Who's Got the Blues?

I do. I have the blues. I have turquoise and aquamarine and cobalt and sapphire and navy. And I'm feeling blue, kind of low, pretty dispirited really. No, my dog didn't run off. Nobody stole the truck. Nope, the blues are generally matters of the heart if you listen to any of the great blues musicians like T Bone Walker, Furry Lewis, or John Lee Hooker:"They call it Stormy Monday, but Tuesday's just as bad. You know, Wednesday's worse, and Thursday's oh so sad..." It's a state of being that everybody knows. Listen to "The Sky is Crying." Or not, the title sets it up...

But then there is azure and cerulean, the color of the sky in Colorado. Blue jeans. Indigo. Picasso had a blue period. Lapis lazuli is the blue stone crushed and inlaid with gold in the tombs of the pharaohs to remain fiercely brilliant for millennia. In 2009, chemists in a lab discovered, completely by mistake, a blue pigment made by superheating the elements yttrium, indium and manganese. This new color is arguably the first synthetic blue pigment invented since cobalt blue in 1802 and was subsequently brought to the public by Crayola with a crayon named in an open competition. After 90,000 submissions they settled on Bluetiful. (Haven't we learned by now not to let the public decide things?! Hello, Boaty McBoatface, elections....) This new compound absorbs red and green light waves for a vivid and durable peacock blue.

Speaking of light, and wings, when I was a kid around five, my grandmother had a plate on the wall of the room where my brothers and I slept made of butterfly wings under glass. Aside from the terrifying clown portrait, it was the most amazing thing in her entire house. It was electric blue, almost radiant, lighted magically from within. As an adult, I learned the color of the Blue Morpheus wings was a result of lightwave interference as opposed to an actual pigment in the bug. Check out this link for a bowl I made of anodized titanium around 20 years ago that was exhibited in the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College.

The anodizing process creates a layer of clear oxide on the metal surface that is only millionths of an inch thick. Light bounces off the surface of the metal AND the surface of the oxide to cause wavelength interference, cancelling other colors and letting the blue shine. When one views from the side, the oxide layer is just infinitesimally thicker and hence, purple. The latest science news is about "Quantum Blue," but that is all nano-particles and complicated, and we can deal with it when it makes it into a crayon.

Why does anyone sing the blues, if it's all about misery? How could this art form exist? Books have been written to explain this, but I'm going to use Wile E. Coyote instead. Life, like the Road Runner, is fast, relentless and it never stops. You cannot win the race that makes us worm food.Wile E. Coyote is our existential hero. He never wins. He never, ever, catches that bird. But, regardless, he tries every freaking episode. No matter how bad the blues can be, there is the voice and the guitar, Wile E. with his rockets and springs and anvil, Stevie Ray and Derek Trucks playing their hearts out. Texas Flood, Blak and Blu. Statesboro Blues. The blues is the sound of spirit over odds, defiance over the inevitable. Life is full of tragedy. Even kings die. B. B. King is gone. Floods come. Fires too. Partners leave. The tests are bad.

But midnight blue and the robin's egg blue of morning are not so far apart. Dusk. Deep blues. Dawn. Acoustic blues are good early in the day--Michael Hedges, Tommy Emanuel's version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." "Blues Power," by Eric Clapton told me forty years ago that "I got the boogie woogies in my very soul..." And I have come to believe him. B. B. King is gone, but have a serious listen to a twenty-two year-old Marcus King. He is the real deal. As a singer, as a song writer, he can explain Wile E. Coyote in the context of love and life and a flamethrower guitar solo.The notion that these two blues legends each have the last name King should tell us something. Royal Blues...

John Mayer sings,

"Joni wrote Blue in her house by the sea,

I gotta believe there's another color waiting on me...

To set me free."

 "There's no way to delay that trouble coming every day..." sang Baltimore's brilliant son. Sorrow and pain are part of destiny, but we have Miles' "Kind of Blue," and "All Blues." We have "Stella Blue." "Drifting Blues."We have "Blue Sky," which will ALWAYS lift. We have bluebirds. We have blueberries. Yves Klein. Blue eyes, which, by the way, have no actual blue in them. It's all light scattering, like my job. Deep blue sea and the dusty powder blues of the distant Adirondacks at sunset. James Turrell. The sparkle song of a hermit thrush soloing in the woods.And, naturally, light with a dominant wavelength between 450 and 495 nanometers...

That should cheer up anybody.

Peace out all you humans,

Don't be blue, unless you want to. Then be ultramarine...

P.S. Dear friends, and by this I mean those who take the time to read these musings about life and stars and dogs and weeds... I'm not trying to win the day or convert your religion. We are all off the cliff, airborne, waiting to hit the bottom of the canyon with a boulder or anvil following us down. This is precisely why we need love, levity, tricky art and fine music. Without these it's a simple math formula of time, velocity and gravity. "Gravity is working against me, and gravity wants to bring me down..." That's either Sisyphus, Wile E. or John Mayer and the last one has the best voice, I'm sure.

Rock Steady

Transitive Nightfall

Greeting astute humans,

Three weeks ago I was in the studio late and came outside to a moonless, dark night. Stars were bright. I drove a couple blocks to the lakeshore and a spot I know with no street lamps next to the Burlington Surf Club, one of our magical paradoxes in Vermont--a surf club...  I laid back on a huge towel in the grass (sans ticks, i hope) to watch the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. August 11th. Acclimate the eyes. Relax. As always, it's a bit anticlimactic for those of us who love movies with the God of Thunder holding fast in the searing torrent of a dying star's energy blast...

Zip. A momentary streak of white light. A minute later--zip--white line in the blackness over the lake. Silent. Ephemeral.

In 1968, the Grateful Dead released a two-and-a-half minute song as a single that sold around 500 copies. In concert, this song, named "Dark Star," became the de facto anthem of the band's psychedelic journey. Many concert versions of the song lasted up to a half hour; they played it in Rotterdam for over 48 minutes. Then the band stopped playing it for four years. It appeared on New Year's Eve in 1978 and then disappeared. In the following eight years, they played it once. Ultimately, it returned as a staple, and myriad live recordings preserve the special auditory dance that defines the "Dark Star."

After a few streaking meteors, I thought about the difference in the light I was witnessing. Old light, the specks of twinkling white I perceived, were photons generated millions - tens of millions - of years ago. Hundreds of millions of years... The dying dust incandescence of a meteor was new light. Fresh. Instantaneous. Just created. Old, constant. New, a flash...  Poetic. For me, a juxtaposition sublime.

Then, I rolled up the towel. Hopped in my car. Flipped on the headlights. New light!! HA! What a crock. I'm making new light all the time. Snap.

Right there, I was hit with the the definition of poetry. We make the distinctions. Our sensitivity and our spin are what frames all of this reality into moments of beauty. That is us. It's what we do. Dark night, white light. Frame it. Delight.

 The Dead sing,

"Dark star flashes, pouring its light into ashes...

