whirling silver hoops

whirling silver hoops 

around her slender frame

suddenly a slinky

Once again this year we are fortunate to have the National Acrobats and Circus of the People's Republic of China perform at the Sondheim Theater. This year's performance, Peking Dreams, combines dazzling costumes with breathtaking feats of acrobatics. The show begins with a graceful parade of women in traditional costumes.

Acrobats tumble through the air as standard bearers wave enormous red silk flags.

A group of contortionists balance on top of each other. All of these acts require tremendous strength as well as incredible flexibility, dexterity and balance.

Women twist and back bend, all the while spinning sets of four plates on long sticks in each hand. One would be hard enough, but eight!

Above them a woman balances a vase of flowers at the end of a stick held in her mouth while she slowly lowers herself to hang upside down by one foot from a strap suspended from the ceiling.

A man wearing only a pair of gray silk pants walks with deliberate steps across the stage. Slowly he climbs a pole. Holding the pole with only his hands, he extends his whole body upside down, sideways. Then he balances on one hand at the top.

Look at those muscles!

After a group of women in red costumes form a pyramid, an assistant tosses large red fabric discs to them, which they catch and spin with their hands while their feet hold up the acrobats above them. The woman at the top is balancing upside down, spinning a disk on her feet.

A group of men in blue vests dive and tumble through rings with incredible agility as the rings become progressively higher. This man is doing the splits as he dives through the rings!

The last man, wearing a red vest, dives through the highest set of rings, while his companions form an expectant line.

A group of men demonstrate their skill with lassos, tumbling through their own or another's lasso.

One woman climbs a streamer of purple silk, weaving it around her arms and legs, then hangs by her mouth from the top.

A troop of women in exotic costumes and umbrellas pose gracefully.

The star juggler spins umbrellas on her fingers and toes while she balances upside down on a man's feet. At the end, she tosses one umbrella up to balance on top of another one.

Then she keeps hoops going around her body and in her hands as more and more are tossed to her by an assistant.

Finally, bending backwards, she turns a whole raft of hoops into a silver slinky.

Next, in a comic scene, a man dressed in traditional operatic costume attempts to woe a veiled woman, carried in a cart, with a rose, which she continuously throws at his feet.

To entertain the reluctant woman and her suitor, the retainers begin juggling their hats. The woman finally lifts her veil and we see that she (played by a man) is quite ugly!

Eleven women in pink costumes demonstrate their skill on bicycles and a unicycle, singly and in unison. Here they wheel around the stage, one arm behind their neighbor's back, the other raised high, maneuvering in tandem with no hands on the handlebars.

For their final stunt, one by one they run and mount a single bike until eleven women, and over a thousand pounds, are balancing on one moving set of wheels. How can the cyclist at the bottom even see?!

The final act of the show features the same man who climbed the pole. While women beat large red drums, he mounts a series of chairs, the top one set at an angle, and balances upside down on the top of the tipped chair.

For the ultimate feat, he builds two columns of blocks and balances upside down on them. As we hold our breath, he knocks one column down. Now he is balancing vertically on only one hand. You can see the blocks falling to the floor while his feet are almost as high as the stage lights.

Somersaulting down, he lands upright on the tower of chairs.

And so this dazzling performance ends as all the performers appear on stage and the audience rises to their feet to applaud.

how the river turns

how the river turns

walls and windows into 

fluid squiggles

The River Kaw, also known as the Kansas River, runs through Lawrence, Kansas, dividing the city, which is connected by the Massachusetts Street bridge.

The Bowersock Dam crosses the river under the bridge. A low impact dam, it is the only hydroelectric dam in Kansas.

Suspended above the dam are electric high lines. On these perches with a view, crows gather. They come and go, but there is always room for more along the wires.

I walk down below the bridge for a closer view of the water. Someone has inscribed LOVE in red letters on the underside of the bridge. For awhile I watch the way the water reflects buildings, turning stone and glass into free-flowing abstractions. 

Across the river, the sun setting behind bare trees turns the water to liquid gold.

On the north side of the river near the bridge, someone has constructed an amazing sculpture composed of driftwood and river trash, set among the limestone boulders of the flood bank.

