Virtual Residency Day Ten; Biodiversity, Water and Sounds

I took most of the day today as a day of rest after singing of peace in the morning in our local Union Church. When I came home, I walked in my garden with my remaining elderly dog and my cat, visiting the trees I had planted from the installation that came down last month at Exit Art in NYC. They now look as they they grew there since saplings.

I noticed the birds had eaten all the red currants before I had had a chance to eat more than a few last week. The black currants are still plentiful. There will be a bumper crop of wild raspberries.

The heathers I planted this Spring to make up for some winter kill when the ground kept heaving and refreezing when it should not have done so, are filling out in the incessant and unseasonable rain and fog, a benefit of global warming I suppose. I deadheaded daylilies and made a mental note that they need to be divided soon unless I want a garden of nothing but daylilies.

I considered the percentages I heard Friday night of exotic species in local meadows, at least 46%, as I studied the delicate colors of the tiarellas in bloom. They make a rich foreground understory tapestry against the greys and browns of the far islands at low tide. Left to the devices of our Spruce Fir forest here, we might have 6-7 species in an understory. Thanks to "invasives" we have the biodiversity fo several hundred instead. On the other hand, we may have so many Spruce because of losing hardwoods to shipbuilders centuries ago. Penalosa diagrammed how our white spruce may be doomed because it cannot outpace the trajectory of global warming. Species migration is not fast enuf to compensate for cliamte chnage. I may think of them as weed species but I would be heartbroken to lose them. They so define the local character of this coastline.

I am still working out mechanics for this event. I was tired today because I was up until 5 AM this morning trying to finalize exactly what images to use on the web site top page for this residency. Khoj is in an urban center and the images I had planned to use, based on conversations with Navjot Altof last year, about working collaboratively with her in a small village, will not be appropriate: rural women in saris at a well with pots on thier heads. This choice I have made, to work virtually limits me as much as it opens new doors and windows. We will use the image of the portable water on trucks. Women do arrive and carry the water off but apparently not in saris and they carry bright plastic buckets on their heads rather than clay. I have also been finalizing a press release for the event, wrestling with my quasi-science-arttalk to make it into normal english. Many details remain and need to be put in place.

After my walk, I made several calls to the sound artists for the concerts. Alan Crichton of Kingdom Falls here in Maine asked a series of very good questions I cannot yet answer. How the general audience is going to hear the concerts as they unfold live if there are more than 500 people at any given time for example. Tomorrow I will try to nail that down with my webmaster.

I have been trying to learn the new software to do all this and it is exactly like learning a new language. The languages I learned young, French, Spanish, Hebrew, a tiny bit each of Russian, Italian, Portuguese, German and so on stick with me in direct proportion to how young I was when I first learned them. At seventeen, I spoke many languages, including exotic smatterings of Arabic and Urdoo because I went to an international school and it was normal. Languages come easily when you are young. Today I limp thru one or two besides English only if I brush up first.

I have nightmares of getting deep into the days of the concerts and all the new software language flying away like seagulls calling to the winds. It isn't the same as standing at a podium and just remembering to lift my soft palate and drop my larynx before I open my mouth to let air out and sing.