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A Kind of Glory

March 16, 2026 by redtreetimes

In the Woods, March 15 2026

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable
thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it
wishes, undirected.

–John Steinbeck, East of Eden, Chapter 13 (1952)

I walked up the top of my property yesterday morning. My forest is a mix of different trees consisting of hardwoods like oak, maple, hickory, ash, beech scattered among a variety of conifers such as spruce, white pine, and hemlock. I wound up in the area of the forest above. It’s a section that was once mainly hardwood, predominantly birch and ash. But in the past couple of decades this part of the forest has been particularly devastated by blight and invasive species such as the emerald ash borer beetle. The white birch is now almost completely gone from my woods as are the white ash that heavily populated this section and much of the rest of these woods.

Looking yesterday at this scene in the March snow was both sad and inspiring.  It looks bleak with the tall remnant stumps of ash and other downed trees. There are a few trees whose lower trunk are twisted from finding a way to survive in the once dense forest. These are the ones that caught my eye and drew me to this part of the forest.

But soon, in mere weeks, it will be once more alive with new growth.  And like those twisting trees, life adapts.

Life survives.

Its glory continues in an everchanging form.

The photo and this bit I’ve written don’t really totally blend with the Steinbeck passage above. But in a way they do. I’m going to leave it up to you to determine that. I have included the whole section below from which the Steinbeck quote was taken. It’s been several decades since I read East of Eden and I was probably too young then to appreciate the power of these paragraphs then. It is as powerful now as when it was written. It speaks to all dark times when there are those who seek to control the minds of men.

There are some parts that I might not fully agree with, such as there are no good collaborations. Though I am not a collaborative artist, I respect and admire many works that were the result of minds and talents coming together. Perhaps he meant that an idea is first formed in the mind of one individual before others are invited in to possibly improve or expand upon it.

If you have time, please read. There is a credo of defiant hope in it. Just what we all need.

One sidenote: From my little foray up into the woods, I can predict a heavily tick-laden spring and summer ahead. I picked two ticks off my body last night. Egads…

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can
feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

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Big Music Forever

March 15, 2026 by redtreetimes

I have heard the big music
And I’ll never be the same

— The Waterboys, The Big Music

I was looking for a song to play this morning and I thought about a favorite track from an album, A Pagan Place, from back in the 1980’s from the Irish group The Waterboys. I was surprised to discover that in the nearly 12 years I’ve been doing this blog that the song hasn’t somehow surfaced.

The song is The Big Music and it’s about hearing a song or piece of music that just opens you up. Shakes up your whole world and changes how you see everything in it. Maybe even alters your whole life’s path.

It’s a song that really speaks to me. Growing up in the country at a time before digital broadcasts, satellite television and streaming services, we had two TV channels so reading and listening to music filled the void for a kid who was eager to learn about the world. In retrospect, I realize now how fortunate I was.

We had a big box of singles from the late 50’s and early 60’s that had been assembled by a cousin and somehow ended up with us when he went into the Army. It had tons of good stuff including early rock from Elvis, lots of surf music from the likes of Jan and Dean and the Surfaris, goofy novelty songs, and lots of pop chart hits that feel pretty dated today, such as Heart from Kenny Chandler, a song I listened to hundreds of times back then.

Plus, my sister was an avid music fan so there were always plenty of early Beatles, Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan singles on the record player. That first ringing chord of A Hard Day’s Night still thrills me in the same visceral way that I remember feeling as a kid.

Through those formative years, there were plenty of songs that hit me hard and opened up the world for me in small ways. Too many to list, actually. But I don’t know that I can mark one song that was that single defining moment. The Big Music for me.

Well, maybe it was from the first time I saw Springsteen back in 1977. The show and sound was unlike any other concert I had seen up to that point. I wrote about that show in a 2015  blog entry that mentioned the effect from his dramatic performance of the Animals‘ It’s My Life had on me.

That song and performance changed a lot of things with repercussions that still echo through my life.

When I think about it, I doubt that I would be writing this today without that song at that moment.

