pre-equinox homesick blues

mother earth

is dirty,

naughty!

she made a pass

and grabbed my ass;

but...no worries,

because on i'll pass

her sensual act

to the women

walking on her...

what awaits me in reply

is even greater,

for randy earth mother

has also groped

her venusian sisters:

pining and lupine,

rolled-over and supine;

baying for blood,

covered in mud;

seeking a wrestle,

receiving a grapple;

straddling serpent,

eating an apple;

tumbling runs,

rumbling tums;

fruitful yields,

in farmers' fields;

skin so soft,

hard in the hayloft;

start with a flirt,

end up under skirt;

seeds are watered in,

the fluids we're covered in;

two-backed beast has burrowed

deeply into her furrow;

our sweet, sweating mess

will insure a good harvest.

homo technologicus autisticus

mr. and mrs. gadget:

are you harried

or just married?

sitting at a table for two together

alone by yourselves

along with thousands

of your closest e-friends

with whom you maintain

friendl-e relations...

or is it business?

or just busyness...

are you numb?

out of your minds

since they've dropped out

and down, down

and out, to your thumbs,

which dance deftly

over digital displays,

while your eyes---

sole windows to your souls---

glaze over?

game over.

'can i take your order?'

time for you

to face the face facing you

at that table for two.

not carved in stone

without harm, i witnessed,

on my arm, a mole

be subsumed whole,

as if my body knew what it were doing.

no need for training

or scientific stamp of approval.

no post-grad program in mole-removal.

with this consumption, i thought,

went some assumptions i'd been taught:

that our mortal and mental coils

were more like foibles---

happy/sad accidents not our own,

though they were etched in necklace millstones;

that living is a superfluous luxury

though we more resemble static statuary.

new logo look

what do you think of the new look? comments welcome. i've done a package design to match and i'm 'well-chuffed' about it!

james' talk about soil remineralization

apologies for the utter crap picture [and the utterly british style of the previous]...

james did a 90 min. presentation to the 'norfolk organic group' last night---informative and interesting. as you can see, he was equipped with powerpoint, laptop and projector. it was well-attended, with about 40-50 eager gardeners present. all of the rock dust samples we brought were sold---an auspicious start!

mom's gunna be jazzed when she sees this

puerile, i know...but puerility plus self-consciousness of said puerility equals charm somehow in my inner calculus...ask mom...

artiste: two-point-zero

the idea

the big idea

[what's the big idea?]:

that an auteur,

a single author,

[one who inspires awe]

can make,

can make anything,

can make a single thing

worthwhile;

worth our while,

worth our wily

hive mind's attention

anymore---

anymore clever,

any more than the

computing cloud's

worldwide brain.

kiss it goodbye--

[a good buy for the globalistas]

the propriety,

the private property,

the proprietary prosperity,

deeds that are titled,

deeds that are entitled,

the greedy intellectual title-deed,

'cause, as a corollary,

the coroner comes

to the coronary

of the

souled-out [sic],

seemingly selfish,

single-celled self---

dead of a broken art.

move over,

'cause here comes everybody!

even coffins won't

be single occupancy...

and all new virtues

will be virtual.

sutton hoo

sutton who? 'hoo' is an anglo-saxon word for 'ridge'...

at the suggestion of my friend, hugh, i [finally] visited this site---named sutton hoo---of a very significant, recent anglo-saxon treasure find in neighboring suffolk. this past weekend, james and i had access to julliette's car...the weather didn't suck...why not?

i must admit that i felt like i did months ago while visiting the 'conceptual ruin' of caister st. edmund. [post here]---that the site was all in your mind, not in front of your eyes. the story, mind you, was brought vividly to life by the exhibition at the visitor's center and even more by the wonderful national trust guide, with whom we booked a tour. but, in front of your eyes were a couple of grass mounds; some were surrounded by gravel rectangles, marking known burial sites---a leader ringed by his family/subjects. one gravel rectangle represented a prince [equipped with a satchel of lamb chops to fuel his journey in death] buried with his horse [who had oats to keep him galloping on]!

however, i did think this signage was unwittingly funny:

the sunset that day was something to see:

gloomy dartmoor

about an hour's drive from james' mom's place lies dartmoor: a large, hilly plateau of misty bogs and tors that sticks out---literally---from the surrounding, relatively friendly devon landscape. small wonder that people have been drawn to it for millennia. those people placed stones there. we searched for some on a day trip.

over muddy hill and down squashy dale, we found this first formation---an alignment with a central standing stone. the central menhir seemed to mark the cistern of a well. or was that because water was copiously flowing down into it that day?

here's another view of the same alignment facing the opposite direction:

from this alignment we walked a straight path to another menhir surrounded by its own circle:

this is a landscape that makes it very logical and perfectly reasonable to believe in faries!

from there we spotted some interesting ridges off in the deceiving distance. one was particularly interesting: a huge earthwork! multiple piles of stones. what could it be? an ancient royal burying ground? the destination seemed popular enough. lines of people dotted the topmost ridge. off we went. as we closed in, we started to see strange anachronisms: a van, foundations of relatively modern buildings...mmm....climbing to a higher vantage, it started to make sense...those people? the army! this was an old quarry that the military used for training...the drill sergeant screamed the boys into repelling supplies and each other up and down the steep rock face. they took no notice of us. i would have taken a picture, but their camouflage blended in so well with the surroundings [like it should] that it was pointless. add another futile quarry to the journey...

we made it back to the car just in time. the sleet started to really hammer down!

