It is hard to imagine that these supple, sensuous flowers grew wild in the mountains of Central Asia before they were brought to Europe from the Ottoman Empire and became so wildly valuable in the Dutch Golden Age that some single tulip bulbs were worth more then ten times the annual income of a skilled craftsman in 1637. "Tulip mania" is still the term for a maniacal financial bubble. The wealthiest era of the Ottoman Empire is called the "Tulip Era."
I love these flowers myself (though I didn't ransom the farm for them) and decided I had to create a slideshow of my photos in their honor. Most were photographed here on the farm, but some are at my university campus and in Holland, Michigan, where there is a Tulip Time festival every May. Temperatures were hot in March, and tulips are already blooming here (though these photos are from previous years), so I don't know what tulips will be left for Tulip Time. You'll see some little ones dressed up in Dutch costumes at Tulip Time a few years ago.
Happy Birthday to my husband, with whom I lived in the Ottoman Empire once upon a time, . . . oh wait, I guess he isn't that old! It was called Turkey by then.
I've paired Carla Cook singing Duke Ellington's classic "Tulip or Turnip" which really warms up my spring fever. Full screen is best (at YouTube if you can't enlarge it here).
Tell me, tell me, tell me, dreamface, what am I to you?
I am one who knows how this blogging experience can change a person, for I have been profoundly changed. Later this month it will be six years since I began synch-ro-ni-zing. While it is my spiritual practice to write, and my creative play to take photographs, is it also an act of rapt listening to sit in the blog "theater" where you, my blog friends, share your own explorations. I evolve, much as a result of our engagement with one another.
Within just a couple of months of starting synch-ro-ni-zing, my outlook was transformed by one blogger. When I had just a couple of family members reading my blog, including my sister Ginnie who explained to me the ways of blogs, having published at In Soul for a year already, M.A. Rauf stopped in from India for a warm and welcoming visit. Ginnie had taught me to reciprocate blog visits as part of bloggy etiquette, and so I visited Rauf's Daylight Againafter that first greeting from him. ("Rauf" — or "rauf" as he prefers — is pronounced "rah-oof.")
There isn't a way to summarize Rauf, or his blog! But I can say that he is a stunning photographer with heart, a writer with compassion and deep respect for those who are "untouchable" or otherwise downtrodden (you will see this for women in his photography), a lover of science, and a fervent lover of his India, with all her complex layers and intricate arts. He opened my eyes to atrocities; he encouraged me to think for myself. His humor, honesty, irony and sometimes outrage over what humans do to each other—including at home in India, and in the U.S.— shook me out of comfort. His love and compassion taught me to see people differently. He took over where my big brother Bennett left off when he passed away, whose worldview had shaped my own, environmentally and politically. He teaches me tips about photography, too, like Bennett.
Rauf doesn't blog much now, a real loss to me and his many followers from all four corners of the world. But he still takes photographs on his travels around India, and he still rages against agri-businesses that threaten not only all of our health, but the very lives of farmers in India who literally cannot survive financially and consequently commit suicide as families. When you watch this YouTube slideshow I made of a sampling of Rauf's images (please watch, it's just six minutes), observe the faces of his subjects, who cannot resist his charm: even Mother Earth smiles when Rauf lifts his camera.
Today is Rauf's birthday (January 8; it's already the 8th in India). Even though he and I have never met in person, and may never meet (though I hope that one day Don and I will get to India to meet him!), he is my brother. Happy Birthday, Rauf! This is a small "thank you" for the gift you are to all who know you. Watch full screen to be wrapped in the photos, and listen to "Time Remembered" by the Bill Evans Trio.
To my friends near and far, I've put together some photos of Christmas on the farm and linked them with jazz singer Abbey Lincoln singing "Christmas Cheer." I wish you Merry Christmas, and as Abbey sings, Here's to love . . . now . . . and throughout the year.
You'll see a couple of angels given to me by my mom, the first at 0:28, a woodland musician I treasure. Another is the colorful grosgrain one at about minute 3:45, who looks a little worn, but still cheerful. Christmas and my mother are linked, with memories of sitting at the piano with her while she played carols from the big blue book, and I sang songs like "The Holly and the Ivy," "Go Tell it on the Mountain," and "Good King Wenceslas." Toward the end you'll see a portrait of my small mom with Matroyshka dolls. After the video, I'm sharing a new angel who flew in from my brother Nelson this week, too late to include in this slideshow. She is holding a red bird like the cardinals in the video and seems to have just alighted from the meadow, so beautiful.
Have a happy weekend, quiet or loud, at home or in someone else's, with all your angels large and small.
It's been a busy and tiring week, but a good one. I have not been blogging today, but I will respond to comments and visit blogs soon. My mother-in-law is doing so well she won't need any more dialysis and may go home early next week!
