Lifedrawing before I take to the skies...

While I'd rather be at home packing, and there is still way too much to do, until Friday I am at a job where I can while away my time, between calls and mailings, on the NET (instead of finishing packing, oh such stress). For Jean, Adriana Bliss, e_journeys, Mary Godwin, Richard Lawrence Cohen, and Dale, who left such heartwarming messages and a welcome back whenever that may be, and Tamar who sent me an email, thank you, my dear blogging friends...

Last night I went with my new friend Stephen, Voxcat, to his weekly lifedrawing class, and then to English Bay to watch the fireworks, a magnificent display of light and colour and explosion over the ocean and against the backdrop of the mountains, a most wonderful way to say goodbye to Vancouver.

I post three of my lifedrawing efforts. They were 3 minute poses. A challenge for one who likes to linger over drawing. By the third hour I was exhausted with the speed, and began to colour instead. These images contain stories, reflections, ways of composing life and being and may become photopoems later on...


Meadow Dancing
©Brenda Clews 2005


Her Figments and Shadows in Half Tones
©Brenda Clews 2005


Are Those Her Wings, Has She Yet to Put Them On?
©Brenda Clews 2005

Time to take to the skies...

With many behind-the-scenes crises and negotiations, it's finally official. I'm moving back to Toronto, where I expect to be welcomed by quibbling but supportive family and a whole group of beautiful friends. I plan to fly out of Vancouver on Monday, with my dog and cat in tow. I have nowhere to stay, and will have to rely on the kindness of friends for the first bit (my family can't help, my brothers live in a no-dogs condo and my mother is in her 80s and couldn't handle me & my pets)...

I'm gonna miss you all! I am working this week, and packing like a halycon now that it is actually going to happen, and don't know when I'll be on-line again, it could be a day, a week, a month...

I'd like to thank all of you for your supportive, encouraging, warm and sometimes humorous comments as I struggled through my uncertainties. You've all made it an easier journey, and my last post, Sky Songs in the Park, was particularly inspired by our connections to each other. I'd especially like to thank a fellow blogger who has been most kind to me throughout the ongoing crises and practically hand-held me through the worst and most unsettling parts, Ira, thenarrator. And Pru, ydurp, for your support behind-the-scenes too. And Laurieglynn, for your long and encouraging magical emails. And dear Bonnie, Literature_Chick, I hope to squeeze some time out of this busy weekend of packing and moving to go to the Slough to meet you, the Japanese fishing village in Richmond, where a most amazing woman lives in a little house on stilts. And Stephen, Voxcat, it sure was wonderful meeting another blogger and hitting the town to dance last Saturday night, and how you took me to that magical house in the Slough last night, ahh; we'll keep in touch with each other through the blogosphere...

Until we meet again, my beautiful writers, friends, confidants... big hugs, lots of kisses, and tons of delightful laughter... & keep on posting! xoxo

Sky Songs in the Park

Marriage Mandala

Ok, it would make an interesting tatoo. I painted it 20 years ago when I had a dreadfully sore throat and fever. I remember lying in bed, sipping codeine-laced cough syrup straight from the bottle, journal on my knees, acrylics beside me, painting. I was into snakes and mandalas, just coming out of my Jungian stage. It's a small image. Then I got married that year and used it as the image for our Wedding Invitations. My sculptor friend was the only one who remarked on it, and he said, "O my g-d! For a wedding?" C'mon, dear old friend, two ouroboros' are intertwined, the serpents are kissing and forming a heart, there's a wishing star of blessing and guidance, a pearl or moon holding the secret of wisdom, and flames of passion leaping out of the sun... Sigh. Did the marriage last, well, no, but that's beside the point.

"Marriage Mandala" ©1985 by Brenda Clews

Ouroboros: a circular symbol or a snake or dragon devouring its tail, standing for infinity or wholeness.

Mismatched Coordinates, or Resting in Uncertainty?

Uncertainty continues only because the coordinates are not coordinating. Desires and their fulfillment are slightly off. And that variation sends the compass spinning into chaos.

I'm attempting to plan a move back East because I have not been able to find permanent work. My children are presently in Ontario and their plane tickets back to Vancouver have been cancelled. Everything is nearly in place, but not quite.

Late yesterday afternoon I received a call asking that I stay on as a temp receptionist at my favourite company in Vancouver for a month; and I have been asked to do a maternity leave for a year beginning in late November too. Had the offer of a month's work occured even a few days ago, it would have changed everything.

I've been doing well living in uncertainty. Making plans based on the lack of work here, yet with no certainty when I arrive back in Toronto either. That's equally up in the air. But this call yesterday threw me into chaos, a sleepless night, the sense of inner explosions imploding...

Then it turns out that the mover I discussed my move with has booked nothing, not checked into the cost of shipping by rail, and so it's like I'm not leaving at all. Although I am leaving a house I haven't been very happy in; at least that's definite and certain. Or is it?

So, for a week's work, and hopefully growing clarity in the confusion, I wasn't going to say anything about my uncertainty. But I did. HR, who I adore, truly, wasn't too happy with me. But, hey guys, I could have lied, said yes, I can do a month, then sped out of here when everything else was in place, if in fact it did fall into place. They decided to give me another week of work here, a week I can definitely commit to.

