The 'new' profile pic...

The new profile pic. Okay, so you've seen it before: but not 'collected.' Ahem. This is the large version of 'how much can you fit into a postage-sized profile pic'?

Dancing of the Selves...

"As my father lay dying": remembering a time of uncertainty.

This was originally a comment at 100 Days, but the system was down. The topic in the comment thread (look at Day 34 & 35) was uncertainty. MB, Lorianne, and Stray have written eloquently on uncertainty. I thought this reminiscence, this understanding of uncertainty might be interesting, perhaps inspirational.


I've had two major periods of uncertainty in my life. The most recent is the near loss of everything I've accumulated, all my books, paintings, furniture, objects, the other one was when my father lay dying. He had emphysema and caught pneumonia in hospital and had stopped breathing and was manually resusitated and the interns and nurses ran, wheeling him through the corridors to Intensive Care. When we were allowed into ICU, he had multiple tubes in, multiple tubes out, was unable to talk with the tracheotomy. For six months the doctors refused to say that he had another day to live. 'Any moment', 'We can't say beyond today', this psychic and emotional torture. Each day I went to the hospital not knowing, I held his hand and lip read not knowing, I left not knowing if I was to see him alive again. I couldn't sleep, left my TA at university, didn't work on my thesis, lived in a state I don't want to remember. It was like that Eastern European or Russian author who's name escapes me at the moment who was blindfolded and taken to be shot each day and each day wasn't shot. Excruciating. Existential angst. Everything out of your control.

Perhaps he might still be alive if he had wantd a cybernetic existence, living in tandem with machines for breathing, eating, excreting, even these 22 years later, he was such a fighter, but after six months of this tethered, Gulliver-like existence my Dad had all the tubes taken out, the machines unplugged, and he faced death directly.

Those few days when he lay gasping for breath, dying as his body filled with carbon dioxide that his lungs were unable to expel were unbearable... true uncertainty is not an enviable or desirable state.

Neither was the year I just went through. But for the last decade or so I have become a meditator. With daily meditation, I began to understand how strong we are underneath. There is a deep rhythm to life that we can trust.

I wouldn't call it bedrock but perhaps the song of the bedrock.

Meditating is not just listening to, but participating in, at our deepest level, shorn of everything, the song of life and death.

And finding the rhythm okay, ecstatic even.

____
The upper right image was of my father and I in 1976, eight years before his death. The one below is of me, three weeks after his death, in 1984. I've always liked the gentle, accepting, peaceful but knowing look in the eyes of this photograph. Did I ever feel like that? I don't know.

Flame of Love

For Sparky's Illustrated Poem Marathon.


Flame of love,

I gave myself

to Love Divine.

_____
click here for larger size


Art influences I would say are Bernini of course, Dali, postmodern digital art (especially in the clumbsy photoshop cut-out making it not commercial art), and something obscure, a Tarot deck called the Secret Dakini Oracle Deck, by Slinger & Douglas. I have long loved mystics, of any religion, creed or belief system. Sainte Thérèse d'Avila was a wild, beautiful and divine woman mystic.

The model? I don't have to pay her.

A day in the life of

Sleeping and waking whenever I felt like it was a bust. I'm regulating, night-time sleeping, daily meditation/nap (which is entirely different to sleeping: the former for physical rest; the latter for spiritual sanity).

Up this morning at 6am, coffee, emails, bath the dog, brush her, shower, dress, jeans, shirt, jean jacket, off to Kensington to meet Theo, an old friend and sculptor - we met in 1982, he was eating dinner at the Queen Mum's on Queen Street and was a good friend of my ex, who introduced us. It took a long time to get to know Theo, years in fact; it wasn't till after my marriage ended in 1997 that he and I became good friends. He's one of my most loyal friends, too. It is through Theo that I have understood that loyalty is one of the most important qualities to me. That's another topic though.

We chatted for a couple of hours, then he went off his way on his bike and I my way. Dropped into Gwartzman's discount art store to get a rip-off Moleskin look-alike for $3.97, but passed on it (my first one's not finished yet) and bought a 9"x12" printmaking board and a canvas remnant. After I dropped my dog off at home, where she barked nonstop I believe, I went to Honest Ed's and bought a T50 stapler that is so stiff I can barely squeeze it, then to a Chinese produce store for BC blueberries, and home to be greeted by now hoarse barks. I've eaten two bowls of fresh blueberries with cream and sugar, stapled a cloth over the under-the-stairs cupboard, and stretched canvas over the board and gessoed it.

Exciting day, huh.

This is blogland!

We get to create these posts, to reveal our lives publicly.

Theo's never owned a computer. I marvel at that.

Looking back aways...

Not a trip down memory lane, but sort of. I discovered my daughter had taken these photos out of the albums we recently excavated to show her friends, and I was touched. In the process of scanning...

In 1977, at 25 years of age. Ah, the world ahead! My first relationship of 5 years that had become a marriage was ending. A late bloomer, I didn't go to university till 21; I was working on my second B.A. and getting straight A's. When I look at these photos, I think I knew more then than now.

Did we all start from a position of surity that has gradually crumbled away? Leaving an essential glimmer in the unknowingness?

light like colourless smoke

Freshly edited for Sparky's Illustrated Poem Marathon.



larger version here

Marigold Moon

For Sparky's Illustrated Poem Marathon.