Redtree Times

Speaking Truth to Power — At West End Gallery

A lot of people aren’t encouraged. I’m sort of a patron saint of early losers.

Ya know: Fix your legs and your nose and your voice, and maybe you’ll be a little something.

Or I was told to give up and make room for the talented and beautiful people. I get letters from people who hear this. People walk up to me and ask for advice. I’ve narrowed down my response: Prove them wrong.

— Ruth Gordon, Interview with James Grissom, 1984

Man, I adore Ruth Gordon. Don’t know that there could be any better or more concise piece of advice.

Prove them wrong.

That thought has been one of the driving forces behind any success I have ever had. I may have talked about that here before. At the moment, I can’t recall. I know I have written about how I was affected by people walking by my work when I first publicly exhibited it without even glancing at it. How it pissed me off and I left telling myself that I would show them.

In retrospect, I realize I was actually angry at myself at that moment for not showing what I had in me. Their perceived snub was actually just what I needed– a challenge and a wakeup call. It spoke to my competitive nature, especially when the competition involves pushing me out of default position of inertia. A challenge always wakes me up.

I probably wouldn’t even got to that point had it not been an earlier encounter that turned into a challenge to me. Several years before I was at a low point in my life. My business had crashed and burned a few years earlier and I spent a couple of years after that in auto sales, something I was not suited for in so many ways. I was stumbling blindly in my early 30’s and was working as day laborer for my brother putting up swimming pools in the summer and building and cleaning chimneys in the fall.

One rainy fall day that had cut our workday short, I found myself at the home of a well-known psychic in the Syracuse area. He was known for his work at psychically locating lost children and abilities were spoken of in glowing terms. As I said, I was stumbling around at that point, looking for any sign, any direction, that might set me on a clear and singular path. Maybe this guy could help me? I wasn’t sure but I was up for anything.

I went into his place that afternoon in my work clothes wet and soot-covered from cleaning chimneys. I don’t remember much of the ‘reading‘ he gave me that day except for one short comment he made. At one point, he said, “Let’s see. What are you meant for? I sense that you have no artistic or musical talents so we can rule that out.”

The rest is a blur lost in my memory, but that comment remains. I had been quiet in dealing with him so as not to give him any verbal cues that he could run with. It felt to me that he wasn’t getting much from me and began to judge me and base his reading on what I was presenting him physically–a silent, wet, sad guy in grimy work clothes.

I left his place a short time, muttering, “Screw that guy. I’ll show him.”

I hadn’t thought of this in a while, but it came back to me recently. I never really thought of it as a source of inspiration but looking back, that moment as I left his place may have very well set me down the path I am currently on. It set off a series of seemingly unrelated events that ended up with me finally picking up a paint brush after being pretty banged up in a fall off a ladder a year or two after his ‘reading.’

Everything that followed that fall may not have happened at all without his offhand comment that made me determined to prove him wrong. I was firm in my desire to be the only person to determine who or what I was or was not. Not him nor some nebulous feeling that he got from the visual cues I presented him with on a wet rainy fall day.

Of course, there is an argument to be made that he was not wrong. Maybe the last thirty-plus years have been smoke and mirrors, a product of my sheer determination to prove him wrong. I have to admit there are down days when I think he was not totally wrong.

But just a reminder of that comment from him is enough to set me off again. Maybe, like Ruth says, I was an early loser up to that point. Maybe. It sure felt like it. But his trivial judgement set me free in a way.

I will go to my deathbed proving him wrong.

I don’t know how this going to come across. Guess it doesn’t matter. You may not relate to this, but I think many of you out there have been told what you are or aren’t too many times by people who only have a surface knowledge of your being, your desires, or your abilities.

If that applies to you, heed the advice from Ruth: Prove them wrong.

Here’s a favorite song from the Kinks that I’ve shared it several times in the past. It’s been about four years and it feels right for this post so here’s I’m Not Like Everybody Else.

By the way, my first fraction of radiation went well. I was told to not expect any real side effect until after the third or fourth fraction, at which point the effects will mount up for a few weeks before subsiding in a few more. Hey, good to have something to look forward to!

