I did manage to get a decent drawing done today, and I feel much better.

A bit of hail today.

I should be...

So I should be painting. I know this, I have a giant canvas ready to go. I cartooned an idea on it and promptly painted over it. That is never good. I have the summer to work and I have not worked much yet at all.

I am circumnavigating the same ideas over and over as if I am caught in a thermal. I get sick of my own concepts, which is the danger zone because nothing gets done. I want to make the glide over to the next thermal which may take me higher to the summit.

Of course that requires a bit of skill and my lack of confidence today plagues me.

almost time to travel

A migrant song-bird I,
Out of blue, between the sea and the sky,
Landward blown on bright, untiring wings;
Out of the South I fly...
Some irresistible impulse bears me on,
Through starry dusks and rosy mists of dawn,
And flames of noon and purple films of rain;
And the strain
Of mighty winds hurled roaring back and forth,
Between the caverns of the reeling earth,
Cannot bewilder me.
I know I shall see
Just at the appointed time, the dogwood blow
And hear the willows rustle and the mill-stream flow.

-Maurice Thompson, from "Out of the South"

All the Hemispheres

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.

By: Hafiz
From: 'The Subject Tonight is Love'
Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

For at least 4,000 years, Man and Hawk have been partners. The bond that forms between a falconer and a hawk is unique in all the world. The falconer deeply loves and respects his companion. The hawk, however, is always aloof, reserved, independent, and superior.

The Falconer's Apprentice
William C. Oakes

Musée des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden


About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on

leaving

A relief to finally be done, as I manage the last bit of cleaning. They wave their small hands as they stare at us attempting to memorize our faces as the buses drive away. I know when I see them again they will be different from the life they have lived over the summer. I will miss them because they always kept me laughing.

What is in a name anyway?
She who lives far across the sea
the bright honeybee.

everyone

What do you write to everyone?

Hello, everyone?