I have worked a lifetime in the schools, as an artist in residence, 50 years to be exact, and without the National Endowment for the Arts, which also funds our state and local arts partnerships, I could not have reached so many students where traditional teaching methods have failed them. You see, I am dyslexic. Albeit undiagnosed. The arts are the only thing that saved my life. I am both a visual artist and a poet. Because of art I learned to read. Because of art, I became a writer, and have won numerous awards for my work. Art allowed me to access my intellect, and also to grasp critical thinking skills—and my life goal has been to share this process with young students where traditional educational practices have failed them. This was all was made possible through the auspices of the NEA, and the CAC. Please support the arts. Art literally saves lives.
When I saw the price of BioElements body cream on eBay I nearly fainted. $65 for 4 ounces? I got the bright idea to spruce up what was left of my old (read rancid) BioElements body cream with my equally old essential oils.
What I thought was lavender oil was lemon oil that spilled al over the place—now I smell like a piano in a used furniture store. It seems like such a good idea at the time using up all that old oil. The little plastic lid that was supposed to control how much oil comes out of the essential oil bottle flew off—oil spilled everywhere.
My Winix air purifier is going completely nuts, it’s in the red with all four fans going for all they’re worth. Soon it will achieve lift-off. Luckily because the lemon oil was so thick I was able to mop most of it up. But some was on my hands which I rubbed on my feet. I rubbed the excess oil on my feet and legs as I had nowhere else to wipe it….damage control. Put it this way, my toes think they are well lubed honkey-tonk piano keys at this point.
I’m showing the grain all right. I was able to mop up quite a bit of the lemon oil and smear on some furniture. The furniture is happy, my air purifier is not. My little teak pullout desk board is now very shiny. Now I can’t go outside into the sun because lemon oil is phototropic.
What makes this entire story ludicrous is that I did it twice, first with Rosehip oil. The lid dolloper literally flew off. Rose hip oil all over the place. I did not expect to have two freak accidents today. It seems when I’m going to royally fuck up I do it in spades.
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From NASA: “Behold the moment when the moon passed between Nasa's Deep Space Climate Observatory and the Earth, allowing the satellite to capture this rare image of the moon's far side in full sunlight. We don't see this side of the moon.
This is because the moon is tidally locked to the earth and doesn't rotate. So we only see one face of the moon from the earth. Humans may likely land on the far side of the moon before the end of this Century. This is indeed beautiful shot.”
📸 NASA
Patrice Vecchione says to write with your heart, write with your eyes, and write with your life wide open.
What am I looking for within this writing life? To be open is to change, to not be static, to ask what if, and let’s see, maybe include curiosity and exploration, and especially trust. The closed fist and the open hand, the relief of trust and the infinite possibilities that we, as we sit at our work, will uncover truth.
We are open, free, but not always able to speak about life as we feel it, but we mostly choose not to. So take my words, these words as strong as my mind. I would use my words to write near and far. In Galway the bird stands for all things and Saint Francis and the sea.
1. At the center of my life is my work, the calm within the urge to create. Everything revolves around it. It is how I define myself, how I see myself. I was one of those children who failed miserably at school, I learned late and I learned slow. As if in a fog. Reading outwitted me until the end of third grade. I can still remember the day I learned to read.
The overwhelming feeling I am left with at school was that I was hopelessly sad. But at the center of my life was the quest to explore distant vistas, discover secret valleys that led me up to the mountain passes where euphoria sleeps. John Denver called it Rocky Mountain high, but, for me, it was every mountain pass.
Maybe it’s the exhaustion or a lack of oxygen, but where I feel most alive is when I am in the mountains. My knees know their relative age, so hiking is now problematic. There was a time when I hiked all the fireroads of West Marin road and the sky was the limit.
And I feel that I am not writing what I should be writing about—par for the course. Sometimes writing is a shield and when I crow about my accomplishments, I feel guilty, I am so used to being slapped down. Is it a Catholic thing? Pride goeth before the fall? Or has it more to do with not tempting fate? Not tempting the devil to eke out his revenge on your success. Not tempting the furies to take it back a few more millennia.
