A sailboat without sails / A dream as summer solstice approaches

On the summer solstice, the sun will rise here at 5:07 a.m., but it will begin to be light much earlier than that.  The birds were singing today at 4 a.m.

Last night I had a memorable two-part dream.  In the first part, I was with a crowd of people.  We were on a bluff above a steep sandy beach, sitting in chairs arranged side-by-side.  We were watching huge ocean waves that appeared to be winter surf.  The waves looked like this:




In the second part of the dream, I found myself sailing alone through the air in a brightly colored sailboat without sails.  By subtle body movements, I was able to guide the sailboat high above the deep blue-green sea, not far from shore.  The view and experience were exhilarating.  A strong wind came up, making it difficult to keep from being blown out to sea, but I found that if I guided the sailboat in counter-clockwise circles, I could make my way back to the land.  As I approached the land, my circles transitioned to clockwise, and then I flew in a direction that would have to have been south, if I were coming in from the Pacific Ocean.  I was not able to keep the sailboat as high in the sky, and then I skimmed along above fertile farmland, sturdy houses, curious people and brown cows grazing.  The landscape looked something like that of this scratched photo of me on the San Mateo County coast in the winter of 1971:

Then I woke up and went out on my porch to listen to the birds singing in the pre-dawn light at 4 a.m.  The photos of the moon were taken just after 6 a.m.

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.

(Jonathan Gottschall)

(from beth's blog 27 May 2018)

Josephine's mandalas: #6 of 21

1/31/90

Twinkle Twinkle, little cell .....
You've done your work and done it well
When I die, you'll drift to sea ......
And wait there for another me ..... (-:

(click on the image for additional details)

This mandala was made on a Wednesday, within 24 hours of the previous one.

Up until the last year of her life, my mother had planned to be cremated and have her ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean. My recollection is that she had made arrangements with the Neptune Society.  This was a sore point with my father. He wanted her ashes to be buried alongside his ashes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where his mother and father and younger brother were buried. Almost exactly a year before she died, she gave in to his wishes and changed the details of her will.

It has always seemed to me that her freed spirit remained in and around Gualala. Three days after she died, a Black Phoebe appeared on the ocean side of my parents' home. I had never consciously seen a Black Phoebe before. It sat on the porch railing and peered at me as I stood near the door to the porch, talking on the phone with one of my older cousins who had been close to my mother. The Black Phoebe remained for sometime, seeming to be calling to us in the house:



Twice when I returned to Gualala for visits after my father had sold their home and moved to Bellingham, I had encounters with a Black Phoebe. Both times I was out walking and felt greeted by a Black Phoebe who stood on the soft dirt path and looked at me in what I perceived to be a friendly and fearless manner. Black Phoebes are dear to me now.

I like the single bright red star and the shimmering energy of this mandala with its radiating words.

After both of my parents had died I had an unexpected dream of seeing them joyfully reunited on the sloping hillside outside their home in Gualala. In the dream image, they were free of the differences that had kept them at odds with each other -- at least during many of the years I observed of their 46 years of marriage. They seemed to truly love each other in my dream.

This is what their home looked like in 1974 before more houses were built on their street. My Dad is looking south out of the living room window. My impression is that this was the happiest time in their lives. Their three daughters were grown. My father had retired and enjoyed gardening and woodcarving. My mother loved their new life in Gualala and had an abundance of creative energy. As always, she was never without a book to read.


My mother is sitting just to the south of house.

My father did the finish work on the addition to
their house which included a garage, a master
bedroom and an art room for my mother.

My mother took the paintings she had done in the
early 1960s and hung them up in the garage.


I am guessing that this photo was taken in 1974.

It just occurred to me that, in these photos, my mother 

is 7 years younger than I am now. I am 9 years

younger than my mother was when she made her

mandalas. My mother's mother died when my

mother was 20, and her father died when she was

29. She didn't have her parents for as long I 

did. 

It is also occurring to me that looking at my mother's 

mandalas is bringing thoughts of my father and of

my parents' marriage to my mind.

Thanks to whiskey river for this reminder.

Red Duck (2006)

"Red Duck" is the last image from my 40-year retrospective (1966-2006). It was painted after I had a dream last June, where the only thing I could remember was that I had seen a red duck. The dream seemed to be a good omen, and I thought that there might be a new series of paintings in the works. Instead, it was the last image I painted until I started painting again in March of 2007. It could well be considered the first in that same series on which I have been working since March of 2007.

Although I have 24 new paintings, I am going to take a break from blogging for a week or two. Thank you to Loren, Lori , robin andrea , bev and kjm for your comments and encouragement since I began my 40-year retrospective in December of 2006. Thank you to all who have been visiting without leaving any comments.