This morning I felt the need to be quiet. So I spent some time gathering photos and making a slideshow. I've paired my winter photos with Esbjörn Svensson Trio's song "Winter in Venice." Wouldn't that be pretty, to walk in Venice in winter?
Starting at around minute 4:15 on, the photos are from today. I hope the images and music will help you feel peaceful. I am always drawn to solitary things in photographs, and while taking them.
It's going to be a busy week here, with Thanksgiving this Thursday. Living out in the country on this farm (it's a non-working farm, I think you know) means we can go out for a walk in nature when we need a break, into the sanctuary of the meadow and woods. I made a video slideshow of some of my photos, so come out with me and Esperanza Spalding while she sings "Ponte de Areia." We might not be digging our toes into sand on a Brazilian beach with the surf pounding in our ears, but the air is fresh and the November sun is warm. Sometimes I even discern a zephyr from across the sea.
Five and a half minutes through my little cosmos. It's best full screen.
Ponte de Areia
Esperanza Spalding
2008 Heads Up International Ltd.
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There have been countless messages of water in the last week. Garlic and sapphires in the mud (T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets), silence, or music, and the river - the Blue Nile, the Tigris, to name a few -
Every object and being in the universe is a jar overfilled with wisdom and beauty, a drop of the Tigris that cannot be contained by any skin. Every jarful spills and makes the earth more shining, as though covered in satin.
.................................................- Rumi, from The Gift of Water
I think we don't believe it, those words. Or many don't, and that's why we're in such trouble. But you know what? I believe.
It's just so hard to see sometimes. Like now, in a ravaged island in the Caribbean. Water water all around and not a drop to drink. But look how the water flows from every direction toward that point, to cover it with love and healing.
Anyway, the water flows, but still Nature and men rage, do wild and destructive things, we say stupid things.
GO WITH MUDDY FEET
When you hear dirty story
wash your ears.
When you see ugly stuff
wash your eyes.
When you get bad thoughts
wash your mind
and
Keep your feet muddy.
I made a short slide show of water images. I took all the shots, except the last one - I don't have that capability.
Have a good weekend.
All images but the last "marble" image taken by the Galileo, courtesy NASA, are mine. Music in the video provided for free use by musopen.com - Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg performed by Free Tim with symphonic pieces on a professional Yamaha Midi board.
He signed up for the Marines when he graduated high school in 1973.
He served a few years. No one in the family knows what he did, he couldn't talk about it. He was a Marine on undisclosed missions in the Pacific.
Now, just before his 54th birthday, Don's cousin is gone, from congestive heart failure. What secrets were better left unsaid, that didn't take him to his grave, but he took them there?
Good night, David. Time to rest.
This was my first military funeral, though I've seen them on TV and in movies.
I was feeling sheepish about my camera until one of David's sisters met me going inside with "Thank you, none of us thought to bring one. I want the kids to have something to remember this by." From that point on, I felt complete freedom, with a purpose. If you know me, you know my protests against militarism. But it was time to set that aside and do something for the family.
Arriving at the cemetery we were greeted by a row of seven Marines holding rifles by their sides, poised in readiness for the 21-gun salute to come. I snapped several shots of their fixed faces before I went inside the mausoleum for the ceremony. Like the guards at Buckingham Palace, they were stoic and unmoving, barely breathing it seemed, in their stillness.
Inside, as the other three Marines fulfilled their ceremonial charge - one playing "Taps" on his horn outside the door, the other two marching up the aisle, then folding the flag in meditative precision - I felt calmed. When the rifles rang their 21 shots outside - each Marine firing three times in sync - and David's daughter burst into a sudden wail, I realized this is why we offer ceremony, why we turn to it in times of great sorrow and joy. In the silent, slow folding of the flag, how carefully they caressed it with their white gloves, how tightly they held it between them in their task of transformation. And I saw, as if for the first time, how beautiful our flag is. In those moments I didn't see borders, or patriotism, or war. I saw stunning, vivid colors in a bold design unlike any other flag in the world, and it had become a blanket covering a soldier at rest. A thing of comfort. And when the Marine handed David's widow the red white & blue fabric triangle I felt its power. Ah - the American flag, an instrument of healing!
I remember how I felt at age 7, perched on the floor in front of our black and white TV, watching Caroline Kennedy - one year younger than I - holding the hand of her mother dressed in black, in a veil. They walked up and touched her daddy's flag-covered casket in the vast Capitol rotunda - first her mother's black-gloved hand, followed quickly by her own small white-gloved hand - this girl with hair and white anklet socks like mine. Then her mother's kiss on the flag. They were us. We were being healed by ceremony.
If you're interested, you can view David's military honors in this YouTube slideshow.
