Farewell to Bohemia?

 

For fear of offending whoever may be locally reading this blog, I have to say that, although Tucson has a major university, 3 community colleges, all with art departments, the Art Institute, and the University of Visual Arts as well, Tucson's Arts District is pitiful.  The so-called "Downtown Arts District" may be sprouting condos and nightclubs, but there's hardly a gallery left compared to the 80's.  It was far more lively 25 years ago, even though Tucson had, literally, half the population.

Tucson is always bringing in "experts" with big budgets to "develop" the downtown arts and culture district (for example, the multi-million dollar "Rio Nuevo" project, now defunct) and nothing ever really changes.  Storefronts with landlords who get tax breaks sit empty waiting for property values to go up, and those promised low rent live/work warehouses are ever elusive. 

I've said it many times, and I know it will never happen.  But if Tucson really wanted a lively downtown Arts District, make the storefronts and warehouses now sitting empty available to artists and arts groups by subsidizing the rents, and Voila!  You'll have a world class Arts District in about 3 weeks, and cafes, little bookstores, and non-profits would sprout up like daisies along side it.  Within 5 to 10 years, the area would be so interesting that artists, having demonstrated that they have some monetary value, could be kicked out by property speculators and in no time at all those storefront galleries would be full of Starbucks and the Gap.   A true success story.

Everyone knows that Tucson was never much in the way of an "arts market".  Abounding with artists, everyone knew 25 years ago,  and now, that the chance of selling work was pretty minimal, and artists who hoped to do so went to Santa Fe, Phoenix, or Los Angeles to find galleries.  But money is not (contrary to contemporary wisdom) the only reason people create.  

Certainly, Property speculation is intrinsic to our economic value system. But what about community goodwill speculation? Creativity speculation?  When the Muse Community Arts Center, a former YMCA building that housed my studio years ago went down, never to return, I had to wonder:  what equity did the people who inhabited the Muse get for raising the "monetary value" of a neighborhood by, in essence, raising its energy? People came to the Muse because what went on in the Muse was interesting, exciting, innovative. 

There is a nonprofit in Phoenix called Arizona Citizens for the Arts. The organization is described in it's website as "the charitable arm of Arizona Action for the Arts (that) increases discussion and awareness of the importance and impact of the arts in achieving quality of life, educational excellence and economic health for all Arizonans and Arizona enterprises." While I am glad such an organization exists, there is also something  disturbing to me about the notion that we need charities devoted to convincing Americans that art and creativity is something that can, just maybe, contribute to education and the quality of life. Is it no longer obvious? Do the arts now need to be justified because they can make money, providing "economic health" and accommodating, in some fashion, capital "enterprises"? What is "real value?" Can we can no longer justify even the creative impulse, the masterful creation of beauty, and the healing depths of self-expression - unless we are convinced they can make money? What, then is "real value"?

Anyone knows that genuine innovation in the arts, theatre and literature rarely "makes money", at least in its inception, largely because it is exactly that, innovative.  Jackson Polluck's canvases may stand out on Sothby's auction block now, but not when he was alive and making them.  Ranier Maria Rilke may be studied in universities across the country now, but he died a pauper.  And so on and so on............innovative creators need community, synergy, discussion to thrive, share ideas, inspire each other.

They need creative petri dishes.  And they also need CHEAP RENT!  Without the cheap garrets of the Left Banke there probably never would have been Impressionism.  Without the cheap warehouses of Soho there might not have ever been Post Modernism.  Without the cheap rent of Haight Ashbury, there certainly never would have been a Summer of Love, the Visionary Arts Movement, New Age.  I might add that all of these areas, while nicely gentrified and expensive now, are no longer even vaguely art centers.

Well, end of rant.  I ran a gallery/studio when I lived in Berkeley and had a lot more money, and I'm glad I was able to.  I know it's unlikely that I'll be able to afford to do it again, there  or in Tucson, and I've given up thinking about it anymore.  But do need to say, to anyone who will listen in these wobbling times, that the arts are the soul of any given community, and of any given civilization. They embody the conscience, the aesthetics, the history, and often, the future of an evolving culture. They celebrate what is best in the human experience, our highest aspirations and our complex human diversity.

Can't resist sharing, while I'm thinking about art and real estate, an excerpt from this great article, which was written about 2000 by Rebecca Solnit.

Farewell, Bohemia - On Art, Urbanity, and Rent 

by Rebecca Solnit 

"... in the future there may be very few artists, at least artists whose origins are middle class, not because the urge stirred up during the postwar era has died down, but because the circumstances that make it possible to make art—or at least to live modestly with access to the center—are drying up..... On my least cheerful days, I imagine a nation in which those who have something to say have nowhere effective to say it. I went to Seattle to protest the meeting of the World Trade Organization, and where my bohemian friends can now afford to live is much farther from downtown than it used to be, when they lived in now-gentrified-by-computer-capital Capital Hill.

