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Art tricks, artistic influences, art news & observations


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Cabin Stories 5: death and life

In right now there is reverence

deep prayer, an endless, thunder-throated,

steady dripping Love.

The shore waves sing a slow ballad in 7/8 time.

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Good deaths are soft. A miraculous easing of release.

A shedding

a moulting

a fall, then surrender to moss and insect

to beautiful, fragrant rot:

With my body I nourish thee.

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Or with a scream, to announce the end

before the snapped neck, the severed jugular

The feed, even as last breath releases:

With my body I nourish thee.

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There are other deaths.

Reactive, angry, resentful.

Only humans die this way,

non-compostable, ungenerous

like broken plastic buckets

that can feed no one.

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another death I can find no mirror for,

here among the trees, or in the song of the lake:

A human distortion again, since

This One is badly injured, but still alive.

You miss your mark, wound, then walk away?

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You dishonour Love?

It is impossible to nourish anything with this

if you won’t claim it as yours, if you deny it release.

There is only hush and hesitation then. Wrongness.

The crows cannot gather the shining story.

growth stops.

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So. I see her.

I will take my sharp knife

with proper gratitude and joy,

and release She you could not see

from the living, breathing world.

Since you cannot, I will make a good end for her.

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She is willing, graceful.

With this body, I nourish thee.

NOTE: When I was a kid I used to catch and keep caterpillars in jars. I wanted to watch them be, save them from being stepped on as my grandfather used to do with righteous conviction.

The moment of this morning in the deep thunder rain was one in which I understood that nothing is static. Release through death is nourishment, which is then decomposition, integration back into the world – lessons from a lifetime deepened, woven back into the ecosystem. We are only small in this system, but we are many. There is in fact no use in the forest for glass jars, or plastic buckets; you can’t, even with philosophy and romance, separate death from life. To try is to distort, and cause harm.

Thanks for reading this.


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Cabin Stories 3: weather

The tarps work well. Easy to pull out and put away, which is required since sometimes rain comes unexpectedly at 3am. I am quietly and ridiculously proud of this.

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It occurs to me that I haven’t been myself for some years now. That the strong, creative me, fully open to possibles and wonder is only just now beginning to stand up, be seen and look around again, in these past few weeks of Cabin.  She sings, draws and writes every day now.

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There was a glimpse of this me in 2014, but it was chewed up and diverted by small town commercial gallery egos (abetted by my own stubborn naiveté about the way things work in that world), by painful/ joyful diversions into and out of romantic love and by the increasingly heavy requirements of paying for culturally prescribed things. Things that, from here, I’m not sure I needed.

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Many of the things I did need then I don’t need, now. In retrospect, the psychological distance between those needs then and these now is a lot like the distance from the top of the dover cliffs to the rocks below them.

Down is where you look when fear runs in your veins. Down to the meeting place between Forever Sea and Rocky Shore (while your friend the little white dog tugs at your leg to pull you back from the edge).

And then if you look up, where fear has no place, you can see your old, embedded practicalities for what they are: just a few small options among a big-sky-full of others.

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As I surrender to the last hours of Day 29 after The Leap of Faith, I can see what I could not have imagined before I found my courage. 

My ‘friend the dog’ is the cat who joins me to watch the sun set each night. The place where rocky shore meets the endless water has expression as vast and diverse as any behavioural spectrum, but this inspires fascination, not fear. On every level I know I am stronger. 

When the beauty around me reaches impossibly generous levels of gentleness, I stop drawing/writing/reading/singing, and just witness.

Gratitude.

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There is strong emotional weather, to be sure. Beauty without shadow is nothing you can build a good path from. I welcome it – there’s always room for change. Change is all around, here – dancing with life. 

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During and while all of the storms pass over and through, the spiders spin, the birds forage, The butterflies do their impossible, the waves sculpt the shore, and the trees drink both sun and rain, stretch themselves steadily upward and down. 

The clear sky remains the same, regardless of weather, full of options. I trust the sky.

I’ve landed well.

 


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Unplugged yet more connected

Story Cake first instalment is coming – never fear.  It has been delayed by some time-sensitive physical and academic tasks, which have taken precedence over all else:
I’ve been packing up the old and building the new.

To the point where I’ve got twenty days left here:

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during which I find places for all this house-ness,

and incrementally move my work here:

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Where I can collaborate with the lake, the trees, the critters, the rocks, and the folk who come to drink it all in.  There’s often wifi connection from across the water; I have some solar panels and a battery.  I have paint, paper, books and simple recording equipment.
What a great big enormous blessing.

It’s been a life-long dream, this.  Ever since I first read about Emily Carr and her cabin.

Postscript:  For the next three weeks some paintings from #Selfie and Five paintings at the River are available for a reduced price, fully instalment-negotiable.  Tomorrow I will post a list with sizes and suggested prices, and my contact information.

 


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Resplendence

A multitude of tasks and their stressor partners slow-dance around my house like dust motes in the sunlight; I am happily, if overwhelmingly engaged in the actions of living.

