...perennial as grass...

If you read the words below, and you should, they are a lovely affirmation of life amidst the turmoil of modern "life, or "flaming chaos," as we now call it. Spock from the tv show Star Trek recorded this on an album in 1968; and I first encountered it on posters during the hippie days of the early 70s. (I know, I know, super old). "Go placidly..." seemed wise during the Vietnam debacle and being a "child of the universe" helped overcome the alienation youngsters always feel. Peace and love was groovy. Still is. The notion that this was a benediction found in a church over 300 years ago lent it gravity and foresight. Yeah, the world has always felt like a dumpster fire, or Wednesday, as we now call it, even in the 1600s. These lines of prose are profoundly applicable today. Read them slowly, even if you used to have the poster:

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Found in Old Saint Paul's Church, Baltimore, 1692 A.D.

But, the truth is, this is a prose poem written in the 1920s by Max Ehrmann from Terre Haute, Indiana. It was widely shared with little notoriety in Europe during the war and ultimately published after his death by his widow in a book of collected poems. In 1956, a pastor distributed it to his congregation, without attribution, in a mimeographed booklet printed on a letterhead reading "Old St. Paul's Church, Baltimore, A.D. 1692", the year the church was founded. To this day, there is confusion in the public mind as it is so familiar and yet feels like a historical text. Wisdom, whether from the seventeenth century or from the Midwest, has no bounds. A moral code in one paragraph, yes indeed. "Keep peace in your soul."

The extraordinary concept of the proper unfolding of the universe, especially RIGHT NOW, is a comfort.

Thanks Max.

As always, please share. Comfort is needed. And buy art now since Beauty is always a comfort and a delight, and artists right now are working on the placid part with noise and haste. Imagine growing fruit and the fruit stand is closed. Or playing music and everyone is wearing earmuffs... Or...

You get the picture. So, get the picture. Peace and love, Bruce Mac

P.S. Doyle Bramhall Jr. sings, "Love is the answer. The answer is waiting."

And Be yond

"If your paddle isn't in the water, you're slowing down."  

I have been told this from numerous sources--friends, my brother, a coach, and plenty of articles that encourage stand up paddle boarding as a sport and not simply a nice little bit of fresh air out on the lake. The point is that the board really has no inertia to keep going on its own. If you don't have pressure with your paddle on the water, you are losing speed. So, cadence is the key. Quick. Chop chop chop...

As usual with this sort of observation, I tend to expand it into the greater realm of our time on the planet.  Stop efforting for even half a second and you are slowing down. Chop chop chop... or start falling behind. I have done a share of paddle races and this is the truth. The athletes who paddle snick snick snick are the ones out in front.

Competition speed climbing is coming to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The goal is to scale a 5 degree overhanging wall, 15 meters tall with standardized holds and smack a mechanical switch at the top to beat your opponent, who is climbing the exact same route at the exact same time just 12 feet to one side. The men's speed record is held by Reza Alipour Shenazandifar from Iran in 5.63 seconds. That's the equivalent of scaling a nearly 5 story building in less than 6 seconds. You are either going up very, very quickly continuously or gravity is trying to pull you to the center of the earth. We all climbed trees. 50 feet up a tree in 5 seconds?!? I'm not sure I could fall out of a tree that fast...

Wallace's Giant Bees (megachile pluto) are the largest bees in the world. They were thought to be extinct after their initial discovery in 1858 until specimens were observed in 1981. 37 years of searching and, until earlier this year, no video footage existed of the 1 ½-inch long insects. They are resin bees, black with a white band around their middle and have a wingspan up to 2 ½ inches. These monsters are on the "25 Most Wanted" list from the Global Wildlife Conservation "Search for Lost Species" initiative.

The common thread here is the "paddle in the water." Don't. Slow. Down. Don't wait. Scaling a 50- foot wall? Practice and focus and a young athlete is doing something unthinkable. Don't even mention the Alex Honnold miracle documented in "Free Solo." Want to find a lost species? Spend 37 years in Indonesian lowland forests to find a giant bee living in termite mounds.

But, and there is always a but. Socrates said, "Beware the barrenness of a busy life." When I walk in the woods, I take it slow.  I’m shooting pictures. Listening for a spider walking. Paddling? Some are sweat fests. Some are more about the liquid violet and gold light on the moving mirror or the way rays project out of your head's shadow on the water’s surface when the sun is high. 45 years of throwing a frisbee around with my brothers and sons isn't accomplishing anything. But, I'll do it every chance I get.  Feel like throwing a little 'bee? Always...

Get busy, my friends. And then don't. Making art is this tightrope everyday: Get it done. Now what is it for? Intense effort followed by relaxed analysis. Paddle hard and then stroll... Be fast. Bee patient. 'bee always.

Vertical flow. Horizontal flow. Same same.

Mostly, be passionate. And, YO Summer!! 

love love.

Out and Back

The most popular vehicle in the world is the Flying Pigeon. It's made in China and the company has sold 500 million of them. The design was established 135 years ago and even though all sorts of little parts have been improved, it is basically the same machine. You can walk outside almost anywhere and there is one rolling by. Today there are over a billion bicycles in the world. A very fast woman rode 184 mph behind a very fast car. A wickedly determined man rode across the U.S. in seven days and fifteen hours. My brother Kevin rode 272 miles with 20,000 feet of climbing in 26 hours. For his sixtieth birthday.  Athletes. One woman rode the equivalent of nearly four times around the Earth in one year. Endurance athletes.

From my bike saddle, I've seen lightning, way way too close (KA  BOOM!), snakes, (yeah, too many of those), hawks, eagles, falcons, pigeons, wooly bears, slugs (one rainy day was slug-a-palooza, super gross), redwoods, a microburst thrashed forest, a dead owl (might have been napping, but I think not), a very alive mountain lion (Go Aero, Eyes Up), fog, sunsets, deep green forests, the rain they used for Noah's flood, poppy fields, blue ridges, blood and broken bikes. (Sorry Kev). I've eaten bugs, dust and mud, been injured in my driveway by my bike, and I have been helicoptered out from the high Sierra after a stupid crash. (Sorry Kev). I have ridden with close pals, friends, lovers, a wife, brothers, strangers, lots of strangers, sweet strangers, and mean people. I met a couple at the top of Middlebury Gap just south of here who, when asked where they started, they smiled and said, "Portugal." I rode 167 miles one day around Vermont with Kev and Steve, a day I will savor forever. One day with these two, while they were fixing a flat on Whipple Hollow Road on the ride Steve calls "Castle Flow," I fell asleep on my bike. Story for another time.

But why ride? It's not like I accomplished anything while zooming across the countryside. Sisyphus pushes his rock. I ride out and back. What's the allure? Mark Twain said, "Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." (See above, Life Flight, woo hoo). Well, there's dopamine -- brain synthesis chemistry in high gear. Endorphins, yes please and thank you, I'll-have-a-bit-more-please. There's ADHD management in real time when stuff is sailing by at forty miles an hour. I'm a better animal in motion than sitting in a chair. Clarity prevails on a bike.

But mostly, the answers are all above. It's private time to understand the landscape. It's social time to understand people and my place in the fabric. It's internal time to go all-out crushing the climb in full sufferfest mode, or coast along the coast. It's being out in all weather and saying howdy to all the critters who live here. It's oxygen in and problems out. It's the visual food for the creative soul -- the time to wrestle with the art piece smoldering in the back of my brain and placidly laughing at me from the studio. It's being one with the universe with an elevated heart rate. Don't ride? Should you get a bike? In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the bike salesman says, "Sure, it'll change your whole life for the better, but that's all."

AND, finally, what's this have to do with art? Read every tenth word above (you know what I mean). Velocity of reality. Light. Clarity. The universe and my place in it. Blood. Brothers. Mist. Out and back. Endurance.

And suddenly, these paragraphs written a couple weeks ago seem so flip. Who cares? The world is on fire! Disease. Murder. Politics. HAVOC.

On the radio was a story this week of a man in India who got injured and couldn't do his job. His wife, home and kids were 700 miles away. The pandemic came and his daughter who had moved in to nurse him to health was down to their last $20. She bought a bicycle, put her father on the seat, their meagre belongings on the back and rode a single speed bicycle all the way home. In a week. Standing up the whole way. 100 miles a day. She is fifteen years old. They had no money and no food. People along the way fed them and they slept in the fields on the side of the road.

