Sculptures, Clarence Street Art Collective, The Cedars, Dallas, Texas
I had a terrible time sleeping – finally at the early hours of the morning I was able to fall into a deep slumber.
The dreams I had were vivid. I was receiving a constant supply of Amazon boxes at my front door. They were of wildly varying sizes and shapes – some were long and thin, almost sticklike – others vast and bulky. They were all light in weight – as if they held nothing, or air, or ghosts.
As a matter of fact, every one contained on of two items. Half contained time and the other half contained happiness.
I guess these are the two things we really wish we could order online, but can’t.
“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life
The Sweepers
Wang Shugang
Cast Iron (2012)
Crow Collection of Asian Art
From my blog, The Daily Epiphany, Friday, July 10, 1998
Zen Food
Over my lunch hour the “low gasoline level” alarm went off in the MiniVan. It’s a gentle, yet jolting alarm; a soft, insistent “bo-ing” and accompanying orange light in the symbol of a gas pump. My head hurt.
I drove a block down and filled up the van with gas.
The gas station was one of the new ones that offer everything under one roof. Twenty pumps, cold drinks, car wash, hot food, air and water, pizza, oil and washer fluid, magazines and lottery tickets, toys and office supplies, maps and pornography. An entire civilization springs up in this little store with its spreading shade-wings across the hot tarmac. An oasis, a tacky colorful monument to American Capitalism run by a family of Pakistanis.
I finished pumping and walked to the store to grab some juice and pay. As I was walking I could see through the glass door a sign hanging from the ceiling. It was bright red neon; near the back of the building, yet very visible and obvious. It said: ZEN FOOD
I was tired and hot and my brain was fuzzy. I allowed my thoughts to believe the evidence of my eyes. Why would a cheap-ass convenience store offer Zen Food? What is Zen Food anyway?
A momentary fantasy floated through my brain of exotic, delicious, far-eastern culinary delights. Spicy colorful mixtures, displayed on steam tables, savory herbs and succulent vegetables prepared with ancient recipes and exotic skills. I allowed myself the luxury of imagining for a moment I had stumbled on something special, a precious mystery hidden away in the most common of locations – a gas station.
As I entered the store it was obvious that an advertisement hanging from the ceiling, an inflatable pack of cigarettes, had concealed the first three letters of the sign: FRO
I pulled a V-8 out of the freezer. The day suddenly seemed hotter, barren, a little more bleak and a lot more ordinary.
“Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak!”
― George Bernard Shaw
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Conjoined, Roxy Paine
From my blog (I called it an “Online Journal” then), The Daily Epiphany, Tuesday, September 22, 1998
Ground Stump
We had this big ash tree in the back yard. Not a very good tree. It had obviously been cut down once before and sprouted back with these multiple trunks splayed out in all directions. A “junk tree,” it grew fast and weak. Invaded by borers, several big limbs had already fallen off.
The final straw was the summer’s drought. This ash had a shallow root system and was way too close to the house. It sucked water out from under our foundation, helping to worsen the cracking and moving as the drying expansive clays pulled out from under the slab. The tree did provide some nice shade, but the live oak I planted a few years ago is growing up, it will be a stronger, longer-lived tree.
Ordinarily, I would cut it down myself. About a week of work. But I don’t have the time or energy. We gave in and hired a crew to remove the tree and grind the stump, three hundred fifty bucks. Today was the day.
Poor Lee was upset. He is still young enough that all things, especially living things have personality and soul and are valuable. Lee didn’t want us to kill the tree. I explained about the foundation and the fact that it would give us a lot more room in the backyard, but he wouldn’t give in until I agreed to let him plant an acorn.
I came home from work to find an enormous pile of wood and leaves along the front of our house, waiting for the city to come pick it up. It is amazing how different the back yard looks. Bigger and wide open. Almost naked. Lee was out there collecting sawdust, the soft remnants of the ground up stump, in a big bowl that he conned Candy out of.
What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.
—-Thomas Paine
The Fabrication Yard, Dallas, Texas
Outta Wood
In this modern world we seldom talk to strangers. Think about how rarely you have any meaningful random interactions outside of work.
Sam had plans to convert his garage into a big room for his kids to play in. His youngest was making giant constructions out of these odd plastic connecting pieces. He had a half-finished monstrous roller coaster – the tracks were flexible plastic tubes. It was too large to fit in his own bedroom… or even in a corner of the living room. The kid was upset that he couldn’t finish his contraption because he had run out of space.
Sam didn’t want to admit or even think about the fact that he was changing his house – removing his garage and building out a new, larger room simply to make space for his kid’s toys. He didn’t think about it, but it was true.
