Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Becoming Spring

The torrent of the skies;
The rain and the wind,
The swollen rivers and the fallen trees.
Speak to my soul of the torment of becoming alive.
The sweet peace of death that was winter,
is not passed so easily.
As the things that will be green,
struggle to break through the frost laden soil.
Thus it is which each thing,
To become alive is a struggle.
I recognize it well, as i am still in the struggle!

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

a little dity for spring

The rain
And the Wind
they make an awful pair.
We have seen too much of both,
but the temperature is not cold!
I can breath with that!
Spring comes,
My eyes hurt,
my mind is sharo
and I feel...
so much!
Let us welcome spring!

Monday, March 29, 2010

eary morning

In the morning as i awake,
a vision of wholeness flashes in my damaged eyes.
I see you as who you are,
one person with much depth.
A a beautiful women,
for me not to acknowledge that would be wrong,
and yet i see still deeper still.
To the depths of your struggling soul,
seeking to be free of all that hinders you flight,
And there is still more,
a luminous spirit,
both caring and reflecting Light.
Of all things that is what draws me to you.
Not like a moth to a flame to be burned,
but as the world awakens to the light  every morning with the sun.
Thank you.

Friday, March 26, 2010

The process

The sky is clear,
The sun is warm,
but the wind is bitter and cold!
The journey of my soul is not done.
One small crack in the walls i have made
and the flood begins to rush in.
How could i know
that there was so much more to know?


The incident with the stress test started something that went way far back in my life.  I guess that is what things like this do, they reach back far in the past to sources, cracks in the dam.  Where weakness came in.
Through all these years, i have dealt with emotional things that had a root in fear and now it is like a light has been put on it.
God may heal all things, but we have to allow it.  And the only way to allow it is to know about it.
Ah, this crazy adventure i am on!

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Figuring out about your self, without trying

It was a simple stress test, you know the one, where you get on a tread mill that varies in sped and slope.
Where you are hooked up with all kind of leads to monitor your heart.
It begins slow and increases until you can not go anymore.
I was into the final phase of it and something deep inside was nagging me.
As I was breathing harder, it became stronger.
Long before I was finished, I stopped.
And there it was staring at me in the face, fear,
of not being able to breath.
I talked to a friend who immediately said that fear is cellular and I understood.
When I was on that operating table a year and a half ago and I stopped breathing, I remembered.
I was afraid. then and it came back now and I had no idea how strong it was!
There are more things that opened up and so my adventure is once again, an adventure.
Now it reaches deep into my soul and address...
fear.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Nothing Fancy

Today is a bit blah and i have not posted in a while.
The late spring/early summer weather has turned back to what it should be, early spring.
It is wet and there is a chill in the air.
This is okay, this is the way it should be now.
People tell me i take the difficult and look at the positive,
i do not think i have a choice.
If i did not do that, everything would be dark and gloomy and not just blah.
The world is not a gloomy place.
We may act that way.
things may get in our way and treat us badly,
but it still is a wonderous place with all kinds of colors and surprises!
So I will take my view and run with it
and see if i can live still one more day.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Vision

May be the double vision is not so bad.
I see thins from two perspectives now (tho i still can not spell in either)!
That careful searching mind,
sees the clues
and the patterns
and puts together all the pieces,
which leads to answers that no one else will see,
at least until much more information is available.
The other feels
and so sees the the heart
and soul
and the spirit of a situation.
(Others do not seem see) and so i see,
not answers, but truth.
Both perspectives are true
and now it sees i see from more sides than most.
Ah this crazy double vision!

Friday, March 19, 2010

Out on a limb!

It has been a rough week, but a beautiful one.
Had to work extra and it wore me out.
Was it worth it?
Yes, I got myself heard...again.
I feel like a broken record and I keep saying the same things.
It is beginning to sink in.
Took a break and let my heart come out after all that analytical stuff.
Felt good to be soft again, but not while fighting, afterwards,
so you can do something good for yourself.
I will vist you all again soon, but the flowers beckon me...!

Thursday, March 18, 2010

My Father – a remembrance

Joseph E. Kuntz Sr.

