Birthday Totem Meditation: Roll On John / Watching the Wheels / Here and Now

I've always been struck by the fact that, in this song, John didn't say that he didn't believe in God.  What he did say was what he did believe in. He believed in himself. He believed in himself and Yoko. He believed in reality.

"All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher that the religious institutions originally worked with: reality."

(Gary Snyder)

I can't find any documentation for this, but my memory is that on the album where the song first appeared, John's song was titled "god" with a small "g."

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali begin with the word "atha" which could be translated either as referring to "God, the root of all things" (not in the Jewish or Christian or Muslim sense of the word, but in the Native American sense of a mystery at the root of all things) or which could be translated as "here and now."  My perception is that John was saying that he believed in "here and now."

Reality.

Of interest to me is that, among many other spiritual traditions that John was curious about,  he looked into Hindu thought.  The song "Instant Karma" was a result of that.  "Karma" is a Sanskrit word meaning action, work or deed. Yep. There are consequences to our actions.

The concept of "wheel" or "turning" is contained in the word "chakra," a concept of Hindu thought that John was likely familiar with, although he chose not to align himself with any religious or spiritual tradition, which is also my choice and a choice that many of us make.

Born: October 9, 1940, Liverpool, United Kingdom

Happy Birthday, John!

You would have been 74 years old today. 

Thank you for singing about god/God so eloquently.

You were my favorite Beatle from the instant I first saw you singing on the Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964 when I was 14 years old. You are dear to so many of our hearts.

"You burn so bright. Roll on John."

(Bob Dylan)

Here and now.

Addendum:  See October 10 at whiskey river!

Remembering fearless dreams

When I was in my 30s, I had a recurring dream of running at top speed from the top of one building to another in an unknown large city, performing astounding acrobatic feats. Someone was chasing me, but I knew they could never catch me. I was fearless.  What a revelation to see my younger dreamself in these young men flying through the air with such grace and landing on their feet with no loss of momentum.

Many thanks to Doonesbury's Featured Videos for another splendid offering!

That gouache and watercolor painting I did in the late 1980s is "Beloved Person in Bird Costume Crossing the Night River." Here is another one from those years.

Something of that old fearlessness is coming back to me in my 66th year. It comes and goes.

"How long can I stay drunk on fear out in the wilderness?"
(Bob Dylan)

For the child that cries when innocence dies

"Working with Intuition and Three Angels," gouache and watercolor, painted by am in 1992



Suddenly, inexplicably, I'm wondering if I still can get a ticket to see Bob Dylan at the Paramount in Seattle on Sunday, October 19.

Yep. There are still tickets left. I'll be sitting a little bit closer to where my seat was for the first Bob Dylan concert I saw at the Paramount Theater in the early 1980s -- up near the roof in the second to the last row.

Until just now, I had decided not to go to another Bob Dylan concert. A baffling process. Working with intuition and three angels. As my father used to say, "We'll see what we will see."

This is what I wanted to post before I began this post:

"The universe came into being with us together; with us, all things are one."
(Chuang-Tzu)

Mandala #4 -- Working with situations that used to baffle us

This mandala took on a life of its own much more than the previous ones. No matter what I did, I couldn't make it work the way I wanted it to. After I made a decision to fill in some of the background with the shade of green called "hedgerow" (the green that had originally been only a thin border line), the pencil kept breaking off. In the far distant past, having a drawing feel like a failure could bring me to tears. Years later, I learned that when it seems as if a drawing or painting is "ruined," I can keep going with it, letting the "ruined" part lead the way.  Below is an example of that phenomenon. "Self-Portrait with Brothers of Mercy and Night Falling From The Sky" was painted in gouache and watercolor in 1990 during the First Gulf War:

As I was working on this one, I left the room for a few minutes.  When I returned, the wet paint in the sky had dripped down into the ocean and the wave. After a moment of shock, I went with what had happened and turned the drips into the bars of a cage or prison bars. The painting had a life of its own. This is the painting that my mother asked if she could buy. I offered to give it to her. She insisted on paying for it. When one of my father's brothers saw it on a visit from Minnesota, he said, "Your daughter is a philosopher." Unless I said something, it never occurred to anyone that it had not been my intention for there to be bars between the three people and the ocean, but when faced with that dripping paint, I made a decision to use it.

