REDONDOWRITER'S SACRED ORDINARY

SoulCollage® Card - Orma Hammond

This is the third SoulCollage card I have made recently and I call it Orma Hammond and it is in my Community suit. Orma died on Nov. 22, 2015 and all of us are still reeling from her loss. 

"I am the one who first met Orma in 1990 through my good friend Kathy Barron. She was not only an artist, had had an exciting and unusual life, she was beautiful and we shared many spiritual beliefs. A relationship had recently ended and she was starting her “new life” as she had done at least 3 times before. I ultimately introduced her to my friend Rick Hammond and they instantly fell in love. Then she moved to Guatemala to do community service and regroup--and darned if Rick didn’t follow her there and bring her back home eventually--as his wife. Orma very unexpectedly died on Nov. 22, 2015, only a week shy of her 80th birthday. She and Rick were married for more than 20 years and I am the one (of many family members and friends) who tries to bring him comfort as he grieves. But, I am grieving, too. She was a larger-than-life kind of person. She leaves behind a large inventory of art. The background of this card is one of Orma’s paintings and her self-portrait when she was younger is on the bottom. I miss you so, Orma, and your sudden death has me thinking a lot of my own aging process and speculating on how much time I have left."

SoulCollage® Card: Mad as Hell, Tough as Nails

Our monthly SoulCollage® group met yesterday and I made three cards to my surprise. Today I'm sharing one with you I call "Mad as Hell, Tough as Nails," and it is in the Committee suit.

After we create a card, for those of you who may be unfamiliar with the process, you write "I am the one who" statements. This is what I wrote: 

"I am the one who directed anger inward until I was nearly 50. When I was first diagnosed with clinical depression in my 30s it was the first time I’d heard that depression can be caused by suppressed anger. I am still slow to anger outwardly, and only rarely explode and regret my behavior. That wasn't always the case.  Now I usually recognize anger rather quickly and consequently have become tough as nails when I need to be. I work out my anger in my written journal and the various types of art I create, and sometimes talking to my therapist or friends. I am the one who displays a pleasant “nice” face outwardly but inside I think I must sometimes look like a pissed off little kid Shirley Temple. My inner critic passes judgment continuously but the outer me looks like I have the most agreeable personality in the world. I am the one who is probably a phony sometimes, but I also strive to be a peacemaker and to try to look at things differently than I sometimes feel. From A Course in Miracles, “Would I rather be right, or would I rather be happy?” That’s a question I often ask myself when I’m tempted to get snarky or act like a know-it-all. I pick my battles carefully. 

The Anatomy of an Illness Through SoulCollage®

For the past seven months I have been challenged with what finally was diagnosed as an uracheal adinocarcinoma of the bladder. It has been a long journey because I have a hard time surrendering to God and I am susceptible to anxiety and depression on top of it all. But as of now, I've recuperated well and now it's a waiting game. Following are nine SoulCollage® cards made during the last months that have greatly helped me, along with a written journal, of what I call "The Anatomy of an Illness", and all the emotions related to diagnosis and treatment so far. We usually put our cards in suits and I am assuming these are all Committee cards because they are part of me. Admittedly, I am posting here for catharsis, but I'm also hoping that others who use SoulCollage® can use my process when they need healing. I will post each card in the succession they were made with a blurb below of "The I am the One Who" statements. I cannot begin to thank my doctors and health care professionals, family, friends and extended community who have helped me along the way. 

Time May Be Running Out – I am the one who began having blood in my urine in middle May but I didn’t feel ill. I did, however, start becoming very anxious as I intuitively knew something “not good” was up. My own family doctor orders blood work but there is no infection. I next go to Little Company of Mary Hospital for a CT uroscan. I am the one who begins to feel trapped inside my body and I have no control over what is going on. Neither does the doctor and we both find that the wheels of progress to specialists sometimes move slowly. I am very scared. My part-time work is a Godsend.

Frozen in Fear – I am the one who has had a lot of radiation in my life and resist more imaging, but the CT shows a blip at the dome of the bladder. It is assumed to be an uracheal remnant, something I had never even heard of before. The urachea usually disappears about the 20^th week of gestation and is part of the umbilicus. Whoever would have thought it would be so complicated to get a timely referral to an urologist? I revert to a frightened child who has no mother and I don’t even have the capacity to notice the sun filtering through the trees. A series of anxiety attacks plagues me when I'm alone and do too much thinking, but in public no one even knows anything is wrong. 