I have neighbors who put together fifty bags of groceries a week to give away because they didn't want anyone suddenly out of a job to be hungry. I have a friend who is an ER doc and stayed away from his family, sleeping in the basement or in an empty condo after treating Covid patients all night. An artist buddy is selling art online everyday and sending the money to a food bank fifteen hundred miles away. Each of us can play a role. If you have some to give, give.

Now more than ever we need love, humanity, and patience. We need a sense of dignity and restraint, respect for each other and their challenges. Get up from the crash and say, 'I'm sorry, we can work this out." Picture that angry person at their limit and imagine them as a child on a tricycle. Just trying to make it go. Will a bike save the world? Nope, but the person making it go can. We need the fresh morning air and effort to get over this big hill. It's raining hard and the road is slippery? Go carefully. Head home. Out and back. We can do this. AND, consider that this is not about going 184 mph. It's endurance. In the Tour de France, almost any of those badass skinny athletes can win one day. It's the ones who survive every heatwave, snowfall, stomach bug, elbow, deluge, flat, shunt, cramp, crosswind, breakaway, sprint pile-up, nasty climb, fan freakout, and screaming mountain descent, that prevail. The world is inside-out right now, but, quoting my brother Kev, "The point of pain is the place of growth".

Anything I sell before July 4th, I will send 20% of the money to The National Black Child Development Institute. Do your part just a little bit extra right now when it's really needed. Somebody somewhere is sleeping alongside the road. Just trying to get home.

H.G. Wells, England's brilliant futurist, said, "Everytime I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." I wonder if he had a Raleigh. They were British, biggest bike makers on the planet at the time, based in Nottingham and started by a chap from Sherwood Forest...  Sound familiar?

The Big Now

In 1971, there was an ad on tv showing a Native American, an "Indian" at the time, with a tear in his eye after surveying the litter on the water from his canoe and the trash alongside a road. All these years later, the tear in the eye of an old man whose country we inhabit continues to resonate. I was just a kid. But I grew up canoeing, spending time in the woods, "leaving a campsite cleaner than I found it." That was nearly fifty years ago. We, white people, as a group, ruined his home.

The year before, my brothers and I went to the movies and saw "Little Big Man" with Dustin Hoffman as a 122-year-old man recounting his life's story --- he was a white pioneer boy whose parents were murdered by the natives, he was then raised by these same "Indians." Captured by the military, he renounces his tribe to save his life. Put into foster care he becomes a good Christian boy who is then seduced by his foster mother. He runs away, becomes a mule skinner, a gunslinger, marries; his wife is abducted. He then returns to Cheyenne life, becomes a father with four wives, who are then massacred by the cavalry. Thus, there follows a general unravelling of his mind... He claims to be the only surviving white man from the Battle of Little Big Horn. He was the reason, he claims, Custer and all his men were slaughtered. As the hired scout, he sent them all to their death.

Fast forward to 1993. I saw a movie and afterwards sat in the parking lot and wept. I was horrified to be a person. Being a human was too painful to bear. I had just sat through "Schindler's List" and couldn't stand being a person when people are capable of such inhumanity. The horrors depicted I could not understand. How could anyone behave in this way? How could millions of people behave in this way?

Fast forward to now. It's not a movie. It's the same horror in real life. Torture and then death. On a street corner. Why? Because some people have forgotten the truth of life. All life. Every single person in the world is a child who got bigger. Every single human being is someone's baby. Who then became three. And then four. And then grows... Into an adult and then older and finally, elderly. And fragile, like a small child.

Would you kneel on the neck of a three-year-old? What's the difference? Two hundred pounds, give or take. Would anyone defend this behavior? I repeat: Every human was once a child, and deserves the kindness shown to a child. Just because you are taller doesn't mean you lose your right to kindness. It's really very simple at its core. Treat all humans with the care and respect you would afford a small child; the heart of this is kindness to each other. Pure.

I am white. I have led a privileged life. Yet from childhood I have had a sense of guilt. This is not my country. It belongs to the native people who we Europeans have treated with atrocities. We brought Africans here to exploit by the tens of millions. I can't get on an elevator with a non-white person without wanting to say, "I'm sorry." That sounds absurd to write down on paper, but it's true. As a little kid, my grandmother in Virginia had a "yard boy," a black man in his seventies. My entire life I have seen that for its implicit disrespect. I can't blame my grandmother for her lack of vision. She was a product of a system of beliefs, another world view. But CIVILIZATION is overdue to evolve. NOW is the time to stare into the bias deep within and recognize we are either part of the solution or we are the cancer itself.

The simple crux move is kindness. NOW. Regard a person as a person, and as a child, and you will elevate them to their status as a precious member of our big family. We are different skin colors. We have different faiths, countries of origin, languages, preferences for partners...  You will see these things, but you will first see a little human on a journey through life that we all make. The Dalai Lama says, "Be kind, whenever possible. It is always possible."

Will this solve today's crises? Will racism be eradicated so simply? No. It won't. For that we need strong, determined, brilliant people of every color and gender and background working together to reshape the collective mentality of all citizens of all countries. I can't do this. I'm just one small person and far from the smartest guy in the room. I am just one voice; this will take a choir and probably a drum section and lots of horns, some marching and conductors and very loud arrangements. However, I can stand for kindness. Moment to moment, remember, every person needs it, deserves it, and I will give it to the best of my ability. Please walk with me in this direction.

Thanks, my friends. Just a small step...

It's love put in action.

Bruce

P.S. You are thinking, "huh, ok. Sounds good." But, get busy. NOW means NOW. Get political. Write to your law makers. Donate. March. Volunteer. Register new voters and, most importantly, vote for leaders who will make the changes we demand. Now is an excellent time to change the world. Inequality. Pandemic. Climate change. Ready GO.

Freckles

Recently, in the middle of a conversation, a friend said to me, "Freckles don't mean anything about anything." O.K. Roger that. Move on from a completely inane observation about reality.

But, as with so many moments in life, that little statement resonated. Yep, sometimes it's the stupid things that are actually clever. Clever, stupid, it’s a fine line. Some of you will get the Spinal Tap reference right there...

"Sometimes you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right..." was scrawled on the back of a highway sign by an on-ramp heading east on I-70 back in 1979. I was hitchhiking from San Francisco to Memphis, and seeing a lyric from Scarlet Begonias in such a random spot made sense at the time. Still does...

Steph Curry once made 77 three pointers in a row in practice. Witnesses say he missed a couple but ended up sinking 94 out of a 100. Michael Jordan once scored 59 points shooting 21-27 from the field and dropping 17 out of 19 free throws. Grace and power. Transcending the game...

Snowboarding rapidly through trees is about my favorite thing in the world. NOTHING makes me more present than this dangerous velocity. My mind can't wander; I can't be thinking of anything else. In fact, I have come to realize that I can't be thinking of anything. The purity is the emptiness.

Making art is what I do. It is the thing in my life that pulls me forward, makes me want to practice, makes the exploration exciting, makes all the crazy stuff I see and do and hear and read smash into my head to lodge as raw material. For years I have spent countless hours scratching the surface of metal to make light dance. And when the process of doing this becomes automatic, it's perfect. When I'm lucky, I find a "flow state" that is nothing short of magical -- I'm no longer making the piece. It's making itself and I'm just in the room moving my hands around. Making patterns with loud tools and tight lines and matte and gleaming and mysterious stuff that sometimes later I wonder where it came from or how that stuff manages to look so... well, you know...

Sonny Rollins, one of the titans of saxophone recently wrote in the New York Times:

"The spirit of art shines through in a performance when I stop thinking — when I let the music play itself, not just the one song that I’ve memorized, but all of the songs and experiences I have in my mind. And as things come to me, unplanned, I surprise even myself."

When Pat Metheny or John Meyer is soloing, you can see the look of complete detachment on their faces. They are not thinking of notes -- the suspended 7th in the arpeggio... They are thinking music and sound comes out. The analytic brain is gone. They are dancing through trees, dropping through space in deep fluff, playing with gravity, surfing, glissando, sparkling, lost in the moment, in flow... This is where the art lives. This is knowing your instrument to the point that it disappears. Notes, tools are instinctually chosen. I don't know what this is going to be when it's done. Not even sure I'll know when it's done.