 

The river hones the wood, revealing the grain, turning it silver. And the river casts up the junk that has been thrown, dropped, lost in the water, so that humans with beauty in their eyes can turn it into art.

lady in black gazes

lady in black gazes

beyond a woman in black

gazing at her

Mona Lisa gazes serenely out of her frame within a frame. The terra cotta walls are dimly lit, but a soft light falls on the face of the lady. Sitting on a bench in front of the icon, a woman contemplates the aura of Da Vinci's most famous painting. Although it's a reproduction, the experience still feels sublime. 

We traverse slowly through the Da Vinci Exhibition, currently on display at the old Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri.

In the corridor leading to the entrance, we sit in front of a large reproduction of one of Da Vinci's pages of drawings, bathed in rainbow lights cast on floors and walls like the stained glass windows inside a cathedral.

Inside, the first hall is filled with working models of Da Vinci's numerous inventions. Some invite the visitor to "Please Touch" to turn the mechanism. Da Vinci was fascinated with flight, studied birds and drew many designs. His aerial screw, "a spiral in the air that would rise high," was the predecessor of the modern helicopter.

The spiral, especially the spiral arising from the mathematical ratio, phi, also fascinated Da Vinci. 

We see this golden ratio throughout the exhibit depicted in the first letter of his last name emerging from a series of golden rectangles within golden rectangles. I could follow commentaries about the displays by audio through an app on my smartphone, but I choose the old-fashioned method of text and images.

Overlaid on Mona Lisa we see a triangle, golden rectangles and the golden spiral.

Da Vinci's other most famous painting, The Last Supper, is based on golden rectangles. The mural takes up an entire wall in the exhibit.

 

Leonardo was also captivated by light and its reflections. He used an eight-sided room of mirrors to study the human form in different poses. And he was the first to discover that the eye captures light to allow vision.

The room of mirrors was a popular place for taking photos. Wouldn't Leonardo have loved the digital camera?

Many of his inventions were extremely practical, or were at least meant to be: gears, pullleys, levers, bridges, wheeled vehicles, an armored tank, boat hulls, even a submarine. 

The underwater vessel, designed to sink ships, held only one person.

Every realm of life, from nature to human engineering, was explored by this true Renaissance man, including music. 

He wrote, ". . . painting is the servant to the eyes, the noblest of the senses . . . . when many voices meet and sing at the same time, they are a harmonic proportion, a delight in such a way that the auditoriums remain astonished. . . . Don't they know that the soul is made of harmonies and that harmonies are not created but by the concurrency or by the properties of the objects that are seen and heard?" 

So we see that Leonardo was always inspired by harmonic proportions in everything, whether natural or manmade.

curled in a tight ball

curled in a tight ball

furry tail curved over its face

a chipmunk fails to stay

warm enough on a cold night 

trapped above ground

To my dismay, we failed to check the "humane" live trap until the morning after a cold fall night.

The little chipmunk is curled in a ball in a corner, between the trip plate and the end of the wire cage. Usually, I carry the live chipmunks in the live trap a couple of miles away to release them.

This one looks like it's sleeping. But when I touch the cage, it doesn't move. A dead chipmunk in a live trap.

Perhaps freezing to death is not the worst way to go, returning in fetal position to the way it was before it was born. But when I remove the tiny lightweight body from the trap, still curled up tight, I feel such despair that our lack of timely surveillance caused the chipmunk's untimely death. No more trapping chipmunks while the nights are cold.

rogue cornstalks flutter

rogue cornstalks flutter

above a field of rattling

soybeans ripe for harvest

Driving after dark on our back country road, we see monstrous bright lights in the fields, combines harvesting hybrid corn and soybeans. This morning I pass a field of soybeans, their monochrome brown punctuated by rogue cornstalks sticking up like standards in a battlefield. 
          Kernels from the ears of hybrid corn are not used as seed because the offspring of these plants do not resemble their cross-bred parents. Nevertheless, some kernels from last year's corn crop have managed to survive harvesting, harrowing, freezing, tilling and the planting of soybeans to pop up at random in an otherwise unvarying landscape.

