Fourth of July, Seaside Oregon

I went on my evening beach walk among the holiday seekers who blasted the roar of the mighty ocean into mere snippets of her usual magnificence. The booming and hissing sounds and sulpher smells were overwhelming by the time I made it back home.

Rerouted by the beach police I walked among the "camps" of refugee-looking groups, each carving out a fire pit and resting place—some with developed architectural design and attention to engineered heat retention.

The diversity of each cluster's sense or lack thereof to their temporary shelter and cooking abode captured my attention and focused my gaze upon the similarities of the structures and yet the obviously unique signature each group presented to their own tribe and my quizzical eyes.  One reminiscent of Chaco Canyon kivas complete with consistency and beauty, took my attention.  While others, lacking order, design or beauty, threw my gaze searching for something to assuage my inner need for peacefulness and tranquility to weather the intensity of the density of such a piecemeal patchwork quilt of human gathering.

Quite a journey through a foreign land.  Life truly is a dream rich with surprises in all ways, and this fourth of July escapade underlies this truth, yet again.

Kat

4 July 2016

Oregon Country Fair, 2016

Where the world is truly a dream, complete with philosophically-speaking moss-covered trees, mouths wide and wise, giant people giraffes arched and lumbering languidly, 20-foot tall blond-haired fairies in crinoline skirts sprinkling fairy dust down upon our heads, toddlers with curly lime green hair kicked back in wagons pulled by dancing fairgoers, where every shape and size of human being, clad in a cacophony of costume styles from “nothing,” to beautiful unicorn-wigged women, a man’s man bearing bear-bottle glasses and pink Hawaiian hula skirt, and every assortment from the earliest historical period to present day. Even “normal” took on an Alice-in-Wonderland” essence.

A menagerie of our wildest fantasies. When Woodstock happened, in ’68, Joni Mitchell was not w her lover, Graham Nash and his band at Woodstock due to some snafoo. She wrote the quintessential song t capturing the essence of that moment. Sometimes being there is the sum of the experience, while others can ride the edges and write the most provocative, evocative, complete summary of a moment’s beauty sheerly observing, feeling, and ultimately connecting as one upon the ethers that only love and its companeros make possible.

Kat

9 July 2016

A Smile- KB

How I love to excite
the corners of your lips to rise
to crinkle edges by your eyes
when you delight in the words I write.

Kat
9 July 2016

Personifying Grace--White Poppy

A soft-spoken woman knocked gently on the side door of my Seaside home asking after the glowing tissue blossoms held elegantly tall and upright in my corner southern garden.  Fluorescently white, as if reflecting all the light in the universe, bright white, the purest essence of absence of all colour possible—baring no pigment, even in its crinkled shadowed vertical-lined single petals.

Large and earthy-abundant in pregnant-form, overshadowing its plain surprisingly stocky stem with its brilliance--sleight of hand, so-to-speak.  Not with intentional deception, but with beauty, elegance and a majesty of being because its integrity demands an equally determined rootedness to carry it firmly, substantially and gracefully into the air.

Kat

6 June 2016

Evolution and its Encumbrances

Red feathered, yellow footed and beaked, Ruben was not an unusual-looking rooster nor was he set off in any other way from other cocks.  But that he was my first rooster in charge of my first flock, gave him meaning to me.  Proud, I came to understand, was Ruben—and over the months, I noted that his preference for Juliet and only Juliet, set him apart from other birds I later came to know.  Inseparable they were—from coop rung at night, to field grazing during daylight hours, the two were lovers, friends, and where one was, so the other was to be found.

Birds’ brains we are told, are pea-size—and of little matter.  Emotions and feelings, obviously lacking.  Otherwise, how could a human population house birds in the deplorable conditions where beaks and wings are clipped, in cages holding them tightly squeezed and where daylight and movement are absent?

Howard Zinn, author, historian, playwright, social activist and Boston University professor, told us that what a government will do to a country abroad, it will soon do to its own people.  Extrapolating from this, we might wonder how the current corporate US government manages to fool its own people into similarly deplorable living conditions where food, air and water are contaminated with toxic shortcuts for corporate profit--dulling our minds and ultimately allowing our government access to our own choice for freedom. 

The domestication of our fowl came through man’s evolutionary shift from nomadic to agricultural based living. As we might suspect, from Zinn's perspective, our own ultimate fate is clearly presented to us in our animal’s quality of life.  How is it possible for the “smartest” species to be diminished so greatly and that we do not see it upon us?

Kat

2-29-16

Origins Without Endings

Life teams with newness—tender lily shoots tipping out at the creek’s surface, touching air and sky.  Wet unfurling curled cone leaves ribbon out on slender stems, lushly engorged on photosynthesis and early sap flow.

Peeps and chirps, delicate as baby’s breath, fill a background silence of earthy under-story in the dense oxygen-rich landscape, merging fauna life with flora.

The fullness of newness.  The culmination of cycles—waxing of a full moon, extending her feminine edges in tandem with the light—of not only her cycle, but in conjunction with the solstice—both reaching newness of boundary, yet ancient. 

Long ago now, without beginning and with no ending, in my short lifetime.  On and on, life begins-- waxes, wanes.  Tender. Expanding. Maturing. Closing.  Only to begin again and again and again.

Kat

20 June 2016

Fuzzies And All Those Other Sensations

Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.  While it is getting ahead of you, it is a good way of getting lost.  And sometimes getting lost is a good way of finding yourself.

Do you think? 

Being in love with the fuzzy brown center of a sunflower can be wondrously cozy and life-saving.  Mesmerized by nature’s beauty calms the mind--slowing down the physical breath and finding a place outside your own head long enough to recognize that an entire world is afire with the miraculousness of life itself---and, that we are not only a part of this beauty, we are the beauty--the ocean wave, the sunset, the fuzzy brown cone center, the sweet honeysuckle perfume and all and everything else.

Kat

13 June 2016