Butterfly Living

In the planning stages it was a dream.  Then we lived it. Now it seems like a dream again. If pictures are worth 1,000 words, here's something like 14K on our Thanksgiving holiday on Maui.

Our rental, The Hendrix House, secluded in the woods, was a former barn, nicely renovated by new owners.

Our yin-yang front yard; in 1970 Jimi Hendrix performed in the field just beyond the horses. You can see the surf line, from our altitude of  about 2,500 feet.  Still when you live at sea level, that's way up.  We call it "upcountry." (Haleakala, the mountain volcano the slopes of which we were on , is about 10,000 feet at its highest point.)

Like we needed to be told to slow down!

Blooming aloe in eucalyptus forest.

Walk on a country road.

Blooming protea, a Maui speciality, just off the road above.

Neighborly goat.

More neighbors.

A horse Thanksgiving.

Not a dream

Safe in the butterfly barn.

The Butterfly House

Lilikoi -- passion fruit--in bloom at the gate to the Hendrix House.

Pine and bamboo--Chinese symbol of winter. It was cold and windy up country, with gusts to 66 mph reported.

Still Hateful, Still Hopeful

Finished two courses-on-the-road, 48 lectures of The Teaching Company's "Comparative Religion" and "Buddhism" CDs. And I didn't even have to write a paper or take a final exam! (I learned about the "Big Vehicle" -- Mahayana -- while driving my little vehicle.)

But at semester's end, so to speak, I was at a loss as to what to feed my CD player. Aha, the Dylan "Witmark Demos" that arrived a couple weeks ago but I hadn't really listened to yet-- I know all those songs --most all of them -- anyway.

Well, this is major nostalgia and confirmation that Dylan was a genius from Day 1. And these raw versions remind me of what my mother said when I made her listen to them when they were first released.

"Why, he sounds just like Robert Frost reading his own poetry," she said. Pretty astute. My mom would have been 87 today, had she lived past 1970. Alas, she (and JFK) never got to get old, like me and both Bob's.

But today I enjoyed howling along in the car, to the other side of the valley like a coyote (not that kind, the doggy wolfish kind), to "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall". Then the next track, "The Death of Emmett Till," kinda somber and not so sing-along-able, made me recall the brief news item I heard on CNN while I was flossing my teeth this morning.

Hate crimes continue, the news reported, with very unattractive statistics. In light of this, some of the old stuff on the Dylan discs sounds as fresh and timely as it did nearly 50 years ago (OMG!) when my mother was only 40.

"This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man...That this kind of thing
still lives today...But if all us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we
could give...We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live. --Death of Emmett Till, Bob Dylan

Hope continues too.

I mean to say Happy Thanksgiving, but I'll save that until Thursday.

Haircut Moon

Cleared two complete lunar cycles of karma with a purifying haircut, to discover I did it on the verge of an interesting full moon. Some people think that cutting hair at the full moon makes it grow faster, so my hairdresser may promote that time for standing appointments. Accustomed to my request for serious pruning (please remove the Barbara Bush), she raves over my color (or lack of it). "I could use you for a model for grey-haired women," she says, "except I didn't do that color. It's so beautiful." So she says. And she likes the shape of my head, which is just as well when trimming it to less than two inches at the longest, at the crown, gradating to 3/8th-inch at the nape.

I observe other patrons in the salon. An old woman (older than me, I think) with obviously dyed hair sitting in curlers under the dryer. I abandoned curlers 30 years ago. And blowdryers five years later. A young local Asian girl with the most beautiful long black silky tresses contemplating a layered look in a magazine. ("No, don't do it," I think.) A poster on the wall for "lowlights...they may be your highlights."

"Didn't we used to call that 'streaking' ?" I asked my hairdresser, who is a year older than me and eligible for social security. "Yes," she said, and then proceeded to describe how she is going to deep-fry four (4) turkeys on Thanksgiving for a big family dinner. She got the turkeys for $2.99 apiece.

"But I had to buy $34 worth of peanut oil for the deep fryer," she added. I guess turkeys are the loss leader for peanut oil sales. Does anybody make money on raising turkeys? The economics of this is really a more interesting topic than hair.

Still, I feel better, the shearing truly does clear the mind, and the day seemed brighter and full of good will afterward. This cut should get me through the solstice, the next full moon, and well into the new year. One less thing to fuss over during this busy season.

Now to find a bargain turkey!