MUSE LOG: Coffee in the Backyard - Chapter 2    
 Coffee in the Backyard - Chapter 250 comments
20 Jul 2003 @ 11:53, by John Ashbaugh

Between Tuesday and Wednesday, July fifteenth and sixteenth. It’s nice for a man to know that he is the son of a good father, and of course it is up to the son to make that determination. I can look at the way I reason and at the way I feel towards other people, and how I express myself, and all such mannerisms from my mother’s point of view and understand that she liked what she saw and what she heard. Through their altercations in observations and ways of looking at the world, and at me, there were reconciliations and the bonding of a lifetime attraction. In a sense I am my father, as my mother saw him, and the other way around, and whatever that is, combined with my unique genetic arrangement, has found its way into this school building in a city at the crossroads of two interstates in the middle of the desert. The word of the day is Inspiration. Bill W. and I have developed this word-of-the-day game. Every other day, he or I will pick a word for the day. It’s a greeting and it’s a theme. Where are we at the moment and where will we be all day? Tomorrow is another word. Today it is Inspiration, and where do you get it when you don’t have it? You gotta look for it. You’ve got to find those times when it works for you. For me it seems to be the earliest part of the morning and the latest part of the night, the two sides of sleep. Today, Holly is getting into our word-of-the-day game, as all of this banter is going on in the instructors’ room, where all of our little workstations are piled with our individual piles, assortments, and arrangements of papers and folders and books. Teachers’ crossroads. Four computer grading and attendance stations. The administration keeps a very close track on all of its students, and retention is a priority, striving to keep students who have attendance and academic problems on track and through the program. Teachers need inspiration too. The class is a four or five hour period once a week for each course. Each session has its own quality of impact and interaction, and the key to an evening is setting the tone. That is Twice a Day Dawn. Whatever in life has bent my neck forwards, the doctor is now bending backwards, so that where I have seen trees, I now see bowering boughs, dancing through the evening breeze against the night sky where wind chimes twinkle an arm’s length away. Check out the candlelight as long as it’s here. Candlelight touching Moonlight in the Garden.

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20 Jul 2003 @ 11:55 by koravya : A Viking
July seventeenth into the eighteenth, Thursday night’s Economics class into Friday night’s Comp Two class. Everything else is in between. Four times a week, I have to shift gears between one class and another class, while simultaneously reading papers and preparing what are called lesson plans, which is a fair enough description, although I think in terms of choreography, depending on who is there and what kind of response pattern I can foster. Twelve out of fourteen in a crew that is responding well to the challenge of engaging a vocabulary never heard before in a scrabble-like configuration. The whole picture comes at the end, while the process grows like the various assemblages of jigsaw puzzle pieces finding their way into a coherent pattern. There is no clear picture in the beginning of what the complete picture will look like. This version of micro and macro economic theory crammed into a ten week, forty hour course tends toward the abstraction of weeding out unnecessary details while emphasizing salient features that gives economics its unique intellectual flavor. Across the back row from left to right are T.J., Stephanie and Berta. Jason’s chair is empty. Victoria, Sam, and Eric Y. From left to right in the front row are Joe, a space for Gerald, Richard, and Paul R., front and center, underneath my nose. Then Tina, Paul F., and Edwin. Good to see that Tina and Paul F. are on good terms for their project. Eric N. has completely abandoned this course. This school has a strict policy on attendance, and those who are negligent are dropped. T.J.’s malady of pushing the envelope with his vocalizations continues, and he had the highest grade in the class in last week’s quiz. His pursuit of knowledge is commendable, while his style can best be described as needling. I’m getting better at keeping him in check, while not discouraging his inquiring mind and ameliorating him into the classroom dynamic. There is an excessive self-centeredness underlying this attitude, it seems to me, while he is forthright in his public apology when it came to the point where I had to remind him that his comment was out of line. This was in connection with choosing the off-day for our class for this quarter. Eleven weeks for a ten week course; somewhere in the middle is one week off, and I am laying the schedule out on the board, my schedule for this class. He wants my scheduling process for this class and our Comp Two Tuesday night class to revolve around him. This is not even a joke to him. He is really put off when I tell him those schedules are made independent of one another with regards to each class’s individual dynamic. He seems to want to have to, or have to want to, get in the last word. He pushes the envelope until finally he steps over the boundary of common courtesy. Most of the people in these classes know him from other classes, and he manages to offend just about everybody in one way or another, and what is so amazing about this is that there is no intention to be offensive or insulting, and everybody understands this, so that ultimately no one is seriously offended. He’s almost like the class clown, of a very special sort, like Emmet Kelly was a very special sort. This clown is not so sad. He is marked by something else. The Viking, perhaps. A man from the Baltic area, surely, with his long crinkly red hair tied in a pony tail. Picture T.J. now at the helm of an ocean going Viking vessel, sailing full-rigged through the waves to distant shores, challenging the intellectual puzzle of Economic terminology. The course is challenging to me for I must delve into the various recesses of what I recall from this long-forgotten matrix, and strengthen my powers of explanation while maintaining flexibility in accordance with the pace of learning.  

20 Jul 2003 @ 11:56 by koravya : Yellow Flowers
Here is a stick of incense in the garden at night between Friday and Saturday, July 18 and 19. Here is another stick of incense between two candles in the living room, one at the window facing west and the other on the bookshelf on the east wall, under a painting by Rod, an old barn in an abandoned field of bright yellow flowers, backgrounding into a mixed coniferous, pine, and cypress tree forest at dawn or sunset, backdropping into a broad distant hill to the right, and an even further distant mountain to the left. Rod is a master of rendering depth within a landscape. I have listened to him belabor himself in his efforts to know where to find the particular value of the particular shade of the particular hue of green that he is looking for, that her sees, every time he looks across a landscape. If he would paint one one-hundredth of the number of paintings that he has described to me on our various outings, he would be all over the place. As it has been, his pace of productivity has been somewhere between that of the snail and the tortoise. He sets a vista on the east wall of this living room. There is a piece of his heart out there in that old abandoned barn in its field lush with saturated yellow flowers in bloom, broken up by the trailing timbers of fence remnants. It is an old barn, and it is a home where the distant wings of three birds arch over the hill through the rose-violet sky in very light value in delicate juxtaposition. Looks like about a twelve by twenty-four, and through this little window, the grass at our feet is as clear as the mist on the distant peak merging with the sky.  

21 Jul 2003 @ 16:24 by swan : An expanded view of the garden,
the trees, the sky and more opportunities to share coffee, thoughts and conversation. And thus it reflects: "Whatever in life has bent my neck forwards, the doctor is now bending backwards, so that where I have seen trees, I now see bowering boughs, dancing through the evening breeze against the night sky where wind chimes twinkle an arm’s length away. Check out the candlelight as long as it’s here. Candlelight touching Moonlight in the Garden."  

21 Jul 2003 @ 16:34 by swan : Painted Dreams,
How many paintings remain dreams not only in Rod's mind but in my own. I have been in a non-creative space, at least where painting is concerned. It used to bother me, and I would wonder if I had reach the end of my creativity and would never paint again. I decided some years ago that there was an ebb and flow to my inspiration and when I was in an ebb, I would just sit back and enjoy myself because when I was in a flow nothing could stop what ever wanted to come through and it could go on for days, weeks or even months,

I am in an ebb right now that has been about a month long. I would say it was more like two months but I had a painting on my drawing board that I just completed a month ago. It was half finished for three months. This rarely happens, but I reach a place about half way through the image where I could not go on. I got stuck and felt like I couldn't do the rest of the image justice. The part I was stuck on was an important vision that my friend Aryk had of Michael the Archangel. it was such a beautiful vision I didn't think I could do it justice so I walk away from it for three months. One morning about a month ago something told me I could finish it and I did in about three hours. When Aryk saw the image he said it was very close to what he saw.
Creative energy is flowing somewhere else in my. My inspiration is in a quiet space inside of me waiting. Like I am waiting because my life is in that kind of place. I don't know what is happening, where I am going, but I feel things beginning to stir.
In the places I can not see, I trust that something important is happening, and I let myself relax into the void of not knowing.


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update: right after I wrote this and posted it I got a phone call from someone who wants me to collaborate on a book and it would have 60 illustrations.  

26 Jul 2003 @ 18:47 by koravya : Learning
July twenty-first into the twenty-second. Monday night into Tuesday morning. Yesterday’s Group Dynamics into tomorrow’s Comp Two, section one, on the first leg of a weekly journey through four classes, successively smaller, from twenty-four through twenty to sixteen and then ten, seventy altogether. Quite a few I’ve had before in other classes, either a Comp One or an Econ, and there’s just a few whom I’m having for two of my classes this quarter. There is an ongoing spillover effect between personalities and subject matter, and it all comes down to a row of numbers which translates into a letter grade. Fascinating system: mathematical evaluation of performance, to include at the instructor’s deference, adjustments for effort, sincerity, determination, responsibility, and attention. Allowances made for obstacles met and challenged, especially if they are overcome. The learning process takes the time it takes to get to that place where we are actually listening to what each other is saying. Why on earth should anyone want to listen to me talk about group dynamics? I could add, what am I doing here teaching this subject? My first answer is that I am learning something here. Even if I’m no expert, I know more than they know, and they need to want to know what I know. They need to see and hear that there is something to get out of this course. There is what’s in the book, and what I say, and what they do together, and it’s a tossed salad.  

26 Jul 2003 @ 18:48 by koravya : Cerveza
Tuesday into Wednesday; Composition two, another debate, and we are all getting better. This is an intellectual socialization process. Tonight we had a quiz on logical fallacies. T.J. takes the longest time to think through his alternatives. Tonight’s debate concerns the reintroduction of wolves into southwestern forests. Stephanie, Nicloe, and Kevin against, with Ira, Eric, and Rochelle in favor. Where is the balance between that species and ours? And who is making these decisions, and what are their motivations? Both sides are rather well prepared. Rebuttals generate a need for counter-rebuttals, so that while strict format is breached, lively semi-formal exchange creates an entertaining event. Later on, after a lecture-discussion about the ways and means of composing a valid argument, Stephanie reads her thirteen page pro-choice abortion paper to the class. Anyone is invited to read their paper to the class, and invite comments, questions, and discussion. So far, Stephanie is the first. Kevin takes issue with her premises that she has the right to make that choice about an embryo. The premise is the issue, and Kevin and Stephanie have the exchange that has been in the brew since their paths crossed at the beginning of this course six weeks ago. These are both intelligent and ordered people and the exchange befits a confrontational academic approach to an irreconcilable difference. Kevin declines to read his paper; he feels that he’s said all he has to say in his response to Stephanie, and I rather agree. The activity keeps them awake, and it brings ‘em
through the gates if they think there is actually something to Do in here. I am thankfully beginning to see how this course can be about a bit more than writing. It’s about telling the world how you think. So the class has got a plan and we’re going to meet here again next week to pick up where we left off and move on to new territory. Nicole stays late to take the quiz she missed when she wasn’t here for the first hour. She’s a star for dedication to her intellectual development, but she has a hard time being on time. She also wants to go over the various remarks I wrote in her recent paper about how her forms of phrasing and choices of vocabulary are sabotaging an exemplary train of thought. Here is someone who really wants to know what really needs to be done to make a discernible change in her expressive style. An exploration into mystery, not knowing what will emerge, while sure that the present forms must change . . . somehow . . . into something else more satisfying to clarity. The word for the day is Cerveza, thank you Bill. And in the back yard this evening with this season’s array of foliage, the Buddha says put your hands on the ground and destroy your illusions.  

