4.29.2026 – ignorant of how

ignorant of how
they see, don’t see unless work
very hard at it

Paul Cézanne – The Village of L’Estaque Seen from the Sea (Le village de l’Estaque vu de la mer)

Sprawled there by the creek and cautioning myself against my canteen whiskey I stared at the assortment of dead leaves that had gathered themselves in the spring, with some floating, a few suspended in the clear water, and the bottom of the spring pasted yellow and dull red with the others.

I had once tried to paint this phenomenon, unsuccessfully in the minds of others because it is not the sort of thing one can see clearly.

There was the odd thought, absent for years, that nearly everyone was ignorant of how they see, lost as they were in the attraction for the simplicity of photographs, which is not how anyone sees.

We don’t see all at once unless we work very hard at it.

When I first saw Cézanne’s work I was dumbstruck at his comprehension of true vision.

From True North by Jim Harrison (New York, Grove Press, 2004).

I think that is why I enjoy the beach.

I want to see it all at once.

I work very hard at it.

4.13.2026 – sense of proportion

sense of proportion
in good and bad experience
loses its appeal

Adapted from the passage in the book, The Road Home by Jim Harrison (Atlantic Monthly Press New York, 1998) where Mr. Harrison writes:

With age I need not make judgments about their comparative merits, having lost the impulse to be right.

One is one, and the other is another.

With age one loses all sense of the supposed inevitability of art and life.

Vivid moments are no longer strung together by imagined fate.

The sense of proportion in good and bad experience loses its appeal.

Bad is bad and you let it go.

Good you cherish as it whizzes by.

Mental struggles become lucid and muted with particular visual images attached to them, somewhat irrationally or beyond ordinary logic.

Money shrinks to money.

Fear is always recognizable rather than generalized.

It is sharp and its aim is very good indeed.

If there is wisdom as such, it is boiled down by fatigue.

The sense of proportion in good and bad experience loses its appeal.

When you have a man who sits in the office of president of the United States who post images of himself portrayed as Jesus Christ, all things, good and bad, lose their proportion on a level of good of bad.

Landing in the land of the unbelievable, I need not make judgments about their comparative merits, having lost the impulse to be right.

The sense of proportion in good and bad experience loses its appeal.

When there are no comparative merits, their is little effort needed to be right.

As I wrote the other day that I struggle mentally to become lucid and I feel muted with particular visual images attached to them, somewhat irrationally or beyond ordinary logic and ask how a man could become not immoral, not amoral but, somehow infinitely worse, morally extinguished and president.

The sense of proportion in good and bad experience loses its appeal.

Beyond belief.

I what for the outcry but where your treasure is, their your heart will be also.

3.6.2026 – wave lasts moments but

wave lasts moments but
underneath another one
waiting to be born

Adapted from the poem Waves by Jim Harrison in the collection, Saving Daylight as published in the Complete Poems of Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, WA 2021).

WAVES

A wave lasts only moments
but underneath another one is always
waiting to be born. This isn’t the Tao
of people but of waves.
As a student of people, waves, the Tao,
I’m free to let you know that waves
and people tell the same story
of how blood and water were born,
that our bodies are full of creeks
and rivers flowing in circles,
that we are kin of the waves
and the nearly undetectable ocean currents,
that the moon pleads innocence
of its tidal power, its wayward control
of our dreams, the way the moon tugs
at our skulls and loins, the way
the tides make their tortuous love to the land.
We’re surely creatures with unknown gods.