and then on to things more pleasant...or not

Somehow I discovered an interest in stone towers, or cairns. Now, my friend, Bob, is encouraging me by sending me pictures of stones he has balanced and books about cairns and poems about cairns. I am hooked although I have yet to make one myself. I have to find a few farmers with rock piles.

Here is a link to the Wikipedia site if you want to know more.

And take a look at Andy Goldsworthy's work.

Here is a beautiful video poem done by my friends, David Bengtson and Mike Hazard.

And David's (AKA Bob) beautiful poem. Used without his permission but I don't think he'll prosecute me for copyright infringement. I gave him a coffee mug, after all!

Stone Towers

Today I walked the yard in every direction

looking for stones large enough to stack and balance,

one on top of the other, to build a stone tower,

to say, I have been a guest in this house. I have left

this gift of gratitude. But there were no stones.

At Point Lookout, though, you’ll find, facing east,

three smooth-stoned sentinels, stones so carefully

balanced they could topple under the weight

of a gull’s foot or an unsuspecting hand.

If the towers fall, maybe the Vietnamese fishermen

or the elderly couple from Ohio or the wounded soldier

home from “the sand” or my friends from St. Mary’s

will rebuild them, these poems of stone––

like us, temporary testaments

to balance and fragility.

David Bengtson

The Artist House

St. Mary’s College of Maryland

October 2004

Gus practices down dog on my yoga mat.

This right here is proof that I have been left behind. I can barely grasp the meaning of apps (much less how they get where they are) but an app that documents your memories without writing, by just collecting data from the moment, is beyond baffling. What. the. hell. Writers of the world, unite. Tell them to take this app back to the place from whence it came. What bullshit.

But your personal memories (sans editors and hashtags) are harder to recollect – which makes the new iPhone app Kennedy so darn intriguing. Kennedy – named for the iconic question "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" – isn’t a traditional diary; it’s a push-button moment immortalizer that automatically remembers contextual data surrounding an event.
So, you’re watching a sunset. You’re thinking, “This is nice.” You may not pull out a conventional journaling app and wax poetic about the sunset, but you might open Kennedy and press the screen. When you do that, the app instantly collects the current date and time, location, weather conditions, and news headlines, with options for a note or photo. Months later, you can scroll back and trigger that sunset memory based on the surrounding details.
It’s one diary you won’t get tired of writing.

I'm going to quit here for now. I went to the pulse and did 40 minutes of cardio exercise so I am feeling the need to lie deown and play a little Scrabble...or maybe read some of Saints of the Shadow Bible.