26 Jul 2003 @ 18:49 by koravya : Alice's caterpillar
July twenty-fifth into the twenty-sixth, Friday into Saturday. This Comp Two class has ten enrolled students and four are in attendance. It’s one on one between Dustin and Lee for tonight’s debate on the physician assisted suicide issue. Well matched intellectually with distinctive different styles of presentation. Brandon is countering last week’s absence with his presence this evening, thoroughly unprepared for tonight, woefully behind in homework essays, congenially responsive when spoken to, capable of clear writing, yet disinclined to go out of his way to write a single word more than he absolutely has to. So the first two hours of the class are mostly Juan and Lee and I going over logical fallacies and through a debate. Finally, Melcor comes in, a welcome addition to any intelligent discussion, just in time for an essay on the stereotyping of gender roles in our culture, and of course here in Albuquerque’s distinctively multi-cultural society, the processes of redefinition are both cross-generational and inter-cultural. And how do any of us as individuals from our societal matrix respond to those unexpected incidents in our lives, both good and bad, that it is impossible to prepare for, regardless of what one might think one might do? Juan has had a gun held to his head on two separate occasions. So he found out that he handled the first incident rather calmly, while the second incident was more taxing for him because his sister was there and she was also threatened and he felt compelled to reiterate to the robbers that his sister didn’t have the combination to the cash register. Now, having two incidents behind him of having the barrel of a gun pointing to his brain, he thinks he’s beginning to get a little insight into his reactive patterns to such occurrences, while recognizing that every incident must almost certainly be unique in its situational circumstance, i.e. circumstantial situation. Whatever it is that’s actually coming down at that actual moment. This is the question. Who are you and how do you know who you are? We’ll take it for granted that you think, therefore you are, and that the path to reality lies in getting in touch with the rocks beneath your feet. It’s easy to know who you are when all you do is things that you’ve always done. The rut is a marked path, and the Santa Fe trail was not a stroll through the park. Choosing a way marked by venerable footsteps is a noble path. The path of self-discovery traverses a landscape of variable personalities moving in every which possible direction and the protagonist is nobody without somebody, even if it is his or her own imagination, to play badminton with. Feathered thoughts fly through the breeze, falling to the rocks, until from out of nowhere, momentum reverses within the time space of a microsecond, and a new twist to the idea rockets towards the stratosphere, and all the rest of the concentric spheres encircling our planet, until our gravitational mother leads us back to the rocks from where we come. The assignment is to prepare a topic for this quarter’s argumentative research paper.  

30 Jul 2003 @ 20:11 by koravya : Taking Turns
July twenty-ninth in the sunlight on the desktop in the early morning. Been a long time since I’ve been over in this neck of the woods. To the outsider, this desktop is a total mess of papers and photographs. Stacks of things and tumbled stacks of things, just like all over the house, with a little clear space right in front of my face on the faux wood grain table top. Eight year old Kaitlyn is standing in a galvanized steel washtub filled with water on the grass, cooling off her feet halfway up to her knees on a hot day. Taking turns with grandmother Rosemary’s brother John. Corners of her closed lips turned up into subtle dimples, sporting a blond ponytail, wearing a pink sleeveless t-shirt with three little hearts emblazoned across her chest, inscribed within a rectangle of even smaller hearts in constellation array. There is a way to think about wading through a day. Suppose, just suppose, that everywhere you go today is immersed in water halfway up to your knees, a real hallucination in a city going through one of the hottest, driest spells in its recorded history. All of us in the city sloshing through the day in our shorts and bare feet; classrooms, hallways, parking lot and all; all the way up to your front door and all over your floor, and here I am sitting in the middle of it, the Lake beneath our feet. The glaciers are melting and the waters are rising. They might take a little time to melt away, and then again, maybe not as long as we might think once they get started. This is not even technically an Ice age, but it may one day seem to have been if existing trends continue. It would be interesting to see some time-lapse photography of a projection on the earth’s surface of the results of melting icecaps. Can it get to the point where all of the ice will have melted? What kinds of dislocations of life forms would result? Would there be a trigger for a return to another Ice age? Meanwhile, sitting in my room full of water, the day beckons forth. There are lesson plans for the classes, and there are lesson plans for the day as a whole. Keep the working parts working, the chemistry in balance, and the thought as clear and fresh as morning dew. Taking the walk between last night’s Group Dynamics and this evening’s Comp Two. Got a lot of prepping to be taking care of for tonight’s class. Papers to read over and comments to make, suggestions to recommend and numbers to pull out of a hat. Then I’ve got to prep for a twenty minute presentation tomorrow to the faculty on library operations. Got to keep track of the library inventory that my student assistant Trudy is compiling, prepare that annual report, approaching its deadline, and concern myself with other miscellaneous stuff clamoring for various forms of attention. So today will be a busy one, but that’s Ok. Tomorrow will be an easy one. Just Keep on Sloshing.  

31 Jul 2003 @ 08:31 by koravya : Rainbow Bridge
July thirty-first. Here’s that sunlight on the desktop again. The news of the day according to the metropolitan newspaper has been scanned. Some people have died and some have been born. Nobody I know in particular. Still walking through the same crowd.
Here is a little rainbow flashing by on the semi-glossed wood grain on the edge where a shadow blends into sunlight. Some little wave between the two sides of the glass pane squeeze the colors like fresh orange juice dripping into dew laden emerald leaves of uncut grass. The park keepers will inevitably come around to keep the lawn in order, but at least for this morning, there has been a stay of execution. Usha has brought us another day. The rind peels back from the horizon in a ribbon of yellow into orange into the Blue of cloudlessness enveloping summer’s treetop leaves. The dirt is our brown and orange Red, the colors that cling to our toes when we slosh through the mud.  

31 Jul 2003 @ 09:03 by swan : Following a rainbow and crossing
the bridge. As I type this I hear the rain dancing on my roof top. The breeze is fresh and moist after days of hot and humid. Can I anticipate that a rainbow will follow? I see in as I peer into the tiny drops of rain landing on the window sill, Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and purple. The gift of light, and water bringing the joy of color, into sight. I drink it in with my eyes, it fills my being and I become the rainbow.  

2 Aug 2003 @ 10:55 by koravya : Creating Interest
Friday morning, translating into August from July. All of my courses are more than half over for the quarter now. People have learned enough stuff to begin to put research and presentation projects together. Even when I was getting a bachelor’s degree in Economics thirty years ago, I never had to verbally explain any of it. All I had to do was write reports that were read, graded, and duly handed back, take written tests and quizzes, and respond to an occasional question. Now I am faced with translating my understanding into fourteen other thought patterns simultaneously. Clearly, we all need to have some common ground, and as the master of ceremonies, I have a lot of control over pacing and emphasis. I wonder how I would do now if I had to take any of those exams and quizzes from any of those many courses I took in Economics, Business Administration, and Finance. That was a lot of stuff over at the University College of Commerce. Now I am cramming it all into a ten week, forty hour course for analytical thinkers. It’s a preliminary and it’s a final and it’s a scrabble game all rolled into one. I try not to throw too much at them, but there’s plenty enough even at that, and it is vital that I keep them alert with continual question and answer sessions in a multiple choice format. I like multiple choices because it helps them sort through the alternatives and apply some reasoning to the evaluation of each. And they’re easy to grade. I’m not faced with all sorts of bizarre written attempts to explain in your own words what some concept from the planet Mars actually sounds like. The overall attention level is good, and I can’t ask for more than that. From there on out it’s up to me to create a presentation that will stick a little bit because it was in some fragmentary way intellectually stimulating, creating connections between neurons that had never existed, or at best been underutilized, until now. I am putting a face and creating a voice for this book they are having to read. And they have to research and present three separate projects, in the sixth, the eighth, and the tenth weeks. So it’s not just all about them listening to me. It’s also about them talking to me about something they have found out, and even to each other, in this peculiar, specialized language.  

6 Aug 2003 @ 12:08 by koravya : Stretcher Bars
August third, halfway between midnight and midnight. Lisa is having a party last night, just something that she and Paul made up for no good reason, and while poking around on the web for an hour or so in the afternoon, I discover that August 2 is Lammas, the festival of Lughnasadh, halfway between the solstice and the equinox. A fair amount of esoteric bottles of beer and homemade fajitas. Now it just so happens that Amy is in town from Phoenix for the weekend, on one of the legs of her southwestern saleslady’s job. Lisa said come over at seven, so I came over at seven and Lisa and Amy are the only ones there in the kitchen putting together the homemade guacamole and a variety of other well prepared ingredients. Looks like these two ladies are becoming friends. Lisa flew over to Amy’s in Phoenix a few weeks ago, for one of Amy’s parties; so between them, two circles of friends in separate cities intersect. There’s a set of photographs, so I can catch a glimpse into Amy’s backyard in the night, and the various strange faces that could just as well be here tonight. There are two Kaitlyns and a Matt, who is with one of the Kaitlyyns, and Dan, a familiar face here, and Amanda, tall, with silky red hair, half tied in a ponytail and half swirling softly around her shoulders; smooth clean skin as fresh as polished alabaster. As the population filters in and dusk settles, and the meat is cooked over the barbeque in the backyard by the co-hostesses, a circle of chairs around the candlelight of a multiplicity of candles in a tight circle at the center of the conversation between each and every other one finds its course of exchange. Amy lives the life of a traveling businesswoman, with Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas as her territory, and she needs to make the rounds of her clientele on a regular basis.
She likes her job for the freedom it gives her to do things her own way. Her relocation to this part of the world from Chicago a little more than a year ago is the direction of her choice. Her boyfriend Jacob is part of a startup musical group, probably some sort of variation between rock and jazz, and he is the vocals. They’ve got a gig in Taos for August 22, a Friday night when I teach, so I won’t be able to visit. It doesn’t take much of an excuse to get me into wanting to drive the 130 miles to Taos for an overnight or a weekend. Amy says she and Jacob and the band will try to get a gig together here for that weekend, so their new friends here, amongst others, can hear what this new band is about.
So in any case, one way or another, it looks like I’ll be meeting Amy and Jacob in about three weeks, under one circumstance or another. Underneath the story of Amy the businesswoman, is the story of Amy the artist and writer. That part of the story is a freshly opening seed just beneath the surface of the moist ground, sending a first root into the dirt and a first leaf into the sky. She’s a reader, and she listens to books-on-tape while she drives and whenever. She is feeding her brain, and how it’s going to come out is yet to be discovered; but clearly, there is this inherent desire that something will have to be written. That point will have to come when all of what she is will have to go into what she writes. There will no longer be this concern about whether or not anyone else is even going to read anything she writes. If it comes out in a form that can be shared and that others enjoy reading, fine. The joy is in working the language the way one likes to use it. The joy is in knowing what your own written voice sounds like, and using that voice to craft a sculpture, or a three-dimensional view on a two-dimensional surface, simply because it is a self-fulfilling exercise. Here she is approaching her twenty-eighth birthday on August 22, and she’s having a hard time getting started with finding her voice in writing. So as I encourage her to persevere with her intention, and remind her that she needs to start doing something extra to start making it happen, while not worrying about it if she does not feel all that inspired when she wants to be, and further remind her that the truth of the intention will make it happen or not happen, I recollect the time when I was twenty-eight, when I acted upon a long smoldering desire to pick up a paint brush, and did so with passion, determination, and productivity. I tell these things to Amy, and say that we as writers, regardless of how long we’ve been doing it, continually face all kinds of obstructions and misgivings about getting a round tuit. I’m telling her what I need to be telling myself. We’re both in the same boat, she need to get started and I need to get started again. I generally don’t like to tell anyone that I’m going to do something. I rather generally prefer to tell others what I have done. If I decide to do something and something goes wrong or whatever it is doesn’t turn out right, I don’t have to come around and say I couldn’t do whatever I said I was going to do for whatever reasons. I am answerable to myself for what I complete. Show time is show time and is greatly diluted, in my mind, when I create expectations in others for what I plan to do. However, I can note that I took a remarkable and unusual step late yesterday morning when I drove over to the art supply store and bought enough stretcher bars for two paintings. First time I’ve bought stretcher bars in these almost three years in Albuquerque, and its safe to say I haven’t done a serious painting in over five years. Not to say anything about what might happen here. I just went out and bought eight stretcher bars yesterday.  

