Listen,
O brothers and sisters, 
you who have mastered the teachings -
If you recognize me,
Queen of the Lake of Awareness,
who encompasses
both emptiness and form,
know that I live in the minds 
of all beings who live.
Know that I live
in the body of mind
and the field of the senses,
that the twelve kinds of matter 
are only my bones and my skin.
We are not two, 
yet you look for me outside;
when you find me within yourself,
your own naked mind,
that Single Awareness
will fill all worlds.
Then the joy of the One
will hold you like a lake - 
its fish with gold-seeing eyes 
will grow many and fat.
Hold to that knowledge and pleasure,
and the Creative will be your wings.
You will leap through the green meadows
of earthly appearance,
enter the sky fields, and vanish.

     -Yeshe Tsogyel (757 - 817 C.E.)

Forest Lake

I was alone on a sunny shore
by the forest's pale blue lake,
in the sky floated a single cloud
and on the water a single isle.
The ripe sweetness of summer dripped
in beads from every tree
and straight into my opened heart 
a tiny drop ran down.

    -Edith Sodergran, trans. by Stina Katchadourian

If a tree falls in a forest but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If color, like sound, is a vibration, and no one sees a bright red flower, is it really red?

If rhetorical questions cause a reader to stop reading, does the rest of the essay matter?

I am still trying to figure out why vision therapy has affected my ability to perceive and utilize color.  I recently started a new round of vision therapy “tune up” sessions and discovered even more surprising things.

I restarted therapy after a long absence – longer than intended (see August 2013, September 2011, and August 2011 in the archives for earlier episodes in this serial).  I was supposed to come in for assessment and maintenance sessions, but life intrudes on the best laid plans, and I went a whole year without therapy.  I expected that testing would show a little slippage in my acuity and functionality.  If you don’t do any exercise for a while, the muscles get slack, and I assumed the eyes are not an exception.

I had improved.  My vision had continued to improve, even though I had discontinued therapy.  Cue the Theremin music in the background.

Now if I could just get my damn stomach muscles to do the same thing.

The artwork I have been doing is nothing like the artwork I used to do.  It has evolved (devolved?) into abstract swaths of pure color, some of which seem to move as you look at them.  If they start to talk to me, I’ll let you know and you can send for the head doctors.  I have no idea how this came about.

Now all I want to do is play with color.  I have no use for the tonal work I used to find so fascinating.  I wonder if my eyes and brain have progressed/regressed to the same level it was a few years after the injury that affected my vision, when my ability to perceive and enjoy color was still strong.  I suspect that that ability faded as I got older and my vision continued to deteriorate.

I’m like a kid in a candy shop.  I have no interest in making pictures of things.  I just want to see what happens when certain colors start to dance, with themselves and with each other.  I want to explore the emotional responses that colors create.

A funny thing happens when you start making all abstract art.  Your friends stop asking if they can have some of your stuff.

I started researching color as a result of these weird things happening with my eyeballs, and discovered that the science of color is even weirder than my experiences.  For instance, when you look at an object, that object is absorbing all the colors but the color it appears to be: the perceived color is bouncing off that object.  That suggests that the object might be all the colors except the one you see. 

Wait, it gets freakier.  Colors, like sounds, are wavelengths.  Synesthetics, people with synesthesia, perceive that each color has a corresponding sound, and sounds have colors.  Apparently, it’s more like a chord than a single note, in most cases.  It used to be the conventional wisdom that people with synesthesia had some crossed wiring somewhere in the brain.  Now neuroscientists are considering the possibility that “normal” people have a mild case of combined blindness/deafness.  Since color is a wavelength, and sound is a wavelength, we should be able to read them both as frequencies.

It must be cool to listen to music and literally see it as a kaleidoscope of colors as well as sounds.  Similarly, I would love to brush a swath of paint across a canvas and hear it sing its own special song.

If it ever happens, I will let you know.  Please promise not to alert the head shrinkers.


My Behavioral Optometrist is Dr. Steve Gallop: 610-356-7425  http://www.gallopintovision.com/

People say that Summer is the best time of the year for fresh produce, but Spring is "not half bad," to make a Yorkshire understatement.  You have to buy or grow the good stuff of Summer, like tomatoes.  In Spring the edible goodies are, literally, growing like weeds.  That's because most of them are weeds.

Nettles are one of my favorite wild foods.  I love the tea, made from leaves desiccated in the dehydrator until crumbly.  I love the fresh greens, cooked like spinach and substituted for spinach in any recipe, but without the slimy, unappetizing gooey black mass that cooked spinach becomes.

I understand that there are contests around the world to see who can eat the most raw nettle leaves without vomiting, despite the sting.  I've never tried it (and probably never will), but supposedly you can roll a fresh leaf upside-down, from base to edge, and eat it raw without getting stung.  I think I'll skip.  Nettles are too good cooked to bother.  Creamed nettles, nettle pesto, nettle dip, nettle green sauce, nettle fak'a hoy - the last two are African recipes worth dying for.  It's probably unfair of me not to print the recipes here.  Sorry, I can't give away all my secrets.

Another workhorse of the un-rototilled garden is dock.  Dock is used as a green or potherb, and has a slightly lemony, faintly sour taste.  We like it in spring soup, for chilly days.  Dock doesn't reduce as much as other greens when cooked.  Because it likes disturbed ground, it often pops up in the garden before the domesticated vegetables are even in the ground.

I prefer many of the wild weeds to their more commonly available domestic counterparts.  Just as I prefer nettles to spinach, I would rather eat Japanese Knotweed any day over asparagus.  Asparagus is nasty.  The stalks are either like chewing on the branches of small, flavorless trees (undercooked), or mushy rolls of wet newspaper (overcooked).  Yuck. 

