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art
November 2009 
ChacoCanyonNightLight
Posted on Mar 31st, 2009
by 
Doug
Doug
Chaco Canyon Night Light
19"X25"
India Ink, Bee's Wax and Pigment on folded paper
I dreamed of pink desert highways,
night sweat
windows open and the
fan making airplane
noise,
with a night light on
imagined the red glowing eyes
of devils
with whip tails and dark leather wings
cowboys with white hats,
white horses,
night lights
stars
and the moneychangers
are thrown out
and the burnt bones
of the dry rainmaker
is thrown into the kiva
where the night light is,
where tears are too precious to rain,
where the stone people
are fired by the sun
where they fall
crashing in giant
night noise
like god fell
from a hot
summer nights bed
imagining that
he was just a boy
with a night light on.
19"X25"
India Ink, Bee's Wax and Pigment on folded paper
I dreamed of pink desert highways,
night sweat
windows open and the
fan making airplane
noise,
with a night light on
imagined the red glowing eyes
of devils
with whip tails and dark leather wings
cowboys with white hats,
white horses,
night lights
stars
and the moneychangers
are thrown out
and the burnt bones
of the dry rainmaker
is thrown into the kiva
where the night light is,
where tears are too precious to rain,
where the stone people
are fired by the sun
where they fall
crashing in giant
night noise
like god fell
from a hot
summer nights bed
imagining that
he was just a boy
with a night light on.
Access: Public
i love starting the day with a great poem… this is terrific, doug. Love the print too.
I second Donny. Imagine: just a boy with a night light on! I love how it wrapped around to that, Doug. (was thinking about you yesterday.)
Hi Donny and thank you! So are you back in Cali again, back from Washington?
Thank You Kathy!
Yeah, I've been kind of quiet lately spending time integrating my experience traveling through the southwest where the horizon is way bigger then I can comprehend.
I'll bet you came back with dust in your shorts after spending time with the Stone people and burnt bones! You'd look striking in a white hat on a white horse, Sir Douglass! But… I seem to imagine you more with the leathery wings and the red glowing eyes in a baseball cap. Hmm?
I can see how your trip informed this painting. Every time you post one, my Muse keeps saying, “See, see, look at the cool stuff you can do if you just let go!”
The poem makes me think about the current world situation for some reason. We're in the, “fire before the Phoenix stage,” and we're looking for a cowboy on a white horse, (or a “Knight-Light,”) to save us.
Hi Pearly, After camping in the back of my van for a week yes I was a little dusty for sure! You think I could do both the black leather wings, red eyes and the white hat and horse?
Hi Catherine and TY!
It's funny but I spent a couple of days in Sedona as well as going to New Mexico and Chaco canyon. When I was in Chaco I got a strong impression that what happened in Chaco 800 years ago is what is happening now in Sedona. Personally I'm a little put off my spiritual mecca's especially where the charge you a dollar and a half just to see them, now $5 just to park in Sedona!
Wow I felt like I was in spiritual Disneyland and I could wait to blow out of that town for something real and alive!
Oh, but don't get me wrong the area is beautiful, it's just the money grubbing and tour buses that turned me off.
There's a song about that… They paved paradise and put up a parking lot! Something about putting a tree in a tree museum and charging the people a dollar and a half to see them… yeppers, Jesus had to put out the money changers in the temple and now you see why! He simply wanted a place to pray in peace!
Bat wings and a white hat…? Well, I don't think it's been done in Hollywood but I think you could get away with it!
Hugz!
Hey Pearly! That would be Yellow Taxi. Well I was thinking Joni but you might be thinking Counting Crows?
Maybe I could do really small leather wings?
Hugs(((Pearly)))
my heart be still… they charge you money to park in sedona?
and I remember when there were only 3000 people living there…
and in 96 maybe 8000 and getting crowded… but there was a cap to building
and not the water rights for more than 14,000…
and then i drove there 2 years ago and saw nothing but houses on the cliff tops. the builders won!
and I hope folks living there enjoy their view…
and boulders dynamited away for another hotel.
and construction every where.
oh to see the red rocks and oak creek canyon and open blue sky and fresh air across the mongollon rim… sigh.
sedona will always be a special place to me, but I sure like the way it used to be more than the way you describe it now…
very very very ….. sad.
best place for sunset is on border of az and new mex…
last time i drove it 2 years ago, it covered the whole sky!
and then I coulda used that night light, as i could not see a thing in dark!
beautiful poem. thanks doug for sharing… my heart here in the desert.
of rolling hills that the water left behind… and the very wide open sky!
peaceloveLIGHT~~margo
TY Margo!
