Serenade to a rose: Stella by Starlight

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". . . not a dream,

My heart and I agree."

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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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from light to dark in a few hours

One year we lived near the railroad tracks in a depressed little town north of here. Dad took a small church as pastor - in an act of kindness, I think. The church basement smelled of mildew, and only a handful of the townspeople attended. My dad always cared about poor communities and so-called lost causes. But after less than a year we moved back to our old home town. Dad went into a new line of work, no longer a pastor.

A bright spot in the year of the dingy, depressed town was a family of five beautiful girls. It was as if Sweden had airlifted a gift and set them down gently for all of us to enjoy beside the lake where they lived. Not that they were Swedish, I don't think they were, but they were perpetually blonde and tan, with the whitest teeth, biggest eyes and sweetest dimples. They charmed us all with their worldly innocence. It didn't hurt that they also had a colored TV. (This was 1966, so: Flipper the dolphin, and funny-wacky-leggy Phyllis Diller in flashy dresses and spiked hair and ankle boots.)

My 14-year-old brother was in love with one of the gifts - Candy, who was his age. Yes, that was really her name.

One summer evening after dinner he asked me to walk to their house, and I was happy to, since Candy's sister Barb was 10 like me. Off we trotted down the tracks, which led us straight to a radiant evening in Sweden-land. Even the girls' mother was full of cheerful goodwill and prettiness.

Time flew as we played, laughed and ate chocolate chip cookies, and before we knew it, dusk was falling. Reluctantly, we said good-bye to Candy, Barb, and the gang, and skipped the mile and a half home over the tracks as the sky darkened.

Arriving home in the dark, we recognized immediately that our house was not so full of cheer and prettiness as the cottage of the blonde beauties. Our poor dad and mom had no idea where we had been for the past 4 hours! My brother, four years older than I, had not mentioned our plans to them. As the younger guilty party, I was not deemed as culpable, so I did not suffer the sound whipping he did.

I wonder if my brother thinks of the family by the lake with guilty pleasure as I do.

welcome the wild

This is me. Not very wild looking am I. But it's not just my fault. I'm sure it's partly my environment that helped make me this way. There are certain restraints on preacher's kids. And well, such kids either comply or break free. Example: I never went to high school prom, or any other dances for that matter, much to the consternation of my football player boyfriend one year: "What! No prom??" I offered that he should take one of his friends who happened to be female, which he did. Magnanimous of me, no? To be perfectly truthful, I went to dances in the high school cafeteria a few times after football games, but I stood in the darkness at the back, away from the rotating disco ball above the dance floor and watched, smelling the weed on my friend Jeff's breath as we talked. Jeff didn't dance because, I don't know, maybe because he was high, too shy or too cool. We in my family weren't supposed to dance as it was too worldly. So, I've got Baptist feet. (The Methodists, in their church across the street from ours, danced right in their basement!) Happily, dancing commenced when my nieces and nephews started getting married. We Baptist-footed siblings have tried our best to move and not embarrass our children too badly at those weddings. I don't think we've succeeded at that, but we sure have a good time. (Sadly, this came after my parents had left the earth. I think they would have enjoyed watching us, and maybe dancing themselves too, in another life/world.)

I've been learning to put my arms around chaos for a while now (yay Beato! yay chaotic oscilations! yay Bishop!), to be more uninhibited, reckless. Since moving to the farm, I feel myself aligning more with the cycles of Nature. But outwardly, I don't seem to veer much from disciplined order and self-control. What's up with that? It's time to start some Druidic jumping over bonfires!