You.

I wake into my first thoughts of you.
It is morning.
It is dark.
I have yet to place before my eyes the light bending glass

(that will take me
from dirty milk VHS
to blue ray, sorta.)

I am in the ocean
my eyes are in the ocean
my house, the room, enveloped
we are held, drenched, floating in this sea
the sea that is you..
the youness that did not sleep or sucumb to the dark
the youness that did not blink
or push crusties from his eyes.

I am staing on the floor
You are here
Here before, between, in... through.


--

the ruff start of a poem.

You.

One Eye Kirk. Real time.

Here's look'n at you kid.

Just so happened that I went to the eye doctor today.  So, while my eye may be big, and my head small, my eye was extra big today.
AND great GOD-be-praised Hallelujah news.  The blister on the back of my retina continues to shrink.  When looking through my left eye I still find that my vision is soggy (out of focus) in a center area, but all the wild distortion is gone.  I am SO thankful.

Great Circle made manifest

Can you see the circle?


Jan 7?   Just returned three days ago from the greatest adventure in my life.  Make that maybe the second greatest adventure.  Or third, or fourth.  (I just thought of what it means to be married, or a Dad, or Jesu's little brother....

I had hoped I would have plenty of stories to tell while I was IN travel.  But it just didn't work that way.

So look for posts over the next weeks or moth in which I flesh out our Go Great Circle trip.

This, from the final leg - Lincoln City Oregon USA....Jan 2nd, 2013.

Great Circle Logo

So, this is the Logo my daughter Kayla designed for our "Great Circle" trip.  Pretty cool isn't it.

One Eye Kirk - What's in a Name.

One Eye Kirk.

sounds like a singer of the blues.

As is, the moniker for this blog is part theater, part present history, and part spiritual vision.

(waiting on the doc.  First time to use my camera phone.)

Several months ago I started noticing some abnormalities in my vision.  I looked at a crescent moon  and swore it had two tips... on each end.  I wondered if there was some kind of strange eclipse.  Then I noticed I kept trying to bend and straighten my glasses.  It seemed like one of the lenses in my glasses was askew..  I kept seeing distortion, like a looking trough the edge of a windshield.

It wasn't till I actually covered my right eye (my "shooting" eye) that I actually noticed my left eye was seeing the world all wonky.  Think of having a big drop of honey on your glasses or a little funny mirror right in the middle of your vision.  Beyond that, the world as viewed through my left eye was about an "F-stop" darker.  Like wearing medium sunglasses.

So I made a b-line to the optometrist...who turned me over to retina specialist.

I was subject to a small battery of tests, including one where they put glowing die in my blood so they could photograph the back of my eye.  Later I would pee florescent.  They showed me a grid chart.  All the lines in the lower right corner collapsed.

The eye doctor confirmed I had something called "Pigment Epithelial Detachment" -- in short a blister on the back of my retina, with that rich seeing rod-and cone stratum, pulled from the back of my eye.

Then he told me words that made me a little anxious.  My condition might self heal, but there is not a lot to be done.  We should wait.   Laser surgery or steroids might irritate my eye, leading to greater damage.

In the meantime, my vision just kept getting worse. Lines that should have looked like Twiggy looked more like Beyonce.   I knew even the prescription for my good eye needed adjusting, so together, I was having a hard time with camera focus... and even a harder time viewing my work on computer.   I am a God conscious man.  He gave me my eyes.  He can take them back.   But I was concerned.

Went for a second opinion.   Map of the back of my eye, showed the blister had bloomed.   He suggested that It is highly probable that I have early Wet-form Macular Degeneration.  I would later find MD it runs in the family.

Long story short.  I am receiving treatment for my eye, that consists of a series of shots... delivered straight into my eye.   They are using a drug... developed for cancer patients  that will target the capillaries growing under my retina.   I have never been one given to taking meds, and the cost of all this is astonishing.   Funny.   I have long wanted a real nice set of speakers.  And now I spend that much on a single shot in my eye.   Vision is both common... and terrible (in that old sense of the word.)   I cannot imagine how some  folks function without it.  I earn my living with my eyes... So I let them pump away.

And now.  Good news.  I am seeing much better.  After two shots, there is considerably less distortion in my left eye.  I still see a discolored dull spot, and I am getting new glasses to boot.  But I am relieved.  And PROFOUNDLY thankful.   For medical treatment.  For answered Prayers.  For the love of friends who have shared their concerns.  And for the ongoing ability to praise God by looking at His world with the eyes he has loaned me.

Go Great Circle #2: Charlie's Dream

In the next day or two I need to write a very special letter to my Father’n Law – Dad McGinn.  Ever since I was a teenage boy, I have dreamed of being a National Geographic Photographer, prancing around the globe, or living in the ruts, mixing it up with folks in exotic lands.  

