questions where I don't have an answer

We've all seen them. They can be on street corners or in doorways. Sometimes they ask for money. Sometimes they just watch as we go by. Some seem unaware of what's around them. In the United States, when we are just leaving two major holidays, and in the cold season for most of the country, there have been multiple articles on our problem of growing homelessness. This is just one such article.

Death and a Dumpster

What do we do about this? It's not new, but it's growing more significant for multiple reasons. I've seen many articles in the last months. Most blame us as a people-- suggest it's a problem of corporate or personal greed. Is it?

Is this the fault of our culture and we are heartless? 

Is it a product of many who don't fit into a modern world where jobs, even service jobs, require some strength or skills? 

Have some chosen it as they don't want to follow rules? 

Is it mental illness? 

Is it an influx of those from other cultures where they don't know how to fit in ours-- or don't want to? 
How much is PTSD from wars?

How about believing society owes everyone a living and if they don't get it, it's society's fault--  hence the fault is someone else's? 

Would a reverse income tax, where money is transferred from those who work to those who do not-- would that fix it or make irresponsible living worse?

When is irresponsible living a product of an irresponsible society? 

These are only a few of the questions from both sides of our partisan and cultural divide. I can come up with more possibilities but the idea of someone dying in a dumpster to get food is heartbreaking to me. If the food was left on the streets, which evidently France has been requiring, will that lead to more rats or spoiled food that sickens someone leading to lawsuits? 

My concern on the homeless being allowed to live on the streets, defecate wherever they want is historical memories of cholera and other diseases that come from not having sanitary systems. When cities allow tent camps, who maintains safety and sanitation in those facilities-- or is it maintained? If food is left to rot, rats flourish leading to plague. Does anyone seriously believe people today are immune to plagues, when we return to practices that led to so many of them?

One town has threatened, with a criminal charge, a church for providing free, home-cooked meals for the homeless. The local government charges that it encourages them to be there. If not there, where?

When I am in large cities or even our local towns, I see the homeless, some on bicycles provided to help them get around. They often have packs with them-- or their bike is filled with stuff they have scavenged. Vividly, I remember some of my experiences where the people were clearly mentally ill or high on some drug. That usually is not threatening. I've had a few times where it was. 

What leads someone to end up like the man in the article? What can we do about it in a country that has considerable wealth-- but with a valid question to be asked: what really helps? Currently, many of our cities have decided the answer is to allow homeless camps. Those are not new for those of you too young to remember them. I recall going to my grandmother's home in Portland and seeing the fires from the encampment down along the rails in a nearby valley. Those were the years where the men rode the rails and their encampments were not downtown. Today it's different.

Despite what some might think, this is not a partisan issue. It's a cultural one. What can be done-- dumpsters with lighter tops allowing anyone in them to get out even if sick or weakened? Tiny homes with the hope that whoever lives in them will clean up their act, with a real address, and get work? Many things have been tried-- what works? The blame game does not if it's not accompanied by some real solutions. I don't have them. Do you?

Family fun and seeing as a painter at Turneffe Flats, Belize

Grandma planned to take each grandchild on a trip when they graduated from high school. Madisen wanted to swim with sharks. We did see a lazy nurse shark but we had a whole lot more experiences with grandpa and with Madi's mother.

Don

Grandpa Don fished for three of the days.

Diane and Madisen

Here we are looking at crocodiles in brackish water.  In the background there are black mangroves. During slower moments, I shared my painter's eye by inquiring of Madi and Madisen how many colors they saw in the leaves of the red mangroves. We all see differently so there was no right answer only what you perceive.

 
After our family Christmas trip to Belize, I brought home this abstract painting from a four month exhibit at Albany Public Library.

To my surprise I realized I had painted the lighting like what I saw with my uncorrected myopic eyes while snorkeling. The first day I did not bother to put contact lenses in my eye. The second time I had a contact corrected for far vision. The third time only a contact corrected for close vision and the fourth time I bent the frames of an old flexible sports glasses frame so it would fit inside my 180 degree snorkel mask.
What I saw was amazingly similar to the more organic abstracts I paint. Just goes to show me what I see as a painter is already what I look for when I paint.
To the left  is one of  our guides, Abel Coe's photos with his new Olympus underwater cameras. He could find the candy colors and exquisite patterns in a variety of reef habitats. He gave all of us permission to use his photographs.