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Every so often pressures collide with sensibilities and swirl the dust mote dancing into a frenzy. Through and over all of this a thin cicada song of anxiety – I’ve mostly learned to ignore this, like the writer who works beside a busy train track.  Some days are better than others.

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I am doing my utter best to lay solid groundwork that will take me/us somewhere new, satisfying and truly relevant in these times.  To connect need to need in a way that can reveal surprising, intersected solutions.

To make functional use of art and music, in valuable and valued service.

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Need to need, like bee to flower. Then honey, more flowers, a resplendent spring.

I seek nothing less than an active, challenging, collaborative peace.

 

 


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The white chair

The test for old chairs is in the sitting, and this one more than passes, happily. It’s an online auction chair, old and formal-ish in the picture that prompted me, upholstered outrageously  – in cream and white.  It looked comfortable in the photo, but this could have been wishful thinking.

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Old White and formal-ish comes with a history I can only invent. I find myself doing so in collaboration – my back against hers, my body held softly but with just enough firmness, my lap at just the right height with feet on footstool.

It becomes the chair I write from in the mornings.  The chair claimed first by my visiting daughter.  The chair that lends lightness to the room, drinks in sunlight.

This chair beckons, but does not compel.

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Old white was intended for the cabin, where comfortable things are welcome, though curiously it seems to want to stay here, in town.  I sit in its welcome, listeningly, and feel happiness.

Outside the window is springtime.  Conversational starlings and squirrels (both black and red), a carpet of scilla on the tiny back yard, humming with bees.

Yes, that’s what it is.  A simple, welcome, peaceful happiness.

 

 


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Pivot

So much anxiety.

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Even here, in this small town Shire-like piece of Ontario, we dutifully find our regular dose of Fox news or its equivalent so we can chew on our worry in a bizarrely informed way.

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If not Fox or Sinclair and the suspicious smell of fascism, or the use of our tax dollars to bail out yet another oil pipeline through the wilderness project, then about Stan the heavy-bearded wanderer toasting muttered anarchy with Listerine; about the goose wandering alone for a month in the open field; the pencil thin young woman entering then leaving the methadone clinic to the profit of some private business person who would rather she stay addicted.

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The young, ballcapped man, tight with sloppy rage, yanks an aging woman out of a broken down house, her shirt still open to a tan-coloured pushup bra.  Every window in the house is smashed.

Here in the shire, on my way to the store for cream.

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We share our news in the bank lineup, the grocery store, the gas station like chatter over an undertow of unease… is any belief system, economic system, political system, educational system not showing signs of extreme erosion, even as others crumble?

It’s not just the climate that’s changing (…weather’s odd for this time of year, doesn’t feel right….).

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Today a friend asked, “What do you know for certain?”.  About anything, she meant.  Gave me pause.

I said that I suspect I have a working theory about how things change, but certainly no certainly.

Whatever work I’ve been able to accomplish – internal and external – in these past few years has been a more or less messy mobius of intention, action, and reflection.  All three balanced and juggled like plates or knives, never still, never dropped.  But this is abstract.

Think.  Choose.  Do.  Think again.  Do differently, Think.  Choose again. et cetera.

My working theory is that, A) pivot points occur only in the doing. 

B) well-considered doing (not just ‘busy-ness’) is an effective antidote to worry.


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Loudly we gather

Future Bakery now has wifi and wall plugs for charging laptops.  This is good, because our B&B has no power at the moment, and there is course work to be done, due at 11pm.

The B&B power is out because the hydro lines were clipped by the arm of a crane as it lifted drywall up into a house a few doors down.  Nobody notices anything odd until the lines all down the street start to smoke. “I’ve never seen anything like it”, says the fireman from the other side of the do-not-cross tape.  “Smoke was just pouring out of the lines, all along here.  We’re waiting for Hydro to come now, but until they do we’re keeping people off the street…”

We are fireman-escorted to our car then drive down the road to Future bakery which has both power and coffee, also where a big reno was finished just last month.  I’m sitting where the cheesecake used to be, beside a wall plug that wasn’t here six weeks ago.

 

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We people watch while the laptops charge, while the Hydro guys figure out what’s wrong.

While the conversations, the meetings, the dates, the thin, the abrasive and the low soft voices, the laughter and the listening-faces.  While the staff continue to sort out where everything goes.  While the cars park and shine, the blinking phones, the open doors because it’s spring, the arm tattoos, the scrape of metal chairs on tile floor.  While the resplendent boston ivy soaks it all in, as we do.

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This after the night in Ottawa Jail Hostel, managing sleep between two distinct snoring styles and one creaky bunk.  The 5am alarm for lovely Slovenia lady so she can catch her Kingston Train, and the barrel of male francophone teenagers pranking each other in the hallway shower.  The rock paper scissors cappuccino made for me at the campus cafe after hugs all round on behalf of everyone’s mom.

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The apartment couch before the drive, then the drive through the 401 rain that clears over the Don Valley, then the arrive and park, the pub (playoff game) and mashed avocado on toast. Out of the pub onto the smoking, taped up street….

Now here, watching.  Now, charged up.  We will go home through the lights and the loud, to the dark.