                                                                                                                       Charles McGinn

As God, in his goodness would have it, I HAVE known a greater part of my dreams.   Wife, Kids, camera.  Indeed,  I have the raw pleasure of shooting pictures most everyday.  And some of the folks are occasionally exotic.  For the unacquainted, I work for the State of Arkansas, serving our Governor Mike Beebe.  Must be one of the greatest jobs on earth.  I get to watch leadership in action, tour all parts of the Natural State, and see what makes our little nation click.  But still --- its not the same as living out of a pack, under the lure of constant uncertainty.

But in a couple of days, I will come closer to my boyhood dream than I have been in decades, all due to the vision – and generosity - of McDad.

Chas/Charles has been talking the Great Circle for decades.  These days he is less apt to remember that he has had this conversation with us only recently.

Dad's vision for our trip is part Romantic – part Capitalist. 

He wants us to do what most folks only dream about… and make a video in the process. (Then sell it to you, even as we encourage you to join us in your own planet circling venture)

In keeping with his idea, dad wrote in a recent letter:

“Again, Make it  Great Circle, Not Great Zig Zag…   So that the journey will be the shortest possible for the cash-poor traveler.  It’s round the world, not see the world.  If people start doing this I truly believe mankind will finally begin to realize that we are all on this planet together and that there is plenty of room And that folks are pretty nice everywhere if you give them half a chance.  Least ways, there’s no reason for talking about nuclear bombing your neighbor.” 

To be continued.

Cowboy Up

                                                          Cosby and Cody - to wed, in a week.

Go Great Circle: Part 1

GGC: Kirk Jordan

What is it and why?

Over the last weeks or year, you may have heard me whisper of my forthcoming trip, something we call “The Great Circle.”  Then I blush with pleasure.

Truth is, I have tried not to talk of it too much, cause every time I do I feel like I am boasting, and then I remember the Lords’ specific injunction about declaring our future with the certainty that we control it.

            Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

(James 4:13-17 ESV)

So… with that stern warning in mind, I want to tell you what is on my plate (Lord willing) and how such a idea has come about.

On December 3^rd. I intend to leave Conway Arkansas, with my daughter Kayla in tow, fly to New York City, meet up with my sister-in-law Carlin and her husband Ray/Reza (hereafter, sister and brother) then, over the course of the next month circumnavigate the globe.  From there we will hit seven major cities around the world, and return to the USA one month later.   We plan stops in Milan, Istanbul, Dubai, Mumbai, Singapore, Melbourne,  and Auckland.  (Followed by a stateside visit with my first Dad in Lincoln, Oregon.)

The idea is that of my Father-in-Law, Charles McGinn, also known as Dad, or McDad.

Best Time Lapse Ever?

https://youtu.be/Rrj74AZ0l5Q

Prepare to be blown away. And don't get impatient. The beginning is excellent, but more traditional. By the time it gets to the end your socks melt off. Or something like that. I sure hope I get to meet up with Randy Halverson (Photographer) some day. I am a newbee at timelapse and his stuff makes me want to hide away. I LOVE THIS. Thanks Randy. Music by BT.... pretty rad. It's like a whole new way of hearing sounds.

I see the moon, the moon sees me. Climbing up your apple tree. Kirk Jordan or "not quite all there"

On the occasion of my forthcoming death

Note: I am part of a group that hangs out on G-Plus (Google +) called "Selfie Sunday" -- On every other week or so, we post a self portrait of ourselves, and in turn look at, and comment on each other's self portraits.  This week was a Halloween theme.  As is, I am not too fond of Halloween's obsession with darkness, though in an abstract way, I think reflection on death can be a good thing.  So here is my photo contribution to the day, with a reflection - beyond the grave.

Recently I had occasion to go to the memorial service of a truly outstanding young man, Cris -- “The Romanian” – a pre-med student at the University of Central Arkansas. Cris was a special light. At 22 he loved life, blushed loudly, took in knowledge with unbridled curiosity, and otherwise lived with a intensity in before God and man that is simply rare. (Someone said they now understood -- Cris had to fit 70 years into 22.)

That, in combination with the death or declining health of others near to me, has led to on a odd stream of introspection. (For whatever reasons, my mom often thought about death, even to the point of giving instruction for her “Coming home” celebration. So --- as part of a family tradition, here is a list of things I would like to see at my funeral. Which of course, assumes that I might be permitted to look in on such things. I don’t know. Perhaps I will have no interest.




The major songs.



Be Thou My Vision.

Immortal Invisible

Like a River Glorious (my favorite hymn as a kid.)

And He will Purify (From Handle’s Messiah)

Going up Yonder (the latter two sung by Marvin or the Philander Smith Gospel Choir)

the Amazing Cloud Tsunami! (order Print)

To see the cloud in motion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6EouhO6E0o



Apparently a lot of folks in AR like the middle picture.  Some would even like to buy it.  If you would like to help a soul, without an entrepenurial bone in his body, please do so.


