Portraits

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 My brother Nelson, holding Lesley, Christmas 1981 (Pentax ME Super)

I live in the photographic light created by my brother Bennett, who was eight years older than I. Early on I learned to frame a photograph from him. In my mom's house, above, I was about to snap a shot of my brother Nelson holding my baby Lesley with someone's cowboy hat on, and Bennett, in his sweet, quick intensity said, Wait wait, Ruthie, let me show you something. If you just move over here, you can get that little Christmas tree behind them, and you'll always know it was Christmas time when you look at this picture.

In 1977, when Don and I got engaged, we wanted a photo for the newspaper announcement. We asked Bennett to shoot us. He hated taking portraits! We annoyingly insisted, Please, please, you can make them as casual and snap-shottish as you like. I know he didn't want to do it, but he shot us anyway. Here is a sample of what he took. I was about to turn 21, and Don was 22. Yikes, were we ready to get married?

For a lot of years, Bennett spent nights in his dark room, agonizing in pleasure over the prints of photos he shot, until they were perfect. He shot what he loved, like rustic cabins in Nova Scotia, or the tall ships when they came to the New York harbor. He won grand prize for a huge print of a Greek Orthodox priest dressed in black from head to toe. After years of gallery show awards for artistic photography, he started caring more about family snapshots and family videos. He loved to chronicle family stories as they unfolded. He passed away before the age of digital photography, in 1996. My nephews have been scanning his images, and I don't know how that project is coming. One of these days I'll post others of Bennett's scanned photographs here, like the Greek Orthodox priest.

As our kids grew up, I rarely asked them to pose. I just snapped them as they were playing. Have you noticed nowadays that if you aim a camera at a person age two to twelve, they instantly pose and smile? They even have patience and will sit and pose again and again. It's like they really get the connection between the camera and the photograph, because they can see it instantly.

It's important to mark special events and milestones. As Susan Sontag said, photographs are experience captured. Imagine the visual world without portraits by Rembrandt, Modigliani or Picasso, or without Cartier-Bresson, Leibovitz or Arbus.

Rauf in India shows the range of portraiture, from a street musician in Rajasthan, to a dancer in costume. Rauf is an artist. Besides taking beautiful pictures, he also creates backgrounds in his studio and in PhotoShop.

I had conflicted feelings when a fellow teacher at Don's school asked if I'd shoot her daughter's graduating senior portraits. First, photographing people is different than photographing chickens. Then, I kept hearing Bennett's voice: I hate taking portraits! Maybe portraits are artificial, or silly. But then I thought of rauf, and other great portraitists, and I decided to say yes. I found that I enjoyed the process of shooting Elizabeth a lot, seeing her in different settings at the farm, and making it as fun as possible for a couple of hours. Here are some shots of Elizabeth. It wasn't hard to make her look beautiful, since she is beautiful.

I have two more senior pictures lined up this summer - both young men, and also one child portrait. I love some of the spontaneous "portraits" I've seen online, which blur the line between snapshot and portrait. I would love to have a brother look over my shoulder and tell me, Wait wait, Ruthie, move over here just a couple of feet, and also to teach me the manual settings. It was Bennett's birthday yesterday, June 28, he would have been 62. He would have loved the farm and most likely would be following us around with a digital video camera.

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Family reunion #1

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In Michigan we know how to make the most of heavenly summer days. November through April - half the year - we wrap every bit of our bodies except our eyeballs in layers of down, Thinsulate and wool to go out in cold, snow and freezing rain. Evening is coming on by 4:30, and after soup for supper we light candles and read by the woodstove. (I actually love winter.) So when abundant June, July and August warm up the stage, we take advantage. Don and I both come from large extended families, and we have three family reunions, one for each month of summer. Two of them are one week apart, Don's family's at the end of June, and mine over the 4th of July holiday at the lake cottage. Then we have a third gathering for my family at our farm the first week of August, which we call Farm Day. (Last year's Farm Day was Farm Wedding Day.)

Yesterday was Don's family's - Reunion #1 - at his second cousin's farm, over in the thumb. When you live in Michigan, and you want to explain where you live, you hold up your hand, and point. We drove about an hour and a half to get there.

You can't choose the family you're born into, or adopted into, so if you like them, it is one of the good fortunes of life. You can choose the family you marry into, so if you don't like them, it's really your own fault. Or maybe you bear your in-laws with gritted teeth, because your partner is so winsome that you're willing to pay the price. Well I have had good fortune both in my biological family and my married family.

