Sunday, July 28, 2019

yesterdays crayolas 7/27/19





Back in the 90s when I lived in Occidental, California, we frequented a pizza place called The Bohemian Cafe aka The Boho.
They had amazing pizza and  all of their tables were wrapped with plain white butcher paper so that you could color with the crayons they provided right there by the ketchup.  Sometimes I went there with other Environmental Educator / Naturalists and sometimes alone.  I could color for hours.  Its been awhile but this past few days,  I have been coloring more.  Perhaps its a regression. It is very freeing.

Saturday, July 27, 2019



o

They are in the process of tearing down Mt. Carmel West Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, this place where I was born.  This is a picture of a stained glass window in the Chapel there that I took right before my Mom died.  While looking over my blog for June and July of that year, 2012, it turns out I took some cool pictures , from the tower across the hall from her room...looking over the Bottoms (as in River Bottoms), Avondale, Martin, 
Rich and the other parts of our "Ancestral Village", they all now call Franklinton again.
 All things must change I reckon but this is somewhat hard for me to watch from afar as  the building and expanding of this hospital ... many , many families were displaced under so-called "Eminent Domain".


To see those pictures click on this
 and then scroll down.
https://anniebsiemer.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2012-06-21T11:45:00-04:00&max-results=7&start=10&by-date=false


This pic from my Aunt Katie





That was a difficult time of my life but also such a profound period of personal growth.

Saturday, July 20, 2019

We do not need magic to transform our world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better."
J.K. Rowling

wisdom found fishing on facebook....


Thursday, July 18, 2019

the eddy has been in a " timely quote" draught....


but Thanks to Rob Breszney...it 'tis no more.


 DO YOU HAVE A SOUL?

Some people imagine the word "soul" to be a New Age term, a lazy woo-
woo concept favored by fuzzy thinkers. As evidence that this isn't the case,
I offer references to "soul" by writers who don't fit those descriptions,
starting with Walt Whitman.



I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul.
The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of
hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself — the latter I
translate into a new tongue.

—Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

+

How prompt we are to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our bodies; how
slow to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our souls!

—Henry David Thoreau

+

The soul should always stand ajar,
That if the heaven inquire,
He will not be obliged to wait,
Or shy of troubling her.

—Emily Dickinson

+

This earth is honey for all beings, and all beings are honey for this earth.
The intelligent, immortal being, the soul of the earth, and the intelligent,
immortal being, the soul in the individual being—each is honey to the
other.

—Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

+

Ondinnonk is an Iroquois word with two related meanings: 1. a secret wish
of the soul, especially as revealed in dreams; 2. the spiritual part of our
nature that longs to do good deeds.

+

In the best-known version of the Greek myth, Persephone is dragged down
into the underworld by Hades, whose title is "Pluto." But in earlier, pre-
patriarchal tales, she descends there under her own power, actively
seeking to graduate from her virginal naiveté by exploring the intriguing
land of shadows.

"Pluto" is derived from the Greek word *plutus*, meaning "wealth."
Psychologist James Hillman says this refers to the psyche-building
riches available in Pluto's domain. Hades, he says, is "the giver of
nourishment to the soul."

+

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the
senses but the soul.

—Oscar Wilde

+

"There is a saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears,"
writes Clarissa Pinkola Estes. But the magic of that formula may not
unfold with smooth simplicity, she says: "The teacher comes when the
soul, not the ego, is ready. The teacher comes when the soul calls, and
thank goodness—for the ego is never fully ready."

+

What is the "soul," anyway? Is it a ghostly blob of magic stuff within us
that keeps us connected to the world of dreams and the divine realms? Is it
an amorphous metaphor for the secret source of our spiritual power? Is
it a myth that people entertain because they desperately want to believe
there's more to them than just their physical bodies?

Here's what I think: The soul is a perspective that pushes us to go deeper
and see further and live wilder. It's what drives our imagination to flesh
out our raw experience, transforming that chaotic stuff into rich
storylines that animate our love of life.

