Apprentice of Wonder

A Blessing

Some days it is easy to find the wonder.  Some days, like today, it just appears in front of me.  This photo was taken on the way up to Golden Gate State Park today.  The image of the two black and white horses took me instantly back to a basement room in 1974 in Allen Hall at Louisiana State University where Ray Beard read aloud the poem below. 

My B.A. is in Poetry Writing.  As you might imagine, I have studied and read a LOT of poems in my life.  Here is my single favorite poem, the one which turned me from a journalism major into a poetry writing major within the time it took to hear this poem read aloud. 

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom. James Wright

Last Night of the DNC

This was the sunset last night over the DNC.  It's one of the most spectacular sunsets we've had in months.  I am choosing to see this as a good sign for the upcoming November election.

A couple of hours after Obama's rousing acceptance speech, I went back down to the 16th Street Mall to witness the action of the final night of festivities.  There were actually fewer people out and about than on the previous two nights, but I still caught plenty of hilarious Democrats in action, with several one-person "protestors" spouting their causes.

I never did figure out what this interview was about, but the fully-decked-out Mountain Man was a sight to behold, and the interviewer with the mike was a riot.

And standing next to the Rodeo Girl was this guy posing with his Obama head:

Overall it has been a fun week to be working nights in downtown Denver.  I haven't felt this kind of energy on the streets since the 70's.  In fact, there were several times I felt like I WAS back in the 70's.  The smell of patchouli and raggedy jeans with holes in the knees and teenagers with "smoke weed" signs and the several "Stop the War" signs scattered all over were very reminiscent of the Vietnam War days.  I haven't seen this kind of political excitement on the streets in decades.  I'm glad I was able to be an observer of this historic event.

Live from the DNC

This is a very exciting, energetic week to be working in downtown Denver with the Democratic National Convention going on. 

I work from 4 p.m. until midnight and have been taking my dinner breaks outside this week.  There's been thousands and THOUSANDS of people milling around; tons of hilarious political signs and single protestors, everyone out there spouting a cause.   

There's the radicals, the anarchists, the anti-war folks,

and even the anti-meat activists.  Anyone with a message who wanted publicity was there, and all of them welcomed we amateur photographers. 

You could even hula-hoop to help bring the troops home. 

There is A HUGE police presence but no reason for them to need to use force.  They were all standing around, looking serious with their masks and SWAT team equipment, but nothing was happening for them to use it.   It was completely CRAZY!  Wild, buzzing energy, thousands of people EVERYWHERE and so much excitement in the air you could taste it.  Everyone was happy and excited and the words "hope" and "change" were actually tangible in the streets and in the energy of the people.

 

My souvenir for the week is this t-shirt, which I could not resist.  I'm going back down there now to try to get a couple more of these.

So now you know where I stand.

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Please forgive my odd arrangement of photos and text in this post.  Typepad has changed in the 2 years since I last used it and I'm going through an adjustment period of trying to figure out how and where to position things.

Trying to Get Back to Wonder

 I vowed not to let a year go by between posts, and then after that year passed I made another vow not to let two years go by, but time flies, even when you are NOT having fun.  And I wasn't these last 2 years.  I've been trying to get back here for over a year now, but.... life got in the way, as they say.  In particular, my previous (note the word PREVIOUS) job got in the way of my life.  It began to take over my life starting in mid-2006, when my happy little local department of a national law firm was consolidated into one large national department and I suddenly went from working for 40 attorneys to over 900 attorneys.  It's a long, sad story that I don't want to tell here, but the bottom line is that after the most stressful year of my life, I left that job, after 14 years, in May, and am now working at another much smaller (and local!) law firm in a similar capacity.  Even 3 months later I am, to my amazement, still not completely free of the effects the immense stress I was dealing with for the last 2 years took on my body and my soul.   

To say that this Apprentice was unable to find wonder in anything is an understatement.  Only in the last few weeks have I finally FINALLY begun to wake up and notice, once again, the things in life that used to bring me such joy and fill me with wonder.

 One of the first things to excite me was the arrival, for a brief three days, of this beautiful white pelican on the little pond near my house.  The beautiful bird had never visited this pond before and he hasn't been seen since.  He arrived at the pond and spent 3 days slowly circling the edges, gobbling up every fish available, and as quickly as he'd appeared, he was gone.  But oh he was spectacular floating around the pond for those 3 days.  Even the geese looked tiny in comparison.

I work hard at not carrying or holding onto regrets in my life, and so I am going to move forward from here on out with this blog.  I may go back and fill in some things, and I may not.  But I have broken the ice with this first post, and it was trying to explain where I've been the last 2 years that was holding me back.  So onward and upward.  Today is the first day of the rest of my life as an older and wiser Apprentice of Wonder.