robert plant – Little Home In The Valley

There are two life lessons that I have to pass along this morning. I have others are others that I could mention, but these two are crucial for me to keep in mind, I think.

#1: There is more kindness in the world than I ever imagined.

#2: There is more cruelty in the world than I ever suspected.

Why have such a somber opening in today’s posting? Mostly because my country is presently exemplifying the latter of the two lessons listed above. At almost every turn and in nearly every aspect of our domestic and foreign policies you find there is both dangerous stupidity and the basest sort of malignity that are operative to a degree which is nearly blinding in its brazenness.

If I didn’t firmly believe what Lesson #1 provides, I don’t know how I would manage the daily dung-stream that rolls down my computer screen and into my eyes. What has been for me the most painful thing of all is realizing how many of my neighbors accept cruelty as a normal way of conducting our nation’s affairs.

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Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.

The Dalai Lama

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It’s best that we mortals not try to predict the future and leave such things to the gods. For instance, I can easily imagine back on some sunny day in 1975 that Zeus took a long look at this guy and said:

“I think that when he gets to be an old fart, we could pair him with one of the best female country singers on the planet and they would make two peerless albums of duets.”

And so Robert Plant and Alison Krauss got together in the studio to make the album Raising Sand. Fourteen years later they made Raise the Roof. I really doubt that an ordinary human could have seen that coming.

Please Read the Letter, by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

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We are all just walking each other home.

Ram Dass

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Robin and I are watching a three-part series about Abraham Lincoln. It’s one of those creatures called docu-dramas, and has quite a cast of commentators, former President Obama being one of them. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is another. Look for it on Netflix.

Just as there is not a day that passes without new and odious revelations about our 47th president, I have never watched or read anything about Mr. Lincoln that did not improve my views on humanity and make me feel better about my membership in the species. We are capable of such great and good things, and there is no shortage of leaders, past and present, to provide us guidance toward a world where justice and kindness prevail.

We may have to look for them, they are often the quieter ones in the back of the room rather than one of those people who are scrambling to get to the microphone.

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Killing the Blues, by Alison Krauss & Robert Plant

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The tedium of balancing the checkbook or reconciling the checking account software over an adult lifetime has been almost stultifying. Every month of every year and the only thing you find to break the monotony is a rare check that you forgot to record . And the bank never makes a mistake. I had almost decided to give it up as a complete waste of energy.

Until this week, when the printed log of my account revealed a photocopy of a withdrawal check signed by a complete stranger, from an account whose number was not at all similar to ours. The check was for five hundred dollars.

When I took the document to the bank, the teller’s pupils dilated and she immediately told me to take a seat, while she notified someone higher up the chain of command . When that esteemed person came over with the paper now firmly in her hand, she took great pains to tell me how an error like this might have occurred. It was obvious that she was embarrassed for the institution and wanted me to know that stuff like this simply didn’t happen at the Bank of Colorado.

The Bank manager and the teller, in my fervid imagination.

I didn’t care. I wanted my five hundred dollars back. Exactly how it had been taken away was of no interest to me and was their issue. But … now I can never think of quitting with doing these boring reconciliations. Bleah.

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Here is a puff piece about Robert Plant taken from an Apple Music review of his recent album. It happens I agree with it.

“It’s hard to think of another artist from the 70s classic-rock era who has aged more gracefully than Robert Plant. Rather than trying to relive past glories, the former Led Zeppelin shrieker has spent much of the 21st-century recontextualizing his formative influences – American blues, English folk, early rock ‘n’ roll, Middle Eastern classical – into more earthy and ethereal realms.”

The man has evolved in full view of all of us from basically the poster boy for the excesses of rock and roll to a mature artist who keeps putting out really interesting music. I’ve included a couple here today from the album Saving Grace. Look at those photos and marvel at what time makes of a face. From beautiful boy to a Mount Rushmore sort of gravity.

A side note. My son Jonnie was into music from early on in life, buying albums before he was ten. When he found an artist he liked, he would often save up and buy everything that man or that band had recorded. Such was the case with Led Zeppelin, the band where Plant became a legend. At the time, they meant nothing at all to me. It took a long time after Jonnie had moved on for me to catch up with his tastes.

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Soul Of A Man, by Robert Plant

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Saw a Lewis’ Woodpecker on our neighborhood walk this week, pecking away in some dead branches. Thet are pretty easy to spot, once you know they exist. I only learned about them this summer, when I saw one on a visit to Durango.

The Lewis’s Woodpecker might have woodpecker in its name, but it forages like a flycatcher and flies like a crow. It has a color palette all its own, with a pink belly, gray collar, and dark green back unlike any other member of its family. From bare branches and posts, it grabs insects in midair, flying with slow and deep wingbeats. It calls open pine forests, woodlands, and burned forests home, but it often wanders around nomadically outside of the breeding season in search of nuts.

All About Birds

The description sounds a bit like a lot of us, who wandered from home and years later couldn’t quite figure out how to get back or remember clearly how we started out. “I know I was a woodpecker in the beginning, but how was that, again?”

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There came a period in my mid-adolescence when I chafed at being expected to attend each family gathering the way I had done as a younger child. One day I flatly refused, and quite a scene ensued, with the rest of the family eventually going on without me. Harsh words, lots of pent-up resentments released on both sides.

Finding myself alone and not enjoying the solitude one bit, I made the decision to leave home. I did own a car, had a part-time job, and thought I might be able to support myself in meager fashion. So I packed the trunk of that car with all that I owned of any value. (I will tell you that it made a pitifully small pile.) And then I took a nap.

When I awoke, the rest of the family had returned, and so I resolved to wait and leave in the morning. I never learned how it happened, but somehow my parents became aware of what was stored in my car’s trunk, and my father did a very uncharacteristic thing, for him. He sat down and had a talk with me. No recriminations, no lecturing. Just letting me know that he and I were not adversaries, and that my safety and happiness were very high on his list of concerns.

The next day, I unpacked, feeling relieved. I think that over those hours I had realized that although I was now perched on the edge of the nest, I was not quite ready for flight, and was glad to have been talked out of it.

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Too Far From You, by Robert Plant

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POETRY CORNER

Over my life I have written things that for want of a better name I call poems. Thought I’d put one up here once in a while, just to air them out.

Our personalities are like sweaters

Which are never finished

For as we add a row or two

Of length, to fit where we are now

A cuff or collar may unravel just a bit

And need repair

I think that illness is a time

When many rows are dropped at once

And not replaced

The wind blows through the holes

That have appeared for others

To appreciate

We stop, pull back

Repair enough to make it wearable

Then go on as before

All knitting

And unraveling

Together

May 1983

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I Never Will Marry, by Robert Plant

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As of this morning our government has shut down, whatever that means. This might be a good time to push it into a hole, kick some dirt over it, and start afresh. In its present iteration it serves no one well but the criminals at the top.

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