field notes:

3.27.2003

You can find more great pictures of the people of Iraq here.
If you're looking for coverage of the war from non-embedded journalistic sources, I've compiled a few links. Later, I'll post them and others in the column to the right:
Iraq Peace Team

Electronic Iraq

Iraq Body Count

Iraq Journal

Where Is Raed? A good question now, since he hasn't posted in a couple of days. Hopefully, he will get service back, and is okay and we'll hear more from him soon. But for now, you can read his coverage of life in Baghdad through the 24th.

Godspeed Raed, and everybody else who finds themselves in Iraq today.

posted by Lisa on 8:30 AM link |

3.22.2003

How can it be both things?

The first day of spring and a day of horrible war. How can I hold the grace for one and feel despair of the second in the same day, in the same hour?

Inside, I watch the bombs, and outside, buttercups, forget-me-nots, daffodils and lilies sway me.

I returned to an Osprey nest that I plan to monitor throughout the year. It sits suspended in First Valley and from a trail above we're able to see down inside. It seems sturdier than last year's nest, and I wonder if the same two birds built it. One of them sits as if they have eggs but doesn't move off the spot so I'm unable to know for sure. My friend has a scope and we plan to watch as the chicks hatch, are fed, grow and fledge.

Outside my window a beautiful hummingbird, is it Allen's or Rufous, rests on a twig, tiny as a leaf. My heart breaks with the sight of one so delicate.

The pain of war makes the spring beauty more piercing. The impossible green of a newly born leaf set against the oaks' still mossy torso makes me want to rip open my breast and cry. Every blossom a miracle in a world like this: where the unthinkable happens.

Where the unthinkable is set to music, and graphics are created, and commentators talk about the unspeakable. Where do they find the words?

posted by Lisa on 9:15 AM link |

3.15.2003

Brian Eno wrote a nice little essay about America that was only published in the European version of Time magazine. Wouldn't it have been great if they had published it in the American version?

I feel like I'm waking up from a long sleep. It's a cold and rainy day in Laguna Beach, I had my first walk up at 'Top of the World' amongst the wildflowers and cacti of Laguna Canyon.

I shared a bedroom with my 4 1/2 year old niece a couple of nights this week.

Finally asleep
child breathes sweet dampness into
this world from that

My 10 year old niece and I had a day off by ourselves going to the Getty, seeing the Rembrandts and romping in the gardens; dinner at Shakey's pizza, and a Los Angeles showing of 'Rivers and Tides' at the Nuart in Santa Monica.

Where's the gasoline?
this way that way still no gas
Sherman Oaks and back again

Hot chocolate
I pour coffee in the cup
double whammy!

I met a friend for breakfast in Costa Mesa, around the corner from my alum high school.

Seventeenth street
so comforting this one block
it remains unchanged

Before breakfast, at 'Plums', waiting for my friend.

These young faces
so much ahead to change them
order pancakes

these old faces
serious eating oatmeal
so much didn't happen

these young women
I watch for keys to my youth
they don't notice me

posted by Lisa on 12:43 PM link |

I wrote this post on the fourth of march before I left for this trip to L.A. I couldn't post it because of blogger troubles. I've been an unusually silent blogger because of a family emergency down here in L.A. All is now well, but it's been a very different trip than what I'd imagined. Read on, and I'll post more after. I'm still in Laguna Beach, but I'm back to field notes.

From 'How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel' by Alain de Botton, a bold, somewhat cheeky, irreverent yet unflippant 'self-help' book based upon a careful reading of Proust's In Search of Lost Time:

"The Lesson? To hang on to the performance, to read the newspaper as though it were only the tip of a tragic or comic novel, and to use thirty pages to describe a fall into sleep when need be. And if there is no time, at least to resist the approach of Alfred Humblot at Ollendorf and Jacques Madeleine at Fasquelle, which Proust defined as "the self-satisfaction felt by 'busy' men -- however idiotic their business -- at 'not haviing time' to do what you are doing."

More another time...

I've had little time to write lately...and miss this correspondence greatly. I hope to have some time in the coming weeks. Look for me here!

I leave this afternoon for another road trip to L.A.

But first:

Thoughts on Poetry
by Basho

"When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write. Quickly say what is in your mind; never hesitate a moment."

"If you describe a green willow in the spring rain it will be excellent as a renga verse. Haikai, however, needs more homely images, such as a crow picking mud snails in a rice paddy."

from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa

posted by Lisa on 9:03 AM link |