Lost: One photo...

taken by my father, Howard Maxwell, of one Mr. Dougherty, a hermit who lived in Elysian Park near downtown Los Angeles in the early 1950’s. Before the term “homeless” entered our daily lexicon, Mr. Dougherty lived out-of-doors in the park. He wore a shabby tweed sports coat, with half a dozen short, stubby sharpened pencils, points up, in the breast pocket. He also wore an enigmatic smile.

Intrigued by his demeanor, the pristine pencils, and small pad of paper displayed with care in that pocket, Howard interviewed and photographed Mr. Dougherty for a human interest story that ran in the Los Angeles Times, where my dad was employed as a staff photographer. Mr. Dougherty told my dad that he could not read, that he signed his name with an “X”, but that he kept his pencils ever at-the-ready, just in case inspiration struck him. Dad said there was a bright twinkle in his eye as he spoke.

Hearing this story, when I was a child, touched my heart. It troubled me that the grown-ups relayed his tale looking down their noses, pinkies up, with a touch of meanness in their voices, as if his “preparedness” was a joke only they could understand.

What if inspiration did strike him, and he didn’t have the tools at hand to capture it? I’ve certainly been caught-out with no paper and pencil, when a song has entered my head, while driving down the road, and I wanted to jot it down, or a particularly gorgeous cast of the light was showing off in the sky and I wanted to capture it. Alas, no camera.

Perhaps, Mr. Dougherty’s deep connection with the “out of doors” from which many of us house-dwellers are disconnected, was something that inspired him daily, and he was only waiting for divine inspiration to teach him how to capture it on paper… with words or pictures. He certainly knew how to speak, and didn’t seem at all reticent to converse with my father.

I’d like to think that my dad’s intent was pure; that he saw in Mr. Dougherty a quiet dignity, and that it troubled him too, that his colleagues and friends, and even my mother, were off-base in their derision. I’d like to think Howard wanted to inspire Los Angeles with the simple, unaffected dearness of one corner of humanity.

Kindness and open-heartedness inspire me.

Recently, a colleague shared with me how she figured out a way to connect with an elderly woman she’d seen several times from a distance in her neighborhood. It seems that the image of the woman’s bent figure, painfully slow gait, and utter aloneness touched my colleague’s heart with compassion. After perhaps a week, J finally recognized her stooped posture right up close, in front of her, in line at the grocery store. A conversation unfolded organically. The old woman’s face lit up, J said, just to have another human reach out to her. Now they wave and smile at one another in passing. I was moved to tears by J’s tender persistence to find just the right bridge to walk over and acknowledge and say “howdy” to a familiar stranger in her hometown.

I certainly know very shy places inside myself, that at times keep me from reaching out to others, even when I’m longing to give or receive contact.

What might our world be like if we erred on the side of thinking that everyone, on some level, desires contact with others of their species? What if we, like my colleague J, sought and found an opportunity to acknowledge the humanity of a seemingly lost soul? A simple smile with eyes open to receive another’s human essence may shift something in both hearts.

Namasté is a greeting on the streets in India, not just an oooey, ooooey saying at the end of a yoga class. Ram Dass is credited with this definition:

Namasté… I honor the place in you
in which the entire universe dwells.
I honor the place in you which is of love,
or truth, of light, and of peace.
When you are in that place in you, and
I am in that place in me,
We are One


God/Nature/Humanity has many faces - including our own.

A woman I got to know a little bit at a recent women's retreat shared a practice of setting aside 50 one dollar bills each month to be kept ever at-the-ready. When she sees someone who looks as if s/he could use a buck or two, she extends her hand, her heart, and a genuine eye-to-eye smile with a couple of bills. Such a simple act, honoring that place which is or light, of love, of truth, and perhaps hungry and down on her/his luck.





I wish I could find the lost box of photos that was always in the living room cupboard as I was growing up. So many of my father’s photos were brilliant capturings of beautiful souls, tortured souls, and the wreckage of acts of human souls gone astray from the blueprint of their uniquely human and perhaps meant-to-be humane journey.

Is there a GPS App for getting our lost parts back on track?

When the sky is the color of a New England slate gray, clap-board house that teeters on a rocky promontory, the kind of blue-gray that mirrors the stormy sea, then all plants dressed in green come alive in such a way as to make their singing audible. Can you hear them?

“Vwuhbba, Vwwwuhbbbaaa,” they sing. “We’re alive! We’re alive, a-l-i-i-i-iv-e!!! And we can feel the moisture in the air, so we’re celebrating with little thirsty tree dances, and bristly bush dances, and dry twiggy-straw-in-the-dust dances.”

That perfect gray is the color of pure potential and impending good.

It’s not only the color that electrifies mammals and causes crows to crow and owls to hoot. The color coincides with a particular freshness in the air, a coolness, a quickening, a curious unknown, yet familiar, palpable unknowable something; a change for the better.

People come alive.

Often, these pre-storm skies come in October in northern latitudes; once the laziness of summer has been booted. A friend, Lynn Lopez, once wrote, “October, and finally the air has some authority.”

