Watching the Wheels (John Lennon and Yoko Ono)

Such a great birthday yesterday; I hit the ground running in the local community outreach garden, which I have committed to do once a week.  It kicked my *ss, but in the best possible way; I was dirty but happy (and delighted to wear a pair of the adorable gardening gloves Melanie sent... 😍 )

Chico and Rob took me out for lunch (Pollo Tropical has a vegan wrap - yum!).  Came home, showered, napped, then headed to Sarah and Colin's for an early dinner from Parlour Vegan (and Eric surprised me there, when I thought he had to work!).

Was delighted by the plethora of phone calls, texts, e-mails, gifts, and thoughtfulness in general all day from family and friends near and far.  I remain grateful for my support circle, which is sometimes a parallelogram, which is perfectly fine as well... 💞  

Lower back.  Ouch!  Upper hamstrings.  Eek!  More stretching in my future so I can kick the garden's *ss this time, instead of the other way around... 😁

It is indeed Feel Good Friday and, as is tradition, five items below of beauty, interest, and humor to brighten your day/weekend/week.  Enjoy! 

~ The 2021 Met Gala Is Going Plant-Based—Here’s Why:  Yes, people eat at the Met Gala. And this year, for the first time ever, the chef-curated menu will be 100% plant-based.

~ So Many Tchotchkes, So Little Time:  Instagram stores that specialize in knickknacks are booming. Blame the pandemic.

~ ‘Wicked’ Hits the Road, Carrying the Hopes of Broadway Tours:  The production, which starts Tuesday in Dallas, is the first Broadway tour back onstage, a test as American theaters seek to rebound from the pandemic shutdown.

~ Our Buy Nothing Project Mission:  We offer people a way to give and receive, share, lend, and express gratitude through a worldwide network of hyper-local gift economies in which the true wealth is the web of connections formed between people who are real-life neighbors. (thanks and love to Michele for the heads-up to this wonderful project... ❤ )

~ The Extraordinary Presence of Frida Kahlo

SONG:  Watching the Wheels by John Lennon and Yoko Ono

BOOK:  Great Quotes For Gardeners: Reflection, Inspiration, And Some Humor For Those Who Love Gardens by Craig Hlas

POEM:  I Would Like by Jane Hirshfield

I would like

my living to inhabit me

the way

rain, sun, and their wanting

inhabit a fig or apple.

I would like to meet it

also in pieces,

scattered:

a conversation set down

on a long hallway table;

a disappointment

pocketed inside a jacket;

some long-ago longing glimpsed,

half-recognized,

in the corner of a thrift store painting.

To discover my happiness,

walking first

toward

then away from me

down a stairwell,

on two strong legs all its own.

Also,

the uncountable

wheat stalks,

how many times broken,

beaten, sent

between grindstones,

before entering

the marriage

of oven and bread—

Let me find my life in that, too.

In my moments

of clumsiness, solitude;

in days of vertigo and hesitation;

in the many year-ends

that found me

standing on top of a stovetop

to take down a track light.

In my nights’ asked,

sometimes answered, questions.

I would like

to add to my life,

while we are still living,

a little salt and butter,

one more slice of the edible apple,

a teaspoon of jam

from the long-simmered fig.

To taste

as if something tasted for the first time

what we will have become then.

QUOTE:  "First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do." ~ Epictetus

Happy Xmas (War is Over) - (John Lennon)

Impossible to believe that today is the 28th anniversary (a Monday, just as it was then) of the murder of John Lennon - I remember it like it was yesterday. I was living and working in Carrollton, Georgia with my husband, but had driven into Atlanta that morning to attend a full-day job-related seminar, then over to my parents' house to have dinner before heading back home later in the evening - my dad was watching football, which was interrupted with a news bulletin about the shooting.

I recall feeling sick to my stomach and not really being able to process the information - John and Yoko had just released their Double Fantasy album, which was difficult to come by because he'd been away from music for a while, but we finally procured a copy a week or so before. I kept thinking short-term of the loss for Yoko and Sean and John's fans... but also long-term in that it meant there would never be a Beatles reunion.

Strangely enough, when they released the name of John's killer, my husband recognized Mark David Chapman as one of the junior counselors when my husband was a senior counselor at the YMCA in Decatur, Georgia years earlier - what a sordid bit of synchronicity (as John was always my husband's favorite Beatle)...

Some of you know I'm a regular contributor (since early November) at Star Maker Machine, a very cool collaborative blog in which we staff members are given a theme each week and post some of our favorite songs which apply, as well as write about the history behind - thanks to Anne for sharing a lovely story song of the event a few days before...

I'd been noticing the movie Chapter 27 (based on the book below) on our OnDemand cable menu, and last night decided to watch it - Jared Leto did an unexpectedly amazing job portraying Chapman, and the film, although explaining little, was successful in providing an eerie glimpse of Chapman's irrational and random decision-making processes (at one point, after getting his album autographed, he had convinced himself to fly back to Hawaii and seek counseling)...

[ Added 12/9/08: No Peace at NBC by Roger Catlin, December 4, 2008 ]

SONG: Happy Xmas (War is Over) by John Lennon (backstory here...)

BOOK: Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon by Jack Jones

POEM: Rememberance by Rainer Maria Rilke

And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing
which would infinitely enrich your life:
the powerful, uniquely uncommon,
the awakening of dormant stones,
depths that would reveal you to yourself.