Edgar Degas Beach Scene (1870)

— William Butler Yeats, From To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing (1912-13)

Starting radiation this morning so time is short. I am rerunning a post from several years back that has been garnering a lot more attention recently. It probably has something to do with that twat in our White House who posted “Good, I’m glad he’s dead” after learning of the death of Robert Mueller.

This is where we have found ourselves as a nation, stuck beneath the thumb of a government under the control of the least suitable, most despicable creature in our history. Maybe anyone’s history. Gone is any sense of decorum, integrity, or character. He has so bamboozled us that we find ourselves being dragged into angry debates about his impropriety rather than calling out the mass of corruption, deceit, criminality, and the multiple atrocities he foists on us and the world on a daily basis.

I wrote this yesterday afternoon in order save some time but had to delete a big chunk of it this morning. It was too angry. Writing about anticipating the death of someone else, even someone for whom I have absolutely no respect, seems like a stain on my own character. It goes against everything I believe in.

That is one of the many ways he has changed this country for the worse–forcing so many of us to compromise our beliefs, ethics, and morals.

Making us become something less than what we know ourselves to be. 

Among the multitude of his crimes and transgressions, that may be the most unforgivable.

Hope you’ll read the post below. There have always been liars without shame. And there have always been those who stood against them with little effect, often losing everything in the process but their honor. You may think differently, but it is the latter who loom as giants in my mind.

Time ultimately reveals those honorable giants.

May we all live on as the giants we are meant to be.

[From 2019]

I can’t say that I am a big Bill Kristol fan, the conservative political analyst, but yesterday he deftly used the excerpt above from a W.B. Yeats poem to describe the Mueller hearing of the day before. It so well described an honorable man dealing with the current occupant of the white house and his minions in congress that I wanted to know a bit more about the story behind that particular piece of verse.

It turns out that the poem from which those lines come is titled To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing that was included in a small volume of poems called Poems Written in Discouragement 1912-13.

The poem is at the bottom of the page and at first I thought it referred to someone in Yeats’ universe, a writer or artist or playwright, who had put their whole being into their work for years and years only to never be recognized for that work while others– who this person at least equals in talent and effort– gain greater recognition.

That seemed like a logical interpretation. The history of humankind is filled with such stories, especially in the arts.

Turns out there is a different story behind the poem.

It has to do with an Irish art dealer named Hugh Lane who was trying to establish a public art gallery that would bring modern art of that time to Dublin near the beginning of the 20th century. He proposed to give the city his collection of 39 modern masterworks from Renoir, Manet, Degas, Monet, Daumier, Pissarro and Morisot so that they might establish a museum/gallery. The paintings shown here, the beach painting from Edgar Degas at the top and The Umbrellas from Renoir on the right were part of Lane’s collection.

At that time, Dublin had yet to display the new art of the age and its city fathers and religious leaders were not swayed by the offer. They viewed the new art as being decadent and with an air of libertinism to it. This turned into a heated public battle in which Yeats and others in the Irish artistic community fought to bring the new art culture to the country.

Lane and Yeats eventually lost and Lane’s collection eventually ended up in the possession of the National Gallery of Great Britain after Lane died in the sinking of the Lusitania by German U-boats in 1915. He was returning from New York where he had sold two great pieces (one was a favorite of mine, Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell) to what would become the Frick Collection. The Lusitania was only eleven miles from the Irish coast.

The battle for Hugh Lane’s collection has been fought continuously for the past century between the National Gallery and the Irish government. There are a lot more details so I am not going to get into the whole affair here. There is great article in the Guardian that goes into everything that transpired.

I just find it interesting how Yeats could turn a poem that dealt with the loss of a public debate about art and philanthropy into a poem that feels like it could be applied to many people who are in creative fields and may never realize the recognition their work may well deserve.

Or to a prosecutor dealing with a shameless liar along with his corrupt cadre of willing accomplices.

Here’s the whole poem:

Beguiled– At West End Gallery

But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place.

–Jean-Paul Sartre, The Diary of Antoine Roquentin (1949)

How many of us recognize those changes, the small metamorphoses as Sartre described them, that take place within us on a constant basis? How we see ourselves has us believing that we are the same as we always were but that can’t be, can it?

I tend to believe that most of us simply adapt to the accumulating changes, whether or not we recognize them. But for some, is there a time of veritable revolution when a tipping point is reached and the whole of those changes far outweighs our long-held identity of self?

