Beginnings and Endings

Monday, glorious sun-flooded Monday. Summer has finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest, and with enthusiasm. No question this morning - top all the way back for the drive in to campus.

Pulling into the campus at 6:45 AM the sunlight was draped, in Dali clock fashion, over the top and front of Snoqualmie Hall, and the campus was so quiet. It must be the early hour, because today is the first day of summer quarter. I was reminded of Shelley's line, "As beautiful as a wreck of paradise," from his poem, Epipsychidion.

Soon the campus will be bustling with students, though not as crowded as it would be any of the other three quarters. Summer quarter has a slower feel to it, which belies the actual intensity of its compressed calendar.

Summer quarter is a starting point for many students, getting a prerequisite class or two out of the way before diving into fall, winter, and spring quarters. New beginnings, or at least a continuation for our returning students.


Today is also an ending day for me. We lost a dear colleague this weekend, to cancer. Today our office assembles with an all-too-painfully-obvious empty desk in our midst. Tears, hugs, stories, remembrances, and even some laughter at memories of the time before this separation. Some work is getting done, too, but half heartedly.

Shelley, same poem, comes to mind again with another phrase lifted out of context, but appropriate to the moment even so: "...make the present last, in thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, folded within their own eternity."

Such is the power of memories.

Today's commute playlist:
- Dr. Dog: Heavy Light
- Belle and Sebastian: Nightwalk
- Bruce Cockburn: God Bless The Children
- Seamus Egan: Mick O'Connor's
- Fountains of Wayne: Fire in the Canyon


- Posted via Hermes.

Largo Monday

Monday, the fourth day of summer (or, to be technical, the fourth full day but fifth actual day of summer for those of us in the western half of North America, since our solstice came about an hour before midnight this past Thursday). It’s wet this morning. It was pouring shortly before I left the house, but merely misting as I drive into campus.

Cockburn pops up on this morning’s playlist (given 20+ of his albums in my music collection, the odds are in his favor) with And We Dance. A free-spirited love song with poetry-as-lyric:

Midnight flight
Midnight flight 
Fullmoon light 
Laughter in the air 
It's a party all right 
Slate-blue clouds 
Iridescent sea 
I'm heading for you 
And you're headed for me 
and we dance and we dance and we dance...

…and…

Paradox and contrast 
Variety and change 
History repeats 
But it's never the same 
We've got this time 
We've got this rhythm 
Till the whole thing comes apart 
Like light through a prism
and we dance and we dance and we dance...

Followed by Before The Mountain from the wonderfully unique Largo album (Sadly out of print now). This is another oddly free-wheeling love song. If you can find a copy of this album, you won’t be disappointed. As the Amazon.com review of thalbum puts it:

Largo's concept is a heady one: A song cycle based on Antonin Dvorak's "New World Symphony," which was itself inspired by the Czech composer's love for indigenous American music of the early 20th century. But thanks to the songwriting savvy of mastermind Rob Hyman (of the Hooters) and the efforts of such special guests as Joan Osborne, Cyndi Lauper, and Taj Mahal, the concept never weighs down the music. Stylistically, the set ranges from the swamp-rock shuffle of "Disorient Express" to the poignantly soaring power balladry of "An Uncommon Love," with a real highlight coming via "Medallion" (which transposes Springsteen-styled workingman's rock to the life of a Pakistani immigrant cabbie). --*David Sprague*

Largo is as good a term as any for this morning, too. “(esp. as a direction) in a slow tempo and dignified style.”

Good, as they say, stuff for a Monday commute between the quarters.

Today’s full playlist:

• Zack Hexum: All I Want
• The Beatles: Yesterday
• Bruce Cockburn: And We Dance
• Largo: Before The Mountain
• Camera Obscura: You Told a Lie

Posted via Hermes.

To the motion be true

Thursday, that fake harbinger of weekend, the great pretender, almost Friday. When I first got up this morning it looked like the weather would be dry and mild. By the time I left the house, though, it was steady rain.

