The Broken Wing Dance of the Killdeer

To Joshua, just because.

Yesterday as I awoke my mind drifted on the vapors of lethargy back to a simpler time in my life spent harvesting asparagus with my little boy out under the wide canopy of southern Michigan's waning springtime sky. There is great contentment to be found in the harvesting of crops in general, but perhaps never so much as when the little buckets and baskets and fruit flats come back to the truck bed overflowing with the evidence of a hard season's work finally paying off.

Our Michigan days are ancient now, and they blur at the edges, but Mr. Rankin, who owned the asparagus farm still holds a strong place in my memory, and of all Michigan memories he's probably the best. I first met him at the little grocery store situated just on the outside of the township of Clinton where I worked as a cashier. It was through the frequency of weighing his tomatoes and bagging his butter and eggs and in our agreements over apple prices rising and falling inconveniently to our preferences, and through all the other customary chatter and commerce that takes place over a grocer's counter that he and I first established our mutually affectionate bond. He was old, rugged, weathered, and yet beautiful. The best of days were the ones he waited a little longer so that he could pay his bill in my line and tell me about life out of doors on his farm.

One day in our exchanges he asked me if I would like to work for him, which because of my established employment at the market, I first reluctantly declined. He smiled, knowing that I was poorly suited to a life spent predominantly indoors. Then he suggested that I could probably keep my job and still work on his farm anyway.  He needed someone to help him harvest his asparagus. I needed a chance to break out of the binding restrictions of market life.  It was a deal maker when he said that I could bring along my little boys if I wanted to. I finally decided to seize the opportunity, especially since Joshua, who shared my enjoyment for outdoor activities, hadn’t yet started school and I was pretty sure the experience of spending time on a farm would be very fun for him.

And so it happened that I began working on a Michigan farm, setting into motion the backdrop of a peaceful season in my life with my young son spending time together working outdoors, while my previous friendship with Mr. Rankin moved out from underneath the confinement of neon lights into the wide expansive arena of a many-colored Michigan sky.

One afternoon in the long parading days of harvest, having wound our way deeply down  one of the asparagus rows, Joshua and I suddenly happened upon a small flapping dusty bird. She was bent and broken, lying rather helplessly among the asparagus crowns. I was startled and surprised as Joshua and I had both been busy talking and working and concentrating fairly well on our task, me finding and snapping, he gathering and stowing, the tall green and purple spears into an old farm bucket.  We may not have even noticed the bird, so intent were we on our labors, but she had flung herself onto the path nearly directly in front of us, immediately causing me and Joshua a full spectrum of emotional responses, not the least of which was alarm at the sudden movement and relief that she was in fact a poor little injured bird, and not a snake.

Dragging a crippled wing, this artful little creature was clearly in an even worse predicament now, not only injured, but also at our mercy.  She turned quickly away from us then started pulling her tiny broken body to the far end of the asparagus row as fast as she could, which wasn’t very fast. She turned now and then to look at us, fear showing in her eyes.

Joshua and I watched her with concern, our faces contorting in mutual sad sympathy. We decided to follow her, wondering if we might be able to gain her trust somehow and perhaps transport her to a bird sanctuary where she could at least have a little hospice care and the promise of an easier daily breakfast while she convalesced her pitiful little twisted limb.

Just as we began forming some kind of desperate plan for hosting a spontaneous bird rescue, the poor little creature suddenly bolted up toward the sky, flapping and spinning and flying in a dizzy, half-crazed manner.  Her injuries were apparently not conducive to warrant a rescue after all.

Relieved and bewildered, Joshua and I decided to take our nearly full buckets back to the old flat bed truck at the back of the house.  When we saw Mr. Rankin we told him of the strangely semi-tragic scene. I noticed his face crinkle into a smile while we demonstrated our concern with our eyes still wide and our arms flailing in similar manner to the sad spectacle we had witnessed. The land still enchanted him, that was for sure, and I could see that he wanted to suspend the vision of us trying to rescue a wild bird for a little while, without speaking it away too soon.