At this rate, though, I may be out of a good job that gives me parameters I'm comfortable with, with great people, and a good move back home, and with the coordinates swinging wildly and without connection in the starry sky, end up on the street...

Now those universal co-ordinates where desire and event meet in action, why aren't they matching up? They're slightly askew, just off key, and all it's serving to do is make me feel badly about lost opportunities. You can only push the event continuum so far in a direction, and then it takes off, like an avalanche, and there's no stopping what you've started. I'm almost at that point, or have I jiggled it enough so that a move back is already immanent in the Great Ledger of Life? A move back into the uncertainty of no job, no house, and having to start all over again from scratch? When I suddenly, and at long last, have work here now, or at least a real offer of it?

Or, why do I get offered exactly what I was looking for after I've given up and decided to leave?

I mean, I'm only talking interim; I was also going to tutor at an agency in the evenings for more money than a temp agency pays, and, hopefully, return to university in the Fall of 2006. This, merely a bridging strategy. So why is the bridge suddenly offered when I've given up and almost gone the other way?

What does it mean? Or am I to listen to the sardonic laughter of the Gods of Fate as they watch me squirm? Giving me what I asked for after I given up the thought of getting it and had begun to make other tenuous plans...?

I still have an enormous amount of packing to do this weekend. I feel like collapsing in a heap of tears and resignation. Arghhh.....

What's Hidden in the Crevices?

I wonder what is hidden in the crevices, the tiny tide pools, the obscure and wayward parts of ourselves? There is a central story, our main narrative, who we are, what we've experienced, the way we think of ourselves, the way we tell our stories, the way we present ourselves to others, but what if that falls away? What if sometimes our own mainstream is still, empty, non-existent; what if it disppears for awhile; what then? What would come creeping out of the shadows, slithery, bat-like things, or fairies, gnomes, sylphs and undines, or a cast of characters of every shade and tenor, or visions of sublime beings composed of light? Would the inner child come creeping out -- who's full of fears and magic? Would we release pure poetry like the kisses of soft breezes and rays of warm sun? Would stray and incoherent thoughts stream by, fluffs of seeds floating into view, and allow themselves to be thought, their blossoms already promising, even if for a moment? In what ways do we surprise ourselves? In what ways don't we know ourselves? In what ways are we open to other stories of our lives, ones that don't fit the main narratorial road we've carved often painfully out of the mountains and the sand and the ocean of our lives? In what ways are we willing to change and to accomodate our own inner minorities, our own submerged selves, and create an inner democracy between all the aspects that compose us? When you listen to stray thoughts on the edge of your consciousness what do you hear...?


On the way home, after I had posted these thoughts, a butterfly landed in my open palm and stayed for a photo...

MP3: On Paintings in the Sand

MP3: On Paintings in the Sand

Prose Poem ~ On Paintings in the Sand ~ at SoundClick, 6:42min (text here). There is some fun discussion of time in it, and other insights into the creative process that our lives are...

Jean, whose photograph inspired my piece, has written of the Tibetan Buddhist Sand Manadala created by monks visiting from Tashi Lhumpo Monastery in India in the basement of Clerkenwell art gallery in London. The monks, who had preplanned this by months, started the day after the recent bombings and the pouring of the sand to create the mandala went on for a week during the aftermath. Jean has written a beautiful entry. I urge you to read it.


(Photograph by Nancy Jane Reid, click on the image for its source URL.)

For more background information, here is an introduction to Mandala Sand Painting. Here is a site that shows the Mandala Construction process in photographs. And here's another series of photographs of the astoundingly perfect creation of a Sand Mandala and its being swept away...

On Representations of Ourselves, or "The New Profile Pic," or Myths of Self-Imitation...

A discussion on the self-referentiality of imitation of the self...Oh, ok, I'll stop being so veiled, in my travels through the blogosphere today I saw a comment by someone that said that all the bloggers they met were nothing in real life like they portrayed themselves in their blogs. Which got me thinking...


On Representations of Ourselves, or "The New Profile Pic," or Myths of Self-Imitation...

"...many people put on masks to discover who they are under the covert masks they usually wear, so that the overt mask reveals rather than conceals the truth, reveals the self beneath the self; and it tells us that, although such masquerades cannot change people into other people, they may change them into others among their many selves"....Doniger goes on to say, "the essence of a masquerade: to present something known in such a way that people mistake it for something unknown (or the reverse.)"

Wendy Doniger, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was (Oxford, 2005), p.3-5.

Now, hmnnn... My new profile photo doesn't look like me. I'm not sure who it looks like... it was darkened considerably for the profile. Here is the original photo (click on it for a larger size), and another of the painterly things I did to the background with the impressionist brush and with the midtones darkened. Neither look like me, the light washing away the wrinkles, the years, the spots and arrows of outrageous time, but I found it an interesting photo in itself, not as representation of me as I see myself, but as representation of an image of self that is just plain different. I'm a soft woman, not the way it looks in the small version, which I think of as inclining towards heavy metal... *chuckles*~

If you met me, though, I might have to impersonate the image of myself that I have created in my blog... ! Oh, it's so interesting, persona, representation, who we are, the ways we present ourselves to each other! And how we might need to masquerade as ourselves were we to meet. Or, another approach, perhaps we masquerade as an aspect of ourselves that helps us to discover who we, in fact, are. So I masquerade as a writer in my blog, only to discover that I am a writer! The mask and the central persona become interchangeable so that life imitates art...