He was born in 1920, March 18.
The date itself sounds so impartial, but he was born shortly after the “Great” war in the French province of Alsace.  So the time was a time of great hope that the insanity of war would not come again.
The location was at on Farm some 50 miles from Strasbourg, France and is the capital of Alsace.
And so the location was a place that had witnessed first hand the ravages of the “Great” war.
Both the Germans and the French claimed the location, but the Alsatians preferred to be called French.
The mannerisms, the food and drink of the Alsatians were typically German.
In school he was taught French, German and English and apparently master them easily.
At 15 he got his pilots license and went to a technical school to become an engineer.
Soon, of course, a dark cloud rose and World War II began.
Apparently, propaganda people approached my dad because “he looked German”. 
He was not interested and rather was recruited by British Secret intelligence and became a spy.
He was captured twice and escaped twice; both times he escaped into Switzerland.
The first time he was imprisoned with a Russian Soldier and learned the Russian language.
After his second escape he was asked to go back a third time, but would not because he had been given up by neighbors in Alsace and it would have meant dire consciences for his family.
He made his way through the south of France and over the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain.
He quickly picked up Spanish and became completely disgusted with the Catholic Church, who was aiding Franco against rebels in Spain.
He spent some 6 months with a family in the south of Spain (Moorish), who treated him well.
It was at this point he felt he needed to rejoin the French fighting in North Africa and travel to Portugal (learning Portuguese along the way) and traveling by boat to North Africa where he meet up with the Free French Air Force,
The equipment was old and he flew a Spade biplane with twin 50 caliber machine guns.  That is what they had.
He never spoke much of the war or fighting or the things he had seen.
Rather he spoke more of the comradely of the French pilots, the food (a favorite was raw liver, soaked and marinated in red wine, raw garlic chopped and raw onions and I have never tried it), his disgust with the clergy of the Catholic Church, the anger at his neighbors and the peace he had for a short time with the Spanish family and their daughter (no details were ever given).
Some time in 1944 he came over to the United States to train on more modern aircraft.
While he was training, the war ended.
Because of what happened to him in France (being given up by neighbors), he resolved never to go back to France and moved to Washington D.C and worked with the French Consulate mostly because his aptitude and skill with languages was so good.
He resolved to become a United States citizen and had a Senator sponsor him.
The requirements at that time and because he was living here and working with the French consulate, were that he had to live outside the country and apply to come back in.
He chose Cuba and for 6 months lived in Havana.  There is one story he told of being in a cantina where a group of 5 Cubans were talking (in Spanish, of course) about how they were going to rob him after he left because he was obviously a foreigner.
Of course he understood every word and he was in his French military garb (including hand gun) and dissuaded them of their plan in perfect Spanish before he left. According to him, the pistol helped a bit.
He did talk of terrible poverty and corruption in Cuba at the time and was glad to leave.
Sometime after he returned to Washington DC, he started working as a jeweler and he married an Argentinean woman.  This and a few other things in his life, I only found out after his death.
The woman left him and went back to Argentina.
It was shortly after this he met my mom, who was working as a nurse in Washington DC.
They married and decided that Houston, Texas was the place that was “up and coming” and moved there.
He thought it was either Houston or Los Angeles, he chose Houston.
I was born a year later in 1954.
The issue of living n Houston was not as easy as he had hoped.
My parents bought a home on the western part of the city, one block from the city line.
With his education he procured employment at an industrial manufacturing plant as an engineering estimator.  That meant that he would determine the cost of the materials to do a job.
The company was very diverse so over the course of the years, he worked on specifications from submarines to Nuclear power plants.
His struggle was a difficult one, as fluent as he was in English; he had an obvious accent and was severely discriminated against as a “foreigner”, which at that time in Texas seemed worse than being a “northerner”.
He worked hard and we lived comfortably.
My best memories of him were his love of all of the outdoors.  He loved to be outdoors, camping, fishing and hunting, but he was very “old school” which meant that he had great respect for animals.
When he hunted or fished, he took only what he would use and he used as much of an animal as was possible.  There was no sports hunting, it was for food and to be outdoors.
He had no fear of animals and his best hunting was done with a camera.  Pictures of a moose from only a few yards away, pictures of him petting an old Bison, who was every bit the giant still.
We traveled when we could, Galveston every weekend I the summer, Big Bend national Park riding horseback, fishing in the early morning from an ice feed stream in New Mexico, camping in Yellowstone and Glacier national Parks.
Our cat caught and brought home live baby quail and he raised them, not to eat, but to have in a large outdoor cage.  We had a Horned toad and a red-eared terrapin turtle that stayed in the yard.  The squirrels came to him for food from his hand.
With that, I remember his gentleness most.  His frustrations and rage at life were less important because they were not directed at my mother or me.
When he retired, he and my mom moved to Colorado, to a small community in a very rural area.
For the last 13 years of his life he was where he wanted to be the most.
He lived life large and was concerned because he was slowing down, but before he did slow down, he was stopped suddenly in a moment.  Tho it was hard for my mother and I, it was best, for he lived a life fully to the end and had no suffering.
This is my remembrance of him on the anniversary of his birth many, many years ago.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Storm - the aftermath