With the gently propulsive force of the soul, we probe beyond the surface
level of things, working to find the hidden meaning and truer feeling.

+

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

—Pablo Picasso.

+

At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the
approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered
with wrinkles — wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put
there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.

– André Gide

+

The soul moves in circles.

—ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus

+

Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes, but the friendship between us, the
mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, the enchantment of the soul,
these things do not perish and can never be destroyed.

—philosopher Voltaire in a letter to his partner Marie Louise Denis

+

You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical
justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.

—Albert Camus

+

I note the echo that each thing produces as it strikes my soul.

—Stendhal

+

I am not quick moving. I have to wait for myself—it is always late before
the water comes to light out of the well of my self, and I often have to
endure thirst for longer than I have patience. That is why I go into solitude
— so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern.

When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I
really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish
me from myself and rob me of my soul—and I grow angry with everybody
and fear everybody. I then require the desert, so as to grow good again.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

"The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with
clinical coolness," said the painter Joan Miró in describing his artistic
process.

+

"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul," wrote environmentalist
Edward Abbey.

+

"I had tended to view waiting as mere passivity," wrote author Sue Monk
Kidd in her memoir. "When I looked it up in my dictionary, however, I
found that the words 'passive' and 'passion' come from the same Latin root,
*pati*, which means 'to endure.' Waiting is thus both passive and
passionate. It's a vibrant, contemplative work . . . It involves listening to
disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied
and undiscovered, the places one lives falsely."

+

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf
howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as
near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of
hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery.
Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.

By waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of
ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated
universe."

—Tom Robbins

What Tesla Knew....


as me and you 

Friday, July 12, 2019

on my bucket list....;

https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5083716.pdf
This is taken from a forest service brochure online:
Garden of the
Gods
"Shawnee Hills took millions of years to form.
Rock formations and cliffs at Garden of the
Gods—
made of sandstone —
are about 320
million years
old. Long ago, parts of Illinois,
Indiana and Kentucky were covered by a giant,
inland sea. Then, great rivers carried sand and
mud to the sea, where it settled along the shoreline. Over time, the sediments turned into
layers of rock thousands of feet thic
k. At
Garden of the Gods, that rock is more than
20,000 feet thick —
about four miles deep.
Eventually, a great uplift occurred that
fractured the bedrock, exposing it to nature’s
erosive forces. Since then, windblown sand,
rain and freezing and thawing actions have
worn down the layers of sediment creating
beautiful rock formations at Garden of the
Gods. To find out more, read on-
site
interpretive signs.
Observation Trail
Observation Trail is a quarter-mile
-long-
interpretive trail that leads to areas on to
p of
the bluffs, which feature views of Shawnee
Hills and Garden of the Gods Wilderness.
You can see rock formations with names such
as Camel Rock, Table Rock and Devil’s
Smokestack. Observation Trail has some
short, steep grades and a few steps. However,
as a whole, the trail is not tiring. Caution:
High cliffs in the area.
Campground and PicnicAreas
Pharaoh Campground—
open year round —
features
12
campsites, tables, fire grills, toilets,
drinking water and trails. Nice views of the
Shawnee Hills can be
seen from the
campground and picnic areas. Pharaoh Picnic
Ground is open year round, as is the Observation
Area
. Overnight parking is
not allowed
Wilderness Trail System
Rocky streams, sheer cliffs, pine stands,
hardwood forest, trickling streams, rock
overhangs and scenic vistas are here. Spring
offers wildflowers and rushing streams. Autumn
offers beautiful fall colors and few insect pests.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5083716.pdf



Forest
Service
Shawnee National Forest
602 N. First Street, Vienna, IL 62995
618-
658-
2111

This excellent link has a good amount of info about Cherokee Trail of Tears:
www.fs.usda.gov/shawnee     08/2016

Saturday, July 6, 2019


Thanks Bo!







"The only way we can survive as a nation, and as a people, and to have a just and peaceful society, is if we embrace that incredible tapestry and realize that our “tolerance” of those who do not look like us, sound like us, pray like us, or love like us is what fundamentally makes this nation the greatest on Earth."
 