Madisen and Melinda

 This was my granddaughter's first experience snorkeling and my daughter had not snorkeled since she was 10 or 11 when we were in Hawaii. I went snorkeling 4 times and my daughter and granddaughter went out 8 or 9 times. I was happy to see them enjoy so many new experiences at the atoll They also enjoyed special excursions on the mainland including the Mayan Altun Ha ruins, the tube float through the caves, and the Belize Zoo.

 

 

Don after his three days of fishing joined us once on the snorkeling adventure boat. Also with us is to the far right Tash now from Saskatchewan, Canada. Like Madisen who is considering secondary education and a sophomore at Concordia University in Oregon, Tash is a university student. Tash is currently interested in many things including anthropology psychology.

 

Next Wednesday I will post some pictures about the ecology of Turneffe Atoll.

 

 

 

 

Eight more pages from the watercolor book of my Turneffe Flats Adventure

The last eight pages include memories of the last half of our week including a night time nature walk and more snorkeling. If I should paint from memory, I am prepared as these on site, small pictures remind me of my interest in how the light rays entered the choppy water covering coral, sponges, and algae in uneven illumination. We saw porpoise, black and red mangroves, frigate birds, royal turn, and a cormorant rookery. On the night walk, I became aware of how many eyes reflect light including the crocodiles, snakes, iguanas, brown spiders and tarantulas. I tried to eat termites but probably only tasted the shell they made for their colony. The illusive boa constrictor was not found.

I have been asked if I plan to frame my watercolor book, the answer is no. I fold it in accordion style. Notice where I cut and folded into a compact index card size book.

  I will keep it in a shoe box for reference as a way to remember the energy of being there. The quality of my paintings doesn't come up to all I saw. Some pages are overworked. But what I like about the book making process is looking for lighting and life flora and fauna detail that I wouldn't have noticed except that I was painting. The process heightens my awareness.

Tomorrow I will post some photos of our adventurous trip

Dec. 24 - 29th adventures at Turneffe Flats Atole in Belize

When traveling and on vacation, I like to make accordion folded watercolor books devoting a couple pagess a day to what is memorable to me.  This is a 16 page book with memories from a week's stay. Eight more pictures will be posted tomorrow.
 

Welcoming a new year

by Rain Trueax

This is the week where I take some time (usually) to consider my life in the previous year. This naturally reflects some on what I will want in the year to come, despite the fact that I am not one for advance planning-- one of my personality quirks. It complicates vacations in places like Yellowstone, where if you don't plan in advance, you don't go-- so sometimes I must plan ahead, like it or not.

There have been years where I took the time between Christmas and New Years to write goals for the coming year. Those got increasingly complex, divided into categories like spiritual, emotional, and physical. I rarely looked at them as the year would go on. Mostly, I'd look at them when I got to this week where I could see if writing them down had changed anything.

During my fifties, with my kids raised and new possibilities out there, I created soul collages aimed at visualizing what elements I would want in my life. In my sixties, I did less considering what I wanted. Maybe I was doing what I'd wanted or simply recognizing some of those things were never happening. Until my seventies, even subliminal goals didn't relate to aging. The truth is as you go through middle age, things don't change a lot. Once you get into old age, there are more differences that realistically must be taken into account in lifestyle choices.

Seeking the Lost Art of Growing Old with Intention

I think there is some virtue in living each day with intention, but too often I don't. I just live them and don't think much about it beyond what I want for that hour or maybe what to eat or watch or read. 

In my fifties, when I made vision collages (3 of them), I didn't realize I was creating collages about my books, not my life as such. I kept thinking they weren't doing anything until I saw they had-- just not as I'd expected. That's kind of familiar in terms of how my life works out. What I think is for one reason often turns out to be not so much.