He was an old Michigan farmer who had seen many a Technicolor sky roll across his land. He was familiar with the orange and blue and sapphire that swirled on the airy palette above, and with the billowing up, or the laying flat of the clouds. He knew how to predict which hues and shapes meant a hidden storm was lurking, and which ones meant a tornado could be on the way, or which held the gentle promise of sunshine. In Michigan, this kind of understanding is no small asset, especially in summer, for when a Michigan sky shines brilliantly the first hour, it might easily fracture into a rouge storm the second.

Even in late springtime as we harvested the crops, once or twice Mr. Rankin had to come out to the field to find us.  There we would be, working under a pale pink sky without any concern for a storm.  He would warn us that the weather would most likely be changing soon, then advise us most convincingly to call it a day, which with my California upbringing, I thought was hasty.  But sure enough, within a very short time the pale pink of the sky would drift away on the lightest breeze, like a soft chiffon scarf slipping away unnoticed from the delicate shoulders of a beautiful woman. Then a  new sky would come rolling in on a much sharper wind, like an old grey carpet being flung out across a floor. It would land fast and hard and everything about the sky would change completely! It was something rather spectacular to watch, if not the very representation of amazing! One time Joshua and I waited for a little while, watching the sky quickly change from pink to lavender to green to grey. It was like going to a movie where the whole sky was the screen!

Being a farmer, well seasoned and ancient as a river, Mr. Rankin knew also the temperament and mood of the ground he worked. He knew when it was heavy and needed the lifting pull of the tractor blade, and when it was light and windswept, and languished for a deep drink of sky water. All these things were familiar on a very deep level for him. It was only this new breeze of a young California mom blowing across his land that caught his thoughts up in a swirl, perhaps reminding him of whatever ancient day may have existed when all things on the farm were new and curious to him also. Having Joshua around the farm surely must have brought childhood wonder and excitment to his days. Having me there most likely added the element of amusing bewilderment.

Prior to our experiences on the farm Michigan seemed like a moderately pretty place to me - to the depth that the word 'pretty' can be used to describe a land of red barns, mysterious looking trees, and wooden bridges; but I was also much younger then, and mostly accustomed to the treasures of the coasts and forests of California, which I desperately missed. Not yet a student of field and sky, I was genuinely homesick for the comforting majesty of my home state, still so unaware of the ways that love and endurance and all sorts of divine whisperings can be beautifully demonstrated anywhere, even in a dusty asparagus field in southern Michigan.

But Mr. Rankin knew these things very well, and because of our friendship, it was through his eyes that I first began to believe there might truly be magic east of the sierras. When we talked his love for farming showed on his face and I knew that his communion with the sky and land was something a person should want to aspire to.  In the least it seemed much more meaningful to me than trying to gather up tips from the produce manager at work to know when a tomato might be ripe enough to sell for a Tuesday dinner salad.

A smile twinkled on his face for a long time after we told him about the fortunate outcome for the little bird, and the moment hung softly silent between us for a while until he explained the loving tradition of the supposed injury to us, winking at the magic and triumph and salvation of mother-love reasserting itself yet again, this time to the eyes and experience of new beholders.

It is a divinely appointed mercy that God gave the Killdeer bird a little theatrical talent, burying within her heart a particularly natural skill with the pathetic death and dying scene; for with such blessed trickery and cunning the tiny little creature, who lives most of her life on the ground, might enact a true natural miracle, saving her helpless young from the danger of a possible nest invasion.

Mr. Rankin explained that the Killdeer surely takes on a risky enterprise building her nest on the ground as she does, but should her strategy of camouflaging it fail, she makes mighty use of her wonderful gift for drama. By dragging her body away in a convincing pretense of being injured she attempts to lure danger away from her sacred little abode.  What’s more, she does this knowing that it will require her to become an open target and easy prey for any kind of hunter.  While her little defenseless stone colored eggs lay silent and still, she abandons the nest for their sake.  The very hope of their survival rests in the daring, bold theatrics of their mother, who must then follow up with the immediate finale of a clean getaway.  If successful, the little eggs or hatchlings will once again enjoy her warmth and sheltering protection, while she in turn, simply returns to the nest as a quiet little uncrowned hero.

