2007 Old Year Review

Who was it who said “The Past is Prologue”?  (Ten points extra for the correct answer   Here’s where we review the past year, check off our to-do lists and see what lies ahead.  Share your triumphs and tragedies, personal and professional, the paths not taken and the roads yet to travel.  And if you want to share any New Year’s Resolutions, feel free to do that as well.  Cheers!

Happy Holidays?

December 1, 2007

It has recently been noted that polls are showing that more people dread the holidays than look forward to them.  Some people are looking for ways to get more meaning into their festivities, to “green” their holidays, or to just opt out completely.  What are your feelings on the holidays?  Do you look forward to this time of year or just wish to fast-forward to January?  And if you are looking to be greener than the Grinch, how are you planning to do this?

A Room of My Own

October 26, 2007

In 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own.  In it, she wrote the now famous line, “…a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”.   Let’s expand that to “create her own art of any kind”.  Do you find this to be true?  Besides your room here at Riversleigh (and if you don’t have one, why not?), do you have a room or at least a space of your own to create in?  If you don’t, do you think you really need one?  How essential is it?  If you could create your own space, what would it look like?  And how about having the money?  Please post your answer and pictures of your space under the category “BS 26.10.07 Room of One’s Own”

Bluestocking Q & A for Oct. 5, 2007

1. What are you reading right now?

2. What books or authors made such an impression on you that they virtually changed your life (or at least the way you think about life)?

3. What book(s) do you want to read or think you should read but haven’t? And why not?

4. That book that you have inside of you, the one that’s just screaming for you to write it- what is it’s title?

My lucky day

At the financial asset management firm where I worked for 5 and 1/2 years, I did not really “fit in” with the others there.  Why?  It’s hard to know where to start…but our values were just different.  I was more concerned with world affairs than what was on TV.  I live in the country, in an over-100-year-old house, and buy my clothes at thrift shops and the Salvation Army.  Most of my co-workers lived in the city or the suburbs and bought their clothes at the mall.  I badgered the bosses into letting me start a recycling program in the office.  I was appalled at the waste of food I saw everyday and talked my co-workers into giving me their leftovers instead of throwing them out, which I then brought home to our chickens or to our compost bin.  My co-workers learned that if they had questions about being a vegetarian, natural foods, green living, meditating, Yoga…I was the one to ask.  I also gave Tarot card readings, seemed to be able to “read their minds”, and celebrated days like Beltane, Dia de los Muertos and solstices instead of July 4th and Christmas.  So what’s all this got to do with Friday the 13th?  Because for all of the reasons above, and more, I was called the “office witch”, and on Friday the 13th, everyone would say, “…but it’s Mari’s lucky day!”.   And so it was.

Celebrate Blog Day!

This is not from my blog, but to join in on the Blog Day fun, here’s another postcard from Paris from Mari.  Vive la Blog Day!!

Beltane Fires

Beltane is one of the two great Celtic Pagan festivals (the other is the Celtic New Year festival of Samhain, or Halloween).  It begins the evening of the last day of April and continues through the night till the dawning of May Day.  The Great Goddess and her young consort have consummated their union.  Fertility and new life are celebrated with bonfires, maypole dancing, bouquets of flowers and offerings of eggs, milk and honey. 

We’ll celebrate Beltane with a bonfire, if the weather permits, like the one above.  We’ll plant seeds, transplant our seedlings, and cut flowers to decorate our house with.  We’ll eat poke, a wild plant that grows abundantly here, and strawberries I bought at the farm market, and asparagus from our garden and the farm market.  We’ll give thanks for the return of the sun and the warmth and for new life.

Here’s a link to more information on Beltane:

http://www.thepaganweb.com/beltane.html

Posted by Mari with Beltane Blessings

 

The Art of the Home

Fran wrote a lovely poem for this week’s Bluestocking topic regarding distractions of daily life that keep one from their artwork.  It is true that we allow these mundane things to distract us, but I was reminded that we can also see our life, daily distractions and all, as a work of art.  That thought made me think of a quote I have on my refrigerator from Edgar Cayce:

“Do make the home your career, for this is the greatest career any soul can make in the earth.  To a few it is given to have both a career and a home, but the greatest of all careers is the home, and those who shun it shall have much yet to answer for.  For this is the nearest emblem of what each soul hopes eventually to obtain…for it is ever creative in purpose…”

Edgar Cayce reading #1070-1

I have met the enemy…

She tells  me I can’t get out the oil paints right now because I can’t have the windows open and the house will smell of turpentine.