In another field planted with corn, the stalks form dense rows of rustling dry leaves. Farmers in this area grow two cash crops, corn and soybeans. They usually rotate the two crops on their fields in alternate years. This is because grass crops such as corn are unable to take nitrogen from the air, so they need nitrogen in the soil. Legume crops such as soybeans have bacteria on nodules on their roots which take nitrogen from the air and fix it into the soil. So the corn planted the following year is able to use the nitrogen provided by the soybeans. 
          Of course, many farmers also add chemical fertilizers containing nitrogen to the soil. Farmers who maintain large hog contained animal feeding operations (CAFO) will collect the swine manure in pits and then spread it on fields. However, pig manure is very low in nitrogen as well as incredibly stinky!

This field was harvested all night, ahead of a rainstorm. Both corn and soybeans must be quite dry in order to be stored in silos and transported by rail. But rain after a harvest is welcome for refreshing the parched soil for next year's crop. 

curving out petal

curving out petal

unfolds from the heart of a

melancholy crocus 

Last fall I planted half a dozen autumn crocus by the front walk, just inside the gate. In the spring, violets and peonies came and went, iris and roses, and finally asters and goldenrod. Now, in late October, everything has gone to seed. One cold morning, I venture out the front door to be greeted by a solitary burst of violet flame lighting up the dead leaves, more vibrant than the red blueberry leaves at the foot of its pale stem. It looks a bit like saffron crocus, and indeed it is often called meadow saffron, but it blooms in the fall instead of the spring. I can't imagine what possesses the plant to bloom when almost all the pollinators have flown away, retreated into nests or died.

This flower (a member of the lily family, Liliaceae) is as surprising as the surprise lilies, Lycoris squamigera (actually in the amaryllis family, Amaryllidaceae) when they magically "resurrect" in August on their leafless stalks. Both plants are called naked ladies because the blossoms appear long after the leaves have died. Now I recall noticing some narrow dark green leaves that came up in this spot in the spring but produced no flowers. I had forgotten planting the autumn crocus the previous fall. Unlike the tall pink resurrection lilies, autumn crocus are daintier, more delicate. This particular variety, "Waterlily," has unique double petals, like a fairy's tutu.

Autumn crocus may look like saffron crocus, Crocus sativus, whose red-orange stigmas are used as a colorful and flavorful spice, but all parts of Colchicum autumnale are deadly. The leaves, seeds and corms contain colchicine, a poison whose symptoms appear in two to five hours and resemble arsenic, with no antidote. However, properly processed as a drug, colchicine is used for the treatment of acute gout. Interestingly, I recently had a bout of gout. The doctor prescribed allopurinol, which probably contains the alkoloid colchicine. But I opted to use an herbal formula, Gout Resolve, which definitely did not contain any toxins and it relieved the pain and swelling in my toes in two days.

Only one autumn crocus appeared out of the all the corms I planted a year ago. But the single bloom, alone among the dying foliage, is more heart-breakingly beautiful than a handful of companions. 

So fragile and short-lived. After three days of blooming, this morning in a cold autumnal rain the lone naked lady bows her lilac tresses to the ground.

small black caterpillar

small black caterpillar 

shrouded in silk strands clings

to the top of a dry grass stem 

head raised, not moving

I find first one, then several more small black caterpillars, clinging to the ends of dead grass stems. To my eye they stand out, black against the pale dead grass, like the banded woolly bear caterpillars, black against gray pavement. But these caterpillars are not crawling in search of a place to hibernate. They are not crawling at all. Their bodies are wrapped in silk strands, head arched back. It's as if the larva climbed to the highest place it could find, clutched its multiple feet around the grass stem, raised its head and said, "This is as high as I can go in this earth-bound body. But I want to ascend!"

One caterpillar has choosen a fluffy cluster of goldenrod flowers gone to seed for a resting place. Probably what I'm seeing is not a defunct caterpillar but merely the shed skin of a larva that has molted during its rapid growth.

Another pair, end to end, have chosen the same grass stem. The one farthest out has its head raised in the usual supplicating pose. The other one seems to have been in the act of turning around. Too crowded up here! But alas, it didn't have time to find another stalk to climb before the urge to molt.

I find one chrysalis hanging from the same kind of dry grass stem. Perhaps the little black caterpillar that left its outgrown skin behind is turning into a pupa inside and will emerge as a moth or butterfly.

During an online search for black caterpillar, I only find one that looks like my stem-bound husks. If the match is correct, they may be the larva of the Harnessed Moth, Grammia figurata. If so, I can understand the larva's urge to transform into a moth that can spread its flashy red, black and white wings and fly above the earth.