Gaia Community: Doug's Blog

IntoTheReal

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:59:00 GMT

IntoTheReal

7/2009

Watercolor on canvas 30”X40”

Darling I’m moving more

Into the real

The wind moved me today

And did not blow right through me

I realized a leaf

My arms grew strong

I could sense the smell of you

Through all these bifurcations of me

The colors like pink and ocean aqua

I think maybe there are various forms

Various levels of being

This morning I woke up

And the world looked the same

Only it was more of the world

Then I could touch before

With just the dust

Of my memory

And so I use these hands

To gather dirt

And water

And I’m growing flowers

For you

Right out of my emptied head

And I look for you now

Because I want to perceive

You

seeing me

for the first time

Tags: Art, Poetry, Nature

In the Mist

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 07:10:48 GMT

Have you ever stood outside

At night in the mist

Looked up at the darkened sky

Felt the cool air on your face

And your lips silently form the words

I love you

And you want those words

To reverberate through all

The dark matter

To vibrate in the energy fields

The brown grass

Where you lay down

To imagine clouds drifting through the blue

You want those words to travel

On those imagined clouds

And if you should be in the mist of them

You’ll feel those words

And the magic is

I feel them too

Tags:

Value System

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:53:31 GMT

This morning I was chatting with a healer/artist friend from Washington state about the ills of our global monetary economy. Well yeah, but it was a sick system before the crash too cuz it undervalues the core economy. I mean what gives with the fact that I get paid 5 times more for sitting in an office managing others to manage software programs, (meanwhile spending my time writing poetry, making connections and thinking about the painting I'll work on tonight), then my disabled son's aide makes!
Whew, I'm out of breath! Lol!
Well I happen to think the work I'm doing is important, cuz the other stuff I'm not paid to do is feeding into the core economy. Hey that's what art and poetry and making connections is about in my mind anyway. (Yes it's way right side but making a momentary excursion to the left, to the left)
It's intended for healing, it's intended to connect us into what really matters and collecting green stuff ain't it!
I mean DUH!
Right now a part of the art world is plugged into the monetary economy but I believe a larger part is not. All you have to do is spend 5 minutes on the internet and find all kinds of "free" art, music, writing. My vision is that art is a gateway between the monetary and core economy.

So what would happen if everyone pulled their content down from the internet for a single day?

What would happen to our world if the payment for art had to be made as time into the core economy?
"IBM you want my poem/ K let me get out my calculator (my 10 fingers).
That'll be 5 hours into the time bank TY!"

So I'll be the first convert and sell my artwork for time into the core economy.

Here's some more info.

Timebanks

A word to my fellow artists. Being paid money for art is not validating in fact it's a invalidation because art has no price. If it did have a price, the price would be your life. Besides the Art was never yours anyway, only the work was and that is time.

Blessings

Doug

Tags: New economy

The bride striped bare by her bachelors 12/12/12

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 07:40:29 GMT

BrideStripedBareByBachelors

6/2009 India Ink, Bee’s wax and pigment on clayboard panels

24”X36” (24X18” each panel)

I remember the shoes

I remember how she spoke to me then

The vast glass walls

The dirt floors

The surreal ash,

Wheels and sprockets,

clock parts,

pages scattered on the Tuesday streets

I remember the teddy bear

With the stuffing on the outside

The button eyes lost in the sheets

The pee stains smell

And the breasts not offered

In the age of Rational Mind

Children drew pictures

Of twin candles burning

As if it were our second birthday

A second age

A second coming

An age of timelessness

And the Balinese

Walked into the guns of white men,

We walk into the fire

Of shadow

Of clarity in the deep pool

Of Magical Mind

I think of the shattered glass,

A looking glass

Beauty created by accident

Some careless accomplice,

Creates with the artist.

And they hid from God

Because they where ashamed

Of their nakedness

And we will strip her bare

Because we are not ashamed anymore

Deep in a sealed wooden boat

The woman who abandoned the white BWM

In the garage below

Sails into the

Worlds beyond

The knowledge of light and dark

White doves descend

Into her deep pool of longing

And in this,

The last world

a woman

Gives birth

Tags:

Point of Assembly

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Thu, 21 May 2009 08:09:51 GMT

Point of Assembly

Watercolor on Canvas 24X36"

It's at some point
just behind the right shoulder
a place where we are taught
to fix attention
and there it coalesces.