...Shall we go, you and I while we can,

through the transitive nightfall

of diamonds..."   

Yes we can. It's all we get. Good thing it's made of diamonds...

Peace and love ya'll.

Bruce Mac

Light Wobbles and Evil Weeds

Yo Mates,

EXPRESSO is an instrument designed in 2013 and first tested in 2016. As the most sensitive spectrograph ever built, it is engineered to study the tiny wobble in starlight, the minute changes in color caused by gravity, which are created by the orbit of a rocky exo-planet. We are looking for other Earths billions of miles away. It's funded in part by Netflix in the hopes of finding the successor to "Friends" and "Game of Thrones." Nope, sorry, made that last part up.

Light. Tricky stuff. Along the roadsides in Vermont right now is an invasive weed related to the infamous Giant Hogweed, called Wild Parsnip, which can cause phytophotodermatitis. Its sap, the oils on the plant, can get on your skin and when exposed to UV or sunlight will cause second-degree burns. The scars can last for years... Who designed that plant? In 2017, the EU created the Giant Alien Fund to combat the spread of this wicked weed, whose evil had been forewarned by the British band Genesis in 1971 with their song "Return of the Giant Hogweed." Nobody ever listens to prog rockers...

As you know, the sky is blue because that end of the visible spectrum has a shorter wavelength than the red end so blue is scattered more by the molecules that make up air, primarily oxygen and nitrogen. Longer wavelengths pass through, which explains why the sun and the moon near the horizon appear more red. The direct light of the sun has to pass through much more of the atmosphere at the low angle of day's end, and hence, more blue scattering. Also, the dust and water vapor and pollen and smoke allow the longer wavelength red light to pass more easily. We all know this, but the magic of spectral analysis is studying the specific frequencies or lines that are being absorbed. With this analysis we can determine what is in the atmosphere of an exo-planet-- exactly what elements are present and in what ratios and concentrations. We do these because we are fundamentally curious animals. Oh, and by the way, we can determine if it might be habitable for us humans, once we are through destroying our current planet. Or not. It's up to us. Current studies show plants and animals moving away from the equator fifteen feet per day... 

This summer in Vermont has been the most superlative I can remember for sunset watching. Nothing like a daily binge on a non-TV channel with no content--no characters, no plots, no ads....  Just light, water vapor, billowy white up high, then mauve, purples, gold... Watching over a plane of shimmering  H2O helps quite a bit.

While the smart humans and their instruments are analyzing the spectrum of planet HD2O945AB, an exo-planet kind of like Jupiter, billions of miles away, I'll be here with all you guys taking notes on these summer evenings of waves and wavelengths, gleams and sparkles.

Has to be art in there somewhere... Better get back to polishing...

Avoid the flowering roadside monsters. Pay attention in the twilight.

Pink and Green, Same Same

Season's greetings,

Recently, I was down at the Battery in NYC and looking across the water at the Statue of Liberty. Back in the '80s, during the restoration work for the centennial celebration of the Statue, I read all about the crazy engineering of this massive sculpture. It's 305' 6" from the base to the tip of the flame. 100 tons of copper panels held with 300,000 rivets are attached to a wrought iron frame with no contact between these dissimilar metals. Copper touching iron in salt air would disintegrate the iron rapidly through the ion flow from galvanic reactivity. A giant self-destructing battery was not the idea. The restoration engineers marveled at the builders’ architectural stratagems, but wondered why such primitive iron - chock full of impurities with a strangely high carbon content - was used, only to realize eventually that the impurities prevented cracks from propagating. Blazing sun, expansion, snow, wind, ice, lightning, salt, fog... Yep, ready for all that. Gustave Eiffel helped design her before he became famous.

Looking at "Lady Liberty Enlightening the World" - the actual name of the artwork - sent me back to my little infinite library to look up "Hyperion". Not the god, not the moon of Saturn. At 380 feet tall and 600 to 800-years-old, Hyperion is the tallest living thing on earth. Lady Liberty is huge out there in the harbor, but there is a coastal redwood "hidden" on a steep hillside in northern California. The size of a thirty-story building, its actual location is kept secret for its own safety, but, in truth (excepting Man and his tools, of course), these life forms are nearly invulnerable: foot-thick bark; pink heartwood impervious to insect predation; and, even when all the limbs are consumed by fire, the tree will sprout new growth. Hyperion is young and still growing. The normal lifespan of these monsters is up to 2,200 years. Sheer size is helpful too--up to 30% of its moisture needs comes from fog, harvested by the leaves and limbs of these living, literal skyscrapers.

In 2017, someone paid 71.2 million dollars for a rock that weighs about four-tenths of an ounce. It was dug out of the ground in 1999 in Africa and, after two years of study, was cut from 132.5 raw carats into The Pink Star. It's now a 59.5 carat oval and is technically a "mixed cut Fancy Vivid Pink Internally Flawless Diamond".

So, what’s the thread? Giant art. Monster living organism. Tiny sparkly rock. Green. Green (and brown). Pink. Big. Bigger. Pipsqueak. Well, it's #6 on the Chart. Carbon. The high carbon content in the big lady’s iron was intentional and primitive and brilliant. Most of the armatures lasted 100 years, only to be replaced with 316L stainless steel, the exact material I use to push light around. The "L" stands for low carbon. The ancient redwood forest stores more carbon dioxide per acre than any other forest on the planet, including the tropical rainforest, with 1,000 metric tons per acre, double the rate of most forestlands. And, of course, the most concentrated form of pure carbon is a diamond. Impurities like boron make a diamond blue, nitrogen makes a diamond yellow, but pink is thought to be not from impurities, but a specific crystalline lattice structure that simply absorbs green light, therefore reflecting a pink hue. Pure. Purist. So, carbon impurities, good. Carbon capture, really good. Pure carbon, lovely.

Where do WE come into the discussion? Take away the water in my body and I am more carbon than the next element by a factor of ten. I am way, way mostly carbon. The point here is diversity--a single element is all of the above goodness, and in the manifestation of 160-pound me, self aware, creative, arguably the most complex carbon assemblage we will ever know. (Personally, I am not that complicated. But, you know, US, together, all together). One atomic bit can take all these forms. Me and the tree, Lady Liberty and the Pink Star. I like this club. A lot. Art. Plant. Rock. Animal. Diversity is pretty magical when you peer into it--one thing, many forms.

Thanks for following along my friends. Summer is here and time for big Art visits and trees and as much sparkle as possible. 

Moving Air, Moving Art

Often it is easy to overlook the thing that is glaring and large, the obvious can get overshadowed by the details...

In the news this week was the UK running entirely on wind energy for five and a half hours. Denmark has operated for days on wind power alone, as has Portugal. In California, scientists have modeled a solar and wind grid for our country. Their calculations consider that wind is intermittent and solar is well, naturally, doing nothing at night. If we had twelve hours of energy storage capacity, we could be 80% sufficient, and with three weeks of battery storage we could be 100% renewably powered. Buy stock in battery makers...

