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
Self-portrait with a picture of Katie on the Wall (Approximately 1979)
“No one can tell what goes on in between
the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don’t.”
sun and blue sky sunscreen and music seaweed hat and hot tub birthday 77 — thankful more sunscreen alone, why
existential moment
searching for clarity
becoming entangled
more sunscreen music plays on
time present
time past
now, conditions
timeless moments
caught in limitation
being and un-being
feeling easy
cause for wonder
sudden shift in
sunlight
more sunscreen
In his book, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics, Richard Rohr writes about third-eye seeing, which allows for a co-equal footing of the first eye (the physical sense of sight) and the second eye (the eye of thinking, reasoning and reflecting). The Mystics build upon the first two eyes by affirming their fundamental connection in such a way to avoid the simplistic symmetry of dualities. The resulting connection is what Rohr calls, “presence.”
“It is experienced as a moment of deep inner connection,
and it always pulls you, intensely satisfied,
into the naked and undefended now,
which can involve both profound joy
and profound sadness at the very same time,” Rohr writes.
By abandoning all false dichotomies, the captured moment can be viewed in the presence, which I have referred to as “the now” in earlier postings. The further we travel inward the more everything appears to merge into an inexpressible, but nevertheless real, sense of oneness with the world around us.
This week’s Presidential election has reminded me of Marshall McLuhan’s trademark, “The Medium In the Message.” From it, I recall his belief that we go through life looking through the rear-view mirror, and becoming aware of our environment only after we have left it and that what is communicated doesn’t count as much as how it is delivered.
Of course, the medium that exists today is much different than that of the sixties, they still alter our sensory life, therefore what we know. As a result, our society is like the driver who sees neither ahead to the future nor outside the side window to the present but looks only to the past in the rear-view mirror — “Make America great again.”
McLuhan believed that education must serve as a defense to the media fallout. He likened our society to the mariner in Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “A Descent Into the Maelstrom.” The mariner is caught in a whirlpool, but he figures out the relative velocities of currents and saves himself. The question remains whether, as a society, we are educated enough to save ourselves.
“TIME FOR MORE ACTION”
January 17, 2003, Peace Demonstration In Houston, Texas — Photo by Joy
In some ways, I feel as if I may have been in a trance these past eight years, kind of a passive free feeling. It’s now time to stand. Social justice, like art, requires an effort. It’s time for those who have half a heart for poetry, half for life to stand for truth. Those who have continued learning and have been sharpening our weapons by night to clear their throats and stand, becoming the voices of truth.
This image started as an iPhone selfie and evolved to become a self-portrait. I’m sure the purest of the art world would not see this as a self-portrait painting. For me, however, smartphones, cameras and software are tools, just as paint, canvas and mirrors are tools. Each can be art
without having been done by a Rembrandt or a Sontag. My desire is for others to become a tourist in my reality.
kenne
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.
Self-portrait (Photo-Artistry)
Self Portrait by kenne
Self-portrait with a picture of Katie on the Wall (Approximately 1979)
Photo-Artistry Self-portrait by kenne
Digital Art by kenne
Poolside, January 15th — Computer Art by kenne
Self-Portrait 
“What?” — Image by a Fellow Traveler
Self Portrait — Computer Painting by kenne
“Self-Portrait” — Image by kenne
“TIME FOR MORE ACTION”
Kenne and Joy — Computer painting by kenne
Self Portrait (Summer, 2015)
Image by kenne
Self Portrait — Image by kenne
Selfies
Before the iPhone
and selfies,
there was the
self-portrait.
Children drew stick-figures
of themselves,
and still do.
Artisits painted
reflected images
of themselves,
and still do.
The images of life
we find most
fascinating
are of ourselves —
mirror, mirror
on the wall . . .
Tell me your stories
of unknown pleasures
as seen in the eyes of others.
— kenne
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