Thursday, April 07, 2005

Fragments towards a Meditation on the Body...

MP3 of this post at Sound Click: "Fragments Towards a Meditation on the Body...", which I'm not sure about, but it's there now...
_________________________________________________________________

On our blogs we post, barely editing, always planning to come back at some future point to edit, only the posts fly by like days...


Anyway, I just put this montage together, the writing moves over small line drawings of dancers I did maybe a year ago...the words shaping themselves are nothing conclusive or that I would want to rest my weight on, barely touching the surface of this subject, the body, but leaning into the writing coming soon on the body where all bodies are created...

This is just a miniscule meditation on what tells me I am alive. A sort of Descartian I Am, or even Buddhist recognition of the. most. basic.

The ground of being, the body, where I begin...

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Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usWhen do you finally come to dwell in a residence so that it begins to feel like "home"? It happened today when I moved our large wooden rocking horse out of my room - the 'clothes horse' literally, where I flung my clothes to pile up - and put in a 'captain's chair' that I recovered years ago in another lifetime. Now I can take out one of the stained glass windows and look at the street and houses and foothills while I read. I know I'm not making sense, especially as I now am in the process of turning a red painted milking bench into a foot stool by stretching an upholstery fabric over a cushion and stapling it. And I can't explain this, and shall take some sort of photo shortly, but as I sit in my 'new' corner and read under the clamp lamp I clipped onto an ancient metal stand, looking at my room, which I quite like actually, in this old and rather dumpy rented house, I feel like I've finally "moved in." And I've been here, not altogether willingly, since July 1, 2003!

I came here to apply to do a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies, but they changed the program, it was the strangest thing, really, how it happened, and I didn't even end up applying to Admissions, and then got stuck here, but that's a story for another time.

Or maybe I was destined to come out here to the West Coast all along. Now the psychics I spoke to before I came said it was a very good move for me and that it would all work out wonderfully and they couldn't have been more wrong. The thing is, talking about telepathy and my theory of mind-reading, is that I had no premonition about the changes going on in the program I wanted to join and so they couldn't 'read' the problems I would encounter.

Yes, this is definitely a story I will continue at another time. Here's a photo of moi in ma corner reading, if I can't live with it, I'll try to replace it with a daylight one tomorrow...

Oh, that painting, yeah that's exactly where it's sat for months waiting, someday I'll finish it, who knows...

xo

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Monday, April 04, 2005

I'm here because I'm wired to you all by telluric forces. In the midst of the angles of light everywhere. Bliss pouring in the edges of the world. Way too much inner light. I want to spend the day meditating or lying in bed doing nothing. What luxury. But my kids need me, so I watch the Supersize movie with them, gross, really gross, and this just after 8mm last night, nightmares, and then make myself a pure ground sirloin burger with cheddar cheese on a whole wheat bun, sigh. I snatch a 2 hour nap. Luxury. Image Hosted by ImageShack.usThen dinner for my kids, not me, I only eat once a day, although I snack on & off too. Finely chop celery, onions, mushrooms, garlic, slice the chicken into small strips, put on water for the pasta, butter in the wok, melting and sizzling, then onions and garlic, watch the tiny bits cook, twirling with a wooden spoon, then the chicken, stirring, brown everything, add the mushrooms and celery, and just before its ready, the sliced spinach leaves, oh, and make a simple Bechamel sauce out of butter and flour and milk in the microwave and put in some salt and parmesan cheese and stir the sauce into the chicken and then add the pasta. Even the dog whimpers for some. Easy meal. Go back to my computer and read more blogs. Blog reading takes up the greater part of the day I sometimes fear. Issues with plagiarism at thenarrator's site today, but then, that's what sometimes happens to our most talented. My son, who turned 18 yesterday, and re-organized our entire closet of a kitchen while I was shopping, has gone out jogging with our dog, and my daughter, who was reading on my bed, is napping. It's raining gently outside. I'm living in some kind of continuum where the molecules of the air are bright with light, are bouncing all over the place like little suns, even when all the lights are out.

Photo: our dog, Keesha.

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Raw Emeralds...





“I saw him, like a Titan, with all the grace & faults, all the achievements, with great love, fullness.” His heart as large as the world. I feel love for us radiating from him. In his final moment he is a powerful force of goodness. He is full and vibrant with energy. “Then he shrank back into a distance; I saw him in death; and then he was gone.”

That is the vision I received when I prayed that if I might not be with him when he died, that it occur when I was in a state of meditation. Immediately upon opening my eyes the hospital called to say that my father had passed away. I drove to the hospital, parked illegally, arrived within 10 minutes of his death. He was emaciated, shrunken, like a starvation victim, and looked 30 years older than he was. “I went to the hospital. He is gone. In peace and with dignity. He is gone. My father is no longer alive. I felt at peace, too. His body---but the spirit is gone, and the moment of separation remains on his face. Will, pain, struggle, surrender, beauty, peace. And mystery. Love.”

I wrote in my journal, "My father died this afternoon, peacefully, with dignity." May 25, 1984. And today, "Theresa Marie Schiavo died, peacefully, with dignity." March 31, 2005.

The one brings back memories of the other.

It took two days for him to die. Days of numb unreality. Days in which I do not sleep; in which I drink wine to deaden myself, to cope. He died of blood poisoning, unable to expel the poisonous gases from his lungs. He died earlier, maybe 6 months earlier, but he was resuscitated in Intensive Care, where he was hooked up to a machine which breathed for him through a tube into his trachea, a machine that measured lung pressure, a heart monitor, a tube into his stomach that fed him, tubes for urine and feces collected in discreet bags, and numerous intravenous lines going into his bruised arms carrying saline, a pharmacopia of drugs, and morphine.

He was fully conscious in this hospital bed, in this place where he was tied down like Gulliver by multiple ropes. For 6 months I lip read or he wrote notes. He agreed that it was a worse experience than being a prisoner of war in North Africa, Italy, and then Poland. He fought valiantly to regain use of his emphysema-weakened lungs after the pneumonia that he caught in hospital had stopped him from breathing. In the first month in ICU he was winning. But bodies are not meant to be kept still. A blood clot moved from his leg into his lungs and a life of any independence from machines became unrecoverable.


He went through all the stages of death that Kubler Ross wrote of. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

One day he decided he was ready to die. It was Spring, there was a profound bliss about him; he was at peace with his final decision. The hospital called in lawyers, all the affidavits were in order. He said his goodbyes to us, refusing to let us stay and be with him as he died, asking that we go home.

