BEAUTIFUL,  but deadly...

JIMSON WEED

Datura stramonium

Georgia O'Keeffe did at least five paintings of the wild jimson weed. Every part of the plant is toxic. Small amounts of the plant, probably the seeds, were used by some native American groups, usually ingested or smoked by shamans to induce visions. It is a dangerous plant that can cause death. It is common all over the United States. I got these photographs on Friars Road not far from the San Diego River.

The pictures today are from the "Spirit Tree"

You pays yer money and ye takes your choice

Unless you are a once-upon-a-time English Teacher, you may not remember all of Huckleberry Finn’s adventures in that extraordinary story by Mark Twain, but you’ll surely remember that for all his unschooled naivete, Huck wants to set things right... he wants good people to be safe. His mind is open to the possibility that what he has always though was the truth may not be truth at all. By chapter 28 he is coming to terms with the possibility that things are often not what they seem to be, and sometimes setting things right means running risks not just for himself but for the people he wants to keep safe. 

-----------from the opening of chapter 28:

...BY and by it was getting-up time. So I come down the ladder and started for down-stairs; but as I come to the girls' room the door was open, and I see Mary Jane setting by her old hair trunk, which was open and she'd been packing things in it -- getting ready to go to England. But she had stopped now with a folded gown in her lap, and had her face in her hands, crying. I felt awful bad to see it; of course anybody would. I went in there and says:

"Miss Mary Jane, you can't bear to see people in trouble, and I can't -- most always. Tell me about it."

So she done it. And it was the slaves. I just expected it. She said the beautiful trip to England was most about spoiled for her; she didn't know HOW she was ever going to be happy there, knowing the mother and the children warn't ever going to see each other no more -- and then busted out bitterer than ever, and flung up her hands, and says:

"Oh, dear, dear, to think they ain't EVER going to see each other any more!"

"But they WILL -- and inside of two weeks -- and I KNOW it!" says I.

Laws, it was out before I could think! And before I could budge she throws her arms around my neck and told me to say it AGAIN, say it AGAIN, say it AGAIN!

I see I had spoke too sudden and said too much, and was in a close place. I asked her to let me think a minute; and she set there, very impatient and excited and handsome, but looking kind of happy and eased-up, like a person that's had a tooth pulled out. So I went to studying it out. I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many risks, though I ain't had no experience, and can't say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here's a case where I'm blest if it don't look to me like the truth is better and actuly SAFER than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it's so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it. Well, I says to myself at last, I'm a-going to chance it; I'll up and tell the truth this time, though it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you'll go to. ---------------

Edward Snowden, the former technical assistant for the CIA who has leaked details of a top-secret American phone surveillance program, is “setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where it’ll go to.”  

I’m guessing Mr. Snowden thinks of himself as a new age Huck Finn... doing what should be done to set things right.  I don’t know how or what to think about it.  I’m skeptical that he has what Mark Twain put into his (and our) Huckleberry Finn.  We’ll see, I guess, as the Snowden story unfolds.

Some of the things we know about Snowden from the young man himself and from reporters’ inquiries:

• Snowden left the CIA and began working for Dell (which refused comment) and then private defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton in 2009, which confirmed Snowden's employment. While at Booz, Snowden was assigned to work at NSA facilities in Japan and Hawaii. He told the Guardian he lived comfortably, making nearly $200,000 per year.
• Snowden was living in Waipahu, Hawaii, with his girlfriend last month when he copied the last documents and information he would release to The Washington Post and The Guardian. Neighbors told the Post that Snowden and his girlfriend were noticeably standoffish and regularly avoided conversation.
•  
• He told The Guardian that he hoped the surveillance programs, which began under the George W. Bush administration, would be curtailed by President Barack Obama. When the cellphone and Internet surveillance programs were expanded by Obama, Snowden said he felt compelled to expose them and protect Americans' privacy.
• Snowden told The Guardian that he has long been a champion of Internet freedom. His laptop is emblazoned with a sticker that reads: "I support Online Rights: Electronic Frontier Foundation."
• According to the Post, Snowden gave $500 to Ron Paul's 2012 presidential campaign.
• Neighbors told the Post that Snowden and his girlfriend mysteriously packed up and disappeared from Hawaii in May. Since May 20, Snowden has been in Hong Kong alone. He told NSA supervisors that he was taking time off to receive treatment for epilepsy, which he was diagnosed with last year following a series of seizures. According to the Post, Snowden's mother also suffers from epilepsy.
• Hong Kong is a Chinese territory that enjoys relative autonomy. The country does have an extradition treaty with the U.S., however. According to The Associated Press, the extradition documents contain exceptions for political crimes, though AP sources said it's unlikely China would want to destabilize its relationship with the United States over Snowden, who has little political relevance in China.
• If extradited, Snowden faces considerable jail time for possible treason and aiding the enemy.
• 
  

This day has been a kaleidoscope of images.  They were all captured with my cell phone.  The boots and worn house slippers caught my attention at church.  A small boy, perhaps five years old, and younger sister were sitting on a bench with their mother. I asked the children first and then the mother if I could take a picture.  I said I really like the boots, and then I noticed the worn, dirty house slippers the little girl was wearing and said immediately that I liked them and asked her to let me take a picture of her shoes, too.  She moved closer to her brother and put her feet alongside his. The mother nor the boy nor his sister seemed aware that he was wearing his boots on the wrong feet.  There must be a story here, but I don't have a clue what it is.