With Mandala #4, I felt that "hedgerow" had taken over the mandala and "ruined" it.  Although "hedgerow" looked fine when used sparingly, I didn't at all like seeing so much of it. Suddenly it occurred to me to play with the colors using iPhoto, including seeing what the mandala would look like in black and white. When I arranged the black and white version with a version I preferred to the original version, I found that I liked the way that the three of them looked together. "Hedgerow" no longer looked so awful to me.

Still, I like the third version best.

Oboe remains noncommittal:

Remembering Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin and her music saved my life more than once.

October 2nd meditation

"... the month-without-gods ..."

Sunrise: October 2, 1949
Sunset: April 20, 2008

Peace,
Richard

Celebrating my 65th birthday today

Many years ago the thought came to me that we are all the same age -- all of us now and all of us who were ever born and all who will be born. We were just born at different times.

My first birthday:

Summer of 2014:

Working on mandala #4:

So happy just to be alive.

Late Afternoon Meditation After Looking Up On September 29, 2014

Don't be afraid to cry. It will free your mind of sorrowful thoughts.
(Don Taleyesva, Hopi)

Laughter is a necessity in life that does not cost much, and the Old Ones say that one of the greatest healing powers in our life is the ability to laugh.
(Larry P. Aitken, Chippewa)

Quotes from this book by Don L. Coyhis -- a gift from my friend, Kathy.

Through the rainbow series: #3

Here is the set of 24 watercolor pencils that I am using for this series. This palette is called "Walk to the Sea." No wonder I love these colors. I bought this set at the Bellingham Community Food Co-op some time ago. The sketchpad came from the Dakota Art store. Now I understand why the colors are named as they are:

fog rolls in

along the lane

rabbit boots

hop skip jump

squirrel jacket

dew at 5 am

carmine bird

hedgerow

While I was working on mandala #3, I wasn't able to keep everything as symmetrical as I wished. Oh well. It looks fine to me anyway. I don't need to aim for Fearful Symmetry. Leave that to some immortal hand or eye. Progress not perfection.

For this mandala, I started with "dandelion" and made my way through the rainbow to "tupelo honey." I haven't been using "biscuit festival," "fog rolls in," "wildfire," "teddy bear," "brown bear," or "picket fence." I use "grizzly bear" to date each mandala.  At some point, I could made some mandalas with the browns and the grey. 

It feels good to watch this unfold.  I feel better than I have felt in a long time. The counselor I am working with in regard to my war-related PTSD suggested processing my experiences through art work. I am grateful to her for that suggestion. 

From 1980 to 1991, I did process much of my old trauma, but beginning with the First Gulf War and with the wars that have followed there was new trauma that had the effect of blocking me from drawing and painting. This blog has been my creative outlet for almost 8 years, and there have been a few times when I have been able to paint or draw or weave in addition to writing blog posts and taking photographs:

Spring 2007

December 2007

January 2008

February 2008

Weaving in late summer, fall and winter of 2007, 2008, 2009, 2013

Now seems to be a time for fearless and asymmetrical mandalas. Start at the center and move outward. Anyone can make one or be one. Each one unique.

P.S. Somehow I lost control of the fonts and text sizes and colors as I worked on this blog post today. 

Oh well (-:

Mandala #2: Through the rainbow series

Mandala #1: Through the rainbow

Yesterday I began with red and worked my way through the rainbow.

Painting

The return of laughter

Friends at a flea market in Bellingham. Our laughter is sacred and helps us survive and thrive.

The true end of a war is the rebirth of life;
the right to die peacefully in your own bed.
The true end of war is the end of fear;
the true end of war is the return of laughter.