Wet or dry, this is a stunningly beautiful time of year here. Everywhere I look I see lush deep greens and bright new-growth spring greens. Trees are blossoming in soft pink and white, the early rhododendrons and azaleas are starting to pop in a wide variety of colors, and the purple heather —now a part of so many urban landscapes— adds a complementary color along the foot of the everywhere-green. Seasonal change abundantly visible and visceral.


Today's randomly selected soundtrack was excellently chosen by the small digital gods of the iPhone. This was a string of tunes that played nicely together, as if designed to be played in just this order. Yet they will likely never play again in this order on mine or anyone else's iPhone. Could happen, statistically, but probably won't. Nothing in this algorithm is that static.

The same holds true of the poetry selection from this morning's "spin" of the Poetry Foundation iPad app. This app opens to a "spin" button, which then randomly selects two themes from two separately scrolling lines and pulls up poetry related to that combination. Today's spin combined the themes of Gratitude and Youth, and the first poem offered matches this morning's theme of changes. Easy As Falling Down Stairs by Dean Young, starts off with: To always be in motion there is no choice... and later goes on:

No matter
how stalled I seem, some crank in me
tightens the whirly-spring each time I see
your face so thank you for aiming it
my way, all this flashing like polished
brass, lightning, powder, step on the gas,
whoosh we're halfway through our lives,
fishmarkets flying by, Connecticut,
glut then scarcity, hurried haircuts,
smell of pencils sharpened, striving,
falling short, surviving because we ducked
or somehow got some shut-eye even though
inside the hotel wall loud leaks. I love
to watch the youthful flush drub your cheeks
in your galloping dream.

or we can draw on Sam Baker's lyric from this morning's first song, Juarez:

A beautiful woman
Wraps around his shoulder
Eyes painted like clay
Except older
She says hell of a deal
Ain't it
This getting older
He sings an old song
A song to himself
He sings waiting round to die
Waiting round to die

or (with more grace), Bruce Cockburn from Mighty Trucks of Midnight:

I believe its a sin to try and make things last forever
Everything that exists in time runs out of time someday
Got to let go of the things that keep you tethered
Take your place with grace and then be on your way

or, better still, Cockburn again, from The Gift:

These shoes have walked some strange streets
stranger still to come
Sometimes the prayers of strangers
Are all that keep me from
Trying to stay static
Something even death can't do
Everything is motion
To the motion be true

That all seems about right on a beautiful, though wet, spring morning. To the seasonal change, to colorful rebirth, to gratitude and youth, even, yes, to death in its time, to the motion be true.

Today's full playlist:
- Sam Baker: Juarez
- Phil Keaggy: Lady Slippers
- Bruce Cockburn: If A Tree Falls
- The Beatles: Long Tall Sally
- Dire Straits: Money for Nothing
- Sheryl Crow: Letter to God


- Posted via Hermes.

We haven't seen everything

Low hanging clouds and almost-fog give way to overcast skies as I drive in this morning. It's Wednesday, that most malleable day of the week, and I woke this morning at 4:00 AM. I wasn't woken by anything in particular (at least, not that I am concisely aware), I was simply awake. I know better than to fight that circumstance in the early morning, because once I'm awake, I stay that way. So up I got, very early, and early out the door.

The iPhone is set to an all Bruce Cockburn mix this morning which, with more than twenty albums to draw from, covers a lot of possible songs.


Lovers in a Dangerous Time kicks off the playlist as I point the Miata toward the college. This song could be the anthem for the supporters of marriage equality, and particularly during the current Supreme Court DOMA case:

When you're lovers in a dangerous time
Sometimes you're made to feel as if your love's a crime --
But nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight --
Got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight
When you're lovers in a dangerous time

As I listen to the song, I am reminded that I recently had a long-time friend show a homophobic facet of their world view, quite unexpectedly. Questions popped out of my initial hurt: Don't they know we have a gay son? Do they really mean this of/toward our children, whom they have known for a lifetime? Is this a true representation of how they really feel?

Somehow, they didn't know this about our son, as it turns out. They hadn't thought through all of the nuances in their comment, and were quick to retract it when my wife reached out with some of the questions raised above. Years of friendship are stronger than one painful incident, after all.