It may be that artmaking will become like blue-collar American jobs—it’ll be relocated to places where it can be done more economically: to Marathon, Texas; Virginia City and Tuscarora, Nevada; Jerome and Bisbee, Arizona, just to name a few remote places to which artists have been migrating. Artists in small towns could become the equivalents of maquiladora workers, making goods for an economy in which they cannot afford to participate. It may be that cities have raised, so to speak, their admission fees—by obliging those who wish to stay in a city like San Francisco, for example, to join the dot.com economy, or an equally flush sector. But paying that fee—as Carol Lloyd almost admits—might mean abandoning the values and goals that brought one to the city in the first place and that perhaps made the city livelier, more tolerant and generous-spirited, than the suburbs and small towns one came from.

Cities can probably keep their traditional appearance as they change fundamentally at heart, becoming as predictable, homogeneous, and politically static as the suburbs and gated communities. Those who can afford both to make art and to reside in the center will come with their advantages in place, and much good work might be produced; but work critiquing and subverting the status quo might become rarer just when we need it most. Art won’t die, but that longstanding urban relationship between the poor, the subversive, and the creative called bohemia will.

For a long time it seemed that the death of cities would result from the decline of public space; but it may be that the disappearance of affordable private space in which public life is incubated will deliver the fatal blow. At least, it looks that way in San Francisco.


Notes:

1. "Spectre of Eviction in the Mission," San Francisco Examiner, November 29, 1999.

2. The eviction of American Indian Contemporary Arts was covered by the San Francisco Chronicle and, on December 15, by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which reported that the monthly rent will increase from $3,500 (AICA’s rent) to $10,000 (what the new tenant, Financial Interactive, will pay). "

The Night Blooming Cereus and other Milagros ....

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

Denise Levertov

Here is one of the loveliest secrets of the desert, the mystical Night Blooming Cereus. This cactus only blooms for one night. To encounter a Cereus on a velvet hot night is a magical event...........they were made to bloom in moonlight, to be seen with "night vision", which is very different from day vision.  

Rare, wonderful, how can there be such  "Milagros"?  I remember someone saying to me once "This is it.  It's July 17th, 1996.  This will never come again."  And he was right.......his comment brought that particular day to my attention, both its gift and its loss, over and over.  Even as I remember that day,  I see all the lost  domestic magnificence of a summer day in upstate New York, humid light filtering through red maple leaves, the smell of a barbecue, my ex-husband's voice as he pressed my shoulder and handed me a plate of corn on the cob.  All of that is gone, long gone now, irretrievably gone except within the reservoir of  memory......even "my" husband, who is someone else's husband now.  What, and where,  is the "I" indeed?

Living in this extraordinary time when so much is endangered, and so much is also possible.............I find I have less and less use for abstractions.   The world is too full, and too precious, to waste in abstractions that remove us from the shimmering web of life in the here and now.  I know full well that my own life continues to become shorter, that my sight or smell or hearing will no doubt diminish, that those Goddess given pleasures are, as Denise Levertov wrote, to be "tasted and seen".  Because it will never be July 8th, 2012 again.  "grief, mercy, language, tangerine, weather, to breathe them, bite, savor, chew, swallow, transform into our flesh....." All a privilege, all an exchange, all about reciprocity.

I was reading a book someone gave me by Shirley Maclaine called "The Camino".  I found it  annoying..........I appreciate Ms. Maclaine's bravery, and wanted to know what it was like for her to cross Spain, to walk that road.  But most of the book was about describing her ideas of the meaning of life, sex,  and the origin of species in Lemuria and Atlantis, as well as remembering a past life with Charlemagne.  I rarely felt she was just "there", on the Camino.  She also kept having a constant battle with the paparazzi......I couldn't help but think that she needed to  unconsciously create that distraction as well.  Dying her hair brown, assuming another name, wearing sunglasses, and  saying "yeah, people say I look a lot like Shirley Maclaine" could have nipped that one in the bud.  Oh well.  I didn't like the book, but I did learn something from it. 

I've had a dream of walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain as a  Peregrino for many years.  My pilgrimage would (maybe) end at the great Cathedral in Compostella, or maybe at Finisterre, "the end of the world", and I think I would not be making it to visit the bones of Saint James, but rather, to follow the ancient path of the Black Madonna.   I would go to Compostella to be "composted".   I don't actually think a goal, or a purpose, is all that necessary to the Way anyway, which is why I loved the recent film "The Way" with Martin Sheen.    The Journey is the Reward. 

It seems to me that extraordinary events are going on all around us, miraculous occasions of great beauty, or astounding mystery, and one is often so busy being somewhere else, preoccupied with "abstractions" about life, that we miss the everyday Milagros, given, and given, and given. These are the days of "miracles and wonder, the long distance call".  I think there is great solace in seeing that, even now, even here,  "on the Camino".

I had an experience I called "Angels in Nebraska" back in 2005.......I've shared it before, but would like to share it again.  If anything, the message gets clearer for me all the time........

