Sheets Of Light

MP3 of "Sheets Of Light" here

At my Aural Pleasure poetry reading site at Sound Click. I erased all the preamble on this one; even Omar's gone. Just the writing tonight... perhaps, uhmm, a postmodern foray... *hugs, hope you enjoy... (1min15sec).

"The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, LXXI

The light is like delicate paper caressing the wall.
Lantern paper. Translucent paper on the sand
of the walls. Should I write the calligraphies
of my heart here? Even before
the wind blows it away.

On these iconic, cuneiform tablets of light,
pillars marching over ancient surfaces,
sails of light, perhaps fleeing the rich shadows
of time itself, love letters to you in luminescent alphabets,
a song of creation creating itself?

In all its tragedies and magnificences,
amid broken columns of meaning,
crumpled, torn bits of marble or parchment,
a festival of light...Cleopatra with her Anthony,
Eloise with her Abelard, Juliet with her Romeo...
Interlacings of the numinosity of love
written on sheets of light.

©Brenda Clews 2005

A Dozen Cherry Trees...

Any editorial suggestions would be much appreciated...

The Reading Meme

I’ve been memed! By Richard Lawrence Cohen! Normally I don’t do meme-extracted confessionals, but here goes…

THE READING MEME

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?

While my memory would have to improve vastly, I would like to be able to preserve and pass onto ages of less Dark Ages Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Now I don’t speak French, but the unexpurgated French edition is the one I’d have to memorize. Even though I don’t agree with all her ideas, I think her massive history of everything about how females are made, not born, is one of those pivotal books that only come along once in a long while. Beauvoir, I tip my glass of wine to you…

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

There must be one somewhere…

3. The last book you bought was...?

A few days ago I purchased The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene at a used bookstore on Commercial Drive. I’ve been lusting after this book for some time, Chapters being out of stock when I last tried to order it. That it had just come in when I walked into the store and bought it is one of those wonderful coincidences that I don’t make as much of as Jung would have.

4. The last book you read was...?

Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Francesca Fremantle, from the library. Last November I participated in NaNoWrMo, and wrote a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, a breathtaking experience. Anyway, as the month began I was working in the back offices of a funeral home, specifically in the vault that contains all the hand-written ledgers of the details of the funerary services and final resting places of the departed. The ledgers were amazing documents, and I considered them a modern “Book of the Dead,” and because they were essentially financial records was able to throw a lot of stuff on capitalism into the novel (believing that Capitalism is the “root philosophy” of our culture). So thus began my novel… anyway I had ANI from the Egyptian Book of the Dead appear as a mysterious blogger at one point, and included an otherworld journey based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead towards the end of my novel. Reading Fremantle’s book was just more research on the Bardo Thodol (she has some beautiful, lyrical passages but overall I found her thought too judgmental and rigid for my liking)…

5. What are you currently reading?

The Elegant Universe, and I’m loving it… O, those hidden dimensions, and those dancing, sweet, lyrical strings vibrating… always thought music was the highest art form, agree with Pound, et al, and now, seems, yes, vibrating coils in 11 dimensions are potentially the basis of all matter and thus a prime candidate for Einstein’s beloved unified field theory…

Sigh, okay, like any bibliophile, there are others in varying stages: Being Bodies by Lenore Friedman and Susan Moon, Fruitflesh by Gayle Brandeis, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was by Wendy Doniger, Selected Plays of Helene Cixous, edited by Eric Prenowitz, and, uhmm...

6. Five books you would take to a desert island...

Pl-ease, do you know how complicated this is? I take it seriously. Whatever I say I may indeed have to take with me to an imprisonment on a desert island. Okay, so I’m heavily into Norton’s on the desert island sojourn. Sorry! While it’s only blurbs, and that would be frustrating, I’d have to remember everything else I read from those snippets, and that’d keep me occupied, wouldn’t it, wouldn’t it?

-Norton Anthology of Literature
-Norton Anthology of Poetry
-Norton Anthology of Literature by Women
-Riverside Shakespeare
-Elegant Universe (can’t leave unfinished book behind yet!)
-and some Helene Cixous…O, maybe Promethea, I don’t know

That's 6, but...it's not enough!

