At the far north end of my street, nearer to Emeryville, further from BART, is a confluence of sorts. The park lands of Mandela Parkway gather speed to leap over Grand Avenue,  rivers of traffic pour off and on the freeway, and most recently the ArtIsMobilUs bus shifted languidly from one  side of the street  to the other in front of Peralta Studios.

I smile every time I pass it. I feel embraced by the ecstatic creativity of these two artists: Ezra Li Eismont and Crayone, grateful for their energy welcoming me to my neighborhood.

Art need not be corralled. It doesn't need to stand still. It can still kick up its heels, carouse in the midst of chaos. Follow ArtIsMobilUs around town, discover the extent of infinity, and -- why not -- revise your notions about the 'stability' of art.

This 8' x 24' painting is mounted on the side of a bus that happily drives around town. Oh, what a wondrous world it would be if we all were to paint our cars and trucks with such imaginative vision.

Life would be so fine.

Truly.

Every morning, I wake and flip on the radio, and every morning after a very few minutes I turn it off. I find the brittle language, the constant spew about war, death and destruction exhausting. This morning, my little dog drowsed on the bed and I sat at the kitchen table, eating dry cereal topped with sliced strawberries and almond milk. The radio was on, and a man described drones buzzing the skies of Afghanistan while he and fellow prisoners closed their eyes, knowing they would not hear the missile that killed them. These drones were moving past the speed of sound. Even though I knew that soon there would be a discussion of the great and fabulous imagination of Dr. Seuss, I turned the radio off . . . went and sat on the porch to drink my tea and watch the flowering pear tree, pushing new green leaves against a still blue sky while the tiniest of finches danced from branch to branch.

I know the world is plastered shut with violence. I know that the human need for violence needs to addressed, revealed and never concealed, but I am tired of hearing narratives of violence and violent conversations about a life that could be peaceful and peaceably discussed. Change your language and change the world. Speak about beauty and live beautifully. Speak peace and live peaceably.

I thought about a brief ten minute video I watched recently of  'the artist as a young man'. . . Eskae, an artist I have known all his life – since that night he drew his first breath – on film, speaking 16 years ago about  the language of living, the language of art, while he and Crayone painted visual narratives, at the request of its owner, over the entire interior and exterior of a house in Napa before its demolition. Floors, walls, ceilings, bathroom fixtures -- everything touched by joy. The touch is gentle, the lines graceful, the images quirky ironic and potent; the transformation extreme. Politics without violence.

Give it a listen and watch as one artist creates a lively environment of gratitude and rebirth in a structure that will soon be splintered and shoveled off to the landfill, making art for life, for living, even in the face of death.

I may be prejudiced – Eskae, after all, is my son – but I find both this Bright Moments video and what this young artist has to say remarkable.  Sixteen years have passed, the house is gone, much has happened, but what he says about language and art  still  resonates today.

Yesterday, was surprisingly warmer, no rain, and I found myself  walking about another unfamiliar neighborhood where there are more apartment buildings than there are houses. The houses nestling between the taller fatter but not necessarily sturdier apartment buildings are sometimes large, sometimes small. It is impossible to know why they are still here while other, equally venerable, I’m sure, have disappeared. It’s the sort of neighborhood where young twenty-something men toss footballs in front yards, looking every inch like well-composed ads for high-end sportswear. It's the kind of neighborhood where neatly detailed Porsches and BMWs are parked at the curb next to manicured sidewalk gardens overflowing with exotic plants that no one ever disturbs. No garden thieves here.

It’s the kind of neighborhood where dark-skinned women push red-cheeked blond babies in super-wide strollers as expensive as some cars and equipped with expansive sun shades above, shock absorbers beneath and huge shopping nets behind. Here elderly women walk small dogs so fluffy so orange so bedecked with bows and ribbons that they seem like stuffed animals on wheels. Should my scruffy terrier, ruffian that he is, try to say hello in the way dogs say hello, sniffing all parts that really matter, little Phoebe would be immediately swept up into her shocked Mama’s arms, out of harm's way. Here there are no heavy mesh security doors but plenty of discrete video cameras, recording every passer by. Windows have no metal bars  but are equipped instead with expensive tasteful shades, designed to allow light to enter yet keep anyone from seeing the domestic bliss within.

And, here, surprisingly, some houses brazenly display lawn ornaments, stubbornly (and thankfully) out of sync with  gold-leafed building numbers, marble entries, and copper gutters.

Behind this rusty dog, closer to the house, stands a tall yellow birdcage, empty except for a few sprays of always blooming plastic flowers and a hand-written sign that reads:

                                                                           Those who like to sing will always find a song.

I went out this morning in search of December trees. Autumn is an extended season here in the bay area. By early December trees are still fully garbed in red and gold. I found some bright red trees just beginning to lose their leaves, but what I didn't expect to find and did were angels.

