Posts

Tehran.

-
Image
Somebody told me: “Oil is raining on Tehran”.  The war was driving me crazy, the television flashes and black and white explosions over and over and the broken gray concrete and rebar and chards of glass and scraps of clothing. Somebody said: “What about the cats and dogs?”  I’d been doom scrolling for days as the Middle East caught fire again and I felt sick so I took a toke turned on Clapton and sweet relief flowed through my body and I came back to reality. I got off the couch to see if the Snow Drops I planted in late Autumn at the base of the huge Hemlock tree outside my front door had come yet. But not yet. And I turned to look at Point Mountain to see if there was a first blush but not yet either and I turned to my dwindling wood pile  and carried four logs inside.  The feeling was overwhelming. I needed the Goddess. Over these past days my energy was drained and sucked from me by the doom scrolling and I tasted blood and bone and burning steel and rubb...
Post a Comment
Read more

Aloka: Sanskrit for Illumination and Light.

-
Image
I awoke and the gray cat was curled in a bundle beside the bed and the sun had not yet risen but silver light was coming and the line of pines and skinny oaks   was skeletal against the sunrise. This morning there was no ice and frost on the old wooden sash windows. A week ago they were opaque and ice formed where the needle wind found its way into the cracks.   This morning I turned, as I usually do, to  gaze a minute or two on Hassan Hourani’s painting, hung on the wall in a two by three foot  black frame. The painting is Hassan’s  journey from Palestine to New York. Hassan is a character in his own paintings  and in this one lays across a steel trestle bridge in a long yellow robe that conforms in color with the peeling remains of the unpainted plaster and floral wallpaper on the bedroom wall. Hassan stretches across the bridge like a cat amid crooked tenement buildings with yellow lit windows and television aerials and lamp posts and yellow light. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cuba Librés with Wilfred Burchett in Cuba cha cha cha.

-
Image
Wednesday, August 22, 1979:  On assignment with Four Corners, ABC documentary unit with David Brill and Ian Macintosh. It’s the Sixth Summit of Non-Aligned Nations , a politically charged affair in Cuba. A hundred nations opposed to America are gathering ninety miles off Key West, Florida. The summit represents nearly two-thirds of United Nations' members and comprises fifty-five percent of the world’s population but it’s hardly known in the West.  After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the early sixties Fidel Castro is still alive and we’re hoping for an interview. U.S. aircraft were not welcome nor allowed in Cuba so we flew via Kingston, Jamaica to Havana on Aeroflot. The Berlin Wall had not yet fallen and the Soviet Union still stood tall beside Fidel twenty years after the Cuban Revolution.  It’s a little over an hour’s flight, and I’m watching the white furrows of trading vessels steaming in the blue-green Caribbean Sea. And soon we descend and take a taxi to the Hotel N...
Post a Comment
Read more