« November 2010 | Main | January 2011 »
It's 10:30 p.m. in Redondo Beach and Mollie and I have walked in the cold. New York welcomed in the new year and soon West Coasters will, too. This was a quiet day and night at home, mostly collaging, art journaling and writing.
Happy new year to all of you. May we all be healthy, happy and relatively stress-free. May we "stay awake" each day to greet all the sacred ordinaries that are happening around us.
Thanks to my son Tony and his family, I was gifted with Kelly Kilmer's two-day Rejuvenations workshop at Stampin' from the Heart in Culver City. Today was the first day. It was raining again so I decided to take the surface streets vs. the freeway and it wasn't bad at all. I'm reverting to being a scardey-cat driver which is a little old lady thing, I guess. Many Californians are nuts when they drive in the rain and I feel very defensive.
Anyhow, we made a journal from scratch today and so far we've done four pages. Kelly has a photo up on her blog of the gigantic mess the seven of us made at the work table.
My other son Joe gave me Frida Kahlo's diary for Christmas so this is one page I completed today in honor of her life. I'm too tired tonight to scan this page properly so it is much darker on the left side than it is in reality. Now it's time for one last quick walk with Mollie--and it's COLD and WINDY.
Since I was 14 I have kept diaries and journals and I've taught different methods of journal keeping for many years. I always say that if I have a journal and pens, and a book, I can stay occupied for many hours. But there is a twist. When I flew to Las Vegas to see my sister a few days ago I left my current journal on the plane along with the book I was reading, Steve Berry's "The Amber Room." I've got the airline alerted about the journal, but it would be nothing short of miraculous to get it back.
I got home from the airport last night about 10:15 p.m. after my two day visit with my sister Virginia and while I was there I found myself writing on plain paper for inclusion in a later journal. I began making the covers of the new journal today and have continued processing my memories of the visit and my see-sawing feelings.
While downloading some photos tonight this photo I took in Portland 2 1/2 years ago begged to be shared. It's such a beautiful now moment photo. What could go with this? Mary Oliver's "The Journey" seemed perfect for she says things that I am not only unaware that I'm feeling, but she brings peace to the place I'm in right now.
The Journey
by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.
My US Air flight was late getting out of L.A. (thanks to screwed up schedules across the nation which makes the whole traffic pattern fall like dominos) but my nephew picked me up at the airport and we went directly to my sister's assisted living facility in West Las Vegas. It is owned and operated by an M.D. gerontologist and his RN sister and it is a wonderful place. There are 8 bedrooms and baths and 10 residents in a lovely home. My sis was asleep when we arrived and I felt sad seeing her so frail. I hadn't seen her in over a year.
She is 84-years-old and has Parkindsons Disease and the dementia that often accompanies this disease. She can only walk a short way with the walker, but the caregiving staff there are so loving and kind. This place is not like any other group home/assisted living I've ever visited and it definitely has become "home" to her. Our hope had been to take her to her "real home" for a few hours but she declined; she says it causes too much anxiety.
One big difference I noticed was the lack of expression on her face, which my other sister had, too, as the disease advanced. Virginia was our family clown and joke teller supreme. This photo shows my nephew and Godson Jim, me, and Virginia this afternoon. She tires quickly and so we gave her some respite and then went back again later in the afternoon. She was more alert then.
On the wall behind her is a quilt made by her daughter featuring family photos. That handsome man in portrait my brother-in-law Sal who died seven years ago from Alzheimers complications. Life sure is hard sometimes.
I am not writing this as a downer, but as a celebration of a long life. It is sad to have to go through all she has and will yet experience, but aging and illness are such an integral part of life. For a long time I "fought" the aging process and tried to simply avoid the end product--death. My spiritual director, Betsy Caprio, long ago suggested that a healthy thing to do is "dance with death" in my psyche to take the fear out of it. I guess dancing with the aging and illness part of my life and others is also in order.
The family gathered here today and everyone pitched in with the cooking. Fire in the fireplace, kids, grandkids, other family and a friend--12 in all. We had a marvelous time but I was busy enough that I didn't take many photos.
My son-in-law took this photo of me and Mollie adoring me. It feels so good to be adored. And how to you like that Christmas apron which I got at a garage sale for $1?
I just finished packing my carry on as I have a 7:30 a.m. flight to visit my sis in Las Vegas. It is also pouring rain again and I imagine it is raining in Vegas, too. I am looking forward to seeing my sis.