6 Aug 2003 @ 12:14 by koravya : One by One by One
Passing through midnight between Tuesday and Wednesday. I have submitted my recommendation for the inventory report to my boss, with whom I will refine its nuances before he submits it to national headquarters. Who looks at this report and what they get out of it, I have no idea, so as long as there’s no complaints, I’ll keep doing it like I’ve been doing it. This has been my third annual inventory, and I’ve had three different student assistants for this project, and Trudy is the best. Outside of inventory help, I have rarely been assigned with a student assistant on a regular basis, such as would be necessary to get this library in more precise order. Now I’ve been promised that Trudy will have a continuing presence and responsibility in the library for at least a few hours a week for the foreseeable future. She knocked out a whole new spreadsheet of every book in the house, from shelf to database, like lightning in slow motion. Now it’s going to be her slow motion job to refine the arrangement.
So much of this specialized collection is uncatalogable according to the library of congress numbering system. All kinds of specialized reference books that may as well be in a foreign language for all I know about it. I just put the same colored ones with the same colored ones, and no one ever said anything to me about them being out of order. Circulation out of this reference library was seventy-one last year. A lot of the academic activity gets focused through the 22 computer stations, and the four electronics workbench stations. The books do get knocked around. There is some reference activity, but the majority of the open floor space has been taken over by the proliferation of computer stations. Desk space has been reduced to a fragment of its former self. It’s my job to keep order in the library, and my new assistant will apply her magic touch and wave her magic wand, and Poof, every book and manual and magazine will be in its appropriate place in the galactic configuration. And who will notice? Who will care? Shuffling through a stack of old magazines in a corner on the floor is a very Buddhist thing to do. Why am I here? is the inevitable question I ask when engaged in such activity. Trudy’s from Indiana, just near Chicago. She’s old enough to have four kids, while engaging the world with enthusiasm and interest. She’s majoring in computer networking systems, and she punches the buttons on that keyboard like a tabla player. I am quite confident that my inventory and collection are in good hands.  

9 Aug 2003 @ 09:39 by koravya : Raindrops
Between two candles between Dawn descending and Dawn ascending. Thursday into Friday, August 7 into August 8. Sprinkles have been falling occasionally lately. Barely enough to wet a chigger’s whisker, although there was a moment Sunday afternoon out on the volcanic rock formations to the west of town when the momentary sprinkling of large, luscious drops caught me out in the wide open. Nothing to do but turn to it as it came down splattering this parched face. Spread these arms and face the wind from the south-southwest across the endless plain. Here in the backyard is a corner where two adobe walls meet over a concrete slab. Here is a corner of emptiness. Look at your hands stretch into the sky through the bowering limbs of leaf-laden trees into the fragmentary clouds passing across the dark moonlit sky. The doctor is teaching me things about my lower back and my neck I need to know. There is a spillover effect from the thrice weekly adjustments into my sense for developing whatever set of exercises contribute to the straightening of my lower spine and the re-alignment of my neck. I don’t know where the neck problem comes from. Maybe too much bending over a desk reading, or something like that. The lower back problem I know comes from my stint as a city bus driver in Madison for four years between ’78 and ’82. That was the period during which I formulated most of the set of drawings for The Gathering of the Tribes of the Earth and its literary accompaniment. So there was something good came out of that period, but this lower back problem has been with me ever since. So I’ve been working with it myself all of these years, exercising it this way and that way, to induce the good feeling that comes from a sense for good posture. Now this doctor has some very specific radar for zeroing in on places that need attention. He’s given me an exercise I would never have thought of. Things are loosening up and straightening up, and that little adobe corner is anywhere in the world I want to be. From the ground beneath my feet to reaching for the sky, these are the dimensions of our world. Stretch out those arms to raindrops in the backyard. Just as once, yesterday or so, the monsoon rolled in from the ocean after a blistering summer, and I sat on the roof of my home amongst the surrounding treetops and opened my arms to the deluge.  

9 Aug 2003 @ 09:40 by koravya : Two way street
Do a little stretch in the adobe corner in the middle of the night between Friday and Saturday, August eighth into the ninth. Hold one wrist with one hand behind my back and squat completely down, rest there for a comforting moment, then raise myself to standing, still holding one wrist with one hand, and letting that lower back do its proper work. The release of that nervous energy from that lower spine, travels to this neck and bends this head backwards towards the sky. Trudy has gone and retrieved a detailed breakdown of the library of congress cataloguing system and is embarking on the task of numbering our collection of unnumbered items. This is beyond anything I even expected. She has already out-visioned my vision of what this library could be. I certainly wouldn’t have the time or the mentality to cope with such a task. It’s beyond my purview, except through the assistance of a highly competent student employee. I take who is assigned to me when they occasionally are, and while the attempt is made to match capability to task, some are clearly more suitable that others. Trudy has already outclassed all of my previous helpers. Put them all together and they wouldn’t add up to one Trudy. She has seen through this mess that no one else, including me, had been able to see beyond. And she knows how to do what needs to be done to make it happen. I let her know that I’m really impressed with what she’s doing. All I have to do is turn her loose, and she will make this library, into a library. It takes all afternoon to conjure up a plan for an evening class. Tonight is my micro class in Comp Two. Six out of ten make the show. This is a thought-provoking class and the message of interaction needs to be clearly demonstrated. This is my seventh week with this group of entirely new faces, and they all have a different sense of what is going on here, not to mention my own mode of interaction. A sense of cohesiveness amongst the class members, even to the point of developing a sense of responsibility to one another, is built into the curriculum of many of the courses here, with a lot of emphasis put on group projects and presentations. The only exceptions are probably math and physics. Working well with others and presentation skills are part and parcel of this electronics and computer oriented curriculum. I get the opportunity to get them thinking about words: those that they write, those that they speak, and those that they hear. There are different favored means of expression. Some write well and speak very little, and some vice versa, and others at various places along that spectrum of possibilities. The objective is the development of the means of verbal expression, each according to his or her nature and favored direction. My contribution is to recognize the possibilities and encourage them, each and every one, in a simultaneous environment. Every class has its own quality of cohesion, and it is a continually evolving phenomenon. I could wind up seeing some of these students in other classes down the road. This educational process is a two way street.  

13 Aug 2003 @ 11:31 by koravya : Another step
Monday August eleventh into Tuesday August twelfth. Through a Group Dynamics class after our designated one week break, designated by the instructor’s prerogative. Long time no see everybody, let’s get down to work, and have a good time while we’re doing it. Time for a creative thinking session. On your marks. Get set. Go. And done very well by all seven groups of three. Then on to their more serious considerations, with special reference to their final project due in two weeks. The path of my re-education after the city bus-driving stint proceeded from where I had left off in cultural Anthropology, proceeded through Teaching English as a Second Language into Linguistics and on into a three course visit with the creative Writing section of the English Department. Nevertheless, the Art building held a mystery that I needed to understand, so there I went, from elementary number one to as far as I could go with it for however long it took, leaving nothing behind. I have to go back six years to the last time I painted through a world. The first go-round was long enough to be subdivided into periods of development, from ’73 to around ’80. Then there was this two and a half year bachelor’s program from ’87 through ’89. I learned a few things, but originality was dead. Nobody’s fault. Just not the right chemistry. Likely as not, I wasn’t ready and I wasn’t inspired. Just going through the motions, sense of exploration muffled. Then there were those three years from ’94 through ’97 at West Texas A&M in the panhandle town of Canyon. That’s where I met my painting instructor and my printmaking instructor. Something entirely new. Something I knew I had been looking for, and that’s where I had to go to find it. It thrived for its moment in the sun, and then it went to sleep. All of that happened there, and this is a different place. Maybe something will happen, and maybe something won’t, but I’ll keep the thought alive. The only way for me to do it effectively is through a passion in progression from one into the next. Maybe the same old tried and true, and maybe something a little different. All I’m doing is entertaining myself and testing my sense of universal beauty, something through which an aesthetic can be shared.  

