long-distilled love
again, to Donna
we’re fifteen hundred miles apart/but i can feel your beating heart/and i can hear your honeyed voice/and thrill as both of us rejoice
the years with change and machination/have yielded nectar’s distillation/more tasty than the finest wine/two souls in intertwining vine
we’ll turn our back on stressful censure/continue on this sweet adventure/and loving kiss may well presage/a romance free of care and age
In the distance is Piestewa Peak. The foreground is typical of the nicely-tended horticulture in the Biltmore district of Phoenix, Arizona, USA. This is a “nice” part of town, and we’re northbound on the west side sidewalk of 24th Street, on a hike to bring the mountain closer.
Just south of the street that is both Glendale Avenue and Lincoln Drive is one of the outposts of Charles Schwab, an investment firm. This outfit has a clientele mostly in the upper socioeconomic strata of the world population, and it entrusts Schwab with the management of its wealth. There are many parking spaces on the Schwab complex, but this Sunday, the New York Stock Exchange being closed, almost none of them are occupied. To the west is a water treatment plant, and to some minds both Schwab and the treatment plant traffic in effluent.
We are quite close to the mountain now. If the range is considered a “rockberg” analogous to the icebergs of the oceans, we are walking above a subterranean chunk of the Rocky Mountains. And it is time to turn back. The climb to the summit requires more energy than we have left.
If our weekly mileage continues to steadily and sensibly increase, some day we will walk from our doorstep to the mountain, climb the mountain, and walk back. It’s a wonderful part of The Great Human Adventure to make a grand plan, follow it, and achieve it.
Do yourself a Flavor of the Great Human Adventure . . .
Here is a companion piece to “The Great Human Adventure, Part VIII.” I think the two will work as a diptych, but we’ll see.
Before I started working on Part VIII I chalked up the back of the paper it is on and placed a piece of black paper behind it and at an angle. Then I drew with a hard-pointed mechanical pencil with sufficient force to impress the line drawing onto the black paper. I’d originally intended to glue a lot of cutouts from the black paper onto the White, but I found that just three were enough.
After I finished and posted Part VIII, I was taken by how completely different the chalk line drawing proved to be, despite being–literally–the same drawing. It was like the second drawing was a whispered rumor of the first.
At 64 years of age, with my memory fuzzy about previous artwork and/or postings, I can’t remember whether I’ve done a “Great Human Adventure” piece before. The “Part VIII” serves two purposes. It’s unique even if I already did a “Great Human Adventure.” It also acknowledges that I am far from covering all the territory that Human Adventure may cover. When I read a novel and the characters become my friends, all too often the author wraps up all the loose ends, including the death of the main character, and leaves no room for further adventures. What I’d like to see is wiggle room for more stories, and not before the novel starts nor after it ends. “A year and five months went by and some life-changing things happened, including overseas travel and the acquisition of a scar, but we will need to put that aside for now.”
More Good Adventures are always possible. Friends, I want them for us.
One with Clay, Image and Text 