A Warm Game Of Texas Hold ‘Em (haiga) – 6/52

A Warm Game Of Texas Hold ‘Em (Haiga) – 6/52, BlackBerry 52 – WEEK 6, Golden Valley, Minnesota, February 11th 2011, photo © 2011 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved. Medium: Digital BlackBerry photograph altered in Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0, Font: Myriad Pro.

After reading the Lunar New Year postcard from Lotus (her BlackBerry52 Jump-Off for Week 6), I started to think about how we don’t know each other in person. We are vulnerable only through our poetry, writing, artwork, the years of conversation that have taken place in this quiet space. There is a long stretch of road, I-35, that connects the landscape between us. Part of her knows this place; her mother once lived in Minnesota. We stare at the same moon, sun, planets and stars.

I was scraping ice dams off the roof last week, and happened to look up behind the blade I was wielding. There between the brilliant blue branches of the oak and ash peered the Bone Moon. The Ancients sometimes called February’s moon the Snow Moon. I reached into my pocket, grabbed the BlackBerry, and snapped off a shot of the sky. It became the backdrop for a haiga, an unbroken expanse of words extending all the way to Texas.

The blue? For Valentine’s Day, Liz asked me on a date to the Walker to see the work of neo-Dada painter Yves Klein — With the Void, Full Powers. I was moved by the architecture of air, the fire paintings, his relationship to the elements, the Anthropométries (human paintbrushes), and the Ex-Voto dedicated to Rita, the Patron Saint of Lost Causes. I walked slowly through a white-walled room of blue monochromes, Klein’s Blue Period. I’ve never seen blue look so beautiful. Blue for the skies of Winter. Blue for communication and expression. Blue for the Blues.

Blue has no dimensions. It is beyond dimensions, while the other colors have some. These are the psychological spaces. Red, for example, presupposes a hearth giving off heat. All colors bring forth associations of concrete, material, and tangible ideas, while blue evokes all the more the sea and sky, which are what is most abstract in tangible and visible nature.

–Yves Klein (1928 – 1962)

Through color I feel the sentiment of complete identification with space; I am truly liberated.

–Yves Klein (1928 – 1962)

_______________

Lotus and I will continue our call and response by posting a BlackBerry photo for the 52 weeks of 2011. Feel free to join us if you wish (learn about the project’s beginnings at BlackBerry 52 Collaboration). To read more about Lotus, visit her at alotus_poetry on Twitter (where she writes poetry every day in community with other Twitter poets), at Poetry By Lotus, and on her Flickr account.

-related to posts: Best Of BlackBerry 365 — First Quarter SlideShow, BlackBerry 365 Project — White Winter Squirrel, Flying Solo — Dragonfly In Yellow Rain, Searching For Stillness, icicle tumbleweed (haiga) — 2/52, The Mirado Black Warrior, The Dying Art Of Letterwriting (Postcards From The Edge)

-posted on red Ravine, Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

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Runes, Oracles, & Alphabets

RUNES, BlackBerry Shots, Minneapolis, Minnesota, December 2009, all photos © 2009 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

Yesterday we went to a book signing at Common Good Books. Jeff Hertzberg and Zöe Francois recently released their second book Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. The bread was delicious, the authors serious about their work, down-to-earth, engaging and fun. In casual conversation, it came out that Zöe knows Latin. I remembered that I had taken two years of Latin in junior high, a curriculum requirement in the 1960’s. That got me to thinking about language and alphabets.

After the signing, Liz and I did a little Christmas shopping and later went to the studio. I was looking at this set of Runes I made from clay a number of years ago. For a period of time in my life, I consulted with different oracles on a daily basis: the I Ching, the Runes, Tarot, Medicine Cards. I have a passion for learning about symbols in different systems of mysticism.

Symbols are used to create structure within a system, to help us understand complicated ideas with a simple visual. Over time, color has been organized into systems like Goethe’s Triangle and subsequent Colour Wheel, while chakras are symbolized by certain colors. Logos and brands (like red Ravine or ybonesy’s new logo) take their lead from symbols of yore. Graphic designers are always trying to create  innovative new fonts with which to drape old symbols in more imaginative cloaks. (Yet people still like an old standby because Helvetica remains one of the most widely used fonts around.)

I couldn’t find my Runes book last night or I would have drawn the Runes. But I did find an odd book I’d snapped up at a sale, an old Readers Digest Book of Facts. According to the Languages section of the book, all the alphabets around the world can be traced to a North Semitic alphabet that emerged around 1700 B.C. at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. From the Semitic alphabet developed Hebrew, Arabic, and Phoenician. Then Phoenician alphabet was adopted and adapted by the Greeks who in 1000 B.C. introduced a modified form into Europe.

The Greeks standardized the reading of written lines from left to right, added symbols for vowels, and gave rise to the Roman alphabet (used for modern Western languages) and the Cyrillic alphabet (named after Saint Cyril and used in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union). The North Semitic alphabet spawned the Aramaic alphabet which eventually developed into Asian alphabets, such as Hindi.

The earliest forms of writing are picture writings found on clay tablets in parts of the Middle East and southeastern Europe. Some of the oldest found in Iraq and Iran recorded land sales and business deals.