Last night it shifted
and I flew out of the
third floor window,
saw my daughter
and her friend
entering the back door
below
I stood on the wall outside
watching
like a clown
doing some stupid stunt,
a trick,
because everyone knows
I can't really
walk on walls
but somehow I
think I could
imagine swimming
in warm living water
under the night wire
the spotlights passing
overhead
the illicit wet flowing
over new white skin
like liquid breath
caresses.

I'm thinking that maybe
this shifting is what
we did before we
fell off of the wall
before all of the king's horses
before all of the king's men
made
this assembly
that maybe I should
just
fall again
like maybe it's better
to be be broken
and shifting the dream
then fixed
and steel.
Is this real?

Tags: Art, Poetry, Nature

Lady in the Window (poem for realistic mannequin #22)

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Mon, 18 May 2009 23:56:18 GMT

She seems pensive and the light is suggestive of late afternoon,
dusk,
and the lady in the window is still in her pajamas
like she is house bound.
A feeling like a child being punished by being sent to her room,
looking out of the window
wishing for the freedom to be outside playing
with friends
but instead alone here to contemplate
being alone and rejected.

If I were looking in from the outside
would I see a mannequin,
something made from plastic,
slightly used,
slight scratches on the body
paint, pink plastic flesh,
places,
where the careless striped her bare
too quickly,
hurling her rudely,
carelessly,
to the bottomless floor.
And now she is surplus,
thrown up on a website for the used
for the old,
offered at a discount.

I might,

and I might imagine
that blood still moved
behind the frozen Mona Lisa smile,
might imagine
that there is still warmth within
that slightly used,
slightly worn,
and plastic exterior.

fem22a

Tags:

Phenomenal/Ordinary

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Tue, 12 May 2009 22:43:23 GMT

I have seen that phenomenal woman through a night window and yes she is both tired and beautiful and I can be both her and that man last November walking in the rain. It was a Saturday and the kitchen lights were on, people were in the living room. She was wearing red, standing in the doorway of amber dinning room light. It was like sneaking into a drive-in movie and while it was so clear and you could see their lips move, still you could never hear what they say and yet I could tell it was a polite conversation, one held in a kitchen in formal wear. And in the upstairs, in those private spaces in this mansion on the corner of Wave and Pilacitos she dances alone, the skin screaming release from it’s cottony enclosure, sometimes staccato, sometimes a sort of flow, sometimes barely moving at all, like the fluttering of closed eyes, like that bending forward, head down crown rudely pressing through, like a waterfall, a thin membrane between this and the many worlds where beauty brushes silently passed the open window, Saturday night scents of stale beer and Lysol drifting through.

Tags: Beauty

Mexico Illuminating

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:55:22 GMT

I feel my second opening into the colors
that white silk again
the way that slips down
a slight hide from my eyes

illuminated
where my fingers explore
the pink, the tropical moist
that intoxication of soft sea life jungle
flower scent rising
a rising tide washing away
the wheels within the wheels within the wheels
turning over and over again
to face me
where all our worlds whirl into white hot stars

into the vast silent space beyond the veils

of breathing

Tags: Love, Tantra

Faded

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 11:19:58 GMT

I like to be silly and fun and young with you, hey I’m 16 and you know what that means!

A bean bag chair in my room those hot wet kisses while my mother is out, the first sneaking through the windows of morning to touch that center where it hurts, like strawberry fields, like that strawberry scent you used to wear when the musk of our own flesh was enough to cut the sweetness of our childhood dreams.

3AM and the buzz of overhead wires in the woods. We tried like mad men to reach the stars climbing those metal ladders on the rusty electricity of time,

falling into that open

that love

Those vast desert roads of dry, the chain link fences winded with beer cans and the wicker death of plant life replicating on the edge of it all,

Hoping for a rain

Drenching something after us.

Yes I am the on the edge

Can you fly?

There is an opening

In the white ceiling

Of a lonely house in a desert canyon

Do you see it?

Evaporate into tears

Of wishes

And embrace the harsh and the awkward

All the unloved stones of grey

Our tears create the pearls

Tags:

ChacoCanyonNightLight

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 06:50:03 GMT

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.

