My habit is to turn off the heat every night. After the power failure at dawn this morning, man it was frigid, I am reconsidering.

(I live on an upper floor in an apartment with electric heat. Très expensive! The heaters are controlled in each room by a thermostat. The lowest setting is 5˚C. A lot of heat travels upwards through the building. My daughter and I both have winter weight down duvets that are super warm. If the heat is on, she will open the window, even in the middle of winter! I have a heated blanket that I use to warm up my bed, though even on low it is usually too hot for the whole night. However, a 3 hour power failure in an already cold apartment was downright frigid. When the electricity came back on, I turned up *all* the thermostats to 20˚C for awhile, just because.)

Stone #14

At night I turn off the heat, crawl under a heated blanket. The room air is grey at dawn, the cat, dog and I, shivering, cold, a power failure.

-
A River
of Stones

Stone #13

...the wind whispers ice, waves of snow blow, a few streaks of fragile light. These old lovers, a poetics of winter.

-
A River
of Stones

Secrets

Secrets, 20.5cm x 25.5cm, 8"x10", India inks, archival pen inks, graphite, coffee spill, and some digitally drawn lines as well as text, January, 2011.

A voice recording (2:48min) as I was writing the words (you can hear the pen scratching on paper in some of it, my flipping through pages looking for written images, and the slowness of the process of writing). The speaking follows the writing fingers. I'm discovering the story of the drawing, the poetry of it as I write the words which are a mostly unreadable pictorial element around one of the characters like a cloud or veil or tree of words. But I didn't want a drawing of only dream words: words that are inaccessible because the viewer cannot read them.

It is an invisible intersection, where the words are slowly voiced as they are being written, created enroute, without knowing where they'll go, and the viewer/listener's responses which are evoked by the slow reading that allows time for meditation, for the meandering of thought.

And, these words are interconnected with thoughts and feelings that occurred during the drawing, which was done in three sessions over a month.

In the recording, which is 'real time' (mostly, I did stop and start my iPhone's voice memo a few times, and I cut out some dead space in editing), I'm reading what's being written rather than composing out loud. Unable to post as is, the flat voice, so I had to. Bamboo Music, a background.

Moi, words, voice, mix; background music, Bamboo Music's 'Last Flute,' a free mp3 download on http://music.download.com.

Raw drawing; raw recording. No performance or finesse here. As it was happening.



transcribed:

a cloud of light
swept over the land
across the expanse

bare branches of trees
against a winter sky

    ocean drifting overhead

            dark minnow streaks

                     my mug of sand

                               roots, sky, solid

                     tense, open, terrible,
     
                              told
 

             birdwing

       cross hatching of ink lines


secrets,
secrets, secrets,
          secrets, secrets


secrets of women

secrets
              of women

secrets   secrets   secrets 
secrets

there are no secrets


and then the veil descended
like a cloud of light

sea curls, foam

what is the moment of belief?

how long does it last?

does it matter?


and then,
     and then…

and then.

Stone #12

the chunks of snow that fly off needles, like bits of coconut meat flying from whitened fir trees in a northern oasis

-
A River
of Stones

Stone #11

scooped white dragon fruit, grated and tossed, swirling the night wind, and the black seeds, invisible, smacking my face, coat, hands

_
A River
of Stones

                                          

My Dog and Cat

Keesha, a Springer Spaniel (field dog type, bred to run all day, a high energy dog), and Tigger, who is Tiggy, or sometimes Tiggles, a black cat with some white markings (a thin and long cat with a tail long enough for him to catch).

Keesha was born August 25, 1999. Tiggy was born March 4, 1997. Some dates are too important to forget.

Keesha's bed blanket is many layers thick. Because it's snowy outside, it's even more layered than usual - beginning with a waterproof crib blanket, maybe 4 layers of fleece, a down baby comforter, a halofil comforter, and 2 or 3 towels. Don't ask. She likes it soft. An aging dog.

Tiggy *never* sits near Keesha, and *never* has anything to do with her. Yet he came, and slept like this, on Keesha's dog bed (that's on the bed, yes, yes, I know) for a long time.

Snap, snap with the iPhone.