Jupiter as it has never been imagined before. The James Webbie infrared cam has outdone itself. I am gob-smacked. OK, so the image is computer enhanced, making the invisible visible! But beauty x beauty = beauty. It’s a real gas. Planet, that is. No land. But when my eyes land on this—no words. WOW. More images here:
“In contemporary Hassaniyya Arabic, the language spoken by the Moors (Arabs) of Mauritania and Northern Mali, the terms ‘Whites’/‘Blacks’ (b ̄ıda ̄ n/su ̄ da ̄ n) are used to distinguish between Moors who are, in status, freemen, and those who have a slave past. A different Arabic word for ‘Blacks’ (kwa ̄r) is used to identify non-Moorish Africans. In contemporary Tuareg discourse, colour-based terminology is used to distinguish internal social status and to denote those who are termed ‘Blacks’ (koualnin), whether people of servile origin within Tuareg society, or to refer to non-Tuareg ‘Blacks’…. In the pre-colonial Arabic literature of the area, the term ‘su ̄da ̄n’ is most often used to refer to ‘Blacks’ who are ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Moors…” THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES
“We are stardust, we are golden.” How can you not love this stuff? I’m all agog and a-drool here. Pure poetry to be able to see back in time into the heart of deep space star nurseries.
The progeny of the 1990 Hubble, the colossal JWST, or Webb infrared telescope camera, was conceived in 1977. After many mishaps and missed dates (it was supposed to be built in 2002, and ready in 2005), it was finally launched Dec. 25, 2021. It took six months for Webbie-cam to reach its destination, and to send back these stellar photos. Wow, I am gobsmacked. This is the most extraordinary news in three years.
Hubble photos took weeks of constant exposure, Webbie-cam managed to see through all that cosmic dust and achieve absolute clarity and enlightenment in just 12 hours. But unlike Hubble and E.T., if something goes wrong, the golden-eyed Webbie cannot call home, nor can astronauts take a space jaunt to tweak it. Webbie has enough juice to last about 20 years. Then it’s lights out. Sayonara, so long and thanks for all the fish.
The gold-plated lens array, designed at Stanford, is 21.7 feet across, the size of a VW Bug, and looks like bee’s dreampad, or a MI6 prop from GoldenEye. Because it is infrared, it has a special shield array, and orbits in the forever shadow of the moon and earth. “JWST operates in a halo orbit, circling around a point in space known as the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point…” In other words, direct exposure to light or heat would fry Webbie-cam san. It’s like totally chill, dude.
Webb is orbiting a million miles from Earth, and is geared to peer through impenetrable clouds of thick cosmic dust, into the secret hearts and wombs of the earliest galaxies and stars ever born. We are literally looking back billions of years in the space/time continuum with these images of ancient “high redshift” starlight. In this case, red stars are the oldsters. White stars are teenagers. OK, my mind is sufficiently blown, folded, stapled and mutilated.
One of my favorite nebulae along with the Horseshoe, or Omega Nebula, is the Eta Carinae Nebula, host to a hopping hot young star nursery, and home of the Mystic Mountain, the Homunculuse Nebula, and the Keyhole Nebula in the Carina-Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way, at a mere 6,500 and 10,000 light years from Earth. And who doesn’t love the gas ring of the Southern Ring Nebula? Aka the Eye of God. And for the record, I’m a Sagittarius. We don’t need no stinking badges.
I always get a kneejerk reaction to the Facebook honeybee memes. At least the circulating memes have been updated to include other (native) bees. Part of the premise of the so-called Einstein quote in conjunction with bees is that we will disappear from the earth in four years as well if the honeybees disappear. But most New World foods are not pollinated by bees—and certainly not by European honeybees. Not that I think extinction of any species is ever a good thing.
Speaking of truth versus fiction, it’s interesting to note how many memes are but half-truths. They need a pithy quote, an authority figure (in this case Einstein) and an erroneous extrapolation to support the straw argument. It’s not a question of challenging one’s faith or belief, but a willingness to look at both sides of our quasi-scientific biases in order to see the larger picture.
Folks from my California native plant groups, are focused on helping the environment, but in their misplaced alliance, they don’t see the irony in planting native plant gardens in order to feed non-native European honeybees, which are classified as livestock. Euro-bees certainly help agribusiness, but not necessarily the environment—as they compete with our native bee species. Besides, butterflies want equal rights and equal billing as super-pollinators when the next doomsday bug meme comes along.
Many native bee dining favorites happen to be toxic to European honeybees including buckeye, azalea, rhododendron, death camas, corn lily, mountain laurel, sheep laurel, and locoweeds. Do we next suggest getting rid of those native species because their nectar kills those euro-bees? Gardening articles actually suggest not planting these native species for a more “bee-friendly garden.”