So, I guess that would be my Big Music moment. I wonder if everyone has a Big Music moment? Or maybe it is a book or a movie or piece of art that seemed to change them in a significant way.

Here’s the song, The Big Music, from The Waterboys.

This post ran back in 2020. I was tired this morning and, to be honest, just felt like hearing and sharing this song. The fact that there was already a blogpost about it was a bit of serendipity. Sitting here in the early m0rning dark of a cold Sunday morning, a little serendipity feels like a king’s ransom.

Certainly more than I had expected. That’s always good enough for me.

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Finding Flow

March 14, 2026 by redtreetimes

Flow

Flow helps to integrate the self because in that state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings, and all the senses are focused on the same goal. Experience is in harmony.

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990)

This week, I finished the piece shown here, Flow, for my annual solo show at the Principle Gallery in June. The title comes from the stream flowing in the painting but also refers to the creative flow I am trying to find at the moment.

This is something I have written about a number of times over the years. It is sometimes easy to tap into but other times it is unsatisfyingly absent, as though I might have to resort to a divining rod to find some hidden spring that might turn into a flow.

I know it’s still there at the moment but it’s hard to completely immerse myself in it. Too many distractions, doctor appointments, and fatigue, both physical and mental. It often feels as though just when I am about to slide into the flow lately, something pulls me from it.

However much it frustrates me, I know from prior experience, having lost the flow a number of times over the years, that it’s there still. There’s reassurance in that knowledge. It often seems as though it has dried up forever but somehow, through perseverance and desire, it begins once more to flow easily. 

This new painting feels as though it has brought me closer to that flow. Much of the time as I painted, I felt immersed in it. It was great feeling and I think this painting reflects that. It has a strength and rhythm that I like in my work.

Now the trick is to carry that flow’s momentum forward. It’s coming, I am sure.

Here’s a post from 2013 that tries to explain it. I don’t know whether it does so in a satisfying way. But, as they say, it is what it is. Judge for yourself.

I wrote the other day about my search for that intangible thing in my work, that quality that will set me off on a new path.  I’ve been thinking about it and what I think I am really looking for comes down to one word:  Flow. There’s a famous book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (please don’t ask me how to pronounce his name)that describes flow as a sense of being in the zone or in the groove, of being so totally immersed in the task before you that the external world is blocked out. He describes it as being like playing jazz, where each action, thought and movement rises from the previous one.

He points out that this flow occurs when there is a balance between the level of the challenge and the skill of the person facing it. Basically, this person is working at the far end of their skill level, pushing themselves to their boundaries in order to conquer the task before them. There can be no thought other than that thing before them. Total concentration and dedication.  

I think of it in terms of a mountain climber facing a climb that seems at the far end of their limits, who must muster up all their knowledge and abilities then concentrate on each movement in order to scale the daunting peak before them.

I have known this feeling, this flow that he describes, in painting. I have often described this feeling of immersion, of a level of concentration where each action leads to the next and time seems to fade into nothingness. I don’t hear the music playing, don’t feel thirst or hunger, don’t think about other things that I need to do or things that might be worrying me.

When I have been in this state it seems so real and so concrete that it feels as though it is always right there and attainable. It is intoxicating.

But it is not sustainable forever without creating new challenges. One you have conquered one peak, you need a new one to face up to. Without this challenge, you are at a comfortable plateau, something I have attempted to describe in the recent past. Stay put, your skill exceeds the challenge and total immersion is not necessary. While there is a level of needed concentration to simply maintain this elevation, there is also room for outside thoughts and concerns.  

The once difficult task has become the normal course.  Comfortable.

And this is fine  and, as I have said before, most artists reach a comfortable level and settle in for the long term at this high level. But deep inside, at least for me at the moment, there is a gnawing feeling to find myself hanging tenuously on a new, scary ascent, pushing my abilities to new levels. Riding the flow of the thrill of this tunnel-like focus.

That’s where I find myself at the moment– at a plateau, looking up for a new peak to attack.