-- Alfred Molano

(Photo by anonymous photographer, posted with permission from Kathy)

Sorrow of war meditation

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
(Mahatma Gandhi)

Presence

On the darkest day
Light clear white seen
Sound of wind heard
Presence by her skin felt
Those mysterious gifts shared
No God and no Not-God either
And yes, yes, yes

Bob the Baptiste and the Rose and the Sacred Ordinary

Tickets go on sale tomorrow for Bob Dylan and His Band in Seattle in October.  I am asking myself if I want to buy a ticket for the Sunday evening concert at the Paramount Theater, which is where I thought I had seen Bob Dylan in concert in 1981, among other years. When I go to the Bob Dylan website to look to find that concert in 1981, I am puzzled to see that according to the website, there were no concerts in Seattle in 1981, and that the two concerts in 1980 at the Paramount Theater were on November 29 and November 30.

Hmmm.  This is very odd.  My memory of that concert is that it happened not long after John Lennon was murdered on December 8, 1980.  I was 31 years old that year.  The concert was part of the "Gospel Tour." I wasn't about to become a Christian, but I was curious about Bob's newfound passion for Jesus.  I recall that I wanted to see Bob Dylan from as close a spot as possible and that I left my seat and made my way down to the steps to the left of the stage and sat on a step about 20 feet away from Bob Dylan.  As I sat there I had the thought that no matter how close I got to Bob Dylan, it wouldn't be close enough.  He was a huge part of the myth of my life, but I was not part of his life and never would be, and suddenly that was fine with me.  I didn't need to get any closer.  All I needed to do was listen at a respectful distance.

As I watched Bob Dylan sing, someone threw a red rose up on the stage, and it landed right in front of Bob.  I will never forget the startled look on his face, the way he winced, and how his entire body appeared to react in apprehension.  He moved backward as if his life were in danger.  He not only moved backward but soon paused in his singing and let his band play for awhile before stepping forward and resuming singing. Immediately I thought of John Lennon's murder and how vulnerable Bob Dylan was to the same kind of death.  His body language made me think that he was consciously (or unconsciously) aware of the real possibility of a fan killing him, too.  When I went back to my seat, I was sustained by the knowledge that I truly didn't need to get any closer to Bob Dylan, and with tremendous respect for his courage each time he walked out on stage.

How could I have that memory if the concert took place before John Lennon's death? Perhaps John Lennon's death was still quite fresh in my mind in 1992, the next time Bob Dylan played at the Paramount Theater.  Now that I think of it, it must have been 1992.  Yes.  In my mind I can only see Bob Dylan and his band on the small stage, and I don't see his back-up gospel singers anywhere.

At another concert in Vancouver, B.C., which must have been in 1993 (according the set list on the Bob Dylan website), I again left my seat.  I wanted to get closer to the stage as he sang "Girl From The North Country" as an encore.  This time the concert was not in a small theater setting.  There were no steps to sit on.  There was only a concrete platform on the left, quite some distance from the stage, where I was not alone in wanting to see Bob from as close as possible.  From that distance,  I was again struck by his vulnerability. He looked fragile.  For the rest of the concert, the sound had been so loud that it was close to being unbearable.  It had taken all my efforts to figure out what he was singing because the song arrangements were unfamiliar and jarring. For that final song, though, the sound was turned down to an intimate level, and he sang in a different voice, in what seemed to me to be a generous and humble voice. That was the last Bob Dylan concert I attended.

Now I really am bewildered.  I don't recall going to a Bob Dylan concert two years in a row, but according to Bob Dylan's website, that is what I did.  I would have thought that the last time I saw Bob Dylan in concert was in Vancouver in a later year, more like 1999.  My memory doesn't appear to serving me well.  So be it.

