Sparkling Lotus Ink

the story of Jamerson

unretouched photo from the old place.  guesstimating it's about 15 years ago now

So the place we lived prior to buying into the american dream so late in our lives was loaded with all sorts of energetic conduits and passageways.  This leaves me with many tale-worthy stories that cry out for telling on Halloween. 

Above is my favorite ghost from there or elsewhere to date.  This is Jamerson.  So named by me.  For those not bass player savvy the ghost is named for this man.  If you've ever danced to early/mid motown songs you already know this guy in his truest form of a magic medicine maker.  He's why you move because you can't not-move.  Even if you generally wouldn't - you occasionally get up and dance around to old Motown, right?  Even if it's only twice a year in your bedroom where you fall down exhausted after five minutes.

  My husband is another James-named bass player who knows a thing or two about life's ups & downs.  At a certain point in our lives we were in authentically dire straits.  At a critical juncture when opportunity and abyss were pretty much equidistant likelihoods my husband sold every single one of his musical instruments to raise the kind of money we needed to get re-settled in various ways.

Any musicians or folks attached to one:  you just heard me right.  He sold all of his instruments so we could have a decent place to live and start building a solid foundation afresh.  For a long while he survived okay with loaned instruments of various kind.  When he played out he stuck to bands of a caliber where all the instruments involved were par.  He recorded in the same hamstrung fashion. 

He didn't fly creatively in other words.  He clipped his wings so all three of us could walk upright and figure out what we wanted for ourselves and each other. That's what he wanted but it isn't valentine's day so that info was necessary background rather than the point.  Twenty years ago, give or take, we reached a kind of solvency where I started pushing for him to begin replacing the instruments.  Once-burnt Virgo energy didn't think so.  Not yet.  It was only the upright bass that was outright missing, he had enough, and so forth. 

It reached a point over 18 months where I was outright hectoring.  And then when it didn't work I did what parents shouldn't do.  I triangulated - given in the context of a day when both the guys were on their way to 'just look' at upright basses - by looking our son in the eye, pointing at his father, and saying "don't let this guy come home without a bass."

T's eyes shone with purpose.  And maybe, after witnessing a lot of the hectoring, he was also imagining what he could do with that kind of granted power if it came to it.  They came home with a bass. Simply from the glow all about the man I love and the way he carried it in the house I knew T hadn't needed to pull out any stops.  Everything was wonderful.  And then it caught up with the rest of the house in terms of disembodied activity.

Every night right before he went upstairs to sleep J would play a few notes on the upright.  Usually no more than four notes occasionally repeated.  I stayed up late to work without interruption and also surf the net when work became too dark.  I noticed there were times when I heard bass notes spontaneously.  Sometimes it almost seemed like an echo but inverting the note order, of what J played on any given night.  I kept track.  It gave me something new to document!  I also named the ghost and then addressed it by that name - something I have never done before.  I was raised not to interact.  You say the in the name of god spiel and that's it.  But I liked this ghost and its attachment to the upright bass.  So I called it Jamerson.  Sometimes I would wish Jamerson a good evening after the notes were played.  Sometimes I'd keep my acknowledgement silent and fill my mind with the real man who was legendary for his ability to play flat on the ground more ways than one.

Eventually I got tired of my husband telling me I was imagining this particular thing.  So I started talking to Jamerson during the day.  Saying I needed a picture.  If he could just.  In retrospect, since most of the conversations about what I believed was happening versus what J knew was not took place in Jamerson's choice of room Service I don't think I needed to say any more.

I have three really good pics of Jamerson.  One is not at all like this one but the other is from the same series.  I can't find either of them and have no more free time to search or I would.  The one taken at the same time as the lede image has all the light swirls very close to the bass. The energy column is quite similar to how a player stands.  In that photograph the bright orange-golden light streams are in front of the strings.  The zingy lines look like fingers curled exactly so and caught in mid-pluck.  If I find it I'll post it irrespective of the time of year with a link back here for memory refreshment.

***

  This is a great and highly informative documentary quite well-worth watching about Motown's truly incomparable house band The Funk Brothers.  His bandmates remember him in the full arc of who he was and all he endured.

wishing you all a well loved ghost or two...

bird art

We needed a propane delivery so I went out to collect this year's Carolina Wren nest.  Have never done that before but over this particular summer I was puzzled to discern no nest shape through the kitchen sink window.  That was a first although they nest there every year.  As soon as I opened the lid of the propane tank the mystery was solved.  This is a deep nest pocket.  The birds seemed to disappear into dark nothingness because that's how their sanctuary was constructed. The long whip-tails of dried branches amaze me.  These are very small birds.  Am astonished I didn't notice at least one gathering addition along the way.  Fascinating!

setting up November's mainframe book-wise

Both books above have been highly recommended multiple times.   These two will be day time reading books during the 4-5 hours in the morning/noontime when my brain's all the way fired but not yet needing extra kindling every couple of hours.  I need this 3-5 times a week to keep me grounded word-wise beyond fictionland as I'm writing it.  One of my covid-based introspections as the third wave hits relates to how I went into the whole thing last winter with this base-line necessity mentality:  gather ONLY what you only-need at a subsistence level.  To the point where my first round shopping purchases were almond powder, garlic, ginger root, and compostable bowls.  Period.  Scaling upwards a ponderous increment at a time was a little mean streets in application for my personality's resiliency factor but then I got into this thing of loosening up in other ways but actively seeing how long I could go without buying any books.