Our modern conveniences or are they distractions?
Were not available,
but we had essentials, water, hot water and heat.
Candlelight made reading ore difficult, but doable.
And the world was quiet except for the rain.

A walk in the morning,
reveled the strewn branches and limbs and trees and power lines.
Scattered across sidewalks
and roads
and backyards.
Asphalt times
and needles
and leaves
were in abundance, but not a problem to navigate.
The river, newly released from a century old dam
and narrowed,
overflowed those man-made lines, but not the gentle slope of the maybe soon to be green park.
A light pole down,
but here no real flooding.
The temperature was cool, not cold
and so much like a hurricane this Northeast storm of march 2010!
The clouds stayed with us most of the day,
but for a brief instant in the morning when a weak sun shown through.
A rumbling thunder came and a little light rain,
but little or no wind.

I still have precious little concept of time.
The grey sky allows only a minimum of light.
Neighbors, all with the same situation, reach out to each other making sure each is okay.
A ride through the town shows true devastation of trees and power lines and crushed cars and houses.
It was a bad one, I see.
The day wears on and i find i do not need the distractions to release this muse inside of me.

Monday, March 15, 2010

More on the Storm

The howling winds buffeting the house,
lulled me to a deep sleep.
I awoke, not knowing hte hour,
but all was still.
As if we were in the eye of a mighty hurricane.
Later that is what it would be called.
The only sounds that came to my ear,
were that of some baby birds nestled safely under the eves of the house/
The absence of sound was strange,
for in the middle a town there is always sound,
but not tonight.
Then the rain came,
not as a soft opitter patter of drops,
but as if a bucket had been trown from the sky.
Spastic, not steady, it came
and then the winds,
but not as before.
With less velocity, but still strong.
In the morning I woke,
still not knowing the time.
The rain and wind had stopped
and doves were cooing oputside.
The sun would not shine today,
for the clouds were still thick.

There are still more pages to come!

Sunday, March 14, 2010

The Storm

While waiting for power to come back the following came pouring out of me, I still have not forgotten how to use pen and paper!

The storm came with a fury,
power was down first,
but precious little rain.
The wind blew trees like leaves,
sweeping the sky like great whisks or brooms.
They did not brush away the clouds,
but danced like children possessed.
The wind roared,
not some moanful howl,
but like a great locomotive rushing past.
For a short while I had my computer and internet also,
UPS saw to that,
but only for a brief time.
Then i could only but watch the malicious weather.
I was safe and warm in my home, but no lights,
candles lit my dark room.
Ah, to ride such a storm,
what distances we could travel.
And the Forsythia, just turning yellow, told us of spring.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

struggle

So many struggles.
so many distractions in each of our lives.
they bend our way
and confuse our minds.
Lies, health, meanness all around us...
seeking to change our way.
The lies will exist no matter what truth be told, why argue?
Our health will be good and bad and in the end we die, why worry?
Mean actions and people,
with agendas of power and selfishness are always here, shall they distract us?
Sometimes it seems that the fight comes from all sides
and instead of engaging them,
we should just step to the side and continue our path, our seeking.
 
For our goal is not to merely survive. but to live.

Friday, March 12, 2010

Information needed

This is an informal poll and is an attempt for me to gain knowledge and change my attitude if necissary.
I recently have had a couple of people tell me they never use bleach or bleach products,
Bleach products would include products that have chlorox in them (laundry bleach, cleaning products with bleach, mildew stain removal products, many disinfecting liquids), most pool disinfecting chemicals (bromine is another), most automatic dishwasher detergents and many other cleaning products.