But what if we didn't have a gay son, couldn't put a known face to this struggle? Would I have been as quick to question the comment, or would I have let it sadly pass? Would they, in turn, have been as quick to acknowledge the unintended ramifications of their statement?

Hatred of others is so easy to fall into, as long as the others don't have specific faces and names. The history of propaganda has clearly taught us that. Let us be clear on this point: to say you can hate the "sin" (the word usually used in this phrase) but love the person is to hate the person. You can add a thousand words of justification to that idea, but it doesn't change the fact that you have directed your hatred toward an aspect of someone else. You have made that one aspect of a complicated human being into a defining and unreconcilable state of being "other," and separated. How else can the recipient of the remark possibly take it?

My commute ends to the final notes of You've Never Seen Everything. This song has one of the most beautiful chorus melodies wrapped into one of the most difficult songs to listen to. Difficult not just because its verses are all spoken poetry, but because of the song's subject matter. The premise of which is that no matter how much you think you've seen, someplace else something totally outside of your imagination or experience is taking place. That and the idea that we sometimes let all the bad news in the world block out the sunlight:

Nobody's making me say this
I'm talking to you
Been traveling 17 hours
Irradiated by signals, by images
of viruses, of virtues
like everyone
Like exiled angels we swing out of the clouds
Above night city-
Fields of light broken by the curve of dark waterways

On the other side of the world
an unhappy teenage girl sets fire
to herself, her house, her neighbourhood and some that dwell therein
Sorry simulacrum of sad dawn

You've never seen everything

and the chorus:

Bad pressure coming down
Tears - what we really traffic in
ride the ribbon of shadow
Never feel the light falling all around

The song never gets any more cheerful, but the poetry and imagery in it is worth a read or, even better, a listen.

Bruce is right, if rather darkly so. We haven't seen everything. That is sufficient reason for moving forward gently and speaking with care. We all have much yet to learn from those around us, as well those who live far away. From everyone we are tempted to cast as "other." From those we do not know yet, with their faces and names.

Today's full commute playlist:
- Lovers in a Dangerous Time
- World Of Wonders from Bruce Cockburn Live
- If A Tree Falls from Big Circumstance
- You've Never Seen Everything from the album of the same name

- Posted via Hermes.

A naked moon and music

The popular dude is back, sauntering in like Sunday through Thursday never happened. Are we ticked that he disappeared for six days, without a word? Nope, we're always glad to see him. He exudes that sort of confidence, does Friday.

Today's commute soundtrack was equally self assured. It has to be if its going to pit John Denver up against Miles Davis or Nada Surf.

The first track is from John Hassell's 2009 release (and I love this title!) Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.


Sampling and soundscaping are terms frequently used when talking about Hassell's influential work. According to ECM (who released this album), Hassell described this album: “A continuous piece, almost symphonic, with a cinematic construction” and drifting “clouds made out of many motifs.” It is certainly complicated and haunting, and very much worth the listen (headphones recommended). Regardless, that title deserves to be a poem. Then again, that isn't a bad way to consider this album, as musical poetry of the complex rather than sweet easy rhyme variety.

The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.

Barking, by Jim Harrison

Good stuff, Maynard!

Today's full commute soundtrack:
- Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny: Cinema Paradiso (Main Theme)
- John Hassell: Time And Place
- Miles Davis: Moon Dreams
- Matt Nathanson: Faster
- John Denver: I'd Rather Be A Cowboy (Lady's Chains)
- Nada Surf: Blond On Blond (acoustic version)


- Posted via Hermes.

Rain and Racism

Thursday morning, grey and lightly raining, as befits early March in the Pacific Northwest. This is what we know, what we expect. It tells us the natural order is still preserved. To someone from somewhere else, this might be the final one-too-many wet day in a row that sends them fleeing for somewhere else, but we are (mostly) comfortable with our gray and rain.

Are we as complacently comfortable with the un-acknowledged racism we all live in, I wonder? I wonder this this morning in particular because of a conversation I had with a colleague yesterday which was reinforced by a powerful op-ed piece in the NY Times this morning (thank you Twitter!): The Good, Racist People, by Ta-Nehisi Coates.