Bo Wriston in a letter to the editor of Pburg,WVA newspaper

Thursday, July 4, 2019

444 words....


A Clutch as a metaphor for living...
There was a time that I swore off cars. I was living in my home town of Columbus, Ohio and George II’s Second -Bush -War -for -Oil was waging and I had been working one of my various stints as a flower delivery driver. In an industry that had so much waste and glutony anyway, I couldn’t also bear or reconcile that I was a part of the problem driving here and there.
All over the northeast side I had been seeing stop signs that someone had cleverly adorned with a “driving” sticker, under the Stop, so that it looked like the sign had been made that way. A way to wake some of us up.
Later working for the Columbus Metropolitan Library I actually met the man who made those stickers. He later moved to Seattle, where ecotopian ways helped him to reconcile . He rode his bicycle everywhere, and really inspired me with his stickers, to quit that delivery job.
I was already an oddball when I first moved back from northern cali to the Westside of Columbus as I rode my royal blue schwinn mountain bike and (for gawd sakes a helmet) everywhere that I could. Besides that, my 1978 vw Transporter van was still in the alley out back, albeit in “pause” mode.
Shortly thereafter, Cota started putting bike racks on all of the buses and in the ensueing 7 years that I lasted on the Hilltop, I saw Columbus become more bike friendly everyday. Y’all who live there now know it’s been called a bicycle-mecca.

Now I am not so free to give up the wheels that get me the 7 miles into the grocery store to buy food for myself, my Dad and my dog.
Now living beings are dependent upon me,yet I find myself wanting to just quit cars again……. On this independence day as I await the eventual outcome effort to raise money for a new toyota clutch on my facebook fundraiser, I pledge an allegience to someday finally being free of the need to own or operate a fossil fuel driven vehicle. But for now I must shift the clutch into neutral and hope for the remainder of the money I need to fix this car to show up.
I pledge to try and be a part of Love, not hate.
I pledge to shift all the way into 5th gear when it comes to taking responsibility for my own experience and allow somehow the other stuff to float on by.
I pledge to fix my yard-sale-find Gary Fisher mountain bike
I am still working on my pledge….

Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Poetry found on freewill astrolgy....



THE MARVELOUS WOMEN
by Mohja Kahf

All women speak two languages:
the language of men
and the language of silent suffering.
Some women speak a third,
the language of queens.
They are marvelous
and they are my friends.

My friends give me poetry.
If it were not for them
I’d be a seamstress out of work.
They send me their dresses
and I sew together poems,
enormous sails for ocean journeys.

My marvelous friends, these women
who are elegant and fix engines,
who teach gynecology and literacy,
and work in jails and sing and sculpt
and paint the ninety-nine names,
who keep each other’s secrets
and pass on each other’s spirits
like small packets of leavening,

it is from you I fashion poetry.
I scoop up, in handfuls, glittering
sequins that fall from your bodies
as you fall in love, marry, divorce,
get custody, get cats, enter
supreme courts of justice,
argue with God.

You rescuers on galloping steeds
of the weak and the wounded–
Creatures of beauty and passion,
powerful workers in love–
you are the poems.
I am only your stenographer.
I am the hungry transcriber
of the conjuring recipes you hoard
in the chests of your great-grandmothers.

My marvelous friends—the women
of brilliance in my life,
who levitate my daughters,
you are a coat of many colors
in silk tie-dye so gossamer
it can be crumpled in one hand.
You houris, you mermaids, swimmers
in dangerous waters, defiers of sharks–

My marvelous friends,
thirsty Hagars and laughing Sarahs,
you eloquent radio Aishas,
Marys drinking the secret
milkshakes of heaven,
slinky Zuleikas of desire,
gay Walladas, Harriets
parting the sea, Esthers in the palace,
Penelopes of patient scheming,

you are the last hope of the shrinking women.
You are the last hand to the fallen knights
You are the only epics left in the world

Come with me, come with poetry
Jump on this wild chariot, hurry–


by Mohja Kahf