Merry Christmas to all. I appreciate my cyber family more than I can express in words. Hope you had a great Christmas, too.
I have absolutely no excuses for finishing a few gifts so late and wrapping the others at the last minute. Where Christmas is concerned, in my wife/mother days I was very organized. Our house used to be the staging for the Christmas families gifts our CFM group adopted. The old days were unbelievably hectic, so I think I set myself up to get a little adrenalin pumping because my life is pretty mellow all in all.
First of all, here is the quilt my niece Rose Ann made me for Christmas. I'm using it for a wall hanging, but it would make a nice throw. I was absolutely amazed when I opened the box. She is an excellent quilter. Her gift is one of the few I opened before Christmas. My mom, her grandma, was also an excellent quilter and I know how delighted she would be to see Rose Ann's quilt.
I am including one more photo because I am very pleased with the gift I made for my daughter. As those of you know, my mixed media work is all recycled materials. So, imagine my delight when I found six beat-up sculptures of a woman's hand at Kohl's on the sale table this week. I gilded this one, added details, and then laced Christy's rosary her paternal grandma gave her when she was born through the fingers. I hope she likes it.
And, to those who read here, I wish you a beautiful Christmas and the peace and happiness of our special holidays.
It stopped raining and I've been giddy with possibilities. A blue sky in the day, stars and a moon tonight. There's only one day until Christmas and I never finished the art gifts for my family. Instead of knuckling down and working with what I have, I decided to be naughty and not nice. In the service of "my art", I took a five-hour tour of the local thrifts which I have not done for a long time. Grocery shopping for Christmas dinner was the ultimate shopping experience. Junque? Baby, I've got junque! Is this blatant consumerism in a different form? Mixed media artists are strange creatures. I've been dancing around and trying to sort out several sacks and then I remembered something profound. In my iPhoto a chicken crossing the road has been lurking thanks to my daughter's recent download. This chicken calls to me! So, it must have called to her, too.
What kid, or adult kid among us, hasn't told the chicken crossing the road joke? There are whole papers written on it when you Google. Yes, I know--she crosses to get to the other side. Damn! That's profound. I think the meaning of life might be in this riddle.
But, I hope the following excerpts, which I found at Philsophy E-Server, will make you smile like it did me.
WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?
Plato: For the greater good.
Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.
Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken's dominion maintained.
Hippocrates: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.
Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!
Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.
Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.
Douglas Adams: Forty-two.
Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.
B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.
Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.
Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of "crossing" was encoded into the objects "chicken" and "road", and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.
Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.
Aristotle: To actualize its potential.
Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.
Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.
Salvador Dali: The Fish.
Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.
Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.
Epicurus: For fun.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.
Johann von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.
Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.
Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.
David Hume: Out of custom and habit.
Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it (censored) wanted to. That's the (censored) reason.
Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?
Ronald Reagan: I forget.
John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity.
The Sphinx: You tell me.
Mr. T: If you saw me coming you'd cross the road too!
Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.
Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.
Wordsworth: To wander lonely as a cloud.
The Godfather: I didn't want its mother to see it like that.
Keats: Philosophy will clip a chicken's wings.
Blake: To see heaven in a wild fowl.
Othello: Jealousy.
Oscar Wilde: Why, indeed? One's social engagements whilst in town ought never expose one to such barbarous inconvenience - although, perhaps, if one must cross a road, one may do far worse than to cross it as the chicken in question.
Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.
Macbeth: To have turned back were as tedious as to go o'er.
Whitehead: Clearly, having fallen victim to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
Hamlet: That is not the question.
Donne: It crosseth for thee.
This bedraggled felt stocking has hung on my Christmas trees for 65 years, although there are ornaments far older than that on the tree that belonged to my mom and to my grandmothers.
It's a huge trip down memory lane when the tree and decorations go up each year. So many items have a story, like this stocking.
I've told the story before, but in a nutshell, my friend Claudia and I were about 8-years-old and we lived in Sunland, CA, a very small rural community back in those days. It was almost Christmas and Claudia and her brother were being raised by a single mom, and my folks were having a really tough time making ends meet. We had walked to the stores on Sunland Blvd. and one of them was a toy store. In the window, along with a variety of toys, were felt stockings and we were oohing and ahhing over them. A man was nearby whom neither of us knew--and remember that this was a small town. I remember he had on overcoat and a hat, or that's what my brain has stored anyway.
