Earth my likeness

Walt Whitman was a wild soul. His love of wild nature and the sensual experiences of life are felt in everything he wrote. ...The beauty of Roderick MacIver's... watercolors creates a grand tribute to this sensitive soul.

As I have walk’d in Alabama my morning walk,

I have seen where the she-bird the mocking-bird sat

on her nest in the briers hatching her brood.

I have seen the he-bird also,

I have paus’d to hear him near at hand

inflating his throat and joyfully singing.

And while I paus’d it came to me that what

he really sang for was not there only,

or for his mate nor himself only, nor all sent back by the echoes,

But subtle, clandestine, away beyond,

a charge transmitted and gift occult for those being born.

— Walt Whitman

Picture and text from Heron Dance, A Pause for Beauty 321, Oct. 1, 2009

Painting: Autumn Portage, by Roderick MacIver

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Added about 9:15 p.m. - Curiouser and Curiouser

On HGTV, there's a program called "If Walls Could Talk." I watched it last night, and part of it was very strange. The featured homeowners had bought a house formerly owned by astrologer Linda Goodman, in Cripple Creek, Colorado. The house still had all of Goodman's furniture and furnishings, drafts of all her manuscripts, personal possessions. Weird.

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The couple who bought the house said that the reason the house was left "as is" and eventually put up for sale was that Linda disappeared. Wikipedia says she died in 1995 from complications of diabetes, but that she had a daughter who disappeared in 1973. I couldn't find any details online about her later life and the circumstances of her death, but apparently she was born in 1925.

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When my children were teenagers, we enjoyed reading Linda Goodman's Sun Signs, and I have read (and own a copy of) Linda Goodman's Relationship Signs, published posthumously and edited by Crystal Bush. The latter book says that she died in 1995, that Crystal Bush and Carolyn Reynolds worked with Goodman until shortly before her death.

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The whole house is decorated with the theme of Alice in Wonderland. It has stained glass windows with scenes from Alice, decks of cards with scenes from Alice on the backs, plates with Alice scenes (a la the Tenniel drawings). All the furniture in the house is antique, and a lot of the pieces are rather funny-looking antiques.

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I don't believe that astrology can predict anything or "foretell the future." But the types of people born under the signs of the zodiac do seem to match the astrological descriptions.

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Sometimes my blog won't leave spaces between paragraphs. I put asterisks between paragraphs when this is happening.