At the very end of the Pirate show that I was watching, Captain Jack Rackham says,

"It's the art that leaves the mark, But to leave it, it must transcend. It must speak for itself. It must be true." 

Freckles are the remnants of experience. Sun, bright, doing damage, signs of time passing, leaving a little mark.

Don't mean anything about anything. Unless they do.

Bruce Mac 

P.S. Thanks for the brief stint of attention. Now buy art. It's more important than you know. It's the mark I leave in the universe. These are the freckles. Give them a good home.

Now What?!

I know all of you are pretty freaked out, to be blunt, about the invasion of our country, first documented in the Pacific Northwest. Sometimes fatal, but generally not, the neurotoxin from the 1/4"-long stinger of the Asian Giant Hornet feels like "a hot nail in the leg," to quote one experienced researcher. Murder Hornets?! Really? Now this?! With bodies that are nearly two inches long with a three-inch wingspan, stripey black and orange, like a miniature flying tiger with fangs and a spear, these nasty invaders can chop the heads off of honeybees at a rate of forty a minute. They have been found to cover sixty miles a day and can fly twenty-five miles an hour.

On July 5th in 2015, I took a photo of my brother Kevin taking a photo of a hornets' nest.

The back of his head looked just like the thing he was shooting -- grey and twirly. Just like mine, I would imagine. (Mine may be more twirly, at least on the inside. Or not, jury is still out). I have always been amazed that bugs can build things out of spit and leaves, big things that they live in, things bigger than my head. Or small grey hexagonal cell structures like the one between the skylight and the screen over my bed. (Actually, I got rid of that a couple weeks ago. Tired of finding wasps stumbling around the floor of the bedroom like they were hungover from the party after the stinging good times. Also, Monique won't let me smoosh them. Have to go open a window and throw them out).

These, as with EVERYTHING, always show up in my work.

In October of 2017, I walked out of the house to find a hornets' nest quite a bit larger than my head lying in the middle of the driveway. Likely a gust blew it there, a paper ellipsoid sculpture, magically gifted to me. You can see it in this piece just right of center that I sold in Chicago in November of that year with the title, "October, Crow and Hornet". The back of Kevin's noggin is depicted with a swarm of scary critters where his nape would be. There are crows, a murder of them, like the ones who hang in the woods outside the studio every October by the thousands. In the center of the panel is a mare's tail cloud from a hike up Camel's Hump with Miss M. and her sister that same month. I often am asked where my art comes from, how it gets out of the grey matter and onto the grey material...

Japanese honeybees have evolved a defense mechanism to deal with these viscous predators. When the bees detect the pheromones of a hornet, the workers gather just inside the open entryway to the hive. When the hornet enters, hundreds of bees engulf it in a dense ball and begin vibrating their flight muscles the way they do to warm the hive in winter. They literally cook the invader. Dead hornet scout. No more hornets follow. It's obviously a defense based on the collective might of the group; the individual doesn't stand a chance. Decapitation. As a collective, the bees are able to defend their homes, their queen, their thousands of brothers.

As usual, my friends, we are so much stronger together. Wasps scare the crap out of me. But I have brothers and friends and I have you. You are part of my clan, and I'm counting on the big family. We got this. By the way, buy art now. It's a good time for that. And tell stories. Always a good time for that.

love love and more all the time,

Bruce Mac 

Common Glory

Greetings from the modern swamp,

Amedeo Modigliani once said, "It is your duty in life to save your dream."

In northern Alabama, a young black woman worked a bunch of different jobs -- bagged groceries at the local Kroger, sold used cars, worked at Domino's, fried eggs at a diner, hauled trash and delivered mail. After work she would play guitar and sing and work on getting a band together. She had never been out of the South, seen the ocean or a mountain, but she was on a mission to make the world listen, whatever it took. "Yeah, you got to hold on!" she sang in the chorus of the song that won the Grammy for Song of the Year in 2012. At 23, Brittany Howard and her band, Alabama Shakes sold a million copies of their debut album. Stardom. World tour.

Johnny Allen Hendrix was born in 1942 in Seattle and started playing guitar when he was 15. He moved to Tennessee and played rhythm guitar in different bands on the Chitlin' Circuit, was "discovered," and moved to England and proceeded to burn down the notion of an electric guitar in a pop group and emerged as the greatest guitarist in history. Turned the planet on its ear at Woodstock, literally set the instrument on fire at Monterey Pop. Wore the clothes of a revolutionary and spoke the language of the astral traveller. Voted World Top Musician in 1969, Performer of the Year, Rock Guitarist of the Year... And dead at 27.

John Berryman, an American poet, said of a particular man, "For a while here we possessed/an unusual man," referring to a friend we all recognize by his language. That man went to Dartmouth for a few months. Dropped out. Later Harvard for three semesters. Quit. Farmed. Wrote. Tried to teach. Farmed again. In 1916, he described himself with his "most notable trait, patience in the pursuit of glory." and so far, "Don't seem to die." That was in 1916. In 1961 Robert Frost was an American institution; he recited a poem from memory at JFK's inauguration as the sun was too bright for him to read his notes. He died at 88.

In Japanese is a phrase, "mono no aware." It's the understanding of the transiency of the world and its beauty. The phrase is meant to convey a sense of beauty as ephemeral, that the passing of beauty is a sadness, but the experience of it is redemptive.

I was planning to write a completely different missive than what you are reading right now, but a couple conversations I had yesterday with two friends altered that scheme. In one, he had had a medical crisis at an age way too young and is now reformulated as a man on "borrowed" time. Every day is a chance to be not who he was, but who he wants to be. Smartest dude in the room, Hell Yeah, or... enlightened, with the emphasis on light, lightened, unburdened, source of light... The other, dealing with a crumbling business model, the kids home nonstop, is spending time in the woods. Skinned up to the top of Mt. Mansfield last Saturday, alone, and fell asleep in the sunshine glorious for an hour, realigning in real time the priorities of life and joy and being right here, right now. 

My mother was in a theater production with dancers, a chorale, and an orchestra in a huge summer-stock pageant sort of thing in Virginia society in the 40s called "Common Glory". That pairing of words has stuck with me my whole life (so far). There is so much esoteric wordiness shouted in the service of political analysis, art criticism, journalistic hooha that this notion of the sublime in the simple is, well..., sublime. What may come? Who knows?! But, Frost said a poem is "a momentary stay against confusion." An excellent song is a place. You can go there anytime. It's a refuge from the noise. Real ART sings. Changes your posture. Will Brittany Howard go the way of Jimi or Robert? Who knows, but you should listen to her voice, and his flying, searing sound. You should look around carefully at time passing. It's full of passing beauty and dreams coming true.

That Modigliani guy is right.

Love love and more all the time.

Bruce Mac

P. S. So, here we are. And I haven't instructed you to buy something from me, so Sarah, my gallery director and right-hand-mastermind will yell at me, not too loudly though. Buy art y'all. Before you can't. Today is better than tomorrow, cuz tomorrow never comes...

P.P.S. Case in point: I was lamenting to myself (you guys do that too, right?) how long it's been since I've heard thunder. Minutes later my son sent me a text video of it hailing in Montana in his backyard. Thunder. From my cell phone. Can't make it up.

Parable

Hi Friends,

Last summer, I headed out for a SUP having checked the radar and knowing storm cells were coming out of the Adirondacks around 5:30. It was just after 3:00. Eighty degrees. Stiff south wind. I left my beach at the north end of Shelburne Bay working hard into the headwind with the idea of three miles into it and then a fast, fun surf back. Wind picked up. I paddled harder.  Fought to the southern lee down where the rushes hide the heron by the fishing access, had a Gu and water and headed home. Wind fell out. Bay went flat. Low black clouds were building west. Lightning out on the broad lake. I started a hard race tempo and paddled over near the eastern shore of the bay just in case. About a half mile from home the cell jumped over Shelburne Point and blew due west at around 30-40 knots. No way I was going anywhere but downwind and into the shore. There's an abandoned estate right there and I just managed to get the board out of the water and up the bank fighting hard with the gusts. Tucked it behind a crumbling stone wall and crouched beside it as the rain cut loose. Curled into a fetal position while the rain pounded down and the temperature dropped into the sixties. Barefoot in board shorts, I pressed into the wall as the wind carried the rain over my head. Nothing but shivering and waiting. I felt alive and miserable and strong and alone. Waiting. Cold. If it's blowing this hard, it's got to go by soon. Waves of emotion. Lightning and thunder. Then, as quickly as it came, the wind died. Rain continued pelting but I grabbed the board and fought my way home on my knees. Stumbled up the lane with my board on my head. Just as I reached the yard, the rain stopped. Grabbed a towel and then a hot shower, still shaking slightly. Came back downstairs. The sun was peeking out.

