Archive for April 2017
Image by kenne
If you are a follower of this blog, if not now, please set aside the time to listen to Amanda Palmer’s reading of Neil Gaiman’s ode to humanity’s unheralded originators of the scientific method. It is very, very powerful. Listen to the poets, poetry will save us from ourselves! https://vimeo.com/214686538
THE MUSHROOM HUNTERS
Science, as you know, my little one, is the study
of the nature and behaviour of the universe.
It’s based on observation, on experiment, and measurement,
and the formulation of laws to describe the facts revealed.
In the old times, they say, the men came already fitted with brains
designed to follow flesh-beasts at a run,
to hurdle blindly into the unknown,
and then to find their way back home when lost
with a slain antelope to carry between them.
Or, on bad hunting days, nothing.
The women, who did not need to run down prey,
had brains that spotted landmarks and made paths between them
left at the thorn bush and across the scree
and look down in the bole of the half-fallen tree,
because sometimes there are mushrooms.
Before the flint club, or flint butcher’s tools,
The first tool of all was a sling for the baby
to keep our hands free
and something to put the berries and the mushrooms in,
the roots and the good leaves, the seeds and the crawlers.
Then a flint pestle to smash, to crush, to grind or break.
And sometimes men chased the beasts
into the deep woods,
and never came back.
Some mushrooms will kill you,
while some will show you gods
and some will feed the hunger in our bellies. Identify.
Others will kill us if we eat them raw,
and kill us again if we cook them once,
but if we boil them up in spring water, and pour the water away,
and then boil them once more, and pour the water away,
only then can we eat them safely. Observe.
Observe childbirth, measure the swell of bellies and the shape of breasts,
and through experience discover how to bring babies safely into the world.
Observe everything.
And the mushroom hunters walk the ways they walk
and watch the world, and see what they observe.
And some of them would thrive and lick their lips,
While others clutched their stomachs and expired.
So laws are made and handed down on what is safe. Formulate.
The tools we make to build our lives:
our clothes, our food, our path home…
all these things we base on observation,
on experiment, on measurement, on truth.
And science, you remember, is the study
of the nature and behaviour of the universe,
based on observation, experiment, and measurement,
and the formulation of laws to describe these facts.
The race continues. An early scientist
drew beasts upon the walls of caves
to show her children, now all fat on mushrooms
and on berries, what would be safe to hunt.
The men go running on after beasts.
The scientists walk more slowly, over to the brow of the hill
and down to the water’s edge and past the place where the red clay runs.
They are carrying their babies in the slings they made,
freeing their hands to pick the mushrooms.
— Neil Gaiman
Illustration by Beatrix Potter
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Utah Couple Riding the Arizona Trail from Utah to Mexico — Images by kenne
Our April 27, 2017, SCVN Friday Hike was trail #39 (Part of the Arizona Trail) out of the Gordon Hirabayashi Camp Grounds to the Sycamore Reservoir. The trail head is near the horse corral where we met a couple from Utah who spent the night at the campgrounds before continuing on the Arizona Trail to Mexico. Now, that’s a real adventure!
— kenne
We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk.
The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness,
a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later
where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.
— Robert Pirsig
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Queen Butterfly — Computer Art by kenne
Butterfly
rhymes with dragonfly
and water with
life.
Butterflies
circle up and down
between my eyes.
Why was it
the butterfly
and not
the dragonfly?
Each carries the
inside of my soul.
— kenne
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Galveston Bay
Kemah Boardwalk
Joy, Kemah, Texas (March 2003)– Images by kenne
I have a Nikon,
I love photography —
Catching time and place.
I catch dreams
Using my eye,
Experience and heart.
The eye is the aperture
Through which
Nature sees itself
Becoming the source
Of all light
Not in the present,
Which is consumed
In the past and future,
But a creative moment
To which the artist
Knows is lost
When held on to.