18 Aug 2003 @ 09:06 by koravya : Sandbox
August thirteenth in the late evening. The birthday of my best friend Jimmy Rose from the days of the sandbox, the old bingo card style pinball machines, the foot long hot dogs, and the soda bottle collectors for that two cents deposit, and those bicycle rides to far beyond the city limits and over those two-lane highway bridges across the Missouri and the Mississippi, and Our Gang style go-carts linked into a train of at least ten diverse constructions on various sorts of wheels, and watermelon parties, and walks across the acres of cemetery open space and tombstone fields. We went to different high schools and he was a year ahead of me; the grounding was in those sandbox and go-cart days when the space between us was half an alleyway up and half a block over, depending on which way we’re walking. My house is your house between these two families of children. He’s got two older sisters, Grace and Pat, who are respectively two and one year older than Jimmy, and younger sister Donna, one year younger than me. Then there is my younger sister Rosemary, one year younger than Donna. There were certainly a lot of other kids around the neighborhood, and we lived just a block and a half from the grade school, and my own younger brothers came along three and five years after my sister, but there was, as far as I was concerned, an important kernel of interaction going on between Jimmy and John and their coterie of sisters. Jimmy and John had their own thing because they were boys and close in age, and Grace and Pat had a close thing because they were close in age, and the same was true for Donna and Rosemary, and all of them could play together if the game called for it. Happy birthday Jimmy, wherever you are, back in St. Louis somewhere. Always a part of my neighborhood, we discovered the world together; going a block further away and a block further away and a block further away, day by summertime day or wintertime day, it didn’t matter. We found each other in the sandbox in my backyard as he was walking down the alley one afternoon and saw me through the spaces in our low wooden fence, and it was obvious that he and I needed to play together in this sandbox. He’s a lifelong friend even if I haven’t seen him for over thirty years. He’s in my sandbox. All the people that were in my sandbox are my lifelong friends. They are almost as close inside of me as the voices of my parents. The sandbox lasted for a long time. A tile contractor lived next door to us. He had a big garage in back of his house filled with his supplies and inventory, and there was a big pile of sand, probably a few or several cubic yards, that he let us play in, and we built some magnificent cities and systems of roads and tunnels in our world. And then it would become erased, either willfully and abruptly, or it would slowly disintegrate through the natural ravages of time, and then we would build another one, different every time. Like the sea of water surrounding the sea of sand, the sand returns to its planetary level. Snap out of it, is the word-phrase for the day.  

18 Aug 2003 @ 09:09 by koravya : Crabapples and Elms
August fifteenth through sixteenth, Friday into Saturday. With a little extra evening time this week, I consumed three consecutive videos, one each on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The Pianist, depicting the story of a man who lived through the Warsaw ghetto; The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the memories of a former slave who died at age 110 in 1962. Chac, the made in 1973 story of a Guatemalan village in the clutches of drought who seek the aid of a Rainmaker who lives alone on a faraway mountain. In the native language with subtitles. An incredible world when you think about it. No such thing as movies or television or radio barely a hundred and a few years ago. Be that as it may, my back yard split level patio enclosed by a wooden fence of vertical slats is the ridge over which the gibbous moon rises in the clear dark sky, only a few hours after a late afternoon thunderhead dumped a small refreshing bucket on the valley. A pair of crabapple trees started growing so close together once upon a time, that their trunks have conjoined for about a foot out of the ground, before each going in a separate way reaching for the sun, finally find their arching branches as intertwined as their roots. Strikingly like the Iranian twins, conjoined at the head into adulthood, each looking in a different direction, each with a will of her own about what needed to be looked at and which direction the head should turn, whose attempt at separation through an operation proved fatal to them both.
The Lord givith, and the Lord taketh away. The patio is very well sheltered by a similar pair of spiring elms growing out of the corner where the fence makes its turn, so close together at the bottom as to be one, each towering its separate way, brushing branches of leaves with each other in the wind. The progress report after three months of adjustments shows a picture of improvement, between my “before” x-ray and yesterday’s. The progress is notable and August fifteenth through sixteenth, Friday into Saturday. With a little extra evening time this week, I consumed three consecutive videos, one each on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The Pianist, depicting the story of a man who lived through the Warsaw ghetto; The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the memories of a former slave who died at age 110 in 1962. Chac, the made in 1973 story of a Guatemalan village in the clutches of drought who seek the aid of a Rainmaker who lives alone on a faraway mountain. In the native language with subtitles. An incredible world when you think about it. No such thing as movies or television or radio barely a hundred and a few years ago. Be that as it may, my back yard split level patio enclosed by a wooden fence of vertical slats is the ridge over which the gibbous moon rises in the clear dark sky, only a few hours after a late afternoon thunderhead dumped a small refreshing bucket on the valley. A pair of crabapple trees started growing so close together once upon a time, that their trunks have conjoined for about a foot out of the ground, before each going in a separate way reaching for the sun, finally find their arching branches as intertwined as their roots. Strikingly like the Iranian twins, conjoined at the head into adulthood, each looking in a different direction, each with a will of her own about what needed to be looked at and which direction the head should turn, whose attempt at separation through an operation proved fatal to them both.
The Lord givith, and the Lord taketh away. The patio is very well sheltered by a similar pair of spiring elms growing out of the corner where the fence makes its turn, so close together at the bottom as to be one, each towering its separate way, brushing branches of leaves with each other in the wind. The progress report after three months of adjustments shows a picture of improvement, between my “before” x-ray and yesterday’s. The progress is notable and significant. There is still a ways to go, especially in the lower part, although working on the upper contributes just as well to the improvement of the lower. The direction has been turned and the difference is noticeable as a striving for further movement in the revised direction. The thrice a week sessions will now become twice a week, and I am given a device with which to carry out neck traction sessions at home on a regular basis. The quarter is winding down now. Only two more sessions for each of my four classes. The burden feels a little bit less on me for teaching them as it becomes a little bit more for them to perform in their final papers and projects. The shift in emphasis is discernable while the focus on the most important elements of the course narrows. The entire system of learning is structured around deadlines, which only become more exacting as one progresses through the grades and levels of depth and precision.
working on the upper contributes just as well to the improvement of the lower. The direction has been turned and the difference is noticeable as a striving for further movement in the revised direction. The thrice a week sessions will now become twice a week, and I am given a device with which to carry out neck traction sessions at home on a regular basis. The quarter is winding down now. Only two more sessions for each of my four classes. The burden feels a little bit less on me for teaching them as it becomes a little bit more for them to perform in their final papers and projects. The shift in emphasis is discernable while the focus on the most important elements of the course narrows. The entire system of learning is structured around deadlines, which only become more exacting as one progresses through the grades and levels of depth and precision.  

19 Aug 2003 @ 17:17 by swan : Go-cart memories,
I hadn't thought about go-carts for years until I read your piece, above. I built mine when I was about 11 years old. It was painted bright green and yellow enamel paint. My best friend John ,who was two years younger and I built it together. It didn't have a motor but was propelled by one or the other of us pushing it from behind. I had rigged up a fancy breaking system so we could stop when we wanted to. It was made out of parts we found in other peoples discarded junk, wheels from an old wagon, the base and old door, a stearing wheel from some piece of broken machinery and the green and yellow paint. And it could fly down a hill like lightning. I usually had my foot close to the break when I was at the wheel, flying down a hill.
I lost my best friend when I was 15 . John died at this time of the year, when he was 13 from food poisoning from the State Fair. We were best friends for 7 years and many of my best childhood memories are of things we did together. I have thought about him many times over the past 37 years, especially at this time of the year.  

23 Aug 2003 @ 15:56 by koravya : Caretaker?
Monday into Tuesday, August eighteenth into nineteenth. The species which could be the caretaker of life on this planet has initiated the beginnings of a mass extinction. At some point of critical mass, the human population which prioritizes
the preservation and continuation of all planetary life forms will withdraw from legitimizing the death machine. The polarization of powers may have unfortunate consequences, but then, who knows? History is full of surprises. The life force of the exterminators has separated from communion with the universal life force. The powers of evil need to be neutralized and the task will require cohesiveness within Gaia. This species is faced with the dilemma of having to overcome the primitive instinct for self preservation at the expense of other life forms. There is a cancer in the biosphere infecting a segment of the cerebral cortex of a significant portion of the planetary human. This is a life threatening cancer and whoever finds the cure for this one will have served life well. The purpose of life is to continue itself, and the purpose of our lives is to continue each other. Will there always be a segment of the population who doesn’t understand this? Or have we indeed come to the crossroads between the continuation of our species and its demise? Shall there come a morning following the darkest of nights when Dawn welcomes the human as the caretaker?  

23 Aug 2003 @ 15:57 by koravya : Dead Grass Growing
Tuesday into Wednesday, August nineteenth into the twentieth. Start from the stretch in this adobe walled corner of the universe. Plant the skin on the soles of your feet in the dirt and the rocks and the dead grass. Bend down close and smell. Stand, and stretch those fingers to the stars, what few of them there are visible in this urban landscape. Thoughts for the day are scrambled eggs. Pick a subject, any subject. Choose a direction. The planet is saturated with six billion souls striving for enlightenment. The only one I have the slightest clue about is wrapped up in this body walking through its dream. All it really wants to do right now is straighten up its spine and get its neck in line, the line it was originally designed to think with. The optimal direction of thought is crippled by the death machine. Another projection of responsibility. How can I, or anyone, say that my, or their, thoughts, have any universal validity? All we need to do is start from our common ground and work from there. Last class before the last class this week.
Last class is next week. Tonight included an explanation of the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning for my more volatile Comp Two class. This is not a very complex world. All I have to do is fire up a few neurons in the attentive participants. Affirmative feedback confirms mutual progress. Providing direction requires an understanding of the possibilities. Curious green ideas float imperceptibly through the stratosphere. If you would like to refute my nonsense, you will have to engage my wit. We are locked into an inquiry as to why you and I should have anything to do with one another. Outside of the compulsion, we can reason ourselves into infinity. There are certain individuals who are satisfied with fulfilling the barest minimal requirements for passing a course. There are others for whom school is a priority and learning is a perpetual objective. Here I stand at the crossroads of a passing parade while occasional meteors flash through the dark sky. Every one of my students has an embedded individual writing style and many of them are grammatically and lexically unique, and part of my job is to get them to strive for a more conventional clarity. The die is cast for most of them. Where does grammatical sensibility come from? Some got it and some don’t and it has almost nothing to do with effort at this point. Whatever it was that went into the shaping of their attitudes has gone into the shaping of their grammatical and lexical configurations. Each of us lives within our linguistic landscape, and however we share whatever we share comes down to the matter of agreement. The soles of these bare feet are scratching the dirt, the pebbles, and this little patch of dead grass. It thrived here once before, and it can thrive again.  

