The most wonderful thing to Know is that we are perfect just as we are - there's no waiting for anything else to happen or to not happen. All is Well and as it should be ~ and ~ we are Divinely supported in all ways in this very moment. This very moment is the only place that life is.



Every Good thing emerges out of Chaos

Yes

I am prepared for more good than I can even imagine

Word seeds that came in sleep

"Oh," said the mist to the flower petals. "I see you've come to visit me."

Teapots 46 & 47 ~ 5th Set of 100 Teapots

Watercolor on hanshi.



Watercolor color and black fountain pen ink on hanshi.

friendly dragon

I met this dragon on the trail yesterday...



... a friendly dragon and,



a cousin to our Unicorn friend whom we met several years ago on the trail at Point Lobos:



If you have been reading my blog for a while, you may remember my post in which the Unicorn appeared. I remember it and you can read or reread it here.

Something I Have Learned by Hafiz

Water
Gets poured through a cloth
To become free of impurities.

The Beloved's Name
Is a mystical weave and pattern--

A hidden sieve of effulgence
We need to pass through thousands of
Times.

From my constant remembrance
Of the Friend,

All I now say is safe to
Drink.

Something that I have learned
From the Kind Radiant One

Who drew me from the unfathomable
Sky's well

Makes me playful all day
Long.

~ The Subject Tonight Is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz; Daniel Ladinsky, translator.

tea in starlight

I painted this one, too, by low lamplight and candle light at night. I like seeing the light in the darkness.



teapot no. 45 (445) of my 5th Set of 100 Teapots
Watercolor and black fountain pen ink on hanshi.

Light emerges

© Nicole Raisin Stern
Watercolor and black fountain pen ink on hanshi.

This is teapot no. 44 (444) in my 5th set of 100 Teapots
View Set 5 here

☆☼☽

Light emerges
as it always does

Just trust
and wait

The Light is always here
even when all seems dark

~ Nicole Raisin Stern

Longing to disconnect

"Before laptops" [I snapped this photo of a scene in the movie, "Kundun", while watching the dvd on my old laptop. In this scene, Kundun is playing with his music box]

* * * * * * * *

All this electronic equipment that has become an integral part of my life is feeling like too much lately - laptop, digital camera, cord to connect camera to laptop, cell phone (with camera), USB mini-chip reader for the cell phone camera, scanner-copier-printer, external hard drive, and the international plug adaptor set for my laptop. I am longing to go back to writing mostly with pen and paper, to spending more time sketching than snapping photos, and more time in real, real-time conversations with friends, than the bits and pieces of conversations via the internet.

A mere ten or eleven years ago, I only occasionally wrote an email. I first discovered blogging in the summer of 2005. Soon after, I found flickr, the photo sharing site, as a way to upload my scanned in artwork. At the time, blogger did not accept images from Macs. I would upload to flickr first, then transfer the image from flickr to blogger. Also in 2005, I was given my first digital camera, a Nikon Cool Pix E990, which was a cast-off from a friend who thought it was about to die. I resisted joining Facebook until the summer of 2009. I had received numerous Facebook invitations from friends which required signing up in order to even view their pages to see if signing up would be something I'd be interested in doing.

I like the show-and-tell aspect of the social media sites. Show-and-tell was a favorite time for me in grade school, along with recess, art, lunch, and gym. Flickr soon became a place to post my writing alongside my artwork and photos. It was also fun to receive comments from friends in many parts of the world. I enjoyed reading positive feedback on my art from other artists and photographers, often in the languages I read and write (Spanish, Japanese, French, and to a lesser degree, a few others).

On flickr, I made many new friends. On several occasions, a few of my new flickr friends visited me, Yuki, Jesse, and Bodhi at our home in Tucson. I was invited to visit a few flickr friends in their homes, too, in different states and countries. Writing and reading comments via the internet in my other languages has contributed to my ongoing acquisition and use of these languages at times when I am not actually surrounded by Spanish, French, or Japanese. I also benefit from the cyber-store function of the internet that enables me to sell my artwork via PayPal.

