Echoes in a Hollow Space

Last night I re-watched My Dinner with Andre for the first time in a very long time. At least 20 years, maybe longer. I've seen it many times. There was a time when my friend and I would go to see it every time it played at the Nuart cinema in West L.A., an “art house” theater which still exists (though it’s part of the Landmark chain now). Every time I saw Andre I felt as if the conversation had somehow magically changed, that new things, new concepts had been added. My sympathy would swing back and forth between the two people talking, I'd laugh at one and then the other, cry with one and then the other. The ending always made me appreciate the mystery and the wonder of life, from the ordinary details of a cold cup of coffee, to the mystical wonders of Findhorn, to living life consciously, and living life in a dream. And it still works. It still works.

In some ways it works better in today’s society than it did in 1981. The themes of living consciously rather than floating along; the themes of how distracted we all are and how difficult that makes it to live meaningfully.

"A baby holds your hand and then suddenly there's this huge man lifting you off the ground. And then he's gone. Where's that son?"

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And speaking of watching, I just finished season 3 of The Detectorists. What a lovely, lovely show. Low key, gentle humor, sweet spirit. One of my very favorites.

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Click on the Twitter link to watch a starling movie (hover over movie for sound icon in lower righthand corner):

God noise musicians are so hot pic.twitter.com/NIiUFtVjqM

— Patrick Steadman (@ptsteadman) October 4, 2018

Click on the link to watch Mom and her starling, Baby (hover over movie for sound icon in lower righthand corner):

pic.twitter.com/cM7opjoc5i— PJ I Can't Even Thompson (pj_thompson) June 8, 2019


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Butterflies are such beautiful creatures. Which is why I can’t understand the urge to collect them, kill them, and use them as art objects, preventing them from living out their life cycle and reproducing so that we will continue to have beautiful butterflies.

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My mother grew up right in the middle of Uintah Co., UT, a place well known in paranormal circles and home to the infamous Skinwalker Ranch. It was a little farming community called Willow Creek, not to be confused with the current day town of Willow Creek which is some ways northwest of where Mom grew up. Mom’s community doesn’t exist any more, as it became part of the Ute reservation. I had to locate the Creek it was named after to get an approximate location on Google maps (below).



I've often wondered if Mom’s nervousness regarding "weird shit," as she called it, was because she grew up in a place where it was common.

Having said that, one of the shows she really liked to watch in the last years of her life was Finding Bigfoot. It was one of the few "weird" shows she could tolerate. Every time we'd watch she'd be fascinated and almost every single time she’d say afterwards, "There has to be something to this." Not sure why she found it so convincing. But maybe Uintah County had something to do with it.

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Speaking of weird (as I do so love to), I was reading a thread on Twitter about the superstitions of health care workers. One of the most frequently mentioned was that health care workers would open a door or a window when someone died so the soul could find its way outside. (This is a very old folkloric belief.) While reading this I remembered that when my mother, who was in hospice here at home, passed away, the very lovely hospice nurse (a lady from Africa—and I’m sorry, sweet nurse, I no longer remember which country you said) took care of business and then went to open the front door.

I don’t think I even asked her why (I was in grief shock) but there must have been something in my expression because she hurried to say, “That’s so the funeral home knows what house it is.” I accepted it at the time but in retrospect, that makes no sense at all. It makes more sense after reading that thread on Twitter.

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It's so difficult to overcome the "I want I want I want" mentality so many of us have been raised with in this society and replace it with the "We are we are we are" mentality. But necessary deprogramming.

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I’m a rather half-assed pagan. I do witchy things but I respect and honor witches too much to call myself one unless I feel I've earned it. I think I'm on a parallel but different path, anyway. I have a kind of spiritual practice that I’m getting back in touch with after many years of distraction and tamping it down to deal with this world. Any spiritual practice that’s worth its salt, I think, has to deal with both the mystical and the mundane or it’s just escapism. (Yes, I know, some would say all spiritual practice is escapism, but that’s their problem. I have no patience with them.)