What happens on that day? Does the identity we once knew as ourselves succumb to the revolutionary new self and agree to a new form of co-existence between the two? Or is it such a divisive conflict that the old self will not allow the new self to rule and, as a result, destroys both?

I don’t know. Don’t even know why this came up this morning. Maybe it is because I have had that conflict, that veritable revolution, within myself years ago, when the new identity began to exert its will over the old me. For a while back then, there was a lot of doubt as to the outcome. Thankfully, both still exist but the old me defers in almost all cases to the new. The old me seems okay with the changes wrought by that veritable revolution. Seems glad to just in a hand in the whole thing.

As always, not sure this makes any sense to anyone. A lot of ramblings made before 6 AM are suspect that way. Thanks for bearing with me– the new me, not the old.

Okay. Here’s a song for this week’s Sunday Morning Music. It’s Holding Back the Years from Simply Red. I chose it just because I haven’t heard it in quote some time. It’s one of those tunes where my appreciation for it has grown over the years since it was released back in 1985. Back when I was the old me. It hits closer to the bone now. I don’t usually like to play (or watch) 1980’s music videos but this one is pretty well done, focusing on singer Mick Hucknall who also wrote the song, which deals with coming to terms with the changes in his life.

A little more info on the song from Wikipedia: Hucknall wrote the song when he was 17, while living at his father’s house. In a 2018 interview, Hucknall said the song was inspired by a member of the teaching staff at Manchester School of Art, where Hucknall was a fine-art student: the lecturer suggested the greatest paintings are produced when the artist is working in a stream of consciousness, which Hucknall then tried to apply to songwriting – “Holding Back the Years” was the second song he wrote using this method.

Wise lecturer…

Hear My Plea– 2026

If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon.

–George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)

There’s forever been a debate about the existence of God. I am not going to get into that. That’s can of worms I don’t want to put my hand in this morning.

But I did want to briefly look at the famous quote from Voltaire: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.“

Whenever I think of this line, I am left wondering if it was our human need to have our voices heard that would have made the creation of God a necessity.

This need to be heard is something that I have talked about here many, many times. It’s the thing that has driven my every creative urge for all my life. I think most people, from the very young to the very old among us, feel that their voices often, if not always, go unheard.

You would think that with the rise of social media that everyone would feel there was an outlet for this voice to be heard. That might fill the void for many, but it often seems that it has resulted in a sort of Tower of Babel situation.

There is sound but no understanding in it.

I think we desire to be both heard and understood. We desire the interaction that rewards us with a question from someone other than ourselves, a question that shows they are interested and concerned in us.

A friend of mine has made the observation that people ask a lot less questions that they once did. Conversation and engagement with a back-and-forth discussion on subjects with any real depth have gone by the wayside. We make statements now that seem to take the form of social media comments.

Don’t get me wrong, I am no better than anyone else on this matter. While I want to have my voice heard, I often avoid true interaction. Instead, I make statements. Like this, I guess. Maybe my work does a better job of it than me. I often think that more interaction with others occurs within my work than with myself.

And I suppose that is one way to be heard. A way to send out my pleas into the universe. Little prayers in the event that God does not exist. Or does.

It’s not my place to say. I just stand here on my roof asking questions that I hope will be heard.

And somehow that is an answer in itself. But that’s something for another day.

Here’s a song that may have nothing to do with this post or whatever you want to call it. It’s a song from Avi Kaplan. Very strong and richly distinctive voice. If you don’t know who he is, Kaplan was the bass singer for the a capella group Pentatonix before going solo in 2017. This is his Change on the Rise. 

Maybe it does fit after all. Who knows?

Now get off my roof–I got some pleading to do this morning…

Something Beyond— At West End Gallery

The more intensely we feel about an idea or a goal, the more assuredly the idea, buried deep in our subconscious, will direct us along the path to its fulfillment.

—Earl Nightingale

Feeling a little under the weather. You might think it was from my treatment, but it actually has more to do with a visit to our vet yesterday with one of my three studio cats, Gary. Yes, I named him Gary– but that’s a story for some other time. Anyway, Gary has never been to the vet so we weren’t sure how he would react. He is very skittish and quick to react. I did mention we share a name?