Any time I got a recommendation or just saw something that interested me I'd grab something unread and read it instead.  This kept me happy until spring.  At that point I stacked up all the books I hadn't yet read in the house and here in the studio.  This makes it sound a lot more like fictionland where this character - Trevor -  has an undeniably serious Book Problem.  Here in real life the overflow was and now remains containable.  It's evolved and amplified sufficiently since this time last year.  Currently I have 8 unread books in the studio - 5 of which are large scale art books of a sort best read and studied over time so that's what I've been doing with them for a few years now at the drip-drop super slow level.

Otherwise there are probably 20 unread novels and non-fiction books scattered throughout the house itself. I stocked up once I realized THERE IS NO PLAN and thus here I am prepared to live in the kind of cancerian always-home cocoon that I used to work hard to have the kind of retirement where that was my own tiny little personalized plan 85% of the time.  It's just a 'way different cancerian mood swingalong kind of a thing when it's enforced and everything that's hanging in the balance is constantly making itself known.

For years I would justify this kind of recurring stash build-up as prep for a book reading emergency.  I mean I've relied on some form of this excuse for periodic book gathering since I was in jr. high and had my first job.  At a library.  Where all the other nerd-girls who worked there spent all their money not earmarked for their bank accounts on books same as I did. 

Being me I began to - what else - organize people around a central community building agenda.  We bought different books so we could swap them around and each read more, more, more.

Books, is all I'm saying.  books. 

Since I finally have my brainwave/reading chops all the way back* I'm also planning to read two novels between now and winter socking-in enough that I'll need to read about gardens and nature full time.  Rabih Alameddine is a strong fave novelist and this particular book knocked me out when I read it as a new release library book.  Never have I more needed to read some kinda trickster-based word tincture than right now.  Whatever this next perilous window of time may be like this book will 'work' at the drop-down personal level.  

Okay - now for the post's dose of weirdness.  I've had exactly two dreams so far in my life that involved a fictional character.  One was about a month ago.  A character named Ella appeared to suggest I read Mira Jacob's novel.  She said it would give me real insight into her family of origin's oeuvre and thus who she is beyond her various purposes in the story.  At the time I was struggling to actualize her to the point of readerly compassion rather than simply:  Okay I immediately see what she's about.  Except maybe you don't - perhaps not at all - unless I articulate additional fictional facts about her.  People read for all kinds of reasons.

Power - for about the fifth time - will be my next morning read.  Mo recommended Stasiland in comments somewhere and I've just started it as my evenings on the couch read.

have I mentioned loving books?

*We're two weeks away from the fourth anniversary of my brain injury.  Spent a great deal of mental/emotional time during the first two and a half years coming to terms with the fact that I might not be able to read anywhere close to my former level.

but I'm definitely back, baby...

still leaning into humor

going back to review my favorite Sarah Cooper videos in her brilliant work making sense of nonsense.

"how to cognitive"

"how to mask"

and my personal favorite - that still makes me laugh and definitely set me off big time when I would have sworn nothing at all was funny back at the time this particular clip was part of the unfolding day's news:

"how to bunker"

 

 

showing up as myself

I was going to post these pics morning before last when I took them but then I temporarily set aside my sense of humor in order to do some emotional housecleaning.  There was an expressed need for me to introduce myself to 5-7 new blog readers.  I said to the person who defined the need "how?  what's the image context?"  They told me to just show up as myself 'preferably unfiltered.'   I chose to go first thing in the morning literal with that cue - while also getting a gleam in my eye because I thought this might be fun for my own version of an All of US (tm grace) if I threw in a couple of [bad.  i know that.  it's kind of the point...] deliberate imitations as well.

This is me spitting in the eye of the devil, so to speak, by imitating The Look our planet's most unfit miscreant gets on its face whenever our country's sole reliable voice of science is permitted to speak and it doesn't like what it's hearing.

