The shiny red dragon was in the center of the street waiting for the parade ahead to move.

The dragon was about half a block from the beginning of the parade route, in the lining up area, but the parade ahead of the dragon, on the parade route, wasn't moving, so the dragon waited and waited.

The teenagers that held the dragon skin and who were, with the dragon skin and dragon skin holder poles, the dragon, were therefore standing stillish--not a favorite teenage activity.

The adult leader of the San Gabriel Valley Chinese Cultural Association dragon team noted that the shiny red dragon was right next to a broad sidewalk that was, at the moment, almost empty, the spectators starting, half a block away, on the official parade route.

The leader gave a signal, said a few words, and the dragon went from street to sidewalk and started sinuously, snakily weaving around and between three spindly street trees, a couple of utility poles, and a lamp post, all over the broad sidewalk.

They were great. Improvised sinuous moving around a place they'd never been before as a dragon was nothing to them. Around and around and all over, and I lucked out because I was the spectator. I was the only person who had kept the sidewalk from being empty when they started.

I moved to the curb and stepped down into the street and "oh, gosh"ed inside of myself.

The kids were moving and getting or staying warm and practicing and really doing on a damp, chill February night.

Notice the space; take the space; make bonus beauty; keep warm. Happy New Year!

Sometimes I get it backwards and feel for a minute that if the weather doesn't act as predicted, it's disobeying instructions. I'm over-listening to the human voice.

God, help me hate them not too much, but just the right amount.

God? God?

What is the city as a group doing?

What is the city as one big thing doing?

What is the city as many beings and objects doing?

Now.

What, essentially, are we up to?

--"You know, they laid all five of us off. No--let's put it like this. They deleted the five positions."

--sidewalk voice, woman talking on her phone

Some teas help healing. Coffee doesn't cause healing but makes us feel that we don't need healing because we're zipping through everything so fast.

There don't seem to be many recorded instances of a heavenly messenger appearing to a human and saying, "Be smug."

Morning and five or six people sitting near the Buddha etc statue on the plaza looked to be meditating.

Then they stood up and did slow movements that looked like Tai Chi or like Falun Gong movements, which are similar to Tai Chi.

Then they stopped and walked a short bit and stopped and rested. Some looked toward imposing grey buildings; some looked toward purple and yellow flowers planted in patters in green graqss.

It was Valentine's Day. I noticed they had positioned themselves physically and there fore mentally to accept things in general and notice the flowers that are there rather than demanding that flowers be given by one specific mammal.

I need to spend my time knowing what I actually know and not get distracted by Bozo-the-clown agreed-upon reality.

It looked like a cross betwenn a corgi and a pit bull, which was entertaining since corgis are associated with Queen Elizabeth II and pit bulls are associated with USA criminals.

It also looked happy, liking being on the leash, leading its human, not too fast, not too slow, across teh cross walk, enjoying seeing and smellig what there was to see and smell.

Sometimes when I breed of dogs gets popular, too many of the individual dogs of that breed are kind of stupid because of too much inbreeding.

This dog, from gene pools that haven't often met looked bright, looked to be loving noticing all thing noticable and figuring them out to the doggy extent possible.

Maybe the different dog bits inside him that hadn't been worn down by too much contact were, every day, enjoying inside him how the other kind of dog gene was different. Wow! You're really like that! Amazing! Often awestruck, never bored.

Love has heard of all the rules.

Open to the process, and the process is love.

There's a shadow under every car that goes with it when it moves and stays with it when it's still. The Earth is under that shadow.

It's not just cars' bad breath but also killer paving and the missing of what we move too fast to love.

Sometimes reading Sappho I can feel that she lived and saw before there was industrial pollution.

The air there uninterrupted to be seen blue and seen through.

Clear air and sun and Sappho writing down what she just noticed.

The best way to be with art is to be with a bit of art again and again, over time.

The most high quality work of art I've gotten to be with that way, often, as part of my routine, is
Three Heads Six Arms, a big statue by Zhang Huan that looks like a big Buddha statue or three old statues made together into one.

It is on Larkin Street, across the street from the San Francisco Main Library and the Asian Art Museum. Those are a fit to have it across from the space between them. The Asian Art Museum is obvious, because it is Asian art and is a sort of comment and variation on Asian Art and the library because the statue is partly about saving things from the past and bringing the past and present together for people now. The library does that.

Three Heads One Arm looks like one object and is. It also is about making one object for now out of things that have been broken in the past. Human-made ruins, reassembled in a new way as one thing.

Zhang Huan in making the statue was working, in his mind and body, with art destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, art of Buddhism and Tibetan mythology shattered.

From the library side, the statue looks a lot like Buddha statues I'm used to--a Buddha head with decorative head gear on top of a body. The body is different in that it isn't sitting. It is supported in a way that could look precarious, but it works, so it looks solid. It's supported on three points, the rounded lower part of the torso (which is all it's got--no legs to cross, an elbow, and a hand.

The other two heads are more austere--faces almost gaunt instead of rounded, no decoration. The arms not involved in touching the ground and holding it all up are spread out like dancing or gliding like a bird. Except for the one arm that isn't all there, the arm that stops at a decorative band a bit below the shouder.

I think the best work of art I've seen at all--not again and again, but at all, is "Guernica" by Pablo Picasso, a large painting about the consequences of bombing a Spanish town back before bombing became routine. I'd sort of gone to New York City to see it before it went back to Spain as Picasso wished since Spain had become a democracy. The Museum of Modern Art filled it's whole self with Picasso paintings for this occasion. I was there to see it, and when I saw it was stunned, was fairly shattered.

I'm on a planet where bombing happens and I do what? I'm on a planet where people destroy there own cultural heritage and make it hard for their own people to be smart and I do what?


To bring these things destroyed together and make them real now, and make them one now, somehow--a big task, a task that seems impossible, but people try and sometimes succeed. We get beauty out of the pieces our human nature as made; hang with the beauty and the horror, and maybe eventually know some things to do instead, some things to do prevent instead of having to reimagine the destroyed.

Maybe.

The Earth is round, but the words to talk about the Earth are skinny.

Help me notice what I need to notice. Help me ignore what will unusefully distract me.