Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Inspired to keep drawing with my non-dominant hand



"The Joy of Music"

"In essence, my birthday is every day."


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On October 1, I will be 73 years old.  I don't let many people know when my birthday is.  For years, I would be traveling alone somewhere in Northern California on my birthday.  I like quiet birthdays in beautiful places.  In recent years, my home is my beautiful place to be on my birthday.  I like being in my 70s.  I am grateful to be alive.  



Friday, September 23, 2022

Meditation on the freedom in living simply


If I were younger, I would consider living in a van in the way this young woman lives.  Not permanently but long enough to travel and see what I could see.  With so many jobs online these days, I could support myself while living in a van.  Sarah has learned to live simply at a young age, after a major surgery which requires her to have an ostomy bag for the rest of her life.  Although I have more living space than Sarah, my total living space is under 700 square feet and requires some of the same strategies that Sarah uses.  I also live alone and, like Sarah, have learned to handle whatever comes up regarding home maintenance, learning that I don't have to pay for maintenance and repairs that I can do myself.  

Sarah's cat, Bodhi, reminds me of my beloved Oboe.  If I were to live in a van, I would certainly share the space with a cat.  

"I was talking to a friend about this the other day and she is moving to Australia and wants to do van life there but she is so scared of all the what-ifs and the unknowns and I like to call them figure-outables.  Like, it's okay if you don't know how to do it, you can figure it out ..."

(If you have time for nothing else, listen to Sarah from 9:30 to 9:45 on the video)

Sarah and so many of the young people give me hope for today.
 

Thursday, September 22, 2022

Fall Equinox Meditation / Fearless and asymmetrical mandala series / You didn't do anything wrong


This September has been an odd month for my body.  It began, as all Septembers do, with the  anniversary of traumatic events that occurred when I was almost 5 years old, coinciding with the birth of my youngest sister on September 4, 1954.  For many years in early September, I would come down with an upper respiratory cold that would take hold of me and not let go for weeks.  It didn't occur to me then than this might be a trauma reaction.  

For many years now, I have been free of upper respiratory illness in September as well as the rest of the year.   In late August, though, my eyes began to itch for no reason that I could determine.  On September 5, the first stye of my life developed in my right eye.  My eyelid was red and swollen and painful to the touch.  I went to the doctor, thinking it was a chalazion, and was told it was a stye and was given erythromycin eye ointment which eventually cleared it up.  

A few days later I had a painful flare of lower back pain, after seven months without any flares.  Both of those issues resolved and then I began having bouts of sneezing.  In the last few days I have had a runny nose with intermittent sneezing but no other symptoms.  Thinking the problem must be an allergy, I took an antihistamine but that gave little relief.  I have been free of environmental allergy symptoms for some time now and am puzzled to have them again.  

There is nothing I can think of that would be causing my body to react in these ways, unless it is a stress reaction.

Last night I woke up just after midnight and couldn't go back to sleep because of the runny nose.  The mucous is clear.  My eyes are mildly itchy.  There is no congestion, but I have a mildly irritated throat as a result of the postnasal drainage.  I have no fever.  These are minor health problems.  I feel well otherwise.

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Oddly enough, my creative energy is up.  Unable to sleep, I sat down at my drawing table about an hour ago and finished Mandala #71, continuing to draw with my non-dominant left hand.

Thirty years ago, in 1992, I completed #71 in the Calendar Series which I had started working on in 1987 at the beginning of my recovery from anorexia, bulimia and alcoholism.  After my mother died in 1994, I lost most of my creative energy.  Now and then it would break through but never for long.  

Twenty years went by and then in 2014, I made my first mandala, inspired by a series of mandalas my mother had made when she was about the same age I was in 2014.  For the last eight years, my creative energy has been strong, although it was beginning to wane.   This past January, I sat down at my art table and wondered if I would ever draw again.  At that moment of despair, something prompted me to pick up a 6B pencil and draw with my non-dominant left hand.  Since then I have completed five non-dominant-hand mandalas, two of them in the past week, inspired by Charles Keepings' black and white illustrations in Dawn Wind, by Rosemary Sutcliff, which I read during the summer when I was 11 years old.  

Using my non-dominant left hand to copy the drawings from that book has been an unexpected joy.  Something has shifted in me in this last week.  I want to draw again, as never before.

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I sneezed again just now.  What could be causing that?  Did I do something wrong?

I'm reminded of my visit to the health clinic to get help for the stye.  I told the physician assistant that I thought that it may have been caused by a change in what I had been eating.  I had been eating a substantial amount of dairy in the form of yogurt and a substantial amount of raisins.  In the past I have tested positive for an allergy to milk and had not eaten dairy foods for years.  It has been years since I have eaten raisins because of their high sugar content.  My body does not react well to large amounts of sugar.  The physician assistant said that it was possible that the foods had contributed to the stye but it was also possible that I hadn't done anything wrong.  He said that people tend to think that they have done something wrong if they have health problems and that often they have done nothing wrong.  I said, "You mean I'm innocent?"  He laughed and said, "Yes."

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It's been a long journey from 1984 to 2022.



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Mandala #71 (Non-dominant hand) with image copied from Charles Keepings drawings in Dawn Wind, by Rosemary Sutcliff.


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Thursday, September 15, 2022

Ocean Vuong at 33 with the Øresund Sound in the background


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From YouTube:

"Ocean Vuong was interviewed by his Danish translator, the poet Caspar Eric, in connection with the Louisiana Literature festival, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, in August 2022."



Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Gratitude to Allison Russell and her band

 


Grateful to have lived long enough to hear this voice, these voices, this music on Tiny Desk just now.