Tags: Art, Poetry, Sharing

Flying Dream

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:39:22 GMT

yes,
there was a missed call
and I didn't even think to look
until it was another day
and it was some other people,
like a body-double
who made those calls

Do you remember dreaming this?

I remember waking up
there was someone standing over me
my pockets had been emptied on the bed
there were things I had forgotten about,
important things I
didn't see anymore.
but someone saw them,
saw them clearly,
more clearly then I ever could
with my closed eyes.

I had a dream of sweet music
it was drifting in from the night woods behind the deck
I could hear the rhythm
I could hear the soft cords,
the singing, the sadness,
could hear the thoughts creating
this vast space
like a man who could unbutton his shirt
and be nothing but the wind sailing through,
like my empty pockets were me,
like what was spilled on the bed was lost,
like I wasn't dreaming anymore,
like this standing over me,
this accusation
is the end of all
I heard from the back deck

I can fly, can't I?

Please?

Tags:

A World Imagined

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:48:44 GMT

The world is a place imagined
And there is nothing
Just thought
Inflating form

Perhaps it was that first day in fourth grade
When the change occurred
When it occurred to me
That everything had already been
Imagined
That the world was somehow
Complete
Without me

I sat at a wooden desk in a wooden chair
In a brick building on Academy Street
Glass windows
Imagined
I don’t know how long ago
Like numbers and letters
Like 1 + 1 = 1
And the two shall become one flesh
All imaginings
Of dead guys

Oh but the maple trees
Through the glass windows
The whirly birds falling green on the sidewalk
Where we line up single file
To enter the bus
They are their own imaginings
Refusing to get on the bus
But allowing their forms
To be altered
Into the desk
Into the chair
Into this human-centric world imagination

And I remember becoming frightened then
I saw the part I needed to play
Learned the rules
Of this imagining
But what if they ever found out that I’m faking?
That I’m really not part of the imagined
What if I,
like the tree
Refuse to get on the bus?
What if I sell this imagined world?
Sell my birth lie
To buy my birth right
Can you imagine that?

Man who sold the world

We passed upon the stairs,
We spoke of was and when
Although I wasnt there
He said I was his friend
Which came as a surprise
I spoke into his eyes -- I thought you died alone
A long long time ago

Oh no, not me,
We never lost control,
Youre face to face,
With the man who sold the world

I laughed and shook his hand,
I made my way back home,
I searched for form and land,
Years and years I roamed,
I gazed a gazely stare,
We walked a million hills -- I must have died alone,
A long long time ago.

Tags:

The Origin of Trees

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:33:46 GMT

In the beginning the first plants on Earth were annuals and lived their whole life in a single year. In winter they found a place where the earth was fertile and they began to grow roots as spring came and later they grew above ground and they saw the sun for the very first time and they fell in love with the sun. Because they loved the sun so much they offered a flower. The sun loved the flower and sent the wind to gently touch them.

The plants, knowing they had to die soon, discovered that they could move their lives completely into the flower and form a hard shell where they could wait out the dark winter and then live again. But they always forgot their last life. Over billions of years some plants learned how to use their energy to form a seed shell on the outside of their bodies and to grow deep roots where they could sleep during the winter. These plants became the first trees and they remembered their lives year to year and lived for thousands of years.

Before man came the trees became very crowded and the trees began to die because many of them couldn’t get enough sun. The sun saw this and felt compassion and spoke to the trees and taught them how to use the energy of the sun and the wind to lift themselves from the earth in order to follow the sun where the sun wanted them to be. The trees listened carefully and they created a cart with wheels like a skateboard. They each followed the sun and moved along rivers, up the side of mountains and some to lonely rocks out in the middle of the sea. As long as the trees listened to the sun and followed to where they belonged they thrived. And the trees learned to grow flowers for the sun and how to put part of their live into the seeds. The life really came from the sun but many times the trees forgot that.

There was a tree growing in a valley with the annual plants and this tree saw that the annuals died after they released their seed. And when the time came the tree likewise released seed. One of the seeds grew into a sapling and the sun taught the sapling the art of following. The tree that helped form the sapling saw that the sapling was leaving and was concerned about the hardships the sapling would have to endure during its journey to the place the sun had selected. The elder tree used all of its energy to lift itself from the earth and followed after the sapling to protect it. But because the older tree cast a shadow the sapling could no longer see the sun so it lost its way and stopped moving with the sun and it’s leaves began to turn white and drop off and it began to die. The older tree also began to die because it was no longer in the place the sun had selected. Finally the sun spoke to the older tree and told it that the sapling would die if the elder tree didn’t follow the sun back to its place with the annuals. The elder tree was heartbroken to have to leave but it followed the sun back to the valley and became the weeping willow and the sapling followed the sun up the mountainside and became the white pine.