And he said, "You are nothing like the woman you are in your blog. In your writing you present a completely different person.' Which shocked me. Who says I have to be like the woman I portray in my blog anyway? I never said it was the 'real' me any more than any of the other 'me's' are real. *giggles & giggles*

I might not be at all as you imagine me to be were we to meet. And vice versa. Isn't this scary to contemplate? That the mask of the narrator of the blog and the central persona of the person might be far apart rather than simply interchangeable. Makes you wanna fret, doesn't it.

Especially if we are trying to discover a writerly voice, our best one, in our bloggerly lifewriting.

How does reality intersect with illusion anyway?

On Paintings in the Sand

The weaving's come undone. Stitches untied, unraveled. Strands of lace and bright-coloured yarns lie like fragmented, melted, Surrealist Dali paintings. Time itself has unwoven its tight grip. What was is spinning undone, the wheel unweaving each strand of memory, each flashback, scattering the cloth that was worn into the unrelentingly ragged. All that remains are tatters of a way of perceiving, a way of composing, a perception that gave coherence to the confusions of meaning.

The wind that sweeps across the damaged landscape of meltings and obscurities scatters what's left, taking even the mementos of a way to compose the picture that made sense, that held it all together. There is no centre. Or circumference. Only the burning, the ceaseless burning of the fire in the sky. And the light that pulls consciousness with it, into recognition, into awareness.

Into weaving stories, making patterns, creating forms, dramas about the world, personas for ourselves, staging scenarios because we don't know. What lies under the fabric of our lives? When the weaving shreds, and is lost, do we busy ourselves with raw yarn and our spinning wheels and our pots of dye and our artistic forms and create new pageants to express us and to create us over and over by reiteration? Why does what flows have to adhere to processes of fixing, stabilizing, pinning, eternalizing?

If I throw away all my weavings, crumpled and shredded and scattered, recycling into the earth, and let time undo itelf through me, will I levitate through the landscape of the unburdened heart? And will I feel the soft rain like glistening petals on my naked skin?


Click for a larger size.

At Jean's blog, This Too, today. A Tibetan Buddhist sand painting of a mandala. Isn't it exquisite?

Sacred Symbol of Female Creative Power...

The relationship between Goddess, hunter, and prey is shown in this ancient rock painting from Tassili in the Sahara.
Rufus Camphausen, The Yoni, Sacred Symbol of Female Creative Power (Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1996), p.58.

While packing books today, I was deep in my maternal body section, and found a stunning cross-cultural book on The Yoni. Which I haven't read but will. And I also found this roaming through the blogosphere over my morning coffee. Is there any connection? In the way of things, yes, I'm sure there is. This delightful wisdom from Dave Bonta's blog, Via Negativa:

"A woman with the right kind of fat is a joy to others and a joy to herself. Her body is pure lubricity, able to move in several directions at once: go watch a belly dancer if you don't believe me. One night with such a woman, my friend, & no skinny woman will ever again be able to entrance you with her momentary cry & one-dimensional hunger. The exclamation point soon loses its power to astonish, but the round curves of a question mark? Ah, there's something to ponder! A thousand queries flood my tongue with the tang of olives.

Yes, hmmnnn...

Now isn't that line drawing of an ancient cave painting most interesting? The way they saw it, the woman's yoni feeds the man's erection and gives him the magical "hunt" power to enrapture/capture his prey...

I could keep you occupied for many posts with images from this book, photographs of natural formations, very beautiful, ancient art, where the yoni is revered, and modern art, where, well, it can be strange (see Gottfried Helnwein's Lulu), or natural & sensual (see Georgia O'Keefe's Gray Line), or as worthy of worship (see Judy Chicago's Cunt as Temple, Tomb, Cave or Flower); if all that isn't enough, there are close-ups of different shaped vulvas (padmini "lotus," chitrini "fancy," shankhini "fairy or conch," and hastini "elephant") classified according to the Kama Sutra, the Anganga Ranga and the Koka Shastra of India. Camphausen wrote this book before Eve Ensler's, The Vagina Monologues, or else that'd be in there too. I don't know of a counterpart book on male mythic sexuality, do you?

Alas, I have to keep packing.

But you can expound prolifically in the comments if this post has caused a springload to flourish in you...

Packing books, I come to a shelf on love...

Packing up my life. And moving I'm not sure where. When I come to my section on books on love, I hesitate, should I pack them all, or carry some with me? Here's Chopra's, Path to Love, and Ackerman & Mackin's massive anthology of love letters, poems, fiction, essays, memoirs, The Book of Love, and the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh's, Teachings on Love, and Joudry's & Pressman's, Twin Souls, and Roman's, Soul Love, and Gurian's, Love's Journey, and an unauthoured collection, One Hundred & One Classic Love Poems, among too many to mention. I decide on John Gray's, Handbook for the Heart, with beautiful essays in it, and Sarah Bartlett's, Mythical Lovers, Divine Desires, which I haven't fully read yet, and carefully slide the rest into a box.