He went in the store and came out with two stockings, told us Merry Christmas, and we never saw him again. It was a magical experience that I have carried with me all my life. It seemed like a wondrous, fancy stocking, but it is very mundane, its' decorations stapled on.
Since I'm 73-years-old, this man is long gone, but I still feel grateful to him every year. He's my archetype of the generous stranger.
This morning, when there was a respite from the rain, I took photos of many of my "special" Christmas decorations--and this is one of them. It's Mexican folk art and I bought it at my friend Barbara's garage sale at least 20 years ago. I love it! We humans certainly like our iconography and symbols, don't we? Or at least I don't think it's just me.
What are some of your own very special Christmas decorations or ornaments?
For those who read here often, Sophia, the art mannikin, and my mirror of what I would wear if I were a younger, less self-conscience woman, has been preparing for Christmas.
For those of you who don't know about Sophia, I purchased her from a woman shutting down a funky vintage clothing store years ago. It was my intention to turn her into a mixed media sculpture a few years back, but I have, instead, kept her in the living room as a symbol of wisdom, but also just for plain-old fun. I think my inner adolescent remembers when she longed to be a fashion model.
I have been enchanted with the name Sophia and the meaning of her name ever since I read a poem by Thomas Merton many years ago about Sophia. If I were to have another daughter (not even possible), I would name her Sophia.
Wikipedia says, "Sophia (Σοφíα, Greek for "wisdom") is a central term in Hellenistic philosophy and religion, Platonism, Gnosticism, Orthodox Christianity, Esoteric Christianity, as well as Christian mysticism. Sophiology is a philosophical concept regarding wisdom, as well as a theological concept regarding the wisdom of God.
In this photo she wears a lovely gown whose lace, short-sleeved top you can't see, but you can see her Vera Wang faux fur jacket. All of Sophia's clothing is purchased at garage and estate sales, or thrift shops. A few others have begun to donate old clothes for her fairly extensive wardrobe.
Below you will see Sophia turned into her yearly snow queen outfit, this year complete with a kissing ball. She stands by the Christmas tree awaiting the family to arrive for Christmas dinner.
Thomas Merton wrote the poem "Hagia Sophia," in 1963 when he was in the hospital and it has always stuck in my mind. It follows the hours of the day in Bendictine tradition and he compares the healing hands of the nurses to Sophia.
Here is a small excerpt that may whet your appetite to read more of his Marian poetry.
I. Dawn. The Hour of Lauds.
There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator's Thought and Art within me, speaking
as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.
It has just occurred to me that as much fun as I have with dressing Sophia each month, perhaps there is more to her than I had realized before.
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting the home of a local artist whose work I just love. Cindy Parker-Cook, whose studio is called Fierce Serenity, has been one of the two vice presidents of the Redondo Beach Art Group this past year and she does a lot of what I call sacred feminine but in the style of Mexican folk art. Her palette frequently mixes black and red, my own favorite palette. She works with a lot of Day of the Dead images, too, another favorite subject of mine.
With all this non-stop rain it seems hard to believe that we sat on her top-floor patio on a brilliantly sunny day, sipping hot tea and chatting, while looking at a spectacular view of the ocean in Redondo Beach.
Here are some photos of Cindy and her work. Her website is currently under construction, but when it's up, I'll include the link. I took a few dozen photos, but I'll share these to begin with.
This piece won first prize at the 2010 Power of Art annual juried art show. Yes, that's a neon light you see.
This is Cindy with another of her mixed media pieces at the art show. Both these pieces hang in her Redondo Beach home.
This is part of one wall in Cindy's art studio.
Be sure to enlarge this image commemorating she and her husband's marriage. They are parents of two young boys and have two wonderful family dogs. I love dogs!
This is one view of Cindy's bedroom featuring a headboard made from vintage doors. She loves garage and estate sales, like I do, and finds wonderful "stuff" sometimes just sitting curbside waiting for trash pick-up. She also recommended a visit to the Dollar Store, not the 99 Cent Store, where I found several items I hope eventually to incorporate into art. She also showed me her copy of Frida Kahlo's art journal which she purchased at Olvero Street in L.A. I checked it out of the library today but hope my son noticed it on my Amazon wish list.
Cindy, thanks for your graciousness in letting me loose with my camera in your house and studio.
Recent Comments