I pray every day for an end to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Sometimes I pray by playing the piano and intoning Gaza while visualizing a time when the women and children and men in Gaza will live in peace and have sufficient food and water.
Here are links to my piano prayer Gaza on Apple and YouTube. Any pennies I get from Apple downloads, and any tiny fractions of pennies I get from streams of Gaza will be donated to Doctors Without Borders who are doing all they can to help in Gaza. I get no pennies from Spotify because they only monetize songs that get more than a thousand streams.
The government of the United States is the main funder of Israel’s ongoing blockade of aid to Gaza and continuing bombing of civilians in Gaza. I write to my Congresspeople asking them to stop voting to send more military aid to Israel, but so far they keep voting to fund the genocide.
On the first of May – purely by chance – the streamable/downloadable songs from my wonderful new album Hip Salon AND the audio book edition of my new novel The Farm at the East Cove Hotel went live.
I’m happy to post the Hip Salon links here for you and for anyone you want to share them with. To pique your curiosity, here is a list of the tracks from my new album along with brief descriptions of those tracks.
1. Hip Salon a bluesy tribute to those who cut our hair while we bare our souls – with groovacious drumming and fab backing vocals
2. Jealouspiano and solo voice
3. A Question For You solo piano
4. Troo Romanz a piano/drums duet
5. Gaza piano and voices – a prayer for peace
6. Everything Is Something solo piano
7. Remembrancea poem
8. Everybody Has To Breathea cappella – four voices
9. Another Question For You solo piano
10. When Is It Done? a story with music
Here are Links for streaming and downloading the songs of Hip Salon.
Regarding the audio book of The Farm at the East Cove Hotel, I had a marvelous time narrating the novel and inhabiting the many characters with their wonderful voices and accents and personalities. Here is the Audible link, and for those who don’t want to join Audible, a link to the same narration from Apple. You can listen to the free sample at Audible to get a taste of my narration and hear Marcia’s lovely cello music that concludes each chapter. And handsome paperbacks are available from all good bookstores.
Word-of-mouth is my only marketing tool. If you enjoy my work I hope you’ll let your friends know. And reviews of my books at Goodreads and Amazon are always much appreciated. Thanks!
Bad people, as my grandfather called them, thought they had successfully rigged the system so they’d win; and for a little while it seemed they had won.
But because bad people are incapable of complex thinking and are only aware of the mechanistic parts of systems, they greatly underestimated the genius of the totality of the system our founders borrowed from the Iroquois Confederacy: a system of seven layers, each layer composed of seven interlocking aspects.
So it turns out bad people haven’t won, and now the six other layers of the system – spiritual, genetic, collective, ancestral, regenerative, and metaphysical – are swiftly synergizing to thwart the actions of the bad people.
Soon our beautiful complex system will eliminate the influence of bad people, decisions will be made based on peace and consensus rather than fighting, and we will experience a social and cultural renaissance.
The bad people, as my grandfather called them, are not just trying to destroy our country and the world, they are destroying our country and much of what makes life possible for humans on earth.
In response to their cruelty and destructiveness, I succumbed to despair and depression. Then one day I was planting baby lettuce plants in my garden and recalled the words of the Buddha. I am the owner of my own karma. My happiness and unhappiness are determined by my actions.
And I decided that in response to the ongoing acts of cruelty perpetrated by those in power I would endeavor to make everything I do a conscious act of love, whether I’m pulling weeds or planting seeds or writing or talking or playing the piano or buying groceries.
And by trusting that loving action is an effective way to oppose our oppressors, my despair and feelings of helplessness have largely disappeared.
We are the owners of our own karma. Our happiness and unhappiness are determined by our actions.
Hallelujah! My new book is born. The Farm at the East Cove Hotel is now available as a handsome paperback. Copies may be ordered from your favorite actual bookstores and found at your favorite online bookselling sites. I will append a few viable links at the end of this announcement. In a few weeks various e-book editions will become available, and shortly thereafter the scintillating audio edition starring Yours Truly will debut.
