Delusions and illusions are both a kind of distortion of our shared reality. The difference is that a delusion sprouts from within the brain (such as believing I am Abe Lincoln, or that my shoelaces are worth a million dollars). An illusion is produced outside of us (like a mirage of water in a desert, or a magician sawing his assistant in half).

The goal of a magician's tricks, though, is to delude the audience into believing the illusions are real. That's something movie makers do every day, hoping we will suspend our disbelief if only for a couple of hours. We believe that the facades they build are actually towns, that an asteroid strikes the earth causing bleak destruction and numerous actors to experience an early demise. Sometimes statisticians, politicians and reporters practice the same art.

Happy to see a common nighthawk this afternoon, flying about a field in Northwest Park, Austin, Texas. This is the first one I've seen for the summer season. They winter in South America. This nighthawk was a fabulous flyer, fast and beautifully agile.

In researching where they migrate from, I found there are bands, stealthfighters, and pistols called Nighthawks. I know there's a restaurant here in town called The Nighthawk. I'd forgotten that the famous 1942 diner painting by Edward Hopper is called 'Nighthawks'.

I have a large bag of correspondance I rediscovered today. Every one of the letters was written and mailed to me by a friend or kin when I was in my twenties. Almost all of them are handwritten. (One friend used a green typewriter ribbon!) As I sampled the mail, I became so deeply grateful. The messages, the different handwritings, the addresses, the kind of paper and stamps used are portals to places and people I haven't experienced in a long time. The writers handled the envelopes, pressed their pens to the paper to share their news and feelings. How marvelous are friends, sisters! I was just as happy to read their words today as I was when the letters first were delivered to my mailboxes in now distant towns. Perhaps for some letters, I was even more touched. The voices sealed in those envelopes speak directly from our young adulthood. Their immediacy is so different from the revised histories we create when reminiscing.

I'm thankful that the timing of my life is such that I am enjoying the gifts of computers and the internet and cheap long distance phone calls, but that I also got to experience the tail end of the history of letter writing.

Although who knows? It could return as a trendy experience some day.

Last summer, I was taking a barren little road out of southeast Idaho when I approached this feed store and was compelled to pull off to take a photo. After consulting several people a few miles later (some of the roads looked like driveways through agricultural fields), I finally made it out of the state of Idaho into Snowville, Utah and on to Nevada. I've driven several times now cross country over the past five years. Most of the trips were easy, and at times exhilerating. This one was the most rugged and challenging.

At sunset, clouds swell with light,
lightning sparks within them.
The wind lifts tree branches,
spins charged, brilliant air.
The sky vibrates,
pauses,
and folds into gray.
Not a whisper of rain,
but a promise -

An evening walk around the neighborhood is always an adventure. It was very warm tonight, 88 degrees. I was happy to find an ice hockey game in progress, and to learn it was ok to go in and watch. How cool is that? (The staff at the rink were wearing jackets, that's how cool.) It's amazing how fast and agile the players were. It's a beautiful, demanding game, and these were athletes with endurance.

wind sweeps firewheel -
waves of dancing color -
Aunt's Easter lunch for five

One of my kids asked me, long ago, 'How big are God's feet?'

Tim O'Brien deliberately uses a wandering hit and miss method to recreate his experiences in the Vietnam War. He repeats the same stories, but with a few facts and some perspective shifted. Through his technique, the reader experiences the great contradictions within war, and the inadequacy of the human heart and psyche to handle something so hugely grotesque and senseless. Each soldier in his company is trying to offset the horror and stench and the absence of normalcy by clinging to something tangible and ordinary: a girlfriend's stocking, a New Testament, a rabbit foot, a pebble.


The book is called The Things They Carried. I reread it earlier this week, but it's still hanging on. O'Brien hides nothing behind fancy words or embellishment; there is a bell-like simplicity to his writing. He acknowledges there is no lesson, no truth from the war, but he has written with honesty and, the contradiction, beauty.

There is a restaurant in Austin, and it has a large framed piece of art on its wall. I wasn't close enough to it to tell if it's a poster or painting, but it depicts an island, and the water in front of it. Instead of seeing the land and the water from above, the perspective is such that you can see both the calm little island, and the activity below, the sharks and fishes and underwater plants. You're seeing two worlds at once, air and water, touching each other, coexisting, yet so separate, so different.

graceful the great pink moon
hovering above the ribbon of highway;
grateful I for You who
picks up the pieces.
mutely You listen;
a cardinal nestled among the leaves
gives You voice

parking lot cat
stretches,
claws unfurled,
and makes
a poem

a stringless kite,
this wind-filled
plastic grocery bag
shoots over the roof
past the motorcycle
parked between
two straight lines
on heated asphalt

Today, there was the woman who said nothing but, 'Bye' and the man pedaling by wearing nothing but a thong and a smile. There was the game with the floating cottonwood fluff, and balancing like a kid atop the faded red curb.