The farm wagon was covered with green salads, bean salads, fruit salads, 
fried chicken, baked chicken, chicken salad, 
baked beans and taco salad,
but desserts are the most important part, 

especially Jolie's flag cake, which she unveils to cheers every year;
this reunion is always just a few days before the 4th of July.

Michigan berries are world famous; this American flag was stitched
with blueberry stars and raspberry stripes.

To put icing on the cake, my husband's family reunion on the final Saturday of June every year is at the farm of Don's second cousin Cheryl and her husband Pete. I know I usually try to sound positive, so I wonder if you think I wear rose-colored glasses. Maybe sometimes I do look for silver linings, but I am not positivizing anything when I say that Cheryl is one of the coolest and favorite people in my acquaintance. You can see from these photos how she and Pete have saturated their farm with loving attention. It's like a personal park. In the photo below, you can see Cheryl in turquoise welcoming young distant cousins with a Hello, Cousin! and a kiss, making everyone giggle as the boys wiggle. By the time she got around the table to the eighth little one, he was hiding under the table. But I know he still adores her, you just can't help it.

There is a pond, and it was plenty warm for all the kids to swim and play on the raft; 

then they played on the farm equipment.

You can guess that Pete and his son Todd run a landscaping business. 
(In the winter they specialize in snow removal.)
One of their specialties is crafting with stone, like this yard chair where Nickie is wiggling
(he's the one who hid under the table from Cheryl's smooches); 
it's anchored in the ground and bounces when you sit on it;
they put the stones on the wall of this barn,
and the fireplace and window sill below that in their family room.

I'm sorry, I am not a thinking photographer. I should have gathered everyone in one shot for a full frontal family picture of the forty or so of us.There were many missing this year, including our Lesley & Brian, and Peter.

I wonder if you have family reunions in your neck of the woods, and if you do, what you eat, what activities you do, and how far people travel? Do you meet at someone's home, or in a park, or a hall?

I really hate saying this, because I don't like it when someone else says it, but here I go: Why does it seem that as soon as summer begins, it feels as if it's already coming to an end?

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Olive's initiation

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“Mind the gap,” the voice said out of the train speaker. And she did. It was a long one, and she had to almost leap from the platform through the door into the train. Her sandal slid on the gritty linoleum, and she felt the memory-throb of a skinned shin as she found a seat.

Once, she had not minded the gap well enough, and her leg slid into that dark chasm, her shin scraping the metal edge of the train, making a washboard gash that filled with the cherriest blood. Always now, stepping onto or off a train, onto or off an escalator, up a curb, down a curb, she watched her feet with the attention of a guard at the Parliament building.

But that other day, one of her first in London, her attention had not been on her feet. She had just finished her first live model sketching session at the academy in Drawing 1. It was, in fact, the first time she had seen a real live man, nude.

He was young, like her, sitting on a stool, gazing sightlessly at the floor. His build was slight, his hair long, as in he needed a haircut, not as in, he wore it long. She did not feel uneasy, the studio class of twelve students was a clinic, and she was an artist. She adjusted her easel and picked up her charcoal. As she started to space him in, she began to feel something for him. Maybe better to say she just felt him. Not that she was attracted, or aroused. She could see something. He was uncomfortable, and his unease hung on him like an awkward schoolboy toga. She couldn’t decide whether to feel compassion for him, or to despise him and his gawky arms. She’d never despised anyone, so why was she tempted now?

Why? There wasn’t supposed to be any emotion in the room. Day 1 of Drawing 1, #1 Nude, is a passage, like medical students meeting their first cadaver. They had all prepared for it mentally long before this, and those other female students like her who had never seen a naked man in the flesh (there were three others) had found their own way to appear relaxed. Hers was to imagine his body as a still life of various fruits and vegetables. This may have started with some obvious correlations between bananas, plums and the male anatomy, but it continued to be helpful in seeing how the shapes of his limbs filled the space. His shoulders were small mangoes, his thighs eggplants, knees beets, fingers carrots, and well, she was distracted from that now. The instructor stood behind her, watching her shade his extended calf with the pad of her middle finger. She was avoiding the foot until the instructor moved on to shadow another student. Feet were so damned hard, and she hated the angle of his. But of course she couldn’t ask him to adjust it. Then she noticed. Nestled in the curly black hairs of his outer thigh, just above the knee, there was a long, fat, shiny scar that looked like an earthworm. In fact, she thought it was an earthworm at first.

