Postcard: Flow Chart

The Drowned Man. Rodeo Beach.

Sculpture mix; copper carbonate and matte white splatters.

Postcard: Sea-Caves

Postcard: Morning Shade

Another view from the kayak heading south from Rodeo Beach toward Point Bonita.

Here, I've just moved south of Rodeo Cove into the passage between the cliffs and the rocks. Once I pass the point just ahead, I'll be able to see the Point Bonita in the distance a bit to the left. Note how calm the water is here. If you check yesterday's Postcard, you'll see more surge and energy as I move out of the shelter of the passage. A rather calm day, but still movement among the rocks and sea-caves. (My kayak does better in rougher water anyway.)

Marin morning: Labor Day, 2010.

Postcard: Marin Morning, Labor Day

The view from a kayak, heading south from Rodeo Beach toward Point Bonita.

The Pict

Here's my tribute to the ancient Picts . . . in fantasy and fact.

Robert E. Howard's Bran Mak Morn is a heroic figure, the last king of the vanishing Pictish race, beset on all sides by Romans, Norse, Britons, and even Irish reivers there in the lands of Caledonia and the Scottish--Pictish!--isles north of the Roman Wall, Hadrian's boundary and the mark of Pax Romana like the mark, the brand, burned into the skin of Britannia. How the ancient goddesses of land and sea must have howled and keened.

Of course, Howard got the history quite wrong--as even he admitted--but the mythic outlines hold, have branded my mind. Frazetta's cover for the Ace paperback Bran Mak Morn helped hold this tale, these characters, this tribe or race of human creatures in my mind.

Despite Howard, I link the Pictish tribes to the Celtic in my veins, to the ink in my skin, but that's fantasy and wayward at that. Still. Bran Mak Morn is a name of portent and import to me. "Worms of the Earth" is a favorite tale. Caledonia a land in the mists. (Listen to Dougie Maclean's "Caledonia," and you can travel there on the wings of song.)

This fellow is a rough gestural piece, shaped in a 20-minute session with a model, a mere exercise, that I later pit-fired. The beaten copper ornaments seem fitting, as does the stone and ivy/weed setting.

The Sea Anemone, with Help from Neruda

Anemona

La flor del penasco salado

abre y cancela su corona

por la voluntad de la sal,

por el apitito de aqua.

O corola de carne fria

y de pistilos vibradores

anemona viuda, intestino.

--Pablo Neruda
The Sea Anemone

The Flower of the salty boulder

open and cancels its crown

by the will of salt

with water's appetite.

Oh corolla of cold flesh

and vibrating pistils,

widow-anenome, intestine.

-Pablo Neruda

--from Neruda at Isla Negra: Poems by Pablo Neruda, edited by Dennis Maloney, translations by Maria Jacketti, Dennis Maloney, and Clark Zlotchew. White Pine Press: Freedonia, New York. 1998.

My photographs of Anthopleura xanthogrammica, or the Giant Green Anemone, were taken in the surge channels off the actual point at Lover's Point, Pacific Grove, CA.

Story: Compassion and the Labyrinth

I've said this before:

stories instruct us, entertain us, tease us, lead us.

Without story, what do we have?

The present moment, sure, but even this present only makes sense once you fit it into the fabric of your life, of your world, of your story?

Didn't one of Eugene O'Neill's characters claim, "The past is the present, isn't it? And the future too?" But only if you know the story, I claim, and you want to know the story. Don't you?

Here are two passages regarding story that resonate with me.

May they resonate with you too.

Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

--Barry Lopez, from an interview in Poets and Writers, vol. 22, issue 2 (March/April 1994).

I found this quotation from Lopez in Charles de Lint's Someplace to Be Flying.

I hold with Barry Lopez--stories, compassion--but Rebecca Solnit, too, offers a real thread through the labyrinth of life.

‎A story can be a gift like Ariadne's thread, or the labyrinth, or the labyrinth's ravening Minotaur; we navigate by stories, but sometimes we only escape by abandoning them.

--Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide for Getting Lost