Spring \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Bee Hiving Moon<\/p>\n
“Life isn\u2019t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”\u00a0by<\/em>\u00a0George Bernard Shaw<\/p>\n Later today, beets blood, bull and golden and carrots, Nantes and one lone blueberry to replace a dead plant. \u00a0I think about it, this planting and nourishing, watching and waiting, then harvesting and preserving and eating, and I feel a part of my life being created. \u00a0This part gets its hands dirty, relishes the seasons and their graces, their vagaries. \u00a0This part looks at shades of green, knows this most important color as a friend and ally.<\/p>\n Another part, this one quiet and inward, wanders the halls of art museums, galleries, image collections on the internet and in books. Looking. \u00a0Seeing. \u00a0No dirty hands here. \u00a0Visual contact. \u00a0Delight in a curve, a color, an image, a remaking of tradition, new ways of perceiving. \u00a0This one knows the spread of art from Chauvet Caves to MOMA and delights in each creative moment.<\/p>\n Then the father. \u00a0And husband. \u00a0The family guy. \u00a0Cousins, aunts, uncles. \u00a0Grandpop. \u00a0One in a line. \u00a0A link between that great one-celled ancestor and the transformation of our species that is yet to come. \u00a0Love not abstract but concrete and timeless. \u00a0Walking with children and their children, walking on toward some unknown future. \u00a0Together. \u00a0That’s a part.<\/p>\n A noisy chunk, this one involved in struggle, voicing the cries of the poor, the victims, the forest under\u00a0siege, the child with no food, the mother with no roof, the woman with no safety, the waters helpless before their contaminators. \u00a0Here the ways we act together take precedence. \u00a0Arms linked, voices raised. \u00a0La Lucha.<\/p>\n The small town. \u00a0A store of memories of times when matters no longer close but the baseline for all that has come later lived as the present. \u00a0Bike rides, baseball games, kick the can after dark, school year after year after year after year. \u00a0Mom and Dad. \u00a0Home. \u00a0Brother and Sister. \u00a0All dispersed. \u00a0Mom and Dad dead. \u00a0A combination cemetery and museum of my past.<\/p>\n This part, this me loves words. \u00a0Reads fiction, non-fiction, poetry. \u00a0Consumes books, then purchases more books, still reading, chomping up line after line, then composting them in neurons and synapses. \u00a0Writes his own word, putting out line after line, trying to repay the great debt from all those others. \u00a0All those who wrote before him. \u00a0To sing their praise, to add a note to their great symphony.<\/p>\n And, of course, the wanderer. \u00a0Who wonders what lies just past the curve of the earth? \u00a0What are they doing over there in China, Cambodia, England, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Chile? \u00a0How do they do it? \u00a0What colors do they love? \u00a0What music do they embrace? \u00a0What makes them the distinctive people they are? \u00a0Most important for the wanderer lies in the stranger \u00a0experience. \u00a0The moment when his America has been stripped away, slunk away into the no longer there distance and he walks among the ruins of Angkor, or Ephesus or on the sacred island of Delos.<\/p>\n As near as I can tell, these are the major parts I’ve been creating, shaping. \u00a0The life my hands and feet and eyes and brain and heart and soul have imagined into existence. \u00a0And neither imagination nor life is yet exhausted.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Spring \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Bee Hiving Moon “Life isn\u2019t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”\u00a0by\u00a0George Bernard Shaw Later today, beets blood, bull and golden and carrots, … Continue reading Creating Self<\/span>