No Good Morning

Get up.  

Remember your dreams.

Take a shower, fix your hair, change your attitude, find some faith. Choose love. 

Change your attitude, have faith, choose Love.

Get going.

Long Exposure

I think where cameras fail

may be in 

the impossibility of 

the separation of

light from darkness,

if not 

stopping time

It's beautiful, running by 

night, blind and alive

to the coming storms on the radar

6/3/2010

if that's not a frog i hear tonight

i don't know what else it could be...

New Recipe

this one is for Dandelion Wine

made from dandelions picked at the height of their bloom: thick, fat, and sticky, all petals and pollen

yellow fingertips and open flowers
in the calf-height grasses of the warm wind-blown fields
of Spring
(or knee-height, for the small ones who might like to help)

brighter than you've ever seen

3 to 4 quarts dandelion flower heads (it may be hard to tell how much you have once they shut tight and settle)
2 gallons boiling water

put the flowers in the water, stir, cover and seal with plastic wrap, and let sit for two days.  do not exceed this time unless you are me, in which case let sit for three days, and work hard as you can for one of them.  stir daily

bring the flowers back to a boil.  to the boil add:

juice of three large oranges
zest and juice of three lemons
1 lb golden raisins

boil gently, or not, for a while, maybe twenty or thirty minutes, or more.  time is relative.  then add:

6 lbs sugar, just exactly the amount you happen to have in the cupboard, and

boil for ten minutes more.

use a sieve to scoop and strain solids into another pot.  do not attempt to strain twelve quarts of liquid with flowers and raisins directly through a sieve and funnel into your primary, spilling hot sweet flowery beauty all over your feet and the floor, and do not feel bad about the wine you've just lost, even though it smells about as good as anything ever did.  strain the remaining  into primary.  let the solids cool for a bit, then spoon into a nylon straining bag, cool a while more and squeeze as much liquid as you can from them, into the primary.

allow to cool to room temp and then add:

1 packet Montrachet wine yeast
2 tsp yeast nutrient

put fermentation lock in place and let sit until 

the next thing happens...

Full Flower Moon

Discovery

I arrived home this evening to find a bee hive in my backyard, which was something of a surprise... I'd recently talked of it with the hive's keeper, and was on the fence at the time about whether or not to host a colony this year.  I didn't last year, partly because my hive didn't survive the previous winter, for somewhat mysterious reasons, and partly because I was not inclined to entertain the possibility of another visit to the emergency room, and the epinephrine and prednisone and rather terrible what-not that followed... I have to say, it feels strange to regard the hive with a certain sense of dread, instead of joy, and beyond that I'm just not sure it's sensible for me to risk getting stung again at this point, or possibly ever.  I've come to realize recently, or at least to suspect, that many of my health issues may be related to something called "histamine intolerance", which is a seemingly complex problem having many potential causes and relationships, not least among them being hormonal imbalances (prime candidate.), digestive disorders of various sorts (check.), allergies (apparently.) to certain foods and almost all noxious things, auto-immune complications (possibly.) and general stress (obviously.).  I rather feel at this point that it's almost without question that if I were to be stung, I would most certainly react quite badly--perhaps in a life-threatening way--and in spite of my preference to maintain gung-ho attitude about experience in general and particularly with regard to "Nature", I cannot say that I wish to know first-hand how it feels to stab myself in the leg with an epi-pen.

Hmmm.

I'd be happy to have the bees grace my garden, but--

Hmmmmmm.

I don't know.  Maybe it would be good to get stung again, and learn what might happen.  Assuming that what happens isn't sudden death, I might be okay with that.

Hmm...