Perhaps I understand that wish, perhaps I never will fully comprehend.

All the tubes were removed, save for a morphine drip. We were on a death watch while he valiantly faced his own death, consciously, his eyes were open, with such bravery it makes me weep to think of.

Beside his hospital bed he kept a rock with raw emeralds in it. This is the poem I wrote 20 years ago for him…


Earthtreasures

Earth treasures you mined
The mountains that spoke to you
Call.
Your ashes become rock and sand
Tumble with the springs.

Clear as that global sky
Purified by pain,
Your consciousness
Draws inwards
To our unconscious.

This moment
Separating from the world,
From your beloved family
Moving towards peace,
And something I must accept

Your death lives
Disintegrating, integrating

Raw emeralds emerge in the rock.

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Stone of raw emeralds that belonged to my father - photo today ©2005
For my father, D. Richard Clews, 1922-1984, and Theresa Marie Schiavo, 1964-2005, and all others who have struggled with the miracles of modern medicine and life and death in this way...
________________________
Postcript: Terri, her tragic story, her death, pulled deep recollection out of me, and I opened a journal from 1984 today that I have not touched in 21 years...nearly tore me apart, opening that book, those memories, and I didn't think I could, but I managed it. Thank you ... xo

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

What is truth...

Click here to listen to an MP3 of this post -:)

What is truth...

Truth is all in our perceptions. NickyJett has a wonderful post on this today. I also recommend ydurp, lionne, and Literature_Chick who have been posting on the topic of how our perceptions shape our reality. If that's not enough reading, there are the rich and varied comments at my earlier post on thoughts.

It is a truism to say that all we have is a perception of truth, nothing else. Whatever we see of the 'truth' is only a version of the truth among other versions. Now it's not that that version is untruthful because it is only a version, it's just not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We will get caught shortly in a semantic net. Can't you see it coming?


If there is no ultimate truth but only verions of truth via our perceptions of a situation, a happening, an event, a person, a feeling, an insight how does a court of law operate?

Maybe something leans towards real 'truth' when more people agree that it happened a certain way?

But the mob doesn't rule either. Just because masses of people believe it, it doesn't mean it's true. The stark example that comes immediately to mind is how many people panicked in 1938 believing Martians were landing during the broadcast of George Orwell's War of the Worlds. Or the ideologies of Hitler's Germany. Or that the war in Iraq is justified because George W. Bush won the American election. The list is endless.

One could say that truth, legally or politically or historically, is merely an agreement among varying and sometimes contradictory perceptions.

Moving from the societal to the personal, I agree that perception is all you have, and based my unfinished novella on this premise. In it I am creating a portrait of a man I knew and loved that could only be unique to my perceptions and not like any other portrayal, and so played with versions of "truth" in their emotional complexity.

But as complex as the layers of truth that aren't true in an absolutist sense but are only vantages, or perceptions, that I've mentioned in this post, are, I also believe the world contains indissoluble truth.

The 'world' I am imagining is not just a place we inhabit but out of which we arose as conscious beings, as the consciousness of nature or the universe conscious of itself, its own beauty, its own pain, its own existential paradoxes.

As I write this, the image of 'what is true' that comes to mind is perhaps closest to Taoism. And of epiphanic moments in our lives. A flow of truth through all things, pooling like clear light, clear lenses, in moments of profound lucidity. When we feel and understand truth, I suspect, is a mystical vision of wholeness that leaves us forever changed and affirmed.

In the midst of this musing, then, I come to rest on the incandescent moment, its ephermerality as ultimate truth.

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"Sketch for Self Portraits," coloured pencil on paper, 17"x13 1/2", 1997

Monday, March 28, 2005

A thought from today...

Experiment #1: a thought from today...

The image “http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/art/brain.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.The brain is a standing wave. What does that mean? When my mind feels like it's turned to deep oceanic water? I can't feel my brain. It is I who is doing the thinking. I am an electrical impulse. I am chemicals pouring from one cell to another. Who am I? Am I the memories that compose me? Am I my mannerisms? My gesture in the world? Is my voice me, its particular cadence? Or is it the way my body moves, even if I am unaware of exactly how it is that I do this? I am moving bones. How is that possible? How do I understand, after half a century of living, how this energy bundle called me is me? Being a person is often so strange that I don't understand it at all. I haven't any answers, nor do I seek answers. The point is that being a 'sentient being' is the strangest experience surely of all; we're aware of ourselves in ways that other members of the geosphere don't seem to be. Or perhaps all living creatures are aware, they just don't go around muttering about it...

And yet, each moment I create this reality that I am living by living it, or it creates me.

As I plunge through the waters of my being, the days follow the nights, I never know how I wake or sleep or love or what propels me.

Many years ago someone said when I remarked how we, everything, arose out of a point of singularity, out of the 'big bang,' not to go there, not to think too hard about it...

But why not? I don't for one moment doubt that each of us contains the secrets of the universe and knows absolutely everything there is to know.

Image source

Sunday, March 27, 2005

Green leafy mirror series...

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I have to run out shopping, can't write, but I took these just now...it was fun to post a dusty mirror image and now a green leafy series, maybe more or maybe no more on mirrors later....

Later:

Think I will write more, but have to go eat something, anything soon - haven't had an actual meal in 3 days. Not sure why I would take these photos and then paste them together and put them in my blog. Was it because I deliberately posted a wan and tired and dusty photo and how often does a woman do that? Perhaps it was to offer a daylight image in a clear mirror. Or was it only a way of speaking to myself? The oddest thing was that I actually took a photograph of myself seated on the edge of my bed and naked in a mirror a few months ago and had never done anything like when when I was young and beautiful but modest. Then I photoshopped it so you can't even tell the woman has bare breasts. Maybe I'll come back from the kitchen and write a meditation on the body... who knows.

Or I'll just snip this out of here. Ohhh, aren't private posts great?!

Later:

After my daughter and I spent a delightful hour over dinner, being silly & laughing, which is a nice change from the tempests we've been having all week, I did snip it, but then realized I was doing it again, hiding. So snipped it back in.

The perception of the self is indeed a strange and wondrous thing. When we look into mirrors are we Narcissus?