"Lie low to the wall" 

Affirmative. We got this. Time to feel alive every day.

Hug your people. love love B Mac

P.S. This happened last summer and I had stopped thinking about it until my good buddy Matt sent me a poem a few days ago, just some strong words to hang onto in this turmoil. This is the paragraph I wrote back to him. Thanks buddy. Got your back too. Look for the sun peeking.

Bikers, Nano Birds and the Abyss

In sixth grade, my friend Marisa created a world called Chaos. She said I was in it and my name was Kaokee. I don't remember any of the plot, and I haven't spoken to her in over forty years, (or 280 if you like to think in dog years, seeing as how time is pretty much an arbitrary human construct to order the chaos of everything. Which, apparently, we really need). The fact that I had a name in grade school cosmology has stuck with me.

The word "chaos" comes from the Greek for emptiness, chasm, the abyss or void. A bunch of those old Greek smart guys wrote a lot about it. Heraclitus posited that it was the true foundation of reality. In the news today, chaos is a constant theme. It has morphed from "Chaos in the Middle East" into "Chaos in the __________ (fill in the blank). ER’s (which magically are now ED's, emergency departments, just ask any doctors). China, tornado wreckage, grocery stores, the Dow, cruise lines, Yemen, nursing homes, medical supply chains, the Amazon, Amazon, elections, payrolls, coral reefs, closures, poaching, oil storage, farm subsidies, school, etc. etc. etc...

Jens Voigt is a retired pro bike racer from Germany who was famous as one of the true "hard men" in cycling. He was a breakaway specialist who would take off from the pack, the peloton, and routinely hammer an attack alone. He once fractured his wrist in a nasty crash and rode the entire day before the doctors x-rayed it and ordered him out of the race. After a crash utterly destroyed his bike in the Tour de France, he borrowed a child's bike because the car with the team bikes had left him behind. He rode it nine miles before the team realized he was still in the race and left him a proper spare. He famously printed "Shut Up Legs" on his handlebars. He set the hour record by riding 31.76 miles in a velodrome after he "retired" from racing at 43 years old, generating an average of 412 watts, an incredible ouput. The peloton of a stage bike race is chaos --180 humans, with five-foot-four climbers weighing 125 pounds, big power-house sprinters with massive track-racing-built thighs, twenty different languages, food on the fly, sixty mile-an-hour descents, flat tires, screaming mobs lining the roadways, broken bikes, broken bones, 180 different brains riding elbow to elbow for three weeks. Jens said, "Having things organized is for small-minded people. Genius controls chaos."

Years ago, I was in my front yard drinking a coffee and a bumblebee buzzed just by my ear. I turned to discover, instead, a baby hummingbird, the tiniest bird I have ever seen, zipping off into the sunlight. So naturally, I made a piece of art to honor the little guy. Called it, "The Rookie." Art helps me order reality. Doing some homework, I discovered the smallest birds in the world live in Cuba. The Bee Hummingbird weighs two grams, the same as two dollar bills, or a couple of raisins, or a half a teaspoon of sugar. They eat half their body weight a day and make nests smaller than a golf ball out of spider webs, which they shingle with lichen to make waterproof. Their eggs are the size of a pea. Our hummingbirds in Vermont arrive later this month, something I really look forward to as a way to order the chaos of time. You know, seasons. In the Greek comedy, "Birds", Aristophanes explains that chaos transitioned into the creation of birds.

In my art, I have a whole genre I call "Chaos" pieces, which range from the inexplicable like "Lush" or "Ruckus," to randomness with elements of structure like "Imperium". I have done a series of pieces that slide from structure into total chaos -- "Crystalline" then "Warren" then "Haystack" -- from the ordered, angular grid of a meteorite's guts, to the organic randomness of a pile of cut hay, Mondrian to Monet, M. C. Escher to Pollack.

In Germanic tradition, the hero had to battle with chaos, generally depicted as a monster like a dragon, Beowulf versus Grendel. Chaos is the base nature of all reality and man must make it orderly to be comprehensible, if even just a bit. Slay it or just give a beat and a nice vocal, maybe a guitar break with some horns for punch. Jens, our hero, once said, "You have to make your own luck. If you try to win, you might lose, but if you don't try to win, you lose for sure." I am constantly in the studio wrestling with the chaos. The formlessness of an empty canvas is the void. There is nothing. Our nature is to make rhythm out of all that, to find patterns for comfort. My favorite artists are the ones who take the familiar and twist it into the unfamiliar or vice versa. Take the twirls and stripes and explosions of our daily realm and build a latticework to see it and understand it. Look to my Instagram #havocgallery for the bizarreness of our natural world, how the simplest moments can hold visual magic. My job is to transmute that into art you can hang in the dining room.

We are bombarded today, more than ever in my lifetime, with CHAOS. Shouldn't the mission be orderliness and consistency, applied science and medicine, structured policy, to save our citizens and our cultural fabric? This fabric is what we have evolved over millennia because it works to keep the chaos at bay, the monsters, the abyss. Keep your rituals as best you can my friends. They are the separation of us from the mess. Take it from Kaokee. I know what I'm talking about. (Fact checked it myself, yep, spiderwebs). Note the name of my gallery that I hung on the door ten years ago -- HAVOC. I am intimately familiar with this stuff. "Random Order" is a nice oxymoron and the title of a piece from 2009.

Finally, one last nugget from Jens: "At the Tour, you always have some fantastic days and some days where you hit the asphalt. Today was an asphalt day for me." This is our collective asphalt day. Get up. Get it moving. "On With It". The hummingbirds will come back soon.

Stay home. Buy art. Hug those you are living with.

Find order that comforts.

love love

as always,

Bruce Mac

Night Light

Yo fellow homebodies,

WE ARE ALL GONNA DIE.

Ok, got that out of the way. Yep, it's true. Every last one of us. Sooner or later. In the Tom Hank's movie "Bridge of Spies," Tom as a lawyer continues to ask Mark Rylance, the accused spy, "Aren't you worried?!" His answer: "Would it help?" That's where we are right now. This anxiety of "Do I have it?" "Did I have it already?!" "Does she have it?!" "What if the kids get it?!!!" can only be offset by the assiduous practice of what the medical professionals advise us to do. That is pretty much it. Be smart. Be careful. Be kind, as everyone you see in the grocery store is in the same swamp. AND, just to be clear, worrying definitely does not help. It creates its own cascade of symptoms from "I think my chest feels tight" to "Lying awake at night is it, right?"  Worrying is using your life's energy to focus on the thing you don't want to happen. Want to chat about viruses? Nope. Naturally, distractions can be really helpful.

Like art, for instance. The title of this piece is "Night Light". As a kid, there was nothing more comforting than having a light in the darkness. Down the hall, in the bathroom, was a night light. Take away that pale yellow glow and the darkness was almost painful. Who knows what could be going on when you can't see ANYTHING? Sleeping at another house as a kid was always a challenge--Gramma's giant house full of really ancient weird things was challenging because of the utter darkness when we were put to bed. I guess old people didn't need night lights, but... fortunately, I usually had brothers around to talk through the possibilities of monsters or attic zombies or crazed drifters sneaking up from the cellar. Smart guys tell us 60% of the brain is visual-processing oriented. Well, for a kid with no night light, it's 100%. No doubt. Forget about sleeping, we just were trying not to die. Funny, we always slept. Never died.

As a grown-up (sort of), I have come to enjoy darkness. When I was on the staff at Camp, we took the kids on night walks--short hikes in the woods without flashlights. The whole exercise was to teach them a sense of security in nature AND to make them realize how well one can navigate in the woods with just the ambient light. Obviously, bright moon on a clear night... you can read a book. But, I remember a night with no moon and rainclouds overhead. Seeing your hands was a challenge, but off we went. The kids were typically skittery, but one seemed completely relaxed. I found out later that he was born blind and surgery gave him sight a few years prior to coming to Camp. The goal of my art is to teach unsuspecting adults (and savvy kiddos) how to see in the day. And at night. And when it feels like nighttime with no night light...