First.   My gift.  Feel free to download to you computer for a backdrop.  But if you need a real print, please pay.


signed 8x12 = 12 dollars (in person delivery) or $15 mailed.
signed 12x18 = 24 dollars, or $28 mailed.


Check or Money order to Kirk Jordan
3 Manchester Drive, Conway AR 72034.   (I'll see if I cannot get Paypal up an going)

email, if needed  kirkwood2020 (at)  yahoo.com.


feedback

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150335211858554&set=a.88702903553.101952.68455493553&type=1&comments&cmntid=10150335230763554

http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2011/08/10/clouds-over-capitol

Is it me, or do you see it too?

Is it me, or do you see it too?, a photo by Jordan's Storm on Flickr.

Hard and Soft. (Okra and Japanese Magnolia)

How many are your works Oh Lord.  In wisdom you have made them all.  The whole world is full of your possessions.


(Psalm 104)

Q: Why do I take pictures?

A: Cause I can't play the music I hear in my head!

AR365 Day 117. Theme: Music

Today's audio track, from a pretty good band with a limited but dedicated following, playing from the 3rd finest album in the history of the world. ((A Sigh For You by DA (aka Daniel Amos) from their 1986 album Fearful Symmetry))

To follow my 365 on Flickr, check in HERE

the Shinners

AR365 Day 116: Theme: Music.

(okay, were stretching this to illustrate settings that beget music.)

for more images of Ozell and Derick, or to follow my 365 project

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirkjordan/

Ozell and his nephew Derick inside the Wright Shoe-Shine Parlor, a business which has been quietly in operation for some 30 years, in a warehouse looking-space in Downtown Little Rock, AR (USA)


For your listening enjoyment:


The Soul of a Man (Blind Willie Johnson Version)

or my favorite modern rendition:

The Soul of a Man (Bruce Cockburn Version)

Quercus Borealis

An old but iconic Kirk poem


A Stained Glass Spider Web Cathedral  (3/91)

When funnel clouds clip rainbows

in our world, where the vestiges of Eden whirl

in a mash of mangled parrot wings

or Iris, smithereened to make

makeup,

We can see why rainbows flinch;

They don’t make it very long.

Banshee decibels defign, the decimating means:

Locomotive grinding wheel , cone of writhen hate,

vicious biting vapors, Hell-

icopter blades.

Each bashing is a moment-ary

Torque

Of glass,

disbanding shock,

Indigo

From icon wrenched

reched red,                   shrapnel  butterflies

Violet, 

         Violently constr ue d,             arch

From Arch etype

divorced.

(The sky is reeling odd tonight!)

I’ve read about those pristine days when rainbow shard was rare.

Lions still ate lily-pads, and rattlesnakes were raging fads

As playmates for the nursery.

Prisma-ash is pollen now,

Coursing through our breath,

Twisted beauty permeates, and I like eating meat.

The eyes of flies are pigment parks in geodesic dome,

Black radiance with chandelier, stuffed in honeycomb.

Oil on the parking lot, mimics Northern lights:

Borealis flares in beaded rain, on surfaces like night.

Death implied is banking, pivoting on air

A bloodied stink is calling to a colored thoroughfare.

Gliding white as whisper, missiles cruise the dark

Pilot fish are dental floss for shearing shard of shark.

The cacti in the desert, wear a brutal fringe,

Prickle pear, with rain, explode into a floral binge.

Snow flakes falling virgin white, in the tilted world

Would we know that dance at all, if sin were not unfurled?

Now I share my paradox:

I believe in paradise, with us once and yet to come:

"World without End…"

I believe in beauty too:

"Meadows from His garden here."

But these strange shattered-glories, fallen-splendors reign

Carving raging channels, deep within my brain

Of a convoluted beauty,

Heaven would exclude.

Note: This early poem totally baffled the class to which I presented it. Several praised the images, but it met with an almost universal “hungh”. One kid said that it said “nothing” well, then added that he liked it till it mentioned God. Now I don’t know if I missed on a communication level because the poem really is too abstract, or if I was simply working with alien themes. I wanted to press a religious question with out sounding like a bible.

To be honest, the title threw them. Folks were looking for the cathedral in the poem. But it wasn’t there. I was mixing metaphors and playing with a personal symbol. We tried not to explain our poems too much –“Bad form”; But I'll help you with the title at least.

Somewhere in the nineties a tornado hit our small college town of Stillwater Oklahoma. And not just one, but four separate cones descending like teats from an angry udder. It wasn’t a national story but it did leave a lot of broken glass and shingles and a flipped car or two in our apartment complex. Later, in typical space-head thinking, I imagined shattered glass tossed and lodged in spider webs … really ….like the bits of broken glass in church windows. The rest is yours.

