FRIDAY to FRIDAY - FEBRUARY into MARCH

Friday Night

The Rubin Museum

Visitors post Wishes and Hopes

Padmasambhava
"In Tibetan Buddhism, he is a character of a genre of literature called terma, an emanation of Amitābha that is said to appear to tertöns in visionary encounters and a focus of guru yoga practice, particularly in the Rimé schools. The Nyingma school considers Padmasambhava to be a founder of their tradition."
(this Buddha that caught my attention is made of Cloth)

Saturday
I'm on Part three and loving it.

 Reading

"The Gargoyle Hunters"

(from Washington Post review)
For Gill, the essential characteristic of Manhattan is its violent reinvention, a compulsive process of creative destruction that makes it such a “maddening, heartbreaking, self-cannibalizing” place. Native New Yorkers know their avenues wind into “a Mobius strip of self-annihilation.” At any moment, rapacious developers may reduce the most beloved old buildings to “a moonscape of devastation” before throwing up some “soulless, homogenized Modernist crap.”  “This is a city where you could inhabit multiple eras simultaneously.”

Entertaining presentation and reading by the Author

(thirty minutes)

Sunday

The promise of sunlight and mild temperatures

 Evening at Home

Monday
A mural painted on the side wall of a building next to a parking lot
West 17th Street, Manhattan

Tuesday

Friend Fred visited to show me a new easier way to store and access my photographs, bless his helpfulness. Retrieved a shot of this large mixed media painting given to a friend many years ago.

Wednesday

Selfie in the lobby on my way to the Zendo

Walking home on this full moon night

Above Madison Square

Met a man trimming branches for a nearby store display
Asked for some

 Home
They will bloom awhile longer, drop flowers, leaf out and root

February Calendar about to be retired
(pine tree on sandstone-Zion National Park, Utah)

Thursday
March 1st
A storm is threatening the East coast. I spent today sorting papers in preparation of the monthly bill pay and also for doing taxes, napping, and listening to a delightful book of short stories by Tom Hanks 
"Uncommon Type"
"Seventeen stories, each in some way involving a different typewriter (Hanks is an avid collector of vintage typewriters and owns over one hundred of them). The stories feature an immigrant arriving in New York City after his family and life have been torn apart by his country's civil war; a man who bowls a perfect game (and then another, and another), becoming ESPN's newest celebrity; an eccentric billionaire and his faithful executive assistant on the hunt for something larger in America; and the junket life of an actor."
LISTEN
(8 minutes)
<iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/557636219/557985912" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"></iframe>

Friday Morning

~*~

ANOTHER DAY ANOTHER DOLLAR

Ha!

If I had a truck and a store, here's

a brand new couch in the rain.

Visiting
Peter Cooper Village

Wendy and I walked to the East river after coffee and a chat in which her son explained bit coins to me and I understood them (then), 
Just drifting.   

 This rain has a sharp bite to it.  I was mighty glad I wasn't far from home, and that I had  my hooded ankle length raincoat on with some down under it, boots, a warm hat and gloves!  It's so much easier with the right gear.

 First Avenue divider
with a spare crocus patch

A perennial indoor window garden
right down the block

Home  then, and reading a trash-found magazine addressed to a woman who no longer lives here.  There's a whole lot of moving in and out in the building, in a whole lot of buildings actually.  It's a subtext to my life, a real estate mystery.  Meanwhile, inside the magazine these  boiled-wool slippers embroidered

The fledgling on the window sill under the A/C "eeep-eeeps" and then falls silent when full.  The rain rains, and my little old computer strains.  It was brown rice and adzuki beans again tonight, and later (Free-plucked from the garbage still in it's wrapping) Jim Hensons' "The Dark Crystal"

"A one of a kind imagination marvel"
Three Minute Trailer

http://youtu.be/DYKQqIRisSE

We are, you and me, as all life forms are, one of a kind.

SUNNY DAY-RAINY NIGHT-SUNNY DAY

 
Saturday, the last day of Summer:

An Afternoon Stroll
(three legged still)
to Madison Square Park

observed color contrasts,

tones, textures, and seeds

some natives that remain
"What truly belongs will return."

A Public Sculpture Installation

Rocks in skeletal trees traveled all the way from Italy,
weighed tons, and cost a whole lot to install

(A bleak vision)

Accompanied By Wind
Voices from leaves of real trees,

chattering children, gregarious grownups,
and a great little band playing

alternative link
http://youtu.be/P6_TckTvSQs

Then southward, down Broadway to the
14th Street Farm Market

There, where I bought so many plants over the years, where nostalgia spreads within me like a spore

I Found Wonderful Wild Mushrooms

gobs of kale to eat and share

onions, and yellow tomatoes

and, these grapes from the Catskill Mountains,
tiny, seedless, and not too sweet,
whose taste sparks a memory:

A Cottage At Cairo, N.Y.
(from a photograph)

A four years old girl in pinafore,
smelling of dirt and strawberries,
leans reluctantly into her Nana's body.

She frowns, or so it would seem.
Perhaps the sun was in her eyes then,
that scowl merely the result of squinting.

The Grandmother looks off in to the distance,
encircling the child, holding perhaps too tightly?
Who knows?  One can not return to ask. 

Fall Begins For The Northern Hemisphere

It rained through the night to this sunny, crisp Sunday.  I slept soon after young , drunk neighbors wore their emotions out with a brief, loud, door slamming, wall stomping, domestic squabble.


My Mind Drifts Back To Massachusetts

A Buddha by my bed there

 This vine making a pumpkin

Feeding bees harvesting

and, reading an old favorite

below is a link to the Libravox recording.
It will shift you toYou tube.

"The Country of The Pointed Firs"

by Sarah Orne Jewett
First published in 1896

(alternate video link)
http://youtu.be/zG5dbVEHFh4

Note
I am grateful for the audible words, for the effort of these readers volunteer labors.  Libravox is a public service site for recorded literature.  Any one can volunteer to read and record a favorite book at
www://libravox.org