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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Oh, fer cryin' out loud, let it go.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Far from defusing I find it amusing.
Get on with some "muse"-ing, Thalia from Visalia.
Muse America
Purple MMMMMMMMM mountains of majesty.
Above, the chemtrailed planes.
Look into the long San Joaquin horizon
Or down into the abyss on which we stand
It will f*#k you as stupid as you have f*#ked it.
It's National Park Service land.
And it's wild; it will kill you.
Like Jesse James. Like Vito Corleone.
Or the rest of the posse,
Tommy Jeffergun
George Washingun
Ronald Raygun
Old Betsy Ross
George W-shaped Ambush
Richard Six-gun
The Russian River is at flood stage, head guy.
What must we do?
Call out the cavalry?
Call out to calvary?
Whatever it is, vary the ca-den soh caaaare ful-ly,
and then do an about-face crossing the span
On reaching Bridal Veil Creek.
Halt. And have a good cry at Lizzie's bridge
For her sake and yours and the kids;
And recall that the creek weeps not,
It is the land weeping for itself;
And you must do so, as well.Thanks, Ken!
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Fletcher
Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
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Fresh
To move
Cleanly.
Needing to be
Nowhere else.
Wanting nothing
From any store.
To lift something
You already had
And set it down in
A new place.
Awakened eye
Seeing freshly.
What does that do to
The old blood moving through
Its channels?
~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~
(You & Yours)
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Fletcher
Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
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Scanning through here way to quickly this morning.
Some bits caught my eye.
Gary Snyder, Piute Creek. Right on target (for my small corner of the world, at least).
Offenbach's Barcarolle. Definitely caught that. Twas sung at my wedding.
In gratitude,
Eric
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Summertimer in the Yosemite Museum
The fithools ooze tar from a mis-named weed
And the wild oats reflect the Spaniard greed
Which started a long-ago fire in Califarnotoff
There in the distances
The many distances
The many smoky, foggy, long egos
In the Golden Days state
We seem to be in now
See, I have some views and so do you
And the guys over there a-stare at Thomas Hill
They are looking at their own past
Though the eyes of a great painter
Who saw the same things they saw
Yesterday before they were born
Or before she was born
Lady-weaving-string-baskets
To entertain the people in her own past
She can and did explain
And remember how it was
In the museum of her mind
She was to me so kind
To tell me of her people
And why they carry on
Their work and play and song
As if it were a single thread
Made of many hairs
And some string added in
From the new guys
This was Julia Parker, who I met in the Yosemite Museum yesterday. What a lady. I did meet her years ago. She was making a red string and reed basket while we talked, or rather, she talked and I listened.[Click to View YouTube Video]
I had just come from speaking with Merry B. Two wise-women in two hours is just enough, let me tell you.
Thanks, both of you precious contrubitors to our community, for opening my eyes and broadening the skies for opening my ears and bringing home the years
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=1054430&tn=1700
Based on Weej's latest expulsion:
New Thing Nor Northing
(Borrowed Intejections and Directions)
That question Norwegians ask when they get another year older: Huh?
That's the only interjection he needed.
Weej succeeded. I only needed to read it ten times.
Wood this been simpler?
Maybe. But not so much fun for him.
Or for you. Or me. I can tell it's a failed experiment.
Never up, never in.
You can try, but it ain't a sin.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
But not in Norwegian.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
[Click to View YouTube Video]
At least that's what I am taking away from this poem.
Huh.
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Fletcher
Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
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Parable
Some fishermen pulled a bottle from the deep. It held a piece of paper,
with these words: "Somebody save me! I'm here. The ocean cast me on this desert island.
I am standing on the shore waiting for help. Hurry! I'm here!"
"There's no date. I bet it's already too late anyway.
It could have been floating for years," the first fisherman said.
"And he doesn't say where. It's not even clear which ocean," the second fisherman said.
"It's not too late, or too far. The island Here is everywhere," the third fisherman said.
They all felt awkward. No one spoke. That's how it goes with universal truths.
~ Wislawa Szymborska ~
(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)
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Fletcher
Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
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Love that eKat! Economy that speaks giant volumes. TPFU!
Eric
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Holidays Among the Rocks
Our last visitor fled two weeks ago.
Then the rocks began to fall....
Hear the larger masses journeying down.
Then that reeky storm-tissue disappears.
I'll eat Royal Arches, salted with Bachelor's Tears.
I'll choose Riverbank Meadow.