Angels guarding graves. Stone angels. Marble angels. Angels with one arm up, the other down. Angels holding roses, books, garlands of flowers and fruit. Angels with aprons overflowing with stone flowers or trailing grape vines. Angels dressed in free-flowing robes, and angels with bare chests and muscled legs. Angels looking downward while gesturing  toward blue skies. Angels stepping out.

On our way from the Post Office, somehow Mr. E and I ended up walking across the lush lawns and rolling hills of St.Mary's cemetery off Pleasant Valley Road just north of Piedmont. This is an older cemetery -- many buried here were born in the 19th century, some here in CA, many in Ireland -- and quiet. We were alone, my little dog and I, wandering about the graves. Mr. E sniffed about hoping to find a ball or a stick; I walked carefully, offering respect to those who lie beneath the grass, protected by these carefully carved angels, barefoot on stone, too heavy to fly but  lifted above the grass and mud below.

I'm a creature of the sea -- more a fan of mermaids than angels -- but I love that humans imagine otherworldly creatures looking much like themselves but with great wings that can carry them above clouds, past  stars and out into the deep vastness of space past asteroids and cold dead planets so unlike our verdant breathing laughing paradise.

What do these angels have to say to the universe? Do they whisper color, breathe out butterflies and hummingbirds, scatter autumn leaves across the Milky Way? Or when they fly do they leave trails of memories, great piles of jumbled words in their wake?

I like to imagine all those years of void between the earth and Jupiter as not gaspingly empty after all but delicately constructed of zillions of small memories snipped from billions of lives that are no longer remembered here on earth. Stretched between this moon and that asteroid would be the smooth feel of an apple picked green from a tree long gone wild attached to the surprise of grapes squeezed from their skin and then spot glued to the bright green of new grass on  a raw patch of land in some 19th century industrial zone, which might in turn  link tenuously to a baby's first cry or a hand waving good-by diffused in the scent of baking bread  or the aroma of burning plastic. No one would think such attachments strange. After all, every little bit, every scrap, every dust bunny  is necessary when constructing an infinite void of muchness.

If these angels were to leave their perches and fly from earth into the void, it is lovely to imagine them pushing memory before them with every beat of their wings and dragging behind them long diaphanous trails of scents and sounds, all that has been felt or heard or seen in a lifetime, expanding and even creating the universe as they fly.

Why not imagine our universe as a 'muchness' rather than a 'nothingness', the vastness of space thick with the language of life . . . all of life, its agonies, its simple boredom, and its beauties.

Maybe I'm just recalling the end of Tony Kushner's Angels in America when Harper, the straight wife of a gay man, leans her head against a plane window, and speaking as much to herself as to anyone, says:

When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.

The net of Indra, the flight of angels, the Rapture. All imagined events designed to organize the chaos of the human world, describe as real the painful progress of a building expanding universe, dreaming ahead and leaving nothing behind. The trees switch from green to red to black; the sky bleeds through, and those of us below keep walking, endlessly walking.

November is closing. Thanksgiving is upon us. Helicopters are hovering still.

Artist Ezra Li Eismont reminds us that the one landscape we can safely and truly occupy is our mind. Why just set up tents in abandoned lots when you can instead erect the mental architecture capable of supporting all that is needed for a more egalitarian society. . .

Think responsibly. Act compassionately.

Move out of Zombie Nation.
Abandon hierarchy.
Forget celebrity.
Discover the conversation.

I am grateful for those who make art in public spaces.

This evening, I am overwhelmed  by the sound of helicopters buzzing incessantly overhead as Occupy Oakland continues to defy those authorities determined to grind it down to dust. The noise keeps me on edge, keeps me from sleep, keeps me in a state of heightened awareness that is not always comfortable, but over in San Francisco another message, equally powerful, is being broadcast loud and clear in a manner far more playful but  as challenging to passers-by intellectually, emotionally, artistically, and , yes, politically. On Hemlock Street, right off of Polk Street, is a brand-new mural painted by Ezra Li Eismont, occupying the entire face of a building and announcing to the greater world that the time has come to OCCUPY YOUR MIND . . . .

. . . . and  THINK RESPONSIBLY.

After all, that inner meditative world creates the greater active world. We think the future into being.

A bold portrait of Michael Jackson as a zombie occupies the wall between doors, both locked and open, overwhelming the barred windows above and transforming an unprepossessing industrial building into serious and provocative art that suggests that we might all consider that agreeing to Celebrity is agreeing to an existence as a Zombie.

We might -- instead -- Think Responsibly. . . . and then, perhaps??? Act accordingly.

Choose to walk the earth as humans.

Act compassionately.

Live in our skin, feel our bones. Laugh. Dream.

Give to others what we know, nestle into the unknown. Cherish new possibility.

Live. And Breathe, always breathe. Inhale deeply and when we exhale, know that  NOW is the time to OCCUPY our  MINDS.

