Pa rum pum pum pum
That's fit to give our king
Pa rum pum pum pum
That's fit to give a king
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Thank you to Sabine for drawing my attention to Michael Blumenthal's poem, "Be Kind," which led me to his talk on the value of art.
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Thank you to Sabine for drawing my attention to Michael Blumenthal's poem, "Be Kind," which led me to his talk on the value of art.
"Do you remember the happiest day of your life? What about the saddest? Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn't have to live on one side or the other?"
Ocean Voung
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Looking east in mid-December:
And if you have time, listen to this music from the county where I live (population 229,247 in 2019). Whatcom County took its name from a Nooksack word meaning "noisy waters."
This blog's first post was on December 8, 2006, when I was 56 years old, unemployed and, to be honest, unemployable, living simply on what should have been my retirement resources, with all the free time in the world and able to do little or no art work. I was not without friends or moments of peace, but each day was long and bleak due to what was then diagnosed as PTSD but has been diagnosed in recent years as a trauma-related disorder and complicated grief. For years I had been receiving various types of counseling and, in between appointments, I made intermittent calls to a crisis line. Although I was not suicidal, I was often in emotional distress. It was on one of those calls to the crisis line in December 2006 that it was suggested to me that I do something entirely new and positive on December 8 (the day R returned from Vietnam in 1970) instead of re-living the trauma of that day yet another time.
Inspired by a first cousin once-removed who at that time had a political blog, I had begun reading blogs and commenting on blogs for about a year using my first laptop, an iBook G4, purchased in 2005. The first blogs I read and commented at had their roots in her extensive blog list.
Taking the suggestion of the crisis line volunteer to heart, I made a decision to go to the Blogger website and set up a blog for the purpose of doing a retrospective of my art work up to 2006. My intent was to revisit my lifetime of art work, one piece at a time, which meant revisiting my life while trying to keep my focus on living in the present in a healthier way.
After a few days of posts, I was delighted to receive my first comment. The blogs I read at that time all focused on a combination of nature photography, poetry, literature, and music.
After more than 20 years of living alone because that was the only way I felt safe, I had a few months earlier brought home from a local shelter a cat that I named Oboe. She was a year old and found it fascinating to watch me at my laptop from the kitchen counter. Her fleece bed was on the desk off to the side of my laptop.
It has occurred to me while writing today that the series of events that led to my healing were buying that iBook G4, learning to use the iPhoto tools, reading and commenting on blogs, adopting Oboe, and starting my own blog.
By the time I finished my retrospective posts, I had begun doing a little bit of art work, had begun to share music from YouTube, and had began to share photos of the view from my porch and views from my long walks in Whatcom Falls Park, Lake Padden, and along Bellingham Bay.
From the day I started my blog, my life changed for the better, not without ups and downs but without that which had haunted me for so many years -- unattended sorrow. Stephen Levine's book, published in 2005, may well have led the way to the day that I decided to begin blogging.
Up until December 7, Mandala #55 had been going extremely well and then suddenly it wasn't. I had hoped to finish it on December 7 and stayed up late working on it but went to bed tired and discouraged because something about it just wasn't right. I didn't sleep well and dreaded waking up to see it still unresolved. It is a terribly unsettling feeling when I something I am working on is not going well. Fortunately, in the morning it didn't look as bad as it had looked the night before and I was able to finish it and feel peace. Although I'm not completely satisfied with the way it photographed, it looked beautiful on my wall where I photographed it in the December morning light.
And it looks good next to the last two mandalas. I've drawn the circle for the 11th mandala.
December sunrise:
Thank you, blog friends, near and far.
72 years ago my parents were married on December 4. This photo was taken by me in 1978 when they were in their 60s and I was in my late 20s, during one of my visits to California. My middle sister emailed this photo yesterday. It brings back good memories of them.