Oboe Loves the Morning Sun in Black and White and Color / The Color Kittens / Mandala #11

An old friend of mine who has a young grandson sent me a link to a YouTube reading of The Color Kittens, by Margaret Wise Brown, with accompanying delightful commentary from a child:



Last week I graduated from the medical transcription editing program with "High Honors" and was able to finish Mandala #11.

Undisciplined yoga practice / Sanskrit

Love

Color chart by Paul Klee.

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.
(Marc Chagall)

New Morning / Tree Change Dolls / My Rebel / Panda and the red horse

With gratitude to a distant cousin in Norway who posted this on her Facebook page. As a child, I had no interest in dolls. I played with my stuffed bears and lambs and my collection of horses. In 1959, I was just old enough to avoid being given a Barbie doll as a gift, but I remember both of my sisters having Barbie dolls. I'd love to see Barbie dolls transformed in this way. A Tree Change Doll would feel at home with my stuffed animals and my collection of horses.

Added thoughts: Thank you, Sabine, for giving me a different perspective on Barbie dolls. As someone who didn't play with dolls, I never understood what playing with dolls was all about, much less Barbie dolls. Not playing with dolls was one way that I rebelled against my mother from an early age. I have a vivid memory of my mother bringing me to a toy store and showing me shelves of dolls behind glass and suggesting that I choose one. I remember how angry I felt towards her that day. I refused to choose a doll.  Now I'm wondering what that was all about. She loved her dolls and wanted me to love a doll, too, but dolls were not soft and comforting like my stuffed animals. I felt alienated from dolls.

While my sisters were playing with Barbie dolls, I was watching American Bandstand on television and listening to rock and roll music and dreaming of having a boyfriend who was a rebel who would "love me tenderly and always treat me good." My dreams were not of being a mother or a successful woman or even of being married, for that matter.  All I wanted was a boyfriend who loved me.  That would be enough.  I didn't love myself.  I could love him. Both of my sisters dreamed of being mothers, and one of them became a mother. Both of them became successful professional women, unlike me.

I finally love myself, regardless. We've all come a long way.

Here's my mother in Minnesota on a snowy day with one of the dolls she so loved:

Here is my mother a few years later:

Here I am with my father and Panda. Not sure if that is my first or second Panda. The first one was lost, and the story is that I was inconsolable. My father understood that I would not stop crying unless Panda was found, and he went out and bought another Panda for me. For that I am deeply grateful.

I remember, too, how much I loved my red horse. He, too, was lost but was not replaced. I remember thinking about him for some time after he disappeared. I missed him.                            

Something weird is going on here.  I can't fix the margins or move things around the way I would like.

Oh well. I should be studying for the final examination right now. Come to think of it, I still do have my red horse. I can still feel what it felt like to hold him. I felt brave and powerful, loved and loving, because of Panda and my red horse.

Faith

"Confrontation at the Bridge," by Jacob Lawrence

The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith. We saw ourselves doing the work of the Almighty. Segregation and racial discrimination were not in keeping with our faith, so we had to do something.

-- John Lewis

Meditation On Morning Light Through A Prism

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty

Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.
- Robinson Jeffers

As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I would still be in prison.
- Nelson Mandela

The healing of our present woundedness may lie in recognizing and reclaiming the capacity we all have to heal each other, the enormous power in the simplest of human relationships: the strength of touch, the blessing of forgiveness, the grace of someone else taking you as you are and finding in you an unexpected goodness.
- Rachel Naomi Remen

Black And White Spectrum Draws My Attention / Somewhere Within The Rainbow / Forever Young

All things are possible until they are proved impossible -- and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.

-- Pearl S. Buck

The young do not know enough to be prudent and therefore they attempt the impossible -- and achieve it generation after generation.

--Pearl S. Buck

May you stay forever young.

-- Bob Dylan