Where do the Runes fit into all this? They are a mystery. The Runic alphabet is one of the oldest in northern Europe with early examples dating to the 3rd century A.D. They have been found in 4000 inscriptions in Britain, Scandinavia, and Iceland but nobody knows for sure where they originated.

For some reason, the Runes remind me of the ancient celebration of Winter Solstice. Some scholars believe the Runes were derived from the Etruscan alphabet of southern Europe and brought north by the Goths after their invasion of the Roman Empire. To me, they are an oracle of mystery. And that’s what draws me to them.

Post Script: The bread baked by Jeff Hertzberg and Zöe Francois was delicious. Their new book Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day looks like a winner with many whole wheat and gluten-free recipes. There’s a recipe for their whole wheat Christmas Stollen Bread in the post of their video interview at KARE 11. Or you can visit their website Artisan Bread In Five with fabulous photographs of mouthwatering baked goods. You will come away hungry for more!

-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, December 13th, 2009

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Popsicle Shadow

Popsicle Shadow, inside the vault at Diamonds Coffee Shoppe, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 2008, photo © 2008-2009 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

Popsicle shadow
lights up old Diamonds bank vault
not an inside job

-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, March 29th, 2009

-related to: haiku 2 (one-a-day), Diamonds & Light (Summer Solstice), and the Vintage Series

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Get Your Blue On

Get your Blue on, a beautiful blue building in Hoi An, Vietnam, December 2008, photos © 2008 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.

Blue is one of my favorite colors. Calm, reflective. Blue is the color I painted my writing room. Blue (like green) reminds me of nature—the heavens and the seas.

(Some languages don’t differentiate between blue and green. In Vietnamese, for example, the word for both tree and sky is the same—xanh.)

In the ancient city of Hoi An, Vietnam, I saw shades of blue everywhere. There was the periwinkle blue of a wall that when I stopped in front of it to wait for traffic, held me in its depth. There was the bright blue-green interior of the restaurant where we ate that soothed, like turquoise water against white sand, in an almost illogical way (being as how the waves in the nearby South China Sea churned gray and the blue-green walls jolted my senses).

Blue doors, blue walls, blue windows. Blue against cheerful yellows and oranges. Blue against blue.

Blue on blue, heartache on heartache.

Something about Hoi An reminded me of towns I’ve been before. I think of Havana, Cuba, or Tonalá, México. People who use such bright color—color that fades over time and becomes all the more profound (as if it has seeped into the skin)—are vibrant people, I think. They are creators, artists, philosophers.

If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue.

~Paul Gauguin

Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.

Blue is considered beneficial to the mind and body. It slows human metabolism and produces a calming effect. Blue is strongly associated with tranquility and calmness. In heraldry, blue is used to symbolize piety and sincerity.

Light blue is associated with health, healing, tranquility, understanding, and softness. Dark blue represents knowledge, power, integrity, and seriousness.

~from Color Wheel Pro

During the holidays I often feel blue. I have a friend who says it’s normal to be sad during Christmas; the Christmases of one’s adulthood will never measure up to those of one’s youth. Never the same sense of anticipation. Never the same thrill.

Many a holiday season I feel lethargic, overwhelmed by the thought of all things I could and should be doing. Cards, decorations, baking. I would love to make my own wreath this year, the kind that Martha Stewart and all those so-called Women’s magazines make seem so simple and so fulfilling.

I once saw a wreath in shades of cornflower blue in Taos. That would be pretty. Little berries. Not blueberries, but blue berries. For once, a wreath that shows my inside out.

Years ago I would have pushed myself to do it all. I even used to stamp my own Christmas wrapping paper with homemade potato cut stamps. BK. Before Kids.

The past several years I’ve taken the weight of those particular accomplishments off my shoulders. I doubt I’ll get out my cards this season, and while I feel a pang of guilt over the whole thing (and the concern that those who send me cards will eventually cross me off their lists), I also tell myself that it is OK. After all, I just came back from a trip abroad. Although, I don’t need an excuse, do I?


In New Mexico, as in other places, a blue window frame, door frame, or portal keeps evil spirits from entering a dwelling. The color is associated with Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary (her mantle is blue) and the moradas of the Penitentes.

The turquoise stone, important in many native cultures and Buddhism, is believed to assure safe journey. When worn in the ear, turquoise is said prevent reincarnation as a donkey, and when found, it brings good luck. (I’ll have to tell my girls, as they regularly pan for and discover turquoise in the Rio Grande.)

In some cultures, the blue bead wards off the evil eye. The blue bead can be seen hanging from a rear view mirror, around one’s neck, or like mistletoe in the doorway.

I’ll have a blue Christmas without you.

Blue signifieth divine contemplation. In moral virtues, it signifieth godliness of conversation, and is the colour of air, attributed to celestial persons, whose contemplations have been about divine things…

~Sylvanus Morgan, 1661

I beseech you, Blessed Medicine Guru,
Whose sky-colored, holy body of lapis lazuli
Signifies omniscient wisdom and compassion
As vast as limitless space,
Please grant me your blessings.

~from the Medicine Tantra

Today it snowed almost all day. A white out—low clouds and flurries that finally started to stick by dark. Not a speck of blue to be found, save for the small dot growing (ever so slowly, like ancient moss) inside my heart.

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