For regular readers of my blog, the first few chapters of The Farm at the East Cove Hotel may ring some bells because earlier iterations of these chapters appeared on my blog a year or so ago as freestanding short stories. However, when the characters from one story began to bump into characters from another story, I realized a novel was being birthed and so took the project offline and allowed the tale to unfold with no thought of showing the opus to anyone until the story was done.
What is the novel about? The first thing that comes to me is kindness. The second is mastery. The third is self-forgiveness leading to adventure. And now I hear emotional improvisation.
Writing the book was my antidote to the terrible goings on in the world and in our country, and I hope that reading the book will provide an antidote for you.
Here are some links to a few of the places where the book may be purchased.
Spring forward. Set all clocks an hour later than what they were previously set at. Henceforth one is two, seven is eight, and so forth.
Einstein said many thought-provoking things about time, and because Einstein said these things I am predisposed to think they are true. He said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” And “The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”
Did he know these things were true or was he just guessing? Or was he just messing with our minds?
Certainly how we divide up the days time-wise is an arbitrary construct. We might have divided a day into twenty hours or eleven hours, and those hours would be longer than the twenty-four hours we currently agree on. And weeks? Why seven days? Many a Monday feels like a Sunday. Right? Who thought of seven? Why not eleven?
I get months. The moon doing her thing. I get years. The ride we take around the sun. But hours, minutes, seconds? Sure they have their uses, but they bug me, as do weeks.
The people who lived in Mendocino for thousands of years (and are apparently still living here according to Einstein) had days and months and years, but not hours, minutes, or seconds. They had Dawn, Morning, Afternoon, Dusk, Evening, Night. And seasons. They definitely had seasons because seasons are not arbitrary constructs.
I wonder if the absence of seconds, minutes, and hours made life less stressful. I like to think so. Einstein might have said Time is the source of stress. Maybe he did. Or maybe he will. In a parallel dimension.
People often say of their impending vacations, “I’m taking some time off.” Do they mean they’re taking a break from measuring the passage of time in arbitrary increments? Or do they mean they’re going somewhere? Will they be free of the constrictions of time for a time? I hope so.
When I left for college fifty-six years ago (or right now according to Einstein) my mother gave me two things: her old Smith-Corona electric typewriter and a Timex wristwatch. The typewriter was a boon, the wristwatch a curse. Given my compulsive nature, I looked at my watch constantly and drove myself crazy. So I stopped wearing it, attached it to my knapsack, and to this day I have a wristwatch attached to my basket. I use a basket as my knapsack/purse nowadays. Everyone should tote a basket if you ask me.
Today is Thursday, which means I’m going grocery shopping at Corners around eleven. Before the pandemic I used to go to town almost every day to shop and get the mail. Then during the pandemic I started doing just one big shopping trip per week. Now I go two times a week, Mondays and Thursdays, and I time my going to coincide with deliveries of fresh foodstuffs. I still wear a mask in Corners and in the post office, though few other people do. I’m in the habit.
I like to take my time when I shop at Corners. Now there’s a lovely concept. Taking my time. Giving myself all the time I need to select the very best mushrooms, the loveliest green beans, and to be available for conversations with people I might meet as we forage together for tasty comestibles to sustain us for another day or four.
Seems like just a few moments ago we got the firewood into the woodshed for the winter, and now we must order more firewood to sit outside and season until October when we will schlep the logs into the woodshed, which is to say we’ve lived to see another March. Hallelujah.
Springtime. Our prune plum tree is sporting her first blossoms of the year. Prune plums hereabouts are an unpredictable fruit, and by that I mean there is no obvious correlation between how many blossoms our tree presents and how many prune plums will emerge and grow to fruition.