a native summed up dartmoor to me pretty succinctly: clouds, mist, prison and the military. sounds about right...

on exploring an out-of-the-way church and finding all life hiding in the local pub

james' mom sent us on a drive to a very small local town named south pool. a single road snaked through the center of an old village. an interesting church stood at the top of the road on a hill. as god's house is always open, we entered the gate...

inside this small-town church, which, from all outward appearances, could've been any other church, we found some surprises---a particularly well-preserved, painted and carved rood screen! to me, this seemed a rarity: an ornate catholic vestige that survived the reformation somehow with medieval painted panels still in tact. look:

the green man is clearly seen in every panel along with some mysterious twins, enacting biblical scenes----a marriage between paganism and christianity. my pet theory is that the twins are remus and romulus and that england was aspiring towards becoming the new roman empire....but my ignorance of history steps in and interrupts this train of thought...hey, i'm no scholar, ok? it was just a pretty freakin' cool church...if you like that kinda thing...

more carving [celtic knots and green men!]:

note the red and green polychrome on some of the wood in some of the shots.

from the church we made our way down to the local pub---a funny from-black-and-white-to-technicolor moment. the windows sweated with condensation. the room heaved with shoulders and hot human exhalation. a smooth jazz trio played on in the corner. this was where the entire village population was and had been since early in the afternoon...and things were getting pretty sloppy by the time we'd arrived.

two unfamiliar, obviously not local, young men---us--- sit at a corner table [the only one free]. unbeknownst to us, it was valentine's day. there were roses on the table. we paid no heed. the table next to us full of drunken over-50's did and removed the roses after a time. oh, they thought we were a couple! we didn't care...and maybe we should've pretended---it would've prevented a soused emissary for the middle-aged, baby-boomer second-youth movement from embarrassing herself in front of half of the pub! she was dressed like...an escort: skin-tight, almost painted-on pants, zippers running waist to cuff...mohair top barely buttoned; extra lipstick glazing her wine glass red!

'oh, finally, some single men!'...she'd been heckling the guys in the other corner who were more interested in the rugby game on the tv; so, she migrated to us. james and i goofed around with her for a time, mock-courting her with the table roses...funny for the first ten minutes; but she didn't leave...until an even drunker friend finally pulled her away...

the punchline? a bemused man leaned over to me, 'guess that woman's occupation...'

'teacher?'

'no.'

'psychotherapist?'

'close.'

'recently-fired investment banker?'

chuckle. 'no, she's gp in london...' 'gp' is short for 'general practitioner'...a doctor!!

punchline #2? the next day, right outside our flat, we saw the same woman with what looked like her mother...she didn't recognize us...ah, merciful alcohol!

return to devon

with a few weeks to go here, i revisited devon----where i was a few weeks into my trip [see my post here]...this created a nice symmetrical set of bookends around the inner meat of the sabbatical. time reveled in its circularity. instantly the rush of who i was, what i was thinking and how i was feeling when i embarked on this adventure six months ago came back to me very vividly!

not that such a neat, novelistic device was fully intentional...james and i had set up a meeting with the quarry with whom we hope to do business. it was close to devon. the rest is, as they say, history.

i needed to revisit the same beach i'd swum at six months ago, during warmer times. i took a picture of myself in front of the same rock:

the beach, this time during the winter, sported more human activity than when i had it to myself in the balmy, golden autumn. dogs happily ran, chasing anything thrown. families and their children cooked lunch over a bonfire. hikers trekked around the coastal footpath [which runs 420 miles west from that spot!] a lone, young teenage girl drew a heart on the sand [complete with keith harring lines] with her footsteps; presumably with her initials paired with those of a puppy-love beloved. i caught the scene on pixels before the incoming tide wiped it away. ahhhh, the existentialism of it all....

and, the much-anticipated meeting with the quarry? it didn't go as well as we'd, perhaps naively, hoped. we were expecting to hammer out a contract. in reality, the people we needed to talk to weren't there. the people who were there were rushing about answering the phones. a higher-up who wasn't very well-informed about who we were chatted to us about the road industry. plus we found out about a possible conflict of interest with some mystery man.

we reeled for about a day afterward from the disparity between our expectations and what had actually transpired. however, on a positive note, we learned that a handful of other quarries surround the one we visited. we need to keep digging!

Ensemble Sreteniye Ancient Church Singing of Byzantine Georgia and Rus

this blows my mind [and ears!]...it cradles me back to earth when i feel nowhere [especially the 3rd track]:

Ancient Church Singing of Byzantine Georgia and Rus by Ensemble Sreteniye

late in the long 6-month day

well, the sun [whatever that might be] sets on my trip as well as the british empire...i sit in the long shadows contemplating the long 6-month day of my sabbatical----i am different somehow...more willing to take a stand for myself...weathered, bloodied...but unbowed...much more work than i'd imagined!

in a few days, james and i leave for the southwest of england [cornwall/somerset] to visit the secret quarry, on whom our entire venture depends. when we proposed and scheduled this meeting i realized just how much of my anxiety was related to not knowing about this crucial piece of the puzzle. is it a deal i can depend on to return to this country? we'll soon find out...

this past week, i've designed the bag for our secret product...indulging in my love/hate relationship with doing computer graphics...brings back the rush of the caffeinated dot-com daze [sic]...of being young with a place in the world [though that place was a soap bubble, reflecting the economy it spawned---neither exists anymore anyway, except as scum around the drain of things past]. the files are very large [because the bag is too], but i'll see about posting copies here...i'd love some feedback!