Now, however, I am longing to connect more with the earth. I need to hold a pen and pencil in my hands and to write in full sentences again. I want to do more face-to-face connecting than interfacing. I know, I know, the internet is convenient, has so many benefits, and a computer is thought to be indispensable. But can a laptop plant seeds in the earth to grow vegetables? Can a laptop prepare delicious wholesome food? Can a laptop emit scents that spark deeply connected human memories? Or hold a baby?

I know that the internet can plant ideas with the zillions of pieces and pages of available information to us. I can speedily find what I want to learn - I just google it. Yet, I miss the tactile looking up of things in big dictionaries, feeling the paper, smelling the moldy books, and I miss consulting with the live person (a librarian) in real-time. I prefer reading books whose covers I can hold in my hands rather than scrolling through electronic versions. And, I don't text.

What to do? I don't know. I am not looking for an answer, really. I think I will just live into the answer and experiment with short periods of disconnection to the internet on the one hand and reconnection to my more desired real-time, physical entities on the other. Or, maybe I'll google "how to disconnect from the internet and still be human" and go from there....

* * * * * * *



The Seven of Pentacles

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.

~Marge Piercy

~*~

TROUBLED

Troubled?
Then stay with me, for I'm not.

Lonely?
A thousand naked amorous ones dwell in ancient caves
Beneath my eyelids.

Riches?
Here's a pick,
My whole body is an emerald that begs,
"Take me."

Write all that worries you on a piece of parchment;
Offer it to God.
Even from the distance of a millenium

I can lean the flame in my heart
Into your life

And turn
All that frightens you
Into holy
Incense
Ash.

~ The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the great Sufi master
Translations by Daniel Ladinsky

Thank you, apples.

Yesterday I went apple picking with friend Josh of Neighborhood Harvest here in Ashland. We picked the remaining yellow apples from a good climbing tree using ladder and apple pickers with extension handles. We ended up with 2 boxes of sweet apples. This afternoon, I made apple sauce - just apples cut into small pieces cooked in water and sprinkled with a pinch of pink himalayan salt and a little powdered cinnamon. Such a warm feeling to be out in the fresh air harvesting fruit with friends. I like seeing how things grow.




Yellow apples with their green tomato, potato, and onion buddies

Renshuu 練習

A friend from taiko class came over this afternoon to practice taiko with me. She brought her bachi (drum sticks for taiko) and her practice drum made from PVC pipe (with real cow skin head). I used my djembé and bachi because that is the drum I have. The djembé's diameter and height are both smaller and shorter than the practice taiko we use in class, but is fine for simple rhythm practice. We practiced the song "renshuu" over and over, smiling with delight as we produced the rhythms together. We spoke the special taiko words - kuchishowa - for the sounds that are made on the drum and laughed.

Golden Leaf Gym

An invigorating romp through the leaves
and standing-like-a-tree exercises at the park.

Membership in this golden leaf gym: free; benefits: priceless!

getting darker earlier now

Today I saw a three-legged deer on my way to taiko class. It was already getting dark in the late afternoon when I was bicycling, bicycling and making up songs as I rode. She was standing quietly under a yellow-leafed tree, this deer who walked gracefully on three. I saw that her fourth leg, which resembled a curled tree branch, was tucked high beneath her chest. After a few moments, a deer with antlers appeared behind her and they walked across the street to where the raspberry bushes edge a wide field of grass.

Don doku don don.

Why All This Talk?

Why all this talk of the Beloved,
Music and dancing,

And Liquid ruby-light we can lift in a cup?

Because it is low tide,
A very low tide in this age
And around most hearts.

We are exquisite coral reefs,
Dying when exposed to strange
Elements.

God is the wine-ocean we crave--
We miss

Flowing in and out of our
Pores.


~ The Subject Tonight Is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz; Daniel Ladinsky, translator

This tree shared its light with me
today, as I stood under it, quietly, like a tree.

dear deer

I saw deer in the darkness tonight as I came to the part of the hill where I hop off my bike. Three of them. I could see their long ears parallel to the ground as they grazed alongside the houses on the hill. I was still repeating don doku don doku, kara kara kara kara from taiko class, exhilarated from the rhythms and the bicycle ride home.