Selma, 1965. Photo from a tweet by Michael Beschloss

As a white heterosexual male living in the U.S. I live with a silent privilege that is not equally enjoyed by everyone. So certain is this privilege that I rarely notice it. I have to stare at it intently to recognize it, even though it surrounds me everywhere I go. It would otherwise never cross my mind that nobody surreptitiously follows me around a store because they think I look like a shoplifter. It isn't remarkable to me that the way I speak doesn't cause the person on the other end of the phone to subtly change they way they "see" me and the tone of our interaction. I am generally not described to others first and foremost by the color of my skin or my ethnicity. And while I have certainly had to work hard to get to this point in my life and career, I really was afforded opportunity.

Day to day, minute to minute, none of this is exceptional to me. It would, however, be exceptional to many people of color in our country, to many people of different sexual orientation, to those with visible and invisible disabilities, to people who speak English with an accent, to many women. People who work every bit as hard (harder in many cases) than me but who simply do not have the same access to opportunity that I have had.

It doesn't even strike us as odd that everyone who isn't a white heterosexual male has a term to describe them, to describe the extent to which they are not white, heterosexual, or male. We may argue about these names, occasionally settle on different branding terms as societal awareness shifts from generation to generation, but we still use these terms to catalog difference.

Way out on the rim of the galaxy
The gifts of the Lord lie torn
Into whose charge the gifts were given
Have made it a curse for so many to be born
This is my trouble --
These were my fathers
So how am I supposed to feel?
Way out on the rim of the broken wheel

Water of life is going to flow again
Changed from the blood of heroes and knaves
The word mercy's going to have a new meaning
When we are judged by the children of our slaves
No adult of sound mind
Can be an innocent bystander
Trial comes before truth's revealed
Out here on the rim of the broken wheel

You and me -- we are the break in the broken wheel
Bleeding wound that will not heal

from Broken Wheel, by Bruce Cockburn.

It's one thing to be acquiescent about rain, grey skies, low hanging clouds, but quite another to continue on as complacently naive about our relationship to our fellow human beings. This is the uncomfortable conversation we must continue to have until this fundamental relationship between us all changes for good. Anything less is acquiescence.

Today's commute playlist:
- Buena Vista Social Club: Pueblo Nuevo
- Shirley Horn: Once I Loved
- John Barry: Dances with Wolves
- Sigur Rós: Daudalogn

- Posted via Hermes.

Fragile Routine

Thursday, a steady fine rain lands quietly on my windshield this morning, briefly accumulating only to be periodically swept aside by the wipers. Lightness is just starting to return to the early morning commute. Headlights a still needed —as evidenced by a headlight-less black Camry that quickly came and went from nothing to nowhere— but only just.

It has a been a spell since I last entered a post here. The usual routine was interrupted by a family medical emergency and all the other-worldly trappings of time spent driving to and from, waiting in, planning around hospitals.



Routines are luxuries, really, flowing from the conceit of believing we are in control, we are making the plans, we have choice in all things.

You are creating distinctions
that do not exist in reality
where “self” and “not-self” are like salt
in ocean, cloud in sky
oxygen in fire
said the philosophical dog
under the table scratching his balls

- from the poem In Every Life by Alicia Ostriker

Maybe routine and non-routine are a difference without a distinction, just different ways of marking days and hours. Every parent quickly learns that babies don't come with instruction booklets, and even children quickly learn that life isn't predictable. So why do we so often strive to make it so? None of us know the full measure of our hours, so do we treat each hour as precious and worthwhile, or as if each was dependably planned on? If you ever need to be reminded of the fragility of plans, spend an hour in the family waiting room of a critical care unit.

Perishable, it said on the plastic container,
and below, in different ink,
the date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.

I found myself looking:
now at the back of each hand,
now inside the knees,
now turning over each foot to look at the sole.

- Jane Hirshfield, Perishable, It Said

Routine or otherwise, Thursday has come around again.

Today's full playlist:
- Fountains Of Wayne: It Must Be Summer
- John Mayer: Gravity
- Bob Marley: I Shot the Sheriff
- Jónsi: Animal Arithmetic - Live
- Madeleine Payroux: You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go





- Posted via Hermes.