Like most people, I barely look in mirrors. To part my wet hair after a shower, brush my teeth, put on some tinted moisurizer, a little eyeshadow that I didn't wear until I turned 52 (is that possible?). Sometimes I look in the mirror to snarl at myself. Mostly it's to see what is probably the most unfamiliar face of all...to this day, I find what I 'see' in the mirror and 'me' inside what I 'see' looking at 'me' very Alice in Wonderland, very curious indeed. Maybe I missed the "mirror stage" in my early development, because that creature looking back at me isn't me, and if I stare long enough she turns into a crone or sometimes a ghostly man or sometimes the face goes blank and there aren't any features at all. Who hasn't stared without blinking at themselves in the mirror until their face contorted and did strange optical things...

You know, I started a blog so I could write, and then I wanted to stop writing, and why is this, is it because I like it too much? And so today I've given myself full permission to write, and I felt so happy!

That's the woman in the mirror. No restraining orders. No pulling back from things I enjoy or people I really like because it gets scary, all that liking gets scary and I think I'll live with the trepidation for awhile. I might get to like the liking if I let myself like it.

This is a new resolution. Be forewarned, you can expect to be hearing from me (though image #3 looks a bit sensitive, withdrawing...).

Does anyone else tangle with parts of themselves?

Resolve: Go with green leafy plants bring bounty.

The dust wiped off,
the mirror washed,
the reflection cleared.

xo hugs xo

Saturday, March 26, 2005

Free Sites I Recommend

In my right module I now have listed
these sites and will update any new
ones I use regularly.

Free Sites I recommend:
*Creative Commons: A nonprofit that
offers flexible copyright for creative work
~audio & video hosting here
*NVU: An open source website builder
*Audacity: Audio recorder/editor
*ImageShack: Hosting your photographs
*Tripod: Create a free website easily

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Friday, March 25, 2005

Looking into a mirror...

This meditation in response to a "creative writing challenge" on looking into a mirror, not the most flattering of the series of photos that I took, tired, late at night...


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Wednesday, March 23, 2005

But is it art?...

MOBA: But is it art?

Hilarious! And I've only been through 4 or 5 of the portraits. My sides are aching from laughing so hard. When I've had a rest, I'll go back and view more. I'll be back later to "comment" or maybe not!!! Bwahahaha, oh my, oh my....

I'd like to credit Heartfield for posting a link to this site.

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

10 Are Dead in Minnesota After Rampage at School Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

What pain and anger can cause a child not just to fantasize darkly in desperate moments but to kill others on a calculated rampage? His grandparents. His fellow students. Himself. Perhaps revenge on a world of defeated dreams that never understood his depths of despair or the danger of his anger? The funerary dirge is of inconsolable loss, bewilderment at those who compose the school system who didn't see this dark and bloody volcano brewing, anger at the teen himself, for pelting his fury in deathly bullets extinguishing many lives in his wake, anger at our culture of anger, its endless portrayals of violent death on the news or movie screens, and sorrow, sorrow for the loss of so many young people, for the lives that they will never have.


In our culture of violence, with its readily available guns, what we most need to fear is ourselves, our neighbours, the breakdown of a fellow citizen who lives out the celluloid glory of infamy with terrifying impunity---such bullets tear through the reality of our lives.


My deepest condolences to all those of the Red Lake Indian Reservation who have lost loved ones in this tragedy.

Monday, March 21, 2005


HAPPY SPRING RAINBOW DAY!


I saw a rainbow today! And I came home and spoke for a good 5 minutes about it, recording, and you can go listen here:

Spring Rainbow: March 20/05, 5 min

It's an experiment in blathering on without writing first (ho hum de dum)! No poem, not yet....


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"The Vision of Ezekiel," German, early 16th Century, Woodcut

Friday, March 18, 2005

One of my birth paintings...

SaucyVox.com

Go check this out. It's an on-line magazine published by the one and only, inimitable, brilliant, sensual and talented Feith:

SaucyVox has featured one of my birth paintings, Lace of Light (24"x37", watercolour on paper, 1987), on the cover of the current issue.

Now that I have procured a domain name, I shall be posting the entire series of Birth Paintings (1986-89) with writing to go with them as part of my book on the maternal body. I just need to watermark them, and then embark on the process of writing a first draft in my blog. So, that's coming....

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Thursday, March 17, 2005

On the life of a temp worker...

I've only taken 2 data entry jobs out of desperation ever. And I have discovered I go a little crazy doing them, and so will not accept anymore assignments like this again.

One was for the Real Estate Board, and they treated the team of us wonderfully with fresh coffee and a large tray of breakfast goodies every day, and an insistence on regular breaks, and they chatted with us at lunch, etc. It was a humanizing experience.

The company I left yesterday was the exact opposite.

While the women who I was helping were great, our 'supervisor' left much to be desired. She ordered us not to talk to each other when another temp was telling me that the bus she had been on the previous evening caught fire. She later took us into a private room and said we were not allowed to come in or leave even 5 minutes late or early, that we were being watched. When I finished a huge proof-reading/data entry job, the one I was 'hired' to do, and I did my portion in about a third of the time of everybody else's, and spot-checking my entries I didn't find a single mistake in my work, I went to the 'supervisor' and asked if I could leave. She said no, that the woman who I was helping still needed me. Then my temp agency found a receptionist/babysitting job at UBC for a day and a half, terrible pay, but an escape. I was told I couldn't leave, however.

Now I'm not a very good 'worker bee.' And I don't take kindly to being trapped. I began complaining to the folks sitting next to me about the "slave trade" of temp workers, how temp companies are like "pimps," how much money they make off us and how little they pay us, and the like, and whoever the 'mole' was, they ran upstairs and got the 'supervisor' who marched over to my desk and said, "You can leave now," and watched me pack up like she thought I would steal something, and when I asked why, she said, "You have a bad attitude." I could hardly stop smiling.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usWhen am I going to write that article on temp jobs and the need for government regulation in this industry? I have discovered many of the companies that regularly use temps actually have a 'supervisor' who could be classified as an "authoritarian" personality and who takes pleasure in demeaning the women they have hired for "service." These 'supervisors' are also wasting huge amounts of their company's money with these hiring practices. But how else are they to dominate and humiliate workers without getting sued, fired or blacklisted?

Do I make it sound somewhat extreme? It isn't, believe me.

Why am I in this line of work in the first place? That's a long story. But one of my problems is that I get bored very quickly with monotonous work, and hence the variety of temp jobs suits me. I've worked all over Vancouver since I began this last September. The work I'm given, however, barely touches my skills, talents, education, ablilites, and I'm now looking at Government contract jobs that involve writing and web design, but how to break into that field?