Here I focused on soul-less down-dropped eyes but I have the wrong eyebrows and failed entirely to get the arrogant terminally malnourished-in-every-way inverted V of a mouth while declaring we'd all be rockin' by July.

it was SO EMPOWERING to do this rather than stewing about the context and innumerable results for just that block of time it took to handle my thoughts and feelings in this other kind of way.

sometimes it isn't raining

I wrote a post with this same title and image that I thought out in advance as an ongoing mid-day activity.  It was careful to be: careful, mindful, and neutral-gear neutral.  Maybe that was the problem.  Or maybe it was just retro merc shadow type stuff  or one of those lazy thumbed keystrokes you don't intentionally make.

Gonna take that as a hint and stay in real-life-while-on-the-internet mode which is how I've been for the past couple of days.  Just say what's true for me.  If the sheer certainty of my voice's willingness to speak at that level is either off-putting or offensive that's a very unfortunate point of unintentional impact on my part. 

I've shuttered my creativity blog for reasons I'll be blunt enough to label underbelly bullying of an eye-rollingly tenacious nature.  And that's all I'll be saying on the subject barring uniquely extenuating one on one circumstances.

As far as this primary blog space I'm going to get back to where I left off within my planned blog posts somewhere right around the time Covid came along.  Somebody I taught to be the kind of person who could facilitate such a thing sat with me yesterday after carefully but firmly suggesting I allow myself to at least make a full and complete list of people central to my life who've died since the beginning of the year.  The phrase "pragmatic grasp" was applied and I had to ask for a pen so I could write it on my hand lest I forget. 

I taught him very well.  And that's all that really needs to be said.

so I said it to him directly there in the moment and his eyes lit up above his mask.  And his mouth was already moving to ask well what did I simply want to say to him?  And I smiled under my mask.  I said I wanted to tell him a story he's tired of hearing but I wanted him to stay with me all the way as if he never heard it before - right up until the end of my trademark rim shot interrogative that's a major part of my storytelling-for-a-purpose shtick.  And he shut his eyes and threw his head back and groaned because he knew what was coming.

When this person was three I met him for the first time.  His mother was a friend of mine I'd met in the UK and that's where they lived.  Until they came here for the first time and I met him as a three year old who marched directly in front of me and pointed just as directly at my third eye with bold certainty. 

he said "I know you.  I know you from BEFORE."

So I said that but with a lot more embellishment about their home when they first arrived and his mom and also stuff his father said about it all later on in the evening.  And he was nodding with his eyes shut trying to push himself past his resistance to yet again hearing this story he's heard way too many times.  But never from me.  Because let's face it. I have my own son to annoy with comparably off-told stories that prove some or another hippie-dippy point of mine.  This other guy's father?  Is relentless with this particular tale.

And I saw him make the pivot in his 'memory' of everyone under the sun telling him this story which he doesn't remember because HIS big takeaway of that day was apparently this person arrives with chocolate bars.  His eyes shot open and he looked at me.  He was nodding his head okay.  I never heard YOU tell me this story before about what I said.  I was getting this all from his eyes and that's because of masks.  And, obvi, people who are willing to wear them.  Eye language flourishes when there's nothing else to scan that speaks to collective humanity as we instinctively best recognize through our own and each other's faces.

And I watched his eyes think (another favorite thing of mine to notice about people important to me) and then he said "what is the interrogative?"

"What if," I asked him.  " 'Before' was Now?"

Whoa.

the return of RED

Most of the maples here turn bright yellow or deep plum.  Scattered here and there we have a few scarlet leaved trees. For the past several years they haven't turned color but simply browned, shriveled, and fell in a few days' time.  I presumed it had something to do with lessened rainfall and virtually no snow cover for a few years in a row.  So now I'm drawing the highly unscientific conclusion that my intuition held a degree of merit.  Nobody can say we had insufficient rain this year.  We also managed, at least here, to maintain a thin layer of snow and snow-packed ice. 

The picture above looks like one enormous tree but that's a skew in perspective.   The elm stripling seemingly divides the tree in half visually.  But it's actually two trees on either side of the narrow shady path that leads to the field.

The picture above was taken on the same day I took the images in the previous post.  The others were taken during a break in the rain afternoon before last.  Today it's sunny but everything's kind of or outright swampy for my waterproof shoes.  Have been dealing with neurological pain for several days running somewhere between 5 and 7 on the pain scale.  Even with effective healing options that kind of thing becomes physically draining the longer it's in play.  Today needs to be a gentle recuperation day rather than a get out there and ... get! out there!! wall-to-wall productive experience. 

When it was merely drizzling J raked leaves from the side dooryard and the driveway.  I took these pics during what we thought was a return to sunlight but then right after dark a fresh deluge began.  Glad he bumped that task to the head of the list.  We would have had flooding problems for sure if the leaves had been there causing major and secondary dams in the driveway.

