Quick As a Cat!

Kittycat sat alone on the deck.
Although I sat with her she still sat alone.
She had found a "something" out in the woods
and was beaming herself out there – like kittycats do.
I had my camera and framed up her head, to get a nice profile picture.
I pressed the shutter and the lens went "Snap!"
and Kittycat was there – quick as a cat!

© John Womack, 2007. All rights reserved.

Reflections In a Gallery

Next time you find a good gallery go in and look at the art that hangs on its walls. Check out what's in the stack bins and the browse boxes, and then take some time to sit and reflect a while. There's more in a good gallery than first meets the eye.

All languages are filled with wonderful words. And those words can be composed and organized into amazing concepts and thoughts, but the most beautiful thing that any word or concept can do is to combine with others and tell you a story that can enrich your life. And a good gallery is a lot like a good book, it can show you things you might not otherwise see, or even think of – and it has the ability to make you aware of who you really are.

So next time you find a good gallery, go in and stroll around, look at the pictures. Check out the bins and browse boxes, and then just sit a while. Tune into the gallery. It has a story it can tell you, and that's just the beginning. If you watch closely enough, it will begin to tell you a little bit about yourself. Reflect on the pictures you see and reflect on the energies you can feel. Ask yourself what is it that wants to come through to you here.

Franklin, North Carolina, has such a gallery. It is not only in the heart of town, it is really "uptown". Its name is The Uptown Art Gallery, and it is where the Macon County Art Association hangs out its work.

So come to Franklin. You'll by amazed. Come to the Uptown Art Gallery, look at the hangings, then sit a spell. Relax and feel what is really there. What are the messages that come through to you? And if you reflect carefully enough, you may find that you too are on the way to becoming a beautiful work of art.

© John Womack, 2007. All rights reserved.

Junk Mail

Went out to pick up some trash out of the ditch where our gravel driveway reaches the hard road. Thought it would only take about 15 minutes, but spent almost three hour at the task. I had a plastic bag and filled it up real quick, then found two more bags in the bed of my pickup and eventually filled both of them up too.

Wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. Turned out that dragging the plastic bags through the ditch didn't work very well, mainly because it wasn't really a ditch. Actually, it was just a steep grassy wall that fell off the road into the woods. The bags snagged, and so did I, and I realized I would have to develop some kind of a trash-pickup-protocol for doing this. At first I tried leaving the bag and tossing the stuff in its direction. But when that didn't work I realized I would have to throw everything I found up on the right-of-way of the hard road, so I could pick it all up later. That seemed to work pretty good.

So I was stumblin through the buckberry branches, and the twisty Laurel limbs and a lot of Rhododendron arms and legs and knees. I tried to not step on the flowers -Windflowers had just come up, and there were a lot of Spring Beauties, and amazing violets - brilliant blue ones and bright purple ones, and gigantic white violets, all this poking up through the Milwaukee's Bests, the Icehouses, Steel Calibers, Busch Lights, and a lot of Mountain Dews. Even found one Budweiser - must be a republican tossed that one. Found a pair of old sneakers, 4 hanging pot plants, a lot of disposable diaper things - guess those had mostly disposed - some paint cans, lots of cigarette stuff and a whole lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken remnants.

At last I was through. I staggered back to the truck to get the other two bags and was just coming back past my mailbox when I heard a Jeep coming up the hard road. It was our mailman.

Billy pulled up on the right side of the road, sitting on the right side of his Jeep, with his eyes rolling around at all the trash.

"Whut happen heer?" He grinned as he held out a couple of letters to me.

"Didn't you hear about the accident?" I asked him.

"Man, I doan heer nuthin' bout innythang when I'm out here - whut happen?"

"A mail truck turned over." I said.

Billy looked back over his shoulder al all the trash on the side of the road. "Where is th'truck?"

I told him pretty matter-of-factly, "Oh they hauled it away."

"Is the driver OK?"

"Yeah, he's fine, he's gone to get a bandage on, I'm cleaning up for the Post Office."

Billy looked at me "Wheres the Post Office people?"

"They're at work, back at the office. No big deal they said - it was a junk mail truck."

Billy looked back at the trash, then at me. "You spoofin me." He said sofly, with a question mark floating in afterwards trying to find its proper place.

"It's a fact." I said confidently.

"OK, see you later." Billy put his Jeep in gear and pulled up the road to the next mailbox.

I bagged my trophies and went home.

© John Womack, 2007. All rights reserved.

The Happiest Horse in the Mountains

The happiest horse in the mountains
Is a horse with a whole lot of hay
But when this poor guy came up to the mountains
he was a horse who had no hay at all.

They gave him a fence of bright, shiny barbed-wire,
and went off and left him all night
with a very small bucket of water to drink
and a itty-bitty bale of hay.

But next day they came back in a great big truck
With a trough of water that fills by itself,
and a bale of hay as big as his eyes!
For the happiest horse in the mountains.

© John Womack, 2007. All rights reserved.

The Thang

I first saw it late in the evening when The Thang was crossing the road far ahead of me as I was walking my dogs. It ran - or rater floated - as it moved and my first thought was of a huge spider. When it stands upright it is considerably taller than it is long, like a bob-cat, and to a lesser extent a coyote, although it crouches so much that that is hard to notice. These pictures were made from my front porch in mid-afternoon.