In response to the whispers from the Portland Rose Garden Rose.

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^{← A variety of tearose called Grace - known for her delicious warm fragrance by growers; mine in her planter certainly pulled me through many a tractionless summer.}

If you knew that lips are made to kiss apart the curtains of you little i and reveal the saucer with which to track the sky, like petals kiss open a flower (and no, flowers do not open up their petals - as if they were automatons in Emperor Rudolf’s wonderous and alchemical garden. No flowers have no mechanisms and parts that work the whole. They simply are kissed into revelation by their own lips); if we could rent the veils that prevent us seeing these things, we would all plant Sa’di’s hope for Mankind up into rosegardens.

With these fanciful delights, bubbles, tickertape and a merry band parading through the streets of a sunny town below, we took to the buzzing air this Summer, alight, aflight, in faith's tow - never ignoring the undertow, never forgetting planes crash, even on roofs of houses deemed safe in the world of Garp. Never dissing the ones who need to stay mute, or bullying the ones who change their chameleon minds into picking a favorite colour.

All that is sense and nonsense is not love.

^{← Top: from the blurb of The Gulistan,or, Rose garden of Sa'di Below: A bezoar (a small stony concretion which may form in the stomachs of certain animals): Goa stone in a pierced gold holder with stand}
As Colour Bridge Children, we went in and came back out of the imperial heights of July and August, skidding over dry ice, salt and pyrite crystal, singing like copper bowls of their cosmic configurations and metallicness. We rocked the sea of life, because it has the ears to hear with.

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No one can be more realistic than the spiritually guided ones.

We were slight of frame and delicate of touch. Still we did not only have keepy-uppy feather-blowing competitions; we were not afraid to load our satchels up on the way home after the sun had been licked to sleep by the lapping tongue of the river we lay down beside in the silvery moon and its mecurial shimmer. We picked out the bezoars of the belly of the waters which had brought to life the inland seas; and carried them back down in to the Valley of Death as ornaments: tributes to the work of excretion and build up. The shells cast up onto the shore. The seedpod dropped onto the coast to be sent adrift.

Passing Through New Mexico

We smelled the tramps on our way home, in the same briefs they had worn for a month already. We registered that the balloon fiesta was initially a flop, with most balloons failing to lift off because of the fog. We shrugged to think how this was the 47th time this had happened: why think about a more propitious location, now? And we already suspected not even the FBI could prevent deaths despite the ramped up security at such events. People have been drowning by numbers since 1988. Serious irreconcilables spoil our progress all the time. Cooks, thieves, wives, lovers….It takes a hard back dust cover to keep us all together in the damp and grime of forgetting ourselves.

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Photo credit. ^{Fog spoiled the Balloon Festival in Abuquerque, New Mexico this past weekend, or otherwise security issues did! Only 13 balloons managed to lift off at the onset of the fiesta. I find all the reporting around this event confusing and distressing (two die!). Take the before last link for the article on safety measures: what is with the MORE inserts? More disaster to be sure. How does this add to the light and airy feeling of the festive occasion?!}

Perhaps it goes too far to wish upon a balloon that we might fly away over the rainbow to never return. But we were not wrong to remain optimistic and positive dancing the fandango at our own fiesta. There really is no saving the ones who shovel fear like snow into walls of ice.

Has it always been this SAD? (The Standard American Diet of wasteful stuff and inane things to do - enjoyed the world over but invented largely by our teenage New World, I'd say.)

¡ No es un araña!

How many died on the nasca plains drawing six (?) legged spiders (some say they must have gone up in some kind of hot air balloon for a sense of scale and perspective for their huge and very precise drawings.) Heck, isn’t it just an ant anyway?!

We returned from our summer odyssey, not only never to be forgotten unto eachother but to become exemplary rememberers. We displayed our finds like Chaldean exhibits, which we kept dimly lit so as not to startle too awake the unsuspecting show-case visitor.

There is nothing subversive in our sailing, but not everything makes for pleasant viewing, as I've tried to say in this piece all along: we made it in and out because we steer a middle course, keep our balance, steady, swift, and reliable as in a trimaran I am lead to believe.

We are souls well aware of being in the world but not of it.

^{Detail of an alabaster bas-relief of Ashurbanipal II's lion-hunt scene. 7th century BC. From the North Palace at Nineveh, in modern-day Nineveh Governorate, Iraq. The British Museum, London.}

We chased dragonflies and landed like swans, braking on our heels in our winged Hermes sandals.

We harmed no living soul, we woke up none of the resting dead. We stayed up late with the ones who had come from the ultra-marine, toasting mellow the marsh indigo dread back into cradling peachblossom womb, to the chant of the Jumblies who set out to sea in a sieve (or perhaps, at times, we banked rather on those in a crockery jar to appease our doubtful boat builder.) ‡

And here concludes my report on the summer holidays the three of us, a veritable threesome of New Propotions, have enjoyed as an adventure never to forget. We didn't drown for all the clumsy but ever enchanted sailing in our sieve, possibly because we aren't clever enough to count in the numbers that could count us out of ether truth: like Graham's number or a Google or a Mersennne prime to name but a few Massive numbers Instead we weighed the immeasurableness that is the gold and silver, mercury, tin and lead of our new consciousness, tiny spark by tiny spark.

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‡ see: Edward Lear. The Jumblies the link gives you the poem towards the end, and includes a useful analysis of sea(-faring) imagery used by renown poets in general as well.