But this is not the point of my missive. The point is that sometimes we need to state the obvious to truly comprehend the whole picture. When comparing wind power to coal or natural gas generating plants, it is easy to overlook the obvious. Build a fossil fuel facility or a wind turbine? Well, with one of these you never need to buy fuel. Let that sink in.

So, what does this have to do with art? On the right hand, nothing. It's just my way of saving the planet via enlightenment. On the left brain, stating the obvious about art is that it IS and stays being Art. The obvious is that art stays. Bach, Shakespeare, Cézanne... Always right THERE, dancing its little dance, humming its little hum... Actually, Bach in a cathedral with a pipe organ...

But you get the drift. Our lives are awash in flitting images and sounds -- flashing screens, endless words assimilated and replaced moment to moment. Art endures. Great art has tenacity and endurance, permanent awe attached. I am stating the obvious. Yep. But then again, it doesn't need any fuel either.

Pointy Wings and Flying Economy

A frigate is a fast warship. It's also the name of a bird that I have noticed in Florida flying extremely high and never seeming to flap its wings. I stared at one for a while and concluded that it must be some kid's kite just sitting there all geometric angles and solid black. After a little homework, I identified that living kite as a Magnificent Frigate Bird, separate from its other pals, the Great, the Christmas, the Ascension and the Lesser Frigate Birds. Fabulous naming work. Ornithology crosses into poetry at some point. It's also called a Pirate Bird for reasons I will get to.

This is one of nature's architectural masterpieces. It's a sublime point of evolution, a simple silhouette of precision aerodynamics. Although its body is over four feet long and has a seven and a half foot wingspan(!), its bones weigh only four ounces and are hollow. They are half the weight of its feathers. One-fifth of its body is devoted to a complex respiratory system that flows through its bones for cooling. This creates the largest wing area to body weight ratio ever recorded. Satellite tracking followed one bird aloft over the Indian Ocean for two months straight! They have been documented at two and a half miles up, and one was recorded gliding forty miles without flapping its wings.

Magically above, hollow, effortlessly soaring, it lacks the correct anatomy to waterproof its wings so it cannot land on water. Huge sodden wings could drown it. It loves flying fish, thermals, and billowing cumulous clouds. A gliding marauder, it practices kleptoparasitism by harassing smaller flying birds until they disgorge their last meal, which the Frigate Bird snatches from the air. It's the Pirate Bird for this reason.  It doesn't swim. It can hardly walk. Its bill is hooked. Its tail is forked for maneuverability, although from the ground that is not apparent. All black with a metallic green or purple gloss, the male has a bright red throat sac only visible during mating season. It is global, soaring the trade winds.

Locally, wouldn't it be nice to flap just once every six minutes to stay on course?  But, we don't. We run around like our hair is on fire. Our hearts beat around 115,000 times a day. Those little Chickadees that just showed up in the yard and are making a total racket have heart rates around 2,000 beats a minute or 2,880,000 beats a day. My bones weigh around twenty four pounds. The Chickadee's little spherical body weighs a total of about four-tenths of an ounce and they never fly far. So, what is the point?

Art. As usual, is the point. We hairless apes balance between the languorous and the speedy, the wanderers and the homebodies. We can't soar, but we can make symphonies. We know too much about too much, but have the capacity for delight. Our super power is creation. All things reproduce, but we alone see, feel, and interpret.   

On that note, spring is here my friends. Time to open some windows and let the fresh air in. As always, there is art apparent--thoughts and hands and tools and insights push light around for specific effects. That's the best. That's what makes us special creatures - it's our invisible wings.

Love love my friends,

Please share these thoughts wide and far,

Bruce R. MacDonald

P.S. Last week I drove through West Yellowstone and saw a bald eagle standing on a rock in the middle of a nearly frozen stream. It was fishing patiently. Just standing there waiting for the right moment, the right fish... 

* Here is the Extra Pointy 2.0 

You know, I won't ask you to reread this all over again. But just substitute the initials FB for the Frigate Bird. Reading along, la la la. Facebook practices kleptoparasitism.... On high, hollow. Opaque. Lovely. Futuristic. Hooked Bill. Invisible forked Tail. 

Maybe I/we need to stop reading about that stuff on the news feed and pay more attention to the backyard and actual open windows. Birdsongs from the woods rather than the Merlin app. Staring into the depth of the sky instead of the lovely new OLED screen...

We balance when we are balancing in the balance. Originally from Latin, "balance" literally is the use of scales, keeping both sides even. For every virtual an actual. My artwork hovers in this interstitial--you can see the computer image but the thing itself is irreproducible. My art exists, in its essence, only in real life. You cannot experience it without wandering about in front of it. No video can do what your two eyes can do. The wiring from eyes to brain is miraculously precise in orienting space and light, reflection and depth, refraction and motion. To truly "see" my art requires your presence. It's a curse that I accept. It's like making a CD with only half the notes available every time I post an image. 

So, come to a show. Stop by my gallery. Take a walk. Ski really fast. Balance. 

And peace, 

And love.  

Houston, we have a pair of slippers...

There's a crack in my windshield right now that is in the worst possible place--in the middle, crawling up from the lower left to be directly in my line of sight. Really?! Right there? Anywhere else and I could probably get through snow plow and sanding season. Nope, right smack in my line of sight... Cracked vision.

In 1900, L. Frank Baum was writing a book about a magical land of bizarre creatures, talking animals, monkeys with wings, witches, a man made of metal. On his filing cabinet was a label: "O-Z". Thanks to the movie made in 1939, we all know how that adventure turned out. A hundred and forty years prior, Voltaire wrote an insane bit of literature that was banned soon after publication, yet became a best seller. Translated into thirteen languages, the tale mocked government, religion, wealth, medicine, academics, travel, sexual mores, and fundamentally, the spirit of optimism. Our hero's mentor repeatedly stated, "It's the best of all possible worlds." In junior high, I discussed this book with my father, who explained to me the double-edged sword of this statement. "...best of all possible" sounded at once wonderful and depressing. This IS what we get. Yep, it's the best, couldn't be any better. Sounds like the heart of the blues to me... without the guitar solo. 

Turritopsis Dohrnii is a jellyfish from the Mediterranean and the Sea of Japan that has the capability to undergo cellular transdifferentiation. This means its cells can change from one to another--a nerve cell can become a skin cell--in a process considered the holy grail of medicine. Human stem cells have this potential as well. Scientists discovered that they can take a mature Turritopsis and stress it--poke it with needles, make it really cold--and it will revert back to a polyp, a baby, and then grow back into an adult. As far as we know, it is unique in the animal kingdom in its capacity to reverse its biotic cycle. Life, stress, revert to a previous form, regrow to maturity. Repeat endlessly. No other critters can do this. (Then again we humans have the power of writing things down). One of my brothers has told me over and over that stress is the point of growth. Ask anyone training for the Olympics...