"Night Light" is part of a series I started as an attempt to capture the way light shimmers on water--the late afternoon sparkling on the bay of dancing sunshine, the wriggling white or pale yellow lines of the moon on the black surface. Years ago, from Eagle's Aerie, the highest lookout on the mountain, I stared through binoculars at the sun sparkles on Lake Dunmore, a couple thousand feet below. That little moment forty years ago I still consider. Capture that. LIfe's work maybe...

I'm hopeful this piece will find a home where one of you would enjoy the comfort of a "Night Light". Beauty is a comfort. Sunlight is a comfort. I have a good friend who has a "pondering room," where she can sit surrounded by a number of my pieces. Seems to work for her--she's a bright light herself. In a "normal" world, I have shows that put my work in front of a hundred thousand eyes. Here and now, I have these missives.

Stay safe friends,

Support the artists trapped in their studios. Better investments than the Dow, methinks.

Be strong. Notice the shimmering. Stay calm. 

Bruce Mac

The Brink

Hey distant but close friends,

The gravity of our days is fierce and has been somewhat paralyzing considering what may come, but I still would like to share, and have you share as well. Stories help.

Last summer was a challenging time for me, which in retrospect, falls into that perspective that is always impossible when one is standing knee deep in rising waters. My life was going either in one direction or another. That's it. Two roads diverged and both were fraught with unknowns that at the time were somewhat terrifying. Being as sensitive as I am... sleepless nights were common. As is often the case for me, all this manifests in my artwork. I made a panel called "The Brink." It's large, nearly four feet by eight feet and tremendously complex, as you can tell by the detail images that follow.

There stands, just right of center, a lookout tower under a shower of iridescent rain. It is anthropomorphized architecture--a person--with the windows for observation at the top, exactly the way our eyes are placed on our bodies. Left of center is the Orb, the ball of energy, with which, on so many days, we find ourselves having a mandatory staring match. Is it finances? Is it your relationship? An addiction, a worry over the kids, aging parents, the small but insistent fretting, house paint, car repair, knee pain, gaining weight, losing weight, tuition, is my job secure, should I finally call, am I the person I know that I can truly be before the lights go out... ??

There's a garden, full of spiked geometry and blossoms. There's a wandering cloud, an EKG, ripples on the water, a sunrise, the wind, rain, the moon, the house in the distance, a pyramid small - that upon inspection becomes enormous, encasing the three-dimensional schematic for the time machine that might be the best answer. There's the void. There's the far distant teeny, tiny tower reminding you that you are not alone in the staring match. Layers and layers... the void. Our planet from space... The horizontal broad beam of light holding up the tower...

Yep. That is all in there and a single paragraph doesn't begin to explain what is what, but...

My path emerged. I made some choices and life is better. No one bought "The Brink." Then came the political explosion of the impeachment inquiry. Is this the collapse of our democracy? A tyrant or just a careless man in power? Immigration. Election interference. Greed. Lies. The Brink! And the country survived. (For now).

And now. The Brink! The entire world upended and so many of our assumptions of normal destroyed. The abyss of tomorrow or next week or next month. The Orb of energy looks suspiciously like the sphere of a virus, dark and menacing. The energy ball of focus and its streaming wind of airborne broken glass cannot be willed away. It's huge. And close.

Is this art piece some talisman of prescience? Well, yes. It is. My unconscious made this metaphor last summer that on this very day rings bright and loud. It's a scary world we find ourselves facing but, and this is the moment of salvation, there is always the energy ball. That short list of worries above never goes away. It's an endless list and terrifying to stare at. Some of us will make it through this alive. For a while. With hope, a long while. Some won't. That's how this works. What seemed the brink before was and then wasn't. And then was again and then wasn't. And now...

On the panel protecting the tower/me/us is a force field. Almost nothing gets through and what little does, there is a wall of massive organic complexity perfectly engineered to handle it. The concept of a force field of protection will be the subject of my next missive. Please stay tuned. I have been fascinated since childhood by the notion of a field of visible or invisible power that protects us, can shield us from ray guns, catapults, destructor beams, meanies, orcs... Sometimes it's blue and sparkly, depending on which movie you are watching or the book in your hands. I am hard at work in the studio making force fields for all of you people. You can buy one to protect your family. But these are my metaphors. The real Force Field is us. Today I am surrounded by people, (ok, they are standing over there, close, but not too close) who are the reason we will get through all this. The strength of us all together is it. Yes, this is the BRINK. We will look different after and there will be another brink, but the force of us together is how we will prevail. My energy field is yours to use. We got this. There are too many brilliant, dedicated, caring-beyond-reason humans who truly are the Jedi among us. Nobility is in our DNA. Do your best. Stay safe. Send love every day. Support those who need it. We all need it...

And btw, somebody please buy "The Brink" as my two Spring shows in NYC didn't happen. Make me an offer with what might work for you and we'll see if it works for me. My summer show in Seattle probably won't fly either. Support the arts. Now. Making metaphors helps. Crazy huh? Who knew. Can't make this up...

More love every day,

Bruce Mac

P.S. My personal brink of last summer means I now have a partner in my life. She's awesome. I'm lucky.

Which Watch When

Let's start with a couple of basic questions regarding value. First, how many days is a million seconds? How about a billion seconds? Next, what does the Mona Lisa weigh? If you wanted a stainless wristwatch for scuba diving in 1974, what would you buy? How about a sports car in 1969 if you were looking to spend under $3,000?

I have a piece of art for sale that is 22 1/2 inches square in my gallery. It's $1,200. A moderately well-known artist named Jack sold a piece exactly these dimensions in 1950 for $306. In 2006, a piece of this artist's work around 4 feet by 8 feet traded hands for about $30,000 per square inch. I have a 4 foot by 8 foot piece for sale here in the gallery. It's not $140 million dollars. He sold canvasses splattered with paint. I scratch metal really carefully. He's a genius. I'm just me.

What is anything worth? Exactly what someone is willing to pay for it. Mr. Pollock's art is all one-of-a-kind, like mine, but Ferrari made three dozen 250 GTO's between 1962 and 1964. They cost around $18,000 when new, but one sold for $2,500 in 1969. You know, used car. One was donated to a high school in Texas and they auctioned it for $7,000. In 2018, one sold for $70 million to the guy who started a company making excellent floor mats for cars. I have them--heavy-duty plastic and perfectly fitted and reasonably priced. He makes millions of them and millions.

An artist named David Choe painted graffiti murals at the headquarters of a start-up tech company in California, and he took shares in the company in lieu of cash. When Facebook went public his shares were worth around $200 million. Good call there David.

People constantly ask me at shows, "How much does it weight?" and "How long did it take you to make?" I have a piece here in the studio right now called "Solid State" that weighs 18 pounds, just like the Mona Lisa. Mine's newer, less well-known. So what things are worth is a function of age, notoriety, weight, rarity... A diamond was found last year the size of a baseball that weighs about 3/4 of a pound. What's it worth? Whatever you can get. The luxury company Louis Vuitton owns 25% of it and plans to send it on a world promotional tour. Diamonds are roughly 1 to 3.5 billion years old. Check the box for age and the box for how long did it take to make and the box for scarcity. Add marketing. A backstory helps: Rockefeller bought the Pollock painting for 300 bucks; the GTOs won a ton of races. Throw in the factor of good condition--is something in great shape? The watch mentioned above was bought in 1974 for $345 and the owner thought it was too nice to wear, so he left it in a lock box. Turns out it's now worth around $700,000 since it is pristine. Backstory? Paul Newman wore that model Rolex in a movie. I have a piece I just finished. It's in flawless condition and so special only two people have seen it, so far... What's it worth? Make me an offer. It's called "Box Lightning". Someday it will hang in a museum. For now, your house will do. All collections start with one piece. Every one. Ask any collector.