And some purple granite for me.
It was a tranquil day in Yosemite.
--Reverntly lifted off of JMuir, Winter in Yosemite, Yosemite in Winter
http://www.yosemite.ca.us/john_muir_writings/yosemite_in_winter.html
"That giant speaks volumes," retorted MFM.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Love that eKat!
Economy speaks
Giant Volumes.
T P F U.--Fletcher
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Fletcher
Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
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You guys are making my beautiful warm afternoon even better.
Warm days and cool nights here in the San Gabriels... the wheel is turning (did it ever stop?).
Bring on that Muir guy... I think we may have shared a tree back in another life.
Eric
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Fletcher
Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
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Cross posted from Neebee's "THE ROBIN SHED..." thread...
The Messenger:
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird-equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.
~ Mary Oliver ~
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Fletcher
Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
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eKat of the North
Mouse plumbing the depths of mind
Both please the Fletcher
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Ah to be alive
On a mid-September morn...
Barefoot, pants rolled up.--Mtnmun
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Mtnmun
Trad climber
Top of the Mountain Mun
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 8, 2012 - 08:01pm PT
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Thanks for the Julia Parker Vidio MFM. I do not believe I wrote that poem above, but here is a painting I did of Julia Parker after she touched my heart a few years back.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Begin video first...
The Meat Eater Diaries
I have never heard it said that we are getting to the vegetable course of a discussion
Nor never has someone ever said to me, "Ah, here's the Conversation Starter Soup."
We may scream for ice cream, but we all lean towards nice fatty, crisp bacon.
Even on our baked potatoes. Especially in our BLTs. What's a BLT without Bacos? Still a BLT.
I should start thinking about the meat of this discussion.
Should we begin with Lamb? Beef? Pork? Rattlesnake? Turkey?
Rodger's steer? Baloney Butt? I can't thank you enough.
I will thank Rodger and God, for it is mete, always and everywhere to give shanks for the glory that is marbled with fat.
I can't help it but I like big butts. Pork butts. Archery butts.
Fletcher, the target of many, the butt of the joke, but one of the funniest guys you'd ever want to meet.
Let there be potatoes as well. And the wine of your choosing.
Vintage photos. Really old. Like days of yessteryore. Jerked thoughts on paper.
And just to be shore,
A small salad of haiku
Served up on a wish.
A non-rhyming oddball
A vegetarian answer
For those who like fish.
It's not just the meat
In the ocean. It's the meat
That's the ocean's motion.
I move for more meat.
I move when my bowels say.
Drink Adam's ale today.
Haiku is much harder
Than you might think. It is not
Just count, then the ink.
But not all that hard.
At least it demands not rhyme.
At best a little time.
Getting to the heart of the matter I sense I have come to a fence.
I'd better jump over
And land in some clover.
I feel I have put in two cents.
How Wild Buffalo Got Wings
Father killed buffalo for the hides and meat to support himself and family. I have seen the hillsides, slopes, and flats black with herds of buffalo for days at a time. When the buffalo hunters would shoot at the herds you would hear a roaring noise like a big storm coming. The earth would almost quiver like an earthquake from their running. I saw Father shoot, before breakfast, as many as he could skin all day. We could see the smoke of his gun from the house every time he would shoot.
In the early days when we first moved there, the buffalo were quite numerous. We could see them every day--big bunches of them going by. they were our mainstay.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
We didn't eat only the choice part of the buffalo, what we called the hump. They call it loin steak now, I believe, if it's cut from a beef. It was quite a large steak which lay along the side of the high hump on the buffalo's back. . . . When we needed meat and Father was out killing buffalo, he'd bring in some of the hump.
Father used to take the buffalo tongues when he was killing them for the hides. Mother would pickle a fifty gollon barrel of buffalo tongues every fall; so we enjoyed buffalo tongues during the winter. They were black, blacker really than a Jersey cow's tongue, but they surely were good eating.
In pickling buffalo tongues, Mother always boiled them in water and then made a preparation of vinegar and salt and other things and poured it over them until they were all covered. When we wanted to use them, we'd take them out of the barrel and wash them thoroughly. then you could warm them or eat them cold...
In the summertime, when we couldn't keep steak very long, we'd eat jerky. They'd cut the steak in strips and hang it up in the attic of our log house, salt it well, and let it dry. That's what we ate for lunch lots of times, we kids especially.