In the image above, Bob Dylan reminds me of an old Baptiste.  Baptiste is a character from the film, "Les Enfants du Paradis," a French film from 1945 that made a lasting impression on Bob Dylan.  Baptiste works as a mime, but in this clip with a Beatles song superimposed we see him both with his mime makeup, holding a rose, and without his mime makeup:

While looking for more images of Baptiste, I found this image,














which reminded me of the scene in "Masked and Anonymous" when a little girl sings "Blowing in the Wind."

If I know nothing else, I know that at least one thing is true -- that the sacred is in the ordinary.
(quote from the film "Masked and Anonymous")

Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead.  But then I realize that to someone else it might not seem so ordinary.
(Georgia O'Keeffe)

Coincidence?

Here's Georgia looking through a cheese hole, and reminding me of Bob Dylan:

There is no end to the richness of the associations I have with the work of Bob Dylan.  That's just the way it is.

All the questions and answers

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

-- quote from Dag Hammarskjöld (1905-1961)

All I know from my limited experience is that many of the questions that life's diverse teachers have put to me are kōans, beginning with these questions from one of my earliest teachers:





Some answers in the wind, from the album, "The Wind," 2003, Warren Zevon (January 27, 1947 - September 7, 2003):



Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock?  Why not go for a walk instead? (am's italics). But then I realize that to someone else it may not seem so ordinary.

When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore ... unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I'm gone.

-- quotes from Georgia O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 - March 6, 1986)

Q:  Is this worth posting on my blog? Why write this down? Why not go for a walk instead?
A:  Something moves me to spend this time working on this blog post. What can it be?

("Person with Questions,"watercolor, gouache, and pastel on paper, early 1984, by am)

A Letter from 1978

"I fought with my twin, that enemy within, 'til both of us fell by the way."

"There's a white diamond gloom on the dark side of this room and a pathway that leads up to the stars. If you don't believe there's a price for this sweet paradise, remind me to show you the scars."

-- Bob Dylan, quoted from "Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat), 1978"

Girl from the North Country (2014)

Set list -- Gothenburg, Sweden -- July 15, 2014:

Watching The River Flow

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

To Ramona

The Levee's Gonna Break

Shelter From The Storm

Cry A While

Girl From The North Country

Summer Days

Desolation Row

Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum

Lonesome Day Blues

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

Thunder On The Mountain

Ballad Of A Thin Man

All Along The Watchtower

Blowin' In The Wind

Vincent van Gogh and Karma Yoga

"Painter on the Road to Tarascon" (1888)

How can I be useful, of what service can I be?  There is something inside me, what can it be?
-- Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

There are six branches of yoga, each with a different focus:

Raja yoga (path of meditation)
Karma yoga (path of service)
Bhakti yoga (path of the heart)
Jnana yoga (path of the mind)
Tantric yoga (path of ritual)
Hatha yoga (path of physical health through postures and breathing practices)

Undisciplined Yoga / What It Feels Like To Be A Tree

Thank you, robin andrea and tara, for inspiring this post with your comments on my previous post.

For me, there is no discipline and no joining involved with yoga because I choose the poses I do, and I do them at home.  I'm a thoroughly undisciplined person who is not a joiner, and I don't do well with authority figures -- even yoga teachers that I am grateful for.

After the initial period of taking yoga classes, it has suited me best to practice alone at home in the way I want to practice yoga.  That's what has worked for me for nearly 30 years.  Rebellion dogs my every step.

Doing a series of yoga poses just feels good to me.  I can experience what it feels like to be a mountain and a tree and an eagle and a frog.  I can experience what liking myself feels like.  I can experience what being relaxed feels like.   And then there is the corpse pose, the oddest pose of all.  When I rest in that pose, I experience how alive I am.

As I experience it, the process of doing yoga poses is like preparing and eating a good meal or a taking a good long walk or taking photographs or reading a book or taking a hot bath or working on a post for my blog.

My perception is that the Buddha chose a single yoga pose, the lotus pose, and stuck with that one for his practice of of meditation.  He didn't do it as a discipline.  He did it because his experience was that it worked for him.  I don't have to do my chosen poses if I don't feel like doing them, but I miss them if I don't do them for awhile.

