to he who stops trees from falling
peace be with you
and happy birthday

I found a new place to live today.

The calendar new year may still be ten days away, but in some ways, today marks an annual fresh start. The earth is angled so that for us in the northern hemisphere, it’s the day of the longest night, a time for bonfires and trees bedecked with tiny lights and keeping warm with those in our tribe. Tomorrow the daylight begins a slow increase, a physical shift of the earth’s axis that will continue for six months until the summer solstice, the longest day.

So, why not celebrate, celebrate the fresh starts, the shifts of the cycles in our planetary systems. Good solstice! Happy new year!

A joshua tree in Boron, California:








Mistletoe clutches
leafless oaks
along Texas road -
winter solstice

Control is not an essential aspect of leadership.

I was in the hardware store the other day, a city store with narrow aisles and lots of different items within small spaces. Searching the aisles for those large paper lawn and leaf bags, I glanced up and saw someone familiar. He was a small, serious man dressed modestly in black pants and a worn, wine-colored henley. His hair was white and wispy, and he had a white beard and a bit of a tummy. There was a special weight to his spirit. When he glanced for less than a second my way, looking me right in the eye, I turned aside. Then…Santa? I looked back up just as he was turning the corner. I walked quickly, hoping to catch another look, but he seemed to have disappeared through the open door into the daylight. Everything had become very bright. I turned around to see the store owner at the counter with a small smile on her face as she went to her work.

I took these pictures on April 6 in my neighborhood in Oakland and Berkeley.

When I grow up
I wanna be an old woman -
an old old old old old
old old woman.

Michelle Shocked

Some things are so big, you can’t see them. You’re an ant on a horse’s back. You can smell horse. You are perched on a haunch, and can feel horse beneath your feet. But you can’t see the horse.

A lion can be pretty ferocious, but to an ant in his mane, the lion is just a tangled bit of real estate. The ant can’t see the lion, or feel its teeth. It wanders about, confused as the rest of us, or perhaps confidently focused straight ahead, another day of work, unaware he’s traveling on a lion's neck.

I sensed something powerful and amazing this morning, but am too tiny to see.

the birds are singing
upside down
the dogs are keeping
nose to the ground
its all
a complicated love
bright leaves in stacks
along the walks
the black-eyed peas
the people laugh
it's all
a complicated love
the dryers roll
round and round
church windows glow
high above the ground
I see it through
the chain link fence
it's all a complicated love
the lady wears
a funny hat
we're singing songs
and dancing fast
it's all a complicated love

Perhaps it isn’t words we’re listening for but the murmuring undercurrent.

I woke up still thinking about the tree and the leaves, and why so many leaves might fall at once. There’s coincidence, but that’s a lot of coincidence with so many leaves. They weren’t torn from the stems by the wind. The wind had been blowing in little gusts before and after the leaf fall.

Did one leaf yell out to the others, Ready, Steady, Drop? I think not.

So if not the wind, and if not the leaves, what else? There was the observer (me). I could have been hallucinating.

I thought about the tree.

It was as though the tree were startled, had a brief shock, and relaxed its hold. The leaves that were most ready (perhaps the stems having already dried and shriveled) fell. Imagine a waiter holding a tray of hors d’oeurvres and a loud noise comes from behind. The hands might flex open for a second, just long enough to let those canapés drop to the floor.

Can a tree be startled?

How would such an impulse be communicated?

Looking out my window
to the wizened plum tree,
to the indecisive drizzle and wind,
almost thirty yellow leaves
dropped from their wet branches at once.
They fluttered and spun
on the short journey to the earth below
as though jumping from a plane
on a single signal.
The breeze continued to blow
in fits and starts,
but the air show was over.
Many leaves still trembled,
hanging from their stems,
but not one let go.

in the dark city sky
the bay area train
flies overhead
each car lit brightly
its own reality
a traveling universe
now here now gone

If there's one thing you learn in martial arts, it's that everything is about timing.

Michael Shermer writes his least skeptical and most appreciative Skeptic column of the year in the September 2010 issue of Scientific American. He reviews Timothy Ferris’s book, The Science of Liberty, and reports on the author’s take on democracy and science.