[My grandfather preferred to jerk the neck meat of bears he shot; peppered heavily, it is like the biscotti of the meat world. Others prefer to jerk chicken necks, and various recipes are found. It seems to take women a lot of experimentation, but men seem to have a more instinctual grasp of how to properly jerk chicken neck. Buffalo Wild Wings, anyone?]
[Everyone wore home-made buvvalo Adidas.]
In still-hunting of buffalo, they had lots of running to do because they hunted on foot altogether. They'd see a group of buffalo coming and they had to be pretty speedy to get in the lead of them and lie down in a buffalo wallow or in a hole somewhere to be in shooting distance of them when they came along. With those black-powder guns they couldn't kill one more than about a hundred or a hundred fifty yards away.
Few people ever ran buffalo on horses and that was Bill Cody and a few others, but in horse-hunting they drifted them around so much, they'd run them off the hunting grounds and the hunters would have to move. If they hunted them on foot, they would't stampede so many of them, so they would leave the range.
[Everyone had light-weight camping equipment.]
In 1874, when Mother was making some bedclothes after she was able to get some other goods, she wanted some filling for a quilt because she could get no cotton or wool. Father used to take the long hair off the buffalo and bring it in. Mother padded the quilts with it. She would wash it thouroughly, get it all clean and nice and straighten it out with the cards as she used to card the wool, and get it into shape together just like a pad of cotton for a quilt. She'd put it in the quilt and then quilt it (sew it through back and forth) to hold the padding in place.
When I left the plains country to come to California, I had an old quilt in my camp bed that I'd carried for years and years. It had been re-covered and re-covered. It was padded with buffalo hair. I told my wife I wasn't going to leave that buffalo hair, so I took the covering off and put the hair in a sack. I had a burlap sack alomost full of it. It was just as nice and soft at that time as it was when it was taken off the animal. I brought it to California and kept it until our house burned down out west of Modesto about three miles away.
[Our first climbing rope was plaited buffalo hide strips.]
Being a plains rat, I knew nothing of the Rocky Mountains except they each had a summit. There were also rumored to be as many as the buffalo. I decided to see for myself. I knew only that I might need a rope and warm hat and the quilt padded with buffalo hair. I never thought about what I would do with the rope. There was nobody to hold it for me, nobody to tie it to, and mainly there were no mountains yet. I still had to get there. I wasn't going to leave that buffalo hair, so I took the thing along stuffed in a sack over my shoulder, put some fresh bananas in with it, and set off down the road. I got to the Rocky Mountains, but the bananas had gotten squashed the first afternoon when I sat on the sack I was lugging.
I was picked up by a gentle soul named Beckey, driving a dilapidated Studebaker wagon. I showed him my rope when he told me he was heading west toward the desert towers of the Carson Sink which he'd heard tell were numerous, virgin, and easy. Who could resist?
[More installments at a much later date.]
Edit://www.bsblog.com/09/10/2011/grief.html
Mtnmun--
Ah, young grasshopper,
you are the author Haiku.
Done by you. It's true.
See ya to da O.P., eh?
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Fletcher
Trad climber
Fumbling towards stone
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You guys got me going now... more baby steps came to me at one kid's football (that's soccer for you 'mericans) practice this evening:
Lying on the earth
Flat on back upwards to sky
Both grounded, far-flung
Eric
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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For All We Sing of Snow
Jack Rosenblum
http://vimeo.com/10165779
For All I Know I Blow
For all I know I blow. Beep-boop-boop-beep-beep
So I'll just jam with this dude, slow. Plinky plink, plinky plink
Where I'm at since you've been gone.
Typos all over the place.
Double space in your face.
Backspace backspace backspace
period period epic period GF's pregnant.
Beep-boop-boop-beep-beep
Plinky plink, plinky plink
Verbs and nouns in my hand,
A big old smile on my face.
And when we come to read it
A lone spark breaks through.
Beep-boop-boop-beep-beep
Plinky plink, plinky plink
--A Beefheart acolyte, apparently
Telephoto Mountain Messages
It's all about the hills,
Ecstasy in vertical.
Nothing finity.
Dancing on the peaks
Of the summits of the top
Of the world. Early. Often.
In ranks they fall away
Foreground, middle distance, far
Himalayan peaks
The years too drop away
Layers and layers of age
Ledges like ledgers
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Telly marking snow--
Snow better thing I know--
Always makes my day
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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panny cakes syrup
butter scrambled eggs coffee
and a ton of snow
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