Bloggers' Group on CaaT

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One of the eBay groups I belong to, Complementary Art and Things (CaaT) has formed a group that is planning to all post on one theme per week. Something to focus on is always helpful for me, so I thought I'd join them.

Unfortunately, this week's theme is organization...uh oh. I'd go take a picture of my "studio", but I have no liability insurance...besides, I wouldn't want to cause harm to my friends.

When I was working, my office often looked like my studio. The odd thing was, I usually knew how to find anything in it. Most of my time was spent out at coalitions, meetings, etc., so I didn't have much motivation to clean up.

Now though, what with middle age, and menopause, and chemo brain on top of all that, I'm lost in that so-called studio, and many of my art supplies are in hiding under piles of...other art supplies. Gotta clean it! Gotta!

This is the latest of the photography I seem to be obsessed with these past couple of weeks.

Semel Smokestack

Tree Yoga

Snow Crocus

As I've mentioned before, the reason I never picked up a camera until a few months ago is that I have three older brothers, all professional photographers (although one has apparently sold all his equipment and is no longer doing it). It felt like a set-up, ya know? Now that I'm doing it (and having an absolute blast), part of me is kicking myself for waiting so long. But part of me is so happy to have these new things to be doing, in these last years of my life, as I ripen...

Namaste,
May

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Belted Galloways in Early Spring

Dawn

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Vertigo...

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One day, probably around 1985, when we were all living happily ever after in Hanover, I decided to go pick up the kids at school instead of having them take the bus. This was usually a good idea anyway, since Adam was a target of extreme cruelty, and Bizzy was his protector, a tough job for a kid not yet ten.

It was a pretty day, fall or spring (I don't remember), and when I rounded a corner on the curvy road that led to the school, I came upon a small work horse trotting down the yellow line. Not having much experience with horses, I just informed the principal when I got to the school. He dove for the phone, mumbling, uh-oh, looks like the Sweats' horse got out again (Sweat? that's a real name?). I got to add it to my repertoire of stories, along with the one about the guy whose vision improved on a prescription of 20 joints per week. (Some other time.)

Most of the time, when I think about death, I think of it from a distance, as if I get to tell that story, too. In fact, I think I'm managing the last years of my life with conscious attention to making it a good story. I think I'll succeed, too.

May
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Good news and just news

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Illumination

I was thrilled and, quite honestly, rather astonished, to receive an email today telling me that all three of the pieces I entered in the Hygienic Art Gallery's second annual juried show had been accepted. I had some hopes of the one assemblage piece, but really didn't think the two digital collages would make it.

The show opens this Saturday, from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. at the Gallery, which is on State Street in New London, Connecticut. I really am a little blown away. I hope I have the energy to be there for a while.

The energy part: I've been getting increasingly more tired, ever since the radiation to the sternum. I also have a vague sensation that feels like shortness of breath, and I'm wondering if, despite the 'intensity modulated' type of radiation that was used (to bring the intense uptake up closer to the surface of my chest, rather than underneath the sternum, where my heart is), I may have suffered some heart damage. I went to my shrink today, and told him I'm exhausted during the day even if I sleep at night, and that I'm tachycardic, with a resting pulse of 100-125. So he cut my antidepressant down to the pre-Stage IV level, and gave me some samples of Provigil to try. Hopefully that will help.

The picture in this post is of one of my Quan Yin statues. Quan Yin, "She who hears the cries of the world", is the Buddhist Bodhisattva of Compassion, and in the folk tradition, the Goddess of Mercy. I love her. The lights on the background are from my playing with the camera on the night of the recent eclipse of the moon.

I'm still having fun!
May
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Fun with Photoshop

. . .The Gathering Storm

Moon From the Street

These are alterations of a couple of photos I took of the mill on Route 85 in Amston. I think they came out good. The moon, actually, is from another photo I took in daylight. I wouldn't call it a digital collage, though; just a 'digitally altered photo'.

I entered three pieces in the Hygienic Art Gallery's juried show. Apparently they were swamped with entries, though, so I'm not holding my breath. It was just something I needed to do.
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Factory Series

Progress

Graffiti

Smoking Area

Made For You And Me

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Two more pictures

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Smokestack

Steel Skeleton

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Click here to see my 'MyArtProfile' site

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Mill Against the Sky

Mill Window

I've been having so much fun at the MyArtProfile website. I've been spending literally hours some days browsing the different artists' pages.

I've also been taking a lot of pictures, with my (ahem) not professional quality camera. One artist on the site, who has posted some really cool pictures, uses his cell phone camera. Maybe it's a sort of dada thing to do.

Anyway, I'm posting some of them here on the blog, but if you get a chance, check out the site too.
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The 'Reason is Everything' Delusion

John has been reading 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins. I'm looking forward to reading it when he finishes, if he ever does; he tends to read about four pages a night.