Ah, then my books on tantra, how many are there, two dozen? Lots of art books on mandalas and yantras and academic books on tantric art and tantric thought. But there's this, Tibetan Arts of Love: Sex, Orgasm & Spiritual Healing, yes, Gedun Chopel, it is brilliant. Or the large and cross-disciplinary, Sacred Sexuality by Mann & Lyle, a lovely book with many illustrations from art history, and of course, The Complete Kama Sutra, Danielou's translation, no tantric collection would be complete without that, and California Tantrism, The Art of Sexual Magic by Margo Anand, or a Dorling Kindersley picture book of photographs of lovers, The Art of Tantric Sex, and books on full body massages...

I leave you with a photograph of a fun tarot deck: Tarot Sutra, games for lovers, which I've never used, sigh, it's in its original wrapping.

For me, romantic love combines of the erotic and the spiritual, the emotional and the intellectual, of eros and philia and agape, where there is meaning, wholeness, an intimacy with spirit, ourselves, our lovers, each other. (The other two great loves are differently configured: parental love, and I guess married love; but both, ideally, are weighted in philia, or friendship, being together on the path.)

I think I really do like the word, intimate, intimacy, intimacies... and perhaps can spend the rest of the day packing up my life, feeling my way through an aesthetic of intimacy.

On Uncertainty...

Do I like being a deck of cards in the air, a swirl of ocean foam, a migratory bird without a home, having no place to live that I know of in this moment? Maybe...

It doesn't feel free; it just feels like life. Where we can only be certain of uncertainties.

And so should I give up the need to know what's next. Anything at all could be next. Anything at all...

Packing...

Packing is a laborious process. We, my son and I, are numbering boxes. It's screech, cut, slap; screech, cut, slap - oh ho, taping boxes! Then ka-thump, ka-thump, there go the books; after being swiffered with dusters or RRGrindRRSuckRRGWhirrRRGrindSuckRRR with the hand-held vac, from which the dog has run and hidden. Followed by UUHMPH, UUHMPH, which is me lifting heavy book boxes and stacking them; my son lifts weights, he has no problem. Then of course I have to run out to the supermarket, all that work has us way hungry. Now I'm finishing a home-made cappuccino, and am ready to tackle Science, Philosophy, Art, English Literature, Psychology and Religion. Or the filling of another 30 boxes. Then we'll call it a day. Whew.

And how're you doing today?

Making Love/Art Making

Art is created in the dance of love between the artist and their muse. The best art is created by the artist for the beloved, with the beloved.

The dancer, poet, writer, painter, actor, muscian makes love to their lover, symbolically, to the fragrant air, the rich and fertile universe, the intimacy of the medium of their words or paint or music. To see a harpist or a pianist lovingly caress their instrument into singing, or a rock star playing his electric guitar like it was his woman, this dance between lover and beloved is where art is created, deeply, profoundly. It is created in a loving that is erotic and spiritual, emotional and intellectual, that is an act of pure faith, a risk and leap into the unknown.

I feel art can only come out of absolute vulnerabiltiy, when all the veneers have been stripped. When we are naked and unashamed before the beloved. When we have left the safety of our patterns and are in the present moment in its entirety. Even if this moment be one of pain, anger, ecstasy, or a kalaidescope of it all. A moment of presence where there is stillness and flow, wholeness and unfolding, eternity and the onrush of time, nothingness and everything. Where it all works without willing it to; where it just happens – the fruit ripens, it falls in its sweetness, the birth of art occurs.

What I learnt in dance is that creating your movement is best when you are dancing with your beloved. When you are making love to the light streaming in from the window, the alter of burning candles and precious leaves on the silk mat at the front of the room, the colour and movement and sensuality of the dancers around you, the energy of the life-force itself. When you are making love to the man or woman of your dreams, or your God or Goddess. When you no longer care how you look, you're not self conscious, you're holding nothing back, not restraining yourself, and you give everything, your entire passion ~pain, suffering, anger, compassion, joy, love ~ where nothing is excluded, everything is present.

And so this has become my theory of art. The intensity of love-making. Only from this place of union of self and soul can a power erupt that can be carried on the wings of the words, music, paint, dance that it is produced in. And in this way we who partake in the art as viewers, readers, listeners, are touched at our deepest core, feeling our own pain, sorrow, anger, joy, compassion. Our vision is expanded. We are not alone. For we, too, are the beloved, and the artist is making love to us.

Tonight, a love poem...

At the request of Vexations, I have made a quick MP3 of 4 recent pieces, entitled Body Texts I (6.5 min): Her Hands, Calligraphies; The Artist As Model; Scattered Drumbeats; and In the Wake. If you have any responses or suggestions, I'd consider redoing the recording if I have time before I move...


Friday, July 8th, tonight, a love poem...

London Bombings...

The bombs in London, the underground, the street ~ terrible! Such an assault on a city. A thousand injured; over 30 dead: yet a bigger weapon than the bombs, fear, which will paralyze millions.


Passengers evacuate an underground train at Kings Cross (Photo: Alexander Chadwick)

Comment I left at thenarrator's site: It will never end, will it. Prayers. Prayers that the conflagrations may end. Prayers that mediation in the world may ultimately win. Prayers for the mediators; our hope lies in those who can calm the extremes, bring about resolution, who do not see the political world in terms of black and white. I don't know how mediation can occur with terrorist groups and organizations, but it can, somehow. Mediation is the only thing that ever works. Prayers for the fear and the suffering...

That view...