Here are some of my previous posts on yoga.

It is occurring to me that although I am not disciplined when it comes to yoga, I am enthusiastic.

In gratitude to B.K.S. Iyengar (1918-2014)

The news of the death of B.K.S. Iyengar yesterday just reached me.

In 1979, when I was 29 years old, I began taking yoga classes taught in the tradition of B.K.S. Iyengar by Ingela Abbott who had taken classes from him in India.  He was her first yoga teacher.  For many years I took classes from her and then took classes from other teachers she trained to teach in the yoga school she opened in 1987.  Gradually, I developed my own home yoga practice that has continued to this day.  I have taken classes in other yoga traditions in past years, but Iyengar yoga is my foundation.  I have heard teachers in other yoga traditions say that they can easily tell which students have learned the yoga poses in the Iyengar tradition.

My first exposure to yoga -- a positive experience -- had been a single yoga class in the San Francisco Bay area in 1970.  As I recall, that class was taught in the tradition of  Swami Kriyananda -- Ananda Yoga.   My vague goal in the early years of my interest in yoga was to get out of my head and back into the rest of my body.  Unfortunately, I also had eating disorders at that time and most of my focus began to be on trying to lose weight and achieve what I perceived as a "perfect" yoga body.

Yoga taught me about humility and gratitude.  No matter how hard I have practiced, there have always been poses that I cannot do well.  I simply do the best I can and enjoy what I can do.  In the photo below, taken in 2012, I was holding a pose that I believed I could not do at all and suddenly realized I could do when I was 57 years old.  B.K.S. Iyengar said that yoga is for everyone.  I look forward to some form of yoga practice for the rest of my life.  I will never be too old for a yoga practice.  At the end of each yoga session, we practice the corpse pose, and I think of George Harrison singing The Art of Dying.  Yoga on my deathbed.

I was introduced to yoga in the Iyengar tradition at a low point in my life.  In the years after starting yoga classes, I returned to college and finished my degree in English Literature and Art, left a marriage that wasn't good for either of us, created 200 paintings, and began my recovery from eating disorders and alcoholism.  Yoga has played a major part in my healing, teaching me to respect and honor myself and live in relative peace with myself and the world around me.

How can you know God if you don't know your big toe?
(B.K.S. Iyengar)

Yoga is not a religion.  Mr. Iyengar describes it as an "art and a science." That is its great appeal to me.

Thank you, Mr. Iyengar.

Swing and Turn Jubilee

"If I had no horse to ride I'd be found a-crawlin' up and down this rocky road looking' for my darlin."

Here are some poems I am grateful to have found today at Beth's blog.

Say yep to life

yep

I've enjoyed the word yep for as long as I can remember.  Its source for me must have been television.  In my earliest memories of hearing that word, a man is saying it.   It's like yesiree, which I would have heard on the Howdy Doody Show in the early 1950s -- "yessiree Bob."

I wonder if the generation that grew up watching The Muppet Show says, "Yep Yep Yep."

Okey-dokey and okey-doke came from watching "The Little Rascals" on television.

Okey-dokey.

Yippee.

Yessiree Bob.

After starting out as a boisterous child (my father's adjective -- he didn't want boisterous children), I became a shy quiet child who didn't say much in public.  I didn't want to be a cowgirl.  I didn't want to grow up to be Dale Evans or Lucille Ball or any of the other women I saw on television or in the movies.  I wanted to be a brave and solitary cowboy and say, "Yep." And since that was impossible, I wished I could grow up to be a brave cocker spaniel like Lady and have a friend like Tramp who would help me to defend the baby.  And most of all, I didn't want to be like the aunt in this clip:



Yep.

Not yep yep yep  (-:

And then there's wow and wowee.

My wandering mind just said,  "Say yep to life."

