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

Don't Panic (Coldplay)

My daughter Sarah had an appointment in Wynwood this past Saturday afternoon and asked me to accompany her.  I of course said that I'd love to and suggested that, if we had the time/energy/inclination, we should walk around afterward.  The area is a famous community showcasing graffiti artists, and I'd never been down there.  And we did.  A-f*ckin'-mazing!

Here's a bit of backstory:  Wynwood Walls (which is currently closed) and American History... and some photos as examples of the coolness.  We strolled for two hours, stopping for a short while to enjoy tacos, guac/chips, and beers.  I was so impressed, and want to return soon... 😍

NR:  In Zanesville: by Jo Ann Beard

SONG:  Don't Panic by Coldplay

BOOK(S):  The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible by Charles Eisenstein

Walls of Change: The Story of the Wynwood Walls by Jessica Goldman Srebnick, Franklin Sirmans, Martha Cooper (Photographer), Hal Rubenstein (Introduction)

POEM:  Textbook Statistics by Arkaye Kierulf

On average, 5 people are born every second and 1.78 die.

So we’re ahead by 3.22, which is good, I think.

The average person will spend two weeks in his life

waiting for the traffic light to change.

Pubescent girls wait two to four years

for the tender lumps under their nipples to grow.

So the average adult has over 1,460 dreams a year,

laughs 15 times a day. Children, 385 more times.

So the average male adult mates 2,580 times with five different people

but falls in love only twice in his life—possibly

with the same person. Seventy-nine long years for each of us,

awakened to love in our twenties, so more or less

thirty years to love our two lovers each. And if, in a lifetime,

one walks a total of 13,640 miles by increments,

Where are you headed, traveler?

is a valid philosophical question to pose to a man, I think, along with

Why does the blood in your veins travel endlessly?

on account of those red cells flowing night and day

through the traffic of the blood vessels, which if laid out

in a straight line would be over 90,000 miles long.

The great Nile River in Egypt is 4,180 miles long.

The great circle of the earth’s equator is 24,903 miles.

Dividing this green earth among all of us

gives a hundred square feet of living space to each,

but our brains take only one square foot of it,

along with the 29 bones of the skull, so

if you look outside your window with your mind only,

why do you hear the housefly hum middle octave, key of F?

If you listen to the cat on the rug by the fire with

the 32 muscles in your ear, you will hear

100 different vocal sounds. Listen to the dog

wishing for your love: 10 different sounds.

If you think loneliness is beyond calculation,

think of the mole digging a tunnel underground

ninety-eight miles long to China

in one single night. If you think beauty escapes you

or your entire genealogical tree, consider the slug

with its four uneven noses, or the chameleon shifting colors

under an arbitrary light. Think of the deepest point

in the deepest ocean, the Marianas Trench in the Pacific,

do you think anyone’s sadness can be deeper? In 1681,

the last dodo bird died. In the 16th century,

Queen Elizabeth suffered from a fear of roses.

Anne Boleyn had six fingers. People fall in love

twice. The human heart beats 3 billion times — only — in a lifetime.

If you attempt to count all the stars in the galaxy, one

every second, it’ll take 3 thousand years, if you’re lucky.

As owls are the only birds that can see the color blue

the ocean is bluish, along with the sky and the eyes

of that boy who died alone by that little unnamed river

in your dreams one blue night of the war

of one of your lives. (Do you remember which one?)

Duration of World War 1: four years, 3 months, 14 days.

Duration of an equatorial sunset: 128 seconds, 142 tops.

A neuron’s impulse takes 1/1000 of a second,

a morning’s commute from Prospect Expressway

to the Brooklyn Bridge, about 90 minutes,

forty-five without traffic.

Time it takes for a flower to wilt after it’s cut from the stem: five days.

Time left our sun before it runs out of light: five billion years.

Hence the number of happy citizens under the red glow

of that sun: maybe 50% of us, 50% on good days, tops.

Number who are sad: maybe 70% on the good days—

especially on the good days. (The first emotion’s more intense, I think,

when caught up with the second.) So children grow faster in the summer,

their bright blue bodies expanding. The ocean, after all, is blue

which is why the sky now outside your window is bluish

expanding with the white of something beautiful, like clouds.