Lost Without a Compass – I am the one who asks for a different referral and I am able to get in finally to see an urologist who finds no infection and says cancer in the uracheal remnant is rare but.a cystoscopy is needed for diagnosis. Two more weeks pass and my friend Mary Lou goes with me to the cystoscopy done under local anesthetic in the office. The doc sees a tumor immediately and points it out on the monitor to both of us. There it is. Wow. Me, who is afraid of deep water, feels adrift without a paddle or rudder, at the mercy of cosmic roulette. My guardians try to comfort me, but I am too scared to listen and trust consistently. But, in my own inimitable style, I fake it until I make it. 

What Will Become of Me Now? I am the one who realizes that if I want to live, I have to surrender to the doctors and health care professionals. Many tests are scheduled before surgery. I'm off work for summer and I continue to feel like a child watching a movie of me careening out of control as an adult. Internally I wail out to my mom, who has been gone since 1968. I become a frequent user of Torrance Memorial Hospital. In August I am operated on with spinal anesthetic and the tumor is removed for biopsy. Anxious, so anxious. Now I’m with an oncologist again. I wanted badly to use a young local surgeon who graduated from the school I work at and that I knew when he was young.  The oncologist arranges it. My part-time job means so much to me. Will I be able to work anymore?

The Human Body is Miraculous. I am the one who begins to amass images of bodies in motion because I want to believe that though the tumor is now diagnosed as an adinocarcinoma, known to be aggressive, and with minimal research in place to support ongoing treatment, that I will somehow be OK. I am fortunate that it appears to be contained. I have survived breast cancer twice and I’m still here. I am counseled by the oncologist not to do Internet research. I do and I find that what I have can be very bad. I stop the research though every now and then I break that promise to myself and begin Googling outcomes.

Angry and Determined. I am the one who has to undergo an immediate colonoscopy because my type of cancer often starts in the bowel. Tough to get a scheduling. I also undergo a PET scan to see if any other areas of my body light up which determines the extent of the next surgery. No cancer in the bowel thank God but the PET shows two suspicious spots in the lung which have been picked up in other testing in the past few years. I am radiation damaged in the lungs from the earlier breast cancers and my pulmonologist agrees to wait until I’m healed from this bladder surgery to see what’s going on there. Up until now I’ve felt so helpless and finally I alternatively feel scared, angry and also tough as nails.

Trapped but Hopeful. I am the one who entered the hospital on September 9 for the bladder resection. My parish priest came the morning of the surgery as well as several people in my family. The surgeon is a friend of my priest and all wish me well in a prayer circle in the admitting area of the hospital. I am embarrassed and grateful. The surgeons robotically remove the tumor, part of my bladder, the urachea, the belly button itself and report they got good margins. I have 5 small scars and one larger one on my belly and I tolerate general anesthesia well. I am in the hospital four days and go home where my daughter takes off work and oversees my care for a week. I am bedridden with a catheter for 10 days but nurses and PT people visit 3 times a week and the pain is manageable. I learned to use a walker, a cane, and my first shower with daughter at hand was absolutely heavenly. I keep telling myself that butterflies come from chrysalis.

A Roll of the Dice. I am the one who did not have to have her entire bladder removed and I am grateful. There will be frequent testing after this, which I dread, but I know that the key to recovery is my faith, trust in the doctors and professionals who will oversee my care, and the ongoing support of family and friends. But, the cynic in me knows these kinds of things are like a roll of the dice. I have a 50/50 chance of no recurrence. For now, no radiation, no chemo, just tests and more tests. Thank God for Medicare and my Blue Cross supplement. Thank God for the excellent health care where I live. I am philosophical about aging and death and now, at age 78, I finally “get it” that living a day at a time with gratitude is really the only logical way to live. But what I know intellectually doesn’t always translate into reality.

Fractured. I am the one who has lived with a lot of anxiety since this health challenge was diagnosed but I’m also the one who just keeps on keeping on. Though I hide it well, I am often unfocused, fractured and it's hard to concentrate because of the fear of the unknown. I also pray and meditate and write affirmations in my journal. I am at back at work part-time, adjusting to my smaller bladder challenges, and I know that I am very fortunate compared to what could have happened. I recently got another PET scan and in two weeks will have my first cystoscopy post-surgery. This test will be done every 3 months from now on. I will need to consult with the pulmonologist about my lung blips in January the oncologist says, but I feel good, look good, and I am looking forward to 2016. Though very vulnerable right now, I keep reminding myself that I am a Streur, tough as nails. I have productively functioned throughout all this and for the first time in my life, I'm cutting myself more slack when fatigue and anxiety hit. 

