I'm gone…

Well, maybe… I am nothing if not ambivalent.

I've been feeling that things have been stale here for the past few months so I have decided to take a hiatus to consider the future of Rabbit Meets Hat. At this point my intention is to take an extended break, lasting a month or two but, to be honest, ending the blog is also something that is on the table. I just can't say right now. It has been difficult to come up with posts lately & the effort has not been particularly satisfying for me or, I suspect, terribly interesting for anyone else. (I'm not fishing for encouragement here: I really am at an impasse.) I'm hoping that stepping away will help sort it out. There are also some personal issues placing heavy demands on my time & energy at the moment, to the point that I've been feeling like a rather inept juggler: red-faced & sweaty with balls & broken crockery scattered about my feet… 

When I first started RMH with no direction or goal, my friend George at 1904 said this would be fun. Well, he was right; it has been ~ so much more than I ever imagined. I hope that my seven or eight regular readers (You know who you are…) have enjoyed it as well. (Something must have resonated because you kept coming back, right?) I've met some very nice, very interesting people here & all of you should feel free to keep in touch via e-mail or on Facebook. (I'm hoping you will…)

They're back…

Here they are, back by popular demand.
As you can see, this years model is twice as large. (Twice as expensive as well, these bad boys were fifty cents each.) I pledged an oath on Darwin's On the Origin of Species that I would not shell out the spare change for the new & improved model: bigger is not always better, particularly in these times of financial uncertainty. 

Nevertheless, there is a growing pile of simian pranksters sitting on the kitchen counter.

Happy Easter…

Self Portrait, 2009

Garden Study, 2009

In the wee small hours of the morning…

Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof-gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Annie Dillard ~ Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

At two o'clock this morning I couldn't sleep so I took advantage of my insomnia (a trick that all long time victims of sleepless nights eventually learn) & made use of the time to e-mail a friend in Japan. While my keyboard softly clicked away, I could hear, somewhere on the night-quiet street, a solitary mockingbird singing his little heart out; endlessly repeating his appropriated cyclical melodies, trying to find a mate.

He's still at it.

Un Chant d'Amour (after Jean Genet)

Rhythmic Etude (Red to Yellow)

The Devil's Playground…

Modernity, Silent & Shimmering (after F. W. Murnau), 2009

Spring, 2009

Harbinger of spring…

Is it blossom petals? No,

Snow incognito…