The flavor of Knotweed isn't like asparagus.  It actually has a flavor.  It's just a little tart, and the texture has a little crunch to it.  It's good enough prepared simply, sauteed in butter or oil with salt and pepper, that you may never try it any other way.  It's the young shoots - eight inches tall or less - that you eat this way.  Older, taller shoots can be peeled and sliced and used like rhubarb.  Don't confuse it with Poke, another Spring shoot which grows under last year's stalks; Poke needs to be cooked in two changes of water.  

I do not get it.  I just do not get it.  People spend so much time, effort, and money trying to get rid of their dandelions.  Eat them!  Eat the greens, use the roots for a decaf "coffee," put the flowers in salads or use them to make wine.  Or just let them be - they are so pretty.  How many places can you go in the spring and see people trying to get rid of dandelions - with their yellow flowers - so they can put in things like daffodils - which have yellow flowers.  Besides, dandelions are a huge early spring resource for bees.  If you poison the dandelions, you poison the bees, which will cut into the supply of that worth-it's-weight-in-gold, highly in-demand local honey everybody wants.

I went on a plant walk, and one of my fellow walkers told me that he is highly allergic to bee stings.  When he gets stung, he mashes a plantain leaf in his mouth to release the juices, and puts it on the sting like a poultice.  I got stung on the face a couple times (veil fail while working the hives), so I tried it out.  I munched up the leaf, stuck it on the stings, and kept it there about 15 minutes.  I also got stung on the hand, and I didn't do the plantain thing on that sting.  The stings on my face did not swell, did not turn red, and did not itch.  The hand sting drove me crazy for a week. Apparently one of the properties of plantain is that it removes toxins. Good to know.

Please don't think that reading this brief essay gives you enough information to go out and safely start eating your backyard weeds.  As I tell my foraging students, get a book! Go out with someone who knows what they are doing. Look at Wildman Steve Brill's website, or Sunny Savage's Youtube videos or VeriaLiving TV shows.  Whenever you try a new food, take just a little the first time, until you gain experience with both identifying and eating wild foods.

Once you start eating wild foods, you'll be amazed at how many there are around, and how prolifically they grow.  They are there for the taking. Spring is here, and it's time to eat some weeds!

. . . I hope.

     The thing about creation stories, no matter how old they are or where they are from, is that they are all true.

    They all begin the same way.  In the beginning there was nothing.  Then there was something.
    Or, first there was time.  Then there was space.  Then there was us.
    Once upon a time.
    The ancient Egyptians had multiple creation stories, depending on the epoch and who was in power and who was in favor and where you were from.  They were all true.  Still are. 
    I like that.  No need for dogmatic arguments, when every explanation of the cosmos makes sense on some level.
    At first there was only black water and darkness and silence.  Then a lotus formed and rose out of the muck amid perfume and light.  That lotus was Amun, who created himself out of nothing.  Then he separated the nothing and created moist air, the Goddess Tefnut, and dry air, the God Shu.  Then he multiplied the nothing and created Geb, the earth.  And so on.
    Or, at first there was only black water and darkness and silence.  The silence's name was Nun.  This primordial watery abyss existed before all creation.  Not even the gods knew the extent of Nun's realm.
      Or, at first there was only black water and darkness and silence.  There was only the Lady of the Place of the Beginning of Time.  She is still here.

    One of my favorite Egyptian creators was Ptah.  Ptah created himself out of thought and speech.  He thought of himself, then spoke himself into existence.  Then he created the other gods by thinking of them, and speaking their names.  He was a self-made man.
    We come from a literal culture.  We are very literal in our speech and language, and therefore literal in our conceptions and understanding.  We talk about the ancient Egyptians as an archaic, primitive culture, but their understanding was greater than ours.  They thought symbolically, and abstractly.  When they wrote about the Gods and Goddesses being brother and sister, they didn't mean that they were literal, incestuous siblings.  They meant that they were made out of the same primordial stuff.  After all, what else was there?  And they didn't have deities with animal heads and human bodies.  They depicted their pantheons that way because it was the best way to depict a concept; not an actual being.  To them, it was the best way to show something that had qualities way beyond the human or animal.
    Can you think and speak yourself into existence?  Or into a new existence?  I mean, of course, once the anatomical stuff is done.  My father once told me that all relationships either progress or regress.  He was right.  As I get older, I begin to realize that what he said applies to everything, not just relationships.  There is only creation, or death.  
    I have learned that there are things I can depict with abstractions that I cannot depict with pictures of things, or images from the visible world.
    There are many creation stories in which the first primordial deity rips itself apart, or is dismembered by later gods to create the world.  It sounds violent until you remember, what else was there to use?  The stars are part of us.
    Some scientists say that we are not really here and nothing really exists, outside of a kind of film stretched across the opening of a black hole.  All the rest is projection. So, all of what we think of as physical creation might be only symbolic, and abstract. It's all speech and thought, not matter and structure.  Maybe.
    Of course, all creation stories are true. 
    Like the Egyptians, I am finding that some things can't be depicted literally.  You have to chuck your best concept into the void, and see what comes back.
    As I get old, I see that there is only creation and death. Create, or die.  All I have to work with is myself.  I may have to rip myself apart to create something new, and all I have to build with is speech and thought.  For all that I know, those might be the right tools for making pictures out of the un-picturable.  It seems to have worked for the gods.


I am trying out a new Virtual Exhibit page; check it out.