July 1969 - Four Corners is a cartographer’s version of Twister (we got the game for Christmas in 1967). We played. One by one, we took turns and did down dog with one foot in Arizona, one in New Mexico, a hand in Utah and the other in Colorado. Then we reversed it putting a foot in Utah, one in Colorado, a hand in Arizona and the other hand in New Mexico. Then we tried this: one person does plank pointing north and the other does down dog pointing south … [laughter] we’re playing twister. The game came to and end in mountain pose. Mom stood in Utah, one of my sisters stood in New Mexico, the other sister in Colorado. That left me in Arizona.

I took the same trip that I took with my family when I was young, last Fall. I compare both trips and photos taken from the same place, decades apart. This is my journey through Thunder, Moon, and Water.

A chronicle of my journey to and through Utah, Arizona, and Colorado in October 2021 - and how this trip parallels with one I took with my family when I was a child. 

One morning as Gregar Samsa was waking up, he “discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug [ungeheuer].” This is the opening line of a short story named Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. If you have read the story, you might have read Gregor had been changed into a “cockroach,” a “beetle,” or, a “gigantic insect.” Whatever way ungeheuer is decoded, Gregor has morphed into a huge thing, a nasty creepy-crawly thing. Gregor was a traveling salesman. He wandered from city to city.

Tomato and trope: Either way, I have the earth on my hands.

Creativity is how I express my being. I garden. I arrange. I write. Writing is the most fearful, debilitating, and exhilarating form of creativity, I believe.

The revolution I have in mind in A Revolution in Tropes involves space. You must be still. No running. Open your eyes and see the space around you and others.

Apostrophe on Mother’s Day and Mothers’ Day: Endowing the peacock with a shift in perception. The apostrophe is a punctuation mark of several uses. One signifies the possessive case of nouns.

Peacock rhetoric is the instinct for beauty. Beauty is athletic like the “Feathered Prince” who is crowned with lilies and peacock feathers. Athletes are strong and can throw us off guard. Beauty threw Darwin off or he threw it off because the instinct seems so useless for survival.

The peacock fragment in rhetoric is an enigma. The white peacock in Wonder Woman is an enigma. An enigma is a puzzle and a boundary figure. They appear whenever the world feels like a puzzle.

How the forgotten wings of the peacock shaped rhetoric and the theory of public participation and engagement in the civic world.

The fragment of the peacock is an invitation to rethink the forms of communication in democracy. Are we afraid of the peacock? Can we find delight in difference?

Chris Anderson sat down with Elon Musk in May 2017 to talk about the future and boring, a company using the technology of Tesla and SpaceX to engineer a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate traffic congestion, I couldn’t help but think of the techne of rhetoric. It’s boring too.