Some photos of the inlet that the Pacific Ocean flows through where I was working - I have brought work home to do, where I don't have a view like that to distract me.

Scattered Drumbeats...

This will reveal what an incurable romantic I am! I have to admit it was partly motived by a Rumi quote that I wanted to use somewhere; this seemed like a good place. It's also touching on that very strange area of "internet romance" and its expectations, hopes... It's my entry in the Creative Writing Challenge:

A light rapping, knuckle on wood, breaks my solitude. In the dark warmth of the evening, I stop, listen, not expecting anyone, and ignore it. The light but insistent scattered drumbeat on the door tugs at me, continuing until I rise from my notebook, pull my cotton shirt around me. On one side of the door I breath into the soft darkness, unsure; my hand on the handle, I whisper into the crack, “Hello…?”

In the silence of an almost inaudible gasp, I hear indecision, an awaited moment from which one could yet flee, even if what one was looking for has been found, it’s fearful, and holding back for what seems like minutes before the response, “Hello…I, Miriam, I know you weren’t expecting me, I… needed to come, I’m sorry…”

“Who are you?” I whisper into the darkness and silence of the Summer night that spreads itself around the rustlings of moths whirring in the dim porch light, a light that reveals a man, in a soft summer shirt and jeans, standing at the door.

His arms almost tensed, yet awkwardly beside him, his heart full of desire, knowing his need and her recalcitrance, and feeling ashamed and exhilarated to be at her doorstep, looking at her tired and worried face as if it were a vision, “I … had to ...”

On the doorstep of my house, at the threshold of my life, in the night, I found myself wrapped deeply in the loving arms of a man I had never met, but always known. And I whispered to him lines from Rumi in the tightness of our embrace, "The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere, they're in each other all along." We became two sighs in the enveloping darkness, a twin blossom of a moonflower, a double rainbow in the night sky, another hope for the future..

last rites

burn
me to ash
fling
me to dance
my last dance
on the rich earth
sanctify flowers
bright unfolding
caress leaves
with fragments
of bone dust
fly with the wind
scatter my
white residue
light as breath
& illumined love
finally dissolving
into the lake
a dream



©2005 by Brenda Clews, all rights reserved

Writing the Middle-Aged Erotic Body...

This is a piece on the aging erotic body; it comes perhaps out of my difference feminist stance. It is in the tradition of body writing: the writing of the body of the woman. When I did the birth paintings nearly 20 years ago people found the red flowing vaginas of some of those paintings shocking and often uncomfortably averted their gaze at the wall of paintings I had up in the dining room of my house; a decade later those paintings took on new life, were used as journal covers, in art shows, copies often requested, and I am working on a poster of them. This writing is perhaps similar in that, like exploring the sensualities of the hiddenesses of the pregnant body, it explores the sexuality of the aging body. It is honest, open, vulnerable, hopefully sensual and erotic writing, but not pornographic. It is hetero. It is not my intention to offend, or shock, but to show the realism of the beauty of the body. This is the final piece in a small series, beginning with the red flower, an ethics of sexuality and relationships, the woman's gaze of her erotic desire. In Portrait of the Sexuality of a Middle-Aged Woman I want to throw light on her hiddenesses, how she sees herself. There is an element of the rebel, the woman who can be outrageous here too. This writing is a version of a response to a lover who I requested a self portrait naked in a mirror from and who then asked for a portrait in return...

Portrait of the Sexuality of a Middle-Aged Woman

Which sounds so, middle-aged...

She's never taken naked photographs. O, not true, a lover in her 20s did, but they were so faint, it was too dark; and her ex-husband took polaroids a long time ago. But not since then.

Though one night, when she was alone, she did, in the oak cupboard mirror, first seated, naked, only one breast showing, and she didn't like the photo but played with it, re-creating it through various filters that disguised her.

Then she surprised herself. The rebellion of those passing over the proverbial hill? She opened her legs and took a photograph of her vulva. When she displayed the photograph on screen, what she saw was larger than it is usually shown in medical text books. What she saw was beautiful in its own way, the folds within folds, the way her sex spread opulently from front to end. The white creamy remnants glistening. She had taken it after pleasuring herself, just to see what she looked like. Swollen, full, rich. She liked the photograph, felt it was a coming of age recognition of a sexuality she had never really seen before. She hid it on her computer, and then rushed over to delete it when a friend was looking through her photographs, mumbling about a naked photo that embarrassed her.

She'd never intended to keep it. It was not the sort of self portrait that you keep. Not what you'd want your children to find among your effects after you'd passed away. Or anyone else, not even a lover. It was an elaborate cunt, not something she'd ever seen in a Playboy or Penthouse or at any of the online porno sites she'd stumbled on, the ones with cum all over the woman's face and hard, hot cocks still beaming and glistening. When "holes" were shown, they'd be those small slits that the medical text books show.

It didn't make her feel any better, but maybe you had to be older, not tight anymore, to have this gland with its folds and glistenings and outrageous pearly opulences over which you place panties and forget about, or against which you place pads when you are bleeding with your monthly moon.

She's in her 50s. Hard to believe. She's white, Caucasian. She wears a size 8 comfortably, a bit baggy, a size 6 is more fitted. She is about 5'5", weighs somewhere around 125 lbs to 130 lbs. Her hair is long and curly and ash brown but is coming in with much more grey. Her waist isn't bad, but she doesn't know the circumference. She wears a 34C bra size; usually with an under wire for support. Though she loves bras with no under wire for hanging around the house.