Let’s just say it didn’t go well. Without going into all the details, Gary somehow received his needed shots and I ended up going to Urgent Care after he clamped his jaws pretty hard onto my thumb. I was given antibiotics. I am glad I went since my thumb last night was extremely sore, hot, and swollen with a nice purplish plum hue.

Still sore this morning though less so but I am left with a pretty good headache. As a result, I am replaying this post that has run several times over the years. I run this post about every five years so it’s about due. As I say below, there are lessons to be learned in every endeavor we undertake. For instance, I learned yesterday to not try to grab a mad cat.

Anyway, here’s that post from a number of years back.

It’s funny sometimes what you take from an experience in your life. At one point in my life I was in the retail car business, working at a Honda dealership in Ithaca both as a salesman and for a time as a finance manager. In order to keep their sales staff engaged and excited about pushing their product, the management there would periodically send us to seminars with industry-specific motivational speakers. They would also provide sets of motivational tapes from other speakers that they would encourage us to listen to in our free time.

One of the sets of tapes was from famed motivational speaker Earl Nightingale who had a deep and engaging voice that added a serious dimension to whatever he said. As I listened to his tapes, it was easy to feel my interest growing as he told his little tales, and his lessons began registering within me.

One of his stories was a short retelling of a classic lecture from the early 1900’s called Acres of Diamonds from Russell H. Conwell (1843-1925), an interesting fellow who was a Baptist minister, a lawyer, a philanthropist and the founder and first president of Temple University.

The lecture, one that Conwell delivered over 5000 times during his lifetime, made the point that the riches we seek are often right in our own backyards. His tale is of an African farmer who sells his farm in order to go in search of diamonds and finds nothing but failure. His search ends with his suicide. Meanwhile, the man who took over the farm soon found an abundance of diamonds on the property and established one of the largest diamond mines in Africa.

There were a lot of lessons to be learned from this tale. obviously. But the primary lesson for me was that I had to leave the car business– it was not my backyard. It was the place to which I had come in search of my own diamonds. I had not even, at that point, began to search my own backyard.

I am not sure if that was the message that management had been hoping would sink in.

Or maybe it was. I was, after all, a pretty unmotivated employee at that point.

Their intent didn’t matter as I was soon on a different path, one that ultimately led me here, thankfully. I like to think that I have found the diamonds that were always under my feet. Or in my heart and mind. However you want to look at it.

The other part of Nightingale’s message was that you had to set a course, aim for a destination. Everything was possible if you knew where you wanted to go and truly set your mind to it. He gave a laundry list of great human accomplishments that were achieved once we put our minds and wills in motion towards their fulfillment.

That resonated strongly with me then and now. I had seen many people over the years who seemed deeply unhappy in their lives and most had no direction going forward, no destination for which they were working. Aimless, they drifted like a rudderless boat on the sea, going wherever the strongest current took them without having any influence over this motion.

If you can name it, you can do it in some form. Having a desired destination allows the mind, often subconsciously, to create a course that leads to that place.

As I said, it’s funny how things influence you. It’s been well over thirty years since I heard those words, but they still resonate strongly with me, even now. I try to be always conscious of the goals I set, knowing that the mind and the universe will always try to make a way for the possibility of achievement.

Most every job I had in my earlier life gave me little satisfaction and meager wages. However, the lessons learned from each were worth far more than financial rewards. They taught me what I was and was not. In this case, I learned that what I wanted most was to work my own fields, to find what riches I might sow and reap in that soil.

And I now always keep an eye out for a flash of light, a glint under my feet, that might be my own diamond.

Lesson learned. All I could ask and more…

Doug’s First Day on the Job (1994)

You got me workin’, boss man, workin’ ’round the clock
I wanna little drink of water, but you won’t let Jimmy stop
Big boss man, can’t you hear me when I call?
Well, you ain’t so big, you just tall, that’s all

— Jimmy Reed, Big Boss Man (1960)

Lately I’ve been looking at some early work here. Most of it has tentacles that reach forward into my current work, even if it is only barely visible. The small piece above from mid 1994 is very much a standalone piece. I can’t say that it had any influence on where or how I proceeded from it.