Some of the first humans grew from the seeds from these two trees and other humans grew from other trees. You can always tell by the human heart where that person came from because that is where the original seed is kept. I come from the white pine and the willow and I’m looking for the others in my tribe because the wind told me there is another place for us and we have to plant our seed to go there.

Tags:

Thundering Silence

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 09:37:25 GMT

India Ink, Bee’s Wax and Pigment on folded paper

25X19”

I steal from her, her silence, her title, her everything

Which is really just wind and water and yes I agree

I’m just a bag of wind and noise and nothing more and here is the but.

But.

What else are we here for?

Yeah, it’s just a skin bag filled with hot air

A little tiny basket hanging below

With the sand man hanging in heavy bags

A westerly wind and the heat in this skin bag

Floating this vessel up a mountain it has no business being on

Well maybe noise is why we are here?

We’re noisemakers and maybe hearing our own noise isn’t the point?

Maybe there is some other point to the wind

We gather behind the skin sails?

We inflate the body, this dream of being

And yes there is the gift of awareness

The I am

But yeah, who cares?

Nobody

And yet

There is a reason

Some moment

Brief as it might be

On one day

Someone stands by a window looking out

And they think

Wow, that’s such a beautiful balloon

All those colors sailing in the wind

Someday I hope to be

That balloon.

And that thundering silence

Calls a rain

A rain

That is ironically thirsty

On that day I hope it is a hot day

Perhaps children are playing in the water

And the thunder claps

Announce the beginning

And I fall.

But it could be winter, quiet

No one sees

And I float

So white in a blue northern light.

Tags: Art, Poetry, Sharing

One Way that Matters

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:46:29 GMT

You perhaps don't remember

the reflection (flying over clouds illuminated by sunlight),
the refraction (most commonly observed when a wave passes from one medium to another),

it was a hall of mirrors,
facing one another,
you standing
there,
your back to me,
that significant smile,
and I wondered
the meaning
of your running shoes hanging over the wire,

laces tied
with that delicate silence,
that whispers morning
from dream,
the mud path,
children's bare feet
wearing a summer oblique
phrase,
passed the old wooden
bandstand,
grey, quiet,
humid morning after,
inhabited by the ghosts
of our mother's music,
reflected (the change in direction of a wavefront),
refracted (

    v1 and v2 are the wave velocities through the respective media.
    θ1 and θ2 are the angles between the normal (to the interface) plane and the incident waves respectively
        ),

a glass door,

a sky pregnant

with the gathering rain,

a simple word

carefully etched in white,

“Shelter...............retlehS”.

Tags:

Six Kinds of Loneliness

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:27:28 GMT

Shambhala Sun Article By Pema Chödrön

This morning I flipped open a book that a friend gave me a couple of years ago and it opened to the pages where this talk was writen and it confirmed for me a need to be quiet for a while. Lately I've been standing outside of myself and watching this fool trying to fix something that wasn't broken to begin with and I think well yeah, I'm OK with this life the way it is and I remember when I felt no need to check email because there was nothing in my inbox I needed to respond to. I was content and I was OK with that and now I'm a fool too and I'm OK with that as well. Yeah maybe being somewhere in the middle is good because contentment doesn't create and desire can leave you like a mad man screaming
STELLA!!!!!
As the train screeches on rusty tracks around the corner.