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Humble

March 13, 2026 by redtreetimes

Dissolve– 2011

If we were humble, nothing would change us-neither praise nor discouragement. If someone were to criticize us, we would not feel discouraged. If someone would praise us, we also would not feel proud.

–-Mother Teresa, In My Own Words (1996)

Humble. Quite a word.

When we were young the idea of being humble seemed antithetical to all the impulses, desires, and dreams surging within us. The world then sometimes felt simple and easy to conquer. It was all laid out before us. Plans were effortlessly conceived that seemed as though they could not fail.

Time and youthful energy were on our side.

We felt that all we had to do was to proclaim our greatness to make it so.

Of course, all of this had not yet came met the real world, had not shook the hand of reality.

When that happened, soon every word that corrected or criticized became a dagger. After feeling the stab of failure a few times, we were primed so that even the smallest words of praise greatly inflated our ego, our pride, and had us once again breathing the air of self-importance. It made us once again feel invincible.

But time wore on us. Where we once saw a limitless horizon in the distance that we felt was within our reach, we now looked at it knowing that it might well be beyond the limitations of our time and talent. The aspiration to greatness was replaced with an aspiration for simple goodness and self-satisfaction.

Oh, the stabs and slights still came but the scars from the past wounds to our psyche now kept the pain at bay. Tolerable because we knew they would not slay us. And when words of praise came, they now made us feel a bit lighter in our soul but didn’t have the same effect on our ego as they once did. We now knew that praise was ephemeral, little more than a smoke ring to be enjoyed and appreciated for a brief instant before it dissolves into the atmosphere.

I think I am at that point in my life. I can still be hurt by the stab and can feel a small bit of pride from praise. My aspirations now are smaller. I need less to feel satisfied in who and what I am.

As I was telling a friend a few days ago, I feel oddly content as I am now, even as I struggle with illness while living in a world seemingly set to combust.

I feel humbled by life now. Not humiliated. Simply humble.

And maybe that is the lesson of this life?

I don’t know. I can’t speak for everybody. We all have different horizons, different depths and breadths of feeling and desire. My humbleness might seem like humiliation to you. Might seem small to the greatness that you desire’

For me, it is just where I am now. Humble and happy.

This, like a lot of my recent posts, was not on my radar when I started writing. It’s kind of like painting– you make a mark and go from there, hoping for the best, hoping that something coherent and real emerges. I can’t vouch for the coherency of this, but I believe it is real.

All I can ask.

Here’s another song from Ren. Sorry to force my obsession on you but this is most likely the driving force behind this post. This song has been in my head a lot lately. In the waiting room at the cancer center yesterday, this song and its lyrics kept running through my head. It made me feel pretty damn good. This is Humble from Ren and the British singer Eden Nash.

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Respect Yourself

March 12, 2026 by redtreetimes

Ralph Steadman– Viral Menace (2020)

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone.

This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.

–Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway

Woke up a little dizzy this morning. Not something I remember having experienced before. A bit unsteady on my feet, sometimes stumbling slightly one way or the other, like I shouldn’t have had that third martini.

To be clear here, I didn’t have any martinis. Just saying.

Anyway, I wasn’t sure I would write anything this morning. I was also a little fuzzy as far my thinking goes. Not that this is much out of the ordinary but it was little more pronounced. But the need to do this blog at this time is, for me, something I can’t neglect. It keeps me afloat in some ways. So, I decided to look for something that wouldn’t require much thought– again, not that far out of the ordinary– that would satisfy this need to put something down.

I pulled up the snip at the top from Hunter S. Thompson from a book of his collected correspondence from the 50’s and 60’s, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967. I’ve had this passage locked and loaded for some time and figured this would be a good day to shoot my shot with it, even if I can’t add much to it.

The passage itself reflects something I began learning from an early age, that you have to learn to love and respect yourself. For one thing, you can’t really love or respect anyone else — or be loved and respected by anyone–without first having done so for yourself.

And secondly and most importantly, as Thompson points out, we ultimately spend most of our lives alone, from birth to death.

