Thursday, July 23, 2015
...and, no, I'm no mathematician...I have to re-count our chickens each night to make sure all the hens got back safely. My first count often goes wacky, because I never really learned to count, it to trust math. But here I sit in a big pile of mathematical messes needing to be unwound. From here on my front porch, I see the neat arrangement of sunflower seeds, the Fibonacci or whatever it is, phi number sequence, supposedly, that makes the tightly packed sunflower seeds spiral out in the beautiful pattern they stay true to. Even though they look weepy and heavy, burdened with their own mathematical and artistic genius...loaded with mathematical law-abiding yellow finches, wrens, chickadees, cardinals. Wondering if they follow any particular order in seed-eating... Then worrying all night over wacky math, disobeying the thyroid laws, in my daughter's struggle with illness...numbers going anywhichway...not making sense. Oh, did I use that bowing word, anywhichway? Yep, I did. Which of course brings me around to fiddling...something I think about a lot, but don't often do at the moment. But I did for a few minutes on the porch here this morning. And, with patterns, regularities, predict abilities and general nature-law-abiding on my mind...I realized my fiddling has shifted somewhat. I don't really have much time for writing ( helping somebody with one thing or another...and today it's more doctor appointments), but in the few minutes I fiddled out here, I realized I have gone off and left the Nashville Shuffles behind. I'm not sure I ever would have been aware of this, really, except that a long time ago, when my daughter was in high school...she and her friends wanted me to show them some fingerpicking on guitar. I showed them something somebody had shown me, a neighbor, about 40 years before that time...broke it down, then played it up to speed. The kids all caught me: "but you're not playing what you showed us!" Then I realized how I had strayed from that and wasn't sure what I was doing! I think for a while now, this has been happening with my fiddling: I'm thinking Nashville Shuffle, mainly, and there might be a ghost that runs true to that somewhere hovering above, but my actual, concrete bowing moves are, well, all over the place. A couple of times I was aware of this, kinda liked some specific thing, tried to go back and do that again with my bow to see what I was doing...and couldn't reproduce it. Lol...so, I'm in the dark. Yet, wondering, if like the sunflowers, birds, overgrown yard and gardens here, that carry a ghost or shadow of a thread that runs true, somewhere behind the appearance of disorder, of anywhichway...if my bowing does it...and if daughter's thyroid does this too. Is there some thread running the proper course, while numbers on a see-saw confuse the tangible we live in here...if there is still some order, some meaning, in the intangible that we feel, we sense, we could tap into to be guided along. I don't know. Feeling confused on many levels. But now it's time to get ready to go a long distance to get her to a holistic doctor...to see if there is any sense to be discovered. An Eastern bluebird just now buzzed me through the porch...the first one I've seen all year. I'm just superstitious enough to think there are signs to watch, hints from everything around us. Sensing this guidance has helped me with many things in my life: tracking animals, planting seeds, caring for plants, playing music, and doing a lot of other things. But, looking too hard interferes with what we see and what we think we see. My great grandmother used to come back inside with a four-leaf clover every time she left to do something outside in the farm. I seem to have gotten this too...my husband always got so envious, because he would search and search for them, I'd keep explaining you find them most when you let them reveal themselves to you. He learned that recently...he can walk along and be receptive to a four-leaf clover...lol. Pretty silly stuff. But I can't help but think...there's so much missing in the madness, the anywhichwayness, that's before our eyes and ears. Maybe searching for order reveals so much, but I can't help but wonder what we miss by searching too hard. And now, I gotta go!
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'pretty tailpieces' 3 hrs
'John hartford' 4 hrs