I VOTE FOR YOU FOR GOD

When your eyes have found the strength
To constantly speak to the world
All that is most dear
To your own
Life,

When your hands, feet and tongue
Can perform in that rare unison
That comforts this longing earth
With the knowledge

Your soul,
Your soul has been groomed
In His city of love;

And when you can make others laugh
With jokes
That belittle no one
And your words always unite,

Hafiz
Does vote for you.

Hafiz will vote for you to be
The minister of every country in
This universe.

Hafiz does vote for you my dear.
I vote for you
To be
God.

from The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master Translations by Daniel Ladinsky

I Took It as a Sign

Someone sent a band to my house,
And it started playing
At five in the morning.

I took this as a sign
God wanted me singing!
Then the moon joined in
And a few of the tenor-voiced stars,

And the earth offered its lovely belly
As a drum

Before I knew it,
I realized
All human beings could be happy

If they just had a few music lessons
From a Sweet Old Maestro
Like Hafiz.

From I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy
Renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky

Today's AbunDance

Did the AbunDance at the Farmer's Market today :))

I traded little paintings created especially for the purpose of trading for fruits and vegetables with the farmers... So-o satisfying and fun! The photo shows today's bounty. Broccoli, mustard greens, daikon greens, Russian kale, red potatoes, yellow potatoes, and another type whose name I have forgotten, two kinds of red onions and a little yellow onion, cantaloupe, tomatoes, red peppers and purple peppers, hot little chile peppers, butternut squash, strawberry/chocolate mousse, and dark rye bread.

Thanks! The container in the upper right with a pink something inside, contained the most delicious Chocolate Berry Mousse, a raw dessert by local company, Body Love Raw Food. Under the pink strawberry fluffiness was the chocolate fluffiness.

The square shape in plastic next to the pink container is dark rye bread from Sammy's.

Greens from, Eric, and Carl, and Quinn, and melons from Antonio... I love this exchange of joyful energies.




Here are the paintings I traded:

for veggies ~


for melons:



for veggies:




for another loaf of bread (not pictured) ~



and

for the Strawberry-Chocolate Mousse (an offering of which Ganesh would surely approve :)

Coffee Press

You can press me
and still,
my essence
will ring true

~ Nicole Raisin Stern

shikantaza

just sit
just sip
the tea is full
then empty
pour again
drink it up
just sit
just sip

~NRS

秋

Autumn wind moves the trees
fresh air
cool breeze ~

No more Yuki

Yuki, my sweet, little Eskimo dog, left this world on April 1st, 2010. Yuki went "to sleep" while I held him in my arms at the veterinarian's. The euthanasia was administered gently, quickly, and painlessly. It was time.

Yuki was my constant companion for 17 years, best friend to Jesse, his cat sister, and big wise brother to little Bodhi, his kitten brother. Now, Bodhi, Jesse, and Yuki are all together again.

My furry family is no more. They were the best.

Yuki was born in February, 1993 and left gently on April 1st, 2010.

Thank you, Yuki, forever.

























The Yuki Set

Yuki-chan

It's a beautiful morning again today, with the scent of orange blossoms wafting in the slightly cool breeze. Yuki is out in front of the house where we are staying; he sniffs the air and stares in one direction for a long time. He stands open-eyed with that quizzical, curious expression on his face that we call "adorable", yet I think his stance and look really spell confusion; he cannot hear anymore nor can he see with clarity. I am guessing that his eyes only sense shapes and shadows.

Yuki cannot hear the birdsong that I call beautiful and he turns around in circles when we walk, unsure of which direction to go, even when I think he will be able to follow my loud guiding claps. He cannot. In the standard dog-to-human calculation of age that we do, Yuki is 119 years old (17 in dog years) - an old man! Yuki has been my dog since I first met one of his puppy siblings at the tender and fluffy age of five weeks, and knew I must have one. Yuki resembled a snowball - hence, the fitting name of "snow" in Japanese: Yuki. We have been with each other all this time.