Fact: The world is a beautiful place—once in a while.

Another fact: We fall in love twice. Maybe more, if we’re lucky.

QUOTE:  "We are all dreamers creating the next world, the next beautiful world for ourselves and for our children." ~ Yoko Ono

Wildflowers (Tom Petty, cover by The Wailin' Jennys)

I first discovered Glennon Doyle (she dropped the Melton a few years ago) in January 2012, when I was doing research for a UU church service I was presenting, based on the theme of my singer-songwriter friend Nick Annis, whose new composition of You Can’t Be the Good Guy If You Do What the Bad Guys Do was my new favorite of his.  Inspired by Nick's musical conundrum, I contemplated exactly what "good guys" do, from ethical buying to considerate interactions to compassionate politics.  I read the story of Ferdinand, I quoted from Dar Williams' song Buzzer (based on the Stanley Milgram Experiment in the early ‘60’s), I mentioned The Paradoxical Commandments by Kent Keith (often falsely attributed to Mother Teresa), and I quoted Martin Niemöller's "When the Nazis came for the communists".

I then went on to say that I was turned on to the coolest blog by none other than Tracey, our former RE Director, and I quoted from the website:

“Although our meeting place is a Momastery (www.momastery.com), we’re no monks. We’re Monkees. And we’re too busy singing to put anybody down.  The Monkees are a group of women with nothing in common other than these beliefs:

1.    We Belong To Each Other
2.    We Can Do Hard Things
3.    Love Wins

We are Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and atheists… but we are kin, so we are kind. Our goals are to be careful with each other… to pay attention and look closely and think hard and pray and feel and wake up and care and connect. So we can become braver and live bigger and truer on this Earth.”

At that point, I was hooked, read each new blog entry as soon as it posted, bought both of her books as soon as they were published, contributed to her Love Flash Mobs (up to a $25 maximum, raising millions of dollars), witnessed her Compassion Collective collaboration with Brené Brown, Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Rob Bell, and even had the chance to see/hear her speak a few years ago.  She's been married and divorced, has three children by her former husband, and is now life-partnered with Abby Wambach, the soccer player.  Glennon continues to face life with humor, wisdom, and compassion, and I could not wait to buy her newest book, Untamed, pre-ordering it months ago through Barnes & Noble so I could get an autographed copy.

Well, even though we moved from our suburban home to our 55+ condo community almost two years ago, I never changed my address through B&N, so the book was sent there last month and then, through a crazy set of well-intentioned circumstances but ultimately life glitches, when I finally figured out why I hadn't received it yet, the book had been sent back.  Oh [three-second pause] well.  I could order another one via Amazon, right?  First world problems.

I was planning to blog about this today anyway, and mid-afternoon yesterday I received a text from my friend Michele, asking if I had the book and, if not, she'd be glad to send me her copy.  Wow.  Synchronicity strikes again, and I am beyond grateful, as well as amazed, that The Universe always seems to have my back.  Thanks, MW.  Can't wait to read it...  💖


SONG:  Wildflowers by Tom Petty (cover by The Wailin' Jennys)

BOOK:  Untamed by Glennon Doyle

POEM:  The Sea by David Whyte

The pull is so strong we will not believe
the drawing tide is meant for us,
I mean the gift, the sea,
the place where all the rivers meet.

Easy to forget,
how the great receiving depth
untamed by what we need
needs only what will flow its way.

Easy to feel so far away
and the body so old
it might not even stand the touch.

But what would that be like
feeling the tide rise
out of the numbness inside
toward the place to which we go
washing over our worries of money,
the illusion of being ahead,
the grief of being behind,
our limbs young
rising from such a depth?

What would that be like
even in this century
driving toward work with the others,
moving down the roads
among the thousands swimming upstream,
as if growing toward arrival,
feeling the currents of the great desire,
carrying time toward tomorrow?

Tomorrow seen today, for itself,
the sea where all the rivers meet, unbound,
unbroken for a thousand miles, the surface
of a great silence, the movement of a moment
left completely to itself, to find ourselves adrift,
safe in our unknowing, our very own,
our great tide, our great receiving, our
wordless, fiery, unspoken,
hardly remembered, gift of true longing.

QUOTE:  "You can be very wild and still be very wise." ~ Yoko Ono

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