Art Farm and other such things

here in are the images you've been seeking ... Charles Tucker on Residency at Art Farm with his intrepid assistants Scott and Carey ...

The Weasley's Burrow, aka: The Barn
The Artist's Garden
Charles Tucker: Cottage
Residents' House: Victoria
Charles Tucker, with intrepid assistants - Scott Bowers, Carey Tucker
Scott Bowers, Carey Tucker, Charles Tucker
Scott and Carey working on their roof bench
Life on the Farm

being here now

Revelations

On loss and other real things

I have been thinking … maybe way too much … these past months. The summer especially has been a time of contemplation. I have had a need to come to terms, to find a way of thinking about “things” that is tolerable.

over beer with a friend…

We all die. To everyone there comes a death. For those who love the dying that death is never fair or good enough or kind enough … It is always cruelty that our world should be diminished and that the ones we love eclipsed. The death of the loved is always a portent of our own end.

To each of us comes a death and never can that death satisfy.

---

All is metaphysics … while all may be knowable, there is never knowing enough to hold it all. The mind is at once infinite and finite … its capacities endless yet never all encompassing so that no matter how much is known there is ever the unknown but not the unknowable.

---

There is the “stuff” of being. It is being and it is thought. Thought is pattern and organization it is inherent to a being which arranges and rearranges, endlessly playing out every possible configuration, every possible reality. To ask if there is intelligence in this design is a misconception, intelligence is the substance of being.


---

There is no time.

We can only know now because we are in this configuration and it is necessarily this configuration that we know. We can only know the now we are in.

If one could travel back in time, time would either collapse, all nows becoming now, or multiple nows co-existing, segregated from one another. If I go back in time and change my own past then I become two … twins out of joint … One of me with my “original” history and one of me with my “altered” history and those two can never be rejoined. Once a thing has happened it can never unhappen and that is to say it has always been.

This is the nature of infinity … all possible moments beyond our ability to hold them all exist. It is only our knowing of now that creates time.

searching for venus ...

I realize now the importance of competition
Without competition there is nothing to push against
No standard against which to measure the quality of production

There are infinite reasons not to achieve
Infinite reasonable reasons not to give over to …

All will understand the limits of our success
Because there are reasons
A thousand reasonable reasons
That all our friends will understand
And commensurate
Over the slings and arrows
Which impede our progress

There is nothing to measure
But what we do

an unseen tether

Saint Catherine of Alexandria

It is easy and it is difficult to know how to surrender and how to give permission.

We live with the unseen witness and we ascribe to this witness many judgments. We believe that somehow if we suffer others will know our suffering and we will gain worthiness through this suffering. Somehow through debasement, by prostrating before others we prove our goodness. Those few exempted from these interior recriminations are those who through some fluke of rearing or through some internal dialogue have managed to persuade themselves, or are raised to believe, that they are worthy … some believe this in excess.

It is nothing more than a contemporary self-flagellation with the same degree of usefulness. While the diseases it spreads are perhaps less virulent than the plague they are none-the-less damning in their outcomes.

No doubt the content of this witness’s character was formed in the early days of Christian guilt. It is no doubt the descendant of those cultural beliefs that allowed the aristocracy to believe that God had ordained them to their places and had just as firmly placed their lessers rightly beneath them. Conversely, those lessers, equally convinced of their place, were satisfied to have a sense of ego/goodness fed through the virtues of their self-sacrifice. (I am made better than you in my suffering.)

Always it is a balance … how to silence this witness and reconstruct the being in some more helpful form… to know and accept that we are somehow worthy of our happinesses.

It is true that faith must be internal … it is the content of that faith we must reconstruct.

blue

always back and forth
A struggle to do this simple thing
To see and know what has been done
And to know what yet needs to be done

It is the struggle
The knowing of the limits of patience
The standing still
The absolute aloneness of that struggle
of seeing

The community of the lovers of solitude
Those who will stand
And take responsibility for what they have put into the world
A profess-ion
A declaration of the self

It has always been this
This secret love

You are wrapped in its folds of
Forever blueness
My fingers stained

Is it not worthy
Of all my time
Is it not worth
My life
And is it too much
That I profess
My love
In this act of struggling

afterall

Gustav Klimt, Danae

So why not
Give over
To the life deferred?

Waiting no longer for the validation of
An other
But the self embrace

Why not
Give over
To the love of life?

To joy?

What virtue
To deny the imagined life?

Laugh

Give over

No more waiting
Now to what is loved

zoe home safe!

the universe smiles ... zoe has returned home.

zoe is missing!!!

today and everyday ...

i'm thinking of you. happy birthday.



actions reveal motives
motives decode actions
the choices of a life … write a truth …

in other words …
if you want to know someone
look at the consistency of what they do
a single moment might be an anomaly
a thousand moments writes the story

petition

note to self:

the people who would say evil things ... are usually evil.

put another way:
don't let the bastards get you down.

a toast and an adieu...

a toast to the greatest cat who ever lived … (raise a beer and down it) … there was this animal that impacted my life in a way and to a degree and in such a positive manner that I grieve his death as much as I have grieved many others and more than some others I’m afraid … to have him in my life added a texture and a personality that frankly surpassed some humans. stupid to think this… maybe … but I believe that these lives are as potent and as lived and as felt as many an other. I know people who will never get the simple joy from living that he did … that will never value their companions as he did … that never had the courage that he had, nor his devotion… thanks William for finding me and having the kindness to share our lives. i love you always.

learning to live ... finally

Mama cat
Home
My room, my bed
Pictures of grandfather, sister, mother, father, me
Clothes
My life like it was

RAF
Grandmother
My heart
You
My life like it was

My righteousness
My obliviousness
My innocence
Grandmother
Him
My Youth
Mike
Bobby
A close friend
Daddy’s mind
My heart
Alabama
Mother’s voice
Daddy
My life like it was

Mother
Part of Me
Him
Trust
My life like it was

Lucy
William

--

The true marker of commitment, the signifier of devotion is to bear witness to a lifetime of moments.

i don't even have time to write...

I'm so busy and I'm thinking of so many things. I so want to get them out before they slip away but the clock keeps ticking and it's already eleven and I have to go to bed.

oh well...

summer... the living was easy...

back to the fray...

but first a glimpse back at the summer of love...

Dumbledore

Harry and Dumbledore: Ethical Statement

sometimes i ponder...

the living cannot intrude on the dead.

the dead do not fear death. the dead do not regret the manner of their passing. the dead are not haunted.

traveling to unknown destinations...

Katherine and her father, on our journey...

sitting...

red hot chili peppers is in the background. the conversation is as always intellectual intrigue and then... i love that phrase "and then..." certain phrases are pregnant with tomorrow. did you know there's someone who reads my blog who won't read this post most likely because it doesn't have the right title or search words. no search words! search me. (ok i'm smiling now).

so sitting at a table with conversation and always imagining the future and remember the past but beer at least erases some of that.

i am filled with love, beer and happiness and music right now, right now.

banff, midway...

Castle Mountain, Rockbound Lake Hike with Susan Bowman, Scott Dorman, Charles Tucker (and me); Chuck Listening to Jazz; Columbia Ice Fields Visitor Center; Chuck and Lane on the road to Columbia Ice Fields.

We went hiking yesterday with Scott and Susan. We've been going to Jazz and making work. Here are just a few pictures from our adventures. I have a million more... sigh.