This shy young man had a scar that must have been from a knife, straight and even, and raised above his skin by at least a quarter inch. Was he a street boy who ran skunk to school kids, and his supplier got rough with him when he didn’t pay up? Is that why he needed a hundred quid from modeling this week?

The hour was quickly up and her sketch not quite finished. That foot was only an outline. There was no charcoal stroke for an earthworm scar. She packed up her materials and gave one glance back at the boy-man wrapping a towel around his waist. She slid out into the bright summer light on Southwark Street with images of him in an alley in Brixton where all was dark except the glint of a steel knife. She jogged to the stairs down to the tube, her flat sandaled feet flying down, for she had heard the train pull in. Eyes on the platform, mind on the boy-man, she hurried to the open door. She stretched her foot to enter, her sandal toe skimmed the ledge, and her shin banged and scraped the metal, in one perfect motion painting a cadmium red sumi-e brush stroke from the top of her foot to her knee.

Post script: My big thanks to dear Dutchbaby for finding the "Mind the Gap" photo in her files, and offering it if I wanted to use it on this post! 

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People, by Peter Spier

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When Peter Spier wrote and illustrated People in 1980, there were over 4 billion people in the world. Now, thirty years later, there are more than six and a half billion people.

This is one of many illustrated books given to Lesley and Peter by my mom. I have a stash of them, extravagantly different-sized and worn, in the guest room book case, waiting for Lesley&Brian-children and Peter&?-children one of these days. I try so hard to be patient. At Christmas I should post from Peter Spier's book Christmas, one of our favorite items to unwrap from the Christmas tubs. It's nothing but an illustrated account of one family's Christmas experience, before, during and after. We also have Rain.

Peter Spier was born in Amsterdam, and later moved to the U.S. He is a prolific illustrator and award winner. He won the Caldecott for Noah's Ark two years before this book. For People, Spier won the Christopher award, for "affirming the highest values of the human spirit." Peter's father, Jo Spier was also an illustrator, and a Jew. Peter was interned at Villa Bouchina near Amsterdam during WWII, a holding place for Jews, and then was moved to the concentration camp Theresienstadt, also known as Terezin. Is there anything more beautiful than someone emerging from an experience like that and birthing creations like this? To still see beauty in people of all types. To be this open.

 This inscription is on the page opposite the title page.

Here are a few pages from People.

"Not nearly all of the world's people can read and

write, yet there are almost one hundred different

ways of doing it."

"But imagine how dreadfully dull this world of

ours would be if everybody would look, think, eat, 

dress, and act the same!"

"Now, isn't it wonderful that each and every one

of us is unlike any other?"

In 1980, it had been 35 years since the end of WWII, which exposed people directly and indirectly to other parts of the world. Now, thirty years since 1980, we see other places and people (some just down the road) beyond what we can hold, let alone absorb or understand.

I agree with what Menander said in the inscription. Knowing other people, from other parts of the world, and other walks of life, was a privilege I had in my home from when I was small. We had wards of the court live with us, kids who did not have safe homes of their own. Some of them brought danger to me, and loss. Into our home my parents also invited international students from China, Thailand, Korea and India to live with us or visit regularly, and we went to their houses too. I remember the overwhelming smell of curry in one tiny university apartment. Now, since I began blogging at the start of 2006, I have found friends in places that I knew little of, and as a result I know them, and myself better.

I just began reading our One Book, One Community book, Zeitoun, about a Syrian man who moved to the U.S., started a family, and lived through Katrina. Since our incoming first year students are expected to read the book, I figure it's time I read one with them this summer. One value for me reading it is that with my laptop open, I look at maps of Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus and Egypt where Zeitoun's family is from, as well as New Orelans, the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi, wiki histories and find out a little more than I knew - about other people in the world, including my own country. You would not believe how much I don't know.

Do you think we've achieved greater acceptance of people unlike ourselves since Peter Spier's book?

Check out how Sy Safransky saved the 4th of July.

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Father's Day

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Sunday, June 20 is Father's Day in the U.S. Since I devoted a recent post to my dad (the oak book case), I'm going to focus this Father's Day post on my dad's brother, Uncle Jimmie.

