Ross LewAllen and the Elephants of Morning

Silver Mastodon by Ross LewAllen

Some legends say that the elephant is our closest relation to the spirit world.

His main and most accentuated virtue, patience. But -- of what use is this in a world such as ours, a world that is always on the move restlessly from one place to another?

The beauty of the elephant is that it cannot see its tail. It must move ever forward into the illimitable and indefinite future. Doing so, the great, gray eminence blends with the low lying clouds of which it is a herd member.

I am reminded of these things as I think of my friend  Ross LewAllen, my cohort in laughter and occasionally tears over these past 40 years wherein we have both taken counsel from the elephant. Let's promise to be patient with each other. We did. We do. We still do. Because I do not feel him gone. I feel he is here, watching, waiting, like the slow moving clouds.

I remember when he returned from Africa and had elephant visions, most of them things he'd seen with his beloved daughter Laura.

Elephant

I watched a mother elephant

gently lay her tusk

over the back

of her baby

She carefully moved her trunk

from the left side to the right side

of the baby's body

I felt the powerful sense

of touch at work

Dusty gray

moving in the night

Kilimanjaro's healing water

fills their favorite swamp

The elephant's night pace

is tranquil.

--Ross LewAllen

I have seen Ross fly like an egret, white on blue. And I have seen him move like a man on fire. But mostly I see him moving among clouds, in a herd of gray, slow-paced beauties going to where they're going without haste, one step at a time.

Last night, in a dream, the question came up, "Will there be coffee in heaven?"

This morning I have an answer -- sitting in the chair in the sun that Ross liked to sit in while, together, we studied the lilies of the pond. 

There are slow moving elephants pacing the sky and coffee such as they have in heaven.

Ross is the witness in my heart. 

The Tree Frog That Painted A Cat

.

I write fewer and fewer poems because I see poetry everywhere around me. It is already written by nature.



When I was younger and I wrote poems every day, I knew that each one was a prayer of thanks for being alive. I literally wore the poem over my heart by folding the paper upon which it was written and placing it in my heart-side pocket. I wore it for the day in which I wrote it.

Now I see and say the prayer rather than write it. Sometimes I say it aloud. Sometimes I feel it so strongly it urges me to actually twirl my arms about. I feel a little like William Carlos Williams, who wrote the funny poem about dancing secretly and madly in his house when he was all by himself.

This morning I noticed the cat drawing on our bathroom window. It was done by a tree frog's sticky fingers.

It reminds that just beyond the window is where we buried our aged cat last Spring.

The tree frog's cat points to the old cat's burial ground. And reminds:  "Look again, my friends, I am here with you!"

Bill Worrell, author of Places of Mystery, Power & Energy

There will come a time of great peace

All Creatures will live in harmony

All tribes will unite for common good

All people will see there is a great plenty,

Not a sparse scarcity

Bill Worrell, poet, songwriter, performer, sculptor, painter, author did the painting you see above and wrote the verses shown and his new book Places of Mystery, Power & Energy explains the way things work in the cosmos, on terra firma, and in the intricacies of the human heart. He is the original one-man-band artist and the tune that he sings -- whether in paint, poem, song or story -- is always universal. Hail to Bill! 

"Hail, Bill, how do you do it?" 

Tanque Verde

watercolor by Ross Lewallen

This saguaro seems to be dancing. They do dance, you know. It is the wind, the clear air, the rain smell from far off, but most of all it's the desert. As in the subtropics, the low desert is a player in the mood of the observer. You can't take the desert out of the sand nor the sand out of the desert. They belong together, as the sea on this island where we live abides in the bode of a shell. Plant the shell on dry ground and it will sing of the sea.

I still carry the mystery of Tanque Verde in my bones.

Impolite to talk

when wind burns

and saguaros dance

Sitting two of us

high over desert floor

looking down on level

plain where mule deer

browse among thorns

Gerald Hausman

The Kiss of the Bat

My mom used to say, "Creatures are talking to us all of the time. Are we listening?"

I listen. Last night, sitting on our dock as night settled in, there was no sound. Then the hoarse rasp of an anhinga. That is, a snakebird. Long undulant neck, long sharp beak. She nests in our paperwood trees and you can see her black sleek form against the whiter trunks. Silence.

Then the whirr of wings and something light and furry, something unknown lands on my left cheek. I feel a touch of softness. Then more whirr, and it -- whatever it is -- is gone. "What was that?"

Lorry says, "It was the largest moth I've ever seen." I'd seen it too, very briefly, and thought it was a hummingbird. But it was, in reality, the moth they call Bat in Jamaica. It kissed my cheek and hummed away into the night. I remembered Frost's line: "For once, then, something."

Last spring I mentioned a long black snake sliding up to where I sat on the dock. It kept coming. I thought it would stop. It didn't. It came right up to my big toe and sort of tasted it with its forked tongue. I got a good tickly feeling. And remembered my Navajo friend Jay telling me that he'd seen medicine men "toe herding rattlesnakes."