So, wrapping up: Age, scarcity, hoopla, weight, provenance, size, obvious genius and dumb luck are all factors, in no particular order. Quite often we value what others value--sparkly rocks, machinery, colored goo on canvas...What is the value of anything? What is the value of waking up in the morning not in pain? How about the last White Rhino? Grandkids? Priceless. But as far as "things" go--invest in what makes you smile. Take chances. There are sneaker collections worth millions. Matchbox cars. Baseball cards, omg. Then, patience. Days and days and years of smiles.

Oh, a million seconds is 11 and a half days. A billion is 31 and a half years.

Find what makes you smile and head that direction...

And, of course, take care of each other. And, support the arts. Today.

Peace and love as always, Bruce

Dark then Light, Rhythm in Hues

What could be the furthest thing from your mind right now? Here's a guessing game:

What can regenerate a detached limb? What has three hearts? What grows from the size of a grain of rice to the weight of a man in three years? What can taste with its skin, has copper-based blue blood, and is happy at 47 degrees Fahrenheit? What has excellent vision, with horizontal, dumbbell-shaped  pupils, and can also "see" with its skin? Some are bioluminescent. What first left the family tree of humans a half a billion years ago? One can walk carrying coconuts. Some, when pissed off, turn bright red and raise horns above their eyes. Got it yet? What has two-thirds of its neurons outside of its brain? What can change the texture and the color of its exterior at will to be indistinguishable from its surroundings, or mimic a mass of predators or a rock, or simply pulse rhythmic color?

21/Borisov is an interstellar visitor flying in a hyperbolic trajectory around our sun right now, only the second object from outside our solar system we have seen. It looks like a comet but it came from outside our small(ish) neighborhood. I imagine that at the controls of that spacecraft, it it were one, there might be something like the above being. You could hardly devise a stranger creature if you tried. No bones. Can fit a 100-pound body through a hole the size of an orange. All of them have a toxin that is delivered through saliva; one is poisonous enough to kill a person. They can bore a hole the size of a large needle through calcium carbonate with a tiny abrasive tongue and then inject this venom to kill its dinner.  Most have a complete lifespan of six months but the largest live up to five years or so. Hawaiian folklore believes these to be the lone survivors of another age of the universe. They breathe water but can absorb up to 40% of their required oxygen through their skin. They don't have ears but they can hear. They make ink but don't have pens.

The solstice is in two days, making today's day here in Vermont only eight hours and fifty minutes. Eight. Like the arms on an octopus. Am I alone in making this connection? Yep. Pretty much. But it's ok; I'm used to having things connect in my tiny brain that no one else connects. In fact, it's part of my job. Do something no one has ever done before. My art is exactly this. Make people use their eyes like they never have before. Ask people to consider how truly bizarre our world can be. Is it coincidental that a Hawaiian observatory crew found the first interstellar object, dubbed Oumuamua, which I wrote about back in December 2017 (Current Thinking link) AND the octopus is revered in Hawaiian folklore as the symbol of Kanaloa, the spiritual leader of the underworld. Kanaloa is associated with intelligence, flexibility, and, he is the navigator. There it is. The aliens that live on earth left over from a previous universe are probably the navigators of these interstellar objects (spaceships).  Makes total sense...

Or not. If you are still with me... 

Happy solstice, dear friends. Happy holidays. Light the candles. Trim the tree. Hug your assembled family. Have a feast. Invite the neighbors. Dream your wildest dreams through the longest night this year. Call me and buy art heirlooms as gifts. (My gallery director requires that sentence). Mostly, greet each day as the miracle that we get once again. They are numbered. All are precious. And share your blessings just a little bit extra around this pivot toward brighter days. Two arms we have to hug everyone we love. Giant Pacific octopuses have suckers that can lift 30 pounds and they have 1,600 of them on their eight arms. Don't hug them.

Peace and good will. Repeat...

but mostly love and more love...

H E X

A hex is a spell usually meant to curse someone or something. This piece, "Hex", is based on the panels placed on barns, starting in the early 19th Century in the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside, to ward off evil and invite prosperity on the farm. The word itself is from German referring to casting a spell, but I like the notion of both meanings. A word that means both itself and the opposite of itself has been a fascination of mine for years. "Sanction" means to say it's ok to do something. AND it means that nobody can do the thing. "Dust" means to remove dust or it means to cover something, like "dusting" the cookies with sugar. "Cleave" means to cut AND it means to hold fast to something. Divide and not divide. "Overlook" means to have missed something AND it means to look over something to be sure nothing is missed. Language is so slippery. Makes me crazy. "Hex" is both the spell and the thing to ward off evil in your space. (The patterns on the metal are based on the precise mapping with 3D laser scanning technology of the energy fields surrounding pyramids recently discovered buried in South American jungles. Pretty sure. Maybe...). Around 2005, I did a piece called "Angor Wat" that referenced this same energy mapping of the massive temple in Cambodia. For millennia, this religious monument, the largest on earth, was the spiritual center for countless believers. Seemed to me that a satellite view would be helpful as none of those people ever saw it from above. Uluru, the sacred sandstone mountain of the Pitjantjatjara aboriginals in Australia, was just closed this last week to tourists wanting to trek to its summit. I made an art piece in 2003 named "Uluru" to celebrate its stark magnificence and spiritual potency. The strand between these art pieces is the energy within objects. Painted, constructed, or naturally occurring, we humans endow things with power. Or maybe they have power that we perceive. Either way, "Hex" is part of this continuum--the overview of the invisible energy. And, by the way, "strand" is one of those contronyms, as a verb and then a noun.

P.S. Send me your favorite contronyms if you have any. If not, let's all agree that language is whack. AND, look around for objects with energy... those are my specialty.

I Like it Here

OK, wade right in. 29% of the birds in North America have disappeared in my lifetime. That's around 3 billion birds. July 2019 was the hottest month in human history. New estimates show that at current levels of production, by 2050 there will be more plastics in the ocean, by mass, than fish. People in positions of power and wealth to effect the necessary revolution don't seem to care. Hell, I have heard, is really hot too. It's over for our children. We are doomed. Let's race cars and buy crap.

But,

Wait a minute. I'm sorry. Here's what we know:

The diameter of the Earth is 7,917.5 miles. Yaks and their shepherds live at around 16,000 feet. The Small Himalayan Jumping Spider, who makes his little snug hut/web at 22,000 feet, is the highest living critter we know about. (This fact bugs me a bit since spiders are all carnivores, so what are they eating up there?!) The Bar-headed Goose migrates over the Himalayan Plateau and has been confirmed flying over Mount Makalu at 27,825 feet. Upper atmospheric sampling has found bacteria living from 5-10 miles above sea level. Speaking of seas, the Mariana Snailfish was found living at just over 5 miles down. I don't really want to know what they eat. Ice cold debris descending from the pitch blackness?!

A quick bit of math shows us that life as we know it lives in a layer that is 10 miles thick, maybe 15 if we add those upper atmosphere molds and bacteria. This is a very, very, very thin film. Relative to the Earth, all life lives on only about .189% of the planet and that's a figure based on distance as opposed to mass.

Right now, utilizing the Hubble Space telescope, the farthest we can see visible light is from a galaxy we named GN-z11 that is 32-billion light years from Earth. Hubble has also established the observable universe, using all frequencies of radiation, to be about 46.5-billion light years in all directions, or roughly a sphere with us in the middle that has a diameter of about 93-billion light years. That is what we know. That is as far as humans can SEE and that is how our giant brains do the math and physics and determine the size to the very edge of everything. And as awesome as this vision is, as sophisticated as our sensors and computational analytical skills get, we have not found ANY evidence of other life ANYWHERE.

Ok. All life that exists is the thinnest film of green scum right here. All life. Every last bit. Just the merest wall of a bubble, a layer of almost nothingness, relative to the planet AND  the great beyond. This little film is all the life in the universe that we know about for real. As the atmosphere around us, and the oceans and weather and land changes, life will adapt, or die. Extinction events have happened repeatedly, just none involving us.

But, I believe in our humanity and the power in these massive brains. If we can detect a bee on the moon by its heat signature, we can do this. If we can bring back the bald eagle, we can do this. If we can build a Hubble and tune it repeatedly, we can do this. I recently read a sign held aloft by a school kid saying, "It's too bad we don't have an unlimited source of energy floating across the sky everyday." We can fix this plastic tsunami. We can make food for everyone. Tasty food. In my next blog thingy, I will explain how. Maybe. Probably... In the meantime, I would like a little help from you guys to spread the word.