Check out Ezra Li Eismont's show, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, opening on November 12, right around the corner form this remarkable street mural at the Space Gallery, 1141 Polk Street, San Francisco, and while you're there, spend some time with Little Old One,  at Lopo Gallery, opening the same day and featuring the collaborative works of Bunnie Reiss and Monica Canilao.

The other day I was in my back yard trimming the passion flower vine, and I discovered dozens and dozens of caterpillars, munching on leaves, getting ready to spin cocoons. Then, some days later, I found myself in San Francisco on Pine Street between Polk and Van Ness, face to face with the king of all caterpillars: the fifty-foot long Skullwerm.

Wearing a jester's hat and smoking a pipe, this caterpillar has shed its skin and is outside the mind, swallowing smoke and presumably other bits and pieces of city life. It's a worm of dream, of thought, of memory, attached to the warm body but burrowing into collective mind of the city. The skullwerm is that tiny wriggling worm of an idea that escapes the mind and attaches itself to the last leaves of summer. What it eats it will transform to flight.

This skull-king with its hollowed eyes is a-bumping and a-grinding through pink and green. Having chewed half the leaves of the forward tree, it's getting ready to spin a cocoon, compress its string of pearls body into the burlap sack of winter, but wait a month and a huge butterfly will unfold its gold-flecked wings wide enough, tall enough, frail enough to lift the Golden Gate above the fog.

I want to be there for the unfolding of that transparency.

Three tiny little earthquakes in Berkeley at midnight, felt only by seismographs.

We are transforming. We will evolve.

Friday afternoon, as I turned my car down 14th St in front of Frank Ogawa Plaza, two motorcycles cops pulled across the intersection closing down the street. In front of me were masses of peaceful protesters walking towards Clay Street, and as my car was alone, the only non-official car on the block, I did what any sensible person lassoed by police barricades would do. I pulled over to the curb, parked and walked over to the plaza where a few folk not marching were milling about the pitched tents and the neat piles of posters and placards of Occupy Oakland.

 
One of the first things I noticed were large chalk drawings on the sidewalks, each one illustrating either some disturbing aspect of contemporary American life or more hopeful suggestions for positive change.

A large and somewhat unsettling drawing caught my eye. Below the scrawled letters “Dying for Education,” was the image of  corpse, dead eyes staring blankly skyward, a bullet wound in his chest. Above the “Dying for Education" sign were multiple portraits of young soldiers, all bloodied and blinded.

Everyone knows that too many young Americans who cannot afford to pay the expensive tuition now demanded by public Universities join the military, believing they will avoid the suffocating burden of loans assumed by fellow students and that their tuition will be paid when and if they leave the battlefields alive. Sadly, too many die before they attend their first class, and those who survive are, as the drawing suggests,  so badly wounded emotionally and physically that  education can no longer serve as the lifeboat they once imagined it might be.

Education should not be so expensive that students must either go to war or into deep debt to pay for it. If the federal government were to subsidize education, not war, then without becoming enslaved to war or debt, American students might gain the knowledge needed to contribute positively to a peaceful and productive future.

The OCCUPY movement asks legislators to think responsibly and discover ways of revising national expenditures so that we might recover our economy and our democracy. We might, for example, again consider Roosevelt's very 'educational' 3Rs:

Relief. Recovery. Reform.

Forgiving student loans would both provide Relief and Recovery. Two locks freed with one key. Millions of recent and long past graduates are currently saddled with student loans greater than most mortgages, and that overwhelming debt prevents them from starting business, buying houses or cars. To forgive those loans would provide immediate relief, and as these citizens would then have more disposable income, such forgiveness would immediately contribute to needed economic recovery. Money previously paid only to banks to cover exorbitant interest on crushing debt would become available to be spent in the community.

Banks were bailed out; bail out students. No one should have to risk death to gain an education, and there is no question that a strong nation needs its people educated.

It doesn't take a genius to notice that Reform of institutional and corporate worlds is necessary if we are to relieve the suffering of the unemployed and the underemployed and recover our democracy. The time has come for US citizens to stand together and demand accountability  for the military industrial complex. This drawing, pictured at the right, reminds us of just how much we have let slide. Blackwater, a shadow army created by the Bush Administration, operating both abroad and here on US soil, is representative of the dangerous continued privatization of institutions that in a democracy should remain accountable, regulated  and public. We know of Blackwater's activities in Iraq, but many do not know that heavily armed Blackwater mercenaries zoomed about New Orleans after Katrina, looking for  'criminals,'  answering to no elected or appointed agency of the law. We do not need private mercenary armies occupying our country. We, the citizens, we the people, must occupy our communities, our land, our democracy.

After the swelling crowd of peaceful walkers turned up Clay St, I was allowed to move my car and did. Later that evening, long after dark, I was checking the local news and discovered that earlier around noon the 91st homicide of the year had happened only blocks from my house. Again, a 20-year-old man was shot dead, this time on 11th St at Willow.

Vigilantes with guns are always egregious and dangerous.

Rest in Peace, Occupy your Dreams.