She had a 'sex-goddess' body once, flat stomach, rounded breasts. After the birth of her second child, her thighs were left mapped with cellulite, which she accepts gracefully as a remembrance of the bearing of children, but which her husband found most unappealing. She's not comfortable in a bathing suit because of it. Before kids she wore string bikinis, the less fabric the better. Things change when your body is stretched with a child growing within. It's not that she doesn't love her body, she does, just in a private way. She prefers to be seen in clothes, that's all. When she was younger she preferred to be naked. Things change.

And now the little spider veins on the legs, around the feet, the larger ones that are showing on the hands, that's bothersome. But more in the way she thinks it makes others uncomfortable. The tiny veins remind her how the body is like a tree, with tiny branches or capillaries carrying life blood, and it's a beautiful creation no matter how old or what size one is.

Her breasts do sag a little, but she doesn't mind. She still has an awe of her breasts because of the breastmilk that flowed through them so freely once. And because if they're caressed and squeezed gently and sucked on she becomes very aroused and her vulva responds in ways that...

She's slim enough, not skinny, making the signs of aging both less and more pronounced. If she was heavier, her hands wouldn't be so carved with maps of veins. But she can still bend her body with as much flexibility and freedom as she ever remembers. She just can't fall onto the floor on her knees anymore, or even bend her knees for too long without pain. Her eyes are blue, or perhaps grey, with little brown specks around the pupils. Her skin is good now, but she has rosacea, it runs in her family, and has to wear a hat always. The skin on her face is very sensitive to sunlight. She babies her skin. Her teeth, oooh la. That's maybe getting too personal. Talking about vulvas is easier than talking about teeth! Save teeth for another day... Only one scar on the shin. Her skin is soft.

Orgasms are easier than ever. She believes orgasms are very healthy and would like to have at least one every day. She thinks everyone should agree that orgasms are healthy and that everyone should have at least one a day.

The Artist As Model, Or Her Desire In Her Gaze Of His Desire?

Is it erotica? Well, yes, I suppose so...

Of course it's about the body, the erotic body... and whose gaze is whose? And whose subjectivity is being expressed, and who is the object of her desire?

The Artist As Model, Or Her Desire In Her Gaze Of His Desire?

...and I lie back against you, you are caressing me, your arms, your shoulders, your hair, your face, I lean into, am held by, softly, and pulling me onto you, and I sigh gently in ways that you love, and you can feel my increasing desire, tightnesses, and deep blossomings, your breath, your tongue, your fingers on my skin, until I am an instrument in your hands and you are playing intoxicating music for your erotic pleasure, until I am a foaming sea of lavender for you, moaning and gyrating gently, craving your deep holy offering, crescendo of bliss, the air scented, a sweetness of grapes and hyacinths...

On the Ethics of the Love Life of a Single Woman...

(Using a stylus & tablet allows me to create a transparent layer underneath which I can layer other images, though I could have done a better drawing with a pencil... those are real love letters from years ago, and the writing in the border was from a one-time flame...)

Love Letters: On the Ethics of the Love Life of a Single Woman...

Please bear with me while I express this, sum it up, even if only for myself.

My ethical position came finally to this. I would not get involved with a man unless I had an openess to a relationship of forever. I wasn't putting time limits on it. If I thought that I'd maybe never want to see him again after one night, I would resist sleeping with him even if we were making motions towards; if I thought I might like perhaps a few weeks or a few months with someone at most, similarly I would walk away. That might all be fun while it was happening, but what if he fell in love with me, I'd only hurt him. I don't want to knowingly hurt anyone. It's a creed I live my life by, including my love life.

So, only if I could conceive of a forever would I get involved. That seems fair enough. And if he's not in that same space, and is looking at being into me for one night, a few weeks, or a few months, that's the risk I take. That's preferable to my doing it to someone else. The guy I did the "intimate friends" with got terribly hurt. Did that make me a better person? No. It made me a person who knew there was no commitment on my part and even though I told him that and did it anyway I knew there was a risk if he fell in love. And breaking up was hard to do because I became part of all the failures of love in his life. I don't want to go through it again. It wasn't a case of, 'well, we tried & it didn't work,' so much as, 'this was never anything more than a sexual diversion in my life for a short while.' They are two different scenarios. I simply chose not to do the latter any more; I can live without the sex, I can't live with hurting men who I more-or-less use, even if they agree to it.

It's my position, not anyone's else's, nor do I expect anyone else to adhere to my decision for myself based on what I can and can't live with ethically. And it's coincided with aging, so that's helped. And with increasing financial difficulties, that make me far less attractive. Etc.

But, then again, I wonder. A man of the cloth? And I a non-organized religion non-congregation spiritual rebel. And now man who lives nearly a continent away? Is it just that I'm afraid of intimacy? Or that I'm really choosy and the circumstances just happen to be the circumstances and not part of the design?

I hope this isn't too torturedly introspective for you.... I've never actually taken the time to write out my position in this free-wheeling world of free-love before. And it might explain why I'm at your doorstep free of entanglements and baggage. And why you don't need to worry about a thing, either, my dear lover.

***

The Red Flower...