As with the nature and character that Mr. Rankin had described, the little Killdeer mama who had observed me and Joshua pillaging the asparagus crowns that day long ago must have understood that her nest was in our direct path and we were bound to find it. She must have realized that in order to protect her eggs she was going to have to take on a threat that was easily more than 500 times her size.  In her favor she had her talent for acting and our gullible sympathies. She wouldn't have known that we had no interest in harming her, and had we ever succeeded in 'rescuing her' to a bird sanctuary she would have likely fretted herself to starvation. I think upon her now with great respect. She made a clean getaway and tidied up all the loose ends of our near intrusion beautifully.

Some days after the bird incident, on very quiet and deliberate tiptoed advance with hopes of spying reverently in on the little actress and her family, I wandered gently back down that same asparagus row. But despite my stealth she somehow still knew that I was on approach, and so once more she flung herself wildly onto the path, dragging and limping and squawking this time, trying now to drown out the noise of her hatchlings.  These things she did commendably, and I was duly impressed, but I didn't follow her down the path again.  I wanted to see the little family she loved. Without disturbing the area with my hands I simply crouched low and peered in on the fuzzy little offspring over whom she had brooded and for who she was willing to risk her life.  There in the indent between two asparagus crowns, three little hatchlings had popped out as twittering glassy-eyed babies who knew nothing about how much their mother had already loved them into life.  I called Joshua to come quietly over to my side. This was something a little boy should see.

Sometimes I think about the Killdeer and how resilient her little beating heart must be.  How wide is the depth of parental love and how endless and fretful is the grand sovereignty of motherhood!

Our Michigan days have blurred into only a few lasting memories now, but I do remember sending a card to Mr. Rankin the first Christmas after moving home to California, telling him that he made all the difference for me while I lived in Michigan. In great sincerity I told him that I was not likely ever going to forget him or the experience of working on his farm. This blog proves that I haven't. The kindest compliment we can ever pay a friend is to try to become more like him.

Mr. Rankin, for his part, sat down in his kitchen one winter’s day and wrote a simple letter back to me, saying that mine was the nicest card anyone had ever sent to him, and that he was real glad he always shopped at the market where we had met.

Wide and colorful as the hues of an ever changing Michigan sky, life rolls on and brings its changes. Joshua has grown up now, his school days have come and gone. It's been many years since I have worked at a market weighing tomatoes and bagging up butter and eggs. These days the sky above me is as wide as a tarmac and it shifts with the lights and sounds of planes coming and going. At night the sky grows quiet again, as blue turns to crimson, then to purple, then to black, over this California city.

Most of the local birds that I'm familiar with these days band together in flocks on the pavement just outside the terminal, and they scatter in black waves with the coming and going of people dragging their luggage down the walkway. They don't appear to be trying to fool anybody about anything.

The thing I notice most about them is that they always head back to the very same place after they've been scattered. I guess there is comfort in that, just as there was comfort out on Mr. Rankin's farm, watching the broken winged dance of the Killdeer with my little boy close to my side.

Thoughts on Belonging

My soul hungers for an ocean and to pull up close to a shoreline, or to wander in the tranquility of a forest draped in kaleidoscopic canopies of sky, leaf, and light.  I knew this instinctively even when, and maybe especially because I was once a city child, living for awhile with a foster family in a downtown suburban house in central San Jose, under the looming shadow of a freeway overpass. Like every place before it, this was a place of transition, but still I loved it there.  I was living with the Beede family, falling in line in the new regime as the 3rd child of four. It was the first time I remember truly feeling at home and part of a cohesive family. Even now, whenever I reflect back upon pivotal eras of my life, that place and time and family dynamic still remain vibrantly alive to me, and I visit those memories reverently, and with great self-compassion.