 She tells me I can’t go outside to photograph because it’s too windy.

She tells me I can’t go do some pottery on the porch because I need to clean up out there first and it’s too cold anyhow.

She tells me I can’t because….

I have met the enemy…and she is me.

Posted by Mari with thanks to Pogo.

Sunflowers for Vincent on his birthday

     Vincent was born on March 30th, 1853.  At age 16, his uncle (also named Vincent) helps him get a job at the famous Paris-based art gallery Goupil & Co. at its Hague branch.  For the first few years he does well, and is transferred to London and Paris, but Vincent’s relationships with his employers and his family deteriorates as Vincent increasingly comes to see his life as an art dealer meaningless, like the “pretty pictures” he is forced to sell.  He is fired.  Vincent’s father is a preacher, and Vincent decided to try to become a preacher too, but is a failure at that as well.  He tries teaching and that doesn’t work out.  He falls in love with his cousin and she rejects him.  His father kicks him out of the house.  Things aren’t going well. 

     In 1880, at age 27, Vincent turns to art.  We all know the rest of this story: Vincent dies 10 years later, after having created an enormous number of paintings and drawings, but never selling enough to support himself and apparently never becoming successful.  How did he keep going those 10 years?  How did he not starve, have a roof over his head, and more importantly, keep working at his art without succumbing to the doubts and fears expressed by his family, his associates and himself?  His brother Theo.  That one person who believed in him, who supported him, who was his lifeline and touchstone. 

     Vincent wrote to Theo, shortly before he died: “At present I do not think my pictures are worthy of your kindness to me.  But once they are worthy, I insist that you will have created them as much as I, and that we are fashioning them together.”  Theo died six months after Vincent, but before he died he wrote to their mother, “Life was such a burden to him (Vincent), but now, as it often happens, everybody is full of praise for his talents…Oh Mother!  He was so my own, own brother.” 

Posted by Mari, for Vincent’s birthday, and dedicated to my husband Rod.  Although I am no Vincent, he is my Theo.

Raku Pot with Bones

Here’s a picture I took recently of a raku pot I made two years ago and part of our bone collection.  We live near fields and woods and are regularly visited by foxes, raccoons, deer and ‘possums.  Sometimes they leave their bones behind and we collect them, if we can get to them before they’re eaten.  I made this pot with the thought in mind of keeping part of our bone collection in it and that’s why I designed it with the bone shapes on the outside.  I believe the skull is from a deer.  We love bones and I would dearly love to have a human skull.   I mean other than the one that’s inside my head.

Marcel Proust and the Writer’s Workshop

Last night I went to the 2^nd meeting of a Writer’s Workshop I had learned of at the local library. At the first meeting, three weeks ago, I was the only participant. I was assured by the leader of the Workshop that at least a “couple more” people were coming to the 2^nd one, and when I arrived at the library, I met the two new “writers”. One was a college student, a young Asian woman probably in her early 20’s. The other was an older woman, overweight and with the bearing and stance of a no-nonsense, do-it-herself farm woman. We introduced ourselves and the leader, a mid-30’s woman with a Master’s in English, told the newcomers how we had worked the last meeting. Each had brought samples of their work with copies for all, and each was to read a portion of what they’d brought. Then the rest of us would critique, make suggestions, and so forth. The college girl had brought a journal entry about a bike ride she took in Wyoming, the leader had brought a fairy tale she’d been working on, and the country woman had brought a short story about a hunting dog.

I had brought my recently written review of the first part of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and I was the last to read. After finishing my reading, there was total silence. And then more silence. And still more silence. And then finally- silence. At this point the door to the room we were in chose to close itself, slowly and also silently, and we all stared until the door was completely closed. I said, “I’m sorry, Marcel, I’m doing the best I can”. Everyone laughed, and joked about poltergeists, and then the college girl said she couldn’t really say anything about my writing, because it was “…like, a critique, right?” and she couldn’t understand it. Our leader made some helpful suggestions and asked me questions about why I’d written some things as I did, such as Proust’s use of a Magic Lantern Projector as a metaphor and as way to introduce the themes of the novel. After I finished, the farm woman finally rared back in her chair, crossed her meaty arms over her chest, put one ankle up over one thigh, and said, “Have you ever noticed how when you have a group of people in a room, there’s one who doesn’t say much and just listens as the others talk about what a book really means and what the author really meant and their opinions on it all. I’m a listener, and I just sit here thinking what a load of hogwash! What clap-trap! Why can’t you just read a story and enjoy it? All that stuff you’re saying means nothing! It’s all hogwash! It’s all clap-trap!”