Is this risqué? To post, I mean; no, it isn't, not at all, but, then again, I don't know... even hardworking "equality" feminists can get irate over the moon-time, it makes us different to that "one sex" white-uppermiddleclass-male everyone aspires to (except some of us don't). I'm a difference feminist. But not essentialist. Despite what it may or may not look like here. An embodiment theorist. Make of it what you will...

O, Urban Hiking...

The kids have spent copious hours on the phone with friends in TO & negotiations with their Dad, so I went off to a tiny Chinese company that I do long distance through, which was actually in a very expensive office tower downtown, to pay the $18. I owed (isn't it cute, owing that little), but gave them $30., they don't have payment by Internet banking, so it's usually a cheque in the mail, but when I realized their address, why, that's a trip downtown... so I've been trying to get down there all week, but yesterday afternoon was finally gorgeous & sunny.

Downtown looks like downtown but is emptier than the downtowns of big megalopolises... I walked around, enjoying the downtowness, the buildings of every shape, size, colour, from old and tiny squashed inbetween to glittering glass stretching up to the sky, the flower beds of tamed nature, the tiny parkettes with their miniscule splice of nature so vastly different to the wilderness, the close crop of streets, endless cars & the anger of drivers, and wandered down to the water, by the Shaw Tower, the reclamation project a much larger slice of land now, smelled the salt air, watched freighters go by and sea planes land, pondered the lush North Shore, the clouds rushing over the mountains, thought about life and Vancouver and what I'm doing here and am I going to stay, or go, what's possible and impossible, and eventually meandered through a bunch of streets until I found a skytrain station and went home.

The wind was blowing the clouds over the mountains, I was glad that it would be clear enough to see the Solstice moon...

Despite my childhood in the wilderness, and even 20 years of living in the crowded downtown core, the heart of the inner city in Toronto hasn't dulled my love of the beauty of cities... I enjoy hiking the streets of any downtown... even the obnoxious smells of buses doesn't bother me, and as a transit rider I laud their great number going in every direction constantly. I gaze at the dressed-up business types in expensive suits and the hair-matted, clothing-soiled druggies, the young and the old, the energetic beautiful people and the tired grey people, feeling neither desire nor disdain nor pity for anyone, enjoying the mix of people, the flow of the movement of bodies and the various shimmers of the fabrics of clothing on the streets, enjoying being part of this fabulous and strange humanity... in my urban hikes, which are not shopping trips and which can be up to five hours straight, I don't stop at coffee shops, though I wish I did... I always feel it would be nice, to stop & write at oases, and then move on, but I don't, I can't, I'm either walking, or standing staring at something, the ship-heavy inlet of ocean, a flying buttress of architecture reaching upwards like Babel, a group of vibrantly red tulips each drizzled with perfect drops of rain if you look close enough, the madness of wind and clouds mirrored in glass towers, the way birds fly through this urban landscape, fluttering down for crumbs and scraps, nesting in the eaves of inexplicably white painted stone Churches... I'm a great wanderer of cities... need to wander in way more cities too...

(click on photo for its source url)

Solstice blessings...

"Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage." Anais Nin

Updating my life: yesterday I was offered a mat leave job in a company I really like, but not until December, which is so far away it's impossible to think about. My son has a job at a construction site today cleaning up, sweeping and vacuuming, thanks to John, my friend ZsuZsi's partner. My daughter has just gone through the halycon she always goes through before the 3300 km journey to her father's for the Summer. Why does this trip bring such anger, sadness and terror for her? As a mother do I worry unecessarily? But today is a new day and sunny; if the promised rain doesn't come, it's going to be hot. It's been cool here and I welcome and savour the heat, the way it relaxes us all.

Yes, Anais, life does shrink and expand according to one's courage, very much so, but when you're looking for work you need contacts. When you've moved to a city where you know almost no-one it's hard to find work because you have no network to draw on. That's what people are now telling me, and it makes sense. Also the 2 year mark is a make it or break it mark. I'm at the crux.

We would like to return to Toronto, and I may be able to just afford the moving costs, but need help at the other end with finding affordable housing. My children's father, who is ideally suited to the role of 'house finder,' he'll get his children back, afterall, has said a flat no. And blamed me for moving out here in the first place. None of which makes much sense, given that he'll have weekends with his kids, be close to them again. Nor can my family help, either no car, or works nights or, in the case of my mother, in her 80s and too frail. Friends? I'm not sure anyone is in a position to find housing for us to move in August. But I'll see.

Just the normal chaos of life, with its multiple decisions...

To brighten this post, because folks in the blogosphere like images, here's one I added a lens flare to and put in my sidebar to replace the one of me reading a book with blonde hair...

Now that 'light' could be a vision, a fairy whispering delightful secrets, a higher consciousness from a space zone, a light-master from a New Age dimension, a lover whom I am dancing with, an echo of the Solstice sun in the lens, or the courage that expands our world, offering a bright future. Perhaps on this morning of new awakenings, new realizations, new hope, you could tell me what you see...

*hugs xo

On Solstice, the official entry of the abundance of Summer, a solar apex, this year with a Solstice sun and moon nearly aligned, O, the fulfillment of all our dreams and wishes...

Phoenix rising...

I went dancing tonight. Feel like a phoenix rising...

(my son took the photograph)

My daughter's poetry...

