August, Summer’s Climax by Marion

All Things Pass - Timothy Leary & Lao Tzu

All Things Pass - Lao-Tzu

From:  “Psychedelic Prayers”, page 51

All things pass
A sunrise does not last all morning
All things pass
A cloudburst does not last all day
All things pass
Nor a sunset all night
All things pass
What always changes?

Earth...sky...thunder...
mountain...water...
wind...fire...lake...

These change
And if these do not last

Do man's visions last?
Do man's illusions?

Take things as they come

All things pass



(from translations adapted by Timothy Leary [1920-1996])===============================
Lao-Tzu (ca. 6th century BC) is traditionally considered the author of the Tao Te Ching and the founder of Taoism. Timothy Leary was a Harvard professor and advocate for the use of LSD to expand conciousness. He compiled this version of the poem from a collection of English translations.

I Envy the Wind By Lucinda Williams

I envy the wind
That whispers in your ear
That howls through the winter
That freezes your fingers
That moves through your hair
And cracks your lips
That chills you to the bone
I envy the wind

I envy the rain
That falls on your face
That wets your eyelashes
and dampens your skin
And touches your tongue
And soaks through your shirt
And drips down your back
I envy the rain

I envy the sun
That brightens your summer
That warms your body
And holds you in her heat
That makes your days longer
And makes you hot
And makes you sweat
I envy the sun
I envy the wind, I envy the rain, I envy the sun, I envy the wind

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Lucinda Williams

My flowers are loving our deliciously hot days!  Over 100 degrees today...

 Passionflower or Alienflower, as I call it.  Smells grape!

Buddha with spent Moonflower

I notice multiples of one every day...being here now.

Passionflower vine, grooving & grasping.  One open; one closed.

Datura Moonflower, slowly opening...

I used to have this van in the 1970's!  So groovy. 

I Think I’ve Seized the Wrong Damn Day!!

Phoenix by Ijeoma Umebinyuo

From:  "Questions For Ada"

One day,
your bones will get weary
of men
who refuse to worship the God in you.

On that day,
you will either slit your soul
or gather your spirit
leaving any man
who has never called you
Holy.

Remember
how your mother kept her bones warm
on nights your father was far away.

So,
do not love a man who keeps you clinging
to the pillow for too many nights.

Stay away
from men who peel the skin
of other women, forcing you to wear them.

Remember how your mother struggled
to find her skin in the pile.

Do not
scratch your words,
soften your pain or scrub yourself in shame.

Do not
drown yourself in a man.

He will leave you struggling to breathe.

וווו×

You let it flow from you...

TAO 78, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Tao 43, translated by Stephen Mitchell

From:  “Portrait of a Lady” by T. S. Eliot II Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
“Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands”;	45
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
“You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see.”
I smile, of course,	50
And go on drinking tea.
“Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall
My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,
I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world
To be wonderful and youthful, after all.” **********

Happy 50th, Woodstock!

My custom Blythe hippie sisters, Tee Joy & Sunny, customized by the talented Sandra Coe in Detroit.  Her shop at Etsy is:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/Coedependent

Alice in Wonderland Blythe.  “White Rabbit” by Grace Slick is her fav song.  ;-)

Happy 50th anniversary to peace, love & rock & roll!  The birth of the 1970's began at Woodstock in 1969.  Magical music, peaceful gatherings and a generation of the best music ever composed in my generation.  

WOODSTOCK (Crosby, Stills & Nash)

Well, I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going
This he told me

Said, I'm going down to Yasgur's Farm
Gonna join in a rock and roll band
Got to get back to the land and set my soul free

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

Well, then can I roam beside you?
I have come to lose the smog,
And I feel myself a cog in somethin' turning
And maybe it's the time of year
Yes and maybe it's the time of man
And I don't know who I am
But life is for learning

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere was a song and a celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes
Riding shotgun in the sky,
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation

We are stardust, we are golden
We are caught in the devils bargain
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Joni Mitchell

Self Pity by D. H. Lawrence

Datura Moonflower opening on a stormy afternoon...

Garfield & I holding paws...

Passionflower...so, so many...

Self-Pity

I never saw a wild thing 
sorry for itself. 
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

~D. H. Lawrence

The House Was Quiet & The World Was Calm By Wallace Stevens

The House Was Quiet and The world was calm

By Wallace stevens

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens, "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - What If You Slept?

What if you slept ... 

What if you slept 
And what if 
In your sleep 
You dreamed 
And what if 
In your dream 
You went to heaven 
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower 
And what if 
When you awoke 
You had that flower in you hand 
Ah, what then?   

~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

_________________________

I haven’t slept all night in years,

Pain, nightmares, fear, hot/cold/hot/cold.  

PTSD.  More nightmares.  FULL MOON!

Listen to true crime podcasts.

Stomachache, heartache, 
children & grandchildren ache, bite my cheeks,
cough, hurt all over, sadness, regret, anxiety, thirsty, 
WORRY, pray without ceasing, 
existential crisis, ageing horrors, melancholy, 
reading, listening to books, soothing music, 
cats making scary noise sounds, 
poetry circling in my brain,
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...

Reading Patti Smith & Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano

"Birds no longer curious cease to wing." ~ Patti Smith, 'Devotion, Why I Write'

I am in love
with these
two books.
A dream sequence,
flowing, floating,
flavoring my
painful existence.
Escape into the
spaces between the
words and find
an entirely
new world.

Marion, still scribbling & making art...

I love kitty paws.  :-)