I find myself bouncing, not walking. Grinning ear to ear, not simply smiling. Eyes wild and wide. Blood dancing. Toes alternately digging into the earth in exploratory joy, and sproinging off of it into the rarified realm of air-borne leaves and bird glide. I cannot sit still. I must be out IN it. IN the electrified atmosphere.

Thanks be to the change. Thanks be to the change of season, the change of trajectory, the change of dry into moist.

Yet, the suddenness of the change gives me pause.

Flash floods caught so many unawares in Southern California last Friday. A friend had to be pulled from her car on Lake Elizabeth Road. The Grape Vine, a mountain pass between northern Los Angeles County and California’s Central Valley became the Scrape Vine… as many cars had to be scraped out of the settling mud-flows.

Near our beloved Painted Turtle Camp in Lake Hughes, cars were buried up to the level of their roofs!

Fires, then floods, fooey!

Nature is truly an awesome force.

But the pre-transition from drought to deluge? Beautiful! That in-between place… Dva da Shanta (Peaceful Place in between, in Sanskrit), Half-way-down-the-stairs, that isn't up and isn't down, as A.A. Milne tells us, between day and night, between night and the coming dawn… that place where what we’ve been no longer has hold of us, but our new self is not quite gelled… Powerful places to be.

May we pause to appreciate the pauses, however minuscule, between what we're leaving behind, and what we're embracing the next moment... and the next... and the next...

San Francisco skyline, between dark cloud cover and drench of morning sun. 10-19-15

Expanding Vision

How fortunate I feel to have been embraced by a thirty-five strong, supportive, and spirited women during a three day retreat this weekend in Mill Valley.

Our facilitator, Julia Cline, shared this poem, among other inspirations.

May you enjoy it.

May this find you well, and seeing your world exactly as you'd like to see it.


Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the House of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller

I Feel Bad About the Trees

Redwoods are losing their crowns to the drought.
No more green bower. What can crows crow about?

Sycamores look sick. Olive bark's darker complexion -
Is burnt to a crisp with no watery protection.

Brown pines pine away,
Carpet of needles deeper than hay.

I think they’re depressed. Who wouldn’t be,
When losing one’s beauty and crowning glory?

Chemo cuts for conifers. It looks simply hell-ish.
They need their needles, they’re not needless. They tell us:

Water us, drench us, nourish our tap-root.
We hold up our arms, to hear hummers hum and owls hoot.





If we’re supposed to be guardians of the earth,
If that’s been part of our job since our birth,

The way we’re doing it is certainly crappy.
Climate change makes no one happy.

Time and energy go to make products and packages
Bits of the natural world for sale: Organic this-es and thats-es,

Broccolini splays in plastic trays,
Sandwich wraps under wraps - Saran Wrap, that stays,

Oil’s burned to make plastics, then to transport the goods,
Then, there’s cooking the foods in our own neighborhoods

We heat ‘em and eat ‘em, all virtually dead
We’re heating the planet. We’re boiling our bed

Fire storms are the norm. Golden State, Oregon, Washington
All at the effect of major drought dragging on.

No doubt, we could do without the extraneous extras.
Living in Simplicity might reduce what hexes us


Who was it said: Live simply so others may simply live?
To forestall global disaster WTF would we give?


In the bustle of our busy day, dare we say, “Nay!?
I’ll bring my own cloth bags, make my meals each day

From scratch, all natch?” How long before we succumb
To the siren’s song luring us with lies so dumb

About luminous luxurious leisure when we buy the ease,
The convenience of pop-up food? Such a tease.

How long before we splinter ourselves along seas sharp shoals,
Shriveled on sandy shores, withered our souls?

Buy these. Save time. Do it all with disposables.
We’re made dumber, not smarter, by our thumbs opposable,

While our less digitized brethren who war not, want not,
Live free ’til we encroach on their lairs with our self-righteous rot.

Feel the fire raging at your feet?
Sub-human? Mad-Womb-less-men gestating heat?

Sub-Saharan desertification
Spreading like wild-fire to every nation.

Where a typical modern home has burned,
The ground is so toxic, hazmat suits are earned

No, required to stir the dirt,
So you don’t get hurt.

Building anew is delayed in that spot
Economy’s declining and going to pot

Our chemical footprint is larger than those
Of Jack’s beanstalk Giant including his toes

Our carbon footprint so huge that it eats
The stratosphere, creating more heat.

Our wireless contraptions’ pollution is grandiose,
Sending invisible “fuck you’s”, I suppose





To the children’s children’s children's children's children's children's children.





Our governing bodies are governed by greed.
Greed binds us and blinds us to what babies need.

Humans and wildlife all live in one boat,
Yet humans are who have the world by the throat.


How do we let go? How do we SEE
That what happens to “them” is what happens to ME?


May cooler heads prevail. May each do her part.
May we question each action with one beating heart.

The planet is precious; just one like it so far.
Like dinosaurs, we’re drowning, but in our own gooey tar.

May the trees prevail and stand the test.
Under their GREEN shade, I’d like to rest.

I feel bad about the trees.
Help me pray for them, please?