I was half listening last night when he was watching a youtube video featuring Dawkins lecturing and reading from the book. This morning he was talking about the book, and one of the things he said was that, instead of church or religion per se, all we really need is a moral compass.

If that's Dawkins' main point--or if all he has to tell us is that religion is illogical, irrational, and not fact-based and, in fact, has caused tremendous pain and harm over the centuries--then he's missed the boat. I'll reserve judgment, of course, until I've read his book. But if Dawkins hasn't read and digested Joseph Campbell, then I don't expect that he'll hit on the real issues.

Humans are spiritual beings. I have memories from a very young age, of feeling that God was all around me, and in everything. My teens were a constant struggle to find and understand meaning and method in the universe. When I was 18, I could no longer accept the condemnation of all my Jewish, or Buddhist, or agnostic friends to eternal hell, and declared myself a devout non-Christian. It was a short step from that to what I thought of as total atheism.

The fact is, I did not want a divinity like that to exist, or to be my supreme principle. When I found paganism, I felt like I'd come home.

But I don't want to go into all that. My point is just to say that criticism of religion based on its historical connection with terrible crimes, or its lack of basis in fact, miss the point. Most members of organized religions are conveniently able to ignore their faith's checkered history. More important, what arguments decrying religion's irrationality miss is that reason is only half of the human apprehension of the universe and our place in it.

The other half is our intuitive experience of something called 'mystery', for lack of a better term. Human beings have the ability to experience things that are unprovable and irrational, such as paradox. The unrest inside us that comes from gnosis, a very strong conviction that, for example, death and life, joy and pain, love and hate, are the same things, make us yearn for a place or situation where we can entertain these inexplicable and unprovable ideas and feelings in safety and relative comfort, and, moreover, to absolutely celebrate them! Of course, it's critical that we allow others to celebrate in their own ways; to visualize the divine in their own ways; to walk their paths in their own ways. But religion is not irrelevant, and I don't believe it ever will be.

May

By the way...

...no matter what I do, Blogger is putting all different fonts, of all different sizes, in my posts. I'm practicing letting go.

Anima Sola

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Long Lost Poem

Actually, that's a lie.

When I started this blog, I posted my good poems first. The most recent are the ones that barely escaped the round file.

This one I didn't think worth printing. But in the interest of candidness, I'm going to print it anyway.

NECESSARY REGRETS

I
have
a
mystery
in
mind.

it is shut up tight, key turned firmly in the lock,
between my dead mother
and my dying father.

I see a child who longs to play the violin,
in mind-felt melodies that sound unceasing,
orchestrated by the heart;
she is safe
as dense green woods would have her,
or fog that sleeps along the water's edge.

Now see the child is grown.
Her father dies alone
in a sterile nursing home;
receives a few reluctant visitors,
abusing them all, old dog that he is.
The ghost of old regrets, long past, forgiven,
fades surely in the memory of
her mother's firm sweet smile
in the face of death.

I
have
another
mystery
in
mind:

this one lies weeping
between the first innocent falling
and the last lost love.

And many other mysteries:
the children I have lost
and the hints of return;
the music that played itself out
and the becoming
of these words.
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Late night ramblings

At any given time, there is a poem, piece of music, work of art, or sometimes something else altogether, that seems miraculous to me, something that seems to connect with the divine that underlies all things.

More and more frequently, it is a song, usually something from a clearly lowbrow tradition. Here is one.

If I Should Fall From Grace With God
By Shane MacGowan (1987)

If I should fall from grace with god
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I'm buried 'neath the sod
But the angels won't receive me

Let me go boys
Let me go boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry

This land was always ours
Was the proud land of our fathers
It belongs to us and them
Not to any of the others

Let them go boys
Let them go boys
Let them go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry

Bury me at sea
Where no murdered ghost can haunt me
If I rock upon the waves
No corpse can lie upon me

It's coming up three boys
Keeps coming up three boys
Let them go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry

If I should fall from grace with god
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I'm buried 'neath the sod
And still the angels won't receive me

Let me go boys
Let me go boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry

In one of my favorite poems, T.S. Eliot saw it a bit differently: "What is this face, less clear and clearer/The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger--/Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye/Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet/Under sleep, where all the waters meet." But the place is the same.

This weekend, John and I went to a wonderful place called Grayville Falls, only ten or so minutes from our house. We saw nature's geometry:

and this amazing bird:


...and many other amazing things. Whatever our view of spirit, or deity, or even cosmic law is, the one thing that is clear to me is that the moment when I go down to become part of my beloved Mother Earth, whether the rivers meet or run dry, is the moment I live for.

Namaste,
May