My dove has come back to her nest...
I heard her this morning before daybreak
cooing softly, perhaps to let me know
she would be needing my garden again.

An Iris Is An Iris Is An Iris Is An Iris... but a fountain pen is the only pen that is a real pen.


THE FOUNTAIN PEN

Ink like blue blood flows from the nib of my fountain pen
satisfying my need to feel connection with the paper...
The inventor of the ball point writing instrument
is due his reward but surely not in heaven.
Sticky, stinky ink rolled from the end of a stick
should not be called writing and the instrument
that transfers roll marks to paper should not be
called a pen. Where is the flow? Where is the fountain?

OLIVE TREE

On a little knoll behind the church
in clear view of the congregation
stands an olive tree deliberately
planted to remind us of tragedy
and loss and suffering to redeem
not just those who sit in wonder
at the miracle of love and grace
freely given but the whole world.

The olive branch of peace doesn’t
deliver anywhere what it promises.
Take a look through history’s pages
and find that revolutions and wars
and pogroms and holocausts come
on and on with deliberate speed
while peace is slow to develop
with or without the requisite dove.

The problem of children suffering
who’ve had no time to learn sin
isn’t answered by an olive tree
on a special mount in Jerusalem
or behind a church anywhere.
No litany or hymn of repentance
lead by priest or lifted up by choir
explains why God allows their pain.

www.jerralmiles.blogspot.com

Yesterday I lucked into a little photography project that opened my eyes and mind and caused me to rethink the title of my BLOG: The Way I See It. The project: photographing a Duncan Phyfe table for my friend Ed Jirjis. We put the table on the floor in the middle of his garage so I could move around it and find exactly the right angle for the photograph. I found the best angle and got the pictures I was sure would show the table to best advantage. Later when I looked at the image on my computer monitor, I could just barely “see” the table that I thought was beautiful as I moved around it in Ed’s garage.The stuff in Ed’s garage is better organized than things are in my own garage. It is definitely not a messy environment. I was surprised that I could just barely see the table in the picture because my eyes were
overwhelmed by all the other “stuff." So I subtracted everything from the picture but the table. What a difference in the way we see the world when we find a way to simplify... How could I not think about Henry David Thoreau and his attempt to “Simplify, Simplify.”

He said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

Views of Balboa Park from the Laurel Street Entrance... and of the city from the lower end of the park.

YESTERDAY... TIJUANA ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE BORDER FENCE; TODAY... JUST TWENTY MILES TO THE NORTH... BALBOA PARK IN SAN DIEGO.

The border fence between South San Diego county and Baja California delineates much more than a political and geographic separation of two countries. The wall that separates San Ysidro and Tijuana is as offensive to anyone who values equity and justice in the global community of nations as the old Berlin Wall was on that day when President Ronald Reagan chided Michail Gorbachev with his famous plea for the Russian president to “tear down this wall.” While it would hardly be reasonable to expect the poorer south side and the affluent north side of the border to be congruent, the stark contrast between life in the United States and life in Mexican along the border is jarring.
Of course, the situation between the U.S. and Mexico is different from the separation of Western Europe from Eastern Europe; but there are similarities that should not be ignored. On one side of the hated Berlin Wall restrained citizens lived in constant fear and poverty, and on the other side people enjoyed comfort and freedom. A difference between the two has something to do with who was inflicting the pain. The horrible conditions on Soviet side of the Berlin wall were caused by political forces in the Eastern Bloc. Nobody blamed Western European nations for the suffering in the East. In our hemisphere there is little doubt that the pervasive terror inflicted on people living on the Mexican side of the border fence is the direct result of illicit, unlawful drug and gun trade in the United States. There is some irony in the fact that Ronald Reagan is venerated by the very same people who insist on building higher and securing the wall between Mexico and the United States. The California Assembly will hear a proposal this week to create an official Ronald Reagan Day in the state calendar. The state Senate has already unanimously passed a bill designating the 6th of February as Ronald Reagan Day. If the bill passes in the Assembly, school teachers in California will be required to commemorate former Governor and President Reagan’s life on that day every year.

Tijuana, Mexico, has become a bad dream that exists in reality just twenty miles from where I lie down to sleep every night. Today I walked into the city from the busiest border crossing in the world at San Ysidro, California. The last time I was there two or three years ago and all the times I was there before that, thousands of visitors mingled with thousands of Baja California residents in city street scenes that always seemed to be happy celebrations. In the old days music and laughter and color washed over whole district from the border all the way out to the bull ring on Avenida Revolution and down to the Centro Cultural Tijuana in the River District. Now all that seems to be left of those good times is the color. Patrick, Vincent and I saw only a couple of other people from north of the border in our walk around the district. The streets are empty. Most of the shops and restaurants are closed. There were no police officers on the streets, and we saw only one police car in a couple of hours.. Two armed Mexican soldiers wearing full face masks had stood watching as entered the city, but they were the only ones we saw. Except for the Amish couple and their baby crossing back into California at the border, the city reminds me of Saigon in the early seventies.The abstract image with the ragged gash running from bottom to top is a picture of the Tijuana River basin from a pedestrian bridge in the River District. In the other picture those people who seem to be having a delightful picnic on the levy by the river basin are really homeless families.