Anyway, I must write an article on the life of the temp worker, though don't want to go about interviewing people (for obvious reasons), and wonder if I can write something very subjective - a first person account, an insider account - and sell it to a national newspaper? My main aim would be to shed light on this area of labour, and cause enough of an uproar to ultimately bring in government regulations so that people who are temping at least get a half decent cut of the salary paid for work that they do. Any thoughts anyone?

Monday, March 14, 2005

Earth Treasures


A Found Poem from Page 17 of Luminous Emptiness


Earth Treasures:
texts
sacred images
ritual instruments
medicinal substances

Treasures to be found in temples, monuments, statues, mountains, rocks, trees, lakes, even the sky.

Of the texts, occasionally they were full length, but usually fragmentary --- a word or two encoded in symbolic script which may change mysteriously once it has been transcribed.


The treasures hidden in the world are triggers to reach subtle levels of mind. When a treaure is found and reveals its essence, it unlocks understanding, or the natural energies of enlightenmnet that compose the mind, where the teachings have always been concealed.

____________________________ Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

Aren't artists revealers of the treasures?














Francesca Fremantle,
Luminous Emptiness (Shambhala, 2001). This story is about Padmasambhava who sought to preserve esoteric Tibetan Buddhist teachings for a safer time and so concealed them in the landscape, but perhaps we don't need an intercessory, surely the natural beauty and mystery of the world is treasure enough.

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

A wish...

The job, any job, holds itself as a tension in my life around which everything else has to revolve, perhaps that's why I do temp work, inbetween there is no job to worry about, and I can, if I am able to withstand the stress of financial worry, something that I am becoming better at, though it's taken years, focus on my own work again...

On another note, I've been in too many offices to mention, let alone recall, and have some ideas about how to architecturally design the workplace so that it facilitates the needs of the people who work there, how to humanize the workplace...

So I need an architect to work with, a business plan...

Will I get this wish?

Monday, March 07, 2005

A Spring Riot...

(An MP3 recording of this post may be found at: A Spring Riot...March 7, 2005.)

It's my birthday - & I'm wishing you the best day and year ever! I know it's not Spring where many of you live, so I'm sending you all the great, exuberant, fertile, creative energy of Spring! Hugs!!

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A Spring Riot, or a walk with my dog past the flowers down to the lake today...

The blossoming crocuses, vivid purples and white to draw the admiration of bees who come humming, colour so pure it dances in my eyes, and marigold-colored stamens reaching up inside the cups of petals; the wisteria, a spray of yellow falling over the hedge, a dowry veil sewn with sun collected stitches---and perhaps the point of this photograph is the rock face with the hole that the tiny garden snail climbs out of, from the dark into the light, its yellow twirls and black dotted shell exposed on the white fieldstone, or maybe it's down at the lake where the Mallard duck, iridescent green of the male's plumes sleek against his yellow beak, who contentedly floats, sleeping or diving for fish, when he's not chasing to mate a duck who looks soft and fluffy and coos in that particular way...oh, it's a spring riot.


(An album of 5 photographs, not laid out linearly, but superimposed, perhaps a little clumsily, yet more the way I remember the walk---the colour of the flowers, such artistry, and the floating gathering of ducks in their watery home...and that snail, who perhaps thinks it's hidden!)

Sunday, March 06, 2005

On the job woes...

I thought I had found the perfect job: reception at a small construction and design firm, 24 hrs a week, and I could choose the hours, through an agency, so a temp employee for 3 months, and then on permanent staff with an accompanying raise in hourly rate. It all looked good. Nice people. Quiet location. Typical office work, sorting years worth of papers into files, updating addresses, Xeroxing, dealing with couriers, that sort of thing. Mostly mindless jo-job work that didn’t require thought only thoroughness and care. Leaving me free to explore the ideas ranging through my mind, free to consider what to write next, to think about my art, my kids, my life...

So I picked afternoons. I would go in from noon to 5 every day, except Friday, when it would be for 4 hours. Everyone seemed amenable.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usBut it was in an industrial area that is not serviced by buses except at rush hour. I hadn’t figured on the difficulty of getting there mid day into my plan. That hour and ten minute trip became more difficult as the weeks wore on. I got sick, too. There was the stress of catching a bus to get me to another bus that only ran every half hour; miss that bus on Marine Way and then I’m late getting into work.

So I went early every day and sat at what has to be the world’s worst bus stop. Oh, covered, yes, at least that, but not much use on rainy days when the splash coming from the trucks' enormous tires was worse than anything falling from the sky. And polluted and smelly. Huge trucks rumbling by without emission controls. And cold. I don’t know why that spot at Victoria and Marine Way is so cold, but it is. Sunless too. When I had bronchitis I could barely breath there; I would stand on the other side of the bus shelter, away from the fumes, trying to ingest whatever oxygen the hills of shrubs and trees were emitting. After the 5 minute bus ride, there was the 2.5 kilometer walk, down roads with more huge trucks careening, across that artery of pollution, Marine Way, again, where I sometimes feared for my life, literally-- those huge trucks and their crazy drivers crashing through the red pedestrian traffic light. Continuing on through a back road leading into the lot of a warehouse where boxcars were often stationed, being loaded or unloaded, and men looking at me in ways that didn't make me feel safe, especially with the private railroad land and thick bushes behind. And no matter how fast I walked, I was always 5 minutes late for work, something one of my bosses duly noted and held against me. I tried so hard to make it work, really I did.

The break-in did me in- I felt so helplessly far from my children due to the lack of bus service mid-day. And then last Thursday the Victoria Street bus broke down. I had to take the one behind it. And, as fast as I ran down the hill from Hastings to Marine Way, hurting my knees in the process, I saw my once-every-half-hour bus fly by. Drat. I was panting in the invisible but heavy pollution of that road and breathing hurt. I sat on the cold bench and waited, misery incarnate. A taxi – oh a solution to getting to the weary job on time, ran to the next road where he pulled in, jumped in, drove for maybe 4 minutes to Boundary Road, and the meter already said nearly $8.00 – and I wouldn't even make that much in the half hour I was trying to get to work for. I told the taxi driver to stop, to let me out, that I wasn't paying any more for the ride. And then I still had a hike to get to work, where I arrived 10 minutes late, and at the end of my tether.