Whack. Stress to fracture. Crack my field of vision. Shatter the worldview. And now, regrow. Colonists left the oppression to start the New World. The status quo is shattering behind the force of #MeToo. Solar and wind are destroying the global system of energy production; ask anyone in Colorado or Australia or Sweden. The cyclone comes to carry away Dorothy, Puerto Rico, Houston... Voltaire's hero, Candide, a bastard born to wealth, suffers and falls, loses his family, loses his true love, finds treasure, loses it, loses his mentor, his country. The story ends with a reunification and his family "tending their garden," -- the highest moral good in Voltaire's lacerating parable of redemption. (Come to think of it, there were monkeys in that story too; and a storm and a tsunami and an earthquake and a wildfire and a shipwreck). The Immortal Jellyfish is real. The ruby slippers work. Sometimes the windshield has to be replaced immediately.

And finally, "If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be." That's Yogi Berra--catcher, coach, philosopher, five foot seven inch giant of a man, lifetime batting average of only .285 but he holds more World Series rings than anyone else.

The word for this week is "apricity." It means the warmth of the sun in winter. We all need some of that.

May the apricity find your face. Keep the jets clean and the fires stoked. There is Beauty looking for you. 

Happy February.

Man's Best Invention

What do you think? Computers? Eyeglasses? The book? Smart phones? A solar cell? The wheel? Fire?

We have a device being newly studied and researched that can literally "sniff" for cancer in humans. Using a probe with around 300 million sensors and a mysteriously complex processor, this device is also capable of detecting particular elemental compounds such as explosives or illicit drugs, as well as the high frequencies preceding earth tremors or even if a human is about to experience a seizure. Its sensitivity is so acute it can detect in parts per trillion or a drop of blood diluted by twenty Olympic swimming pools. This device has actually been under development for around 35,000 years.

Yep, this device will keep you warm in the mountains, chase down lions in Rhodesia, rid your house of mice, hunt for stag or raccoons or truffles. It can operate on fuels as diverse as raw meat, potato chips or cat poop. With nearly 525 million of these globally, we humans use them as proximity alarms or for herding sheep and cattle. Some cultures use them as a source of food, but in the U.S. 77 million people have this device in their homes and would never think to cook one. They exist in a staggering array of dimensions from 4 ounces and 2.5 inches tall to 345 pounds. We shot one of these into space to orbit the earth in 1957. Probably not that really heavy one.

Their uses are diverse and specialized. Not only can they be used as a team to haul loads at 30-35 mph for 10 miles, they can pull this same load for up to 100 miles in sub-zero temperatures without needing an extended break. They see for the blind and hear for the deaf. Some are part tugboat while others are pure velocity machines. They comfort the aged and infirm and have been documented trying to teach babies how to play "fetch."

It's our best invention. Man's Best Invention. We adopted these family members millennia ago to get rid of household scraps and warn us of danger. And now they guard us with utter dedication and will fight to the death to protect us. As built-in entertainment centers for children and adults alike, they survive for years, bound to their charges. Endless tales recount their ability to find their way home to their people across extraordinary distances. They give us love and loyalty. They smile and dance around. So, TREATS, and go for an extra long walk today. We are lucky humans. We did a great job with this project. Way better than a cell phone.

Solstice Aloha

Let's start with Peace. And Love. And warmth on the longest night of the year. That is tonight.

But let's not talk about the darkness, because tomorrow is the beginning of the light getting longer and brighter.

Something happened in October that has never happened before. Ever. We saw something in the sky that is not about us in any way. It was as foreign as a thing could ever be. Astronomers in Hawaii saw in the sky a reddish, pinkish object screaming along at 37 miles a second. It was a quarter mile long and about eighty yards in diameter, shaped like a hoagie, or a submarine. It brightened and dimmed, so it must be tumbling slowly. Its trajectory was such that it sailed inside the orbit of Mercury, around the sun, and is now slingshot up to 55 miles per second and is headed back into deep space, leaving our elliptic out past Jupiter. Whatever. Comets do that all the time...

But, this is no comet. Comets are dirty snowballs spewing debris and gases and ice as they cruise their long parabola around the sun and away. And then back again later. Often much much much later. That is what they do. This, however, is doing a profoundly different dance. This thing is not bound by our sun. Its trajectory is hyperbolic, meaning it came from outside our sun's pull and accelerated off in a direction different from the one it came from. We will never see this again.

The Hawaiian scientists named this object "Oumuamua" (Oh-moo-a-moo-a). (Say that four times and you realize that it's the start of a song, pretty sure.) What makes it so special is that it is the first "interstellar" object ever witnessed. Every "thing" we have ever seen is part of our solar system--it belongs to our sun. It is one of our dance partners that twirls around in our magical gravitational neighborhood waltz. Oumuamua is from another star, hurtling along independent of us. It's here. Aloha. (I love that this word means hello and goodbye).

So what does this "mean"? Nothing but what we impart. Space dust doesn't "mean" anything. But, what could it mean? The name, Oumuamua, means "scout" or "messenger." What might be the message? Why now?

Well, in my tiny and infinite universe, it is the metaphor for different. This red rock pickle from deep space is here to remind us that change happens. Anything is possible. The message is "paradigm shift". Wake up and recognize the temporality of everything. Hello people of Earth. Bet you didn't expect this. Surprise! And now everything is different. Time to think differently. Maybe someday one of these will have beings on board and will we be proud of our planet, our home, our neighbors, our warmth, our humanity? Oumuamua is the shot across the bow of our cruise ship.

So my friends, happy dark-change-to-light, happy solstice. Merry Merry. Now is a good time to love each other with all our hearts. Now is a good time to make change our path. Oumuamua is the signal, methinks. Why shouldn't it be? Peace on earth sounds good right about now.

Aloha and massive hugs,

May 2018 truly be a new year...

Bruce R. MacDonald

Hot Soup, Gold and the Kiss of Creation

Hi folks,

Let's start with Einstein, smartest guy I never met. In 1916, he surmised that since space time was bendy, ("relative" is the term he liked) then there could be waves, like surf. Ripples in space time. Exactly 100 years later, in February of 2016, the LIGO, Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, detected a ripple caused by the merger of two black holes. The LIGO has two "light storage" arms set at right angles that are each 2.5 miles long. These are not like my "light storage"--a kitchen drawer with flashlights, bulbs and batteries. These are beams of a laser in a vacuum tube that through mirror trickery increase the effective length of the light beams to 696 miles. In essence, these brilliant scientists have a rod that long and they are looking for it to stretch the distance of 10 to the negative 18 meters, or roughly the size of one thousandth of the diameter of a proton. (Pretty weensy change, methinks. There is some serious math at work there). If they see that, and they did, this proves that Einstein was again correct and there is such a thing as a gravitational wave. Space time is indeed flexible. Things can go boom with enough force that a billion miles away space time ripples get to Earth. Imagine what is happening in that neighborhood! To imagine we need a DRFPMI. (Look it up). (Or not, if you are not into Noisebudget, Squeezed Film Dampening, Substrate Brownian, Parametric Instabilities or FINESSE. These are the poetics of quantum physics AND excellent band names....)

