et nocte / January 19, 2024 by eoehlkerswright

Gaudete! (serus) / January 4, 2024 by eoehlkerswright

The request for protection in one Compline collect from the Book of Common Prayer for night laborers, the weeping, the sleeping, unsleeping, sick, weary, dying, suffering and afflicted extends uniquely beyond to one final group in need.

shield the joyous

The 2023 Christian Holiday
Contagious and isolating in my rural tiny home in the foothills of the Western Mountains right next door to a more well known town which in 1796 under the name of Bethel as per common practice was incorporated by European settlers despite habitation by the Abenaki, my personal Christmas celebratory norms were effectively cancelled due to external forces: Covid. In the Holy Land, in Bethlehem the traditional Christmas services were likewise cancelled: Bombings.

Seeing to first things first, we see that the list of first things is long.

Joy is no less another state of vulnerability.

Like praying. The powerless act.

A child can see

*darkness and light to you are both alike -* psalm 139, verse 11.5 BCP

*if you look close, really home in on it*

that we are to accept the real-life related norms at times necessitating other-destructive self-preservation as an expectation of successful cultural adult leadership, while punishment of children and other vulnerable individuals or groups for same is common. Either way, having agency, singular, and the plural, power tends to be invoked. I don’t hear those with these called having lack of faith much. I hear we pray for them without it.

For the reconciliation of conflicting requests for protection among opposing persons, peoples and aims Mark Twain, with invulnerable clarity, provides a clear-headed, witty explanation in his posthumous, copyright protected “Letter to the Earth” in the voice of “The Recording Angel, Department of Petitions, Jan. 20. to Abner Scofield Coal Dealer Buffalo, New York.”

I discovered the book at the annual yard sale in my town. I can’t remember when I last laughed the way I laughed hunched over this little paperback in the rain.

It transcends the cynical. No one who didn’t care deeply could write it, I feel.

Spoiler:

Ask only what’s good for business.

shield the joyless

We need nothing less

should we ask nothing more.

This is the whole Collect:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or
weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love's sake. Amen.

Collect, Compline, Book of Common Prayer p. 134

magis recens aranea opus / October 6, 2023 by eoehlkerswright

I am just teaching myself how to do this (again). The delicate process of connecting the strands. I am closer to the image of how it will be, but many strands are as yet unhinged.

imago in mentibus oculisque / October 5, 2023 by eoehlkerswright

ice thawing in a drain pan screw cavity suggests the gaping jaw of an animate large mouth bass.

when you see an eye. when I see an eye, I see something “alive”, don’t you? Pictured is the “drain pan” for my “mini-split” AC/Heating unit referred to generally as a “heat pump”. Looking closer, in the circular cavity lit up by translucent bubble is no eye. It is a screw. Nevertheless the unit does come alive. When the temperature drops below freezing or it snows come October…November depending on the year, the defrost thingie can’t keep up and the entire outdoor compressor unit moves with a life of its own, as they say. Water freezes over the drain pain’s pan’s hope hole and then rises up the pricey little tines, bending them every which way. I must spare the tines for summer survival reasons in a 263 sq ft house, as in the A/C is necessary to avoid inhabitant being baked alive. That word again. The hint of something inanimate come alive is why I thought to display the picture. I initially took the picture because there was no illustration of a “drain pan” in the manual, the manual in which it was suggested one might in some models be able to purchase a “heated drain pan” and avoid the undesirable thing that might would without fail happen when the temperature dropped below 40 degrees or with sufficient wind + snow. This particular model came pre-installed in my custom tiny house, known to be headed for Maine, the part of Maine that gets cold and snows in the winter. We are not always at our best. I personally didn’t even know what a mini split was and even after reading the manual, what a drain pan could be, or especially any idea of what it looked like, thanks to no illustration being in the manual, never mind having been stuck in PFC-Down instruction-illiterate mode by bereavement despite a career spent deciphering manuals for others, and thus I imagined I might be the first ever to photograph a drain pain in action, that is, in real life, in living color, as it were, and save somebody somewhere, some day, some trouble, if not all the trouble I was having, at least some of it. (And I did in fact, for the record, do this at least once.) At the time of the first freezing up, I did not need to see; I felt. Immersed in writing, something I used to do before the eternal crash course in physics called four-season “camping” put me on my guard for the duration, I wondered vaguely why the house was shaking, so much. In later years, if no 40mph storm “gusts” were involved, I knew “the house is shaking so much” as my signal to turn off the “unit” and that I would be pouring on the boiling water in the morning with a hair dryer, for about an hour. I might have allowed this event to unfold three or four times each late fall season before doing something more radical*. Which is what I do now prior even to the first frozen flake. But on that first dark and snowy evening, with one hand I poured boiling water from my mini tea kettle, the largest vessel I possessed, onto the drain pan’s little ice rink for four hours, while with the other hand, I waved a hair dryer or flashlight alternately. I experienced the whole procedure in extreme discomfort, in doctor-speak. The drain pan pictured below is from one of the later years during which I kept up this morning devotion, deciding the activity was “fun.” It’s difficult to recall now, but I know from records of my personal correspondence that I felt an enduring sense of visceral delight, having escaped my nemesis automation, at using my hands to do something practical, something I didn’t even know how to do, but that I must do - even a recurring thrill, akin to being alive. The madness has since stopped. But I have a photograph.

