Grey sky, wind whipping up, garden wailing something of its own composition. Science says all nature has a voice, a sound, if we know how to listen. Thoreau knew.

Real life is all around us – and it’s snickering!

I’m NOT on Facebook to be sold stuff! What? Do they think this is the SHOPPING CHANNEL?? I had a ‘friend’ whose name was always trailed by the words – ‘author of –(and then her genre label) but NOW she’s added the words ‘& PUBLIC FIGURE’ to that. It’s like adding, ‘Super genius,’ something out of Pinky & The Brain.

NO, no, no, no. No one can give THEMSELVES that kind of credential. Okay, maybe an actual reviewer said it. But that doesn’t mean you can pass it on while wearing a custom-made hat big enough to fit your new head. If you do, everyone thinks, ‘Great Big Inflated Ego to match’. Now I’ll have to go get one of her books to see if she even deserves the name of writer…

What’s the real harm? You, the ‘author’ becoming a cardboard self that can be bought and sold. Plus of course this heavy-handed marketing doesn’t leave any room for the personal touch. All this ‘author’s ever posted on FB is something about BUYING her stuff. You get the feeling a robot has been dressed up and trotted out for publicity and there’s nothing underneath but metal. How can this be avoided when you get a book published? Stay real & witty. Share your REAL life, don’t just try to haul in ‘customers.’ Acknowledge other writers. Keep it human & humble. Watch out. There’s a stinger in that flower of fame!

Yesterday a woman came into the Credit Union where I work and told me she was drawing out enough money to buy back a cow which had been sold by our Federal Corrections when they made the monumentally stupid decision to close down the effective and efficient local prison farms.
I rushed right home and found a small pair of cow earring studs with a pin to honour her decision. They named her cow, ‘hope.’ Then I wrote this song, sent it to the local paper and put a copy on the Prison Farms blogsite (check righthand column). But I don’t know her name or how to get it to her so I hope she comes in. And I hope to sing the song with those who need it.

SONG FOR THE COWS

Tune: The Old Grey Mare

The old grey prison
system is out of date
Can’t seem to cogitate
How to rebilitate
Prison farms were helping
Inmates on thinking straight
So, BAM! they closed them down
Sold all the cows off too
Even the heifer’s knew
That closed minds never
Help lives begin again
Just put them in again
Building more prisons then
But those farms were helping
Lives to begin again
So BAM! they closed them down.

v2)
So let’s BUY the cows back
For the community
So that we all may see
Real humanity
The cows a symbol
Of our ability
To say to our government,
‘No!’
“No you can’t take away
All that was built today.”
You might close the farms
But we’re still together here
We’ve got the message clear
We won’t surrender dear
When government’s dumb
We’ll vote them right out of here
And sing till the cows come home!”

This is my morning paper store. Through it I have learned several words of Korean and been able to peruse the Korean Times. Funny how a place can become so familiar you no longer notice its eccentricies.

Raised by two people extremely critical of everyone around us, I absorbed judging others with my mother’s milk. Then I hung around unkind, unloving, critical people and my goose sizzled. No love going on here.
Look at this shot of an uncritical person trying to look judgemental. This is what your face looks like when you’re mentally attacking others. To build up our own egos, we point out how awful so & so is. I know. I did it for years. But no more! I cut out of my life friends who gossiped behind other friend’s backs, rejoiced in their failures, judgments & criticisms falling from their lips on every hand.
Now I work hard at this business of loving totally unlovable individuals, calling on my higher power. I’ve managed to friend several impossibly angry women who would seem to be excellent targets for criticism. No judging them. Just me, learning to love.

You’ll never find Romantic Love till you learn to just plain love the unloveables around you. All the time. Maybe this isn’t your problem. Maybe you’ve never said a critical or unkind word in your life? I know some lovely people who I swear manage to do this all the time. They have lots of friends. When I hang around them, I’m not even tempted to go back to the old, hateful ways. And I listen to Gail Davies (link to the right) and other singers who remind you that ‘love’s the key,’ that will open that door.