The question starts with my statement that I do not know anyone who does not use some product with bleach in it.
Do you know anyone WHO DOES NOT USE ANY product with bleach?
Please respond with the location of the world (Provence or state and country)  and what is the alternative used.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

The sand pit

As straggle along through the days recently,
I have no idea what is coming up.
I know very little except whatever comes my way,
I will face it head on, without flinching.
There is uncertainty everywhere,
but I am standing firm.
Maybe no one else likes what i have to say or how i have decided to live.
That is okay, for me, it is the truth.
knowledge guides me.
Love guides me.
There is no conflict.
There is no anger, just the need to be firm.
Arguments are useless, they can not change my mind.
Truth and love can change me at a whim, but without those..
Do not mess with me.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

A daily process

I am getting tired of doctor visits.
This long recovery is beginning to wear very thin/
So besides the main issue - the vision, where i go down to New York to see a Head Trauma Specialist/optomitrist,  I have my regular doctor who follows up with me doing blood tests and monitoring my general physical health.
March is the month for a physical, blood work and a stress test.
I also am going to a Orthopedic doctor for the fall i had hurting my shoulder and that involves physical therapy twice a week, then a visit to the doctor, then an MRI, then more physical therapy.
It just seems like my life revolves around doctors.
I could go to the gastroenterologist to see how my swallowing is doing, but I already know that the esophagus (which helps push food down) still is not working well, but it is better.
I wanted to go to a neurologist because i do not understand my brain at all.  It works better than ever, it is more creative, has better perception, but then it goes blank, like a circuit popped for a few seconds.  I will wait on that.
Also coming up is a visit to the neurosurgeon to insure that the tumor is not coming back.
I actually get exhausted thinking about all of this.
Such is the life of long term recovery.

This fear

This fear pervades my soul greatly.
It runs deep to my core for i do not understand
the anger
and the hatred
and the jealousy that exists in this world.
They talk without knowing, confusing fear with truth
and the two can not mix.
Misunderstandings
and confusion
and separation rues this land.
I do not understand.
What have I said,
what have I done?
I am only but me and no other.
Not the hypocrite,
not the bully,
just only me, a confused child grasping to live.
Come take my hand, walk with me a while.
Let us find a place to stand and see the beauty of this world...
away from this fear.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Spring Weekend

The piles of snow are finally melting,
so my eye begin to see, not the dark dirty white,
but the fresh earth.
There is green coming, I see the sprouts of the daffodils
and the snow drops are in full bloom.
But my weekend was not as clean as all that.
There were distractions,
 flim-flam artists on the prowl to stand up against,
but I had support.
There were distractions.
Games that suddenly became serious,
but I had help.
And there was a garden to clean.
That was my meditative place, the place I worked alone.
Cleaning and raking and dare i say it?
Planning for the spring,

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Its Saturday morning

Its Saturday morning
and the sun is shining
and the snow is melting
 and there are signs,
just a few little signs;
that winter is ending!



Yea!

Friday, March 5, 2010

This Journey we call life...

This journey we call life;

full of UPS and downs,

twists and turns,




MOUNTAINS and valleys,

We live, we grow, we walk.

The rocks and boulders,
the obstacles we encounter along the way.
Are not there to cause us pain,
but to help us grow.
And in this long walk we call life,
the most we can ask for
is companions to walk along our way.
The heart of a kind person,
the one who makes us smile or cry.
The spiritual one who cries onward.
The brothers and sisters of the heart
these, these are the companions we can ask for along the way;
in this journey we call life.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Struggles

There seem to be monumental stuggles...
around me,
and near me,
and far away from me,
and through me.
This upheaval,
tumultuous as it may be,
is not dangerous
or bad,
but a cleansing of our hearts and minds

Monday, March 1, 2010

progression of a painting

This is probably the best evidence I can present on the effects the tumor had on me.

First a series of photographs of a "daffodil" farm in 2005.

















Now my attempt to paint this, when I knew my ability to paint was gone, but I was still trying.
again this is 2005.
A year later, i tried again for a close friend who requested a painting of it after i described it, still a no go in my eyes.

Now I challenged my self, 3 failed attempts, what would it turn out like now?

Any thoughts?

It was more difficult than i thought it would be, demanding attention to detail.  That attention was what made my painting (as far as watercolor goes) different.
One odd thing, although i have a large collection of brushes, i find my self using only 2 or three favorite ones...