In the middle of the afternoon I went for a short bicycle ride down by the river and found a new graffiti painting, a man sleeping under the railroad overpass near a little patch of weed that looked like trees in a desert landscape.  Later nearer home, I got the picture of the bees working in a magnolia blossom.  

In the evening we celebrated Elaine's birthday with friends.

Jacaranda

Jacaranda is native to tropical and subtropical regions of Central America, South America, Cuba, Hispaniola and the Bahamas. It's at home in San Diego.  The season is almost over, and I was reminded today at a craft fair that our city would be poorer without it.  

Jacaranda trees line Seventh Avenue north from Upas.

The young artist, Nikko Sanchez, was putting reflections

into his painting of the pool at Botanic House in Balboa Park.

He is a volunteer in a project to restore the murals 

at Chicano Park in Barrio Logan.

Today is Irene's Birthday...

Neighbors celebrate.

Here’s what happened...

First, I must confess that my attention has been drawn to birds lately.  My wife would  say “focused,” and I’ll admit it as long as she doesn’t say obsessed when she talks to the neighbors about it. She, too, is actually focused on one particular bird which spends a lot of time on a high branch of a big fiddle-leaf ficus growing in a huge planter near our front door.  All creatures poop, and this bird does it a lot... on our walkway.  Maybe the bird considers its droppings a gift... the way small children do if their parents are perceived to be focused on bowel movements.  

The bird that sleeps by our door is just one of many that live on our hill. Doves and hummingbirds have nested near my window. Since our young hummingbird left the nest, I’ve been on the lookout for it.  Several blooming shrubs around our place attract hummingbirds, but I can’t tell if any one of the several who spend time there might be younger than the others.  I’ve thought I might recognize a clumsy adolescent hummer among them, but I didn't. We also have orioles, house finches, sparrows, scrub jays, wren, warblers, and a couple of kinds of woodpeckers. Parrots from Hillcrest on the other side of the valley come over to our hill sometimes to survey the territory. They always fly around in a squawking bevy, but they never seem to like what the see.  

Mostly, I haven’t noticed  patterns of bird visits to our yard but it’s clear that they come to feed around the flowers and bushes. Occasionally, around four  o’clock in the afternoon hundreds of crows fly west to east in Mission Valley, but I don’t know what that’s all about. I don’t know if they congregate somewhere near the coast and all start off a few at a time like battalions of aircraft on bombing runs of if they start off as a few in the west and pick up others along the way.  They fly east by the hundreds, but I’ve never seen them return together; so apparently they straggle back individually or a few at a time on their own.  Some people don’t like our crows, but I do.  They’re smart creatures.  

My favorites are the hummingbirds and the doves.  Hummingbirds seem smarter than doves; but, of course, again I don’t know what I’m talking about. Hummers seem a bit more cavalier than doves, some might say they are ruthless... even cruel.  I think the mother who was with us this spring actually got rid of one of her chicks. I tried to save it by putting it back in the nest, but she rejected my help and put it out again. She took very good care of the one that remained in the nest... and she did it with no help from a male bird.  As far as I know, she built the nest all by herself.  He didn’t come around at all after the mating ceremony, to which, of course, I didn’t get an invitation. On the other hand, the male dove last year pitched in on all the parenting tasks.  He helped build the nest, such as it was.  Doves’ nests can hardly be called structures... nothing more than a few twigs laid across just about anything that’s reasonably stationary.  In our building doves have laid eggs on the tops of light boxes.  People who don’t want the mess put rocks on their light boxes to discourage them.  My doves last year used a hanging basket that I had put up for a pot of flowers. They got to it before I bought the flowers... half a dozen twigs and straws and they were in the business of making a family... Mom and Pop dove, doing it together.  Before the eggs hatched, the male spent as much time sitting on the nest as the female did.  After they hatched, the male brought food as regularly as the female did.

-------

My ramblings about the lives of San Diego birds is not what I intended when I began this journal writing.  I am writing because of something mysterious that happened around nine o’clock last night when we came home from an event at a Balboa Park museum. A small bird, a wren or a sparrow, followed me into our apartment.  I had left the door open while I put down some bags, and the bird flew into the living room and perched on the frame of our James Rabby painting of sunflowers. It’s the first time a bird has come into our house, so Margaret hurriedly closed bedroom doors to keep it in the front part of the house, hoping it would go back out the way it came in.  Before I could grab my camera for a picture of it sitting on the painting, It flew into my study... and out again... and out the front door. That was it.  That’s what happened.  