Trying to exist in the happiness of others is not your happiness. There’s a lot more to be said on this last sentence but it will have to wait for another morning, he says as his eyes go a little out of focus.

No, one must learn to be alone with oneself and that requires the love and respect of self.

After all, who wants to spend their entire life tethered tightly to a person who they can’t love?

Thompson makes an important distinction in this short passage, that being alone is not being lonely. That thought was like an epiphany for me when I first realized at an early age that I could find real comfort in being alone. That’s not to say that there wasn’t loneliness. As comfortable as we might be in our solitude, we all need other people sometimes.

Wow, this has rambled on for longer than intended and I haven’t even mentioned the art of Ralph Steadman at the top. I’ve been a big fan since coming across it back in the 70’s in the pages of some of Thompson’s books, especially Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

His image at the top, Viral Menace, is from 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. In an article in The Guardian at that time that featured this image, Steadman, who is now 89, stated that we are living in weird times and that Trump is ‘the worst person in our known history.’

Who am I to argue with that? Actually, it is a thought that has ran through my mind many times. If he’s not, he is in the top 2 or 3.

My opinion. I won’t argue with you on this.

In the article, he also spoke about coming across images of his old work in books, saying ‘I’m amazed how many things I’ve done that I don’t remember; I’m going through the book and wondering how on earth I did them.‘

I think that is something I have described here before. I sometimes come across an old piece and I can’t remember painting it or how it came about. I know at once I couldn’t recreate it now, at least in any way that captured what I was seeing in that older piece.

Different moment, different person, different energy, different emotions..

I would imagine that an older singer might have that same feeling on hearing a recording of an early performance. They might try to sing that same song now but it would be different in many ways.

Art is always of the moment. Great art carries that moment within always.

Holy crap, I am just going on and on when I thought I couldn’t write anything at all this morning. Of course, writing a lot doesn’t mean I am saying anything worth remembering. This one of those posts where I will look back it in a few years– hopefully– and wonder what the hell I was thinking. Or not thinking.

Oh well. Que sera, sera. That’s okay with me. Know why? Because I respect myself.

You know I couldn’t kick you out the door without playing this song. This is the always-of-the moment classic Respect Yourself from the Staple Singers. Doesn’t get much better than this.

Okay, you can leave now.

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A Look Back: Winter Park

March 11, 2026 by redtreetimes

Winter Park — 1994

Silience

n. the kind of unnoticed excellence that carries on around you every day, unremarkably—the hidden talents of friends and coworkers, the fleeting solos of subway buskers, the slapdash eloquence of anonymous users, the unseen portfolios of aspiring artists—which would be renowned as masterpieces if only they’d been appraised by the cartel of popular taste, who assume that brilliance is a rare and precious quality, accidentally overlooking buried jewels that may not be flawless but are still somehow perfect.

–The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig

The painting at the top is from the autumn of 1994 making it an early piece for my work. I immediately called it Winter Park when it was completed– if you can call it completed. I wasn’t sure at the time if I was done with it. The white negative space was still up in the air in my mind and I was thinking it might need some color.

But the more I looked at it, the more that negative space took on a positive form for me. Color would have sullied it, made the sky less prominent which was a big factor in choosing to leave it as it is. This was painted not long after I had experienced my Eureka! moment with a painting that I called First View from August of 1994. I have discussed that painting several times here over the years, describing how when I first saw it, I knew that I had found something important to me that I didn’t even know I was seeking.

This painting felt like a continuation of that moment. Especially in its sky. It had the same sort of mixture of muted tones that created a complex color that was hard to describe. It was both beautiful and appealing to my eye but at the same time had the feel of a deep bruise in the sky. And that appealed to me, as well.

It created a great polarity of emotion for me within this seemingly simple piece. The negative space took on the form of snow in my mind and had a joyful feel in the way its clean, cool whiteness played off the muddle of the sky. But it also felt a bit wary and weary for me in the next moment, as though it represented enduring the journey through a long, hard winter that wasn’t yet over.

