We are Soooo Home

 Ah, we are safely back in our tidy little hideaway in the Nations Nashville. Heavy sigh. Deep breath. Lungs full of gratitude for both the gift of travel and the treasure of home.

I don't know if I believe in jet lag. 

It's 5:42 Central Daylight Saving Time. What are we saving? The daylight doesn't care. 

We have been on terra firma in Nashville for around 32 hours and I'm up feeling pretty durned good at right around my usual time to arise. I did my ~40 yoga breaths quietly in bed, stretched, spent some time reflecting on whatever I reflected upon, and quietly arose, slipped on my royal blue cotton tee sleepshirt, and padded into my studio to lay down a poem. I suppose our nearly three weeks in Spain has enriched my connection with words and with whatever it is inside me that shapes my use of them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm usually pretty connected, but...

If I have learned 

anything

it is this:

Every living being 

with whom I have shared love

in any way

has remained,

is with me now 

in my memory,

in my heart, in my...

what is that? My soul?

Those whom I have hated

are nothing,

are gone,

are wisps,

are past

wrong turns,

wrong items

on my life's 

long

list.

If I have learned 

anything

it is this.

Ahem. Well. There's that. This little ditty came to me while I contemplated the old dog who had slowly arisen and made his way to the bedroom rug from his time asleep safely between my love and me. I then (and autonomically) moved closer to her beneath the sheets and she cupped her hand into mine again without willing the touch, just fingers to fingers drawn together like soft flesh and bone magnets. I continued breathing and laid awash with love, just breathing and loving, giving and receiving  precisely like inhaling and exhaling, like love. The word "living" is the only correction I made to it, considering, as I should, of course, that old dog, and other loves not "human".

And yes, I will use as many commas as I would like. They are necessary to indicate the meter. In case you've forgotten, my poetry (and much of my prose) must be read aloud to really work. It's a fault, a limitation, I know.

^^^^^^^^^@@@@@@@@^^^^^^^^^

Stay tuned. I'm thinking the next few posts will summarize our fantastical nearly three weeks in España.

"san sebastian", 2023, pencil on sketch paper, completed after a photo taken from Hotel Londes

Written and produced this morning

I hear this as a sort of Irish folk song, lilting and lyrical, and I may yet make it a song. I had to get it down this morning, inspired by the snapshot of a native neighbor's backyard set. Can you guess which line came to me first?

A Little Listening

A little listening is a good thing, especially if one really, truly listens.

My feelings were hurt last night when my completely loved wife said (and by no means is this the first time she's said this) "It just feels like you never listen to me." That this was stated in response to my wandering around the house looking for my Surface RT device, which she had told me earlier was in the living room on the sofa with the dots on it, and that this statement wounded me in any measure, are but indicators of the emotional range this week has in store.

Those who know me already know that my dear Miranda Lee is marrying this week. And you already know that I am elated. We all are. These two humans were made for each other if ever any two humans were. Don't worry about the wounded brat, dear reader. It's all better now. Nothing a little snuggling and a few hours sleep can't completely fix. Any other husbands ever hear a similar claim from your loving spouse?

I arose an hour ago, at 5am, when Ruby the Cat launched into a particularly frenzied version of the Song of her People, reminding me that I had not listened to her last night as she tried to convey to me that I had not served her dinner.

After feeding the menagerie I logged into my laptop in the family room with a fresh cup of java, and   I gifted myself the 7:04 minutes required to listen yet again to my future (very near future--hell he already is) son-in-law wail expertly on a jazz track without a drum track. He posted this last week as part of his burgeoning work in rhythm education, and I at the time noted it on The Book of The Face and had failed to get back to it (I hadn't listened) until just yesterday, when I revisited it and started sharing it. I want to share again, and then I want to share one of the results returned from Google searching, in quotes, my incredibly beautiful daughter's full name. This may help you understand, in some measure, at least from one perspective (of the many), why I will be happy to walk my daughter down that aisle on Thursday.

For now, maybe I want to prove I can listen. Maybe I want you to. Maybe I just want to add a gigantic glow to the rest of your day. Here are my two Monday morning gifts to you:


and


Have a lovely week (we will) and when you see the Nashville Buells after they return from their honeymoon in Mexico next week, tell them you listened.

Grades and...

Okay. I'm a parent who has two high school graduated children. One is a college graduate and who knows if the younger will ever get to that thang.

With both of these kids, we have been unconventional parents, or at least so I think.We encouraged them to pursue their passions, to explore the arts, and we did not ride them or micromanage their grades or their academic performance. My dear wife and I are not academic people; or rather, a part of me is but it's not a major part.

We set them free in many ways. They might argue that, but when our daughter went to college she was the one in charge. She figured out her path, made decisions about changing it, and did so with our support and blessing.

When our son entered his Freshman year at a Nashville arts school, we backed off and worked to let him manage his high school work. Until Fall semester of his Junior year all went well. He failed four of his classes that semester. He had never failed any class, ever, in the history of his schooling. We all went into triage mode. This past December, my dear son graduated early from an alternative school here in Nashville, where he found teachers who cared about him and also who held high expectations for his work.

Heavy sigh. So. Looking back I hear my brother's sing-songy voice "Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda Shoulda, Woulda." I somewhat resentfully sort of wish that I had bought in more to the academic thing.

Why?

Well, take a look a last week's release of a Pew Foundation study that compared incomes of high school graduates with those of college graduates. It's profiled in Feb. 11th's "Is college worth it? New PEW study says yes" and I heard it discussed several times on NPR this week, with the repeated tagline "The only thing more expensive than going to college these days is not going to college." According to that article, there has never been more of an income gap between college graduates and millennials with a high school degree or less. Get it from the horse's mouth at https://selectra.co.uk/sites/selectra.co.uk/files/pdf/SDT-higher-ed-FINAL-02-11-2014.pdf if you're the sort of bloke who needs to bypass the synopsis.

After looking at all of this, my rational mind wants to keep on developing this train of thought. What if I had been more positive with my children about the benefits of high grades? What if I had more encouraged academic learning and performance? But I have a confession to make. My heart wants to go "yay." Both of our young adults are going to figure it out so that their lives work best for them. I believe that their experiences in the performing arts and their love of artistic expression (and more importantly and more subtly, the understandings they gained pursuing those paths) will serve them far better than any externally applied assessment or any paycheck. They will struggle and they will figure it out: Heck, so did their mom and I. The big difference, I have to admit, is that it's a much more dangerous world that it was when we were figuring it out.

They are golden, and if we've given them anything, it's love and support, and a healthy skepticism about how things are said to work in the world. Screw PEW. And screw the worship of the dollar. Life is about more than that. Listen to this live recording of a song I wrote on this topic -- God I do love Dana's harmonies.

Three Heads

...are better than one.

My dear 10-year old godson Seamus is recuperating from a recent operation to remove a brain tumor, and the whole story is much more than I want to share out here. I do want to share a picture his dad sent, from the hospital lawn, and I know that my brother-from-another-mother James will be okay with my sharing it.

He sent this picture out to his legions of supportive friends. If this doesn't brighten your day or night, check your pulse. And whatever your religious leanings are, if you want to offer a prayer or a meditation for healing and recovery, now's the time.

Really.

Seamus, Jimmy, and Riad, I love you.

Here Comes....LOVE!

I'm reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, and though I'm not much in the habit of commenting on a book before I finish it, I just read through a section that illustrates to some degree the sort of off-mainstream perspective Shirky shares throughout this excellent read, so I feel the urge to share (call it an act of love).

In a section called, "Love as a Renewable Building Material," Shirky relates the story of a Shinto shrine in Japan that is over 13 centuries old but can't get certified as an historical structure by UNESCO, the UN cultural agency responsible for such certification. It seems that the structure is wooden, thereby not "permanent." But the Ise Shrine Imbe monks do an interesting thing: Once a generation they tear down the original structure and rebuild its exact duplicate at an adjacent site. They have accomplished this "rebuild" sixty-one times in a row, according to Shirky. He muses, "A wrecked castle that has stood unused for hundreds of years makes the cut; a shrine that is rebuilt once a generation for a thousand years doesn't."

He goes on to postulate that:

• Wikipedia is a Shinto shrine; it exists not as an edifice but as an act of love. Like the Ise Shriine, Wikipedia exists because enough people love it and, more important, love one another in its context. This does not mean that the people constructing it always agree, but loving someone doesn't preclude arguing with them (as your own experience will doubtless confirm). What love does for Wikipedia is provide the motivation both for improvement and for defense...We don't often talk about love when trying to describe the public world, because love seems too squishy and too private. What has happened, though, and what is still happening in our historical moment, is that love has become a lot less squishy and a lot less private. Love has a half-life, too, as well as a radius, and we're used to both of those being small. We can affect the people we love, but the longevity and social distance of love are both constrained. Or were constrained--now we can do things for strangers who do things for us, and a low enough cost to make that kind of behavior attractive, and those effects can last well beyond our original contribution. Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material. When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love."

That's what I'm talkin' about :)

Love ya!