I've moved- into a much, much happier place (I hope). Just temporary, but a rather roomy basement apartment with 2 southern windows, which is nice, and I've been able to turn the kitchenette into my bedroom by hanging a piece of canvas as a curtain giving my daughter the bedroom, which she is happy with. Seems to be a nice house where our dog is more than welcome; it has far more space than where we were living (a one room garden house) for a much better rent, and in the cache area for my daughter's school. No internet, however. So I'm writing this at the library. The CD ROMs and floppies are all disabled in the library system. I shall have to see how I can upload images some other time. I am doing a little tutoring in student's homes, and I've had students so far from Gr 2 to College, and am enjoying it. Not enough work though. My 3-bedroom house of furniture is still in storage. My son is still waiting to rejoin us as soon as I get financially settled again. The process of starting over, once again, just went through this in Vancouver 2 years ago, is gargantuan, and gonna take more time than I had hoped. Still, I bask in Toronto friendliness, and, though am a bit of a hermit these days, enjoy being back. The hot weather that we're still having is such a balm! Love it....

Big hugs and lots of love to you all.... xo

Three Angels...?

Without fig leaves should I post this? He's one of my sketches from the lifedrawing session, coloured, and copied onto himself so that there are three of him. I'm calling this drawing, "Three Angels." Who knows what you'll make of this, Blogging buddies...

Angst over my website...

Angst over my website...

I've spent the greater part of the weekend, between looking for crucial housing and employment, on my website. If you have a moment, please take a look. I've renamed it: Celestial Dancers & Divine Mothers.

I've redone the Bliss Queen page - even a blurb by our dearly beloved Pru: thanks honey!

And am now finally offering a Birth Poster, a collected edition of all my birth paintings.

Since I found a painting of mine listed at a Russian art reproduction site, I felt I had to label the birth poster with "SAMPLE." Does this work? Is it passably okay?

And then today I just created "browser button" paintings to navigate the 4 pages. Does it work?

How we feel about our babies, huh. This sure is a baby of mine.

Any feedback will be much appreciated! Thanks!

http://brendaclews.com

Accidents in the Unfolding of Our Lives...

In the unfathomableness of what happens to us as we live our lives, the places where we are so profoundly jolted we can barely understand what the forward momentum should be if we are to remain free of, or minimize, such profoundly unsettling events. Do we cause what happens to us? Sometimes. Perhaps not often enough.

Rather life seems not a rational venture of cause and effect so much as a negotiation through ever-new territory. Where whatever rules there were are superceded by other rules to the point where we realize there is no master equation, no set of rules for every situation.

There is only our dance through it all, and our compassion.

Our grace and our ethic.

Can these simple rudders serve where entire holy books fall charred on battlefields of misunderstanding, judgment, bloodshed, death?

An ethic of responsibility and a heart of compassion aren't rules but ways of conducting ourselves, in tune with the tao, a flow of pure energy, transducers, bolts through which the lightning of love flashes the brilliance of being.

Our dance of grace and our ethic of care.

Hold these close, like twin heartbeats, and may you flourish all your days...

The Male Model in the Lifedrawing Session...

Last night I went to a drop-in Life Drawing session at the Toronto School of Art. Now how often do we get male models? Yeah, oh baby. Yeah, they've been photoshopped to greater or lesser degrees. They're viewable. Click on the thumbnails for larger versions. Only one is mostly done; the others I am in the process of colouring...

The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss

The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss is a poem I wrote about one of the founders of Tibetan Buddhism, a historical woman, Yeshe Tsogyal, an 8th c. Queen of Tibet who became a Buddha - The Great Bliss Queen Dakini, a Divine Mother in the tradition of Kuan Yin and Green and White Tara. I read it at an ARM (Association for Research on Mothering) conference at York University in Toronto,"Mothering and Spirituality" in 2003.

I offer a hand-drawn tracing in ink on parchment paper or Japanese art paper on commission, as can be seen in the upper image of this poster, where she is hung over silk fabric and framed in a mantle of Indian silk scarves. The painting at the bottom of the poster is for sale. See my website for details.

To hear the love poem, click on this link: The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss

You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself...

The Buddha says: “You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself.” The path is uncertain. Uncertainty is the guiding force. Nothing can be projected, counted on, leaned against. Home isn't the stable habitat one returns to again and again, the familiar space that holds one’s transformations through the years, remaining more-or-less the same: every day cleaning the same kitchen, washing the dishes, some with light scratches and chips, mopping the taupe tile floor, its tiny cracks, polishing the picture window that look out on the same view, except the trees have grown taller with the passing years. Home for those without a home is what you carry with you, your essence, your inner alter, your ability to love and be stable amidst change. This is what she is about to discover. How to enact continuity without a home, when home is someone else's space, filled with the accoutrements of another's living: when one borrows the necessities for living: a bed, a chair, a couch, a fridge, a phone. The challenge becomes how to feel at home where one is the guest, the boarder, the room-mate, the traveler passing through.

The hexagram of transition: between shells, when the inner soft fleshy essential core has outgrown its shell and discards it for another, this moment of vulnerability. The exploration of path here is in the movement between. Where it is uncertain, where everything is uncertain, where even tomorrow is a mystery that may bring shelter or abandonment to the forces of chaos. It is a place where nothing can be counted on, that is as fragile as a sleep when you don't know if you will awaken again or not. When the flow of the external world is unstable and appears as a dream, a series of unreal images, a projection on a screen that surely will be over soon so that you can go home and sleep in your own bed again. For a recluse to be thrown into a world of dependency on others, to be stripped of what is familiar: loved and well-worn furniture, a life gathered over the years in books, paintings, décor, knick knacks, mementos, clothes, of a home filled with the security of the gracefully collected, of the comforts of the known, stripped of what to withdraw to, is to be shorn of a warm mantle that is like a shawl, shorn of the weavings of a life…

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Buddha quote from Southland's site