We have 1600 species of native bees in California alone, including Yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii, Sweat bee, Halictus spp., Wool carder bee, Anthidium manicatum, Mining bees, Andrena spp., Long-horned bee, Melissodes spp., Leafcutter bee, Megachile spp. to name a few. They can drink the toxic nectar, ingest the pollen from these “toxic” plants because they co-evolved with them.
Here’s the thing, honeybees certainly help the farmers but they don’t necessarily help the environment as they are non-native species—except in Europe and North Africa. If anything, they drive the native populations of insects away, and hog all the local food sources. Check out this National Geographic article. And this Scientific American article.
What’s really killing the honeybees? Pesticides, and varroa mites are a real problem. Monoculture is the real killer. And it is having an illicit affair with Round-up. As for our native bees—they too are threatened by pesticides, loss of habitat, and competition from those Euro-trash bees.
We need to build more bee hotels and create habitats for our native species too. And maybe send those non-native honeybees to bee school. All is not woe. Italian x Carniolan hybrids, are supposed to be more resistant to the narcotic charms of the buckeye. Sounds like both the nectar and the pollen is toxic—like the hallucinogenic mad honey produced by rhododendron and azaleas. I wonder if honeybees hallucinate?
Mr. Bagley returned home with a truckload of unsold vegetables. He drove a dusty-blue pickup the color of a humid sky, kitted up with produce bins and green doors that propped up to make a canopy. He must’ve had a greengrocer route similar to the Lucas Valley milk route in central Marin, over the hill, because we never saw him set up anywhere in the San Geronimo Valley. He was fairly new to the area, his large family took up two pews in the Lagunitas church. I didn’t know anything about them or where they came from. It was an unlikely convergence of events that became a moment etched in time. I was playing with Rosemary and Danny Magnussen. Taciturn Mr. Bagley didn’t say much as he counted out the day’s profits, a mere bowl of change. But his wife took it all in stride and cooked up a massive pot of rice and leftover vegetables. I remember sitting at a makeshift table on a large bulldozed flat, two old wooden doors on sawhorses turned into a table. It never occurred to the Bagleys to send us home. We were all invited to the meager feast, grubby neighborhood kids, no one was excluded. After a hard afternoon of playing kick-the-can, and hide-and-seek, yelling out olly-olly-oxen-free, come out, come out wherever you are, we were scabby wains as ravenous as vultures. I remember a mob of kids sitting around that makeshift table, seated on long planks or on tree stumps, scarfing down mountains of rice and butter, with zucchini and ketchup, like it was the last supper. I never tasted anything so good before. There was something holy and profound in that moment. It could’ve been a Dorothea Lang photograph straight out of a migrant worker camp. Mr. Bagley, sunburned and worn out from a long day selling his vegetables, gazed at us with watery eyes, then cracked open a beer, took a long drought from the amber bottle, then leaned back to take it all in as he smoked his cigarette down to the nub. In retrospect, they were probably on welfare, like many of us, the 50-pound sack of rice, from a food bank. Sometime those who had the least were the most generous. They didn’t stay long in the valley, they moved on to other pastures. Hopefully they were greener ones. What I remember is the indigo sky and the watery stars. And then, the long walk back home in the dark.
This evolved from a Facebook comment.
On Facebook there is a list posted of school massacres that begins in May 1998 with Thurston High School in Oregon (attributed to Ken Bateman). I lost track after counting more than 300 schools. I tried four times to count how many gun assaults on our nation’s children. And not just our children, we are at the epicenter of an epidemic of gun violence with more casualties than several of our recent wars combined. I despaired and could not go back and begin again.
And now we must add Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School not only to the list, but to the list of the four worst assault atrocities in America including the mass child massacres of Columbine and Sandy Hook. I weep for those nineteen 4th graders and two teachers, on the cusp of summer vacation, gunned down by weapons of war. What has this nation come to that we mow down our children with war-grade weaponry like this?
The girl who survived the massacre by smearing blood on herself, who draped herself over the body of a classmate, said she felt it when her friend quit breathing. Miah Cerrillo is eleven years old, she is scarred by the wounds of gun violence, and she will never get to be a child again. Ever. She was the one who dialed 911 and said, “Please come….we’re in trouble,” and then wondered why the police never came inside to rescue them. She said the gunman played loud music at the end of the carnage.
The gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, a former student at Uvalde High School, bought two semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifles (with a street value of $800 - $2500 each) and 375 rounds of ammunition for his birthday. No background check, nada. Not even a driver’s license. Or a red flag warning. Ramos wasn’t evenold enough to buy cigarettes or a six-pack of beer, but congress has deemed that Ramos was old enough to buy weapons of mass destruction. For what it’s worth, the median age of these gunmen is 18 years of age, without exception, nearly all are white—except Ramos who was of hispanic heritage.
There were warning signs. He posted on social media that he planned to first kill his grandmother, and then visit a school with premeditated murderous intent. Eight days later, he shot his grandmother in the face, who was first on his hitlist, then slaughtered a classroom of 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School. She survived and was able to call 911 but it was too late for the 21 victims of his misplaced rage.
According to WA Po, Ramos had a history of being bullied for his speech impediment, and attire—and he was failing, and so, dropped out of school. He had nothing left to lose. This was his payback. Surely he must have known that he would also die that day. Suicide by mass destruction. Why take out an entire 4th grade class? Why that school? What was the tipping point? How long had he been harboring that grudge, nursing it into revenge? Were there no warning signs at all?
Uvalde, hometown of actor Matthew McConaughey, whose mother was a teacher there, is a small community in the Texas hill country near San Antonio, some 50 miles from the Texas-Mexico border. About 90% of Robb ES students are Hispanic, and most come from impoverished families. The Uvalde massacre was the worst school shooting since Sandy Hook, nearly 10 years ago.
So, where were the Uvalde police in all of this? It comes to light that they did not act immediately, rather, they prevented parents from reaching their trapped children by tackling and tasering frustrated parents, handcuffing and macing them. Despite the fact that in 2018, that the Uvalde police force were trained and fully kitted up in tactical armor, they did not do their job. They sat on their haunches and waited.
One brave mother, Angeli Rose Gomez, was handcuffed for attempting to enter the school, was eventually released, she then breached the fence, ran to the school, and rescued her two boys, unarmed. Unarmed. Now that was a foolhardy, but brave thing to do. It took real courage. What did the Uvalde police force do? Nothing.
Now Texas Governor Abbot obfuscates about “hardening the schools.” What does hardening actually mean? Locking people in? Locking people out? A penitentiary school is not the solution. Beto O’Rourke was a brave man when he stood up and challenged the governor for his gross inaction. Thoughts and prayers will not bring back those children. I don’t even know why we continue to iterate that phatic phrase as it does nothing to bring solace to anyone. Meanwhile, the NRA is holding their annual convention. Big business as usual.
Since Columbine, some 310,000 kids have been exposed close to a thousand incidents of gun violence on campus, from kindergarten to college level. So far, this year, there have been over 200 mass shootings in the United States — and it’s only May. Seven more months to go. In just 13 of the largest mass shootings of school children, 148 have died, 182 wounded. I can’t do the math for the 400+ schools on the list. In Desert Sheld, Desert Storm and the Iraqi wars combined, we lost 7158 soldiers.
We are the only country with more guns than people—with an estimated 4 hundred million guns. An unequal equation. Since most of us don’t even own guns, that means a small minority are stockpiling guns, for what purpose? It’s not about the Second Amendment. It’s much deeper than that. Not protecting the vulnerable members of our society—especially young children—against gun violence is a crime against humanity. The Uvalde children were pulverized, only DNA analysis will ID them. Let that carnage sink in. Some parents are opting for open casket funerals so that the world can see the atrocity firsthand. Memorial Day Weekend is not long enough to contain all this grief.
How is this carnage OK? “Thoughts and prayers” is empty lip service. This is domestic terrorism. We need policy change and action now. If not now, when? We need background checks AND a bipartisan ban on all assault rifles NOW, NRA & GOP. Name and ban the weapons of mass destruction, the Uzi, the AK-47, AR-15 and its cousin, the M-16. We cannot normalize this wholesale slaughter of our fellow Americans within our borders. Ever.
Those 60 congressmen who refuse to vote for gun control legislation have a lot of blood on their hands. This “guns don’t kill people” argument is utter nonsense. Of course guns kill people. That’s what assault rifles are meant to do. They are weapons of war, not deer rifles. I think we all want to live in a country that cherishes its children more than its guns. Never forget. As Beto O’Rourke just said, “The time for us to stop another Uvalde, is now…. The lives of our kids are literally on the ballot… Action is the antidote to despair. Are you willing to act?”