When I look at 2017, it was a tough year for so many people. Some of that was those on the left who were disappointed in the country and that the goals they had believed more shared had not been by those on the right. With many of us living in bubbles, it's easy to think that's how the nation is. The truth is we are very divided for what we believe is good. Many Americans felt we were going the wrong way for 8 years and 2017 was a needed correction. Many found that horrifying and it has led to a lot of name-calling with a chasm that can divide a family and end longtime friendships. 

Exactly how 2018 will shake out is uncertain. I wasn't as upset about the political changes as some, mostly because as someone in the middle politically, nobody does all I want; so I'm always wishing it was different. For a moderate, we often wish for a 'none of the above' option, which we don't get.

In 2017, on a personal level, things went in ways that don't make me very happy but that I can't impact or even see what is right-- so I won't be discussing any of that. I'll stick to discussing my work-- writing. It was not a productive year, with only one new book. If had been writing novellas, with my word count of 140,000, I'd have had three or four books, but mine are longer. I've been writing on the fourth in the Hemstreet Witches series since September and only hope to get the rough draft done by the end of the year-- with editing to come. 

In 2016, there had been five-- the year before that even more. I can't explain the reason for the drop in production-- and writing does involve production. I read what other authors produced and felt like-- seriously, what went wrong with me in '17? There are a lot of possibilities. Maybe it was just one of those things-- not my year for creating new books. 

I am hoping 2018 will be a stronger year for work. I hope it'll be kinder to people where life has dealt some heavy blows in '17. I hope that the world will look for solutions to problems that help and don't hurt. I have a lot of hopes. I always do at this time of the year.

When I made the decision to add Diane to this blog as a co-author, I didn't realize it would be for me as much as for the readers here. I like the contrast in thinking-- how she writes what I would never think about. I hope blog readers also like it. There have been some big ups and downs in readership numbers, but if you do something because it feels right, it has to be for how it impacts you, as we can't guarantee anyone else will feel the same-- with books, paintings, poetry, photography or any other creative endeavor. It's about feeding the inner vision, and we do that by doing that.

This is the first painting we ever bought from Diane. She gave us a very affordable price since we were still in graduate school. She had painted it from a 1966 trip the four of us had taken to the Mogollon Rim in Arizona for an Easter break. Good memories from that trip where we rented a log home, which we shared (along with our black cat of the time, Sheba)-- one of many such trips through the years (the others minus the cats).

A seventy-four year old attempting to stay current with a voguish vocabulary

 

 Feeling like a dinasaur, not understanding the younger generations language the same as mine, I look up their words. Not understanding the language on the media I refer to Wikipedia and online dictionaries. Then I make a flip card lexicon.

 

 

 

With the New Year approaching, I decided to turn a new leaf. I would act completely out of character wishing my grandchildren with pop culture language with these sentiments:

  Have a "RAD New Year. Bright as LID s on high! Without Fucking circuit breaking!

 

https://qz.com/119200/oxford-dictionary-adds-twerk-derp-selfie-phablet-and-more-voguish-vocabulary/

Holiday Wishes

However you are spending this day, whether it's a special one for you or just another day, I hope you are having a good day with a shiny, new year soon to come. 

 Image and quote from Stencil

Christmas with its expectations

by Rain Trueax

 

What do we do when Christmas isn’t a time of joy for us and all around we see those where it is?

When I wrote my Christmas stories, I tried to keep Christmas as a positive time.  I though several times used the other side of Christmas, how it can be a dark season for some of us or at certain times in our lives. For my books, I stuck to an upbeat ending, as we need more of that in our lives-- and the news provides us with plenty of instances where it's anything but.

Some of how we feel about this important holiday is influenced by how much control we have over how we spend the days.  If we are in a family, where others need a particular way of seeing Christmas, our options are fewer than if we are by ourselves.  Christmas might seem a lonely time to be by ourselves.  It can be lonelier to be with a lot of people and feeling none of what they feel.