In recent times, I have meditated and put out calls of—how to phrase it? Belonging? Certain deities respond and when they do I honor them on my mantelpiece. Others are just "the spirit of the rock" or "the spirit of the tree." I am sure there is a spirit of the house, this house, but it's unnamed. My mother, as I’ve mentioned, was not comfortable with discussion of anything spiritual. But I think she had some talents. She said the first time she walked into this house it opened its arms to her and said welcome. And I still feel that.

Everyone on the mantelpiece seems okay with everyone else, but I always ask before I place a representation there if everyone welcomes the addition. On rare occasions they say no and I honor that, but most times they’re accepting. And not just spiritual things go on the mantle. It's a kind of cornucopia of silly and sacred and artwork, but it seems to work for everybody.



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What’s something about myself that I once wanted to change to fit in but am now happy with? My weirdness. I never saw things the way most people did. I now realize that’s not my affliction but my treasure.

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"It's not a swastika it's some kind of Tibetan symbol," said the guy in the Nazi war helmet when asked why he put a concrete swastika in his front yard. "I don't think he's a Neo-Nazi," said his neighbor, adding sheepishly, "But he may be racist." #TalesFromTheLocalNews

Random quote of the day:

 

“Discovery commences with awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science.”

—Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for awhile may remember this story, but as it's mysterious and happened to me, I thought it worth posting again.

In June of 2005 I decided to visit Woodlawn Cemetery on 14th and Pico in Santa Monica, California. Not a huge cemetery, surrounded by urban blight on three of its four sides and a junior college on the fourth, but a beautiful place inside the grounds. A number of old, gnarled, and interesting trees are scattered throughout the graveyard, and since it was established in the nineteenth century it has a wide range of dates on the headstones.

I've liked walking through cemeteries since I was quite young (morbid child that I am), and I'd been to Woodlawn often back in the day. I also used it in one of my novels (Shivery Bones), dredged up from memory. I decided to return to see if my memory had gotten things right, and also to take some pictures with my (then) new camera. Because the sun was so bright, the sky so blue, the trees so plentiful, I got lots of shadow-and-light shots. The headstones held many poignant stories, too—heartbreak and mysteries, brief lives, some nearly a century old. I doubt anyone knows the story behind the words on those stones anymore, probably not even the folks who keep the cemetery records.

One story that has always intrigued me centers around two small markers over by the western fence:



No dates, no other graves nearby, just these two little headstones. My imagination has always roamed a great deal over what story might lie behind the starkness of these two little markers.

The next night as I went through the pictures, I discovered another little mystery. I like to view all the pictures in super blow up, quadrant by quadrant. Partly that's because sometimes a piece of a photo will be more interesting than the entire shot; partly because I like to look for anomalies. My favorite shot of the set was a shadow and light picture of a child's grave. And that was the beginning of the mystery:



( The small mystery. )

Those of you who have been reading this journal for a long time may remember this story. I recently posted a shortened and amended version to mourning_souls because I was way too excited to find a community that shares my love of photographing cemeteries. Who knew? There's apparently a community for every interest, no matter how disconcerting.

And the other interesting thing? In the process of posting, I added to the mystery by discovering something I hadn't noticed before. But I'll save that for the end of the post...

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I thought I'd share a small mystery I encountered in a local, urban cemetery.

Back in June of 2005, I wound up at Woodlawn Cemetery up on 14th and Pico in Santa Monica, California. I hadn't been there in while, but I used to like to walk through the place. Not a huge cemetery, surrounded by urban blight on three of its four sides and a junior college on the fourth. But it's a beautiful place, lots of old and gnarled and interesting trees, and since it was established in 1847 it has a wide range of dates for the headstones.

Because the sun was so bright, the sky so blue, and the trees so plentiful, I got lots of shadow and light shots. Lots of poignant stories in the headstones, too. Mysteries that are nearly a century old. I doubt anyone knows the story behind them anymore, probably not even the folks that keep the cemetery records.

The next night when I was going through the pictures, I discovered another little mystery. I like to view all the pictures in super blow up, quadrant by quadrant. Partly that's because sometimes a piece of a photo will be more interesting than the entire shot; partly because I like to look for anomalies. My favorite shot was a shadow and light shot of a child's grave. And that was the beginning of the mystery:




( The small mystery. )