Thank God Marcel had already left the room.

Here’s the link to what I wrote: http://marimann.wordpress.com

Favorite Quotes

“Maybe if I had not picked up that one person dying on the street, I would not have picked up the thousands.”  Mother Theresa

 ”Work while you have light.”  Marcel Proust’s favorite quote, taken from the Bible.

Circle Time

They say that the ancients, our ancestors, early man and woman, believed that time was circular, not linear, like we moderns do today. I say that time itself is an artificial construct, a linear abstraction superimposed over apparently eternal circular events. The sun and moon rise and fall, seasons come and go, men and women are born and die. There, you say, a perfect example of linear time- one is born and in a straight line, shortest distance, one dies. End of time. I say sometimes when you’re in the circle, and the other circles are spinning around you and beside you and beyond you, it’s hard to see for the spinning, unless you can grab onto something in the center to hang on to.When I was eight my father moved our family, my mom and sister and I, to the outer rim of a circle. Kirby Haigh Circle was the name of the street, but only on our half. The other half was called Tarpon Place, I guess because it was on the water and a tarpon is a kind of fish. What Kirby Haigh meant nobody knew, plus it was hard to say and we always had to spell it when we were telling someone our address. The first day my sister and I came home from school, we couldn’t remember which of the houses on the circle was ours, although we knew it was on the outer rim and not one of the houses in the center, whose backyards all came to a point in the middle like spokes on a wheel. So we walked around the circle and finally chose one that we thought was our new house.The house we went to was actually our next door neighbors, a Navy family like ours but they were from Germany. The wife spoke no English at all and she was the one who answered the door and looked blankly at us while we tried to figure out who was this woman in our house. Later we would become friends with her two sons and would trade German words for English. Once my sister asked them what was German for “firefly” and the older one said “light bulb” and we laughed until they went home angry. The older one’s name was Burnt and the younger one was Jurgen, pronounced “yoor-gen” not like the hand lotion. We wondered what kind of people would name their sons so oddly; after all, we were German but had good American names. Mari Lynn and Cheryl Lee. Southern in tone but I was the only true Southerner, having been born in the Naval hospital in Portsmouth, VA. My sister was born in Pennsylvania like my mom and dad; but really true Southerners wouldn’t have allowed me to call myself Southern. Just cuz the cat has kittens in the oven, they’d say, we don’t call’em biscuits.Anyhow, while we’re still standing on the German lady’s porch my mom came out of our house next door and saw us and then we knew we were at the wrong house. The houses all looked alike and as we found out later, they all had the same floor plan although some were reversed. Our house was supposed to have three bedrooms but one of them connected to the kitchen so we used it as a dining room and tried to ignore the closet that was there. My bedroom was billed as a study and was so small I could sit on the floor with my back against the bed and my legs drawn up against my chest and still my feet would touch the dresser on the opposite wall. At night in this bedroom I could hear a clock ticking (although I didn’t have one) that I thought was the house’s heart beating or my own and would be scared because I thought it meant my life was ticking away. My sister’s bedroom was right next to mine and our parents was across the hall. I would try all sorts of different strategies for sleeping with my sister in her bed and sometimes it would work. Sometimes I would try to sleep in my parents bed but when I got old enough to know that sperm came out of the man and went into the woman it made babies, I got scared to sleep in their bed because I didn’t know how the sperm got from the man to the woman. I thought maybe it just got out in the night and crawled across the bed until it found an opening and maybe if there was some in the bed it might get me by accident.