23 Aug 2003 @ 15:59 by koravya : Choosing Chairs
Thursday into Friday, August twenty-first into the twenty-second. Back in the adobe corner under the windwavering branches of towering narrow elms and the canopy of thriving crabapple branches. This yard of earth, this patch of dirt telescopes through fluttering leaves and wispy volatile configurations of cloud in the city-lit night sky into the reaches of interstellar nothingness, where comes into view a star, and the star becomes a randomly melodious wind chime, hanging from a vine which disappears into darkness. The hallways at school are crowded with the new faces of incoming students for the quarter beginning September eighth. Orientation day is a big deal at this school where the notion that we are all family is cultivated. The students are reassured that they will get all the attention they need in their educational pursuits, if they want it, and if they in fact pursue it. The faculty and staff are there to walk them through the difficult steps. This is especially crucial to those who are working full time and supporting families, which many of them are. A buffet of all kinds of good Mexican food is catered in, and the entire staff is involved in the formal and informal get-acquainted process. Along with that form of relative chaos, was a sequence of regular students who wanted my advice on some particular project or presentation or written report. So that by the time I got into my relocated classroom for my last lecture-lesson before their final presentations next week, I was in an entirely sociable mood, and so were my Economics students whom I haven’t seen as this group for two weeks. There was enough food to go around and they got some, and the whole school was like some universal party and I had to begin and conduct a class on the national and international banking system. Quite a few of them want to know. I’ve got their attention, and I am managing to speak in a manner which conveys to them what they want to know. Interesting to see how everyone distributes themselves in this long and narrow classroom we have been assigned to for the evening. We’ve been in a short and wide one for eight weeks. Each person always sat in the same place every time. Now there are twice as many chairs as we need altogether and the depth of field has changed. Victoria is front left and Joe M. is front right. Paul R. and Richard are close behind in the second row. Berta, Stephanie, and T.J. hang back in the fourth, but the latter two especially are engaged with the proceedings. Gerald, Edwin and Eric Y. hang off to the far left and towards the rear, while Paul F. holds down the last row. He is seriously behind and he’s got some catching-up to do. I’ve had him before. It’s the way he likes to operate. Everybody gets the chance to do what needs to be done in the way that works best for them, something that meshes with their learning process. Nevertheless, it needs to get done. Most commentaries and questions throughout the session were from Victoria, Paul R., Stephanie, and T.J. Regardless, the two stars of this class, like Castor and Pollux shining in the dark, sit to the left and right, with focused and relevant interrogations from Victoria balanced by quiet, affirmative and unquestioning understanding from Joe on the right. Provide a taste of the principles of the double-entry accounting system to round off the session, with the suggestion that what they have learned in the course is actually very little within the domain of the subject matter, but a little bit of something is better than a whole lot of nothing.  

23 Aug 2003 @ 16:00 by koravya : Van Gogh's Sower
Friday into Saturday, August twenty-second into the twenty-third. A long easy afternoon wrapping up the latest results for the smaller, less populated Comp Two class. Six out of the ten have managed to find their ways here. Mike called in with car trouble, and Melcor called in exhausted from work, promising that he is doing what needs to be done for this course. I have no messages from either April or Santiago, and they are not at-risk of failing but they have a tendency to fall behind. Next week is the last week for all of my courses. I am going to be listening to final presentations and reading final research papers, and coming up with numbers that represent my final evaluations, to be engraved into their records forever. So they write something for me to read and I have to translate this document into a symbol which carries semantic interpretaton, depending on who’s doing the reading. Brandon is here tonight. He’s been coming every other night all quarter, and he is putting out now in the home stretch. His overall grammar and sense for writing is very good, although he goes about as half as far as I would like him to. He is one quiet soft-spoken young man, and respectfully averse to the debates our class gets involved with, to the point of seemingly wanting to pass the course on the basis of his writing alone, which is reasonably possible, but he is essentially opting out of about thirty percent of what this course is about and engages in. Since he’s only here half the time anyway, it’s a wonder if he’s getting anything out of this class at all. Group activities and standing up in front of people to talk are foreign to his nature, and his writing is honest and perceptive. All he’s got to do is get enough of it over to me by next Friday’s last class. It will also be his last opportunity to get involved in the debate process. I think it would be good for him to take that step but I’m not pushing him into it. He’s got to decide that it’s worth it to himself and give it a round, come what may. Like the first time you jumped into deep water and you didn’t know how to swim and you needed to start learning. Course I had preliminary lessons on the side of the pool at boy scout camp one summer, but that first time out into deep water on your own is a journey into mystery wondering if all of this thrashing around is really going to work. And what exhilaration to find out that it does, and that you have a rhythm all your own in that space where waters break into breath. In any case, this course has got Brandon writing something at least, and the best I can do is encourage him to write more. It’s a matter of whether or not I can show him something that he might want to pursue. Even if it’s only at the level of planting a seed in his brain. Different seeds take better to different kinds of soil. Van Gogh’s sower strides across the furrowed field as the sun sets behind him over the distant wheat fields.  

3 Sep 2003 @ 17:32 by koravya : San Ysidro
Monday into Tuesday, August twenty-fifth into the twenty-sixth. Took the leisure to visit the rocks in the San Ysidro gully yesterday afternoon. A nice little forty mile drive through the desert vegetated landscape of intermittent mesas and not so distant peaks to an allotted parcel of mini-canyonated landscape for the enjoyment of visitors who like to ramble, and the best part about it is that there’s hardly anybody ever out there. A little mini-wilderness to clamber over, complete with lowland stream reduced to soft black mud nurturing a carpet of vibrant thick soft grass, and various long stemmed wispy leaved bushes, vertical sentinels gracefully lining the path of flowing water, when it flows. For now, there is a pool, several feet in diameter, and several more feet in length nestled amidst its offspring. The afternoon starts clear and warm, and within a couple of hours the dark clouds roll in with the kind of wind one can hold one’s wings into, and no rain is forthcoming though one could almost smell it in the air. I took a roll of film through here in the spring, and now I want to catch a few more views. I learned to love to paint these kinds of things during my years near the Palo Duro canyon in Texas. Nice to walk around in familiar territory for a bit. It’s nice to be wrapped up in the present most of the time, but I like to recall some of the places I’ve been from time to time. The present assumes various perspectives as it advances through an allotted life span, and we all know that attitude makes all the difference, in both understanding and affecting events. We’ve all heard of attitude adjustment hour, and attitude adjustment pills and so on and so forth. Quick fixes. Every once in a while, a body needs to go through a more deeply seated fix. One wonders if these adjustments are going to lead to some alterations of behavior or some choices with far-reaching implications, or if the variations will be more subtle. All that will take care of itself. All I need to do right now is take care of today and tomorrow. Final presentations for Group Dynamics went very well. Now I gotta think about my Comp Two class tomorrow. The mythical city of Cydonia, Mars, reminiscent of our ancestors, from the time when Mars and Earth were living twins. Then one fine day, a giant meteor slammed into the planet so hard that it opened a fissure in the crust on the other side of the globe from the crater, and loosened a sizable chunk of crust in the northern hemisphere, shattering its debris into . . . where do those asteroids come from anyway? In any case, she was, and is our sister planet, the only other conceivable hope for life as we know it in this solar system, the various moons of Jupiter and Saturn notwithstanding.  

3 Sep 2003 @ 17:34 by koravya : Our sister in Rust
Tuesday into Wednesday, August twenty-sixth into the twenty-seventh. This is where the fingers meets the toes, if they can reach, and if they can’t reach, make ‘em reach. As long ago as it has been since our sister planet in rust has been as near, the Cro-Magnons were having it out with the Neanderthals, and someone began tracking the patterns of movement in the sky. What kind of a mind would even begin to notice, much less look for, that aspect of the visible? Time to return to the sensibility of our Cro-Magnon ancestors, at least those who were looking to the stars and the planets. Something entirely beyond our capability of ever reaching, something we can only watch. We can walk the earth and sail the seas, but never have been able to fly, and now we have made a machine that can carry our body to another planet. After a while it all starts sounding like science fiction, a vision of the future when machines have taken over the solar system or the galaxy or whatever. It is quite clear that the machine, including the internet, our latest brainchild, likely not our last, who knows? has absorbed a sizable proportion of human consciousness. If and when this entire thing is unplugged, and the entire planet is plunged into its natural darkness for however long, maybe forever, there may be some major reallocation of population. Meanwhile, my primary responsibility as I see it is to those people whom I encounter every day at school, my immediate family, as geographically distributed as they are, and other various acquaintances with whom bonds have become established. Here I am working with all of these young people as they develop and project visions of themselves into some hypothetical future which is seen as different from now as now is from the fifties. Or will there be different kinds of change, and who can possibly foresee what those might be? Modern technology has gifted us with an understanding of the depths of the universe. The species Cro-Magnon, Homo Sapiens, whatever you want to call it, is engaged in an internal mortal combat. The force of life will hopefully prevail. Otherwise, this planet could wind up looking more like our sister in rust.  

3 Sep 2003 @ 17:35 by koravya : Ladder of Rivers
“Meaning to descend the ladder of rivers.”
Larry McMurtry, Streets of Laredo. P.22.
Thursday into Friday, August twenty-eighth into the twenty-ninth. Mom and Dad’s anniversary. Sixty-five years ago, the 28th, they were married in Springfield, Illinois after a four year courtship, and six years later, I was their first born. Now, mother has a lifetime of memories with that one man and their five children. She is soft spoken and thoughtful, and her family has been what her life is all about.
Five children in a small house is certainly interactive, yet there was an underlying quietness and undercurrent of thoughtful speech throughout. I can hear mother and father finding each other through their voices. I can imagine them finding each other through their voices when they were young, when she was fifteen and he was nineteen. Her family had just moved into town where his family had always lived. Her father was a grocer and butcher in a little town near Springfield, and he learned of an opportunity to take over a good store in a town ten miles away. This meant leaving the old store and its town behind, and for my fifteen year old mother, all of the friends she had been growing up with. She would be the new girl, in the new high school, in the new town, knowing nobody. She made new friends and took to drama. How I wish I could have seen her play Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, which she describes as her favorite role. Dad had already graduated high school and had done his first year at college. He made friends with the new grocer, and one day while in the store, he saw this girl come in through the back door to get a bottle of milk for home, and he knew that he wanted to be with her.  

3 Sep 2003 @ 17:36 by koravya : Transition
Friday into Saturday, August twenty-ninth into the thirtieth. Recognize each of them for their own potential and don’t try to mold them. Teaching many of these people how to present an APA style formatted research paper is an excruciating task. No matter how much attention I put into explaining and emphasizing how this is to be done, there are people who manage to screw it up, badly. It’s like I might as well not have said anything, and just let them make up their own presentation style. Some get it, and do it very well. I got it all very well when I was learning it way back when, and it has been a learning experience to me to see how difficult this whole process can be for some people. We all like to follow our potential, n’est-ce pas? And I like to help these people find the potential that they can give attention to. I’ll say one thing for Brandon. He put in more effort towards the end than he had been for the first two thirds of the course. He got up for his part in the final debate. He didn’t say very much, I mean very not very much, but he was up there, playing the part for who he is. Him not having much of an opinion one way or another is pretty much how things are, cause he pretty much takes things as they are, from what I hear him say, and what I read him write.
The irony of it is that he can state his position, whatever it is or isn’t, in rather clear written language. I am trying to help him understand that if he looks a little deeper into nuances of his statements that he will find a clear indication of a position which he can then begin to develop. The current imperative is to get enough out of him to see him through a successful, though marginal, completion of the course. He doesn’t need to do this over again. I’ve given him my lesson, and it’s up to him to learn it. He’s not a speaker, but he knows how to think, and even though he is not inclined to engage in writing, he can do it if he needs to or wants to. What he really needs to develop is his sense of position. It comes through in some of his essays. He does have opinions about some things. I am simply encouraging the range and depth of his perceptual attitudes. I’ve got a stack of research papers and other assorted writings to entertain myself with next week, and final evaluations for four courses to wrap up, while preparing for the new quarter which begins the following week. Wrap it up and make a plan. No classes to teach for a week, and then a whole new schedule with a whole new set of classes. Always something to look forward to.  