My dad was the pastor, the sun shining from the pulpit. Uncle Jimmie was the moon, the kind of man who could slip by without notice. (Not that I don't always look for the moon when I'm out at night.) Two of his dark losses the poem refers to are losing his wife early, and losing his only child Marjorie in her thirties, in a tragic death. Also born in Virginia, like my dad, he stayed there his entire life. I love how he said "Mrs. Culpepper" -- Mrs. Culpeppah. Maybe the Virginian accent is the most beautiful of all the Southern accents. Uncle Jimmie had the humblest and most loving smile of anyone I've ever known. He was very shy, even physically. You could feel him try to disappear into his skin. Yet somehow he managed to transform himself for us kids when he hand-combed his hair down over his eyes, shrank his tall thin self down, dragging his knuckles on the floor, jutting his lower jaw out and sticking his tongue inside his upper lip to make himself look like an ape, and leapt and oh-oh-ohed monkey gutturals around the room, just to entertain us. I miss him. He was a tremendous man, uncle and father. He died in 1994, and I wrote this poem shortly after that.

"Flying to Uncle Jimmie's Funeral" is a catalog poem. That just means you write lists and descriptions, cataloging something, or many things. So if you look, you can see many catalogs of different things. It's a way of expanding a metaphor, like the moon, into more layers.

Flying to Uncle Jimmie's Funeral

He was not magnetic in life.
We did not gather to him like birds
around a sunrise,
airplanes on the tarmac around the hub of gates,
garden club seniors around flowering dogwoods,
doctors around the bed of a dying man
or mourners around a coffin.
He was not central.

He was adjacent.
Reflective of someone else's glory,
like the moon outside my cabin window,
or the pond reflecting the moon
in the farmer's field below,
a point of interest along the route
under a plane flying somewhere else,
the man in the moon, slightly off center,
shy of looking at you full-faced.

More accurately, he was adjacent
and translucent, the man in the moon
in daylight,
a filmy petal at the side of the sky,
delicately agreeing with the sun,
drawing little attention to himself,
allowing other light, not only to take credit,
but also to define him,
so simply lucid he was.

Still, he was light,
undeniably brighter and warmer than the space
to which he was adjacent.
Now that I have looked long enough to study him
I don't recall that a shadow
ever eclipsed his face even a sliver,
somehow, miraculously staying full
throughout the dark losses
of his life.

Now, he lies in Richmond in a casket,
waiting at the center of all our routes,
my parents, my brother and I from Michigan,
my sisters from California,
Chicago, Atlanta,
and those in Virginia,
his sister from Bridgewater,
his ancient friends from Fredericksburg,
Harrisonburg, Charlottesville.
He is the hub of our spokes,
a magnet guiding our courses,
the point to which we aspire,
the focus of every thought.

I imagine the man in the moon, contained
in a closed box
that can't accommodate the rays,
like his fragile body that condensed power
and couldn't keep it from spilling out
despite his efforts,
beams overflowing,
having the life of a respirator tube,
the beauty of a dogwood branch
and the attraction of
a simple white line on the edge
of the runway that turns out
to be an arrow.


~ Ruth M.
February 1994
Published in the Red Cedar Review May 1994

Listen to me read "Flying to Uncle Jimmie's Funeral", here.

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See

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These eye sketches are from a page in the Andy Warhol Idea Book journal Inge gave me a couple years ago for my birthday. It's Inge's birthday today. Happy Birthday, my dear friend. In this journal there are blank pages for me to write or sketch on, and every so often there are translucent vellum pages of Warhol sketches and quotes. I truly love them. No one saw the way Andy Warhol saw. He's the one who said everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Everyone -- really?

The words below are sort of mine, if anyone's words "belong" to anyone (and then I made them into a text-rebus image at picnik.com). I think I am recycling these words from someone else, like G.I. Gurdjieff, Osho, Rumi, Rob Brezsny or Eckhart Tolle. Here, I give them to you, free of charge. If you believe them, use them wisely, and pass them on.

Here is a sketch I drew in that Warhol journal last October in response to reading a Rumi poem called "This Dove Here" (October 4 in A YEAR WITH RUMI, the book I post daily readings from on RUMI DAYS), when Inge and I had our writing retreat at the lake cottage. You would draw a dove in another way. You see differently than I do.

This Dove Here

Someone who does not run

toward the allure of love

walks a road where nothing lives.

But this dove here

senses the love-hawk floating above,

and waits, and will not be driven

or scared to safety. 

If love is annihilation, loving the unlovable as if you are in love with them is about as annihilating as it gets. There is no YOU left, no ego, but there is YOU-essence that appreciates THEIR-essence. See. Only you see as you see. Fortunate are the ones you are in love with, and the ones you see through loving eyes.

Everyone --- really? I have lists, just like you, of the ones everyone shouldn't include. Let's get annihilated. It'll be fun.