I told my two bosses my tale of woe. And said that I cannot do the half day jaunt anymore, that the transit doesn't service this area, that I can only come in 3 full days a week. A bus comes into the area during rush hour. It takes me 35 minutes to get home. Over the period of a week, I would save 5 ½ hours of traveling time, a whole afternoon’s worth of time.

The next day I am told that I won’t be coming back, that they have called the agency and hired another woman to work half days.

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And it was my painting, my painting that has sat for 2 months, untouched, and which I looked at that morning, wishing, wishing, and so I know it was my muse that cut this job short for me, because it just wasn’t working, I need whole days to paint, and, while I could have had that at the beginning of this job, when they were open to flex hours, they got too used to having me there every day, and wouldn’t consider any options other than the one I had originally created.

Anyway, I was just a nameless woman who was hired to make coffee, do dishes, take out the garbage, answer the phone, xerox blueprints, pack a pouch of invoices and timesheets off to head office once a week, clean up an awful filing mess, update a list with addresses 4 and 5 years old (SuperPages came to my aid), chase after tardy submissions of bids on construction projects, they even took away the little ceramic heater that kept me warm, and no-one knew that I wrote, or painted, or took photographs, or have the equivalent of 3 degrees (two BAs, but from a university that doesn't grant double BAs, an MA minus the language requirement, an A student...sigh & ho hum, plus the graduate degrees I didn't finish-withdrawing from a PhD program in my mid-20s, the fiascos with Graduate Interdisciplinary Studies in the intervening years, etc. ho hum), or that I was capable of so much more than they could ever possibly imagine.

Yes, I was bored. But we could buy groceries every week without worry.

Now I have to finish that painting. Not sleep from the stress of financial worry. And find another temp job for next week so we can eat the week after.

I won’t miss that truck heavy highway one bit.

______________________________

Dear Readers, I am usually not like this: Was I really pushed to my edge with this situation and was there there anything I could have done to make it work? Or am I simply PMSing?

Friday, March 04, 2005

On the evening of...

I'm travelling down a road that is travelling down a mountain. I think I'm flying because I'm not aware of a car around me. Yet I fly with the same slow care as if I were driving. It is night-time. The moon is embedded in the sky beyond the trees, a brilliant white light surrounded by misty clouds. I should be scared, but I'm not. There is an unearthly stillness everywhere, silent, empty, the trees appear almost painted in dark purple and blue colours with black bark. I fly quickly through the forest near the base of the mountain, and into a private roadway. It is too still; there are no animals. And a house, like any suburban house, wide and flat and large. I go right through the walls. Into a vacant sunken living room with beige couches and chairs that look soft and comfortable before a large brick fireplace that is unlit. Quickly down the hallway. And I fall into bed with you, you in your pajamas, striped white and blue soft cotton, dreaming of my visit, wrapping yourself around me contentedly.

SoundClick MP3 of this entry: March 4, 2004, 1:32 min

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The cherry trees earlier this evening while walking my dog...


Thursday, March 03, 2005

The Art of the Writerly Nap...

Many thanks to those who left pure poetry behind in my last post on creative process at Xanga and here. I have read, and re-read your comments, each one like a jewel that opens out the entire universe of each of you.

My own comment in response to Toni Morrison's process has also grown, and I wonder if your articulations of your creative processes hasn't also wanted to become more detailed too...?

I am a napper. My idea of heaven on earth is an afternoon nap. Nothing could be finer. I cultivate nap time: have honed and honoured it. Oh, how I love that afternoon rest! Now that I work afternoons, well, there's after work, and there are still weekends! A napper not to be undone, I have turned the nap into an art.

It was a year or two back when I discovered the trick of writing while 'napping.'

What is a 'nap'? I rarely sleep. Usually I meditate first, this produces a much deeper and more satisfying nap. I sit against a small meditation chair that I place right on my bed facing the window. I recite a mantra over and over. This stills my mind. I fall into bliss emotionally.

As I go more deeply, I lie down, cover myself with a blanket, and let go. Everything spins and collides inward. I am acutely aware of the world around me. My body hums in stillness. There are no particular thoughts; the meditation has cleared them. I rest deeply, healingly. I fall in love again and again with the world. I forget that I have worries.

After 20 or 30 minutes, I re-emerge into the phenomenal world, my room, my dog perhaps lying nearby, thinking of what sort of treat I should have, usually it's cappuccino and chocolate.

When I am writing I 'nap,' but never disappear so fully, always being cognizant of the notebook on my lap. I drift in and out, scrawling words as quickly as I can write.

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

How Do You Write Best...

Toni Morrison says: "I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark-it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come... Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It's not being in the light, it's being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense." From The Writer's Almanac, February 18, 2005.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usMy best writing occurs when I am just coming out of a meditative nap. A place where I let go of everything---discovered this being lulled in a hammock strung across my tiny studio. I like to be lying down, with a notebook and a pencil on my lap, or my tiny pocket pc, something private, that only I can see, and drifting dreamily in and out of stillness. It is in this deeply relaxed state that images begin adding their vitality to what I am writing about... It is in this quiet state of mind that my imagination has most freedom... And I have learnt to trust the flow of words, even if they don't 'pull together'; when I come back later, I find nuggets in the tumble of jewels that I can take out, polish and wear...


How about you...? What state of mind do you find best for your creativity and how do you evoke that...?

What's your ritual as a writer?

Thursday, February 24, 2005


My first attempt at hosting audio - following the link in my last post to
SoundClick in Creative Commons. This is a poem, about 10 minutes long, and my computer doesn't play it too well - it buffers a lot. It was just an MP3 that I had on my computer...normally I would do much shorter ones of the poems that I post. If you have the patience, listen to a bit or all of it, and leave some feedback. Promise I won't post anything this long again!

It's a poem that interweaves a love story with a tantra on Yeshe Tsogyal, an 8th c. Queen of Tibet and founder of Tibetan Buddhist...


The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss Copyright ©2003 by Brenda Clews

Oh, I put it under New Age since there isn't a category for poetry in their music styles.


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This is the book that first introduced me to Yeshe Tsogyal some years ago. I still dip into it when I need to be reminded of the ineffable mysteries of life...

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Audio and Video Publishing Sites...

Trying to reconstruct notes from the Blogging Conference without the notes which froze on on my Pocket PC and disappeared when I did a soft reset...

My interests are in audio and video blogging, more to add the speaking and dancing of my poetry to the text than to portray my daily life in a running narrative.