As a foster child, mine was not a world of many constants. My possessions consisted of a rag-tag assortment of clothing and shoes, a few random toys, a red envelope containing a Christmas card from my father, a dark blue tri-fold penny keeper, a doll named 'Pumpkin', and a book about sea shells that my grandmother had sent to me in the mail just after my 9th birthday.

Added to these, I had an older brother named Tony.  He was taller than me and had considerably more freckles. Outwardly I regarded him with feigned aloof detachment, but inwardly I knew that having a 'real' brother gave my nomadic lifestyle a vague sense of stability; I was glad to have him around in the same way that some people are glad to have a faithful old spotted dog.

Life for us was happy enough, for it was alive with the splendor of childhood playhouses and costume parties, and all the typical laziness of growing up; but it was also crowded by experiences pulsating with the electrocuting sensations inherent in being foster children. We were spinning, and dizzy from the spin, and this court appointed status, when I allowed myself to think about it, fell into my consciousness rather miserably, for its demands were heavy and exacting, especially when it meant moving, and moving, and moving. 

Moving can trigger feelings of loss to anyone, but to a foster child, even moving across town can feel like moving to another country where the customs are usually no longer the same.  The household traditions and expectations are a mystery, the cooking is foreign, the way of resolving conflict, celebrating birthdays, and acknowledging compliments, all these things change, sometimes dramatically. Such changes are often difficult for adults, but to be a child sent out to manage them all alone and all at once, with nobody but an older brother (who is, himself, still in elementary school), and with the help of a distant, but vaguely familiar social worker (who is essentially only going to be there long enough to make the drop off and introductions), well, all of these things are enough to make a little child's head spin.

A foster child simply wants to set down roots and belong like anyone else. It's a strange sensation for a child to be envious of a family dog, and to covet the spot that they have worn down on the living room carpet from years of curling up in the same place over and over again. For the most part, a dog's life, for all it's reported drawbacks, seems to me to be a lot more secure than a foster child's.

One of the greatest feats my young girl's imagination ever tried to pull off was to pretend that I really belonged to my foster family in San Jose. I was eight years old when my brother and I moved in with them. Sometime after the customary ten-day grace period ended and the Beede's still seemed agreeable to having us living with them, I became acutely aware that there was something oddly 'functional' about them. For one thing, we nearly always ate dinner together as a family. There was no consistent vacancy in the father's chair night after night after night; nor was there the need to scurry around and recreate an alternate brighter reality within the home and amongst the family members just before the social worker was scheduled to pop by for a monthly visit. Instead, we simply went about the business of regular ordinary family life. We worked together in the yard and rode bikes when chores were done. We went camping in the summer, and for the most part got along fairly well, with a few exceptions when somebody used up the last of the peanut butter and put it back empty, or when we were all heading out for a long drive in the car, with our bony elbows and knees bumping into each other on the turns. We went to school, did homework, watched cartoons, swept porches, planted flowers, visited all the same relatives, and shared the very same tiny little bathroom for two whole years, until finally, in my mind at least, all the lines between 'Beedes' and 'Bishops' had blurred, and we were one.

It is a time of extraordinary vulnerability for a foster child when she believes that she has been assimilated into family, but hasn't.

So when the social worker stopped by on an unexpected visit one day after school and explained to me that there was "a real nice family in another county who had just signed up for foster care and who hoped we would be able to live with them now", I just looked at the floor and listened in polite numb silence, mentally tracing the pattern of the roses out on the area rug. I nodded in all the right places, eyes open, mouth closed. I finally mentioned I didn't really want to go to the other family, but it came down to "reasons". Always there were reasons.

For the first time, I realized the fragility of my fostered world and the flimsy hinge upon which it swung.  Even when I was new and shy in the Beede family, I had still wanted to believe in the solidity of the bureau that held my clothes, and in the solidness of the box that held my toys, and in the promise of the bed by the window in the room where I slept at night. But all these things suddenly became like nondescript furniture pieces that decorate a hotel bedroom and make it look like home. Nobody ever fully unpacks their suitcases and settles down in a hotel. The management understands this from the start, but the foster child catches on only eventually.