And please, can I take the Internet with me? A wireless satellite connection? And some way to recharge my laptop batteries? Pl-ease…

7. Who are you passing this stick on to and why?

thenarrator, cause he’s my friend.
MoreWhereThatCameFrom, cause he’s too mysterious.
laurieglynn, cause she’s too mysterious too.
Lord Pineapple, cause I'm curious.

A moment in each day...

Shadows On The Wall

"Shadows On The Wall": A photo from this morning, a poem from this evening, both together in the image...

Lighthouse Park

Maybe I'm on a kid blog binge: the red tulip was a gift from my son; the apple blossoms for my daughter; so I said to them, I'm going , I need trees. Get on the phone & on the NET, get us out of the house, on the sky train, and on the #250 bus to Horseshoe Bay.

The bus driver forgot to let us off, but I jumped up when I saw Beacon Lane, and he apologized as he let us off at the next stop, and back we walked. So we went hiking, there's nothing much to tell, or maybe another post tomorrow, but here's some pics. Yup: that's the trail; aren't those rocks something; and the lighthouse after which the park is named. It took us only an hour to get there, on a scenic bus ride over Lion's Gate Bridge, along the glistening rim of the Pacific ocean...

O, sorry, Spring out here in British Columbia was 2 months ago, now it's hot like Summer...

Woman of the Sun & Blossoms

Two disparate images today, one on a walk to the park in the hours just after dawn, the other a sketch I did lying in a hammock.

My daughter's the model, though she doesn't look like that, it's not a portrait, but inspired by her. Before she was born, I pulled a Tarot card for her, and it was the major arcana card, The Sun.

I'm calling it, "Woman of the Sun & Blossoms"...

It's just a bit of fun for the day...

The Red Tulip

Solidifying Into Light

If you'd like to listen to a poetry reading, there is a 3 minute recording of this piece at my site at Sound Click: MP3 Recording of "Solidifying Into Light"

I like to work with multi-media approaches, the writing, an image, a reading...

Writing the words of a prose poem in an image is a time-consuming process, as I found when I photomontaged Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls. In "Solidifying Into Light" there is perhaps too much text, yet with much tweaking it can 'work,' if barely.

Creating an image to embed the writing in? It's always a challenge. Today, a photograph, of my amber pendant, my hand beneath the prose poem...

__________________________________

This prose poem arose out of a rather large case of plagiarism at a blog site that has now been closed down.

Pensive Woman

It is crucial to NEVER forget...

Let us never, never forget: Liberation of Belsen.
I haven't been able to stop crying since watching this. Let us NEVER forget. Each generation must remember. NEVER LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN. EVER.

A tree of birdhouses...

The way the branches form patterns, and that blue sky, and those birdhouses are incredible ~ from a master dollhouse maker's studio surely, the detail alone worth admiring. Photos from a walk an hour ago. (If you can't see it, go here: http://img38.echo.cx/img38/8194/birdhousesbc7og.jpg)

Red Breast...

Sky Tangos...

The birth of stars amidst colliding galaxies with their deathly black holes fascinates me...

Collisions of galaxies in the young universe caused prodigious star production even while the black holes at their centres increased exponentially.

Matter suctioned by the dense gravity of black holes flew at massive speeds inwards as gases were blasted to the outer fringes creating the luminescent edges of the merging galaxies.

The light pouring out of such ancient crucibles of creation and destruction creating the very memories we see emblazoned in the night sky through our telescopes.

In such collisions, a thousand more solar masses of stars formed each year than in our slower star-creating counterparts in the modern galaxies we exist in.

But when I look at simulations of colliding galaxies, I see only tangos and hot passion, sangrias and lust, sex and creating babies, the madness of merging amidst looming black holes and bright bursting stardust across the heavenly skies, an explosive terrain of love...

________________________
The photo is an active link back to the article at Space.com, for those of you who want to explore more...

A sweaty butterfly...

I've been languishing since I've found myself, once again, on the temp office work circuit. Which is work in a strange office, then stress a lot in the days between, work a bit in another strange office, stress more, you get the routine. I don't want to buy my monthly gym pass. I can't seem to make it to the park where jogging is free. Dance is too far away, mostly everything takes about 2 or more hours of transit for about 2 hours of dance, and again I don't want to spend the money. So lapse into lax muscles and the only cardio is considering my job prospects. O so lazy...