Once in New Mexico I was awakened by a magpie. I thought I was dreaming but when I opened my eyes there was a large black and white bird on my chest. For some reason I thought it was a she, and when I was awake enough to sit up, I did, and she flew to the open window. I followed her outside. She flew from juniper to juniper. Finally I came to the place where she wanted me to see something. Her nest. The wind had blown it down and her nestlings were scattered about on the juniper and pinon needles. I got my ladder and put the nest and the nestlings into the tree they had fallen from.

That is my story. Listen to all great and small. Believe your dreams. Feel more, talk less. Love everything, even pain, sorrow, bewilderment. Move along with your life, have no grudges. Above all, be kind and think of others instead of yourself.

Blessing of the Christmas Purr

Blessing of the Christmas Purr



According to an ancient myth, there was a mother cat present when the baby Jesus was born. There, in the dove-cooing softness of the manger, kittens were born and a cat did purr. And, it is said, that this sound has been a blessing ever since.

There are many stories about Jesus and his love of animals - especially cats. In one such tale, Jesus finds a young cat upon the road. She suffers from neglect, but Jesus speaks soothing words to her, and carries her to a village where she is fed. Afterwards, he gives the cat to a disciple, a poor widow. It is she, the story goes, who is blessed by this cat's peaceful purr.

The widow then asks Jesus, "You care for all creatures - are they not your brothers and sisters, that you love them so?"

He answers, "Verily, they come from the great household of the Father, and they draw the same breath that you draw. And whosoever cares for the least of these, and gives it food to eat, and drink in its need, he shall do the same unto me."


Such a thought touched the famous explorer, Lincoln Ellsworth, in 1935, as he flew over Antarctica, some two thousand years after Jesus' birth. Traveling across the frozen tundra of a world untouched, and even unsought, by humanity, Ellsworth wondered what fate had brought him on such a lonely mission.

As he soared above the glittery waste, unfit for man or beast, he wondered, "Why am I here on this Christmas Eve?"

Yet over the airplane's steady roar, he seemed to hear a gentler noise. It was the solitary purr of the cat he'd carried with him on this, the first 2,300 mile, single-engine airplane flight over the Antarctic.

"Yes," he confirmed, "I brought along the right mascot for the trip, a cat that has given birth to kittens this very night."

So it was, that another wayfarer was blessed by the solace of a purr on that most holy of nights, Christmas Eve.

GH & LH

Bill Worrell: Sculptor, Painter, Writer, Songwriter, Philosopher

If you love storytelling the way we do ... if you love the Southwest ... if you love mysteries and often ask, Why is that? Well, you've come to the right book: Places of Mystery, Power & Energy by Bill Worrell.

That name should ring a bell, by the way. Worrell is very well known in all the areas listed above, but he is also as down-to-earth accessible, funny, and biblically wise, literarily informed, and just generally fun to be around and to listen to. Anything he writes including brief emails and spontaneous poems is funny-bone wonderful.

We ought to know, we published Worrell's latest book, and we're so glad we did. This is our 14th year publishing Irie Books and selecting what we consider to be some of the best of the best, of which Worrell is definitely one. Imagine a campfire on the Llano River, then visualize some old timers sitting around it. When I close my eyes I see Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Rod Serling, and Dante, just back from the shadowlands, but, look, over there, the one who's entertaining them is none other than Bill Worrell, and he's no shade, hant or shadow, he's the real thing, a cowboy philosopher with a bit of Bret Hart, John Billings, J. Frank Dobie ... there I go again! That's because I just love the way Bill Worrell spins a good tale, and this new book is filled with nothing but laughs, ruminations, and rummages in the dustbins of folklore and science.

He covers such miracles of nature as the mystery of the Lubbock Lights ... the search for man's beginnings in the caves and cliffs of the Lower Pecos ... the vortexes that surround the red rocks of Sedona ... the picky little editors who inhabit the author's historic house -- they turn out to be nibbly house mice ... the ghosts in the walls of his guesthouse, Medium Cotton (we've already booked our visit!) ... the rattlesnake whisperers and bridge jumpers and all-around geniuses that Mr. Worrell calls friends, and he's got a lot, let me tell you!

I would buy this book just for the pictures and the philosophy. When you see Midge wearing a rattler for a hat -- not a hatband, the whole rattler -- you just have to read the story:

I have a photograph of a young man named Midge Davis while he was in front of the store with a rattlesnake coiled upon his head. Midge died of a rattlesnake bite a couple of years later. He was playing with what is called a "high striker". It got him in the arm two times as he was attempting to remove it from a toolbox to show it off. "Let's get you to a doctor," said one of his friends. 

Let me have a beer first," he replied. After a few sips, he said, "You boys better get me to the doctor. He got me worse than I thought. I'll be dead before you can make it, but try anyway." He was dead before they got him to the doctor.

Bill Worrell writes like it was as natural as breathing, so I would recommend this book to anyone interested in how to make sentences pull you in and keep you there. If you don't read, I would recommend that you join Bill around the campfire ... who knows who you'll meet there.