When I think about that house now I still think of it in terms of sound and light and patterns. I knew the pattern on my bedroom wallpaper well enough to predict the repetition of the daisy; I knew the way the wind sounded when it made the tree limb scratch against the roof at night; I knew what the ceiling looked like before the decorator panels had been installed. I knew the pulse of the house and all the ways that it comforted and sheltered my family. All these things coaxed me into a belief that I belonged to the house, and by extension, to the Beede family. My spot on the couch, my place on the floor, my seat at the dinner table, my coat on the hook, my rainboots in the entry way - all these things were false anchors of belonging. But none of those things were real in times of inconvenience. "Reasons" were what was real, whether they were understood or not.

A foster child can easily become either overly alive or prematurely dead in her imaginations, especially when she doesn't remember that sometimes there are just simply "reasons for things". She may begin believing too much in the landscape of her daydreams, where her family life is solid and assured.  It is a blissful field of oblivion upon which feeds her sense of safety and well being. It feels to her as if even the cells in her body have changed and even her very DNA proclaims a family bond.  But when she is caught up short, reality and court papers proving her DNA wrong, she may abandon the art of dreaming altogether, and become protectively unable to envision anything beautiful lasting forever. It is a bitter resignation when a child defaults into an expectation of loss. Belief and disbelief are little life rafts that a foster child deploys to help her stay afloat in the turbulent sea that is her life; but the tendency to deploy a raft even when there is no water, nor any threat of drowning, nor any imminent disappointments looming anywhere on the horizon, can linger for years past the need for self-preservation, unless she can somehow learn a better way. It took me a long time to learn a better way.

Earlier, when we were living across town with a family unsuited for the responsibility of caring for us, it seemed to me that being a foster child was the lowest of things, and a fearsome life. But later, after having loved a foster family dearly and losing my place among them in spite of the fact that they seemed to love me, I realized there was always some sort of enormous burden attached to our presence in every situation, no matter where Tony and I went, or how 'wanted' it seemed we were. My connections to others began to suffer when I realized this. They felt to me to be as temporary as a sandcastle, which thing is always built up impressively, but so easily washed away with the rise of the tide, or kicked down in carelessness. My imaginations found me with many friends and admirers; but reality found me fairly quiet and even somewhat withdrawn. I rarely disclosed anything, especially if it might disturb the tender ecosystem of  life as I knew it. A foster child is often the keeper of many secrets, and has to be. Truth is a mechanism that cranks up the motors of moving again.

Though foster status can make a child feel apologetic about themselves from the start, any true repentance on my part for the dysfunction and illness in my own family that led to my life in foster care was in vain and a futile effort at best, for I lacked the sincerity that one can only demonstrate by abandoning the staining error and making restitution, which I was powerless to do. With six years in the system, I was on schedule to be a foster child for at least another decade until I timed out on my 18th birthday. The quest for belonging was something I had to resolve, both inwardly and outwardly. I was incubating an apology that I did not know where or how to deliver. I was developing a theory that belonging required having a family; to belong was to have inner peace; to have peace one had to belong; to belong, one had to have a family ~ sigh.  But life can teach us where to find peace anyway, even if we feel utterly alone in the world, if we listen deeply enough. It's hard to grow still enough sometimes, but I do try. Life gave me a recipe for trying.

My brother seemed to regard our fostered status as an insult and clung feverishly to the flimsy essence of belonging to a long established line of Bishops and Coles, who he assumed would come down out of the Gold Country to collect us one day, in spite of their persistent and well-alibied absence from our lives. But for me, being a foster child was all I could remember.  Even in my earliest memory my brother and I appear like nomads, toddling from suburb to suburb at the whim of court orders and the fickle on-again-off-again affections of strangers whom we called "Mom" and "Dad", at least until such time as our social worker, for whatever reason, would come to gather us up and take us to a new "Mom" and "Dad". 