Will the gods grant our valiant tree sufficient warmth and the necessary pollinating insects to produce enough plums for jam? And will we manage to harvest the plums before the ravens do? We shall see.
Daffodils are blooming everywhere right now. How lovely and solemn they seem before they open to reveal their bright promise.
Always reassuring to see our lemon trees making new fruit despite and because of everything. “Don’t forget to feed us,” they whisper.
And here come our rose bushes emerging after their winter’s slumber, pinkish red in their infancy and soon to metamorphose into summer green on which roses will bloom.
The first rhododendron flowers on our two acres emerged a few days ago – harbingers of many more to come. The folks who owned this land before us planted several rhododendrons to give us gaudy shows every year, while on the fringes of the forest bloom the wild pink rhododendrons.
I recently engaged a drummer named Gabriel Yanez to play on two tunes on my upcoming album Hip Salon. He exceeded my fondest dreams of how my piano tunes might sound embellished with tasty percussion. What a fabulous percussive vocabulary he has, and how deftly he speaks with his drums. Hallelujah.
Speaking of salons, Marcia recently gave me a haircut and I feel days younger.
So what do we do in the face of this onslaught of cruelty? How shall we resist the Damaged One and his damaged appointees as they rush to do as much harm as they can to those least able to defend themselves? How do we respond as they de-fund food and health programs for the elderly and the poor? What can we do as they de-fund protection of the environment and encourage waste and pollution? How do we respond to people who only know how to take and hoard and hurt other people?
We can be kind and generous. We can share what we have. We can walk lightly and lovingly on the earth. We can join with others to counter cruelty with kindness.
And as we resort to kindness, we must remember that these many acts of cruelty by our current government are sanctioned by a large percentage of our population, people who believe that being cruel to others is preferable to being kind. Many of those practitioners and supporters of cruelty claim to be followers of Jesus Christ, a champion of the poor and the disenfranchised. So why do these so-called Christians support such vehemently un-Christian leaders?
When I was in my twenties I worked at a pre-school as a teacher’s aide, and when I was in my fifties I volunteered in a day care center. Having spent thousands of hours caring for dozens of wee tykes, I assure you that though some children seem to be inherently kind and some inherently cruel, that is very rarely the case. Kindness and cruelty are learned behaviors; and children learn through observation and imitation, and persist in behaviors from which they gain something.
Recent neurological discoveries reveal that children begin to mimic their parents’ behaviors and attitudes mere moments after birth, and by the age of three, children profoundly embody the characters of their caretakers and surrounding ethos.
So let us endeavor to make our culture one of kindness in which young people thrive. Let us turn on our love lights and shine them wherever we go.
In my dream this morning, I am living in the little house I lived in forty-five years ago. The living room is dominated by a big table on which is a large empty terrarium, and on top of the terrarium is a big piece of plywood covered with junk.
I realize that my sorrow (in the dream) has to do with my house being cluttered to the point of dysfunction, so I decide to carry the plywood covered with junk out the front door and dump everything in the garbage.
As I make my way to the front door, trying not to spill the junk balanced precariously atop the plywood, someone knocks on the door.
I open the door and here is an old nemesis of mine, a big abusive man I haven’t seen in twenty years. He is now elderly and sad. I invite him to come in.
When I get back from discarding the plywood and the junk, I find my old nemesis has brought along a teenage girl and an elderly woman, the three of them sitting in my living room.
“I’ll make some tea,” I say, but before I can there comes another knock on the door.
I open the door and here is a big young man glaring at me. Behind him are three young women.
“Are you going to let them destroy Bear Valley?” asks the young man, poking me in the chest. “You better contribute to the defense fund.”
I close the door and say to my old nemesis, “That guy just poked me.”
I look out the window and see a woman and two children come into my yard and sit on a bench, and I wake up.
*
Nowadays I’m tempted to interpret my dreams in light of what the Damaged One and his damaged minions are doing to our government and society; and they certainly do remind me of the many bullies I’ve known in my life.