It’s been a piece that I come back to quite often when I review my past work. It has roughness and rawness that appeals to me. That’s something I still crave in my work but is sometimes hard to find after years of practice and refinement of whatever skills I possess.

In the refinement you sometimes lose a hard emotional edge that can’t be replicated no matter how far one’s abilities have progressed. I don’t know that I can properly explain that.

I think that’s why I am always looking for the next Eureka! moment. I know there’s something still out there but don’t yet know what it is. It will make itself known with unmistakable clarity when it comes.

If it comes.

Who knows? I may have already exceeded my given allotment of Eureka! moments. If so, I am grateful for the few I’ve been fortunate to experience. All were unexpected gifts. All were lifechanging.

What more can you ask?

I thought I would run the post below that was coupled with Winter Park about five years back. It doesn’t have an awful lot to do with the painting itself but speaks to how Eureka! moments and bits of serendipity sometimes lead a fortunate few to destinations they didn’t even know they were seeking. Perhaps at the end of that path in Winter Park…

[From 2021] I came across the word at the top, silience, while browsing through a site I’ve mentioned here a number of times in the past, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It reminded me of the many bits of serendipity that brought me to the life and career I have been so fortunate to have and how lucky I have been in encountering people who didn’t just walk by without noticing my work.

It makes me feel grateful, indeed. It also makes me feel somewhat guilty for my good fortune when I know with absolute certainty that there are equally or more talented people out there whose work and abilities has gone unnoticed. I often see or hear the work of folks who have yet to find an audience and wonder how this could be. I find myself rooting for them, wanting them to continue to do whatever they do so that their work might someday find its way into a situation that will shine a light on it.

It also makes me somewhat guilty for the time that I have wasted, for the bits of hubris I have displayed at times when mistaking the serendipity I have encountered for some sort of entitlement or inevitability.

It’s a needed reminder that any notice my future work receives must be earned anew and that I must take notice of and encourage the talents of others.

Here’s a well-done video for silience:

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Born Into Color

March 10, 2026 by redtreetimes

Born Into Color— At West End Gallery

There is not one little blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make men rejoice.

—John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536)

I was born into a world of color. Color is the basis for what I do and how I see and feel things. Color has an emotional power that triggers all kinds of responses in my mind.

Yes, I was born into color.

However, it didn’t always seem that way when I was a child. I was reared and learned much of what I knew from television. Well, from reading, too, but that isn’t part of this post. From life lessons and ethics to the value of goofiness and absurdity. My view of human behavior was greatly shaped, for better or worse, by the shows I saw on the television.

Black and white television.

We didn’t have a color television until 1973 so, the shows that defined my childhood were all seen in black and white. I took it on faith that Mr. Green Jeans on the Captain Kangaroo show really wore green pants. I am still not sure because my memory only remembers him in black and white. The gorgeous, deep colors of Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons did not exist in color for me except in those rare occasions when I saw one at a movie theatre.

The color in those rare sightings made color feel very luxurious then. I think it was the absence of color in my viewing diet at that time that developed my appreciation and desire for color, that made me see it as a rare and special thing. I found that color had the power to attract and hold my attention, to inspire me, to light a creative fuse.

A single color could, in itself and in combination with other colors and forms, provoke emotions of all sorts. It could lift me up or make me somber from one moment to the next. But primarily, it made me aware of our place in the natural world, that we were part of the colorful richness and beauty that is this world.

By extension, we humans, as part of this world, were also made from that same richness and beauty.

Yes, we were all born into color.

This begs for a much longer essay, one that I am not prepared to write this morning. Perhaps some time in the future, I will better address this. Or not. If I promise to do it, I will begin to feel it as a burden and, as a result, most likely will consciously avoid doing it.

That’s my modus operandi.

One of the things that make me who I am? I don’t know if that is being colorful or just a pain in the butt.

It makes me wonder about the origins of the term  a colorful character and why and when they began to use it to describe certain people.

Hey, that should have been the end of this post. I should have asked if this appreciation and desire for color makes me a colorful character. That would have been a great parting line.

Guess I missed that opportunity. Oh, well, next time. Or not. Who knows?