Ferris is quoted: ‘Liberalism and science are methods, not ideologies.’ Shermer and Ferris hold that democracy is a running experiment. Voting [and the balance of powers] permits the people to continually evaluate their government and experiment with changing laws and rulers.

Science and democracy are not about doctrines, but more about how to run the experiments. As demographics, desires, priorities, and bounty change over the years, the government can take measure of the changes and adjust. Regarding the early history of the US, Ferris states, ‘The new government, like a scientific laboratory, was designed to accommodate an ongoing series of experiments, extending indefinitely into the future. Nobody could anticipate what the results might be, so the government was structured … to sustain the experimental process itself.’

Thus, the benefits are that ‘science obtains knowledge and … liberalism [democracy] produces social orders generally acceptable to free peoples.’

Shermer concludes:
‘The myth of the scientific method as a series of neat and tidy steps from hypothesis and prediction to experiment and conclusion is busted once you go into a lab and observe the more haphazard and messy realities of how researchers feel their way toward discovery. So it is with liberal democracies, which almost never work out as planned but somehow progress ever closer to finding the right balance between individual liberty and social order.’

As compelling a character as Sherlock holmes is, I’m intrigued by his less famous fictional brother, Mycroft. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle creates a character of great girth, of literal gravitas. Rooted to his chair in a second-rate London club, Mycroft solves the mysteries Sherlock can’t break, relying on the complex flowing powers of his mind.

Cecilia, Louisiana is a little town of agricultural fields and straight two-lane roads that neatly splice them. Now I place Mycroft in Cecilia around 1960 – and he’s sitting by an electric fan. He lives on dirty rice and smothered okra. His accent is no longer British but Cajun – and his profound thoughts generate beads of sweat that trickle down his neck to darken the collar of his short-sleeve cotton shirt. He smells of bitter iron and sweet bay rum. The mysteries he solves involve ghosts and hunters and bayous, and keep at bay his own dark memories. He has a fine low voice, and he hums slow unshaped melody that transports him to a solution.

(These two photos were taken a couple of months apart in locations several miles apart. I suppose they are or were signs? Reflectors?)





The problem is, western culture has no niche for soulmates. Your soulmates will rock your world.

Some months back, the martial arts stick teacher offered the following instruction. I thought it funny at the time, but the child-like experience breaks up tension, buried grief, anger.

‘When you raise your boh, imagine you are a superhero. As your stick comes down, lightning bolts rain into the earth. BAM! Imagine the Grand Canyon cracking open, spreading outward before you. BAM!

BAM! BAM! BAM!’

Is there freedom?
Is there choice?
Like babies in a birth canal
we are pushed forward.

I said, 'I am not free' and was freed.

passing a test
we are freed
only to face another,
and another -
in being tested
we grow

I took the right way this morning, but it was the wrong way. I circled around, tried again, and yes, it was the right way but again it didn’t work.

I took the wrong way, and it was the right way, and I reached my destination.

She sat as though she had no thoughts, a single stone beneath the shimmering water of a lake.

An odd urgency to get out of pjs and onto the street got me taking pics tonight.

A painting in a gallery window on Telegraph in Oakland:


Not sure but I think the painter's first name is Dennis.

I met a retired physics prof in the copy shop the other day. He was preparing materials for a meeting with a former colleague. The two of the them get together regularly to study topics they missed out on over the years. I was in the copy shop to print up similar materials for an aunt who was formerly a math teacher, and who is curious about ancient number systems. She just turned 79.

It feels like it’s all been done before, the flowers, the palm trees, the windows, the cars with hands painted on them, the fall leaves like colorful stars strewn across the grayed sidewalks. I've taken my camera outside the last few days, but I can see nothing new.

Yesterday, I spent time before bed, and then in the middle of the night, searching, searching. None of the pics in my file were worthy of posting. Nothing calling!

Often the photos act as a key. They trigger something waiting to be expressed. With no pictures catching my eye, everything felt locked up, unconscious, unwritten.

Plateaus. They can be restful like an oasis, or nervewracking like a forced trip to the mechanic. There's no progress here. Is something wrong? Will the car be ok? Will I ever take a decent photo again?