3 Sep 2003 @ 17:37 by koravya : Three Rocks
Monday into Tuesday, September first into the second. Take a little drive starting Sunday morning, north to Bernalillo , then northwest to Cuba, and further on to the city of Aztec, ancient and modern. Remnants of a thousand year old city on the outskirts of today’s version. Then over to the city of Shiprock and its namesake, the volcanic tower of rock a few miles southwest of town, standing out there all by itself. The driving tracks are rough, and I can’t get too close, and I wasn’t really fixin’ to be getting too close. This is sacred ground, and I am a visitor. There’s a fairly new black pick-up there with an ancient Navaho couple, the only other people out there. They’re not saying anything one way or the other, but it feels like they’ve got their spirit eye on me. They turned off the highway onto the dirt tracked terrain just a couple of minutes after I. I got around to going over and telling them I was taking pictures. The old man said sure, go ahead, take pictures. So I drove around a little more, not much, and took a couple of pictures, and went on down the road to Red Valley. Not far from here, the map shows the road giving out; I figure to take it as far as it goes, and what-do-ya-know, the road has been paved and goes through over a forested high mountain pass all the way to Lukachukai. Here, I’m practically at the Canyon de Chelly, so drive along the north rim road in the late afternoon, stopping off at an overlook. That is one deep beautiful canyon. Drive into Chinle for a Burger King whopper; then go to the Cottonwood free campground at the western edge of the canyon. The tent comes out and gets put up as the last dusk fades into darkness. I’ve got an apple and a jug of water, a flashlight, and a sleeping bag, and the first night in this tent since two Labor Days ago when I spent two nights with Linette in the Palo Duro canyon. The night is clear, the stars are bright, and the ground is hard and refreshingly slightly uncomfortable. With the first light of dawn, I pack up the tent while most of those in scattered neighboring campsites seem still to be resting, and drive the south rim to the Spider Rock overlook, shortly after the sun has come over the horizon of the surrounding plain. Another one of those sacred places. Spider Rock is named for Spider Woman, who taught the Navaho weaving. Gail and I drove down here to the Canyon de Chelly twenty-five years ago in 1978 for a spring break from Madison. I remember we found a trail and went all the way to the bottom. That was just following that winter when I had made my first set of drawings from the Aztec calendar and had just had a bunch printed up in booklet form with its original title. This is my first time back to this canyon since then. Figured I’ve have to be getting back here sometime, although I didn’t know it would be this time out. That paved road through the Lukachukai pass made all the difference. From Chinle, it’s on down to Ganado and from there across to Window Rock, another one of those sacred formations. There is a memorial here to the Navaho warriors who died in the armed services in the service of world war two and perhaps other wars. The list of names does not refer to which war or wars. The direction is winding back now. On over to Galllup, and a brief visit to the Red Rock state park, just west of there. Pick up a nice turquoise blue Navaho style rug of moderate size at a trading post on the continental divide. Stay on as many of the sideroads as possible paralleling the interstate east of Gallup to Grants and Laguna. Nice long stretches of old 66 through here, and on back into the city by late afternoon. All in all, about 31 hours and six-hundred twenty five miles, and a nice little loop through some places I’ve never been before, and some that I have. I’ll call this the Shiprock, Spider Rock, Window Rock trip. Maybe getting time to start cleaning out some of the old cobwebs and ask Spider Woman to help me or show me how to weave a new rug. Gave a ride to a Navaho man from the far end of the south rim into Chinle. Neither of us said much, one way or the other. It was a beautiful early morning.  

3 Sep 2003 @ 18:06 by swan : Ladders and Rivers
brought tears to my eyes. I know, I know, I say that a lot, but than I guess my heart gets touched a lot, or easily. What a dear story your parents have. Juxaposed against all of those solo camping trips I have taken, I guess the story of soul mates just got to me.  

10 Sep 2003 @ 10:07 by koravya : Drops of water
Wednesday into Thursday, September third into the fourth. Kind of an easy week in that I don’t have classes to teach, although twelve-week classes are still going on and the hallways and library are heavily populated with the atmosphere of finalizations and the call to judgment. I’ve got twenty-eight research paper assignments to evaluate. Some of them are rather good, a couple are so far non-existent, one is verbatim off of free term papers dot com, and several are severely mutilated with inadequate references between sources and citations. A couple reveal a remarkable overnight improvement in grammatical cohesiveness. Some are from the heart, through all of the grammatical manglings endured. This little number becomes part of a larger number which is the final determinant. Ninety percent of my 63 students fall into a number which I feel is a reasonable assessment of their performance, in terms of both effort and ability. Then there’s another half dozen or so scattered through these four courses who come up with a borderline number, and it becomes up to me to decide how I want to apply my subjective interpretation. There is no high B and low A. There is only one or the other, for every borderline grade, and the consequences are especially important for the F and the D. All I need to feel for sure is that I can look each one in the eye and tell him or her that he or she got exactly what he or she deserved. As these things get ironed out, I can start focusing on getting ready for next week’s new round of courses. Three Comp Ones, two Economics, and one Comp Two.
Total of about 83 students. Not much going on in the stratosphere tonight that I know of, except for a couple of isolated drops of water falling into my face as I stretch towards the stars in the adobe corner.  

10 Sep 2003 @ 10:08 by koravya : Coffee in the Park
Thursday into Friday, September fourth into the fifth. Staff meeting at school on the first Thursday of every month for all fifty some odd employees who are on the premises which is most of the regulars: instructors, financial aid, recruiters, career services, registrar and secretaries under the guiding leadership of our director, Marianne. She encourages quality performance and she gets it.
Recognitions for new employees, recognitions for employment anniversaries, recognitions for birthdays, recognitions of individual achievement, and of group achievement, together with a call for upcoming events, graduation for this quarter’s class next week, upcoming accreditation evaluations, orientation day later on, open house day, in-service day, and so on, and the entire crew is all on the same page for about forty-five minutes around three o’clock. Coincidentally, it’s wrap up time for one quarter and start-up time for another. The outside world is becoming more remote. I get out of bed around sunrise or shortly thereafter, run a pot of fresh coffee, drink a cup, drive down to the convenience store with a mug, buy the morning paper, drive over to a secluded, residential park, turn the pages while sitting on a bench under towering limbs under a bright fresh blue morning sky across a field of thick green grass a long block wide, and find very little in that newspaper that captures my attention. All of that mayhem just goes on and on and on, and it will go on and on and on long after my bones have been scattered. Anger, fear, and stupidity are not likely to disappear from our species any time soon, along with their attendant greed and hatred. There are many who have been praying for peace in the world amongst men and women for many centuries, and perhaps things are better now than they were some hundreds or thousands of years ago, but there is still a long way to go; and then again, maybe this is the way our species has always been, warring within itself between forces of good and evil, to no end, with only variations in scale. Changing minds is a rare and delicate procedure. Most of us are rather set in our beliefs; whether we can articulate them or not, we make our decisions and act from them. Here is my thought for the day. There are four hundred and fifty students at this school working on some idea of some hypothetical future they might have for having spent their time attending these various classes. They want good jobs, is what they want. They want to make good money, and buy good things. They want the comfort and freedom of financial security. I am here to help them overcome the required obstacles. There is no guarantee that what they are doing now will get them to the place they want to go. There are many paths crossing through these portals. They came from many directions, and they will disperse in many other directions. This is just a crossroads for all of us.  

10 Sep 2003 @ 10:09 by koravya : Tsin Kletzin
Moving right along from Tuesday into Wednesday, September ninth into the tenth, coming down from the kiva of the great house, Tsin Kletzin, on a high point of the South Mesa of the Chaco canyon culture. Following the early morning walk from the Casa Rinconada community at the base of the Mesa, find the place in the circle that looks through the window towards the rising sun. Walk the stairway down to the inside perimeter pathway to the row of rooms that enclose the central courtyard. Leave a fragment of painted pottery on one of the stones of the still standing wall. This little fragment of pottery has been on these grounds for nine hundred years more or less and needs to stay here, although somewhat displaced from one side of the great house to another. Whatever those people did here, there was a relationship between the kiva and these various little rooms, and I act out, or re-enact out, my version of a relationship amongst the structures of the premises. Just trying to catch the spirit of the place during this early morning hour when I have it all to myself. There’s not all that many people around the Chaco culture national monument anyway. There is a sixteen-mile washboard packed dirt and gravel road that likely makes quite a few highway passers-by think twice about stopping off for a visit. Those who visit have thought twice and decided to rattle their shock absorbers for the opportunity and privilege of spending a night or more in this sprawling canyon where once thrived a center of civilization. Tsin Kletzin is peripheral to the main structures of the valley between the walls of rock, still part of the overall complex. Takes a climb to get up here, and another climb in another direction to get back down. About four miles round trip for this little morning walk. After a clear night of watching a getting-to-be full moon traverse the firmament above the tall rocks enclosing the campground. From the kiva of Tsin Kletzin to the city of today, climb and descend and never forget where I have been, and share what I can. For now.  

10 Sep 2003 @ 15:24 by swan : Thank you, John
a beautiful answer to my question. Now the photo has more depth in my spirit.  

11 Sep 2003 @ 22:21 by koravya : Threads
Thursday evening, September eleventh. It’s the resonance and style and quality of voice that creates the conversation, whatever the subject matter. I’m back in Chicago at this all night diner on Rush street. There’s a whole line of booths alongside the continuous pane of glass next to the sidewalk of busy nightlife. People come and people go. This is a busy coffee shop, all night long, and as long as I keep my coffee cup filled and order an occasional piece of pie, the waitresses don’t mind. It’s not all that busy, just busy enough to keep them occupied while the young notetaker scribbles in his notebook for whatever late night – early morning hours suits his fancy on his break from walking for blocks without end in every direction looking for what, he had no idea what. This was his idea of entertainment. Looking for someone not in particular but quite recognizable whenever that person is found. Back in the coffee shop, it’s hours of fun writing about nothing even remotely recognizable as anything that anyone else would be interested in reading. This document contains no information of any significance to anyone else on the planet. It represents an emptiness in time between other segments of emptiness in time. When all of these empty segments of time are joined together, time may be said to have disappeared into the emptiness which preceded it and the emptiness that will follow its evaporation. This section of Rush street downtown is busy with walkers-by on the sidewalks, and a fairly constant turnover of other coffee drinkers and late night diners, and early morning diners, or other people just stopping in out of the street to sit in one of these booths next to the window, and watch themselves go by from the other side of the glass. We take turns, these passers-by and I, and when the notebook starts running out of thread, the feet will have to start doing some talking, and a new knot of intertwined meaning will be traced through that network of sidewalks.  