Save the Thin Film and Maybe our Kids' Kids.

Catchy right?

Thursday and the Tsunami

Howdy good friends,

The license plate on my car says "QUASAR". When asked, I always explain: "It's a mysterious, deep space object emitting massive amounts of energy." They are, in fact, super luminous galaxy cores whose light typically started traveling billions of years ago. Their emissions are across the entire spectrum of radiation. The crush of annihilation into a black hole spins out particles--death of matter, creation of energy. How super luminous? These are tsunamis of cosmic energy--charged particles moving in waves 99.9999999999999999999999 % the speed of light, just a smidgeon below warp speed. Without our cozy blanket of of magnetism and atmosphere we would all be cooked.

But, it's Thursday. I'm willing to bet you didn't wake up this morning thinking about galactic cores. Or that today--Thor's Day--is named after the Norse god of thunder, at least in English. In the Romance languages, today is named for Jupiter, the god of the sky and thunder. In Latin, today is Jovis Dies, Jupiter's Day. Spanish say "Jueves." French, "Juedi." Strangely, or not, depending on how you think the mind of man is collectively wired, Danish, Dutch, Slavic, the languages of India, Nepali, Thai, even some Meso-American languages have the god of the sky and thunder as this day of the week. Tezcatlipoca is the god who is best understood, according to the smart humans focusing on this heritage, as the embodiment of change through conflict. Thunder is most certainly conflict. The god with the giant hammer is certainly trying to change something. Every week.

This morning I was running and saw two birds harassing each other next to the trail. After I got home and did the homework, I identified them as Black-billed Magpies. Big, sporting a striking black and white outfit with a slight iridescence, these guys were really having a problem together. What could be the issue? Apparently these are among the smartest birds on the planet. I'm a bit of a bird freak. They are the only living descendants of dinosaurs. Couple that with the notion they can fly and we have surrounding us ancient animals with super powers. Why were these two having a battle on such a lovely morning?

From some reading recently are a couple stories that stitch this together. First, a monk asked his class, "What is the pitcher on the table?" One student began to speak about the pottery and its function. He was waved off. Another came to the front of the class and knocked the pitcher to the floor, shattering it completely. A smile. Class over. In another class, the teacher began to speak about the nature of all things and a bird began singing by the window. The monk went silent, waited till the bird finished his song and flew off. The monk smiled. Class over.

Conflict and change are the natural order of all things. From the searing radiation bathing the universe to the birds on the morning run on a Thursday, the nature of all things is temporal, temporary, push and pull. Life is defined by our response to this reality, and, if I can express this with even more focus--there is a duality to beauty. A thing--the sunset, a painting on the wall, a favorite song is a beautiful thing that comes and goes. A feeling--the sight of your child, a kiss, the endorphin rush of a hard run, is a thing of beauty that is profound and fleeting. But this duality is an illusion. Both of these, the outside experience and the inner emotion are within your head. Shakespeare said, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

Change, the destruction of things, the sun sinking away, the passing bird song... is the nature of every day. Our defining of this day is how we roll with these infinite inputs. Loss. Yep. Conflict. Always. Music, as much as possible. Every Thor's Day, I consider the smiting hammer. My license plate is the cosmic surf reminder. Between the swells, I try to make beautiful things that will outlast me and share them as much as possible. "Keep on Growing," sang Trey Anastasio and The Tedeschi Trucks Band this past Saturday night at the Lockn' Music Festival. Go look that up if you are a Clapton or Duane Allman fan. Most importantly, see the broken pitcher as the nature of all things. But, listen to the singing bird.

Hugs help too, don't forget. Hugs are both inner and outer beauty. 

Forty Times a Second is Just Right

It was Pi Day, March 14th, Einstein's birthday, and I was reading about how a new computer program had figured out Pi to five trillion digits and I was thinking, "So what... Why do humans need to know this stuff? Can't we just accept that it doesn't repeat or end? It's just a ratio." A few days later, I was tv shopping and ran smack into the new 4K resolution benchmark for the "best" new tvs. You mean my "old" tv with the 1080p hi-def screen is now four times not as good as the new ones? Feels suddenly ancient, doesn't have enough dots. Pixels. Little colored bits... Guess I need more tiny flashing blips of color... Maybe 8 million will be enough...

In Warrnambool, Australia, some researchers have just discovered "middens,” which are charred remains of possible human settlements that date from 120,000 years ago, effectively doubling the age that has been the accepted figure for humans being on that continent. North of there, in the Pilbara region, are rock paintings that are conclusively dated to 40,000 years ago, making them the oldest art pieces on the planet. To this day, Aboriginal artists make imagery of the creation of the cosmos, art rooted in dreamings, the "Dreamtime," when the spirit/hero/wanderers traveled across the formlessness. The tradition of these paintings and carvings manifests the energy of "dreaming," the energy of an individual that existed before birth and continues after death. We are all of our ancestors as we are of ourselves, moment to moment, inseparable from our place and our time, yet bound to the continuum. The art from this tradition spans at least forty millennia and is overwhelmingly characterized by dot patterns. Thought, spirit, the cosmos is organized, rhythmic, small blips of color. (I highly recommend a book called, "Dreamings, the Art of Aboriginal Australia," published in 1988).

In 2015, Dr Li-Huei Tsai at MIT made the first mouse disco. The mice invited to the strobe-lit box for an hour every day were genetically engineered to have Alzheimer's disease. After a few (sq)weeks of getting down with their bad selves on the maze floor, the dissected mice showed significantly lower levels of two different brain proteins that form the plaque characterizing the disease. Cells called "microglia," debris clearing and cleaning cells, were stimulated by the light pulses, which seemed to be most effective strobing at a frequency of 40 times a second (40 hertz). This is the first proven cellular response to manipulated brain waves. Further, when sound at this same frequency was added to the treatment, it significantly improved function in other parts of the brain--the hippocampus, which is used for memory formation, storage and retrieval, and the pre-frontal cortex, which is the seat of judgement, attention, and higher-order reasoning. (I need this for sure).

 Researchers have discovered the firings of neurons in the brain work rhythmically. Gamma waves sweep through the brain at 25 to 140 hertz during peak concentration. (That's networks of neurons firing 140 times a second, just to be clear). Deep delta wave sleep is .5 to 4 hertz. Meditative adults have theta waves around 4 to 8 hertz. Dr. Tsai has formed a company, Cognito Therapeutics, using gamma wave entrainment to potentially alter the course of Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other neurological disabilities faced by an aging global population. Therapy without drugs is a paradigm shift of massive scale.

The didgeridoo originated in northern Australia and is believed to be the oldest surviving instrument. Cave paintings show it being played 3,000-4,000 years ago and anthropologists suggest it may be as old as the 40,000-year culture to which it is attached. The strongest frequencies played are in the 40 to 200 hertz range, although many have infra-sonic waves below the 20 hertz threshold of common human hearing. Anyone who has listened to a group of didgeridoo players can attest to the sound as being frequencies you feel and hear, as well as being sound from a different time. Primitive music, absolutely. Gamma wave entrainment? Maybe.

Did the Aboriginals figure out how to have healthy brains? Maybe. Will I buy the 8 million pixels so my mythological beings in the movies are really contrasty? Maybe. Should teenagers be allowed to pump 40 hertz into their ear canals? Maybe. Maybe I need more music and sparkly lights for my brain fitness. Maybe all these light manipulations I play with every day will let me live as long as my kids. Add music and that sounds like a grand plan.

Rock steady, and I mean steady, my friends. Apparently, it's really, really important.  

And buy art. That way, in 40,000 years, people will recognize my initials and know you had great taste.

And, as always, before time and after, while the petroglyphs fade and before this walkabout we call life ceases, love love, everyday....

We don't repeat and we don't end either. Like Pi. Yep.

Bruce

Synchronicity and the Glint of Two Lights

Here's a quote some of you of a certain age or bent mind should recognize:

"A lot of people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. Give you an example, show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, "plate," or "shrimp," or "plate of shrimp" out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness."