*

Am thinking a lot about the color red as it relates to rootedness, grounding, and the first/primary chakra.  I feel a strong connection between that mental activity and seeing the red splashes in the landscape.  Even yesterday, when the rain intensity was authentically biblical, I could see through the watery blur those same red beacons of years past.  I'm glad they're back.  Everything peaked on the holiday weekend - same as what used to be normal.

Another highly unscientific conclusion I've reached is that the Turkey Buzzards are actively altering their hunting flight circles as more leaves fall.   Their return to a former roosting spot in the big oak tree just over our property line is another sign of previous normalcy laying new claim to the landscape.   Also when I first saw their hulking forms sunning near the top of that tree through our bedroom window I immediately thought purification.  Also thought of sky burials.

Still reading Lab Girl 30-40 pages at a time first thing in the morning.  It's a very worthwhile book This habit of maintaining ongoing slow reads of pleasantly rewarding books rather than incarnating via doomscrolling (or 'necessary' fiction/non-fiction) has proven invaluable.  I actually enjoy waking up in the morning. That makes it a lot easier to evaluate/understand the way I feel moving forward with my day. 

stability takes many forms at the internalized level.

...a sense of personal rootedness...

in sunnier daze

It is once again cold and rainy.  The images are three days old when it was warm enough to lie flat on the cement pool skirt with Mama.  Took about a dozen pics from that angle.  Above there's a pair of circling Turkey Buzzards.  Was a little bit uhhhhh over the one on the left coming out as a kind of reverse aquamarine colored negative.

The flaming red maple is the tree that beckoned me to prepare an essence in the early spring.  The towering honey locust on the far right was a stripling volunteer most inconveniently located.  I discovered it in very late fall.  I saw the leafless branching pattern and hoped it was an Elderberry.  Now there is a second offspring honey locust growing in a less inconvenient spot.

quite the libra, he was ...

remastered version of my favorite John Lennon song. 

Also reading Alan Light on the subject of JL's complex legacy.

Autumn Views

all images from yesterday morning.   Harvested lemon balm tips, thyme, comfrey leaves, chickweed flowers and leaf stems, broadleaf plantain, and violet leaves.  Blotted all the leaves for 5 or 6 hours and then commenced chopping the stems and leaves.  Added dried red clover, calendula, tulsi and more lemon balm leaves from the spring & summer micro-harvests.  Also last year's dried prunella heads.  Prepared a warm infusion on my stove's warming burner.  Love that burner for this purpose!  I now have a fine stock of therapeutic oil for making the coming season's healing skin balm.

Night before last I prepared a half gallon of spearmint-calendula skin oil.  I don't use it enough for somebody my age and nor does J.  So I doubled the amount I generally prepare and created two batches; one in spring when the leaf shoots were lush and another in autumn when fresh shoots have begun to push aside the spent flower stalks.

My sinuses etc. are currently paying for so much time spent outside but sometimes you just gotta.  The landscape was ready to welcome me again and I was not about to wait around any longer.  J's been walking the woods trail and I sense the glistening somewhat otherworldly activities of the past few weeks have begun to recede.  

It's easier to get down to the bridge now.  It's been a number of days - maybe a week - since I stood there with J for a few minutes but in truth I'm not sure.   Time has become what I always wished it could be - stretchy to the point of ongoing low level disorientation.  It occurred to me that this is indeed something I've sought for most of my life - freedom from 'time' as a human construct.  So it further occurred to me that when we all got shoved down the rabbit hole of ongoing reality distortion fields piling one on top of the other, that I might have intuitively leaned into the time-altering aspects as a way of learning what the reality of a personal wish might look like? 

For two weeks in a row I didn't know what day it was pretty much for the entire 14 days.  In my younger adult years that would have thrilled me.  I would have called and written to people about it as a Mission Accomplished interlude.  In the present tense it scared me.  Because I'm old enough to realize it's important to keep sharp and act sharper. 

As soon as I went into the field I could feel why I'd been asked to stay away for a time.  Not so much at a concrete level as the way the landscape's obviously settled more into itself.  I stood for a long while right here where I took the picture.  I took note of what flowered.  Said a first goodbye to hardwood green ringing our property lines.  Left the flag windblown for this official portrait of my co-creative return.

volunteer polk and mugwort stepping in to help with the vinca/periwinkle situation.  The plants are guiding me in how to break this daunting task into viable pieces.  It's hard to explain.  I go out there and they just somehow convey when and where to pull.  And so far it's working...

Mama - still stiff legged but determined - led us to her favorite basking and sentry position: the center of the gaia-breasted fire pit.

I joined her for a good long while. The experience seemed like the lunar equivalent of this highly solar experience.  It still feels odd to my thinking mind to sit on such a powerful expression of sacred land energy.  But on both occasions of spending more than an hour simply being - the last time with emptied essence bowls and this time with the cat - I returned to my normal routine with a strong sense of personal grounding.  Need all of that we can get these days!