Actually, I can’t really say why this piece came about in the first place.

Maybe I was looking for a chuckle at the time because it makes me smile every time I pull it out. I kind of have doubts about that. I believe it was started with serious intent though I can’t remember if there was any real vision beforehand. I think it was one of those pieces where I make a mark, paint a block of color, and let it take over from that starting point.

Sometimes it takes you somewhere that speaks to the serious part of yourself. Sometimes, it doesn’t.

I think the latter applies here. It felt serious at first but the further I got into it, the more absurd it felt. Though much of the imagery feels dark in nature, it made me laugh when I finished it. The feeling that immediately hit me was the sense of chaos and confusion I felt on the first day at every job I ever had. I saw the infighting and bickering between the other employees in the scrum of arms in the background and the authoritarian figure in the front represented every middle manager I had come across who felt ridiculously inflated by the power of their position.

I called the painting Doug’s First Day on the Job.

Now, I have to cut some slack for those managers I encountered. I was a really good employee when given a loose leash and was allowed to freestyle a bit. They had to allow me to be boss of my own position. I don’t know if I can explain this in a way that makes sense, but I only prospered where I had some freehand in doing my job.

The looser the reins, the better the results for myself and the company. Well, at least I thought this was the case. I may be deluded a bit in my memories. However, I do remember that every job eventually ended for me when the bosses tried to exert their authority over me and rein me in.

They may have been right in some cases. It doesn’t really matter. I did eventually realize that I didn’t like to be bossed around or forced to do anything. I also recognized that finding contentment and fulfillment in my work would require that I was the boss, that I had control over most every decision.

My way or the highway is a fine saying when you work for yourself. I have found that middle managers or other bosses are not fond of being told that.

That is probably why what I do and why it best suits me. And why I solely work alone. Every time I think I might have been happier doing something else, I just have to take a look at this painting from back in the day when I was still somewhat in that world and my doubts are dispelled immediately.

As I said, this is a one-off, an anomaly in the body of my work. But I like it very much. I like its color, forms, and flow. And more than that, it makes me smile while serving as a reminder of one reason why I am doing what I do.

That’s a pretty sweet deal.

Here’s a song from Jimmy Reed, Big Boss Man, that fits here like the glove on the big boss man in the painting at the top. I found a Jimmy Reed album in a used record store when I was teenager and fell in love with so many of his songs. So many of them are imprinted in my memory. This song has been with me for close to fifty years. Maybe it was this song that shaped my views of bosses?

I don’t know. Give a listen and if you need directions on getting out of here, the boss at the top will point you in the right direction.

Guiding Light– At West End Gallery

The variety of minds served the economy of nature in many ways. The Creator, who designed the human brain for activity, had insured the restlessness of all minds by enabling no single one to envisage all the qualities of the creation. Since no one by himself could aspire to a serene knowledge of the whole truth, all men had been drawn into an active, exploratory and cooperative attitude.

–Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948)

I like this idea from historian Daniel Boorstin, best known for his trilogy, The Discoverers, The Creators, and The Seekers. He suggests that perhaps we all have a small piece of a larger puzzle. A puzzle that, by design, none of us can see in its entirety. And, also by design, we are given a curious and restless nature that provokes our attempts in seeing beyond our own specific pieces and that part of the puzzle we inhabit.

Can we ever see the puzzle in its entirety?

I suppose it might someday happen if we could learn to cooperate and collaborate honestly and equitably across the whole spectrum of those things that seem to separate us– geography, race, religion, sex, language, entrenched traditions and fears, greed, and so on.

Is that possible?

From the limited view I have from my own puzzle piece, it seems unlikely right. I have doubts. It would take a tremendous effort beyond anything we have ever attempted before to realign thought and belief in a way that could unite and harmonize the whole of this world.

Are we up to such a challenge?

I don’t know. Again, from where my puzzle piece sits it seems unlikely. But if our pieces are really meant to come together to create a sprawling tapestry capturing the beauty and magnificence that is ever-present in this world, then maybe it is possible.

Until then, perhaps the best we can do is to join with the puzzle pieces nearest ourselves. Being all part of the same puzzle, we all possess bits of the beauty and magnificence of it.