Splay

Gnarly

And If you find it here, I never mind a Flickr vote

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirkjordan/

Cohesion

The 365 group of which I am a part (a club of Arkansas based Photographers who have an outlet on Flickr, in which we post a picture a day for a year....) have recently been playing with drops of various kinds.  This is my variation on the drop theme.  Flickr here.

The Visitation

Providence United Methodist Church, Charlotte, North Carolina on the "I'm dreaming of a white Day-after Christmas" storm of 2010.   (What cleary was a storm for the the Northern States, turned Charlotte into a postcard, which in turn cleared in a couple days.   This particular look is produced from a single image...(No Photoshop trickery) as flowing-blowing-snow pours through a strong shaft of light used to illumine the steeple.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirkjordan/5302401018/

You say, I say

You say, I say
(correspondence with a departed poet, KSJ)


Dear Anne

It may be
that you,

Living as you do
in the radiance of city din, or eating
underneath His chin,

Are not quick to hear
poems from half dead lips,
or peer
into the dark abyss from which you
are so greatly liberated.


But,
if our Brother would consent
I pray he pass a fond hello, or
let you know that one
who labors under sun with double heart and dusty eyes
has found within your words
a sister in the soul.

--

It’s a strange thing,
this parting of the heart and posting light

(or misery)

for all the colony to see, but
could you ever have imaged that
your words would reach
three hundred fifty suns
into the future?

And now, here you are
right up front: the “first” gal poet in an anthology of American works.

Anne Bradstreet
1612 to 1672

--


I thought to tell you first, how things have changed—
Your wilderness is parking lot
and littered with machines beyond your dreams.
We wear less clothes or sometimes hold your ilk,
in poor repute.

Indeed, we think of Puritans as pleasure snuffing prudes--
stern faced zealots with a taste for gloom and work in general
But then I read your words and find

SUPRIZE!

A red blooded woman with a taste for joy and life in general

--
And now,
What’s this? Could it be
that crickets filled your ears as they do mine

Or that
oak trees powered through your soul
like living praise?



You say:

Then on a stately Oak I cast mine Eye
Whose ruffling top the Clouds seem’d to aspire
How long since thou wast in thine infancy:
They strength and stature, more thy years admire.
Hath hundred winters past since thou wast born,
or thousand since thou brakest thy shell of horn?

I say:

A seed is power
Spewing power,
Stink or weed
Or common flower.

You say:

I heard the merry grasshopper then sing,
the black-clad Cricket bear a second part;
They kept on tune and plaid on the same string
Seeming to glory in their little art.

I say:

Cricket and cicada calling
A walling falling on dawn
Black audio, rainbow snow
Blowing like a blizzard through my ears.

You Say:

Thy Swift Annual and diurnal course,
they daily streight and yearly oblique path,
Thy pleasing fervor and they scorching force
All mortals here they feeling knowledge hath;

I say:

Brother sun slices though the heavens
Like a bobsled
Running down a course of rigid nothingness
Ever pushed and pulled by pulsars
and the stellar winds of the Milky Way,
But still, He smashes the horizon
Exactly when, and
where He should.

You say:

What’s glory like to thee,
Soul of this world, this Universes Eye?

I say:

He steels a peak through the hole in the sky
We call the sun.

You say:

In a secret place where I once stood,
Close by the banks of lacrym flood,
I heard two sisters reason on
Things that are past and things to come.
One Flesh was called, who had her eye
On worldly wealth and vanity;
The other Spirit who did rear
Her thoughts unto a higher sphere

I say:

I got this doppelganger henchman
with the lusty eyes
steals my joy and deals in lies
plays with matches and gasoline
says: come on man, you can’t be clean.

You say:

Be still thou unregenerate part
Disturb no more my settled heart,
For I have vowed and so will do,
Thee as a foe still to pursue,
And combat with thee will and must
Until I see the laid in dust.

I say

Brother Jesu
Lend a hand
I got this ugly double-man
Hearing with my ears and talking out my tongue
How long Oh, Lord till he’s undone?

You say:

My crown, not diamonds, pearls or gold,
but such as angel’s heads enfold.
The city where I hope to dwell
There’s none on earth can parallel.

I say:

I want to dwell in that city
City of substance and form
I want to warm my skin in his eyes
And rise with the children of dawn.

You say:

Glory

I say:

Hallelujah

Rise

One of the deep pleasures of riding the State Employees Van to work, is that I can take a nap and give someone else the driving frustrations. One of the chief frustrations of riding the van is being caged when all glory is breaking loose. Like these last two days of rises and sets. (But then, this bridge isn't the kind of space you can stop or walk. And the birds... a total suprise. I never saw them till I looked back at my frames.

A bruised reed he will not break, 
and a faintly burning wick he will not quench; 
he will faithfully bring forth justice.  


(Isaiah, attributed to Christ.)