When the bird flew in, I had already posted my BLOG yesterday, the one with E.E. Cummings’ poem that ends with “I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars not to dance.”  My focus was obviously on birds. My picture for yesterday was a saucy female mallard I had photographed up close after she had hopped out of the pool of the fountain in front of the San Diego Museum of Art. I took two pictures of her, so I’ve included the other one today.  A more colorful male mallard was in the pool with her, but he didn’t come out. She kept up a loud quacking quarrel as she marched around the raised edge of the pool before flying off in the direction of the reflecting pool. 

I know it’s just a coincidence that the little brown ball of feathers came into my house on a day when I had been thinking and writing about birds... actually, after I had been quietly celebrating the reality of birds in my life. It was a coincidence... wasn’t it? I went down to the river with my camera today looking specifically for birds.  I heard them singing, but I didn’t get close enough to one, not even a duck, to get a picture.  Go figure...

My picture for today is nasturtiums.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing

than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

You shall above all things be glad and

young...

by E. E. Cummings

you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you're young, whatever life you wear

It will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think,may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation's dead undoom.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

“I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…” 

--David Attenborough

O.K., O.K., O.K...  I don’t know why bad things happen to good people. When I am drawn into a discussion about the nature of God, I must qualify anything I say by admitting that I don’t know what I’m talking about...I’m guessing... and some of the guesses are off-the-wall... and some arise out of wishful thinking.  I have no satisfactory answers to the questions that have driven learned people to draft and offer articles of faith as final proof of whatever they wish to be true.

Yet... Yet... Yet I continue to be moved by what I see... and hear... and feel.

On the morning of June 9th, 2007,  when I sat on the floor of the room in our apartment where I start every day with yoga, I saw a face at the base of a eucalyptus tree in our back yard. Actually, It was half a face, but anybody who had ever been a child in a Sunday School class would say the face was very like the pictures of Jesus in Sunday School books.  

Well, that morning, I went on with the yoga practice wondering what the explanation might be. Every time I looked at the tree, the face was there.  I called Margaret to look at it.  It was there all through the morning.  This variety of eucalyptus tree sheds its skin every year.  The leather-like bark splits and falls away quickly.  At 12:56 p.m. I got my photo du jour.  I know the time because digital cameras record that kind of information.  

I pay attention to that tree.  I see it every morning.  I always notice when the splitting starts.  It happens in June every year, and it began a few days ago.  Mostly the patterns formed by the splitting are abstract. This year the images are intriguing, so I’ve decided to think of this particular tree as my spirit tree.  As I said at the beginning of this writing, I know it makes no sense.  Some things don’t have to make sense. 

There was nothing at all unusual about my bicycle ride today... everything about it was exceptional, a trip like no other... yet it t was very like every bicycle ride of my life.  On my  ride today, as usual,  I went down the hill from where I live half-way up, and thought as I coasted down to the road below that riding a bicycle downhill is like flying, like being a bird.  Does a bird, I wonder, experience the ecstasy of flight dissipate at the moment it settles on a branch if it’s a sparrow or in pond or river if it’s an egret.  When I get to the bottom of a long hill on my bicycle, I am transformed, metamorphosed. Coming down I am bird... floating mostly but occasionally just to feel the strength and power of muscles, I peddle in a short burst the way I’ve seen hawks floating and circling down, effortlessly flap wings suddenly, not because they have to but because they are reminding themselves that they can power their own flight... no wind or updraft necessary; and when I get to the straightaway at the bottom of a hill I metamorphose from bird to centaur. When I am a centaur I don’t forget that I was a bird and can go back to being one again. 

Some days drift and meander through sameness, and other days gallop in a maze of contradictions. Often I don’t decide which of the three possible ways I will turn when I get to the bottom of our hill until I’ve come to a full stop.  Today, however, even before I flew down, I knew I wanted to go out to the sea... to smell it... to feel the damp coolness of the breeze... to hear breaking surf; so I headed west.  After a couple of miles of galloping along with automobiles zipping past me like wildebeests in the rainy season , I turned onto the path by the river where ducks and crows and smaller birds seemed to know I was coming.  Egrets raised their heads and looked around. Pairs of mallards sauntered.  Swallows swarmed near bridges. I was alone except for them, and it seemed right.

...for my Friends Ben and Ben

Alleluia,

Go

od

i

s

God

I don’t long any more

for the go...od old days

when I knew

for..... sure,

no

doubt

how...when...why

about

ANYTHING.

Because the bible told me so

I’d never have

to 

wonder...

didn’t need

cur

iosity,

BUT

it didn’t take!

it didn’t work!

I

wonder...

All th

e

TIME

a

bout

EVERYTHING

AND

i

tin

gle

with ecstasy

not kNOWing

and

MARVEL at the MYSTERY

and am glad for it stretching forward

kNOWing

on

ly

that

Go

od

i

s

God.

If that

makes me

A...theist?

So...

Be...

It!

Alleluia!


That
‘s
all I know
and IT
‘s
ENOUGH.

Our baby hummingbird has gone off into the world to seek its fortune.  I got those last picture... I'll think of them as the graduation pictures... yesterday.  Now the crows are trying to lift my spirits.  It may be enough tomorrow, but today I'm bereft.