Here is the only time those words have ever been written on the internet until now, and I had been so sure that lots of people were saying yep to life.

This is my 64th summer.  Wow.  Wowee.  Yep.

To see a most beautiful place to walk, look here.

"They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever." (Leonard Cohen)

Listen

Things That Remain Painful / Bengal Tiger At The Baghdad Zoo

"Stand-up is how comedians process things that are painful."

-- Billy Crystal, quoted by interviewer during an interview with Robin Williams in 2011.

Robin Williams' early comedy didn't bring me much laughter.  I was severely depressed during those years. What was evoked for me then was the pain that prompted his sense of humor. Although I've found much peace as a sober alcoholic, I sometimes find myself on the depressive side of things.  My gratitude goes out to Robin Williams for the ways he used drama to help himself and us process war and suicides, grief and loss.  There are some things that I can't process through laughter. Depression and active alcoholism are two of them.  

In the interview above, he tells this story:

"Years ago I was reading a story to my daughter.  I was doing voices and everything, and she turned to me and said, "Just read the story."

I'm with his daughter.

In the order that I saw them, these are Robin Williams movies which made a lasting impression on me, helping me to know that I was not alone:

1982 -- The World According to Garp (after watching that movie at age 34, I decided that I did want to have children, but my husband decided that he didn't, and we divorced soon after.  I never did have children)

1989 -- Dead Poets Society (although I remember only speechless anger at the way the movie ended)

1991 -- The Fisher King (wanting to see it again, I looked in vain for this movie in the drama section of a video store and was bewildered to find that this great drama was filed in the comedy section. "Parry is also continually haunted by a hallucinatory Red Knight, who terrifies him whenever he shows any confidence." The quote is from a Wiki article on The Fisher King)

1991 -- Hook (I loved that it wasn't about Peter Pan at all.  It was about Hook.  Robin Williams could just as easily have played Hook)

1997 -- Good Will Hunting

What I'd like to see now is "Bengal Tiger At The Baghdad Zoo." It took Robin Williams' suicide for me to become aware of it.  

"Some nights people come expecting me to riff, and I'm not going to do it. I can't."

(Robin Williams, in the above interview with Charlie Rose in 2011)

I'm feeling all off-balance today.  It's been difficult to determine what I want to say to express my unexpected flood of feelings of grief and loss. I do see a connection between Virginia Woolf's suicide at the beginning of World War II and Robin Williams' suicide in the context of the United States conducting air strikes in Northern Iraq and the recent events in Gaza.

"Ring them bells for those of us who are left."

(Bob Dylan, 1989)

Unsigned Work

Yesterday I searched in vain all day long for my mother's album that documented her art work.  My living space is very small, and it is puzzling that I can't find that album.  It must be here somewhere.  My plan was to start a new series featuring more of the things she had made -- most of which she had given away.

For several years, I have been looking for a carved wooden toy that belonged to my father and had been bewildered and saddened that I couldn't find something that was so dear to me and to him.  Just before I went to bed last night, I was standing on my grandmother's chair and looking once again in a small walk-in closet that has shelves and books in it, among other things.  On a top shelf, next to two dolls that belonged to my mother, was a zippered bag.  After all this time, it occurred to me that I may have put the carved wooden toy in that bag at some time in the past when I emptied the closet in my every-so-often process of going through everything I have and getting rid of what I don't need anymore.

There was the carved wooden toy, along with other treasures that I had forgotten about.

When my father was a small boy growing up in Minnesota in the 1920s, a Christian missionary who had spent time in China gave my father a carved wooden figure of a man in the process of removing husks from rice.  With a little research, I came up with this current image from Thailand of a simpler lever-based rice huller:

So far, I have been unable to find any similar carved objects from China on Google Images.  

