art, thoughts, experiments
Every year something in the garden flowers and makes more fruit or vegetables than any one human can possibly manage to consume or deal with. Unless you’re a farmer you just watch while things fall on the ground and you feel slightly guilty about it all. You might even, depending on how disorganized you are, find yourself buying the very same fruit at the grocery store as is rotting in …
Sometimes I love unintended consequences. In fact, they’re my favorite.
A few months ago I got a new phone. My old phone was fine, but Verizon kept tempting me with new models. I could get a new fancy touch screen “droid” for free at the time (well, $30/month for data, but otherwise free) and after considering how profligate I was probably being I ordered mine. It was frustrating at first, i …
Driving home from a Zen retreat in the Northern California in October we took the scenic route, something I’d not done before.
The road goes in through the redwoods and back out at the sea. As you get closer to Santa Rosa there are little towns. Little means 3 shops and maybe a café. One of the towns had a dressmaker’s shop that John knew about. It had a sign that …
After I did the project with the tadpoles and frog, which originally started as a neighborhood playground renovation (I was involved in writing grants, which I wasn’t very effective at, and had a foolhardy hunch that I could make bronze sculpture myself) I was approached by another group of neighbors to consult on another playground. They decided that they wanted art to be an important part of their project and …
Last week I decided to take pictures of all my bronze sculptures, at least the ones I can get to easily. So one thing I did was go down to the park to photograph the first set of pieces I ever did (around 10 years ago), the life cycle of the Pacific Chorus frog.
Every once in awhile I go down to check on them, make sure they’re still attached to …
I have watched the number that represents my money get smaller. And while I’ve heard myself uttering cries of distress and betrayal, occasional heretical thoughts pass through my mind as well about the current state of affairs and what it really means and what I might ought to be doing or have done. I’ve wondered, what about remembering not only to buy low, but to sell high, the next time? …
The Mayor of Elberton has a lot of old cars and trucks in his front yard, including this adorable 1950’s era Fiat Cabriolet with a very special hood ornament. It even has the keys in the ignition, although that may imply a fair amount of wishful thinking. Having the job of Mayor of Elberton, WA might also imply some wishful thinking, although it occurred to me that it’s a noble …
This is a Buddhist truism that recently took on an “”of course” subtitle for me. The idea is that what seems to block you is where you’ll find understanding, insight, enlightenment. This isn’t always intuitively obvious. But I was walking the dog the other day and thinking about a recent error I had made. Rose and I were in a disagreement about how to clean up her room and I …
I had the thought recently that we’re asleep a lot of the time. Ideally I’d be asleep about 1/3 of my life, except if there was something in the waking world I really didn’t want to miss. But then there’s the sleeping world. It’s as though it doesn’t exist. Like eating food or going to the bathroom on Star Trek. Sleeping is hardly depicted in my mind, let alone …