I am ending that bit here. Like most of my posts, this is written as it falls out of my head. Sometimes they begin at one point and sometimes veer from where I thought they might go.

This post was originally supposed to be about how each of my paintings represent my puzzle piece. It gives you only the view from where I imagine I sit. It gives you only a small view of my sky and landscape. It can never fully capture the breath and width and depth of the world beyond my limited view of it.

But that limitation should not keep me from trying to express the beauty and magnificence that is present in the narrow scope of my individual puzzle piece. Perhaps by doing so, my puzzle piece more easily interlocks with your piece or with the many others surrounding me.  And these enjoined pieces create a harmony that enhances the beauty and magnificence of each puzzle piece.

The moral of this this story? Sometimes we may feel like a puzzle piece that has fallen under the sofa, discarded and alone. At such times remember that you still possess the beauty and magnificence of the whole puzzle in you. Remember that as dark and scary as it might seem under that sofa, someone is looking for you because without you there is a hole in the puzzle.

And we can’t have that, can we?

I am not going to reread this right now so I can’t vouch for clarity, grammar, or continuity of thought. I have to get to work on my own puzzle piece. That’s what I do and the best that I can do from where I sit in this puzzle.

Here’s a song that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with to do with puzzles but it does call for a coming together. Kind of. It’s the classic Beatles song, Come Together, from singer Morgan James, who came to prominence with Postmodern Jukebox. I like the simplicity and spareness of this kitchen performance. Good stuff.

Now get out of here and go work on your own puzzle piece. You got a rough edge right there that needs to be smoothed off a bit. But don’t fret– you’re still beautiful. And magnificent.

Norah McGuinness (Irish, 1901-1980)– River to the Sea, 1959

Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse.

–-George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (1904)

I chuckled when I came across the lines above from a G.B. Shaw play that centered on his native land. My reading of this is that he sees it as a transformative place with a beauty that inspires a balloon filled with lofty dreaming and a harshness that bursts that balloon. As a result, those there sit at two ends of a spectrum, either as aspirational dreamers or angry cynics. Very little neutrality.

I don’t know that this is true, either then or now. Most likely it was seen as such by Shaw for its dramatic effect. I can’t really say. But Ireland, as both a real and mythic land, certainly does have a lasting and sometimes transformative effect on people. Few, if any, holidays have people proudly their claiming ancestral roots in any country like they do for St. Patrick’s Day.

I have written a number of times before here about my Irish ancestors. My great-great-grandfather worked on the railroads being built here in the Northeast in the second half of the 19th century and his family settled in the Binghamton, NY area. Most of his family worked in the tobacco industry, either as leaf strippers or cigar rollers.

Like any family, it was marked by periods of happiness, endless hard labor, and tragedy.

A typical American story.

Below is post from a few years ago that I am sharing on this St. Patrick’s Day, mainly because I like the painting and the song.

My thoughts on this holiday always go to my mom whose birthday fell on this date. She would have been 94 today. I grew up thinking we had Irish blood through my mom’s family since her mother’s family name was O’Dell, which sounded pretty Irish. Found out through genealogy that it was not Irish at all.

It was originally Wodell when they first arrived here in the 17th century. The name shifted over the early American generations to O’Dell.

Actually, they were English. Very English.

Turns out that the Irish part of my ancestry came through my dad’s side. Took many years to find much on it but with DNA testing and the greater access to records via the web, I found that these ancestors, the Tobin family, came out of Barnlough in County Tipperary in Ireland in 1852 as a whole family unit, coming through NY then heading to Rhode Island. Both parents died within months after landing here and their children, many of adult age, dispersed across the region with some heading west and settling in Chicago in the expansion that took place in the second half of the 19th century.

A typical American story.

For this St. Paddy’s Day, I thought I would share a piece of art above from a well-known Irish artist and illustrator of the 20th century, Norah McGuinness. I really liked– and felt a kinship with– her use of color and forms in this piece. She worked in a visual language that I can understand.

Also, let’s hear an Irish song. Well, it’s an Irish song written by an American that has become a very popular song in the Irish culture. It’s The Galway Girl from Steve Earle. The version below is from the Irish musician Mundy who had a hit with this song in Ireland in 2008 that topped the charts for several weeks. I think you can hear why it caught on so well.

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.