Last week scientists had a bonanza. LIGO and a sister instrument detected a ripple and told all the astronomers where to look. A gamma ray detector in orbit pinged confirmation two seconds later and all the major telescopes, around 70, on earth pointed at the same tiny spot of the cosmos. Even Hubble dialed in.

When black holes merge there is nothing to see--all radiation, gamma rays, X-rays, all light frequencies are eaten up by the all powerful gravity. KA BOOM with no evidence excepting the teeniest stretch of the LIGO beam.

Neutron stars are old suns that run out of fuel and collapse into the densest stuff we can still see--a teaspoon full has the mass of Mt Everest. Our sun would turn into a ball of magnetic flux 12 miles in diameter. (You guys all know it is around 864,300 miles in diameter. Right. Check.) Only 130 million light years away from us, (also check, a light year is 5.88 trillion miles) two neutron stars that were locked into a gravitational twirl finally got close enough for their first and last cataclysmic kiss. The resulting "kilonova," (new word y'all, spread that around), mashed protons and neutrons in a furious bath of radiation creating ALL the primordial elements heavier than iron. The debris field from these two 12 mile balls colliding is the size of our solar system. 40 to 100 times the mass of the earth of gold was created instantly. 10 to 30 times the earth's mass of platinum and uranium just appeared out of the atomic stew to be strewn across millions of miles of space.

I highly recommend checking out the animated renderings of all this that you can find on the interwebs. Cataclysmic events are best when you have a cartoon to go by. Once again the tiniest and the most massively unfathomable things are linked, and human beings with insanely sophisticated quantitative tools are marveling at our natural surroundings. There is poetry in the science, and metaphor too. What are children but the golden offspring of two super dense objects getting too close? If we are anything, we are precious and know it. If we are anything, it is a pair of eyes looking for nuance. Tiny ripples that prove we are here and watching. Tiny wavelets across the emptiness... light wiggling, sparks...

Surf the waves everyday, my friends. As my buddy Larry says, "Everyday is a gift. That is why we call it the present."

Come visit the latest playing with light and shapes at SOFA Chicago 2017 this weekend, November 2-5, at Navy Pier. 

We are stretching and bending and refracting and reflecting and hanging about looking for the next kaboom... 

Venus, Vesuvius and James T. Kirk

Hi folks,

"Fortune favors the bold." Apply this quote from Pliny the Elder to Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or Barack Obama. Go do what no one has done before! Ferdinand Magellan left Seville, Spain in 1519 with five ships and 270 men to circumnavigate the globe. He sailed through the Straits of Magellan (crazy coincidence there), named the Pacific Ocean because it was so calm, and died two years later halfway through the voyage in the Philippines, named for King Phillip the Second of Spain. Mutiny, cannibalism, ship immolation...the usual.

In 1989, NASA sent a spaceship named "Magellan" to radar map the surface of Venus. The craft weighed just over a ton, had the same wattage as a hair dryer and was mostly spare parts from other missions. Its data storage was two tape recorders with the storage capacity of my iPhone. In two years, it mapped 98% of the surface of Venus and showed us clearly that Venus is all about volcanoes and lava flows. Nothing like Earth. Nothing like Mars, or Saturn or Jupiter (all names of important guys). It was the first, and still the best, imagery, or atlas, (another important guy) of our brightest planetary neighbor. Its mission complete, Magellan disintegrated in the atmosphere, but some smart guys with degrees believe there is a bit of wreckage left on the surface. Space trash, possibly with a "Made in the USA" somewhere....

The explorer, the human one, chronicled two small smudges of light in the dark, ocean nights of the Southern Hemisphere. These were dubbed the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. We now know these to be two relatively close dwarf galaxies. Back then there were no telescopes to discern their stellar componentry, so they were thought to be clouds--space clouds.

"To boldly go where no man has gone before" is the tag line of a TV show from 1966 that "failed" after only three seasons. Pliny the Elder, an early bold human took a ship over the horizon to find out what a strange cloud was all about. He died from asphyxiation in the toxic fumes from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius which was busy burying Pompeii in hot gravel and ash--airborne lava.

So what of the "boldly going" idea? Will it lead to certain death? Everything leads to certain death. But the bold get things named for them: The Bering Sea, Washington, America, Buddhism... The bold make history. History is the stuff in legends and books that explains who we are and how we got here and where we should boldly go tomorrow. Einstein, Rosa Parks, Jackson Pollock, Leonardo Da Vinci, Madame Curie. They all headed into uncharted waters and shaped humanity. Volcanoes were named for Vulcan, the god of fire and forging, the god of making things, and Spock's home planet was Vulcan, so we come full circle once again. By the way, there is a beer named Pliny the Elder. Live long and prosper. And look out for weird clouds. Especially twirly ones.

And, of the 270 sailors, 18 made it home four years later.

Much love,

Be bold,

Bruce

P.S. And typical of the strange loops in life, I paused on a bike ride yesterday afternoon with my bro to get water and looked up to see a sign that read, "Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve." Yep. Vulcan.

Boo and the Bang and the Meaning of What

Hi folks,

In 2013 a rock the size of a house wandering through space at a random but not atypical velocity of 40,000 mph entered Earth's atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia. It exploded, colliding with the air around 18 miles up, releasing the equivalent of 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb.

Big KABOOM.

When I was four my mom brought home two kittens and let me name them. Logically, I named them Boo and Whack and gave Whack to my brother. How do I know this? I remember it. Based on the number of neurons in the brain, around 100 billion, times the number of possible connections made by each neuron to its neighbors, we have a number estimated to be 10 to the one millionth power. Just to put this in some realm of a context--the total of all the atoms in the universe is about 10 to the eightieth power. Can anybody out there explain to me how those cats still exist amidst the near infinity of possibilities in my little head?

So, the universe has total randomness--dust, supernovae, black holes colliding in galactic centers... Our brain, all three pounds of it, makes sense of that stuff, and pets, with an absurd precision in a near infinite matrix of order and bio-processing. We exist with pure randomness everyday, rocks wandering through the cosmos or a chipmunk running in front of your bicycle; AND we have clear memories and exacting calculations of mass and velocity and Whack all going on at the same time. The fleeting nature of thoughts, of life itself, is a reason I make art. I want there to be a standing wave of a beautiful object. I want to have tangible things a part of your lives that are strange but familiar, magical but parts of home. Time flies. Art endures. Metaphorical bunnies run in front of us constantly...

Wallace Stevens once wrote, "Death is the mother of beauty." I would like to think the heart of his thought is our ability to see and feel and remember and then divide by our finite hours to find the answer of what truly matters. We are living in true randomness. Finding meaning is our duty and our privilege.