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"I met my biological father, Michael George, and my paternal family when I was 30 years old. I learned that I am a first-generation Canadian on my father’s side. He was born and raised in Grenada, one of 13 children. I found out that ours is a family that values education deeply. I found out that we have a historian in the family who has traced our line back to an enslaved woman named Quasheba, who was sold off the coast of Ghana.

Such was her strength and resilience that she somehow survived the transatlantic crossing in the hold of a slave ship, and was eventually sold to a large sugar cane plantation in Grenada. She survived multiple rapes and sales. She survived backbreaking labor in the cane fields. She survived her children being taken and sold. She survived, and she founded generations. I wept to learn her name. I am honored to be her many-times-removed daughter and am eternally grateful for the gift of her strength and resilience. Though we can never know if Quasheba was actually from Ghana, in this song I imagine that she is.

When I was in Cameroon in 2007 with my other band, Po’ Girl, I was especially struck by three things: not being a visible minority for the first time in my life (though I was called la petite métisse pretty frequently, since I’m “pale” compared to most Cameroonians); how many Cameroonians felt the need either to apologize for or disclaim their forebears’ involvement in the slave trade—“My village, they never sold any slaves!”—and how many people there told me that I looked Cameroonian. Ghana is just a little ways up the west coast of Africa from Cameroon."

Sunday, September 11, 2022

September 11, 2001, revisited (along with 1996)


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("Witness with Courage," pastel image, 1984, drawn by am)

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On the afternoon of  September 11, 2001, I heard this song for the first time on "Love and Theft" ** which was released on that same day, after being left out of "Time Out Of Mind" in 1996.



Every step of the way we walk the line
 
Your days are numbered, so are mine
Time is pilin’ up, we struggle and we scrape
We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escape
City’s just a jungle, more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, trying to get away
I was raised in the country, I been workin’ in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down
Got nothing for you, I had nothing before
Don’t even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down
Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around
All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime
Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

Well, the devil’s in the alley, mule’s in the stall
Say anything you wanna, I have heard it all
I was thinkin’ about the things that Rosie said
I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed
Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger nobody sees
So many things that we never will undo
I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too
Some people will offer you their hand and some won’t
Last night I knew you, tonight I don’t
I need somethin’ strong to distract my mind
I’m gonna look at you ‘til my eyes go blind
Well I got here following the southern star
I crossed that river just to be where you are
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long
Well my ship’s been split to splinters and it’s sinking fast
I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free

I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me
Everybody movin’ if they ain’t already there
Everybody got to move somewhere
Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow
Things should start to get interesting right about now
My clothes are wet, tight on my skin
Not as tight as the corner that I painted myself in
I know that fortune is waitin’ to be kind
So give me your hand and say you’ll be mine
Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long


Copyright © 1996 by Special Rider Music

** The song's opening line, "Every step of the way, we walk the line" is an allusion to Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line", a song Dylan cited as being "one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time" in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One.[29]

The song's refrain, "Only one thing I did wrong / Stayed in Mississippi a day too long", is taken from a verse in the traditional folk song "Rosie".[30] Dylan makes this connection explicit by name-checking "Rosie" elsewhere in the lyrics ("I was thinkin’ about the things that Rosie said / I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie’s bed").[31]

The line "So give me your hand and say you’ll be mine" is a near-verbatim quote from Act 5, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure ("If he be like your brother, for his sake / Is he pardon’d; and, for your lovely sake, Give me your hand and say you will be mine").[32]

(from Wikipedia)


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Today and for the last few days here in Coastal Northwest Washington State, the sky is filled with thick wildfire smoke that causes pain to all sentient beings who must breathe it.  

Let me not forget what I need to remember.

Saturday, September 10, 2022

Handle with care


 



It is only a little planet, but how beautiful it is.

-- Robinson Jeffers

Monday, September 5, 2022

Mandala #70 / Beyond my wildest childhood dreams


Dawn Wind, by Rosemary Sutcliff, was first published in 1961 when I was 11 years old.  The Redwood City Public Library had a copy which I read during the summer of 1961.  The black and white drawings of the two main characters, a 14-year-old boy and a girl of about the same age, made a deep impression on me.  I wished that I could draw like the illustrator, Charles Keeping.  In the following years, the memory of those drawings stayed with me.  When I was a volunteer shelf-reader in the children's section of our local public library, I found the book and looked at the drawings again.  They were just as I remembered them, just as stirring to my imagination.  The drawings brought the story to life for me.  I remembered how it felt to identify closely with the lives of the boy and the girl who lived long ago where my ancestors on my mother's side had lived.

Here's what the book jacket says about the story which takes place in Sixth Century Southern Britain:


The boy lay in the silence of the great battlefield, gazing at his own hand spread on the ground beside him.  The hand moved and he realized, with something like surprise , that he was not dead ...

.... It seemed to Owain that nobody but himself had been left alive, until the lean shape of Dog slid towards him from the shadows and licked his hand ....

... The story covers the twelve years that followed Aquae Sulis; for Owain they were hard and difficult years, many of them spent in thrall to a Saxon farmer.  Yet he found kindness and happiness where he least expected it; he found Regina, hidden and half-starved among the ruins of Viroconium ...


A few weeks ago, I went online looking for a used copy and was able to buy one that had been in one of the Croydon Public Libraries in South London.  My desire was to see what would happen if I tried to copy the drawings into the form of a mandala with my non-dominant left hand.


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Early this morning, way before dawn, I sat down at my drawing table for the first time since June and picked up my 6B pencil with my non-dominant left hand and began to copy the first illustration (besides the cover), which appeared on the title page.  Five illustrations later, I had finished the mandala, all the while listening to Bob Dylan's "Rough and Rowdy Ways" CD.

Once again, I am astounded at my ability to draw with my non-dominant left hand.  The drawing comes easily, much more easily than drawing with my right hand.

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Early morning crow