CXXVII

CXXVI

Fear took down the winged life
The winged life we've led
So kiss the joy as it goes by
The poet William said
Blake the poet said

'Cause the old future's gone
The old future's gone
We can't get to there from here
The old future's gone

The old future's dead and gone
Never to return
There's a new way through the hills ahead
This one we'll have to earn
This one we'll have to earn

Hunters in October
Raise their guns in sport
Is war another animal
Or the beast of last resort?
The beast of last resort?

'Cause the old future's gone
The old future's gone
All passengers must disembark
'Cause the old future's gone

John Gorka, Old Future 

CXXV: more work in progress

A bowl and spoon in progress from wood taken from the Cedar lane tree.

CXXIV

I'm not sure if the empty space in the sky should count, but you get a better view of the sunset, and anyone looking at this already knows what the tree stump looks like...

...

Staring at the setting sun
No reason to come back again
The twilight world in blue and white
The needle and the damage done

I don't want to feel this way forever

The lights are on and the cameras click
We open up the lens to broken glass

...

Thursday, Understanding in a Car Crash

CXXIII

 
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy: The Ethics of Elfland

CXXII

CXXI

Until a man in twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherf-ker in the world. If I moved to a martial arts monastery in china and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge.  If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
 Hiro used to feel that way too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherf-ker in the world. The position is taken. ...
Which is ok. Sometimes it's all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you've got.
 Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

CXX

...
I will not open myself up this way again
Nor lay my face to the soil, nor my teeth to the sand
I will not lay like this for days now upon end
You will not see me fall, nor see me struggle to stand
To be acknowledged by some touch from his gnarled hands
 ...

Phosphorescent, Song for Zula

CXIX

 

I got a little work done on my cedar late tree wood project today, but there's not much to see yet and I neglected to take a picture so, here we are back to the main stump. Still with no signs of life in spite of that chain link fence meant to protect possible shoots that might be propagated...

CXVIII

My own cedar lane tree fragments.

I debated for a  bit if this should count, but why not. It's a noteworthy landmark, the first pieces of the cedar lane tree to make it into my workshop, earmarked for a couple different projects. After all the pictures, and angst, its interesting, and a little weird to be working with some of the wood.

Splitting a short section for a personal project. A kind of complex carving still in the planning stage. Having split and sealed it, will give it a little time to dry while I do that planning.

  

A y cut in half with the big saw to make a blank for another project.

CXVII

CXVI: Meanwhile in Rochelle Park

 

Plans are afoot...

CXV

CXIV

CXIII

CXII

CXI

At the Planting Fields arboretum, a really beautiful clearly very old, and very dead espalier pear tree which has been left at least for the season as a trellis for a flowering vine. Tree of life, tree of death...

CX

Still some angles I haven't hit before, even without trespassing...

And randomly, a spider web that made it through last night's storm....

CIX

CVIII: Is it Me?

CVII: Crossing

CVI

A Different Sort of Tree Stump

My magnolia wood bowl that won first prize in sculpture at the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit last weekend. It's the entire inverted root base of the tree, which was uprooted in a hurricane several years ago. I've been sanding ever since...

CV

CIV

CIII

As she listens very carefully to a room of conversation
She can feel the planet orbiting through space
She hears pieces of arguments, beginnings of jokes
And the odd lines of a song she cannot place

And it all makes up an image that resists interpretation
Which is lately how she likes to see herself
How she does not believe in accidents, doesn't disagree out loud
And falls in love with every man she cannot help

And she thinks "most people don't talk enough about how lucky they are
Most people don't know what it takes for me to get through the day
Most people don't talk enough about the love in their hearts"
But she doesn't know most people feel that same way

If she focuses her energies on just walking through the neighborhood
With depths and shallows nobody could sound
Like January Christmas lights under billion year old stars
She comes up with more of what is lost than what is found

So by the time that she explains to me just a glimpse of what she's understood
She betrays the meaning putting it in words
So she smiles at me lovingly and says, "just let me hold your hand
So far it's the only way I can let myself be heard"

And she thinks "most people don't talk enough about how lucky they are
Most people don't know what it takes for me to get through the day
Most people don't talk enough about the love in their hearts"
But she doesn't know most people feel that same way

Dawes, Most People

CII

CI

C An Empty Sky

I can't really believe I have posted 100 of these, and I'm still not sure why. I hope the next 100 days, chronicled or not, see good news, if about nothing else, about some proper remembrance, big, impressive, permanent as anything of this world, for one of those small miracles that make life bearable. A monument not to an unusually large tree, but to the fragility and the eternal life in each of us that it reflected.

It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and it is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium - as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom - well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.
Primo Levi, Se Quest E Un Uomo (Survival in Auschwitz) 

XCIX

'I repeat forcefully: it is neither a culture of confrontation nor a culture of conflict which builds harmony within and between peoples, but rather a culture of encounter and a culture of dialogue; this is the only way to peace.' Pope Francis

XCVIII: Infrared