When I was in elementary school there were two big bullies in my grade, and I remember how shocked and outraged I was when I discovered that our system, our school, couldn’t or wouldn’t stop them from beating up smaller kids.
I was in Second Grade the first time I saw the two bullies hurting a smaller boy. I ran to the school office to get help, and the secretary made me wait to see the principal. While I was waiting, the bell rang for the start of school and I had to run to my class where I was chastised for being late. When I explained I was trying to get someone to stop the bullies from hurting the little boy, several of my classmates corroborated my story and my teacher apologized for chastising me.
But the bullies continued to routinely beat up smaller kids for five more years, and the faculty and administration were unable or unwilling to do what needed to be done to stop the violence.
And now the bullies are in charge of our government, and they’re joining forces with other bullies to beat up the poor and weak and defenseless here and abroad, and there is no one to appeal to for help because we, the people, chose these damaged ones and many more like them to rule our society.
As Damaged Soul and Psychopathic Architect of Ruin continue to attack the foundations of American democracy with alarming success, and resistance seems frighteningly slow to develop among those who should be leading the resistance, we bring you this alternative news feed.
As the earth continues to rotate at a thousand miles per hour and fly around the sun at the astounding speed of sixty-seven thousand miles per hour, Leonard Peltier was pardoned, finally, for a crime he didn’t commit, and for which he spent fifty years in prison. Hurray for Leonard and his family and friends!
*
In more localized news, Mendocino received nearly seven inches of rain last week, and now we are in the midst of cold clear days as prelude to the next storm. A good wet winter so far in the watershed.
In local music news, weekends of late I’ve been driving our little red Prius from Mendocino to Albion to spend delightful hours in the recording studio with Peter Temple adding vocals to the piano tracks we recorded here at our house for an upcoming album entitled Hip Salon, a collection of tunes we hope to bring out a few months hence.
The title song, Hip Salon, came about in a fun way. Our friend Abigail was visiting and said of her friend, “She has a chair in a hip salon.”
I thought this was a great lyric and soon thereafter wrote a song that begins, “She has a chair in a hip salon. She sets you down and goes on and on, ‘bout this and that, that and this, and if she really likes you, if she really likes you, if she really likes you, she’ll give you a kiss.”
While working on the songs at Peter’s studio, one or both of Peter’s cats hang out with us and groove to my tunes, which prompts me to boast, “The kitics love my music.”
On another creative front, the novel I’ve been working on for a year, The Farm at the East Cove Hotel, is soon to be released as a handsome paperback. Then a few weeks later the e-book versions will appear, and not long after that the audio book will debut with yours truly narrating and playing all the characters. What fun!
In culinary news, I have stumbled upon a quesadilla-like concoction that is so good I must share the ingredients with you or feel guilty of a sin of omission. A corn tortilla fried in olive oil, cheese melted therein (or sliced turkey), avocado, sautéed mushrooms, and slices of dill pickles, the entirety doused in hot sauce. The combination of these flavors, with an excellent dill pickle leading the way, is indescribably delicious.
In domestic news, Marcia is about to join me in being seventy-five. Her birthday is easy to remember because it falls on Valentine’s Day and the media is full of reminders about this special day.
In closely related news, Valentine’s Day reminds me of one of the greatest things that ever happened to me as a kid. In Second Grade at Las Lomitas Elementary School, a couple weeks before Valentine’s Day, a little room appeared in the classroom with signage indicating the room was a post office. The purpose of this inner-classroom post office was to process the valentines we were to make and send to our classmates. We each had a post office box (cubbyhole), and when valentines were dropped into the mailbox adjacent to the post office, post office employees (we took turns being postal clerks) would collect the mail and distribute the properly addressed envelopes to the post office box grid mounted on the outside of the little room. No wonder I’ve always loved getting mail. Mail equals love!
And those are just some of the stories we’re following.