15 Sep 2003 @ 20:56 by koravya : Changing Places
September fifteenth, Monday afternoon. Thank you, dear reader, for being on board and for staying on board this leaking hulk of an old rotting boat on its journey across the endless ocean. If it wasn’t for you, this hand would not be pushing this pen across this paper with an attempt to mold an image of order and sensibility out of the universe of disconnected thought it has to draw from. To the other side of my brain, the first reader and editor, you have a responsibility to clarity. Whether someone else actually ever does read any of this or not is one thing. If someone does, however, some meaning is going to be generated in that transaction, and I can only create meaning from the ground we share. In the entry from September eleven, I wrote, “it’s hours of fun writing about nothing even remotely recognizable as anything that anyone else would be interested in reading. This document contains no information of any significance to anyone else on the planet.” I need to be giving blessings to the reader for the companionship I am being given on this road. Do I need a thousand readers, or ten thousand, or ten million? How about one? Give me one reader, and my writing is fulfilled. If that reader needs to be the other side of this solitary brain, so be it, for the process has created meaning, altered reality and changed behavior, even as it is being written. To make a connection with another mind through this process is a blessing, and for blessing me with your attention, I need to be blessing you with my own best attempt to provide a worthwhile passage.
Will graduated with his Bachelor’s degree in Computer and Electronics Engineering Technology on Friday afternoon. Now, he and Raeanna are going to rent a U-Haul in a few days, pack up their furniture and everything they own and their twin little girls almost two years old, and drive off later this week to Portland, Oregon. They don’t know anyone there. Will figures to get in contact with the career services department of the ITT Tech branch in that area and get a fresh new job in the field of his education. It’ll be he and Raeanna on their own, farther afield than either of them will have ever been from Ruidoso, their home town.
Raeanna is pregnant and the new baby is due in April. She will be a mother of three about three months before her 21st birthday. Why Portland? Because it’s there. Because they’ve heard some good things about it. Because they’re drawn to it. Time to move on, and take another step, a rather long one this time, to where they need to be. There was a while a little more than a year ago when it seriously looked like Will and Raeanna were not going to be able to keep their act together as man and wife, but what they have together prevailed, and they’re looking good as a real partnership. I’ll imagine that those little girls have something to do with the ways that Will and Raeanna have been finding each other.  

16 Sep 2003 @ 04:56 by swan : Still reading,
thank you,
for reading me.  

21 Sep 2003 @ 14:48 by koravya : Kitty-kitty
Between Wednesday and Thursday, September seventeenth to the eighteenth.
This lower back has been twisted for twenty years. Now it is slowly returning to previous alignments. Interesting concept. Two visitors to my backyard in the corner with its twin pairs of tree trunks. Cat number one is very white with very light grey streaks and splotches on its face, body and tail. This one sits quietly while I explore that domain of the yard and captures my attention like a Sphinx. She, whatever it actually is, I engender She, is impassive, fixed in her position, impervious to mobility. Then there is the younger one, halfway between kitten and adult, black from nose to tail to toe, casually walking around scratching at the dirt, looking for a place to unload, I engender He. They have found a comfortable spot and neither is particularly bothered by this stranger. I’m not going to try to adopt them, but nevertheless figure to leave a plate of canned tuna out for them. As I am bringing it out, the white one skitters away while the black one remains calm. As a result, he winds up getting to eat the whole plate of tuna himself. Nighttime. The black one sits in a flower pot and walks from one to one, looking for a comfortable one. He’s hanging out in the back yard, and I speak a few welcoming words to him. Forthwith, the white and grey kitty sits quietly in a far corner. She can also hear what I say. They are welcome here, and I will leave something out for them in the morning. I won’t be taking them in the house, but their company outside is welcome. Today, Thursday the eighteenth, is the twins
Julie’s and Jamie’s second birthday.  

21 Sep 2003 @ 14:50 by koravya : Also Known As
Sunday, September twenty-first afternoon, in the backyard, watching the plants in my flower posts grow, watching the shadow advance across the adobe wall. Each of the last four weekends have been eventful. Labor Day weekend was the overnight drive through Shiprock, Canyon de Chelly, and Windowrock. Birthday weekend was the overnight at Chaco Canyon. Then there was graduation weekend and the graduation feast at Yepa’s Sunday afternoon on the Jemez pueblo near San Ysidro, as well as several hours of visiting time that Saturday, Sunday and Monday evenings with Will and Raeanna and their twins as they prepared for their move to Portland. Now, last night, was Lisa and Paul’s costume party. I found a bright, multi-colored lightweight jacket, and an almost equally colorful pair of sweat pants at Goodwill, put on my colorful, knit Rastafarian cap and went as Corky the Clown, a name I made up, although some people tried, when I told them who I was, to remember which television show I might have been from. There was Isis, and the Virgin Mary, Bacchus, and Quetzalcoatl, a Blue Fairy and Medusa, Julius Caesar and Jimmy Dean, George Dubya Bush in his guise as a cowboy puppet, and a few others. As usual with Lisa’s parties, there’s people I’ve met before and some others whom I am meeting now. Lisa’s been making some large, abstract sculptures by constructing twisting, spiraling, rectilinear, curvilinear wireframes about five feet tall, overlaying the wireframes with tightly wound heavy-duty paper, and overlaying the paper with spackle plaster used on house wall interiors. Then she soaks that spackle in some colored wash. Most of these are some dark shades of blue or green, or some light-dark variegated golden yellow-brown. She’s got about ten of these things and is having a one night show this coming Friday night at the Blues club she and her friends attend. I’ll have to miss that one night show because I teach that night. Anyway, Lisa’s party was the most recent event of these last four weekends, while sandwiching in the transition between the end of one quarter and the start of a new one, and the shadow has moved across the adobe wall, and the plants are still growing.  

21 Sep 2003 @ 16:24 by swan : Thank you Corky,
the visual was so funny I couldn't help but laugh! George Dubya got me going again too. Nice story :-)

I am glad the kitties found such a welcoming place to perch for a while.
Do be surprised if they tell all of their friends,  

8 Oct 2003 @ 10:47 by koravya : Another Turning Point
Monday morning, approaching noon, September twenty-two. Here is the path of my liberation. In the fall of seventy-three as I was turning twenty-nine, I embarked upon an experiment. I had been attending graduate school in Anthropology for two years, and seeing Carolyn who was approaching her graduation as a painter in the Art department. She decided to go her own way and I was rather upset. I loved her for who she was and her being an artist made her especially attractive. I was studying art and culture and mythology and religion and linguistics as an Anthropologist-Art Historian might, and she was painting. She took her pictures to a far away city and I spent a summer sitting on a porch swing of an old white wooden house on a quiet residential street staring through the space filtering light through the foliage of large curbside elms and maples or whatever they were, through the row of residential houses on the other side of the street, towards the distant horizon of the Midwestern plain surrounding Urbana, Illinois. It was time to try this art thing out for myself. Going to Art school was not an option. Returning to school at all was not even an option, but I needed to stay in this city for at least one more year, for I do have some strong continuing associations here that I don’t need to be cutting off for the sake of some set of strangers. Indeed, the friends I had made during the previous two years were a continuous source of empathic interaction. I took a job as a night janitor at the city hospital, working four to twelve with a dynamic crew of six or seven younger fellows like myself who really operated like a team taking care of those various floors and their various requirements during the course of a night. The mornings and early afternoons were mine, which was exactly what I wanted. I had two things to do every morning. Write a piece of writing, a paragraph or a page or a couple of pages or so, and proceed developing familiarity with the processes which lead to a finished oil painting on canvas. I had to learn from brief, fragmentary, but precise suggestions and the advice of artist friends about how to stretch a canvas and gesso it, what solvents and mediums to mix in which various ways with what sets of colors in what combinations, what kinds of brushes to use and so on and so forth, before I could even sit down and figure out just what exactly it was that I wanted to paint; so I started by sticking my right forefinger in a patch of medium blue and drawing a wavy streak diagonally across the canvas. This wavy streak through my brushes became the river of life in the shape of a waving, flowing triangle pointing downward. An abundantly overflowing green-leaved tree grew next to this river, its long brown trunk rooting firmly into the ground below. A bluebird almost as large as the tree itself emerged from the branches and sang towards the right edge of the canvas. A little boy’s face emerged from the background near the base of the tree. Something else was going on over on the left side of the river, something complimentary to what was happening on the right. There were some Himalayan style mountains, gray rock below with thick piles of snow towards the peaks. Three small elementary geometric designs were placed in strategic empty spaces of the spontaneously developed composition, a small gray circle about the size of a nickel, a pyramidal equilateral triangle of the same approximate size, and a square, likewise. The crossroads between nature and geometry. I wrote some short stories based on past experiences, but that didn’t feel like that was what I wanted to write. I still had all my old diaries from India, but wasn’t looking in any of them. There had to be some original voice that I could find that could emerge from my immediate experience and degree and quality of awareness. The Here and Now needed to be the source and I was looking for a piece of writing and some pictures that would speak to me in a satisfying voice and show me something I wanted to see. After that first painting, it became one painting after another, and I began choosing, and planning, and designing and drawing out, and practicing methods of doing this, that, and whatever else would lead to my desired effect, the effect that satisfied my view, my interpretation, my take on the world. There I was, looking for my painting voice and looking for my writing voice and feeling very connected with the idea that I was pursuing my own mystery. Come what may out of this experiment in looking for objectively recognizable forms of self-expression, it was given me to follow this direction, so I’d best be about what I need to be doing.  

10 Oct 2003 @ 04:51 by swan : Beautiful,
this piece is my favorite so far in that it weaves together so well and echoes original voice found......  

10 Oct 2003 @ 12:37 by koravya : Lesson Plans
Noon is midnight and midnight is noon. Where is the transition between one day and another? Now between Tuesday and Wednesday, September twenty-third into the twenty-fourth. Tomorrow is a whole new set of unforeseeable circumstances. They will emerge out of all of yesterday’s resolved circumstances. Went scouting through the used book collection at Goodwill on my way to school. Having spent some considerable time the last two or three months under the spell of Larry McMurtry with Anything for Billy, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, and Streets of Laredo, I will either continue with him or try another novelist to keep me entertained at my kitchen table. Night or Day, the pace is slow through a single story, as it’s trends of events and characters intersect with those of my circumstantial Albuquerquean runaround.
Two weeks behind us and third week coming up for the new quarter. All of my six classes are between Wednesday evening and Saturday afternoon. Getting acquainted with those whom I’m meeting the first time. There are as few as eight and as many as twenty-five in a class. The cycle of planning lessons and grading papers is underway. Planning lessons is not bookkeeping. It is understanding what needs to be done and what can be done, in judging how to push without overloading, creating a sense of direction and a sense of accomplishment for every one. It’s easy to sound like an ideal teacher. Working it out with personalities, attitudes, and circumstances is another. If complexity is my cup of tea, this is a good place to be.  

