No Coming, No Going

I titled this watercolor I made of Jesse & Yuki, No Coming, No Going, after a song by Sister Annabel Laity:

♫♫♪♫♫♪♫♫

No coming, no going, no after, no before;
I hold you close to me, I release you to be so free.
Because I am in you, and you are in me,
Because I am in you, and you are in me.

Here's the French version by Lily Gozlan:

Sans venir, et sans partir, ni avant, ni après.
Je te tiens près de moi, et te laisse pour être libre
Parce que je suis en toi, et tu es en moi,
Parce que je suis en toi, et tu es en moi.

♫♫♪♫♫♪♫♫

happy April!

clear day

Today I bicycled from my house to epic cafe, enjoying the glorious blue sky and warm sunshine on my face. I've been holed up for the past several days with a head cold, kind of flu-y and fuzzy headed, so being outside felt like a real celebration. I can breath through my left nostril now; a wonderful thing, breathing. Right nostril breathing still to come.

Odaiko Sonora

Here are the watercolor sketches I did while listening to taiko group Odaiko Sonora performing at the UA Poetry Center Housewarming Festival.

It's fun and challenging to paint/sketch people in movement. I need more practice at letting the pencil-brush-pen flow as the movements go.

Calm between the storm

Yesterday it monsooned here in Tucson all day except for a two-hour period in the morning (while I was out walking with Yukester). My street was running like a little river. There were huge booms of thunder, long streaks of crackly lightning, power outages, trees uprooted, debris flying in the wind, and big branches torn from their trunks. Here are some photos from our walk through the nearby campus of the University of Arizona, starting with the morning trickster sky.

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I saw these people sleeping on the porch of a house.



They were sleeping so soundly, protected from the rain of the previous night and early morning.



We took a different route than usual through campus, to the UA turtle pond.



We saw nibbling koi and some that didn't nibble, little and medium sized orange fish and a few small white ones. Here, koi nibble on the roots of the palm trees growing around the pond.



See the swimming turtle?



We walked along an olive tree street. I admired this old trunk while Yuki sniffed the grasses wet with morning rain.



Past the east entrance of Old Main and the curly old cactus, we headed down 'the mall" to the cactus garden.



By the student union, we saw neighbors Michael (human) and Bernard (dog). We stopped to talk (and bark) with them.





I stepped up and into the raised garden to take a closer look at the cactus blossoms (echinopsis oxygona, aka cereus oxygonus - easter lily cactus). Yuki waited quietly for me, standing guard.



I counted nine blooms on this cereus cluster--that's some serious cereus.







Back sides of the cereus cluster. All the blooms were pointed eastward.



They are closed up now, I'm sure. They only last one day.

Planting

This morning I spent a few hours planting native trees and plants and sprinkling wildflower seed in berms with other volunteers in my neighborhood. I was very happy to be the seed sprinkler; I felt like Johnny Appleseed joyously putting seed around the trees and plants, then raking them in. The ground in this site was so hard that a contractor had to dig the tree and plant holes for us, not even a pick ax could penetrate the kaliche.

teapots 47, 48, 49 & 50 plus summer thrills

One of my favorite geeky computer things to do is to compare and contrast the summer temperatures here in Tucson to those of Monterey, where I lived from July 2003-May 2005 and then again from October 2005-May 2006 (as well as from 1988-1990).

On my desktop, I have two temperature widgets for comparison that show sun, cloud, snow, rain, and fog icons with the temperature in numbers underneath. I usually keep the widgets on farenheit, but take a look at the celsius temperatures now and then for fun.

Right now, my Tucson widget tells me it is 99° at 9pm with the almost full moon visible in a clear dark sky. Meanwhile, in Monterey, there are clouds or fog (can't tell from the widget which it is--maybe both!) and the temperature is 69°!

Who knows why I enjoy doing this as much as I do, but I do. It makes me smile and laugh. Maybe it's heat delirium.

The six-day forecast in the Tucson widget shows six bright yellow sun icons for each of the next five days (plus today) with the temperatures of 108°, 106°, 107°, 109°, 108°, and 108° through Tuesday. In contrast, the Monterey widget shows a sun icon with a cloud on top of it for four out of the six days with temperatures of 86°, 74°, 77°, 73°, 75°, and 74°.

Of course, I don't need to see the Tucson widget at all to know when it is bright and hot outside. My body senses the heat. The heat changes my appetite. I eat less in the morning, almost nothing in the day, drink mostly water and tea until late afternoon when I finally feel a little hungry for a salad or a bowl of beans & rice. At night, I eat very little or nothing and I am up at dawn. It feels cool now in the dark of night. I sip water and listen to Yuki panting.

Summer Suite Sponsor Soiree Slide Show (Ssssss)

I made a slide show from the photos I took on Saturday night at Casa Libre en la Solana during their Second Annual Summer Suite Sponsor Soirée. Casa Libre en la Solana is a non-profit writer's retreat in Tucson in an 1890s adobe right off of eclectic Fourth Avenue. Anyone can donate to Casa Libre en la Solana in support of their mission -- offering writers and scholars a place to write. To see the captions, mouse (or track pad) over the slides. If the slide show is too small or not functioning smoothly, click on the slide show to view it at the slideshow website.