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Robert Duvall: delightful, de-lovely, de-VALL

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Did you hear him say on NPR that he has been approached to play Don Quixote in a film? I did, and I thought: I have to post about him. There is some information on the Net about Terry Gilliam's rekindled film project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which will also star Ewan McGregor, apparently, as Sancho Panza. According to that embedded site, Duvall wanted someone like Danny DeVito in that role - hello! But they need big names to sell movies these days. Danny DeVito would get me to watch. Well I would already watch because of Duvall. I like McGregor (OK, love), but Sancho Panza?

I have only seen Robert Duvall in a handful of roles: Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Hagen in Godfather I & II, Major Frank Burns in M*A*S*H, Boss Spearman in Open Range, Pastor Sonny Dewey in The Apostle, and no doubt a few other lesser screen faces. I never saw Lonesome Dove, which he says is his favorite role. Crazy Heart is next on my Netflix queue, and I can't wait. I am no expert on Robert Duvall, but I can claim to have listened to him through a telephone.

I also have cushions dedicated to him in the salon of my heart. The first cushion is sunflower yellow - Duvall as Pastor Sonny Dewey in The Apostle with Farrah Fawcett. He directed the movie too, deftly. There are lovely old hymns I grew up with, such as "Softly and Tenderly" and "I Love to Tell the Story," which is sung by Emmylou Harris and Duvall himself. When Duvall-as-Pastor-Sonny preached, he was my dad (except for the Pentecostal part; my dad was not a "holy roller"). They even look alike with their balding heads and heart-melting smiles. I want to tell him how his acting affected me and rang like the truest church bell. To me, he is like my dad's ideal self, although Pastor Sonny has some serious flaws. Maybe being flawed and forgiving is ideal, somehow. Another strange connection is that his mother's maiden name was Hart, my maiden name, and she was from Virginia, like my dad.

Which leads me to the other (pin-) cushion hidden under the chaise lounge in my heart, the cushion with pokey down feathers sticking out the wrong way. I came this close to humiliating myself forever, with Robert Duvall. Oh the pain! I would have needed to be cleansed of my sin in the river of forgiveness.

One of our film students in the English department knew someone working on the set of Open Range in British Columbia Alberta. This 2003 film is maybe my favorite movie ever. It's a toss-up between it and Lost in Translation. Oh, and Rebecca. Oh, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. OK, I'm juggling now. 

I remember being blown away by the sound of bullets exploding from multiple Dolby speakers surrounding our theater seats the first time we saw Open Range. Never had gunfire been so real and close.  Never had a Western movie set been so authentically muddy, with timbers laid across the dirt road between the General Store and the Tavern while rain just kept sweeping through town. The two main characters, played by Kevin Costner and Duvall have a relationship that inspires me every time I watch. I'm not a huge Costner fan (I don't think I can forgive him for those endless monotone voice-overs in Dances with Wolves), but he really got it right in Open Range - directing, and also playing shy, quiet and driven Charley Waite. Duvall is Duvall at his best as Boss Spearman: cowboy, listener, straight talker, beautiful human being and best friend to Charley. Annette Bening might seem too 20th century woman as Sue Barlow, but she is radiant and leaves no questions about why someone would fall in love with her. Michael Gambon plays the opposite of Dumbledore in bad and powerful Denton Baxter so disgustingly well that you almost believe it is right to destroy evil with a gun.

So our film student arranged a telephone interview with Duvall on the set. There was some great new technology at the time that allowed a satellite call from high up in the Canadian Rockies. I set everything up for the call in the hall outside my office with a landline phone, and chairs for the three students. Andrew dialed the number.

Some darkly magical force was in that tele-kinexion from the Canadian Rockies, because from the time his voice came on speaker phone, I got teleported into a Twilight Area Code. (Well, Duvall did play in a Twilight Zone episode in 1963.) I got my Roberts mixed up, and in the foggy zone of my head, Duvall transformed into De Niro. The call had been arranged for a couple of days, and I knew very well who this Robert Du- was. I've always liked him, he's tops, the best! But the entire phone call, through which I was mercifully silent, I was picturing him in Raging Bull, and between student questions and comments, I kept almost blurting something out about his performance. I never got the chance, or courage, thank God. After the call ended, and the students floated in starstruck bliss out of the dark old English department hallway, I began to realize my mistake, with horror. If I had been rational, I could have told him how I felt about Pastor Sonny Dewey, him as my dad! It would have been a seminal moment in his career, right up there with his Oscar and Emmys, to hear from a preacher's kid that he had got Pastor Sonny absolutely right!

