Cathedral Rock Panorama by kenne
Suffering occurs when we want
other people to love us in the way
that we imagine we want to be loved,
and not in the way that love should manifest itself
— free and untrammeled,
guiding us with its force and driving us on.
— Paulo Coelho
Catalina Foothills Sunset — Image by kenne
I went to the [desert] because I wished to live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,
and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
— Henry David Thoreau
“Global Warming” — Photo-Artistry by kenne
— Albert Camus
Tucson Door Window — Photo-Artistry by kenne
— James Baldwin
Cactus Flower — Photo-Artistry by kenne— Georgia O’Keeffe in a letter to Sherwood Anderson, 1923
Self-portrait (Photo-Artistry)
I’m now in my 16th year of retirement. Still, like a lot of retired people, I stay very busy, working as a volunteer naturalist in Sabino Canyon, where we teach children about nature, leading nature walks and hikes on the many trails in Sabino Canyon. When I’m not volunteering, I spend my time doing creative things, usually after morning conditioning activities.
Over the years, I have created an extensive iTunes library of music and recorded poetry and psychology. This morning while walking in the neighborhood, I had my iTunes library on shuffle, and two of my non-music recordings of authors came on; Charles Bukowski, “Something for the Touts, the Nuns, the Grocery Clerks and You” and Alan Watts lecture titled “Insides and Outsides.” It was spiritual.
Alan Watts — Insides and Outsides (audio)
Charles Bukowski Video
We have everything, and we have nothing
Some do it well enough for a while and then give way
Fame gets them or disgust or age or lack of proper diet or ink across the eyes or children in college
Or new cars or broken backs while skiing in Switzerland
Or new politics or new wives
Or just natural change and decay —
The man you knew yesterday hooking for ten rounds or drinking for three days and three nights by the Sawtooth mountains now
just something under a sheet or a cross, or a stone, or under an easy delusion
Or packing a bible or a golf bag or a briefcase
How they go, how they go!
All the ones you thought would never go
Days like this, like your day today
Maybe the rain on the window trying to get through to you
What do you see today?
What is it? Where are you?
The best days are sometimes the first, sometimes the middle, and even sometimes the last.
The vacant lots are not bad
Churches in Europe on postcards are not bad?
People in wax museums frozen into their best sterility are not bad?
Horrible, but not bad?
The cannons, think of the cannon
And toast for breakfast and coffee hot enough to know your tongue is still there
Three geraniums outside a window, trying to be red and trying to be pink and trying to be geraniums
No wonder sometimes the women cry
No wonder the mules don’t wanna go up the hill.
One more good day, a little bit of it
Enough and not enough
Arcs and pilgrims, oranges, gutters, ferns, antibodies, boxes of
tissue paper
In the most decent sometimes sun
There is the softsmoke feeling from urns
And the canned sound of old battleplanes
And if you go inside and run your finger along the window ledge, you’ll find dirt, maybe even earth
And if you look out the window, there will be the day
And as you get older you’ll keep looking, keep looking
Sucking your tongue in a little
Ah, ah, no, no, maybe
We have everything, and we have nothing.
— Charles Bukowski
Sabino Canyon — Panorama by kenne
I love this poem. Like any poem that resonates, it does so in one’s own heart, head, and hands
connecting us to the world around us, for good or bad.
Machines are an extension of who we are. When produced by the right values,
the result will be the right thoughts. “Right thoughts produce right actions and
right actions produce work, which will be a material reflection for others
to see of the serenity at the center of it all,” understanding that we’re connected with everything.
All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace
Snow At Windy Point Vista, Tucson, Arizona — Photo-Artistry by kenne
When I think of the historical Christ, I think of courage:
— Theodore Roosevelt
Thomas R. Turner (May 23, 1942–November 13, 2014) — Photo-Artistry by kenne
This posting is the first of several I will be sharing from a long poem written by Tom
sometime around 1980 after his wife left him. Today is the fifth anniversary of his death.
24 to Harwood and Cropsy: No Road Back Home
(Taken from a Brooklyn Bus Route and the Title of a Blues Album.)
Standing above me in Smith's room
Awkwardly looking down through a clipped hesitancy
Our lives came together.
TURNER
With all the ambiguity that last name usage implies
Was what she called me.
Mannerisms of ingenuousness and a tendency toward the atypical
Bespoke your ambiance
(Ineffably I wanted Her)
That voice -
Falsetto
Laced in bursts of Peter's guffaws
Seemed contrived with a dreamed-of authenticity.
(Your mouth, my love,the
thistle in the kiss?)
From within mutually cancelling
Vignettes of naturalness and gender-cliche'
She kissed through closed lips of
Pristine openness.
Innocently I loved.
Through summer notes of vulnerability
Together we embraced an entangled growth of uncertainty
(Our fictions were tempered in
a painful and inward time)
Desperate needs equivocated against ordained directions and
Dead-end holdings of night-bakery-work.
Even then yours wasn't other-directed but
A need to keep the Self-absorption of your Ann Arbor soul on a
Pedastal of conforming difference.
Eliptically we lived in the interstices
Between an illusion of
Fulfillment and letters etched with
"Know what?"
Windmill On Hope Camp Trail — Image by kenne
— kenne
East Texas Sunset — Photo-Artistry by kenne
Growing up, I recall an old-timer
Who was poor, but knew the truth
The difference between right and wrong
Telling me to take whatever comes,
Moving on down the river
Like a drifting boat —
Drift on my friend, drift on.
— kenne
Lake Titicaca Sunset — Image by kenne
— kenne