The Last Snowflake

Hi folks,

In 2012, I made a four foot by eight foot snowflake named "Bentley," for Snowflake Bentley, the Vermont gentleman who, beginning in 1885, made over 5,000 precise photographs of the tiny, crystalline wonders we call snow. Recent research estimates (roughly) that the number of snowflakes that have fallen on earth to be sort of around the number 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 give or take. Approximately.

In the last five years I have made and sold fifteen snowflakes, all different, naturally, and now we come to the last one. Sixteen seems like a nice round number, (although my father used to say that about seven, but that's another story). Bugatti made seven Royales, only six survive. Brancusi made sixteen "Bird in Space." Bach wrote six Brandenburg Concerti. Number sixteen is the end of this series. The notion that they are all different by definition is appealing; I could go on with these the rest of my life. But I think it best to pick a point and call it the ultimate. Cal Ripken, Jr played baseball for the Baltimore Orioles for 21 years, along the way breaking the record held by Lou Gehrig, "The Iron Man," of 2,130 consecutive games played, a record that stood for 56 years that most writers considered unbreakable. When Ripken got to 2,632, he just stopped. That's it. Moving on...

Conceptually, the notion of "The Last Snowflake" speaks to our times. Could be the end of an era. The last Samurai. The last Tasmanian Tiger. Climate change. The last polar bear? The end of snowing... Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?

I have been calling this final one, "#16," the notion being that in the practically infinite number of them, one would have to be #16. This one is it! But, since all the previous have names, I have decided to call this one, "Scheherazade." She is the legendary story teller, the woman who prolonged her life by reciting great adventures, legends and myths. Every night was a new delight and always an open-ended tale that needed another night to complete... And thus she was spared beheading for 1,001 nights until the king fell in love with her and made her his queen. Seems like a fitting name for the final Snowflake. Scheherazade will not melt. She will not fade. The final snowflake stays frozen forever. The sparkling will outlast us all. And, it is a great word to say over and over... 

Warren

Hello Friends,

Here is another one to add to your collection or to start your light sculpture addiction. "Warren" is $4,400 in the gallery, but for the tribe, it is $3,200 until 5/23/17.

The word "warren" comes from a Germanic word for "protection." Most people tend to think of a warren as a place where rabbits abound, not the old meaning-- a place for safety, where your group survives the vicissitudes of life.

Who wants to live a long time? Human lifespan has increased thirty years in the last century. Jeanne Calment (root word in French--"calme"), lived to be 122 1/2. She rode a bike until she was 100 and reportedly ate a kilogram of chocolate a week, which works out to over five ounces a day! On the other hand, the Greenland shark has a lifespan up to 500 years but is mostly a scavenger--rotting meat is a fav, particularly fish of course. None own bicycles, and they swim very, very slowly, less than a mile an hour. Calm fish. The oldest animals seem to be clams (just a two letter shuffle from "calm"), and they have never seen chocolate or bikes (no eyes) and really just spend their lives buried in sand. Super calm clams. No swimming. No riding. Just hiding out. Like rabbits in their warrens.

So, protective behaviors? Neil Young (see how the name works here?) said, "It's better to burn out than to fade away," but he is still making killer music with young dudes. I bet he has a warren.

All best, my friends,

rock steady.

Time Turbine

Awake Spring Peepers,

"Time Turbine" is $4,400 in the gallery, but for you people who know me and read these notes, it is $3,200 until 5/16/17.

We know that time is relative. Albert says so and he knows way more than we do. That's why your map's blinking blue dot on your phone is corrected for the bending of space time by the mass of the earth AND the fact that the satellites figuring GPS are closer to light speed than you are. (Regardless of how fast you drove to work this morning). Without this math correction, that blue spot would be 10 kilometers off and 10 more tomorrow and 10 more...

But, we all know that. What you don't know is that there is a "spot" in space a billion light years in diameter called the Eridanus Supervoid. Nothing is going on there. Nothing. Cold. Vacuum. No explanation for that. Likely the aliens' DMV...

Less than half a mile from my house I have seen a pair of peregrine falcons sorting out a nesting spot on a cliff that drops into the water. We all know these are the fastest animals (180 mph), but they are relatively small birds and though handsome with the black and white chest striping, they are kind of unassuming. Loud when I paddled by but, otherwise, much more discrete than the ravens and turkey vultures in the neighborhood.

Listen to Miles Davis, "Freddy the Freeloader." In the first two notes, you know the song that is coming. Simple and relaxed. It is totally singular. Doesn't need to smack you. Brilliance often doesn't. But it's there and it's waiting for you, every time. Right there.

So, there is the mind-bending conceptual mathematics we know and accept, but can't do. There is the unfathomable stuff we are told. Massive and utterly invisible. Fun to think about. There is the stuff in the yard that is superlative and RIGHT HERE. A falcon and the blues, quiet, unassuming, but the best there is, and, completely accessible.

That is what I do, my friends. The paragraph above sums up "Time Turbine." No one does what I do. Nobody. It's massive and intimate. It's the universe, the ineffable. and it hangs in your dining room. It's always fresh, and a constant. It presents a bit of the light dance all around us, but with style, with intention. Complications like a time piece... 

Everything is Visible, Last Dibs!

Hi folks,

It's The End. Or, at least, the Last Ones. Well, for now, and possibly for a long time. Hell, scientists may never again manage to bash atoms together and and have them stick to make a new Element. If you read science fiction or watch the movies I love, there will be magical new substances that change the nature of our lives. Travel across space, maybe time travel, maybe... Instant miniature batteries. Nano robots that pick the lint from your shoulder, or pancreas. Pills instead of ninth grade... But these things may very well all be built from the basic blocks that we have today. Besides, finding one more Element will make a periodic chart with a dangly-down, embarrassing thingy. Today's symmetry is kind of sublime.

So, here we are. This is the end of the Visible Indivisibles project. I have completed 118 squares of metal to represent every Element. They are all alloy 316L stainless steel panels excepting three--Copper and Titanium, which are their respective Elements. Gold is 24K gold plate over brass, an alloy of Zinc and Copper. Only two were made by deforming the surface mechanically--Titanium and Gallium, and they weirdly were bought by the same guy on different occasions. One other panel is slightly deformed, and the buyer doesn't even know or know why, but that's the sort of stuff you will need to read in the book. There are lots of intriguing nuggets hidden in the process--one gentleman owns the two radioactive ones below Lead. There is a panel with a frog and one with a light bulb, life and death, and perseverance and inspiration, respectively. There is the dead mouse next to the open can, next to the active poison in Loco Weed, next to the poison that likely killed Mozart... Don't get me started.