But all I could do was thank my cowboy guardian angel for lassoing my mouth shut and not letting these words out of my beak: "You really epitomized method acting when you gained an extra 30 pounds as Jake La Motta . . . "

Autographed photo of Duvall found here. 
Photo of Duvall as Boo Radley found here. 
Photo of Duvall in the water as The Apostle found here. 
Image of Duvall and Costner found here.
Photos of Annette Bening as Sue Barlow and Dean McDermott as Doc Barlow, and Costner behind camera found here. 
Michael Gambon photo found here. 
Photo of Robert De Niro as Raging Bull found here.
Disney poster found here.

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A Storm is Coming

A Storm is Coming

The afternoon inches along

like the string

of turquoise stones

rising toward my throat,

as if some new thought

were being formed, escalating.

They say a storm is coming,

and of course it will,

but for now

the cat anchors

the edge of shade

where breeze and sun

juggle the tree's shadow.

Elsewhere, mothers have yanked

laundry from the line

and are securing doors and windows

against the bang of wind.

A car skims blindly

home, driver brittle,

eyes bulging toward

the stream on the windshield.

The leaden storm with mountainous clouds,

gales lined with tearing,

tumbling sticks -

I want it here and now,

hail stones pounding

from a broken necklace

and me knowing what to do.

~ Ruth M.

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Ready to dance

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One summer you're madly sprucing up the farm for your daughter's wedding. You think you're not going to get everything done, even though your husband is a teacher with summers off and is devoting every hour of sunlight to wedding preparation. And not just him. You can still see Nancy on her knees scraping and painting the porch, Bootsie in her farmy bib shorts staining four Adirondack chairs Don built, Jennifer meditatively pulling weeds around the veggies and flowers and painting your studio roof, Peter shoveling dirt bare chested or bending over his Macbook creating the dance music play list, Don planting, grooming, tango-ing with sunflowers to get them to bloom, and promenading to and fro orchestrating all the activity according to Lesley's creative direction from a distance in NYC. You -- you do laundry, lend a hand here and there, throw pasta with tomatoes and basil onto white plates alfresco like a swing dancer throws a jitterbug. It takes months of love and help, last minute flourishes and light-hanging by Don's sisters and brothers, and in the end - twist and shout! - the occasion is beyond wonderful.

Comes fall. Maple leaves dervish around the barns. Then winter, and snow fills up the bowl of the meadow. You watch red and brown cardinals ornamenting the big spruce from your red chair. Then spring, and velvet lilacs welcome you home from work with their French blue waltz in the driveway. Now, with summer almost completely open, a perfect dress for a wedding appears ON SALE for $39 (it was $150), and yet there are . . . . . no wedding invitations in your country mailbox. You could wear the dress Farm Day August 7, but it would be over the top more than just a tad. You and Don could groove up your farm life a little bit in the Great Hall of the Wharton Center listening to Joe Lovano for a couple hours, and go dancing after. Wait a minute, is there any place to go dancing around here?

The dress is a wall flower, waiting to be asked.

On the other hand, there is no wedding to plan -- Woohoo!

Oh dear, there is no wedding to plan. Boohoo.

But no worries, you can come on over to my place, 'cause
. . . . everybody gonna dance tonight . . .





Lorenzo of The Alchemist's Pillow - an excellent blog with art, music, beautiful poetry and humor - pointed a nice finger at RUMI DAYS. Go see who dances on his shoulders.

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Morning bamboo

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my photo, inverted

Paintings by Teerth Krishnanand:

"Zen"

"Bamboo in Wind", Xia Chang, c. 1460, Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Bamboo in the Four Seasons", Attributed to Tosa Mitsunobu, 15th century
Metropolitan Museum of Art

bamboo salad servers found here

hand painted bamboo design vase found here

bamboo chairs found here

bamboo vintage children's ski poles found here

 bamboo bike found here

bamboo scaffolding in India found here 
(thanks, Lorenzo, I had forgotten how great bamboo is for scaffolding)

 I got so excited when rauf commented, because I didn't know
the tribal village in my favorite post of his (his 2 photos above and below), is built from bamboo.
It's so obvious, now that I look again with bamboo eyes!
rauf's beautiful Priya post is here.

bamboo house in China found here

bamboo bar in Vietnam found here

"Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, 
while the bamboo or willow 

survives by bending with the wind." ~ Bruce Lee

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Bamboo forest fight scene:

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