It is a not so well known - or to some of my friends, it is very well known, that I am deeply in love with Rumi.

I know, he has been dead for more than 700 years, but face it, a more passionate man is uncommon at best.

Another little known fact is that I have a new camera and enjoy setting some pretty crazy goals for myself. This week I actually completed a couple of said goals (these are mostly topics on my 43things.com goal list) and in clearing those goals away, it made space for some completely new ones.

This latest goal is one of my favorites yet to date.

Ah-hem. Here goes nothing.

My goal is to photograph 43 People Reading Rumi in Bakersfield.  I figure in bringing this goal to light, I will be working on several things at the same time.

One, I will be completely "out there" with something I love. I mean, it is more than a little odd to ask people, "Hey, can I take your photo?" (I just finished that goal of taking photos of 43 people around town and many of those were taken secretly!). The nature of this goal means I need to make the request for a photo AND THEN I have to say, "Oh, by the way, please read Rumi while I snap your photo."

So far, though, I have taken photos of three people and all three... well, take a look at them... and know I didn't pose any of them, I just snapped away while they read.

Here is Coryn, reading away while at Dagny's. She is obviously enthralled and I think that person behind her is secretly wishing I had asked to be in some snaps, too...

Diana was minding her own business when I wandered into Barnes and Noble's poetry section last night. I was planning on reviewing some books for my Amazon Reviewing Goal, but I sneaked up to her with a Mary Oliver book (Thirst) and was immediately inspired to share Rumi.....

I've met Courtney several times through her brother, Michael Pawloski. I didn't realize I would soon have her falling in love with Rumi as well. She was so inspired she held hands with both Diana and that cute guy sitting next to her as she read Rumi... aloud no less. Can you say, photographer had tears in her eyes she was so happy?!

So - would you like to be photographed reading Rumi? I would love to photograph people in unusual spots... although Dagny's and Barnes and Noble worked well, it would be fun to shoot all over the place here in town, too.

If you are interested - just respond to this blog....

Oodles of smiles over here. You will LOVE Rumi if you don't already!

The other night at Refresh Rhyme Scheme's Poetry Night at Sandrini's I was talking to my friend, Coryn McBride, about writing practices, artistic practices and the like.

One of my favorite ways to "warm up" or practice is to use the sacred art form of haiku. I am not a haiku traditionalist, although I have studied the art to a certain extent... I just love the freedom of expression within its seventeen syllable container.

I have been having such fun with my new camera, snapping shots of everything everywhere that I kind of put two-and-two together and thought, "What if we wrote a haiku a day?" and then "Well, sometimes people get stuck in not knowing what to write about... so, what then?"

So I thought, "witness the moment in a photo..." so here I am, with a photo and a haiku I just breathed in and out... and an invitation to try it out for yourself.

Simply look at the photo and then write a three line haiku - the first line is five syllables, the second is seven syllables and the third line is five syllables... seventeen... or about the length of an inhale and an exhale.

Here is my haiku:

Power lines block God - -
Electric sparks pass by
Who says where he is?

Yesterday I fell into a vat of bleccchy stuff. I don't like when that happens. It reminds me of when my life was like "Pleasantville" all grey and mealy. Nothingness, but not in the open nothingless place I have discovered since... it was that plugged up nothingness place.

The first – and only – time I saw the movie "Pleasantville" I couldn't take it. I got up and paced around the movie theatre, it hit too close to home. That was who and what I had become. Not just black and white, but grey. Bland. Unfeeling, asleep, uninteresting and worse than that - - uninterested in life at all.

I had a big a-ha yesterday.

I was feeling disconnected. I noticed it felt familiar, sleepy.  It felt eerily like being in Pleasantville all over again.

I sat with that realization and it literally made me woozy and I found myself, metaphorically, face down in what I call "bleccchhh."

Coryn asked me last night at Sandrini's about "waking up" last night. She was curious about how it came about for me.

It was July 19, 1999 that the alarm sounded, the call to get up and out of my version of  Pleasantville for once and for all.