The next door neighbors on the other side of our house had two girls that were older than us who baby-sat for us sometimes. They went to the same church that we did but the older girl went to Rock Church a couple of times and so she got thrown out of our church. Rock Church was a place where ladies in purple robes held their hands up to the ceiling and sometimes spoke in tongues and occasionally went into ecstasies right there on the floor. That wasn’t allowed at the Methodist church we attended and so anyone who went to Rock Church had to be kept away from the others, so that they wouldn’t be impregnated by accident. Their father had a heart attack at home alone one evening and when the wife and the girls came home they found him dead, the upper half of his body in the refrigerator. What would it be like to find your father dead in the refrigerator, we wondered. Was the food spoiled? Could they ever again open he refrigerator door without thinking of their father’s face?

I heard this story from Sheila, the girl who lived across the street from us on the inner circle. She was a year younger than me but was my best friend for most of the years we lived on the circle. Her mother was the gossip queen and if you ever needed to know anything about anybody, they were the ones to ask. I say she was my best friend but Sheila might disagree. As the youngest of our friends she was pretty badly used, most of the time. Once we told her we were playing a new game where we took turns getting under a blanket and you had to take off whatever piece of clothes the people outside of the blanket said you had to. When it was her turn under the blanket we got her to take off all her clothes and when she was completely naked we ran away with the blanket. We were playing this “game” in the Jones’s yard which was about a quarter of the circle away from Sheila’s house which meant she had about one-eighth of a mile to walk naked. I knew this because one of our other neighbors said that walking completely around our circle was one-fourth of a mile. She and my mom and some other moms would walk four times around the circle in the evening so they could say they walked a mile. This was before treadmills.

The Jones’ were the poorest family on the circle. They had about ten kids and the father was a mechanic and I don’t remember the mother doing anything except raising kids. They were always dirty and the yard was always a mess and full of broken toys and junk cars. My dad once sold Mr. Jones an old car of his and the father never finished paying for it so my dad got to brag for years about how he essentially gave Mr. Jones a car. They lived on the outside of the circle and behind their house was a large overgrown field where we would go to do illicit things like smoke cigarettes we’d stolen from our parents. One summer when the grass in the field was waist-high Mary Zimmer and I were smoking butts there when she said watch this and she lit a whole book of matches and dropped it on the ground. The grass was dry and caught fire and time then was neither circular nor linear it stood still while the fire and the Jones’ house nearby became the only things in the universe. When the clock started ticking again I ran to Mary’s house and called the fire department and later after the fire was out and the Jones’ still had their house the firemen came to our house to get a report from me and that’s how my parents found out I was involved. My dad said I’d have to go apologize to the Jones’ cuz they could be homeless but I said they didn’t lose their house and besides I didn’t start the fire Mary did but he made me walk the eighth of a mile to their house and again there was no time or somehow time was compressed so that the walk seemed both endless and over in an instant.

Next to Sheila’s house opposite the German family and catty corner to our house was Kim’s house. Because we weren’t directly across from them the neighborhood would gather on our porch in the evening to listen to and watch Kim’s parent s fight without being really obvious. Kim’s dad would come home from work and find Kim’s mom drunk and the fights would begin. They believed in airing their differences so lots of the action took place outside which is why we’d all gather on the porch. Over the years the fights got worse and worse, from yelling to slapping to real violence and then things would really get interesting cuz then we’d have to call the cops. This all ended one night when Kim’s dad came home and Kim’s mom had locked him out so he got an axe out of the car and axed his way into the front door and when he got in he found Kim’s mom passed out on the couch and so he dragged the couch outside, set fire to it and proceeded to axe down the garage while the couch burned with her on it in the front yard. In front of their house is usually where the ice cream truck would stop.

On the other side of the circle, Tarpon Place on the water, is where my other friend Casey lived. I envied them living on the water even though it was really only a small creek that led out to a lake that led out to the ocean. Her brothers had small boats, canoes and so on. The only that I had was an old beach float that leaked but I’d go out on it anyway and catch crabs with a string and a piece of chicken stolen from home. My mom would tell me that I could float all the way out to sea but I didn’t believe her because any one could see it was only a tiny creek little more than a ditch and it wasn’t until I got old enough to read a map did I see that she was right. Her brothers were fishing from their canoe one afternoon and found a dead man in the weeds along the bank. He’d been dead awhile and they entertained us for weeks with their descriptions of how he looked after the crabs had been eating on him. Casey was not a popular girl; she was too smart and studied too much and carried huge armloads of books back and forth to school. She loved to play tricks on people and embarrass them so one day I’d had enough and played a trick on her. We were walking home from school and she had her usual armload of books that was so large she had to carry them in both arms in front of her body and I stuck my foot out and tripped her and she went over like a top heavy tree in a forest. She wouldn’t drop her books even to try to catch herself so she went flat on her face on those books.