And mashed into this entire program is all the art history you can stand. The Visible Indivisibles project is a compendium of Cubism, Minimalism, Futurism, cave paintings, black boards, graffiti, Sol LeWitt, Lichtenstein, Miro, Twombly, ukiyo-e, Hubble photographs, Deco, Op, Pop, comics, X-ray imagery, origami, medieval heraldry, O'Keeffe, Ruscha, Pollock, Hirst, Warhol, Magritte, James Turrell, David Smith, Agnes Martin, Banksy, Rothko, Basquiat... The intention from the outset was to build a body of work approachable from the perspective of a layman, science weenie, or art weenie... Mash it all in there--Przybelski's star and floating, shimmery bits, half lives and a skull and a really big hammer, quantum mechanics and Mondrian, stellar nucleosynthesis and a big round circle on a square. You get a feel for what the book will be about...

Intentionally, I wandered around the chart, doing obscure Elements following superstar A-list Elements: Ununseptium followed by Iron, Roentgenium and then Platinum. Randomly, the last one I just completed a week ago, is Iridium, Ir, #77. And in the homework I read that Iridium is a marker in the Earth's geologic stratum of an extinction event, the end of the Cretaceous Era, the end of the dinosaurs and 75% of all species on earth. Turns out a meteor, rich in Iridium, reshaped the Yucatan and the rest of the planet in one swell foop. The vaporized Iridium settled evenly around the globe forming a thin layer, subsequently buried in the next 66 million years of time and dirt to get to today. Consequently, Iridium as a panel is the night sky with a tiny Earth shatterer streaking along, heading this way. It is after dusk and the stars are out. Nightfall. Day is done. The work is completed. The volcano along the bottom is there for a reason too. Have to read the book...

Fittingly, the end of the era is now (probably just as significant historically as the Mesozoic. I'm sure.). The panels shown below are for sale, the very last ones. This has been tremendous fun, as will be the book. But this is it for the artwork. There is no "later." Step right up folks. Don't hesitate. I expect these to be gone in a day or two...

And, thanks to you dear friends, this has been a blast. So much study exists in the metal, so many stories, so much texture, so much vision wrapped up in a light dance...

Go Aero, Eyes Up

One afternoon last summer I was out on my bike doing my hometown loop. It is a steady state experience for me--few variables excepting wind and rain. I know the course and every roller uphill, every long sweeper. I know where to hammer and where to look out for gravel before the downhill intersection. It is a constant. Hometown. I love it. It belongs to me.

So, there I was about to crest a ridge line heading south. There's a short uphill run to a blind right hand and then a solid mile downhill with a nice cambered S swerve before a covered bridge. I always stand and hammer up to the top and over the crest carrying all the speed I can into that downhill mile. Over the top, full speed and then into the drops. Go aero and pedal hard. As per usual... But just as I started down full rip, something BIG bounded across the road in front of me about thirty yards. Without thinking I braked hard, just short of locking up. The thing paused in the gully on the right and turned and looked right at me, huge eyes locked on mine. I stopped and put a foot down, and it turned and disappeared into the trees up a near vertical embankment. My heart rate was somewhat high to start with and now I was simply gasping. What the hell?! I wasn't really positive what just happened. Color of a boxer. Or a deer. Fat rope of a long tail. Size of a really big dog. Really big. Bobcat movements. After I got home and google imaged "mountain lion," I knew for certain. Holy crap. Vermont is kind of benign on the wildlife front. (If you ignore the killer musicians who play here all the time). I also searched and found confirmation of sightings in Charlotte and North Ferrisburg of a full grown catamount.

Cougars can jump fifteen feet from a standstill. They belong to a family that is the one of the oldest mammals, dating back eleven million years. Typically, they kill with a neck bite, positioning their fangs between the vertebrae and into the spinal cord. They only eat meat. Favorite foods include critters up to and over a thousand pounds--moose, elk, etc or the random coyote, deer, grey wolf...

I didn't even have time to be afraid. Once home and doing the homework I realized that I'm glad he wasn't peckish. Me and my lycra super suit... Hell of a defense I could mount with a fourteen pound skinny bike on the ice skates of road cleats...

The take away from that afternoon is a simple one. Whatever you think is the course of life, think again. Life is fundamentally full of surprises, not all good ones, in keeping with the definition, but I guarantee ones that you never even considered. Providence is determined to keep us guessing. Recently I read that researchers have determined that we misplace an average of nine things a day. By age sixty, that is 200,000 things we have to look around for. Yep, lost the keys again. Surprise! They are in the kitchen. Surprise! We get used to that stuff. Surprise! Cougar on the hometown loop. Bring it on.

Just don't eat me, please.

So friends, keep looking down the road... Just know that whatever you think is what is happening is just a guess. The outcome may be wildly different than what we are worried about. Just stay engaged completely and beware the predators... And, if I can be so bold, get outside and see what is what that is not all human racket... Lions stroll the planet.

Love you all. Spread that around everyday.

We are Zeros and We are Kings

Dear friends,

Enough with the serious talk. I just want to point out a couple ideas and then wrap this solstice with a few words of grace.

First, the temperature of space is minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit, give or take. The distance to the nearest habitable planet, assuming life is mostly like us, is around a billion and a half miles. Basically, we are flying through the infinite emptiness of a freezer. So, what are the odds? What is the probability that we exist at all? I did the math and it comes out to exactly (using the standard rounding error) ZERO. There is absolutely no plausible explanation for me being here to write and you being there to read. So....

Party up folks! As far as I can tell, a freaking miracle is all we are every moment of our lives. Life is just a thin smear of slime on the ball we call earth. AND, in my humble estimation, we should recognize this by showing love and kindness to every other freaking miracle we see everyday. That's it--lesson for today. Your mission is to recognize this simple fact and act accordingly. Hug your peeps. Smile a ton. Love and kindness. That's it. Don't forget. Peace on earth...

And just to make it all crystal clear, this is called

Here and Then

With shared genetics the sons, the daughters of forgotten kings race light on their miraculous feet, gaining elevation in time's wake, streamlining their beings with devotion. Dross lost. Crucible purification process completed, back flip into oblivion. Heirs to the thrones invisible gone.

Fowl, Weather, and Brighter Skies

Howdy howdy amazing humans,

So often, it's the little things. The simple can rescue the soul...

You feel crushed. The world that you know and understand, pretty much, unravels. We all find ourselves on the floor at some point. Overwhelmed. Broken. The news that seemed bad turns out to be just the first volley. And there you are. What do I do now...

Well, nothing... breathe... and breathe and ... Feel what this emptiness really, really feels like. That is you. That IS your heart, your soul speaking. You are that voice. It is pure. All you are as a person is built above this core of your being. You can label it despair. Or not.

Now. Remind yourself that you are not alone. There are nearly seven and a half billion people on planet earth right now. Today the counter is running with over 170,000 born so far, along with over 71,000 deaths. I guarantee there are A LOT of humans experiencing exactly the emotions you are experiencing right at the crux of despair. You are a part of this very large tribe expanding every moment, as important as any member. We are all kings, or paupers, inside. Your choice. We start with nothing and will end with the same.