Here’s a favorite song that is definitely on point this morning. It’s She’s a Rainbow from the Rolling Stones in 1967. Geez, hard to believe this song is almost 60 years old. Great song and a great richly colored video. Good stuff all the way around.

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Big Red Sun Blues

March 9, 2026 by redtreetimes

 

One Path Ends and Another Begins— At West End Gallery

Sun is hangin’ in the sky
sinkin’ low and so am I
Just for the love of someone
and a big red sun
How’m I gonna lose
these big red sun blues

–Lucinda Williams, Big Red Sun Blues (1988)

I have things that have to be done this morning so this will be short. That’s difficult for me since what is taking place in the world as a result of the actions of the idjit-in-charge here begs for comment. Okay, I can’t resist. Here one quick comment:

The situation seems like a spoiled toddler who, left alone and unaware of unintended consequences, wants a cookie in a kitchen cabinet high above his head. All he can see before him is his want of that cookie. Nothing else matters. In attempting to get the cookie, this spoiled brat clumsily sets off a series of events– the aforementioned unintended consequences— that starts a raging fire that eventually burns down the whole house.

And then the whole neighborhood goes up in flames, including a school filled with children, a hospital, and a nursing home. Firefighters are injured and some die in the chaos of the blaze. As a reward, his parents, who have always let their little cretin do whatever his tiny black heart desires and never really liked their neighbors, reward him with a new box of cookies, telling him that all bad things that happen to him are the fault of someone else.

The End. Well, except that this miscreant goes on to become President, mishandle a pandemic, start a war, crash the economy of his country and many others, create a personal army to carry out his whims in his own country, build concentration camps, kill his own citizens, steal and fill his own pockets with the money of his country, demand bribes from companies and countries, spout lies and hatred endlessly, glorify his ugly face and name on anything including a memorial to another president, vilify and deport immigrants, hire perhaps the greatest group of criminal ass-kissing toadies ever assembled to be in his cabinet, use his power to push for the prosecution of his opponents, threaten to cancel elections and reinstate the draft to fight the war he started, and on and on. Oh, wait let’s not forget play golf, strongarm a worthy recipient to give him their Nobel Prize, and desecrate the ceremony for the return of fallen soldiers who died because this creepy manchild wanted a cookie.

But, as some folks I know have told me, he has some good policies they like. I don’t know what they could possibly be, but they’d have to be pretty goddamned good to justify this.

I am sure he will change course soon and things in America will once again be great in, what, about two weeks?

As Foghorn Leghorn might say, “That’s a joke, son!”

Just my take. Okay, that’s not a short comment. But that’s the way it will have to be this morning. At least I was able to use an analogy, a laundry list, and a Looney Tunes cartoon reference.

The Holy Trinity of my existence.

Okay, I really do have things that need doing. Here’s an early song, Big Red Sun Blues, from Lucinda Williams that matches up well with the painting at the top and my own big red sun blues as the neighborhood goes up in flames.

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Adding or Subtracting?

March 8, 2026 by redtreetimes

Kingdom Come– Now at West End Gallery

For as long as space endures,
And for as long as living beings remain,
Until then may I, too, abide
To dispel the misery of the world.

–Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama, Poem recited at conclusion of Nobel lecture (1989)

When I read the short poem above from the Dalai Lama the first thing that came to mind was a question: Has my life added to or subtracted from the misery of the world?

I don’t know. I’d like to think it has added more than it has subtracted but you never really know. Not sure any of us do know with absolute certainty. 

It’s one of those questions that is hard to objectively answer. We seldom fully know the full extent of the results of our words and actions. There are often words spoken or actions taken with little thought that might well have changed another’s life in some way. It might be in a small way, or it might have greater consequence– in both good and the not so good ways. 

We never fully know what sort of fuse we may light in others. It might produce a grand fireworks display in the sky or it may blow up in their face.

I guess the best we can do is to adhere to the words above from the Dalai Lama and try to consciously subtract from the misery of the world. 

