Lidia Yuknavitch

Paintings of a friend....

These two paintings are of my friend Jenny Pea. They were painted by Pamela Wilson. I saw them for the first time just a couple of days ago and felt the need to share them. Jenny is just as beautiful and just as tough as she looks in these paintings and as the world continues to fall apart, I am glad to have a bad ass like her on my side!

The Undoing of Jenny

Jenny Collects Cold Nests

~11/12/16~

RIP Leonard Cohen

Regardless of all the other shitty news, it's still important to take time to honor those who did good and deep work. I don't have much to say, other than that I am truly saddened to say goodbye to the brilliance that was Mr. Leonard Cohen. I'm sure he was laughing on his way out the door. RIP to a true man of words, thoughts, and emotions.

A prayer (to restore meaning to ________)

Ride a horse made of lightning until its heart explodes.
Let a city break your heart.
Gray hair and wrinkles mean wisdom and a belly full means health.
Walk into the darkness alone and explain who
you are and why you came.
Dance forever, quietly or fiercely. Dance forever!
If this is all just a dream or we do
return to  simply ash and dirt, then that
alone is holy enough.

-from sometime in 2014

The Will of the World

     A restless morning, with clouds lower down, moving also with a larger roundward motion. Everything moving. Best to go out in motion too, the slow roundward motion like the hawks.

     Everything seems slowly to circle and hover towards a central point, the clouds, the mountains round the valley, the dust that rises, the big, beautiful, white-barred hawks, gabilanes, and even the snow-white flakes of flowers upon the dim paloblanco tree. Even the organ cactus, rising in stock straight clumps, and the candelabrum cactus, seem to be slowly wheeling and pivoting upon a centre, close upon it.

     Strange that we would think in straight lines, when there are none, and talk in straight courses, when every course, sooner or later, is seen to be making the sweep round, swooping upon the centre. When space is curved, and the cosmos is a sphere within a sphere, and the way from any one point to any other point is round the bend of the inevitable, that tuns as the tips of the broad wings of the hawk turn upwards, leaning upon the air like the invisible half of the ellipse. If I have a way to go, it will be round the swoop of a bend impinging centripetal towards the centre. The straight course is hacked out in wounds, against the will of the world.

                                 -D.H. Lawrence from Mornings in Mexico

A Visitor

Today I heard a rustling outside of the open window of my little cabin.  I climbed down from my lofted bed and whatever had been there disappeared in a burst of blue and black.  My mind told me Steller's jay.  I waited at the window for a few seconds and it returned.  A beautiful big male, his black crest stretching high on top of his head as though he were the king of the whole world.  It is so easy to forget how large a bird can be until you see it up close.  The branch he perched on bowed under the weight of him, he pulled two leaves free with his beak, and then dropped them to the ground.  He moved on to another branch, chirped five or six times, and then vanished back into the forest.

I am grateful for the times when I am reminded that there is so much beauty in the world.  Try as we might, humans just can't snuff out the creative impulse that the world brings to fruition through life.