In the dusk you notice the book shelves
with their volumes in gold and in brown;
and you think of far lands you journeyed,
of pictures and of shimmering gowns
worn by women you conquered and lost.

And it comes to you all of a sudden:
That was it! And you arise, for you are
aware of a year in your distant past
with its fears and events and prayers.

QUOTE: "If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace." ~ John Lennon

I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono (Dar Williams)

From the FolkWax e-zine:

Yoko Ono will unveil the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik, Iceland, on October 9, the date that her husband, John Lennon, was born in 1940. Lennon was shot and killed outside their New York City apartment by deranged fan Mark David Chapman on December 8, 1980. He would have been 67 this year. "This is something that we spoke about 40 years ago," Ono told The Associated Press by phone last week before heading for Iceland. "Our dream is finally coming true."

The Imagine Peace Tower is a stories-tall beam of light that will emanate from a wishing well bearing the words "imagine peace" in 24 languages. The tower will be lit each year from October 9 to December 8, "so it has the feeling of the shortness of life, but the light is eternal," Ono said.

Ono, 74, came up with the concept for the light tower in 1965. Lennon was interested, she said. "He was visualizing then that it would probably become a reality one day," she said. When she turned 70, Ono decided she needed a place to keep the thousands of wishes she had collected through the "wish trees" she had set up at gallery shows around the world. "I was collecting the wishes for world peace, of course," she said. "I thought: `I have to put them in a tower or something ... a peace tower.'"

With that, she set out to make her conceptual light sculpture a reality. Engineers from Iceland and Japan worked from her design to build a 55-foot platform beneath a 6 1/2-foot-tall wishing well that houses nine spotlights. The tower sits on the coast of the Island of Vioey. Ono said she chose Iceland "because it is a very eco-friendly country" that relies on geothermal energy. "It's so beautiful," she said. "There's a certain strangeness to it. I would like to say it's magical."

The wishes Ono has collected -- about 495,000 so far -- will be buried in "capsules" around the tower, each topped with a tree. "Eventually it will be like a forest," she said. Wishes can be submitted by mail or through the Imagine Peace Web site.

"This is the biggest birthday present I gave to John," Ono said. "He's very, very happy about it, I know."

Lest one think Dar Williams' song is disrespectful to Yoko, the opposite is actually true - the following is from an interview when Dar appeared on Vin Scelsa's Idiot's Delight on August 20, 2000 to discuss her recently released The Green World:

Vin: That's Dar Williams live on Idiot's Delight, "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono", one of the songs on the album called The Green World.

Dar: I was asked to write a song for... Sherman Alexie's upcoming film based on Reservation Blues, and which is a sequel to Smoke Signals so I was so thrilled, and... they sent me the script, they gave me the parameters for the song that they wanted. But then I read the scene preceding the song I was supposed to write, and there was this thing about Yoko Ono breaking up the Beatles, y'know, the reference to "Yoko Ono is the person who broke up the Beatles"... and I went to Wesleyan in Connecticut, where there was lots of performance art and experimental music, and Yoko Ono was a very different figure at Wesleyan than just the person who broke up the Beatles, she was kind of a celebrated person, and people knew her works, and (laughs)

Vin: That's not where she went to school, though.

Dar: ...No, she went to Sarah Lawrence... but she did sort of a groundbreaking art piece at Wesleyan, apparently, so she was sort of a hero in that...

Vin: She was accepted as the artist that she is---

Dar: Exactly.

Vin: ---and not as this pop figure who, quote, "broke up the Beatles".

Dar: Right, exactly... not someone who came into the pop world... she sort of came from a marginalized art form, but, you know, people like me find that to be an incredibly valid marginalized art form. So that's why I wrote "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono".

SONG: I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono by Dar Williams

BOOK: All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono by David Sheff

POEM: Wage Peace by Judyth Hill

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,

breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists

and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.

Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,

imagine grief
as the outbreath of beauty or the gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

QUOTE: "When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace." ~ Jimi Hendrix

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles)

I'm a week late with this information, but it's no less important: forty years ago, on June 1, 1967, the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album was released by the Beatles in London - the album was 15 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard charts and has sold to date 11 million copies. Rolling Stone magazine ranked it No. 1 in its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003 - the album, which took 129 days to make, changed rock and roll for all time... and the cover of the album and the clothes marked a high point in pop art. Someone on one of my discussion lists posted this link to a wonderful article - great in-depth and historical viewpoint...

SONG: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles

BOOK: The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World by DK Publishing

POEM: (006) Let Us Picnic Together In Strawberry Fields by Leanndra O'Lear

Let us picnic together in Strawberry Fields
my delightful, melodious girl;
let us sit in the shade
sipping pink lemonade
as awakening blossoms unfurl.

We can twitter a tune by The Beatles, my love,
if we lounge for a time in the park;
I will sing 'Love Me Do'
then grin widely as you
pipe 'A Day In The Life' on a lark.

If we harmonize well, a Fab-Fourian spell
might enrapture the city, my sweet -
then each cabbie and cop
in Manhattan will hop
to a hip, Beatlemanian-Beat.

Should the spirit of Lennon appear to us, dear,
with George Harrison close to his side,
I will beam as you cling
to my arm when they sing
a rendition of 'Ticket To Ride'.

When we venture at sunset
from Strawberry Fields
and meander down Central Park West,
I will nod when you say: “Other bands are okay -
but The Beatles were surely the best.”

QUOTE: "We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow's nest of that ship." ~ John Lennon