As the only speaker I heard all day that referred to artists, his name? famous, I'm sure, though gone in my absent notes, whether he cares about artists or not was obfuscated in his talk, but he spoke about a very wealthy American man who does: Brewster Kahle, the founder of the presitgious Internet Archive, and the force behind the scanning of millions of books to become available to the public (Google is involved in this project too, I believe, but don't quote me!). Brewster Kahle has decided that artists don't have much money. Understatement!

So he is funding a site where filmakers, artists, videographers, musicians, poets, etc., will be able to post their work, and where it will be archived.

One of the problems is the cost of bandwidth and space. Audio and video files take up a lot of space. For the creative artist, space on this site will be free.

This site, and please correct me if I've got it wrong, is Open Media, the Global Home for Grassroots Media. The site should be fully operational later this year.

Another site recommended was Creative Commons. Here you can get your multi-media work published. Check it out.

I gotta run...

Wish I had them damn notes, she says, disappearing over the bandwidth (you know, the place where the sun rises and sets on the internet)...

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

On Xanga and Blogger as writing sites...


What is the blogosphere? It's 31 million bloggers world-wide. That's
alot of writing. That's a movement. That's a social force. That's an upholder of literacy. And we thought the written word was going to die with the ushering in of the audio-video age. Were we wrong!

Audio and video blogging are coming, though. And then we could expect a total explosion in the medium.

We live in an era of self-expression. And we create our own reality shows out of our own lives with no producers or television studios to oversee us. How money can be made out of us is another question.

There was one man at the blogging conference who makes a living from his blog. His name is Chris Pirillo. Today I finally gave in and went to his site. His writing is good, but simple - nothing too complex there. And there are GoogleAds, which is where he makes the major portion of his income. The more hits he gets, the larger his monthly paycheck. What I noticed most prominently, however, is that his site, to my untrained tastes, resembled a General Store. Many links, many products advertised, with him as the genteel owner behind the counter with whom you chat a bit, only, in this blogland, it's mostly him who does the chatting, for he gets few comments. But that's okay. His site has 12,000 visits a month and generates enough income for him to travel all over North America to conferences like the one he spoke at last Saturday in Vancouver.

In fact, most of the folks there, the presenters, seemed more focussed on numbers and income than they did on the quality of writing. One lone voice in the audience asked a question about the artist who blogs, and it wasn't answered with much sensitivity or depth.

Why I want to podcast (audioblog) is so that I can offer readings of my written poems. Why I want to videoblog is not so that I can bore you with tales of my life in poor light but because I would like to offer dance pieces where I perform my poetry.

Though blogging is a medium of disappearing posts, writing our lives disappears as quickly as we live them, I take my writing seriously, as most of us do, and my blog is where I experiment with different ways to write and post my efforts and receive invaluable feedback.

Blogging is one area in my life where I can creatively realize myself. It's also a place where I can offer support to other writers, and thus help them to foster the expression of their creativity too. What blogging has done for my writing is immense; but it's not just the writing and posting, it's the comments, the support of fellow writers, the community.

Which is why I love Xanga. In a sense, Xanga has created its own 'mini feed' in our subscriptions to each other; and by making commenting a 'members only' activity, fosters the possibility of a strong community of writers, I feel. For this I am grateful.

Yet I also feel a pull to be part of the larger blogging community. At my blogger site I went 'public' last night - it had been a private site. I added a site meter. And frankly, I don't know what it means that 30 people have visited, since there's not one comment. And where did they come from? Who are they?

One piece of advice that I would like to pass on, and from someone in the audience, is that if you want to build readership you just keep blogging, post frequently and, the guy said, in five years you'll be way ahead of where you are now...

Is that what serious writers do? Aren't we all serious writers here? Isn't this why we love our blogging site so much?

And the good news is that there is one major feed service that does recognize Xanga - Bloglines...though I tried to activate my account for about 3 weeks using different email addresses before contacting help, who activated it for me. At bloglines I can subscribe to people who blog at many different sites and read their most recent posts, as we do at Xanga.

One last question, HomerTheBrave in a comment on the mirror post of this one at my Xanga site wrote that Blogger/Blogspot is a publishing site; wheras Xanga is a blog site. Any comments?


Sunday, February 20, 2005

Northern Voice Blogging Conference


How does it happen? I lost all of my notes and links from the
Northernvoice blogging conference. My Pocket PC file went strange, and then dissipated into something unreadable.

Suffice to say, it was an interesting day. Here is a link that collects some of the links at the conference:
Resources/NorthernVoice05

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My main interests were in audio and video blogging, and in understanding why Xanga is the way it is.

I have lost the audiopod links, but they should be easy enough to find again. And there is a Yahoo group dedicated to video blogging, which, we learnt, is about 8 months old. In its infancy, but the potential is huge...what we will be able to record for our children and grandchildren. I know it's a bit overwhelming...I felt like lying down too (heh)...but she'll probably be videoblogging before she starts school...


On my Xanga issues, they're irresolvable. In the panel on promoting your website, I did ask a question about the "politics" between blog sites, only to find that everyone defends Google. I do too, but I'm not idealizing the service. Yes, Google doesn't read the "?" in Xanga's URLs to our sites and that's one reason why Xanga blogs don't show up in searches. Okay. I sat next to George, a woman who works at Flikr, the hot new photo service, and she said that Xanga does (or doesn't, I can't remember) use an APS feed, and so they can't connect (oh, and Flikr is a Vancouver company, Canadian, and only has about 10 employees...far out). And I was enamoured of the blog feeds I saw projected on screen, where you can subscribe to many blogs, getting instant updates when there are postings, only to find today, using Feedster.com, that Xanga blogs are not recognized, or even found. This is an RRS aggregator (see note at bottom) that searches through 8 million blogs instantly, the one that connected the US blogging world to a woman writing a blog in a hospital after the Tsunami, and we aren't there.

Can't we kindly ask Xanga to connect us to the rest of the blogging world? Or do we like being a community unto ourselves?

The oddest part was that when I googled myself today, for the very first time my Xanga showed up on the first page (scratches head bewilderingly). It's usually non-existent. I have a mirror post now at Blogger, which does enable a connection to the larger blogging world, for whatever it's worth (besides time).

I'll never leave Xanga, but, hey, Xanga, can't we have a more open relationship with the burgeoning blogging world!


____________________
"In the world of weblogs or "blogs", the term "feed"refers to a "RSS Feed" which is an XML based data format that allows a blog's contents to be accessed via another program. Since we were building a search engine for blogs, we made one that indexed "feeds" and the result was Feedster!"