Part of it was me because I wanted to be alone then, wanted a one on one with a cool breeze sliding down into the canyon from the mesa, wanted to be able to move freely, raise my hands, allow tears, close my eyes while walking through the shadows. Well I did get that but just not in Sedona because there where just too many people.
I found myself dreaming about the inorganic world realizing that we spend most of our time as humans in the inorganic realm building the horizontal connections of human to human at the expense of neglecting the vertical connections. Many don't even know that these connections exist!
UNBELIEVEABLE! Joni sings it SO MUCH BETTER! I added that video to my favorites… it will be funny to go back to work and hear the Counting Crows sing it! I'll have a higher pitched voice in my head the entire time.
As long as you don't try and use those little leather wings to fly with I believe you'll be okay!
I get 5 days off starting at 7pm tomorrow and I'm going to find a place in the mountains to move freely, raise hands, cry out to the wind, and maybe sing until I lose my voice… anywhere in the world where there are no people to clutter up the landscape! I think I'll leave Sedona for the 14,000 plus and their one Blackberry Patch! (they had a barrel with one blackberry plant in it and called the place Blackberry Springs or something silly like that. I've been to Sedona too in 1985 and it was all developed then. I can't imagine it now!)
Hi Doug…
those connections go in ALL directions, vertical horizontal and every other direction as well, in 2D. 3D, and well beyond! in, out, up, down, all around and thru and under and over and every where!
keep the vessel open and the connections will get stronger!
to infinity in and infinity out…
so sad about sedona.
but the world is still a beautiful planet even if humans have slacked off their responsibilities to care for it and its inhabitants. I feel like we are all trying to get back onto the right track…
the stronger the connections, the easier it will be…
peacelovelight, margo
Pearly's on vacation! Whoa watch out Oregon!!! Hey, I'll dance if you sing K?
I'll even get my drum goin too!
How's that go now???
Pearly's on vacation, Pearly's on vacation, Pearly's……
With you in spirit!
Hey Margo,
Yeah we call them connections because it feels like there is a me that feels a you in there, in that vast space of feeling and yes, when we change the feeling in this vast space it will manifest as forms expressing that new feeling. It's working!!!
quoting myself from fb: intense. vibrating. stars dance. - and you dreaming of vertical human beings living in a horizontal world sounds tantrically familiar to my ears. I like. We shall overcome.. some day ;-)
TY Tara!
Yeah I thought the overcome day would have been on the day I saw the boy a man or I was seen by her as such, but now I realize I was closer when I was the boy who had fallen out of bed on a summer night.
Thanks for the night light darling ;-)
Just found this Doug. I had to follow image and lines re Chaco Canyon,close to me, my ancestors, my teacher, my art. Canyon de Chelly too,more so cause Navajo still keep it, not the Dept. of Interior.
Old stuff. the tales my teachers tell about the Chaco people.
800 years ago it used to be like Sedona is now, till the people buried it to shut down what was happening..
Hi Carla
Wow I feel like you were in my head! When I was in Chaco I was seeing what happened 800 years ago and it was just like Sedona is now.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
so what is 'Moloch'? any reference to amelek? (not sure of spelling…)
I need a cool (clean) waterfall to stand under!
peacelovelight!
Probably?
Maybe Moloch was mentioned somewhere in the middle of all that stuff about not cooking lamb in it's mother's milk or the importance of taking a community hot tub after the moon cycle?
Ginsberg certainly tapped into the fire and brimstone sackcloth and ash covered prophet rant of old!
alan ginsberg? (as in … not a supreme court judge, the appointed one that is… as well as not The Supreme…who has been said to say that… hmmm… )
change of subject…
how far is chaco from phx? i want to get out of town this weekend!!!
maybe grand canyon… but I do need to see the open sky and have some relative clean air surround me… this heat is abominable.(fire & brimstone,ha)
or maybe just hang out in the ac hotel room, haha.
sure could use an ocean breeze about now… maybe soon…