 

Polyvore Continues to Captivate Me

As those of you who know me well, I have found such a fantastic stress-buster but also a way to be creative in a new way: Polyvore. Created originally as a fashion sharing/selling site, its easy-to-use layered collage software called the "clipping tool" has enriched my life so much. For me it's like a free Lumosity; I have to constantly use this aging brain, but it also has become a psychological/spiritual tool as well. It takes me about 15-30 minutes to create a set and I pin each set to my Pinterest account and often share my creations on Facebook. I also print each set out twice. One copy goes in my Polyvore scrapbook and the second copy is cut apart and the pieces are often used in my art journals or SoulCollage® cards. You can see all my sets to date at Redondowriter's Polyvore. 

Part of the Polyvore experience can be entering the variety of "contests" that are always available in the groups that you join. My groups are all in the art and expression category. The moderator of a group calls creation guidelines for contest sets. I have only entered 3 contests and won none, but I just love entering nonetheless. I'm not a trained artist, but I am a well-trained writer. The contests give me the same rush as writing to a topic or subject. 

The three black and white Polyvores I'm sharing here were created for the Creative Coalition's black and white clip art contest. They were far more challenging than creating in color. The guidelines said, "Create an ART set using only black and white (grey's ok) clipart/illustrations. A *hint* of _one_ other color is ok. B&W text ok too." I don't easily think out of the box with my art but I find myself beginning to. The trick for me is to find copyright free images from the Internet to put into my Items folder. 

 

Memorial Day 2014: A SoulCollage® Card

Today a few friends gathered together to make SoulCollage® cards and I produced three, but this first one is the one I want to share on this Memorial Day. I am fortunate that the library I volunteer at lets me go through books that don't sell over time and will be recycled. I get some very good images from there. The background for this card came from an old book about the Vietnam Memorial which I did see in 1989. It was a very moving experience. This is what I wrote today about this card: 

I am the one who was young when the Vietnam war was going on--and I was vehemntly opposed to it. I even marched in a protest once with son Tony who was in a stroller. All of us who were opposed felt so angry and helpless; the newspapers and the television news gave the daily body count. I had long been an admirer of the work of the Benedictine monk Thomas Merton who was very opposed to the war. He went to an ecumenical conference in Thailand in 1968 and was electrocuted accidentally by a fan that fell on him. I am the one who later wrote her M.A. thesis on Merton and there were those who felt that Merton had been killed by "someone" because of his anti-war activism. I am the one who would later see Ron Kovic writing in the coffee houses in Hermosa Beach; he was the author of Born on the 4th of July. When I moved to Redondo Beach in 1988, I was utterly surprised to see Ron in his wheelchair cruising through the neighborhood. He would stop to talk and I've heard he occasionally still speaks at anti-war rallies. I haven't seen him for a long time, however. I hope he'ss OK. He lives only six blocks from me.

So, here I am smelling BBQ smoke from the party folks down at the beach on this holiday and feeling very grateful for those who have served our country. I am the one who is basically opposed to war, but still hold in reverence those men and women who were drafted or joined the military, and for those who have given their lives for our country. 

 

Spring Break Allows Time for Art, Reading, Gardening

One of the great perks of my part-time job is that I get two weeks off at Christmas and spring break, as well as eight weeks in the summer. That means doing "whatever" and trying not to feel guilty about it. This morning I took the time to complete two art journal pages I've been playing with for weeks. I'm also continuously organizing in preparation for the arrival of my son Joe, DIL Laura and grandsons Zach and Arlo on Wed. for a week's visit. I'm a bit of a packrat, I'll admit.

The focal image turned up on a SoulCollage^® card last week that I posted here and was featured on Daily Oasis and the SoulCollage^® Facebook page. I often scan or copy favorite images and use them over and over again. 

This page is called Triple Goddess and I am reminded of writer and poet Robert Graves "White Goddess" written in 1948. But, I always love art paired in threes independent of spiritual or symbolic meaning. My closest girlfriends growing up were Claudia and Dannie; I was Frankie. Everyone called us The Three Musketeers. Both of them are gone now, but I think of them so often and both are frequent dream visitors. 

Long posts don't work anymore our IT experts tell us and I suppose that's one of the reasons I post so seldom to Sacred Ordinary these days. I tend to get wordy because a writer is how I identify myself primarily. FaceBook has become my easier way to communicate on the Internet. But I do want to take time to thank a woman I'll name K. who has bumped up my art life considerably. When she destashed her own mixed media collage collection several weeks ago, I was the lucky recipient via Art Gang L.A., a list that local artist and teacher Kelly Kilmer facilitates. What a delight it has been to endlessly sort K's stash and divide it into boxes for other groups, as well as some boxes for just my art work. It's been like being a kid on Christmas morning -- over and over. Every time I use K's stash in my art work I just have to say, "Bless you." I love synchronicity!