Then. Open your eyes, your heart... let the smallest of the small speak. Your dog will stroll over and put his head in your lap. Don't have a dog? Birds are the messengers of the gods throughout the religions of the aboriginal world. They are there, just for you, waiting for your attention. They sing. They dance. They fly... And there are somewhere between 100 and 400 billion. (They are sort of hard to count.) Plenty of those guys to help lift...

Listen to those brilliant humans who have made communication from the heart their mission in life: Danny O'Keefe: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=UaHw0pZNIHk Or Bob Marley. Try a Bonnie Raitt ballad. There is an entire concert waiting in your pocket. Sing the oldest song you ever learned. And, trust me, there is nothing better than the blues. Listen to "Blues the Healer," with John Lee Hooker: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=0aFKgi5D6eU
Look at anything and see it fresh--the magnets on the fridge--what is this magic? Metal that likes to stick to stuff. But not everything... only special stuff. Freaky! The thermos on the counter?! Ridiculous engineering!! Put in cold; it keeps it cold. Put in hot; it stays hot. How does it know?! No moving parts! The wood under your feet--it grew! From dirt and sunlight and rain and now it's the floor. There are ducks that show up in the lake in front of my house as they travel about. They are social and really small and look like they were painted in the Jet Ski factory. I looked them up to find their official name: Little Black and White Ducks. Some people call them Buffleheads but I prefer the latter, more descriptive label. This time of year is symbolized by babies and old folks, so go talk to either. They are closer to the purest realm than any of us. They are filled with genius half forgotten or yet to express. We mourn the passing of so many of our finest here at year's end, but hold the thought that there are more of us every moment, so logically, there are more of the brilliant appearing than there have ever been before.
So, keeping this brief: listen to the blues. "I been down so long, seems like up to me..." "If it wasn't for bad luck, I'ld have no luck at all." "I been tied to the whippin' post..." Because that is really our lot. The human condition is fun stuff mixed with heartache, then heartbreak followed by silence. That is the sum right there. Those are the facts. And when we feel that, we feel our true depth. Fallen angels.
One of the truly wise, Pema Chodron, says, "You are the sky. Everything else--it's just the weather."

So, in the meantime (it's all we get)...open your eyes and hearts. Listen to that boogie music. Dance a little bit. FOCUS on the miracles: Twins! Contact lenses and reading glasses. Snowflakes. Shortbread. Kids' faces. George Winston playing Christmas music. Ice skates. Paint brushes. Sunrise. Favorite sayings. That rainbow this morning driving to work of low ice crystals refracting. Grandad. Voices. The funnies. Knee high chop. A choir. John Cleese. Sparkly lights. Aretha. (Did anyone hear the national anthem she sang on Thanksgiving Day?) Starfish. The HOLIDAYS.

All this stuff pours in when you just let it. We don't get much time. Better spread the love today. Say hey to the chickadee. Remember, YOU are the sky. Share your sunshine. And do your best to make people laugh. It's the lightning.

Hugs non stop. Bruce

P.S. "Nobody loves me 'cept my mother,And she might be jivin' too." B. B. King

P.P.S."Friends seen an` unseen...to you that are ridin` along / In your automobile...to you that are sitting at you table / I greet you with the holy word `Peace`... / For with my infinite mind I thinks constructively...…"Give this one a listen: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GRKs7o-xMU0

"I am what I am, and I am it."love love love

Sheepdogs and tiny lightning, matter and Mind

Hi all,

A big part of my job is noticing things. Generally it's stuff that is right in front of everyone, but I happen to see it and want to point it out. Why do I do this? And, why do I have to be outside so much?

Ok, that's basically question number one (and maybe one and a half). Question two is a little less tricky: What is happening when I notice things? Tiny electrical pulses - miniature lightning - are firing in my head. Our brains are three pounds of jelly, hundreds of billions of cells, each sending bolts to other neighboring cells hundreds of time per second. One typical neuron makes about 10,000 connections to its neighbors. Quick math gives us trillions and trillions of connections. So, I or rather, we, are that. We are trillions of electrical zaps. You are reading this and thinking, "So what? Which brings us to question three: The thing that is thinking - your mind - which is just electricity, is organized by what? How did "I" get here?

Now comes the material part--if "we" are electricity snapping away, there has to be something to snap between. There has to be matter, physical, actual stuff for it to cross between. Yep, that is the pink jelly above the shoulders we keep under our hats. Our bodies, made of a handful of elements, are literally the support system for our brains. Food, oxygen, water is all just the processing system to keep the lightning on.

I live with two dogs. One is an Aussie shepherd with the no-tail-looks-like-a-sheep approach to managing his flock. We, the family, are the flock. He lies on the floor under our feet guarding us from within the flock itself. The other is a border collie and his flock management is to observe from afar. He is across the room, attentive, alert, never underfoot. He manages his humans from without. Neither of these guys has any training whatsoever. They do what they do based on 10,000 years of breeding and training to the degree that their behavior, the way they think, is hard-wired into their DNA. Along with the four-legs-and-a-cold-nose machinery is a pattern of electrical firings, a behavior, that makes them guard us the way they do. And that particular electrical pattern is passed on through matter.

When my youngest son was in pre-school there was a graduation(?!) ceremony that required all the kids to file to the front of the room and sing a song for the attending parents. He took his spot with this paper crown cocked just so, and put his hands in his pockets and started to sing, rocking back and forth from his heels to his toes. EXACTLY the way my father did when he sang. My son had never seen his grandfather sing, and yet there was the same precise motion that I had witnessed hundreds of times.

So, question two is answered by electricity--invisible firings in an organic computer we carry around. When I see things, when I move this pen around, when I ride my bike, the lightning is flashing. But when I smile seeing my son singing, when I make art, when I think about thinking, when I use the work "flock" a bunch 'cause I like the way it sounds, it is the manifestation of DNA, of time and chemistry. I, and you, are the culmination of all those grandfathers and grandmothers stretching backwards into history. How me move our hands when talking, how we choose what we talk about, is the expression of the material, the matter that organizes the electrical fields. Matter makes our minds. And matter makes our behaviors.

And finally, question four--do you have free will or are you enacting what is programmed in your cells? When I notice leaves in pirouette and then put that into my art, did "I" decide that? Am "I" something other than an electrical field playing out a pattern dictated by inherited protein matrixes? Are the shapes and shading in my artwork chosen by me? "I" think so. But, how do "I" know? My mother was a painter, a teacher full of stories. My grandad was a musician and an engineer. My father was a professor of literature and taught creative writing. I'm related to Daniel Boone through my mother's side, perhaps that explains question one and a half.

In conclusion, one of my favorite writers can offer a functional resolution that firmly grounds these notions in a lavender fog. Alan Watts says, "...you do not have a sensation of the sky: you are that sensation. For all purposes of feeling, your sensation of the sky is the sky, and there is no "you' apart form what you sense, feel, and know."

Glad we sorted this out. "You" have an awesome week, day, lunch break, lifetime...

Consider from whence you came...

And don't forget to feed the shepherds...