened to be wandering, this summery Saturday morning along a shady avenue in Gainesville, Georgia.

He was not alive.

At first, I couldn't tell if it was a possum. It just seemed like a classic critter image, like . . .

like a cave painting. The sight of it connected in my brain with some Neanderthal artwork that I had seen somewhere.

Maybe it was the teeth that ripped this cave-art association right out of my neuronic imagery file. Those bared fangs just leaped into my primeval intuition, like a prehistoric reflex suddenly recovered.

And then, my mental odyssey back to the here and now was punctuated with a momentary stop in the 1950's, when I remembered vividly a bared-teeth image from Old Yeller, a movie about a very lovable dog that went mad with rabies and had to be taken down by his master's father. I remember so clearly seeing Old Yeller's teeth, bared so ferociously, so unexpectedly, by the onslaught of rabies.

Had this been a rabid possum? He looked like one.

Probably not. But he sure looked crazy with those teeth displayed like fangs.

Why hadn't someone, a city sanitation worker or someone like that, scooped this critter up after his untimely demise?

Maybe they left him for cave-art.

But that would be unlikely. Gainesville is a very civilized, lovely, genteel southern city, with magnolias and shady boulevards and classic old houses, and monuments to old soldiers.

Nevertheless, I encountered the possum in an unlikely place-- where a private front yard sidewalk joined the city sidewalk. The fanged critter was directly in front of this grand ole home, which is now an attorney's office.

So, obviously, this possum's once-smelly inclusion at the edge of such a serene domicile is not some Neanderthal statement. Probably just the City's oversight. I mean, who wants to mess with a dead old possum in the summertime? This sidewalk relic has apparently survived its stinky phase, to become an artful representation of classic southern culture.

Or maybe its a warning to the other critters: Watch out Pogo; the humans are takin' over!

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Well shut my mouth, it's probably a southern thing, this odd juxtaposition of images, the dead possum and the old someplace. You'd have to be there.

Southerners never cease to amaze me, even though I am one of them.

Now here's a joke to end with: Why did the possum cross the road?

To meet his Maker.

Smoke

The Apple Moment

Who knows how many lifetimes ago the Appalachian mountains laid this little stream down between these two ridges.

This afternoon in bright spring sunshine, flowing waters roll softly over mica-laden silt. Here and there the ripples leap over smooth stones, gushing as they go.

It's just a small stream here, but clear, cold water has trickled along this valley's lowest path for centuries.

The creek is not a wild one now; it's been domesticated. Lawn grass, now vibrant with spring greening, extends through the surrounding slopes down to the water's edge. But the peaceful waters still render it, for visitors and passersby, a welcome respite from nearby human habitations. Overhead, the maples, locust trees and shrubs are sprouting leaves. Spring is here at last.

A cluster of two-story apartment buildings adjoin the stream. A street winds pragmatically through the well-planned site. Beside the shady street, which is reasonably quiet most of the time, a wooden landscaped ledge displays low juniper foliage.

I am walking through dappled sunshine below the ledge, which is about four feet high. There between two junipers next to the timbered ledge I see an apple on the ground. It's very red atop the brown bark mulch. Somebody has dropped this apple.

So I pick it up. I am the maintenance man here. Whose is it? Its a store-bought apple. Maybe I'll return it to its owner, or maybe I'll just take a bite of it. But no! There's a big rotten spot on it.

On second thought, because the bad spot occupies about half the apple, I will not eat it, I'm not hungry in mid-afternoon, and surely nobody else wants this apple either. That's probably why its here on the ground by the road.

What shall I do with it?

I will throw this apple. What the heck. This is the first real spring day here in the Blue Ridge. I'll just go crazy like a March hare and throw it and let it smash. Spring practice.

Where shall I throw it?

There's the stream over there, gurgling through the shade and the spotty sunshine about thirty yards away. Maybe some baby trouts would enjoy this apple if it smashes in their watery domain.

I look at the stream. In an instant, my eyes settle on a specific spot in the stream, where water is gurgling over rounded stones. I raise my arm and cock it back like the center-fielder that I was many and many year ago in little league back in the day, and I hurl the apple over at the stream.

It strikes the water with a splash, exactly where I was looking on the water's surface. How did I do that?

I haven't thrown anything in a coon's age. I have not been practicing this. I'm 62. I wasn't even aiming. I was just. . . throwing an unplanned apple on a day in May.

Doesn't everybody throw an apple, or something, in the spring time just to, just for the sake of . . .

It wasn't my mind that did this. It was a sudden, impetuous act, with no purpose. I didn't even think about it. My arm and my brain managed, intuitively, to retrieve some ancient muscular memory from baseball or from skipping stones or . . . it landed exactly where my eyes were focused.

To what do I attribute such intuitive finesse? Is it evolution that preserved within me this unprecedented, unplanned mastery? Hurling a found object across a trajectory in such an arc of indeterminate accuracy that it splashed exactly where my eyes had imagined it would?

Am a genius? Maybe an idiot savant?

Well, no. And I don't think such a wondrous accomplishment as this is attributable to mere evolution.

My belief is: I know there is a God; God did it. Surely I myself could not have pulled off such a thing. God conceived and formed my DNA and my bones and my muscles that cling to those bones, and my neurons that connect up to my brain that commands my arm and coordinates its movements with my eyes, and my depth perception and a hastily-improvised assessment of the appropriate arc of the purposeless apple projectile and the weight of the apple with air resistance and sunshine and springtime and suddenly for no reason whatsoever there it is splashing in the millennial stream.

Surely God hath done this thing with the apple!

But why did I do such a crazy deed as hurling an apple at a creek when I was supposed to be doing my maintenance man job?

A few hours later, I'm thinking maybe my exuberant toss happened because I was jubilant, having just heard Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue on the radio, or having just realized that it was was a springtime day such as this 350 years ago when Isaac Newton noticed that an apple dropped from a tree and the rest is history and history is being made as we speak.

Glass Chimera