Over the holidays I was in a bookstore doing last minute Christmas shopping and an Edward Hopper book caught my eye. I pulled it down and flipped it open to this page:

Bingo. Two Lights! I had to snap a pic with my phone because of the randomness of the moment. I have a client in Maine whose house has a view of the Two Lights lighthouse in Cape Elizabeth; we have been discussing, for some time, an art piece to speak to the place and the light and the history. He once was walking years ago and met a very old neighbor who actually remembers Hopper sitting and painting Two Lights right there next to his property.

Back to the holidays: less than 24 hours later, I went to see the movie "Aquaman" with my son. It's a DC comic come to life in epic scale and BOOM! there is Two Lights. It's the house where Aquaman grows up. His dad is the lighthouse keeper. Same same from the Hopper painting, complete with the golden light. Bizarre. I thought, "I need to mention this to Tom in Maine."

The next evening I was watching another superhero movie on the tube with my boys. "Ant Man and the Wasp" is a Marvel comics epic special-effects mashup involving interdimensional travel using a massive machine with steam punk details and space ship vibes. Right there in the middle of the movie is the machinery for shrinking and transporting, and the primary element of the machine looks exactly like the Two Lights lens-- a complex, highly engineered, cylindrical construction of glass and brass that weighs nearly a ton. The actual lens was commissioned in 1874 and shone for 120 years before being upgraded to a modern beacon. Then Antman's girlfriend's genius scientist dad bought it?!

Plate of shrimp effect EXACTLY.  What is the universe doing to smash a lighthouse into my reality with such emphasis? Three times in two days? True, "Light House" is kind of where I live metaphorically but... Come on...

I'm sitting here writing this in the studio, music playing, and in the background are the lyrics:

"Everything that falls your way, I say There is a deeper world than this that you don't understand There is a deeper world than this tugging at your hand Every ripple on the ocean Every leaf on every tree Every sand dune in the desert Every power we never see There is a deeper wave than this, swelling in the world...”

Can't make this stuff up. Sting is singing. I am scribbling. I was planning to write about quantum entanglement to sew this together, but it's stitched. Tight.

That quote that starts us off is from the 1984 movie "Repo Man."

Be sure to listen to "The Seventh Wave."

And stay tuned for how this all shows up in my art. It always does. Love love. After all, it's the seventh wave.

"At the still point of destruction At the centre of the fury All the angels, all the devils All around us, can't you see? There is a deeper wave than this rising in the land There is a deeper wave than this nothing will withstand."

Love is the seventh wave, but it's up to us to see it, make it real. All together now,

Bruce R. MacDonald

P.S. Coincidence--(n.) a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection. "Life"— See above--"lattice of... "

The Force and Cookies

"In the old time” is how the story starts. The indigenous people of North America of the Algonquin tribe have a tale of three brothers who went hunting in early winter. They set out, found the trail of a bear and made chase. When you look to the north, there are circumpolar constellations visible at all times of the year. The simplest and most familiar to most of us is the Big Dipper. The three stars of the handle are the brother hunters, and the polygon of the dipper is the bear. The constant in the night sky since childhood for so many of us is this grouping of tiny lights, always there, every night. The two stars on the right side of the bear point to the North Star, Polaris. This star never moves. To quote Bill Shakespeare’s sonnet #116, "It is an ever fixed mark.” All things revolve around this one thing. By the way, the sonnet is about love, love as a constant.

Speaking of constants, what is the strongest thing in the universe? Electromagnetism? Stellar winds? Gravity? Nope. It’s a force known to physicists as the Strong Force. (Got to love the poetry in science---it’s strong and it’s a force. Boom.) It’s what binds two quarks together. (Quark is a word stolen from James Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake, in case you were wondering.) The Strong Force is a fundamental law of nature that binds subatomic particles together to make things like protons and neutrons, which combine to make atoms and, therefore, EVERTHING. This force can inextricably bind together a whole family of disparate particles such as gluons, mesons, baryons, hadrons, uncles and cousins. If these particles are pulled apart, and the "distance” (about 10 to the negative 15 meters, which is a fentometer or about the width of a proton) increases, the force also increases, like a tiny but all-powerful rubber band. The Strong Force is 137 times stronger than magnetism and 10 with 38 zeros after it stronger than gravity. In fact, the Strong Force between two quarks is so powerful that they cannot exist alone; if two are forced apart, the massive energy required to separate them spontaneously creates new particles, new quarks, which are bound together. No "free” quarks exist, nor ever can. Law of the universe.

Here in Vermont in early winter, people want to be home together. "Home is where the heart is” is a proverb so old and ubiquitous that no one seems to agree where it came from. Home is a sort of geography, but it is really where your people are: your partner, your kids, your true friends, your clan, your family. You can’t see The Strong Force, but you can see that smile from those who love you, your mom’s embrace, your sister’s knowing looks, your son’s strong arms. And you can’t beat the expression of bliss that your dog brings when you arrive home. The internet is jammed with the gyrations of a dog overjoyed to be with its humans, the dances, the zoomies, the happy cries of love made visible without the inhibitions of our complicated brains. Home is where that dance happens. Where cookies are baked. Where fires warm and lights are lit. Hugs nonstop, yes please.

With the holidays here and our hearts turning toward home, I think the science guys are only partly right. The true Strong Force is the magic string that binds us over time and distance to our families, to the ones we love. As the fundamental law states, distance can make it pull stronger. Love is the force. It is a constant of the universe. Take your time, my friends, to pull the strings snug.

If you look in the sky tonight and find the three brothers, look to the middle star, the middle one of the handle three. Look very closely and you will see two there. The larger we call Mizar; the smaller is Alcor. In the native story the little one is the dog along on the hunt, and his name is Hold Tight.

Warmth and peace to all my friends and all of yours, and may they overlap more as the days go by. Big hugs through the solstice.

Fast, Slow, How Do You Know?

What does fast mean? Or slow? Seems like a terribly relative distinction. There is a freak of a star discovered in 1961 by Antoni Pryzbylski (say je-bel-skee, one of the all-time great names) with a still inexplicable elemental nuclear recipe that is "rapidly" rotating. Scientists this spring determined the speed to be one rotation every 188 years. (?!) As always, I’m trying to make sense of this in human terms; for instance, a major league fast ball is 100 mph, so a batter has about 400 milliseconds to decide what to do. Blinking takes between 300 and 400 milliseconds. Super fast. Almost two centuries to pirouette? Slacker star. Who calls that fast?

On Memorial Day this year, I was standing on the roof of Fenway Park with my buddy Wily who flies F-16s for the Vermont Air National Guard. We were up there because he was directing the flyover of planes at the end of the national anthem. As precisely as possible, the words "And the home of the brrraaavve…” conclude with the roaring of four Viper turbofan engines plowing through space. Since the jets are going five miles a minute, it’s a tricky dance, with Wily coordinating the song duration from rehearsal with the tower at Logan International Airport with the lead pilot Dan "Gump” Finnegan, who is doing  "an east west bowtie hold"  north of Hanscom Air Base.

So it’s a rhythm thing too. We average 60 to 100 heartbeats a minute. The national anthem from the last eight Super Bowls has averaged a minute and 56 seconds, which is about the time frame Wily was working with. If you are doing CPR, don’t sing "The Star Spangled Banner.” Sing "Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees. It’s the correct 103 beats per minute. "Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen is the same tempo. Just saying. Human hearts are fairly slow, but they do have a steady rhythm.

In October 1944, a professor set up an experiment in a lab in Dublin to demonstrate fluid dynamics using a funnel filled with asphalt that looks solid but is actually a very viscous fluid. It has dripped once is 69 years. The goop is two million times more viscous than honey. But hey, rhythm. Seriously boring rhythm. In human terms, no rhythm at all.

What holds all this together? "Man is the measure of all things,” according to the smart guy Protagoras from 2,400 years ago. Stars spin. Bees making that honey have wings beating 230 times a second. Wily and his pals stroll through the atmosphere at speeds over Mach 2 when they are off leash.  That's humans doing 1500 mph. I hit 57 once on my bike and it felt like Mach 2. My fast is his pokey. Those fastballs are unhittable unless you are Mookie Betts. Phish sang the national anthem once a cappella in a minute and 37 seconds. Radical relativism is the catch phrase, so let’s just agree: it’s not the tempo but the funky rhythm. It’s not the speed; it’s the heartbeat. Timing is everything. Make your entrance at the proper moment, especially if your ride is a jet. Turn before the tree. Don’t miss that wave. Keep breathing.