Such were the constants of our young lives, and they ebbed and flowed around us like threatening tides whose rhythm we did not understand, except to know that we were ever at the mercy of some powerful lurking force which was capable of crashing through any perception of safe harbor and sweeping us away from our friends and teachers and school mates, and our pets, and our 'family', out to a troubled sea alone. Together, but alone.  Always life has it's paradoxes.

Our own mother was always on the peripheral of our lives, though our father never really was.  Looking back I can see that my mother's love for us was everywhere, but it was not tangible like boots on my feet that could make my young-girl self equal to the rugged emotional terrain in which I lived. I could not cling to it with either clutching arms nor reassured eyes, for her love was like a kind of apprentice-fairy dust that sparkled brightly, but could work no real immediate magic in our lives. Her interest and desire to parent us was overshadowed by her illness; and the courts, after reviewing the gray papers that spoke of her long history of depression, anxiety, haldol, and shock therapy, summarily declared her an 'unfit mother' in one stroke, and me and my brother 'dependents of the court' in another.

With all the day to day distance firmly established between us, it wasn't obvious to realize the positive impact my mother could and did still have on my life. Her life affected mine much like punctuation influences a book. It was everything, yet nothing. It did not seem to stand alone to tell a story of it's own then, the way it does now. But it added the dynamic of hope that always makes the impossible possible again, and looking back I have to say, I was loved with an extraordinarily resilient kind of love. I wonder sometimes, as I was so blind then to every stroke of goodness my mother brought into my life, if any child truly understands the depth of her mother's love until time slips away, like a wide angle lens that allows more of the landscape and setting to come into focus. Maybe only then can the evidence of it seep down into the quiet places of our adult lives. It is not always easy to separate being a foster child from being a regular child, when life often pokes us all with the same sharp stick.

It was only after the chapters of my childhood and my mother's life closed and the emotional impact of our story together remained that I could recognize the ever present influence of her love, even her adoration for her children.  It had been woven serendipitously into my life as she wrestled with the illness that separated us. When she could, she took us on picnics and open train rides through the forest of the Santa Cruz mountains. She pointed out the sensations of the breeze against our cheeks and the beauty of the way sunlight looks when it shatters against a forest floor.  She taught us to love any patch of open blue sky, to make pictures in clouds, and to respect wind with a sweater, but not to let it turn us away from a drive to the top of Coyote Pass, where we could watch the whole world roll away in undulating hillsides of brown or green, depending upon the season. All seasons held their magic, and there was within every winter, the never ending promise of a coming spring.

The beauty of the earth came to my awareness as a quiet bi-product of being my mother's daughter.  It came into my consciousness much like her love for me did, shyly, persistently, not unlike sunlight that reaches down past all the tree branches until it finally finds the forest floor.  It filtered through the expansive space and distance between us, until it reached the ground upon which we both stood.  There it made a holy place, and eventually it healed us. 

Healing was a place that I went back to when I was older.  I picked up a piece of it and carried it back into my life like a souvenir from the forest, like golden fairy dust scattered along the shore of an ocean; all it's magical attributes finally working!

Reflecting upon my mother and the depth and gentleness of her soul, and the quietness of her grace, and the patient love that she sent out into the world has given me my connection points. And the earth, with all her splendor, is triumphantly beautiful. Like everyone else, I am her child, which gift I owe to a benevolent God.

This is why my soul hungers for an ocean, and to pull up close to a shoreline, and to wander in the tranquility of a forest. You can see God's handiwork there, and His eternal interest in our lives. Such are the places of unrefutable belonging.