My daughter wrote some poetry yesterday, which she shared, I love it when she shares her creative writing, and then she said I could post it. The second one is in the form that she wrote it, but the lines can be broken up to "look" more like the poetry they are. There's beauty, sadness, love. She's 14, and very, very sweet...

*

I look up at night
planets are moving at the speed of light
and the world's expanding
you're forever fading
see the world in black and white
no colour or light, nothing right, nothing right
you're part of the human race, all the stars and outer space
the world's spinning

and no one seems to notice...

*

The leaves formed a perfect drop, a drop of the sun, rested upon its self, held together by mixes of light, of sky and rain, 50 million leaves, they swirl around me, they dance with my love, sing with forever beauty, in the sunset, they break the world, the universe trapped inside a city, and no one seems to notice, but me, and your world is all the sun sees, hidden by darkness, the white shadows revealed and I'll wait for them, until my days are done, history is in the past, it was somewhere and then it was lost, and no one seems to notice, but me, so I'll float through my memories, cause they're all I have, everyday I create a memory, every second of life, could be my forever memory, so I'll always have a place to be, inside of me, I'm creating my world as it fades, and I can't hold on, and no one seems to notice but me, we're swallowed in the sea, and no one seems to notice but me.

The Move

I need to put a disclaimer in here. I am the author but not the character. There are points of similarity with my life but "The Move" is also fictionalized and parts are made up. It is necessarily more brutal than my life is for the purpose of drama. Since blogging is largely lifewriting, one does need to clarify when one moves into fiction. I am in crisis, yes, and am letting that be a diving board... but I am not writing in the confessional mode; rather this is the imagination of a life...

***

THE MOVE

She stares uncomprehendingly at the Notice To End Tenancy, holds it in her hand like an entropic text. It is composed of financial hieroglyphics and it has a greater power than all of the magical texts in her library. Its final incantation is homelessness.

She sips coffee, looking at the light of the clouded sky, how silvery it is, and wonders what will become. She snaps a picture of a fading rose on the window sill, and transfers it to the computer where she draws fiery lines like fireflies leaving trails on the soft pink lips in the core. The stylus a burning ember, she sears the tips of the labyrinth of folds that the petals are while she scores them with light. Tracing the delicate trails with her lit sparkler, is there a path that she could perceive if she could only fathom it in the dying fragrance of the blossom? Perhaps this tracing is an oracle of prophetic signs on dusty, fading petals that can be read even as they are crumpling inwards, and dropping to the floor.

If you go deliberately into the uncertainty of the darkness will you find the light? Will you find answers to the direction that is hidden but already opening out? Or is there no direction but what is willfully asserted onto the crumpling inwards and emblazoned in the clouds of the morning sky like a scroll of truth?

Even as she flees she is being drawn into the molten core of what is dissolving. But then she's given to drama, especially after a sleepless night and the worry that encroaches her vision like the smudged glass of the window she looks out of.

She finishes her large mug of bitter, aromatic espresso coffee and takes it to the kitchen to rinse. There are no answers, only questions. This is the mantra.

The house is on the market. It has come to this, and she is moving, but does not know where she shall go. Her home is crumbling and she is losing her beloved abode. This brings a stream of thoughts on the protection of shells, exoskeletons, abodes. How is it to live without a shell of protection? Shall she live under the open sky emblazoned with the starlit lanterns of the Milky Way? What is a home, a house, a place to live? And how is that an expression of the architecture of our souls? These are the questions she begins with as she starts the arduous process of packing up her house.

Or has she already left, already fled into exile, already been broken by the isolation that strangers are accorded, and is trying to return?

Has the breaking apart of what is warm, enclosing, protective already happened, and was there a fleeing of the shards of that broken shell for a new place only to turn and re-seek them?

And where does the compass point now? How is she to read it when its heavy glass is fogged and the pointer spins uncontrollably? If there is no centre, how can the world revolve? Without a home, a grounding, what orbit does one spin in? Empty boxes pile up in all the rooms, some still flattened, some already made, waiting to be filled with the accumulation of hers and her children's lives.

How many lives does a cat have? How many times has she landed on her feet, and has she run out of chances?

***

O, Clarity...

Woke soon after dawn, lay in bed for an hour, wishing direction would become clear. An hour hugging my soft, clean, silky dog, who was curled in a ball, sleeping, who I shampooed yesterday after her swim in the lake in the park. I lay in the early morning light, wishing that what's possible would manifest clearly. I can feel myself walking the hot, polluted streets of Toronto; I can feel my reunion with my friends and dancing at The Move on Friday nights; I can hear the long conversations with my family; I see myself walking onto campus, returning to York University. It all feels very happy. That perhaps I was exhausted, at the end of what I could cope with when I moved out here and now after two years I am mended, renewed, ready to return and continue on. The return is becoming so real in a feeling-sense and I'm not sure why. Funds for a move back aren't here/there/anywhere at present. And no temp work this week. Stress. Though I did have 6 hours of unbroken sleep, a gift. And as I sip coffee, looking out at the clouded day of silvery light, I wonder what will become, and I began taking pictures of a fading rose, drawing fiery lines in its core, like fireflies leaving trails on the soft pink lips…

A Letter of Love...

My entry in the Creative Writing Challenge, "Tell a story in the form of a love letter..."

Many thanks to Chez Couronne, who runs the site and blogring.