To make a real effort to see the struggles of others and hear their voices and to offer a helping hand.

To not focus on our own attainment. To not take more than we need.

To be generous in all ways. To give more than we take.

To watch our words and actions, to see them from the perspective of those with which we are dealing. 

To speak words intended to heal and help, not to wound.

To put those words into action. 

There’s a lot more, of course. But the main objective is to simply be aware of our place in this world, no matter how small and insignificant it might seem, and to make that place better in some way. 

Keeping that in mind, we can rest assured that we will not have added to the misery of this world. 

It should be our task and mission.

That shouldn’t be too heavy a burden for any of us to carry. In fact, it becomes lighter with practice. 

Okay, sermon’s over. I’ve had my say. Here’s this week’s Sunday Morning Music. It’s an absolute favorite. This is The Weight from The Band and The Staples Singers taken from the film The Last Waltz, directed by Martin Scorsese.

You know what? I’m not even going to tell you to get the hell out of here this morning. Stick around if you like.

See? Watching my words.  If I can do it, you can do it.

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Why?

March 7, 2026 by redtreetimes

 

Beseech the Moons–At Principle Gallery

Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.

–Herman Melville, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852)

This passage from Melville pretty much sums up the painting shown here. It is about the questioning many of us put to the universe, asking why the world is as it is. Asking what our place in it is. Asking for guidance.

Begging for answers or for a truth to be revealed that displays clearly why life is worth living.

I say that many of us put these questions to the universe, but I may be wrong. It might be that only a small fraction of us feels the need to beg for answers to our questions while standing on a rooftop at night.

Perhaps most of us would simply stand in silent appreciation of the moons’ faces before us. Like a child that accepts what life puts before it without question. As Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård wrote in his 2015 novel Autumn, the first book in his Seasons Quartet:

What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children, life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until … a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?

This passage struck me pretty hard when I read it. I remember that feeling of being a child who is deeply immersed in the world, viewing each experience without judgement or question. Things that I might now see as being questionable or out of the norm felt then as being natural occurrences. Just part of the world that everyone experienced and knew. Or so I then thought.

I felt safe in that child’s world. Accepted and part of it. Nothing was unnatural to me then.

But at some point, as Knausgård writes, a distance appeared between my reality and that of the world. And grew. I can think of instances, some quite early, when that distance first made an appearance. I will spare sharing those instances with you.

But it was in those instances that I began to ask myself questions that never before seemed at place in my child’s world.

Why did some people do the things they do? Why are some people so unhappy or angry all the time? Why is there so much hate in the world? Why do people hurt each other?

It’s an endless list. And it has got longer and longer with each passing year.

I often would like to be that child once more looking up at the night sky and taking simple pleasure in the shape and color of the moon, the patterns formed by the stars, or the movement of the clouds across it without asking what the hell the point of it all was.

I remember nights like that when I was kid, sleeping in the summer on a lawn chair out in the yard in my sleeping bag under an amazing sky. There was a lot less light pollution in the night sky then so the stars would put on a quite a show in the dark sky. I have no memory of putting any questions to that sky then.

Just the beauty and thrill of it was all I remember. Awe.

I have instances now where that feeling returns. I momentarily see the world with childlike wonder, accepting it without question. It is a wonderful moment that makes me feel once more immersed in the world.

I find myself asking why I can’t live my entire life as that child. Then I remember that there is so much suffering in this world and to not ask the question Why? is not something the person I am now can do without feeling some sort of deep guilt.

So, here I am standing on my roof, asking the question Why? to the night sky with all its moons that I can and cannot see. I never get an answer. Don’t expect one. Ever. Part of me thinks that just asking that question Why? is just what I have to do, that thing that makes life worth living for me.

And so long as I get a visit once in a while from that carefree and trusting child that still resides in me, I am good with that.

It is as it should be. Just as a child would see it.

Here’s Annie Lennox asking that same question, Why.

Now get off my roof before the child in me takes a powder and my grumpy old self comes back to push you off. Don’t ask me why I would do that. It’s just the way it is. Now, git.

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