This is a call to abrazoz.
Friday the 13th. Today I taught five classes, itself, exhausting, and I read their poems, and typed some of them up. I usually type up about 10 poems per class, or a page’s worth, double column. But there were so many fantastic poems, I probably typed up 75 to 100 poems. It took me until 5:30 PM to get through all their journals, but I did it so that I could have a long break. Otherwise it’s harder to get through them all if I wait until later. Probably my personal best in terms of getting through a sheer amount of work. Usually I tank after reading two classes. TG the classes are small. But it’s still a marathon.
I’ve sped up the entire reading/commenting/publishing process considerably by dictating kid poems to my iPad, and then emailing them to my MacBook. And the iPad dictation process to Notes really speeds things up, but makes the strangest mistakes, so extra proofreading diligence is necessary at the other end. The Apple speech to text platform is much more accurate than Facebook. But, still it’s a huge time investment. Some really strong poets, but I’ve been working with these kids since kindergarten. Such fantastic writers they are. This year’s poetry book will be extraordinary.
The work is sometimes grueling, but so rewarding. A crazy job, who knew it would become my life’s calling, but I absolutely love doing what I do. It’s like being in the epicenter of magic. A symbiosis of creativity. I absolutely love what I do, but the prospect of financial insecurity is always looming.
I think the quality of their writing is related to how I pair and mix up the model poems. Currently I am using Dorianne Laux’ Heart poem paired with Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Ofrenda poem, the recalcitrant heart and unexpected gifts—and the synthesis produces amazingly insightful poems from 3-5th graders—in both urban and rural populations. One girl wrote a poem to her dead rabbit, and she burst into tears because she felt guilty for not being there, and I said, No, you are not to blame. Getting real. Obviously it was preying on her mind, but she had no outlet. She achieved some degree of resolution by the catharsis of writing.
I am always looking for ways to teach students to find their own authentic voices vs. parroting back the model poems. Of course, I also like to use Emily Dickinson’s Hope is the Thing with Feathers too. My current teaching trifecta. There’s a lot of improv too. For example, I threw in Elizabeth Bishop’s The Fish because 3rd graders were raising steelhead trout to release into the river.
We’ve had a lot of Covid talk lately, the isolation, etc. What I’ve discovered across the board is that they’ve had no real platform to express their feelings around the isolation, and quarantine. So it arises. We keep it real. We share our stories and render it into poetry. The personal experience into the universal. At Berkeley, the next wave of Covid is rolling through the school, taking out students and teachers alike in droves. Sometimes just finding the through line becomes the lifeline. Sometimes we even find love along the way.
5/12/22 Alexander Valley School
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| A horse & his best friend, his groom, Jerry Riley. |
Note bene: I never know where my next writing idea will come from, where it will go, or what spawns an idea, usually it’s because of a Facebook post that serves as a trigger, I write a comment which leads to another comment, and so on. I never expected to be floored by the death of Naomi Judd, someone I didn’t even know. But there you have it. It seems Facebook style Wakes are becoming a thing. This is a developing piece based on a lot of hear-say (stet) as I only knew her on on the periphery. Call it 1° of separation if you must. So bear with me as I uncover a West Marin story.
A new Facebook friend, activist Sandra Birnhak, who grew up with Diane/Naomi in Kentucky, said she went by the name Naomi back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, so maybe she changed her name back to her given name, Diane when she was in LA, with her then husband, Michael Ciminella, before moving to Lagunitas. She was only 17 or 18 when she had her first daughter, Christine, in 1964.
Sounds like Hollywood wasn’t kind to her—in her autobiography, River of Time, she mentions about being molested by an uncle, she abandoned by her husband, then, at 22, she was raped by an ex-con heroin addict. I don’t know how she wound up in the San Geronimo Valley, but it was a haven of single mothers. Since I only knew of her peripherally, I’m still piecing together the stories…
Backstory: The Judds once lived in Speck McAuliff’s apartments above the post office in Lagunitas (where I once lived as a young child before my parents split up). Then they moved up the road to north a cottage on Tamal Road next to the House of Richard (a hippie store), and they also lived on Resaca Avenue as well.