Tags:

Rain

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 22:25:43 GMT

William Carlos Williams 1930

As the rain falls
so does
your love

bathe every
open
object of the world--

In houses
the priceless dry
rooms

of illicit love
where we live
hear the wash of the
rain--

There
paintings
and fine
metalware
woven stuffs--
all the whorishness
of our
delight
sees
from its window

the spring wash
of your love
the falling
rain--

The trees
are become
beasts fresh-risen
from the sea--
water

trickles
from the crevices of
their hides--

So my life is spent
to keep out love
with which
she rains upon

the world

of spring

drips

so spreads

the words

far apart to let in

her love

And running in between

the drops

the rain

is a kind physician

the rain
of her thoughts over

the ocean
every

where

walking with
invisible swift feet
over

the helpless
waves--

Unworldly love
that has no hope
of the world

and that
cannot change the world
to its delight--

The rain
falls upon the earth
and grass and flowers

come
perfectly

into form from its
liquid

clearness

But love is
unworldly

and nothing
comes of it but love

following
and falling endlessly
from
her thoughts

Tags:

AnasaziWash

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 07:53:40 GMT

AnasaziSleeperTrail

14X20 Watercolor on Paper

This isn't Kansas
anymore

and I didn't realize
at the time
that the house of rain
somehow could
with the right
slant of the sun
the summer solstice
through aligned stones
warmed by a heat they did not create
across this line of sight and
these clouds sliding
across the skin
it feels like
just a few cells
before
they actually touch me
counting the minutes
between the thunder
and the lightning.

What is it about the sun
shinning through the rain
and where did all the color come from?
when I thought rain was grey

And the Anasazi wash
oh it's a gutter alright
a gutter like a summer
thunder storm
and the rain so cool
I'm a boy in a bathing suit
and the warm rain
is rushing across
summer lawns into the gutter
rushing through my
butt crack
because I'm sitting
here in the gutter
in the summer rain
sailing a paper boat
to somewhere
I have never known.

Tags: Art, love, poetry, water

Commuter Train

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:45:32 GMT

He entered the train at the Chestnut Hill station at 7:30, just like he had done yesterday and the day before that and the years stretching back and his head hurt thinking about it, this cyclical pattern of his life, if it could be called that. No, it was more like a means to an end, only lately he began to feel that he was merely the means. Yes another faceless work-a-day daddy in a world full of other faceless work-a-day daddies, filing single file into trains, into offices that all looked the same, back into night trains, back to the house that looked like every other house except for the numbers on the door.

Sometimes he wondered if he wandered through another door would he find the same things filling the spaces within, as if filling these spaces somehow filled this vast tunnel he felt passed right through him, right on through the floor. He could hear the screech of metal on cold metal as the train turned a corner, a naked bulb overhead blinking off on, off on, like he was a stone falling in a bottomless dream that somehow passes through the emptiness silently, maybe occasionally passing by another quiet, falling stone.

OK he had to focus now, read the morning paper, something…

For some reason, unknown to him he looked up as she passed by him in the crowd moving into the next train. He noticed her eyes, like she had been crying and it seemed like she noticed him. Not in a obvious way like a man would, but in a subtle glance in his direction, some slight hint of reconition. And there was something about her that flooded him with memories. Remembering when he was living the artist's life on South Street. It was just a bombed out loft with red brick walls and cold water and that single space heater that she used when she modeled for him. And at night in winter they wouldn't bother turning it on after torching the town, one art opening at a time, having breakfast at the Galaxy diner at 3 AM and then falling into bed together until their body heat warmed the sheets, warmed each other.

He was wondering already what his evening would be like, perhaps like last night, eating a TV dinner and watching an old black and white movie in the dark, the kids asleep in the other room and she would be out again, another meeting, another something vitally important. And he would get to the part in the movie just before Rick kissed her, before they missed the train, before he fell into a dream that he spoke to her, before she passed into the next train.

And he would wake again at 3 to find the note on his chest, “I didn't want to disturb you”.

And he carefully placed the note back into his journal, turned and went back to sleep.

Tags:

Your Tear is my Fire

http://Johna16.gaia.com — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:46:36 GMT

I'll hold you while you wet my shirt
in my arms with your tears,
and if you should find yourself here
the silk would slip to the floor
and we
melting together
into the floor
to become one
with the silk

I'm not sure I would sleep that night
I would be watching the dim light
of night time constellations
drift through your hair,
watching the rise and fall
of worlds
soft dreamy breathing,
wanting to touch you again
longing for the morning light
to illuminate the universe
of strange charm
in the rays of light
through a window,
that whisper
with silent fingers,
"Open your eyes
sleeper,
and have me again before breakfast."

And my desire
the warmth of sunlight on a frozen peak
and a single tear from the ice
and as it reaches the heat
of the valley
a raging torrential fire
flowing into the ocean of you.

Tags: