summer's end

labor day was summer blue and pink
shy autumn played around the edges
tuesday never dawned
cold rain down your back


and rain and rain and rain and rain
and i opened my eyes to dreams of yellow pencils
and the smell of paper wrappers on crayons
chalk dust squeak


oh to be in second grade
and the cold rain falling
my new desk shines smooth under warm lights
and my teacher is so beautiful!

warm brown & fragrant

everyone knows Freud's famous comment "What do women want?" (my favorite reply is from Gloria Steinem: "ask them one at a time.")

do you ever hear "What do men want?"

usually John does the cooking, but lately I've been cooking.  last night i made a meatloaf so good he actually dreamt about it during the night.

in case you are wondering, it was a turkey meatloaf recipe from the internet - lots of onion, garlic, ketchup, some w. sauce,  breadcrumbs, 1 egg, i think that's it!

do i ever dream about food? not that i remember...i'll have to pay attention.

dreams of no doubt

in the dream a very small girl, maybe age 3, plays around some puddles as a slight rain sprinkles.  she has sandy rough boy-cut hair and wears a simple rumpled shift.  face and arms are still baby-fat rounded.  her caretaker, young mother, teenaged sister -- yes i think it is her much older sister -- stands nearby staring off at a shadowy female figure some distance away.  the tiny girl raises her chubby arms in the pick-me-up gesture and goes to the sister without hesitation without doubt without trying to read her sister's face or posture.  her sister scoops her up without hesitation without doubt without asking "do you want to come up?" and molds her to her shoulder, still looking off.

this vision of perfect mutual trust and accomodation is so profoundly affecting, i can't get it out of my mind.

let your smile be your umbrella - my birthday version!

let your smile be your umbrella

let your grimace be your shoe

let your smirk be your sombrero

and you'll find a love that's true

let your frown be your long underwear

and your sneer your pocketbook

let your grin be your ballet shoe ribbon

then you'll know you're off the hook!

I thought of this poem in my sleep last night and wrote it down when I woke up this morning!  A good birthday poem! 

(You have to stomp and clap to the fiddle and banjo, and join in on the chorus)

perfectlynormalbeasts detour past my house

grandma moses had the perspective nailed.

when i look across the back yard to the hill above the stream, it really does look like a flat 2 dimensional hill going straight up with black lines that are the tall riverbank trees.  

yesterday, while i was out doing mostly ineffectual bits of this and that to the mud left by Irene, i heard loud cow-calls and looked across at the hillside to see 4 large black muscular long horned cattle-things moving single file across the middle of the flat backdrop of the hill, right midway up in the trees. 

flying cows!  

and suddenly i remembered a dream from last week of huge black cattle flying through the trees, like some japanese movie.

one of them noticed me hunkering behind a tree trunk and flew down with bovine curiosity to close its muzzle over my hand.

i yelled as loud as i could to chase it off, and john shook me awake for my hollering.

in retrospect i think you are supposed to hit them on the nose.

click to enlarge

got camera barely in time to catch a straggler mooing after the others

more owl pellets - they do regurgitate most curiously!

often i've read that one cannot interpret the dreams of others, only the dreamer can say what it means.  to that i say "pish-tosh." i love to interpret other people's dreams!  just now i am puzzling over a friend's dream involving an aggressive scary nebulous thing in an attic.

we all know that the cellar can represent a trip into your darkest hidden self  eeeewwwwwwww!  and discovering new unsuspected rooms on your house...that's always fun!

but an attic?

(click to enlarge)

in this dream the dreamer is helping out a friend whose house is haunted. our dreamer climbs the stairs alone to the friend's attic to take a look around and perhaps help.  but instead of getting an idea of what sort of boggart was haunting his friend's house, he entered the attic and was immediately rushed by a formless threatening something-or-other -- it INSTANTLY RUSHED TOWARDS HIM!