For those by themselves for the holidays, they can take a trip.  If they always wanted a white Christmas, but don’t live where that’s going to happen, go where it is.  Going to a big resort or on a cruise by oneself might seem sad, but the likelihood is there will be others there in the same situation.  Doing something really different can be liberating.

Another way to make Christmas into a different experience is volunteering at a place handing out Christmas dinners.  Serving others, seeing they are in worse shape than we are, may have a depressing aspect, but it can also take us out of ourselves - -something we all need once in a while.

Image from Stencil

Part of what makes Christmas in particular a holiday with pluses and minuses is based on expectations.  I think getting control of our expectations can make us happier in a potentially troubled time as well as one that is supposed to be joyous.

 

In 2014, when I wrote A Montana Christmas, I had in mind continuing a story of a couple who'd had their own love story and romance.  In From Here to There, the heroine had learned that her husband had come from a very dysfunctional family.  In their Christmas book, her object was to bring his family to the Rocking H ranch, joining them with hers, and creating a new dynamic that would change what had been his negative expectations into positive ones.   

Christmas is one of those times where that kind of idea can work or prove catastrophic.  The hero is convinced it will be the latter.  The heroine is determined Christmas has been a time of magic for her, and it will be for the two families.  She has many reasons to hope she is right.

Here is a snippet from A Montana Christmas, where Helene discusses her plans for the holidays with her uncle and the ranch hired man:

“Speaking of seasons,” she said, “with Christmas just three weeks off, I was thinking we should make some plans.”

“More than the usual with Nancy, Emile and the boys?” her uncle asked.

“I was thinking yes… Phillip will be here, I hope. I’d like to have the dinner up at our house. How would that be?”

Amos shrugged. “Never no mind to me if it don’t matter to Emile and them.”

“I invited too?” Curly asked.

“Of course, and a girlfriend if you wish.”

Curly snorted as he leaned back against the counter, crossing one boot over the other. “Women are too danged much trouble. Not gonna mess with one again. I’m too old anyway.”

Now it was Helene’s turn to snort. “You are still a handsome man, Curly, and you know it. What happened with Sherri?”

Amos was the one to laugh that time. “She found out about Jan and that was pretty much it for both of them.”

“Good riddance to both. Women just wanta own a man.”

“Maybe you haven’t found the right one yet,” Helene suggested.

“He’s been married three times. Maybe he’s right to give it a rest.”

Obviously to divert that direction for the conversation, Curly asked, “What you going to cook, Helene, not that I’d be picky or anything.”

“Just traditional fare.”

“So long as that means turkey, dressing, cranberries, mashed potatoes and lots of gravy,” her uncle said with a grin. “I got no complaints. But what’s this planning business about. Throw a spread, open some presents, isn’t that about it? What’s to plan for?”

“There are the numbers. I’ll call Nancy to be sure they can come.” She glanced at Rafe who had said nothing. “You will come also, won’t you?”

“Where else would I go?” he said with a grimace as he shifted positions and manned up to another sip of the potent coffee.

“If no one minds, I’d like to include a few others. One or two that might have to sleep down here.”

Uncle Amos frowned. “My sister coming?”

“Heavens no.” She laughed. “Mother is in Palm Springs with her bridge buddies, and Dad is off with Sharron to wherever it is she convinced him to take her this year. No, not them. I’d like to ask Phillip’s mother, sisters and brother.”

Curly choked on a swallow of coffee. When he got his voice back, he asked, “Phil okay that?” His look said he doubted it.

Despite having had a rocky start when Phillip first showed up at the ranch to win Helene back, those two had ended up working buddies and pretty much thick as thieves. If he had confided his feeling about Christmas to anyone, it would have been Curly, which meant he understood all too well why Phillip wouldn’t want his family there, anymore than he had wanted to have any sort of traditional Christmas.

****

A Montana Christmas is available as a novella but also until mid-January in the anthology, Christmas from the Heart. I had meant to write more stories about this family but other books got in the way. Still, someday I want to do it as I love writing about ranch life and these people-- just have to get my paranormals finished-- maybe the last one could use Christmas as part of it :).

Christmas from the Heart

A Montana Christmas

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