There is much mention of exercise in Blogland these days. Must be the Spring...

My contribution to the Blogosphere Gym is cheap: a $5.00 skipping rope. Yesterday I set a timer for half an hour and skipped on a board thrown on the scrub called grass out back. I stopped constantly to retie my hair or catch my breath or because I can't manage the simple mechanics of turning a rope over my head and under my feet. Perhaps in that half hour I skipped for 20 minutes. Which is what I wanted to do. Then I did yoga for another 15 minutes, focussing on the spine and abdominals. I finished my 'work out' by walking around the house with two 5 lb weights stretching my arms way back and up and down like a sweaty butterfly for at least another 20 minutes.

Not much you must agree, but net result: today my calf muscles ache, and across my chest. It feels good. And not only was it *free* I didn't even have to brush my hair or wash my face or change from house clothes into jogging attire, just put on some running shoes...

Skipping is a great exercise and under-rated. I wonder why?

Stained Glass light...

As far as stained glass goes, the pattern is not sublime. I bought this glass in 1982 at a small stained glass store on Queen Street in Toronto, back before it became an upscale fashionista district, when there were cafes and used book stores galore. I lived in a condo in a renovated Victorian house near the Art Gallery. All my windows looked out onto brick walls or a parking lot. I missed the sky and wanted to hide the impenetrability of brick, the way I felt cemented in.

My father was dying, my life changing irrevocably; I was in a wild and passionate relationship with an intellectual poet. I surrounded myself with stained glass, some pieces more sublime than others.

After my father died, I bought a house with huge windows and privacy a few blocks away. I could see the sun and the moon in the sky. The stained glass went into the attic for almost two decades.

I moved it with me to Vancouver, finding it bringing back a time I had forgotten, and hung it myself with my power drill.

During the day the windows are open. In the evening I shut them and enjoy the deep and glistening colour. When I sleep I draw the curtains.

In this digital photograph of the stained glass casement windows this morning it looks as if the sun is, is... there is such brilliant light, it seems to be pushing the glass open, the curtains open, drawing the viewer out to its brightness, a whiteness into which the landscape has collapsed, the dark blue lace that I have hung as netting to keep out flies and bees in the Summer becomes a mere few stitches of a design over the whiteness of the sun's field, even the window frame is being submerged in light, a light almost blinding to the occupant within...

What intrigues me is that I was working on a cross-cultural study of light in many different fields when my father died, a piece of work I never completed; it was based on stunning dreams of light...

Can you describe this photograph? It is one of the ones with a light that seems almost visionary. Be poetic...

It is impossible for me to believe that I am entirely my body, that everything that I am is contained here in the cafe in which I sit, looking out the floor to ceiling full wall of windows at the rain gently pooling drop by drop into puddles or wetting the street with a sheen only rainwater can give. The world revolves around me, the musac with its forgettable music and chatter, the scrape of chairs of people arriving or leaving, the muted tones of conversation, someone who has a cold blowing their nose, the sounds of food being eaten off plates, knives and forks scraping, the clacking of a dishwasher being stacked in the back, tables being cleared and wiped, and all types of people who are quietly sitting except for one table of loud laughers. My feet are cold. The street is busy with trucks and cars and pedestrians. Umbrellas float everywhere like dark flowers

How can everything I am be contained here in this remote and anonymous spot? Located here in this curve of space and time, at this edge of the universe, that that's it, that's all there is?

Because most of what we are seems to transcend our bodies, it is not hard to imagine what travels with us, our memories, feelings, passions and desires will travel beyond our bodies into a deathless realm beyond our deaths.

One day perhaps we will understand how energy manifest into matter and how it unmanifests, the secret of life and death.

Perhaps we are runners passing the baton ~ our written thoughts, inventions, works of art, labour, children ~ just keeping the links of civilization alive even as we each appear and disappear, a living force for awhile, and then gone.

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...

When 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

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. Then 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.

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.

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

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.

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

A thought from today...

Experiment #1: a thought from today...

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

Green leafy mirror series...

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

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

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...

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.

10 Are Dead in Minnesota After Rampage at School

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.

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....

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

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....