(click to enlarge)

well of course he screamed and woke up.  too bad!! i'd be curious to know what happened next. was this cloud-like thing going to cloud his mind? or maybe envelope him entirely. or maybe just pass right through him in an escape down the stairs through the door he just opened!

maybe the attic's a place of dryness and reasonableness, the higher thoughts of humans. 
perhaps our dreamer tried to help his friend, using logic and reason, only to find himself attacked by something he can't grasp nor make no sense of?

and at the same time, the attic is the repository of someone's past.  all locked up in trunks and stored safely out of the way where it can be forgotten and ignored.

in which case he has entered his friend's past, which attacks and terrifies him, or he has entered his own past --  there's the fun of dreams, because in a dream, they say, you play all parts, and he is the friend, and the helper, and the house, and the SCARY THING too!
or is that more pish-tosh?

owl pellets

(click to enlarge)

my dear friend,

i am sorry i did not do a thorough serious job interpreting your dream, but sometimes it takes me awhile.
i'm the same with movies -- a day or so after seeing a movie, i'll suddenly say "oh NOW i get it!"

you were running through a field of lavender!  so wonderful! but i never asked you what lavender is to you. don't people use it to scent their linen closet? their bedsheets? or is it the scent that helps people sleep? i would like to know. 

in any case, you were moving energetically through a lovely free open bright unencumbered world!

and you tripped and fell.

well we all understand this on some level!  this is life. this is impermanence, yes, thank you Buddha, we get it.

notice, though, it was not a rainstorm, or a monster, or a thank you Freud snake, nor your parents appearing from behind a tree, that ended the bliss.  you did it yourself.

isn't this so very feminine....blame ourselves! i would advise you (and all of us) to watch for this. not to shake a finger and say bad girl, but to pat yourself indulgently, fondly, and say "silly there you go again."

you must tell me sometime, did you trip on a stone, or your own shoelace, or even worse did your own feet get tangled?  you see, it makes a difference in understanding.

the good news is, you were still in that lovely scented paradise.  you were down but not out. ready to lie there and enjoy or get up and run further.  and frankly, i don't believe it was a fall by your own clumsiness.  i think really, something over which you had no control, something that is actually someone else's problem, perhaps someone's thoughtlessly abandoned shoe lying hidden in the lavender, is what you tripped on.

i will have to give it some more thought. 

a dream of pigs

i dreamt that some men in a couple of boats were pulled up in the shadows across the river to watch a huge white pig that had escaped as pigs so often do, swimming away from the near riverbank encampment of naked beautiful dark-haired women , one or more of whom would soon notice and be coming to chase it back to their compound.

no doubt this is a very obvious and common sort of dream...which can be interpreted to mean....ah would you like to guess?

monster dream

one night i dreamt that a monster -- a blobby yucky sort of monster -- was eating all my winter clothes. 

it didn't want to especially, and i didn't want it to, but it had to be done somehow and we commiserated over it. 

"i suppose you will have to eat all my summer clothes too" i sez.

it sez resignedly with a sigh, "oh, you have summer clothes?" 

"yes, they are stored in the attic."

and so it had to eat them too.

plus all the stuff stored there, and the mystery boxes of who knows what inherited from great aunties or bought or received as wedding gifts, and even the big cut glass stuff my mom had for fancy dinners that nobody wanted after she died and who knows  where it is now either my brother took it for his girls or it went to the salvation army and some canny dealer bought it up. 

yes, the monster had to eat all that too!

poor thing!

who let you in my dream? was i in yours?

i dreamed

there were small rooms many boxes

piled everywhere lots of people

much activity

new michael

sang without stop

all bob dylan songs

he knew all the lyrics perfectly

i said to him

we share a gene

for remembering lyrics

he smiled enigmatically

a delivery man came in

tall wild haired it was duane carleton

brought many more boxes

he and new michael

hugged and thumped

in masculine affection

and it was then i realized

they belonged to the same cult

each member had to learn

some important body of knowlege

to save it from

the destruction to come

new micheal's job

was to learn all bob dylan songs

in my dream

i knew the name

of their organization

LOFTUS

now awake

i invoke google

it gives me a site that sells rubber chickens

which i have been needing

since our kitchen remodeling

when my old one got thrown out