*Look at the thermometer, then the weather forecast or just out the window. Snowing? Below freezing overnight? Turn ‘unit’ off; wrap it up, employ another heating $ource until late April.

praesto / September 29, 2023 by eoehlkerswright

A young hummingbird pauses from peer sparring in the pollinator garden.

where at this writing / September 28, 2023 by eoehlkerswright

“You would not cry if you knew that by looking deeply into the rain you would still see the cloud.” Thich Nhat Hanh

At the end of August 2017, I moved to a river valley campground in the Western Mountains, Maine where at this writing I still live and work.

I settled into rural Maine from urban life not seeking supernatural beauty and awe. I was seeking affordable housing. I hadn’t planned to come to this part of the state about which I knew nothing, but the whole one-door-closed-thing happened at the last minute. Photography had accompanied me for the better part of my life, yet I hadn’t planned to become so fully immersed, anchored in a practice, nearly contemplative, of daily photography. I had been turning to prayer, meditation, other arts, writing, poetry translation, more often than not. Now in the wake of intimate death, I was at a loss. Franz had been gone two years. Our home, a rented apartment, still well below market rate, was edging towards 2/3rds of my monthly paycheck. Heading for parts as yet unknown, I had opened a box he prepared for me to be opened only after his death. Inside, handwritten in colored pencil, I found the chapter on clouds and impermanence from Thich Nhat Hanh’s No Death No Fear with instructions to read it every day for 90 days. It made me cry. I wailed until the impulse not to choke overrode my pain. I looked. And I must have looked deeply. What I saw led me here, to a place of obvious impermanence even as I persisted in my dread of change. This next door opened to the sky. Always there, everywhere. To see the fog lift from the river joining the clouds was how I rose at first light. As in how I got out of bed. Meanwhile I couldn’t help notice what the clouds were doing all day long, every day, in their imaginative and mercurial splendor. Never the same, ever the same. Close to home.

Like many, I take pictures to look a little while longer, later. Like some, I take pictures to look deeply enough to see. Into the rain, the fog, and the light.

September 2023.

And like everyone who is at times open to anything and sees what can be seen by oneself alone, apparently, I take pictures to see things, very particular, unvalidated, not in any way at all acknowledged things, clear as day to me.

flowers going by / September 8, 2023 by eoehlkerswright

I dread the final hard frost, the killing frost. That day. Everything so pretty outlined in shining white feathery ice crystals, at first. Then later. Not. I know it’s inevitable. I know cycle-of-life. I know I know. Still. Don’t. Don’t be the hard frost.

That / December 31, 2019 by eoehlkerswright

Snow. Fog. Cloud. Though technically accurate, what I’ve seen in Western Maine skies is inadequately conveyed by the words we use to identify…wild forms of water. Maine’s license plate reads ‘Vacationland’. Leave here to get back to ‘real’ life. Water as found in the wild, unreal?