He needed somewhere to put all the crap that was in the garage. There was a spot in the corner of the yard up against the fence that he could spare. Down to the Home Depot to look at outbuildings. For years, every time he went to the store (which was at least twice a week) he would walk through the extensive display of demo garden sheds, of many different sizes, prices, and materials, all arranged in the parking lot. It was a small thrill to look through them one more time – but this time with a purpose, and intention to actually purchase one. He chose an overpriced plastic thick walled shed.
Wanting to figure out the best way to do the foundation – Sam went to the library and looked at a book: “A Complete Idiot’s Guide to Building Garden Sheds.” He didn’t check it out – simply sat there taking notes. On the way home he stopped at Home Depot again and bought a new shovel, some concrete pillars and a bunch of treated wood – tying the lumber to the roof rack of his car. This stuff was mixed with sweat, a level, galvanized nails, and some string to make up the foundation and floor.
The prefabricated plastic walls and roof were ingeniously designed to slip together and, shockingly, the instructions were clear, accurate, and helpful. It took no time to get it assembled.
He painted the floor of his new tool shed and then needed to install locking door knobs. The kit that he bought was well-made and complete, but didn’t include door hardware. Sam went back down to Home Depot and was outside looking at the demo model at how they did the doors. He silently congratulated himself when he discovered that the “pros” had done exactly what he was planning on doing.
While he was standing there staring at the demonstration shed an old man walked up and shouted at him.
“You can make one CHEAPAH dan dat! From scratch! Outta WOOD!”
Then the old man turned and waddled off and was swallowed by the gaping maw of the giant store.
He didn’t introduce himself. He didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t speak in intelligent, helpful tones. It was spat out like an insult.
Sam kept shaking his head thinking about that guy. If you don’t have something pleasant to say, shut up. If you’re lonely, or want to be helpful, want to talk to strangers, have some respect.
On the drive home, Sam passed by the Lexus Dealership and the highway exit. He had a fantasy that he would stop, get out, walk around, and yell at prospective customers.
“Y’all can buy cars CHEAPAH than that! Cross da street! From FORD!”
O beautiful was the werewolf in his evil forest. We took him to the carnival and he started crying when he saw the Ferris wheel. Electric green and red tears flowed down his furry cheeks. He looked like a boat out on the dark water. ― Richard Brautigan
A pond in Fair Park. The red paths are part of a massive sculpture by Patricia Johanson – I have always loved those concrete walkways running through the water, weeds, and turtles. A neglected jewel in the city.
When I was in high school and living in Nicaragua a carnival used to come to Managua a couple times a year and set up in the dusty field across the highway from our school. It has a lot of memories to me, not all of them exactly and completely good. The thing is, a Third World Central American carnival leaves a lot to be desired in cleanliness, maintenance, and safety. The smell of ozone from electrical arcing was mixed with the fume from the spicy food, and the miasma of people getting sick from the crazy nauseating rides – all probably bought second-hand when they failed safety inspections from more civilized carnivals – and only washed off with a thrown bucket of water through the hot humid tropical night air.
Still, it was a magical time and place. Maybe are carnivals are.
Although our ability to easily pick up a new skill declines with age (no shit, Sherlock), harnessing a specific type of mindset can help you learn effectively as an adult.
Collage by James Michael Starr, Carrollton DART station.
In the novel Catch-22, the author Joseph Heller famously wrote: “Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.”
He’d taken a quote by Shakespeare on greatness and turned it on its head.
The implication was clear: mediocrity is a bad thing, to be avoided. Yet most of us go on to live what by most measures are pretty ordinary lives.
So what’s wrong with settling for mediocrity?
Plano, Texas
Sometimes you can find interest, maybe beauty, in the simplest and most ordinary of things.
We come into conversations with our own agendas and low attention spans, but if you want to build better relationships you need to master active listening.
Time Exposure, Night, Downtown Dallas, Ross and Pearl
But I looked at the dress on the floor and it was as if the fire had spread across the room. It was beautiful and it reminded me of something I must do. I will remember I thought. I will remember quite soon now.” ― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Car fire just north of downtown, Dallas.
I remember growing up on the farm (I didn’t live there all the time,of course, but I did do some growing up there) we would haul trash out to the slough, in the cow pasture (a mess of land that wasn’t good enough for wheat) and burn it. There were decades of fire rusted tin cans there, slowly being swallowed up by the prairie. It seemed like some sort of sacred ground to me, although it had a funny smell.
“It seemed far more reasonable to belong to a species that had evolved natural tooth replacement than to belong to one that had developed the dental profession.”
― Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.” ― Herman Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte
Bill Chance 