Here's a sampling from my porch garden. The seeds I planted a few weeks ago are coming up, too.

The Mother Tree (1999)

In late 1999, I had a dream which I developed into one of the two paintings I did that year. In the dream, there was a room with a ladder leading to an entryway in the ceiling. There were people in the room, but I was not sure what they were doing. Maybe they were painting. Maybe they were reaching toward trees. I didn't know for sure. When I tried to draw what I had seen in the dream, this image was created of a young woman and a middle-aged woman. For a long time, I didn't have a title for it, but then I settled on "The Mother Tree."

I had resigned from my secure and well-paying hospital job as a medical transcriptionist in the spring of 1998 and cashed out my retirement fund with the intention of changing careers and spending more time doing art work. What happened instead was that I went into a situational depression, feeling overwhelmed by my responsibilities as the only family member living close to my father, finding myself less and less able to accomplish anything. Coming out of that depression to some degree, I was rehired as a medical transcriptionist in January of 1999 and took the option of working at home, thinking that that would be less stressful. However, my father began to have more and more health problems and needed more help from me. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to help him during those months.

On December 8, 1999, I learned from his mother, that the boyfriend I had met when I was 17 years old, who had gone to Vietnam in 1970 and with whom I had lived during the first five months of his return from the war, had throat cancer and was living with her and his father. We had a good talk on the phone at that time. He was quite honest about himself, letting me know that he still had drug and alcohol problems as well as extensive legal problems that would make it a bad idea to become involved with him again. He appeared to be confident that he would survive the cancer. It seemed good that our long silence had been broken, but it was unsettling to talk with him again because I still felt love for him and missed him even though I knew that getting involved with him would be a disaster for both of us.

On the day after Christmas in 1999, my father had a heart attack. My youngest sister and I were told in the emergency room that he was going to die. The nurses drew the curtains around his bed. My sister and I stood on either side of the bed holding his hands as he lay unconscious. He was breathing with difficulty but not appearing to be in pain. My sister began reciting in his ear what sounded like prayers she had learned from her study of Meher Baba's teachings, although my father was a Christian who would have clearly preferred Christian prayers. After about 15 minutes, my father opened his eyes and looked up at my sister with much love and then smiled and said, "Hello." Then he slowly turned to me, looked into my eyes and snarled, "WHO ARE YOU?" The medical staff and emergency medical technicians were astounded that my father didn't die. I was relieved that those weren't his last words to me.

He lived for three more years in relative good health, living independently and moving to Seattle to live near my youngest sister, brother-in-law and nephew in the last year of his life, after I developed shingles as a result of severe emotional distress from the many strains to our father-daughter relationship.

Thank God for a local caregiver support group, which helped me see how many other people with elderly and chronically ill loved ones had shared my painful experiences. Thank God that my sister and brother-in-law offered to take over the caregiver role in that last year.

Calendar Series: 51st Month / Beloved Ocean with Fearless Room in True Colors (1989)

Last night I dreamed that a small plane fell from the sky and crashed, nose down, into the bed of daisies my father had planted on the north side of the house where my family lived. A calm and unhurt letter carrier from the U.S. Post Office, holding his mail bag, stepped out of the plane and handed us our mail as we stood at the sliding glass door which opened onto our covered porch. We then helped him drag the undamaged airplane onto our porch and invited him into our house. I went outside on the porch to look at the plane. I realized that it was a handmade plane, built from plywood and painted a flat grey. I thought to myself, "Hey, I could build a plane like that."

Considering that I have felt discouraged recently about being out of work, the dream was oddly comforting.

Looking back at my art work has been unsettling lately, especially because I can see in these paintings a shift which led to my conclusion in 1994 that all my paintings were about "looking back," and that I didn't want to do that anymore, after which point I did less and less painting. I wasn't having positive new experiences, just feeling the weight of old experiences and increasingly distressing new experiences. The elation and creative energy that had begun building in 1980 with my return to college, and to drawing and writing, peaked in 1990 with the onset of the Gulf War in August of that year, along with some upsetting circumstances in my personal life and the lives of those I loved, and I began to experience symptoms of delayed post-traumatic stress disorder. I had thought that painting would help me and others transcend our difficulties, but I began to feel overwhelmed by the losses that life brings.

About today's painting:

I still love the ocean. It's been too long since I've been to the ocean. After seeing the film footage of the Christmas tsunami of 2004 and Katrina in 2005, though, I will never look at the ocean in the same way I once did. In this painting, I was recalling a sense of fearlessness that I no longer have. Still, I remember what Georgia O'Keeffe said:

"“I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life -- and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

Now that's something to keep in mind.

Untitled Dream 1974

Dreamed in 1974, many years before the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was constructed in Washington, D.C.