10 Oct 2003 @ 12:38 by koravya : Nine Little Lights
Saturday evening after twilight has faded into dusk. September 27. The schedule for the new quarter creates an entirely different time zone. A new sequence of a whole new set of classroom configurations. An entirely new weekend even, with going to school Tuesday through Saturday. This has been the third week and we’re kinda getting each other kinda figured out. What kind of writing I am going to get, and what kind of assignments they are going to get. To boot, is there actually anything being learned in between? That is the question. We’ll all find out on down the road. Once I dive into a week on Tuesday afternoon, it’s like swimming underwater until I surface on Saturday evening. There we pass by, my coworkers and students, negotiating our transactions in pieces of paper. The medium between us is paper and the marks that have been made on it. Messages and symbols representing thoughts and aspirations. There are some original ideas out there that will never receive much of an audience. So what does this concept, audience, refer to anyway? Acclaim and Recognition. That my acclaim should come from my tribe would be my greatest honor, that the tribal consciousness should choose to assimilate something I have brought forth. Nine little sources of light in the cabin this evening. Six candles, three at this desk in front of this pad of paper, two in the living room and one in the bedroom. Then there is the digital clock on the CD player and the digital clock on the VHS player. Then there is the little green light that tells me my computer is plugged in.  

10 Oct 2003 @ 16:10 by swan : Today is the midpoint of my solar year
six months since my birthday, six months until my next. The year has given me much so far, some pleasure and joy, some challenge and resistance. Seems pretty balanced. I went to my place of peace and tranquility at the appointed moment, the exact mid point of my year and walk along the shore of that beautiful, abundant giving river. The shore line was pretty clean, no rocks or fishing lures or broken bottles to be careful of. I walked in gratitude for what has come and excitement for what has yet to manifest. The mid point of the year is an interesting moment.
This river has given me so much over the years that I have come to visit. Not long ago a golden eagle egg was placed in my hands by the river. I would say that was the crowning glory of gifts. But I am more grateful for how it has lead me back to my center and my serenity. That is the true crowning glory.  

13 Oct 2003 @ 10:45 by koravya : Bones
Sunday morning September twenty-eighth. Sleeping through a dream of a night in my camping tent. I am unrolling an old, very frayed sleeping bag that I have had for years. There are various little rips and tears and some of the cotton filler is hanging out at one corner. Most anyone else would have tossed it a long time ago, and my father is there in the tent telling me to toss this one, but I assure him and insist that this old bag is still abundantly useful in spite of its shabby appearance. Then as I am laying myself down on top of the rolled out sleeping bag on the ground, my father brings in some bones and lays them down beside me. A hip bone attached to one complete set of leg bones are laid out beside me. Then there appears a complete set of the bones of a hand, in an outstretched gesture of palm facing forward, the kind of gesture one sees on religious icons of both East and West as a sign of peace. In the dream, I am referring particularly to the gesture of Lord Vishnu. But there is more. Here is the lower part of a skull, from the nose through the mouth to the chin, and the most striking feature of this is the smile which is not a smile of death but a smile of life. The bones of the hand and the bones of the smile become embedded in shards of old brown pottery clay, and the bones are transformed into very old and delicate flakes of fresco, and through the smile emerges the face of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and the delicate hand is hers.  

13 Oct 2003 @ 10:47 by koravya : Fireside with Moonlight
Tuesday into Wednesday, September thirtieth into October first. Surrounded by four candles. Let the dancing orange and yellow flames in the black night campfire do their magic. How far into the flaming embers of the inferno would you like to visit? Up the road from Pecos for an enchanted twenty mile drive to the end of the road at the Jack’s Creek campground. Mid-Sunday afternoon. The Friday and Saturday night crowd has almost virtually cleared out and I’ve got an entire forest enclosed meadow of twelve campsites to myself. Not a sound except what there is. Two Gatorades and some trail mix and some potato chips to crunch through the night and the morning. And the fire. In the darkness, take a fragmentary glimpse into the origins of consciousness. We are hypnotized by certain things, and fire is one of those. It is a good place to look for focusing direction. There are three separate meadows at Jack’s Creek, each surrounded by row upon row and cluster upon cluster of tall white birches and various spruce and evergreen. All the way up the surrounding mountainsides on the one side, and down the steeply descending slopes on the other. As night falls, the first crescent follows the descending sun. The tent is facing across the meadow towards sunrise. Between the stars turning around their axis above, and the flames consuming what was once living, and returning to dust and smoke our transient nature, the transition transits. Take a step around and draw a line of interaction from place to place around my little corner of the meadow and the rest of the meadow. There is nowhere to go except the immediate neighborhood; there is nothing to read and nothing to write, and no one to listen to. Not even much in the way of animal sounds. Just some isolated various birds every now and again. Just the trees growing, and some of them changing colors according to their various inclinations, in variations of yellow and purple striating bands across the further mountain panorama. My little Wal-Mart 27 exposure one-shot camera in hand captures a few scenes. Don’t necessarily expect a sequel or continuation for the previous night’s dream, though the dream and the ground have arrived at essentially the same place. There are various clusters of dream-lets, but only rarely does one stand out. Returning home Sunday afternoon, I cook up something, in the kitchen and sit down to watch The Bridges of Madison County, my first viewing. Quite a lovely story of sensitive and powerful emotions. Sleeping is on the borderline between wakefulness and gliding under the surface of the waves. Now becomes time to start mixing it up with my various friends and comrades at school. Between classes, there is a mountain of student papers to pick apart, verbal unit by syntactic unit by semantic reference by lexical nuance.  

13 Oct 2003 @ 10:49 by koravya : Visitor
Middle of Saturday evening, October fourth after a week of classes and other assorted school activities. Between Wednesday morning and Saturday evening is almost non-stop school related thinking, with a little surface for air between Thursday evening and Friday morning. Tuesday is transition day between the man on the other side of the book cover and the man on the inside of the book cover. There was a meeting with the mentors on Wednesday evening. The mentors are a select group of, at this writing, six students of exceptional achievement and dedication chosen from the student body to act as tutors, i.e. mentors, to students requesting such help. There is honor and responsibility with being a mentor, and I have recently become faculty advisor for this group.
After the meeting, I walk the distance to my quiet isolated home. I open the door and there, unexpectedly, is an infant, which I know in some sense is mine. It’s laying on the blue cloth covered padding which I usually place on the ground beneath my sleeping bag in the tent. We choose our paths for many reasons, just as Meryl Streep chose hers in the Bridges of Madison County. We might wonder about the other directions we might have gone in. Nevertheless, where we are at, is by choice. The echo of the campfire in the candle flame flickers. I need to be writing things down to appreciate what my students are going through when I tell them to write things down.  

13 Oct 2003 @ 10:52 by koravya : Water
Tuesday into Wednesday, October seventh into the eighth. Recalling Sunday night at the Holy Ghost campground, up the road from Pecos, in another canyon-valley on the other side of the mountain from Jack’s Creek. Towering pines and brilliant yellow clusters of spiring white barked birch. A mountain stream tumbles over row upon row of descending piles of rocks. The trail from here follows the stream up the lush canyon interior. Along the way, a spring at the base of the great rock trickles forth to wind its way down to the larger stream. This is where the great river begins. Fire burns through the darkness enveloping the canyon beneath the slightly gibbous moon emerging from one ascending horizon of treetops and crossing the valley to descend into another ascending horizon of treetops. There is enough wood to keep the flame going for a while, and with which to fashion a sequence of ember configurations.  

13 Oct 2003 @ 10:54 by koravya : Cracking the Shell
Interlude between Wednesday night’s Comp One class and Thursday morning’s Econ class. October eighth into the ninth. Crack the shell of the routine and sit with the dirt and the trees for a night. Take a walk towards the source. Bring the message down from the place where the river trickles out of the mountain, and take it into the classroom. Answer this question. How can I translate these thoughts and images into clearly written English? Look for the poetry in your prose. Master the art of transitions and the art of relationships. Turn your idea into a bundle of words. Give your self an opportunity to be creative. Just as a painting can only hold a candle to the reality that inspired it, so with words chosen which speak of things seen.  

13 Oct 2003 @ 17:38 by swan : River of Dreams
I am in a training group studying mind body spirit medicine. In my small group we didn't a guided imagery today with the intention of going to our "safe place". That is the place you can go to automatically when you are feeling stress that will help you to calm down. My safe place is at the river and I go there in my mind. I can see it like I am there, I hear the waves, I feel the wind and I am peaceful. We are directed to look at what we are wearing and I see I am in shorts so I conclude that it is summer. "What age are you?" says our guide and immediately I know I am 16 years old. The thought that follows startles me. If I am 16 it is the year before Patrick died on this river." My heart races. I am not sure why it is doing it. I am supposed to be doing a relaxation technique but instead I am handed information that I don't understand.
When I share my experience with the group I am the last one of ten people to share. I had a hard time staying present to the group and each person as they spoke. Many of them intellectualized and I felt myself drifting away. I am conscious of everything that is happening around me and in me, with the exception of understanding why I am 16.
When it is my turned to share I tell my story and quickly I am in tears. I never discovered why the visualization took me to this place but I felt grief. Grief for the loss of a brother who had a short life, who I was just beginning to know. Grief for other people I lost through the years.
And I am clear that this river was my place of safety and sanctuary. Once again gifting me with a part of myself that needed to been seen again in another light. To allow myself to be witnessed and be able to take that in and receive it. I know when I walk those shores my brothers spirit is there with me, in the eagle, in the trees, in the wind and in the very water that took his life. And that same water is a source of life for other beings and a constant source of rejuvenation for me. Life is so much a paradox. The only way to feel peaceful is to be able to walk that fine line that runs between those pairs of opposites, staying centered in the mystery of it all.  

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Other musings in
25 Jul 2004 @ 00:53: Muppetational: The NCN Show!
17 Jun 2004 @ 10:46: Youth Speaks
15 Apr 2004 @ 00:01: 2004-15-04
5 Feb 2004 @ 13:53: Creative Programming
31 Oct 2003 @ 17:40: Samhain
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19 Sep 2003 @ 15:08: signs again
19 Sep 2003 @ 15:05: Signs
13 May 2003 @ 11:32: MAILBOX
20 Apr 2003 @ 19:59: Much ado about nothing---3.5 on the RM scale

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