Renewal


Renewal

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Delicate as a snowdrop
growing
on a grave the season after.

Thin as a Spring White's wings
like bright, wet silk
the shed cocoon.

A prayer on the horizon at dawn
rising.

ii

What does the snow feel as it falls and
melts into the rivulet
at my feet?

iii

And the day came when the risk to remain tight
in the bud was more painful than the risk
it took to blossom.
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iv

I turn,
and you who were gone
are there.




©2005 by Brenda Clews

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

On the Way to Work, Valentine's Morning


Rushing down the road, slippery, sparkly ice pellets flattened underfoot, the sun that the camera records is not the sun that I see. The sun before me is rising, shining in the crisp morning air. This is the sun that wholly knows the world it illumines. This is the sun ushering the day into being. A sun bringing activity with it. The bustling world awakens before this sun. It is refreshing to see, but it signals the beginning of a long work day ahead. When I return in the evening, I shall whisper goodbye to that same sun on the other side of the sky, a sun which I never saw all day at my desk in the office where I currently work. Risking being late, I stop to take a picture.

I take a picture because I know the camera will see a glow of light, a brilliance that is white at the centre and radiates translucent rainbow hues until the landscape that we only see because of that light re-emerges around its edges. I know that the camera sees more innocently than I, who compose the scene I am walking through according to my perceptions, my memories of this path, these rocks, my destination ahead. The camera will compose the possibility of another story. The camera will see two paths converging, where I only see one.

Sometimes we need to take a picture of a scene to see what was really there.

Or at least another version of what was there.

I will remember the unusual and slippery coating of frosted ice. The camera will remember the magnificent light.

That light, as I look at the photo, connects me to a dream I once had, long ago, and so strongly it brings such longing with it...

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Sunday, February 06, 2005

On The Sweetness Of Being

You are unaware of the bliss pooling in your eyes. It but a flicker, yet I see it clearly.

The sweetness of being.

Perhaps it is the sweet fresh juice of the apple trickling as you are biting. Or the perfect lace of snow on the branch. Or the sudden surprise of soft vivid irises reaching upwards. Or the scent of hyacinths in a summer breeze. Or the herald of choral clouds across the skyscape at sunset...

The sweetness of being, found in bliss.

The sweetness of being, the impetus to do, to be more than.

It is sensual, primal, almost visionary, the way bliss passes across us like a caress of warm sunlight.

And we, evolved, reservoirs of memory, mind, feeling, and sensation, who crawled out of the ocean eons ago and flew in light-footedness across the landscape and made alphabets out of everything.

Clay, metals, stones, quills, ink, parchment...

And our cornucopias of alphabets: like seeds in the fields growing our food; bricks forming the structures of our houses, cities, civilizations; minerals and metals upholding a superstructure of manufacture and energy; and our even breaking the codes of the alphabets of the molecules dancing and composing the universe...

Us filling our vast created cosmos with an interlacing calligraphy of alphabets, such sweetness of being.

You who come by, charms of bliss, having the radiance of angels, elixirs that we are barely aware of.

And I awoke this morning dreaming of calligraphies carved out of sunlight knowing that was it.

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Saturday, January 15, 2005

The Tsunami...

The Tsunami...

In memory of all those who died in, and all those who lived through, the tsunami that struck the countries of the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004.

I

In the deepness, a heaving of the earth. I am tensing, straining, the pressure too great. I am tearing, ripping, fragmenting. The gash is 600 miles long. There is thunder under the ocean as I heave and split. Frightened fish flee, their communities scattered. The water rushes over my plunging wound.

I am thrown off kilter in my revolution about the stars, a momentary faltering...

II

A sudden precipitous displacement of the ocean floor and I am falling, swirling, a lethal underwater waterfall.

The earth gives up her energy to the gashing waves. I am swelling, overflowing; there is nowhere to go but outwards. I am a deadly wave fleeing the rupture, my speed and breadth terrifying. I am churning with the energy of the earth's cry.

III

I am the shoreline and the people lining the beaches, holidaying, working, living, sleeping. I am the lands that the gigantic wave races towards. I am the unsuspecting, the innocent, the unprepared, the unguarded. The tremors of the earth are felt, but only the animals heed it. The animals, the elephants and tigers, wild dogs and birds, are all moving inland quickly: the rumbling earth, the rush of seawater in the ear, fearsome. An animal's instinct for self-preservation intact in the way the people lining the beach to watch the sucking out of the water, its disappearance at the horizon, aren't.

I am the children playing on the emptied expanse of beach. I am laughing at the sudden low tide, running on wet sand.

IV

I am the tide that is drawing back to lash the land impeding the flow. I am the striking wall of water. I cannot stop. I am rushing at 500 miles an hour. I am many tons of force. And I cannot stop. I cannot abate the fury unleashed by the underwater earthquake, the crack on the ocean floor.

You in the heavens, hear me! I did not mean this destruction...

I surge towards the beach where the people are talking and watching.

I surge with the full force of nature towards an unprepared land.

There is no early warning system to broadcast far and wide my deadly coming. No-one flees.

V

I flood onto the beach, a great wide water dragon roaring, the children, the sun bathers, wash into me. I keep surging, my water filling with mud, churning, rushing into villages, buildings, hotels, houses, huts, cars, pouring over the land in unrelenting fury, dragging boats, cars, trees, the detritus of broken homes, bashing, tearing apart the world in floodwaters.

I draw back, leaving bodies littered on the sand like beached fish.

VI

Then I am flowing forward again, I cannot stop; I hammer the land with tons of force, my swirling waters, rushing far inland, devastating the landscape. The dead and the wounded float everywhere in me. I hear the underwater screams of terror of those who are drowning calling for their loved ones. My salt water fills their lungs, intruding, squeezing out the air. Their bodies are battered. Those lucky and strong enough to swim with my furious currents are wounded by sharp bits of broken things. More die than survive.

I lash and subside, lash and subside, gradually losing my momentum, sliding back out to sea where I glitter under the hot sun, gently lapping as if I had never risen like furious thunder and drowned the land.