Titled Axis

It occurred to her while she was standing at the bus stop cold and alone last night that she was hearing voices in her head again and they were saying things like "Night time is all about velvet and starlight!" and "Every glass cupboard should hold at least one hand painted tea cup." So she turned to look over her shoulder towards the deeper corners of the street where a bus headlight might appear suddenly, but the voices turned with her, whispering "We were children who lived in the days of a cotton-polyester economy; we could tuck up our entire week's wages in the double fold of a knee sock." And still there was no bus light in the distance, and the stars were wrapped up in a blanket of fog, and there were no cupboards nearby, nor teacups of any sort, and she had not worn a pair of polyester knee socks in years, and all these facts made her wonder if she was slipping away faster now into a world nobody else could see or hear.

"There is relevance in poetry if it get's a person's attention," the voices whispered to her. "All the world spins on a titled axis, so you can feel at home here, and in good company while we echo back tiny random fragments of your life to you in your own soul's native tongue, for what else would you rather do with all this cold, dark, starless sky while you stand waiting for your bus all alone?"

Let this mark out the first actual recording of her symptoms, and yes, Doctor, we are all in agreement that she did hear voices in her head again last night, and has for years, and what do you suppose it means when she wakes up and hears them again, saying things like "This would be a good day to turn over a little patch of earth by the front walkway and slip some tulip bulbs and ranunculus clusters down below the star creeper as future proof that one Winter's Thursday morning you did your part to help beautify the coming spring!" ?

But it is possible she's already on the road to recovery, Doctor. Rumor has it that she started a blog last week. Now maybe the voices will finally stop.

Listen

Fences

Thoughts About Risk Takers: She spoke to me of her friend who is a DJ in London, unplugging from the local UK scene long enough to see the world, come what may. He's already arranged a few first chance gigs in Tokyo, Australia, and Thailand.

I mentioned my friend Tom who sold everything and picked up from Oregon and moved to Maui, where he lives in a tent and drives a canoe. He spends winters carving gossamer-like butterflies out of rosewood, watching the whales migrate past his front yard.

And I'm remembering the guy my hubby and I met because we were all busy watching the same sunrise. He used to be a lawyer but he chucked it all because he felt the need to grow out his hair and take pictures of flowers. Now he drives a little worn out pick-up and for the sake of capturing the perfect shot he's been known to step across the barbwire and metal railing set up to keep the cows from wandering off and the tourists from falling off the cliff.

And all these people come back to me today as I sit down and try to eke out a social network status update for the few readers who will wander past a paragraph.

It occurs to me that as for myself, I spend a lot of my artistic time counting the barbs in the wire.

What I'm doing today is thinking about that a lot.


                                                   "...Live every day of your life."

Birds of a Feather

The little boy put on his mother's head band that she saved for bad hair days and he wore it all morning in the kitchen while they talked about what it would be like when he grew up and left home.
She said "I would give you that headband to take with you as a momento when you leave but I have a hunch I might be needing it a lot more then."
"Well then I'll use it today in advance and just remember," he said.

So his mother let him wear it and she didn't really mind, but he didn't give it back for a long time so she kept thinking all day about how quiet and common and over rated an empty nest must be and that's why she had to avoid mirrors for the rest of the day.

                                                               A mother's love is forever.

Supreme Creations

She had only a few coins in her pocket and had to save them for the bus fare but when she went window shopping that day she found out that there was a store where she could buy the whole world and bring it back home as a souvenir for her kitchen table. But when she looked closer she realized it was a cheap knock off and not a real proto-type after all because it was signed by somebody in Italy and she couldn't think of a single scripture that said God was an Italian.

                                    
                                             There is but one Creator of Heaven and Earth

Beholding a Miracle

There is a miracle that they call 'flight' and it's where the sky can hold up a million pounds of metal without complaining. If you have an aisle seat you have to keep your eyes on your knees so that they don't get smacked with the snack cart and if you are in the middle you have to balance your gaze to the center so that you don't fall asleep and drool on your neighbor's shoulder, but if you are in the window seat you can see for yourself what a miracle looks like and it doesn't make any sense to you that someone would sleep through it, but you agree that it is an occasion that calls for snacks and drooling.

Keep My Eyes Open to Miracles