I've got nothing useful to say about death today except this: Create some small piece of art every day. It matters not whether it's "good;" it's the act of creation that is satisfying.
I'm defining art broadly. For example, as a congenitally peripatetic experimenter, I shoot images of the streets around me and post them to our sister blog, Sidewalk Images. Much of the quality of this photography is trash, mind you, and qualifies as art only in my blue, blue eyes. As my designer friend Mary once said, "You might want to work at getting them in focus and also on the composition."
She was right about the focus, but wrong about composition. I take the images in exactly the form I see them, often at about a two-o'clock or ten o'clock angle. These are usually cast-off pieces of material on the sidewalk.
Sometimes the granularity of the sidewalk itself is so compelling that the item itself simply serves as a useful focal point, as my main interest is in the tiny, packed-together circles of stone that compose the (never-smoothed) cement.
I recall learning how to pour and smooth cement as a boy, in the '50s, working with my Dad, as we built the carport, where we later hung a basketball hoop. The problem with learning to play basketball there was the ceiling to my stadium was so low, I had to be able to perfect hitting line drives into the basket from any distance beyond a couple feet.
Of course, like a bonsai tree, that's how my game developed. I was stunted.
The next time I got the opportunity to erect a basketball court, it was in the '80s at our little wooden cottage in Mill Valley, on a huge lot with fruit trees, the work of an Italian truck farmer half a century before.
The lot rose gradually from street level in a series of terraces until it reached the ridge where the house sat. Along the way were some of the most exotic, succulent fruits still growing after years of neglect, but in ever-declining numbers.
Growing fruit has long been one of my most persistent fantasies. I love every stage of the process, from the dried seed cracking open, yielding a fresh new sprout, helped by soil, sun and water into a seedling, then hardening (the male phase) into a stalwart trunk supporting many branches (much as in software development), which then, in springtime, sport new buds, excited at this chance at life.
The buds open their tender lips to form luscious flowers with the bud still at the core (the first feminine phase), that then willingly accept the long, vibrating penetrating fertilization by the suitable organs of bees and birds to -- wallah! -- create their children: Rounded, moist, sweet, sour, pithy apples, pears, peaches, cherries, apricots, persimmons, avocados, durian, coconuts, coffee beans, and on and on and on.
Banana trees are probably the fruit-bearing plants I know the best, from my years as a reporter investigating the uses of pesticides overseas. There's nothing quite like the sight of a tight cluster of bananas, yellowing, even if they sometimes are hiding a deadly tarantula in their innermost places.
Fruits are a modern luxury. For my father, growing up in a one-room farmhouse without heat or plumbing in Canada early last century, the winter holiday season meant two treats from fruit trees -- an orange, from the tropics, and maple sugar candy, from the trees standing on the land around their cornfields.
All of my children have, according, received little boxes of maple sugar candy from me from time to time.
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