This past week, I've been the recipient of gifts that are out of the ordinary. Today, walking to the store, I came upon this yellow-crowned night heron, feeding in a shallow ditch alongside a four-lane street. It was quite hot, the middle of the day, in heavy traffic. The heron looked at me, unperturbed. It didn't fly off.

I've included the second photo (take note in the lower left-hand corner) to give some perspective. These beautiful birds are usually lounging in trees during the day, in much less industrial settings.

The perfection we create in architecture, in music, in math and physics, dance and martial arts may be a response, a search for antidote, to the messiness we experience in life. Such a relief to carve out clarity in the face of confusion. In creating perfection, sometimes we tease out a map to guide us up and outward. We carve a key to simplifying the multiple plotlines of our lives.

Texas State Capitol

It's like I want a new language after seeing Leo Kottke perform because the one I got is never adequate.

What is this?
During winter, it was most blatant. The pale greening of spring has gracefully softened the appearance of the trees that have survived.

Imagine being a baby chick, growing and developing within an eggshell. The first part of your life, you are not fully formed, not aware. Your body is expanding and unfolding from the zygote formed by the union of a sperm with the egg. As you grow, there's a point where your body is complete, and you spend the hours of a day, restless, pecking and tapping at the wall surrounding you. The shell develops fractures, but still there is no breakthrough. You have this yearning to continue, to seek something beyond the small boundaries of your shell.

Now imagine the shell has broken. What would that first rush of light and fresh air be like? What is it like to have the edge of your whole world only half an inch from your face, and then suddenly to discover the next world expands outward without limits?

My kids received one of those ant farms as a gift. It's a flat clear plastic case. As the ants build their tunnels, you can watch their movement because the walls are pressed so close together, there's not room for the tunnels to to go anywhere but up and down. It's almost like a two dimensional house.

At some point the kids got bored with their farm, so we took the ants outside to release them. The ants were functioning fine within the confines of the artificial farm, but once released they were very confused, and not just about new territory. They stumbled about, and seemed completely disoriented. They had walked up and down all their lives. They knew nothing about walking outward.

Unconstrained by higher level physics and math training(ahem!), I like to imagine the dimension of time is spatial, and that although our bodies experience the time dimension only as 'now', one point on the timeline, time actually exists physically in its entirety. In other words, that the past exists, and the future exists, just as the beginning and end of a movie reel exist even when we're watching the middle of the film. They don't disappear. It's our body experience that is limited, not the dimension itself.

If you're trying to broaden your understanding about dimensions, one of the first little roadblocks to be aware of is semantics regarding the 4th dimension. The first three dimensions roughly translate into width, height, and depth (both in physics and math). The fourth dimension in physics is time, referred to in theories regarding the spacetime continuum (for example, Einstein's theories). From what I can tell, in physics, some don't even call it the 4th dimension because it is not considered to be a spatial dimension. So in physics, there are the three spatial dimensions and the time dimension.

There is mathematical evidence of a 4th spatial, or Euclidian, dimension (and more).(Models of tesseracts and hyperspheres are attempts to illustrate the 4th spatial dimension in ways we can grasp from our 3-D perspective.) Additional dimensions are also hypothesized in physics theories such as string theory (10 dimensions) and M-theory (11 dimensions).

So the term 4th dimension can refer either to time, or a 4th spatial dimension, and it's important to know which is being discussed.

Flatland was written by Edwin A. Abbott, and published in 1884. Abbott develops a thinner-than-paper world that exists in only two dimensions. He describes the hierarchy within that world, and some of its societal challenges. He then introduces a three-dimensional character, like you and me. The 3-D fellow can easily see the two-D people, but it is very hard for the 2-D people to conceive the full reality of the 3-D character. The book goes on to apply that concept to how 3-D people like us would experience meeting 4-D beings. (In short - very uncomfortably!)

I was happy to find tonight a youtube link to Carl Sagan demonstrating the Flatlander meeting a 3-D apple.