Once the Bergamont was gone, the garden used to be all about sunflowers. But since nearly all my space is half-shade, they didn’t thrive. Now I only have a few multi-headed replants courtesy of the squirrels & birds, around the edges.
Eleanor, from Hamilton, drove 6 hrs to bring me Ecinasia (spelled phonetically at the moment) which I have planted here Aug 10th. We’ll see. Watch this space.
Just got this ranku back from someone else’s garden. From the signs, they were probably drinking men needing souveniers since the renku was easily discovered, once I knew where to look. At any rate, adventures in the garden seem to be just that.

I use this sign for privacy. It seems to work among those who can read and are not too hotheaded to ignore it. For quiet Sunday afternoons.
This ones on the lid of my green bin so that I don’t come home and find recycling hasn’t taken it due to some oaf tossing a half-drunk smoothie cup with plastic straw into the contents, pretending they think it is a garbage can. While reycling has a point, how can you prevent someone throwing stuff on top of your carefully selected compost ingredients, other than with bear traps?
Finally this sign has been on my door for 15 years. It works on and off. Those with intellectual pretensions don’t seem to recognize what they are. However, you can solve many other problems with a good sign.

The line beneath explains why it took Brahms so long to write his lullaby.

Just finished, ‘Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott & Her Father,” by John Matteson. At first I was suspicious. The book is footnoted and I suspected it of academia (oh cursed word) but it turned out to be simply scholarly, objective and a great quoter of their work by someone with a close knowledge of who they were.
Thoreau was Louisa’s teacher, Alcott’s friend and lived in their future house on Main Street in Concord. Dabbling with the Transcendentalists has been one of my life areas. Matteson’s take on Fruitlands and the struggle to understand Nature between Father & Daughter bears some resemblance to mine with my father. From start to finish ‘Eden’s Outcasts’ is as engrossing as a good novel. I couldn’t put it down.
This is a picture of my grandmother after whom I am named and her sister, Great Aunt Sarah (Niece Sarah, are you seeing your namesake?). The two old ladies who came as teenagers to the Bellingham Washington area over the mountains in a covered wagon from Kentucky, squabbling with their mother all the way. Dunlaps, they were in those days, mother’s side of the family, believers in every omen and superstition that came down the pike.
I suspect Sarah of chin hairs if not actively sitting for the original witch masks of Halloween while her sister, Roseltha Dunlap Bouck has that ‘don’t-hit-me-I’m-harmless’ smile which she always used just prior to zapping you with a zinger!
But they are family and I’ve just finished reading a compelling tract on how that works out in the long run.

Yesterday I went to see this near-mythologized doctor (he’d blown up in my mind over the years to less than human) – and here he was, courteous, semi-retired and getting on with the paperwork. No memory of me, at least at first.

My husband reminded me when I got home that this was the only doctor in his life he’d threatened to punch in the mouth (on an entirely unrelated matter involving our son), my gentle, non-violent, pipe-smoking husband. So it wasn’t just me, since he believes in the essential goodness of everyone and provocation that would cause him to say something like that had to be extreme -

So here I was, alone in a room with him. (Imagine him in the empty chair, knee to knee) I no longer lie helpless and undressed in bed. Now we were equals, except I am still younger and I had the advantage of memories. And, for pete sakes, I find myself feeling SORRY for the guy, grown older, greyer and thinner. I see him just as a misguided human being with a big mouth. I would make a lousy executioner. I tell him my version of what happened and how I’d disliked him since.

“And now?” he says, as though he doesn’t care about the answer.

“And now I see you’ve mellowed,” I said weakly. Not quite the gunfight I’d envisioned. Still, he decides to put me off on another colleague in the future, dim memories of some of our encounters probably seeping back. Good to have done it, gotten through it with no unkindnesses or malice. Glad it didn’t come down to throwing things or shouting (though I had a whistle in my pocket and was wearing a bracelet with minature covers of banned books to remind me of all the pain writers have had, standing up before me).

Staring our villians down, only to see them diminish, maybe never actually the threats we first believed.