Sometimes I walked to school with my first boyfriend whose name was Bobby Pelkington who lived at where the circle started if a circle could have a place where it started. He was the oldest of four brothers and we would go to their house to play football and devil in the ditch and dodge ball because they made up a half a team just by themselves. There were no rules about being gentle on girls so we would get tackled just as hard or hit just as hard and as we got older the boys seemed less interested in the games than in grabbing certain places so we quit playing. During one game I had just been tackled and was lying on the sidewalk recovering and one of Bobby’s younger brothers started yelling I see her titties and my shirt had popped its buttons all down the front and there I was exposed. Bobby didn’t want to be my boyfriend after that.

Bobby sometimes worked for Mr. Bloomfield, Casey’s across the street neighbor. Mr. Bloomfield was the circle’s full-time drunk and paid us kids to mow his lawn and take out his trash and once he paid me to take care of his dog who’d had a litter of puppies. I wanted one of those puppies and begged my parents to let me have one when they were old enough but my dad was due to be transferred and we couldn’t take a puppy with us. It turned out that my dad’s orders were to stay in Norfolk on the circle and so my mom said I could go get one of the puppies so I went through the spoke-shaped backyards to Mr. Bloomfield’s yard which was surrounded by a chain link fence and before I got there I could hear his dog howling and when I got to the fence I saw that Mr. Bloomfield had thrown all the puppies at the fence and they were hanging there dead. We used to walk past Mr. Bloomfield’s house in the mornings on our way to school even though it meant we had to walk all the way around the circle because he would sit in front of his picture window that all the houses had in an old armchair completely naked and drink Mad Dog. One winter he couldn’t pay his heating bill and it was the winter we had the big snowstorm and the temperature was below freezing and he froze to death in the big armchair in front of the picture window.

We did eventually get a dog and we named him Peanut I guess because he was a tiny rat terrier-type dog. We didn’t have a fenced yard then and so Peanut had to stay inside unless someone took him out on a leash or just stayed with him in the yard but once my sister and Sheila and me had walked up the street and my mom let Peanut out of the house and he was running up the road to where we were and just then the Midgett boys came around the circle in their car too fast and they hit him. He was lying in the road and I ran to where he was and said Peanut are you dead and he wagged his tail at me and then a huge wave of blood came out of his mouth and pooled around my bare feet. I began to scream and cry and one of the Midgett boys got out of the car and when he saw the blood he threw up and now there was blood and barf all over the road and my feet and my dad had to come up later that day and wash it off the street.

Living on Kirby Haigh Circle I learned a lot about circles and time and life and death and what seems to be isn’t what is- necessarily.

http://marimann.wordpress.com

Vincent and Theo van Gogh

I would invite Vincent & Theo van Gogh, and would buy them both absinthes, and I would tell Vincent of the tremendous impact he’s had on art and artists (including myself), a lasting impact of the kind that he would never believe, not in his time or this time or the next.  I would tell him that the fires he saw in the sky and the voices he heard in his ears and the force that drove him to paint and paint and paint as if there weren’t enough time to paint it all were the fires and voices not of mental insanity but of creative insanity.  I would tell Theo that his devotion to his brother and his willingness to support him (despite their differences) allowed the receiver of one of the greatest gifts of divine artistic fire to create some of the world’s finest masterpieces before he burned out.  And that Theo’s devotion gives us a model for giving and acceptance and selflessness that we can but stand in awe of and desire for. 

The lights of the Taverna are burning low and Vincent and Theo prepare to leave us.  But Vincent’s final words to us are the words he wrote in a letter to Theo in June of 1877:  “Not a day without a line*”; by writing, reading, working and practicing daily, perserverance will lead me to a good end.”  These are words that Vincent lived by, and believed in, and proved true in the course of time.  While we may not all burn with the same fire, we can warm our hands and our hearts with those words of advice and our own daily manifestations of it.  And one more glass of absinthe.

(*The quote is by Gavarni, an illustrator and artist)

Visit me at http://marimann.wordpress.com or www.madeleinemoments.com.