I was working at County Mental Health, assigned as a Deputy Conservator to serve folks who were assigned to have me from the courts because they were - what the system calls "Gravely Disabled" due to a Mental Illness. I won't bore you with all the details of what that entails, but my clients were the folks who were the toughest to treat, the ones who didn't wind up in jail…. That whole Mental Health folks winding up in jail is another of my soap-box issues, but I will leave it alone for this blog.

The particular client who issued my alarm-wake up was the last client we moved from State Hospital into the community. He was diagnosed with  Schizoaffective Disorder and also had Sociopathic Tendencies.  He was very intelligent – grandiosity anyone? – and he had, in the past, talked his way off an acute unit where he had been placed on a 72 hour hold. Yes. Bizarre. One of the KMC Psychiatrists wanted to order a battery of tests because of one of this guy's claims, one that he had made (delusionally) for years and years and years. I thought I was going to lose my mind.

The thing is, I loved my clients, all of them – this guy, too – so when he threatened to kill me and my family with specific details on how he would carry it out? I was more than a little bit freaked out. Especially on the heels of another death threat from another client. (And I thought they all liked me, LOL.)

I was seeing a therapist after that first threat and after the second, I decided to call in the big guns and went to an MD – who took me off work for a stress leave which started a long spiral downwards… you would think taking a stress leave was akin to a capital crime from how the system treated me.

All this started with the Death Threat that came on July 19, 1999.

Several months later, on October 29, 1999 I stood overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica. I had just had a session with the "County Prostitute Psychiatrist" whose main job was to tell the Workman's Comp folks that I was, in fact, crazy not because of my work incident, but because I was crazy anyway.

Here's the irony.

I stood overlooking the Pacific Ocean in a state of complete presence and peace. I had a flashing awareness that it no longer mattered what anyone thought about my state of being or where it came from. What mattered was who I knew that I was and what I did with that knowing. I sat there and wrote and wrote and wrote and breathed and breathed and talked to a homeless woman… I noticed the grass seemed to be a more vivid green and as the sun set over the ocean, I saw so much life within it and within everything from then on - it was truly an amazing moment.

I had woken up. Out of the blue, into the light – I had woken up. A fine exclamation point was that the County Paid Psychiatrist came back with "Yeah, it was the job that made her nuts. " We had so much fun during all my tests it surprised me…. It must have been a part of my awakening… having fun with a County Prostitute Psychiatrist in spite of what I knew his main task was to be…. I was completely 100% myself and, I remember now, so was he.

So yeah, sure – from time to time I fall into big vats of bleccchhh. And it is ok to fall into them from time to time. It keeps life interesting.

Back when my life was like Pleasantville... the early parts of Pleasantville, I wouldn't notice that the vat of bleccchy stuff smells like play-doh, generic play-doh ofcourse... or the way it is slightly sticky but not in a sweet way, more like glue... old glue that has been open and is almost but not quite dry.

I wouldn't have noticed the crows standing around the vat, waiting to make fun of me as I struggle to lift my head from the blechhh. I wouldn't have been able to hear the call of the chickadee, right beyond the crows, reminding me the vat isn't everything, it is just a little something that shows up once in a while to remind me.

Thank GAWD my way of life isn't like Pleasantville.

I just need to remember to put my toes into the stream of water... and know there may be a painter-ice-cream guy somewhere under all this goo... LOL.

I feel better already.

Apparently I need to find a new audience for my poetry.

I enjoy stuffed pigs as much as the next person.

My mother used to collect stuffed pigs, afterall

She might still have a few hanging around her Flagstaff home.

Remind me to ask her.

I can't depend on pigs forever.

Besides, they can be difficult to program.

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I have been reading "Song of Myself" an epic poem by Walt Whitman - - actually a grouping of 12 poems from his "Leaves of Grass" compilation.

I got to thinking, "What if we all wrote our own songs of ourself?" as I read of Whitman's discovery through a child asking him, "What is this leaf of grass?"

I decided to play with the collection of river rocks I keep as a work of art on my kitchen table. I spent some time writing - which I will share here, tomorrow. For now, I want to simply share the photos I took.

(And to think my daughter calls me a hippie, taking love photos of rocks from the Kern River!)