Image by kenne
I walk with the wind
hand in hand
moving with the flow,
only to stand strong
when life takes
a wrong turn
from which I learn
there are no
wrong turns
only unknowns.
— kenne
Archive for the ‘Inspiration’ Category
I walk With The Wind Leave a comment
Low Tide At Puerto Peñasco — A Thing Of Dreams Leave a comment
Low Tide At Puerto Peñasco Image by kenne
It was a long time ago.
I have almost forgotten my dream.
But it was there then,
In front of me,
Bright like a sun—
My dream.
And then the wall rose,
Rose slowly,
Slowly,
Between me and my dream.
Rose until it touched the sky—
The wall.
Shadow.
I am black.
I lie down in the shadow.
No longer the light of my dream before me,
Above me.
Only the thick wall.
Only the shadow.
My hands!
My dark hands!
Break through the wall!
Find my dream!
Help me to shatter this darkness,
To smash this night,
To break this shadow
Into a thousand lights of sun,
Into a thousand whirling dreams
Of sun!
— Langston Hughes
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Lemon Tree Blossom Leave a comment
Lemon Tree Blossom — Computer Art by kenne
“True love opens the gates of time.
— Neil Young
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Remembering Mother, Agnes — Mother’s Day, 2017 1 comment
Mother, Grandmother, Great-Grandmother, Agnes.
(The following was originally written and posted September 5, 2012.)
Willie Agnes Poe passed away (September 8, 2006) after three months fighting post-surgery infection. During the last few weeks of Mother’s life, she shared stories of her childhood and often talked about playing with her close childhood friend, Fern. (They remained close throughout life.)
“We had so much fun playing in the cemetery — Can you take me back to the cemetery on the hill?’ she would ask. “I can see the man in black with a big black dog,” she would go on.
In her last days, the man in black visited her. As we were talking, she looked straight ahead, “…see him, he is here! Don’t you see him?” Then she would turn and ask, “Can you bring me a big black dog? I want a big dog! Can you get one for me?”
“Yes, we can,” would be my reply, We were making arrangements for Jill to bring one of their black labs by for Mother, just two days before she passed on.
On August 26, 2012, the family gathered in The Woodlands to celebrate the life of Willie Agnes Poe, which involved a brunch at Cru’ Wine Bar and a gathering at the pedestrian bridge over Grogan’s Mill Road.
After moving to The Woodlands in the mid-1980’s, Mother would walk the trails from her Grogan’s Landing apartment, which included the pedestrian bridge in a six-mile walk around the TPC golf course. Over time, Mother became functionally blind, limiting the trail walking, but not her walking. Early each morning she would spend a couple of hours walking back and forth over the pedestrian bridge. Our gathering at the bridge ended with a symbolic walk over Agnes’ bridge.
Why this celebration now? Because Mother had donated her body to the Texas Medical Center after her death, we didn’t have a family gathering to celebrate her life. It was our understanding that Mother’s ashes would be sent to us 2-3 years after her death. As it turned out, we didn’t receive her ashes till this past May.
Hall Cemetary
Several months after Mother’s death we got word that her brother, J.C. had died. I knew immediately we were going to Alabama. How I know just how important it was to bring closure on the Mother’s life. While in Alabama, Joy and I made a point of going to Lincoln, then two miles out to the country church and cemetery in Refuge. She was always at her happiest when talking about her childhood in Alabama, even more so during her last days with us. She always wanted to go back but knew she would only be able to in her vision of those childhood memories. It doesn’t go unnoted that with the importance of Hall Cemetery in Refuge, Alabama, Mother didn’t desire to be buried there. For her, a higher priority was to give her body to medicine.
While visiting Hall Cemetery, I wanted so to turn around and see two little girls playing in the cemetery on the hill – to see the man in black with the big dog – to hear the laughing, and see the joy when the big dog came running to the children. Instead, Joy and I walked silently, on this sunny fall morning through the small cemetery on the hill, which now represents the burial-place of the last surviving member of the Confederate army. As fate would have it, as we walked through Hall Cemetery, a black dog appeared.
By making the journey to Hall Cemetery, I have for my life captured the feeling of two little girls laughing and playing in a world that never vanished from Mother’s vision of happiness. Real or not, it was real for her – now it is real for me, and I might add, Joy.
kenne
A Celebration Of Life
“When the child was a child, it didn’t know
It was a child
Everything for it was filled with life and all life was one
When the child, when the child
The child, child, child, child, child
And on and on and on and on, etc. And onward
With a sense of wonder
Upon the highest hill. Upon the highest hill
When the child was a child
Are you there
Shassas, shassas
Up on a highest hill
When the child was a child, was a child, was a child
Was a child, was a child, was a child, etc.
… and it’s still quivering there today”
—from, Song of Being A Child. Music by Van Morrison, Words by Peter Handke
Related Articles:
- http://kenneturner.com/2012/06/10/dust-and-ashes/
- http://kenneturner.com/2012/05/23/remembering-mother-on-my-brothers-birthday/
- http://kenneturner.com/2011/03/03/happy-birthday-mother-2/
- http://kenneturner.com/2010/05/09/mothers-day-2010/
- http://kenneturner.com/2010/04/17/capturing-the-moment-great-grandmother-ii/
- http://kenneturner.com/2010/04/16/capturing-the-moment-great-grandmother-agnes/
- http://kenneturner.com/2009/05/10/a-mothers-love-mothers-day-2009/
- http://kenneturner.com/2009/03/11/happy-birthday-mother/
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Seduction 1 comment
Seduction (Chris Duarte at the Cactus Moon)– Computer Art by kenne
Live music can inspire you,
it can thrill and drain you,
sometimes get inside you
and fucking seduce you.
— kenne
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The Sonoran Whisperer 2 comments
Naturalist, Phil Bentley, “The Sonoran Whisperer” — Image by kenne
The Sonoran Whisperer
Follow the whisperer
you will never again
look at the desert
in the same way.
As the desert is
so too is the whisperer —
listening,
meditating,
singing,
playing the harp;
peaceful moments
where the gods become
the Lord Almighty.
— kenne
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Time Of The Heart 1 comment
Pusch Ridge Wilderness — Image by kenne
Time of The Heart
High above the city
stands the fool on the hill
Watching thin clouds move in
while chanting the reflection –
“Use me while you can,
for if you but blink,
I will be gone
no more on this watch.”
— kenne
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Freeing Our Hands To Pick The Mushrooms 2 comments
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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Sycamore Canyon Trail 1 comment
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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Parish’s Larkspur Wildflower Leave a comment
Driftwood Fires Leave a comment
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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Short Yellow Flower Leave a comment
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 Leave a comment
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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Believing In The Importance Of The Struggle — Robert M. Pirsig, Dead At 88 4 comments
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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Sabino Creek Above The Dam 1 comment
Sabino Creek Above The Dam — Image by kenne
Desert Oasis
Shaded escape from the heat —
Nature’s waterhole.
Sometimes drying up
Before the monsoon season —
Desert high and dry.
— kenne
Life is a series of steps,
you climb each one to succeed.
— kenne
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