VII

I am the mother who sees the wall of sea falling on the beach and runs to catch her toddlers. I am the mother whose children slip out of her desperate grasp, who is holding her breath underwater, who is screaming her children’s names silently in the wave throwing her inland like broken driftwood. I am the children’s terror, the children who will die in less than a minute as they cry, “Mama…”

I am all the desolate and broken children who listlessly survey the torn landscape looking for their fathers and mothers, their brothers and sisters…

I am the grieving of the living: the surviving wounded, some of whom will die from preventable gangrene; the ones gone mad with grief screaming at the sea to give back their families. I am the dead whose souls float over the arc of land by the ocean mourning the loss of their lives. I fly with the angels who have gathered in throngs to comfort those who walk in shock and grief…

VIII

In the inlets, bays, bodies bob, like swollen, broken mannequins. The land is strewn with bodies; the death count rising ever higher. Where the tsunami hit: Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Somalia, Myanmar, Maldives, Malaysia, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Kenya. Whole islands have disappeared. Entire villages wiped out. Every country in the world has lost citizens.

I am the stench of decay everywhere.

IX

And I am the love of a shocked and stunned world pouring in.

I am the aid pouring in: the able-bodied helpers, finding the dead, burying, cremating, packing identified bodies, parts of bodies, into body-bags for airflights to foreign lands; the food and blankets being handed out, supplies air dropped in remote regions. I am the forensics teams taking DNA, teeth for dental records, anything to positively identify the dead. For the living need to bring closure, and burial rights, to their loved ones.

I am the shelters that house the grieving homeless masses while the governments decide what to do; how far back from the sea to rebuild. I am the early warning system being installed in byoys bobbing on the ocean and speed detectors under the waves.

I am the love of the world pouring in, the millions of dollars pledged and raised and offered for survival, for reconstruction.

How can we comfort you? How can we help you? How can we show you our caring, concern, support, allegiance?

How can we ensure you, who are among the poorest peoples in the world, are never caught unaware again?

X

And I am the slow rebuilding, plank by plank, nail by nail, mortar and thatch and brick and glass, creating our habitat despite the fear of the sea, the memories of the lush paradise that was, will be, and until the ocean rushes from the earth’s rupturing, as tectonic plates slide one beneath the other, once more…



_____________________________

©2005 by Brenda Clews

Dec. 26 2004
       
yo u r :: h e l p :: c o u n t s!

Oxfam
Unicef        
red cross/
red crescent

americares
network for good
artsen zonder grenzen
/medecins sans frontières

Want to put this on your own blog/site? Here is the code

Monday, September 06, 2004

An Alter...

How do you spiritually nourish yourself? One way, for me, is at my alter. For 25 years I have had alters of one kind or another. My alters have evolved over the years with me.

Initially, I was inspired by Catholic 'poustinias,' or prayer huts, and placed a small bamboo table in a tiny storage closet that I painted white with a gold ceiling and put mystical Jungian mandalas and some mystical Christian images on the walls and I used to go into my prayer room and pray or meditate or sometimes just cry. That was when I lived in Grad Residence. Later I lived in a condo and then a house. My alters shifted to objects as conduits of healing energies and my predilection to the Divine Feminine. Various crystals and incense holders and statuettes and semi-precious stones found their way onto my makeshift alters. When I had a cottage I used make alters by heaping sand into three foot high mounds and flattening the tops and putting shells and stones and feathers and sometimes incense in the sand. After a wind storm blew down some trees, I salvaged a double tree stump that my husband hauled home and on which I placed crystals and representations of the four elements, incense in sand, a shell with water, a candle, and fresh flowers as often as I could afford them. I taught yoga in my home then and my students often brought flowers for the alter too. After my marriage ended I rented out the top floor of my house, which was my room, shared my daughter's room, and had my desk in the kitchen, so I didn't have an official alter for years. My alter then was a quartz crystal ball from Brazil, figurines, Quan Yin holding a baby, Venus of Willendorf, Green Tara, special stones, mystical rainbow obsidian, rose quartz, blue lapis lazuli veined with copper, a large smooth flat stone glued with numerous cottage pebbles, a moonstone white and glistening with colour, glass crystal prisms in the window to catch the dancing sunlight, small quartz crystals scattered in amongst the books, and candles on deep blue glass and wrought iron spirals on my desk.

After I sold my house, moved to the West Coast and rented a three bedroom house, I was able to create an alter in a corner of my room. This alter is quite Tibetan Buddhist and Goddess. An oil painting of the Sri Yantra that I did as a meditation hangs on the wall, the bindu, or centre point, positioned exactly at eye level. The two small figures are Ch'en Rezig and White Tara, masculine and feminine Buddhas, imported from Nepal, their faces painted with real gold apparently- they are exquisitely beautiful. Everything is collected on a hand-carved wooden table from north Africa. At the side is a thick pole from my cottage, found on the beach and so smoothed by the motion of the water of the lake, wrapped in sheepskin and hung with a headdress of feathers. I have Native drums and rattles near, as well as Tibetan bells. My alter space is small, wedged between the wall and a circa 1920s mirrored oak cupboard, and I have to sit with my right knee bent, the left one on the floor- somehow exactly in the pose of Green Tara. Unfortunately I don't do my daily meditation at my alter because sitting like Green Tara for extended periods of time is not very comfortable. Each object on my alter contains years of precious memories and I love to caress them with a silk cloth as I dust them, keeping them clean and shiny.

What do I do at my alter? Why, I commune, of course. Sometimes I do rituals that I make up, or follow procedures from books, incantations and dream magick, entering into the vast and creative flow of universal energy. Mostly, though, at my alter I allow the meditation, the prayer, that life is to flow through me. As I sit, doing a Kundalini meditation, inviting the light of clarity in, images of the world move through my mind, often the suffering of those who I have read of in the news, the suffering of those I love, my own, and I cry, grieving. I ask many questions, always the endless questions, and receive answers intuitively, in feeling. And I am guided here, at my alter, when I need to understand something in my life or make decisions. At my alter I can be myself and can enter into my own deepness to find the wisdom that would be the best path to follow, even if tomorrow it changes. At my alter, I feel close to what is divine, close to everyone on the planet and to our earth itself, spiritually close to all I know and love. I ask for unconditional love and acceptance, and to be able to give these gifts to others. I am comforted, healed, made whole enough to continue on.

Ultimately we carry our alter with us. Many of my friends find comfort at the alter of their church or synagogue or mosque or temple during quiet times. Though it is wonderful to have a sacred space of your own. I hope everyone has a private alter, a reserved corner for special mementos, a garden you've nurtured, a special place in the woods to go and commune, or a tiny triangle in a city park with a tree through which to view the sky, even a bath of soft warm scented water with rose petals can serve as an alter space where you honour yourself and the radiance of life.

A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___