— kenne
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Sycamore Canyon Panorama — Image by kenne
Sycamore Canyon Trail — Computer Painting by kenne
Yesterday’s (April 28, 2017) hike from the Gordon Hirabayashi Campgrounds (4,880′ elevation) to the Sycamore Reservoir was the last SCVN Friday hike on our Spring schedule. Eleven people, including three guides, took #39 trail out of the campgrounds to the Sycamore Reservoir, a somewhat out of the way riparian area in the Sycamore Canyon in the Pusch Ridge Wilderness. The trail is 3.25 miles one way with an accumulated gain of 821 feet. The trail is also a segment of the Arizona Trail, providing majestic views, including Thimble Pear and Cathedral Rock.
This is one of my favorite hikes at the mid-level elevation of the Santa Catalina Mountains, so I was pleased to be the lead guide for the eleven hikers, which included three women from Germany.
The SCVN guided hikes will start again in June on Mt. Lemmon.
kenne
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Caliche Globemallow — Image by kenne
My legacy –
What will it be?
Flowers in spring,
The cuckoo in summer,
And the crimson maples
Of autumn …
— Ryokan
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Driftwood Fires — Image by kenne
birds fly high
footprints disappear
under the tide
shadows move
the sun sets
you groove
on down the shore
where good people
go looking for armour
driftwood fires
the song of water
nature’s choir
stars above
provides direction
for the lonely gulls
the silent nights
amplify the waves
passing ship lights
girls and boys spoon
embracing as they
jump over the moon.
— kenne
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Texas Crescent Butterfly — Computer Art by kenne
Journey
I have seen the wind’s tails
the breeze’s buds.
I have seen the griffon bird
& Delgadina’s tower.
Where do you come from,
o where?
I have seen a blue road
& some girls
were singing the old ballad
of the olive tree in green.
Do you know where I come from,
my sweet girl?
Well . . . from your smile is where,
your last smile.
— Federico Garcia Lorca
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Yellow Flower — Computer Painting by kenne
Short yellow flower
From sunflower family
Loves his tall brother.
— kenne
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Flame Skimmer — Grunge Art by kenne
“So long as the sense of the observing subject remains,
there is the effort, however indirect, to control feeling from the outside,
which is resistance setting up turmoil in the stream.
Resistance disappears and the balancing process comes into full effect,
not by intention on the part of the subject,
but only as it is seen that the feeling of being the subject,
the ego, is itself part of the stream of experience
and does not stand outside it in a controlling position.”
— Alan Watts
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Panning for Garnets In Sabino Canyon Creek — Imaged by kenne
(Click on any of the tiled images for larger view in a slideshow format.)
The Sabino Canyon Volunteer Naturalists will be conducting the final week of the spring semester for Elementary School children in Sabino Canyon. It has been another great year for the national award winning program, now in its 40th year.
— kenne
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Source: William Morrow/HarperCollins
It’s just a little after midnight in Tucson, and I’m having trouble sleeping. It could be that Joy is having surgery later today. It could be that in this age of hand-held technology, it was several hours ago I received a news alert on the passage of Robert M. Pirsig at age 88.
In the 1970’s I was interested in motorcycles — own a couple. It was a time in which I loved reading about technology and philosophy. So, in 1974 when I read a review of a recently published book, “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values,” I went out and bought a copy.
The inside cover jacket begins with a quote from the book:
“ The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.”
What better way to write about the conflict between science and religion, and the nature of Quality in art than to have it as part of a motorcycle narrative of a trip Pirsig, his eleven-year-old son, and two friends took from Minnesota to California? As it turns out, the real journey was not a motorcycle trip, but a philosophic trip that centers on an insane passion for truth.
In February of this year, I posted a blog entitled, The Zen of Visual Imagery – Balancing Passion and Obsession, in which I reference the novel I have worshiped over the years. Whether in my own teaching of educational philosophy or photography, I can’t talk about life without referencing Pirsig for the truth. It is time for a Chautauqua.
–kenne
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It was eight years ago on this date that I posted our attendance at the Houston International Festival a few days earlier. — kenne
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(Click on Any of the Tiled Images for a Larger View in a Slideshow Format.)
Greater Roadrunner Photo Essay by kenne
Alert and cunning
All business searching for food
This is not a show.
— kenne
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Life is a series of steps,
you climb each one to succeed.
— kenne
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