Casa Libre en La Solana

This Saturday evening, June 23rd, is the Second Annual "Suite Sponsor Soirée" at Casa Libre en La Solana in Tucson. Five pieces of my art will be showing and for sale along with several other local artists' work. There will be poetry readings, live music, an art show, a raffle, an art auction, some yummy refreshments, and more. All for a good cause--to raise money for Casa Libre, the Southwest's only year-round retreat offering writers a place to write. So, if you are reading this and live in Tucson, come hear some excellent poets read from their work, enjoy live music, take a dip in the pool and jacuzzi (in case you're not hot enough already), and buy some local art. See you there!

Casa Libre en La Solana
228 N. 4th Avenue
Tucson, Arizona :)

6pm-Midnight

$15 advance/$20 at the door

* * *
Here are Casa's fliers for the event--printed with detail from my painting Kameanji. The top picture shows three fliers lined up as a tryptich. Kameanji is one of my paintings for sale at the Soirée.
**Click**on pictures for a larger view.

Light, heat, sun, bright

Yesterday morning I got up with the sun as usual, between 5:15 and 5:30, sleeping with only a sheet over me. It's that time of year. Sheet weather, lizard and sandal weather. Don't leave home without your water weather. Take your hat with you weather. No need for a reminder in this kind of weather. In summer, hat & water are my fifth and sixth appendages.

Now I find more lizard tails and feathers in my house, but I don't like finding dead gekkos. Gekkos seem rarer and more vulnerable than the lizards, maybe because of their tanslucent pink skin. I praise Jesse for her hunting skill, but not with gekkos. With gekkos she gets only a stare from me. Then I repeat her name three times: "Jesse-Jesse-Jesse" like my mother did when I got into mischief as a child ("Nicole-Nicole-Nicole"), but I always laughed and smiled when my mom said that--and went on my merry way. I think Jesse does the same, she knows that I love her even though she hunts gekkos. She's just being her perfectly wonderful cat self.

* * * * *

In my neighborhood, we began berm forming for the trees and plants that we will plant on the street in front of my house. The ground is extremely hard to dig. Yesterday morning, we worked from 7am to 9am (too hot after that) and removed many large rocks of pure kaliche, like cement. The way the berms are formed will allow the natural rains (the monsoons--when they come) to water all the trees and plants without runoff to the street.

* * *

Summers in Tucson are like winters in the Arctic. If you like the snow, you enjoy being out in it for short periods of time, longer than that is too much to endure. Same in Tucson, the Sonoran Desert Bioregion. Those who cannot stand the heat leave. The rest of us... well, we take our cues from the animals. We find strips of shade when out walking in daylight, take siestas as much as possible, drink lots of water, always wear a hat, and enjoy the early mornings and anytime after the sun goes down. I love summertime. It's fun to talk about the heat even when it is so obvious; my friends and I always talk about the heat and about how dry it is. We commiserate about how cold the public buildings are kept in summer, like the University libraries and any large grocery store, which means you freeze inside unless you bring along a sweater or long sleeve shirt.

Last Friday, I went up to Mt. Lemmon with some friends and we talked about the heat and water and napping the whole way up. What else is there in Tucson to talk about in summer? Everything slows down, tens of thousands of snowbirds and most of the 37,000 UA students have left, and those of us who stay enjoy less traffic on the streets and a less crowded Downtown-UA-Arts District-4th Av area. I love bicycling around with less traffic.

Last week over tea with a friend at Seven Cups, we both mentioned that summer is our favorite time here for all the reasons I mentioned: slower, less people, we like the heat, napping, hats. Tucsonans' summer greetings commonly have some weather talk built into it, it's just what you do when you live in such an extreme climate. And now that we're into 100 plus degree temperatures everyday (37.77ºC plus), I've been hearing more of the "M" word in conversations. For example, "...when the monsoons come" or "I can't wait 'til the monsoons come", "Ahhh, it'll be good when the monsoons are here", etc.

Yes, the monsoons...but, I can wait. We haven't had that wonderful build up of intense dry heat yet, day after day after day of 102, 104, 109 degree heat, blue blue skies, and no clouds in sight. The cactus haven't puckered yet, I haven't walked in enough shade strips yet or felt enough of the relief difference makes once outside in the sunshine after being inside an overly air-conditioned building. The saguaros still need more sunshine for the coronas to bloom. The monsoons will come as the saguaro fruit ripens.

I love the heat and I'm glad so many people leave Tucson in the summer for their green grassy humid watery worlds (and I love green grassy watery worlds in a green grassy watery world environment--just not here in the desert).
We're happily thriving here.

* * * * * * *

My sunflowers seem to be taking the heat well, too. I water them morning and evening, or else they'd be brown and shriveled by now.




































































In between napping, bicycling in the heat, and enjoying potfuls of tea at Seven Cups, I drink cool bubbly mineral water with lime. Agua gaseosa con lima.













A cool afternoon meal.













Sheets dry in 5-10 minutes.