Welcome Spring: A SoulCollage® card

This past Monday I made three SoulCollage® cards in our monthly group setting, but it's this one that really makes me grin from ear to ear. 

I put this card in my Committee suit and call it "Welcome Spring." In SoulCollage® we are encouraged to write "I am the one who" statements to personify the experience. I am the one whose mood picks up exponentially when daylight savings time arrives, so for the past few weeks I've felt like a kid again. The weight of winter (and winter is a piece of cake in Southern California compared to what most of you experience) just falls away. I am the one who has a zany sense of humor with people I trust and I just love this little, totally joyous, in-the-moment, crazy face-making girl cavorting with butterflies and flowers. I love the vibrant colors, the flowers, and another symbol I often use in art: the sun. I am the one whose years fall away and I'm a child again in Sunland, turning somersaults on the lawn, walking on my hands, running in the sprinklers with no top, and pretending that I'm Belle Starr. I am the one who sings, spins, dances, whoops and hollers with joy. 

And spring officially arrives on Friday. Yippee. In SoulCollage® work we often ask our cards a question and to expand the experience in our journals. My question: "Little girl, I name you Ketzie, let's explore how I can reenact the buoyancy and hope of spring even when the days are long, dark and cold. Can you offer some suggestions? 

A Visit Back to my Hometown, Sunland, CA

A school chum from high school was in town from Oregon and I suggested we drive to Sunland/Tujunga, CA yesterday, partially in the rain, to hook up with some of our grammar and high school friends who still live there. This was my hometown growing up--age 6 to 19 and though it is only 45 miles from Redondo Beach, I only visit every few years. The towns have changed, of course, but they still are small towns and much of it is very much the same. Like the house I grew up in--8444 Day St., Sunland, CA. I'm always so relieved to see it is still there each time I visit--so very, very many memories about this house, my parents and siblings, the town, the schools I attended there. 

I checked property records when I got home and it is still in the same family that bought it from my parents in 1957. I know the parents are long gone so assume one of the adult children still lives there. So many memories. 

After a lunch at Joselito's in Tujunga, a long-time favorite place of mine that didn't exist when I was a kid, Harry and Susie, Dave and Socorro, Margaret and I, went to Bolton Hall, the historical museum for this area located in Tujunga. This building was in abandonment growing up but they have restored it beautifully. 

This is Harry, Socorro and me in front of the big stone fireplace in Bolton Hall. We actually went to Sunland Grammar School together and Verdugo Hills High School. Our Class of 1955 from Verdugo Hills still meets yearly for a reunion, usually in Laughlin, NV. I've got it on my calendar this year. 

And here are all of us who got together yesterday. Everyone who grows old says they can't believe how quickly the years pass and I can confirm that. All of us agreed how blessed we are to still be enjoying life. Not all our classmates are as fortunate as we are. What a great day this was. 

 

A Virgin a Day: Advent 2 Mary via Art Journal

This is my entry for the second day of Advent and Rebecca's Twelve Days of Mary. I am very fond of iconography and I picked this image up originally from a Christmas card, but used several tools in my art journal arsenal to create this page. It's far from perfect but then I'm very hard on myself when it comes to art. I did get to play with Derwent Inktense pencils, lots of stencils and ink, Portfolio oil pastels, stamps, Sharpie Post Paint pens, and a bunch of other pens. There is a bias in art journaling toward those teachers who think there "should" be writing as well as art on every page, but my journals are my journals and sometimes I just don't want to put any words. I just want to use the page for going within and then feeling what happens. 

Postcards from Paradise: Veteran's Park Sunset

A few weeks ago the Redondo Beach Art Group held their annual Power of Art at the old Redondo Beach Elks Club in Veteran's Park. The park is about a block from my house and is right next to the Pacific Ocean and the the International Board Walk on the Redondo Beach Pier. I have lived in Redondo Beach since 1988 and as far as I'm concerned, it is paradise. I've watched and photographed many a sunset here, but when I noticed the sun going down the night of the art show, I ducked out the back door and got a series of shots including two where the sun is visible through the trees preparing to set into the sea. I had never seen the sun set from this particular location before. 

The Elks Club is very near the new Veteran's Memorial in the park that was dedicated about three years ago. The late John Simpson, a member of Christ Episcopal Church in Redondo Beach, was one of the people who worked hard to make the memorial a reality. I'd like to think that John is in paradise himself, rascal that he was, and Bob Metcalf, too, also from my church. Tomorrow, on Veterans Day in the park, all our veterans will be honored. John and Bob's names are on the memorial along with dozens of others. 

So, thanks Rebecca, for hosting us today at Postcards from Paradise. I hope that all of you, wherever you read this from, have the good fortune to live in your own paradise.