Somehow, over the years, the carved rice-hulling man lost the front of his right foot.  His right foot was also no longer attached to the surface of the lever, and he could be swiveled on his left foot.  As I was photographing him, I noticed that the stick he had been holding was lying on my table.  It must have fallen out while I was in the process of reattaching his right foot to the tiny pin that stuck up from the lever. When I looked at his hand so that I could reattach the stick, I could see that a hole was drilled from the top to the bottom of his hand.  The stick could be inserted above or below, but could not be moved through the hole in its entirety.  The stick appeared to be broken off at one end. Was there another stick that was meant to fit into the top of his hand so that it would look as if he were holding a tall staff for balance? Looking more closely, I see that it is possible that his left hand is also missing.  I can see now that at one time there was a break to his left lower leg, and that it had been glued back to his left foot.  I wonder what the story is.  

The finely carved toy is unsigned.

After my father retired from his job as a systems analyst, he traveled to the places he had dreamed of traveling all his life.  My mother chose not to accompany him.  One of those places was China -- a completely different China from that of his childhood.  In his retirement, my father also enjoyed woodcarving.  Who knows what seeds were planted in his dreams when he was given that carved wooden toy as a small boy?  I sense that it was one of his treasures throughout life, although I don't recall seeing it until after my mother died in 1994.

Just as it was with my mother, my relationship with my father was conflicted and is in need of healing.  It was painful to think that I had lost his carved wooden toy that he kept throughout his life.  I treasure the ways I do feel connected to my father and am grateful to have found the carving again.  

One of these days, when the time is right, I know I will find my mother's album, too.

When in doubt, apple scruffs (-:

Josephine's mandalas: #21 of 21

7/12/91

Air Baloons
Yarmulkas
Spinning tops
Dyed Eggs

?

(click on image for additional details)

Thanks to all who have followed along with this series, especially robin andrea.

I am grateful that my mother didn't destroy this series of mandalas that would have upset my father if had he been aware of them.  I am grateful to have been able to share these mandalas on my blog.

My mother's earliest creative efforts involved writing.  From childhood, she dreamed of being a writer.  If I remember correctly, in the last years of my mother's life her creative energy went into Norwegian pattern knitting.  The only writing she did in her last years, that I know of, was writing letters.

In 1966, at age 50, she had finished a poem she had begun at age 48. The original version of the poem ended with these lines:

... "What means Gethsemane?"
The Inspiration fled.  Was God its source?
So be it.
Then rich I am having felt His force.

In the final version:

... "What means Gethsemane?"
The answers rise and fall like waves.  I wait.
Then blindly stumble on towards heaven's gate.

In the years between 1966 and 1989, having lost the Inspiration, she redirected her abundant energy to creations that didn't involve words. It is occurring to me this morning that with the mandalas, she was combining words and images -- not poetry exactly but something like it. Traditional mandalas don't have words in them.  There were still words that needed to come through her, but they presented themselves to her in this process.

Who knows why she started making mandalas sometime in 1989 and stopped making them in July of 1991 and went back to working with color and pattern without words.  Who knows what turned her away from Christianity and moved her toward Judaism?  I know that she found joy and solace and meaning in her last years by celebrating Jewish holy days in secret.

This pillow was one of her many handmade gifts to me during her steady output of Norwegian pattern knitting in her last years:

My mother continued to ask questions.  I know that for sure.  She was an artist and spiritual seeker.  She lives on for me in the words she wrote and the things she made with her hands.

Josephine's mandalas: #20 of 21

MAEE AEE
MAHEE AEE
AH-O

1/31/91

LENS
CATARACT
I.O.L.
RETINA
CORNEA
GUTTATA

Josephine's mandalas: #19 of 21

1/21/91

Martin Luther King Day

... I have a dream ...

(click on image for additional details)

Listen

"Freedom Highway"

March for freedom's highway

March each and every day

Made up my mind and I won't turn around

Made up my mind and I won't turn around

There is just one thing

I can't understand my friend.

Why some folk think freedom

Was not designed for all men.

Yes I think I voted for the right man

Said we would overcome.

(lyrics by Pops Staples -- 1962)