ANGELS IN NEBRASKA and a Talking World   (2007)

In an article from his webzine "Warrior of the Light", Paolo Coelho wrote:

"I let my life be guided by a strange language that I call “signs”. I know that the world is talking to me, I need to listen to it, and if I do so I shall always be guided towards what is most intense, passionate and beautiful. Of course, it is not always easy."

I have also have found myself engaged in a "Great Conversation" that seems to be going on all around me, and occasionally I’m stunned to realize I wasn’t listening. The conversation seems to become most lively when I'm in movement, whether walking, crossing a trail, or a state line, or an ocean. Like many Americans, I've been blessed and cursed with restlessness and rootlessness. Between destinations lies a mythic land of migration, a free range for the imagination in the "Bardo" of transit, where I occasionally meet Angels of the Flux.

JOURNAL ENTRY, September 3, 2005.

Stopped in Cozad, Nebraska, home of the Robert Henri Museum.

The Museum has some beautiful paintings of the tall grass prairies by a local artist, and a few reproductions of Henri's "Ash Can School" paintings. They don't have any of the originals. Henri's father, it seems, founded Cozad, but had to leave rather suddenly with his sons and wife when he "accidentally" shot a man in a heated argument. He went to New York, changed his name, started the first casino in Atlantic City, and his son went on to study art and become famous. The boy never returned to Nebraska, although he did go on to live and work in Ireland, New York, and Paris. Cozad is proud of him anyway.

I continue to fret about my commitment to art. My life seems like a tapestry, on my good days, the threads finally woven with some skill into a colorful tapestry, I see that I have achieved some small bit of mastery. And then there are days when so much precious life seems wasted, lost, too many disappointments and wrong decisions and wrong turns. Those are days that are about emptying out, discovering things that once seemed so opaque are now, well, transparent. Unimportant. What really matters?

So here I sit, with a very nice cup of coffee and a sandwich at the Busy Bee Diner, where I have a front row center seat for the First Bank & Trust Company of Cozad.

That got my attention. 

 

 

Lulu and Lucy

Back in March I was talking to myself about the lack of love in my life.  The universe is ever generous, I have found, and so in April a litter of 4 kittens was more or less dumped on me, and I found myself with 4 furry bundles of love following me, purring, everywhere I went.  Garbanzo and Mr. Bean now have good homes, and Lulu and Lucy have taken up their professions as artist's muses.

Sensory Poverty?

 "The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature’s precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature."

 DIANE ACKERMAN

 A few weeks ago I went with friends from out of town  to a rather pricey Indian restaurant.  We were enjoying the wine and the ambience.........exotic hanging lamps and sitar music in the background.  At a nearby table a young, well-dressed couple sat with  wine and a candle between them as well. Each had a  little box in his and her hand, and with heads bowed, they were each tapping away.  We wondered if they were discussing what to order with each other.......maybe they were having a conversation?  Oblivious to us as they peered into their crystal boxes,  we wondered if this was a new version of the dating/mating ritual?

What will happen,  as the time of computer implants looms in our evolutionary future........will people talk and tweet to each other in some kind of informational/vibrational code, freed of such unhygienic nuances as facial expressions, vocalizations, physical gestures, smells, auras?  What about empathy, not just for the human world, but the sensory world of nature?  


I ran across a great article by DIANE ACKERMAN,   thanks to my good friend Joyce, that expressed these thoughts so well.........I can't resist excerpting from it here.

June 10, 2012, 8:33

Are We Living in Sensory Overload or Sensory Poverty?

By DIANE ACKERMAN

 IT was a spring morning in upstate New York, one so cold the ground squeaked loudly underfoot as sharp-finned ice crystals rubbed together. The trees looked like gloved hands, fingers frozen open. A crow veered overhead, then landed. As snow flurries began, it leapt into the air, wings aslant, catching the flakes to drink. Or maybe just for fun, since crows can be mighty playful.

Another life form curved into sight down the street: a girl laughing down at her gloveless fingers which were texting on some hand-held device. This sight is so common that it no longer surprises me, though strolling in a large park one day I was startled by how many people were walking without looking up, or walking in a myopic daze while talking on their “cells,” as we say in shorthand, as if spoken words were paddling through the body from one saltwater lagoon to another.

As a species, we’ve somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we’ll survive our own ingenuity. At first glance, it seems as if we may be living in sensory overload. The new technology, for all its boons, also bedevils us with alluring distractors, cyberbullies, thought-nabbers, calm-frayers, and a spiky wad of miscellaneous news. Some days it feels like we’re drowning in a twittering bog of information.

But, at exactly the same time, we’re living in sensory poverty, learning about the world without experiencing it up close, right here, right now, in all its messy, majestic, riotous detail. The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature’s precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.

Strip the brain of too much feedback from the senses and life not only feels poorer, but learning grows less reliable. I’m certainly not opposed to digital technology, whose graces I daily enjoy and rely on in so many ways. But I worry about our virtual blinders. We’re losing track of our senses, and spending less and less time experiencing the world firsthand. At some medical schools, it’s even possible for future doctors to attend virtual anatomy classes, in which they can dissect a body by computer — minus that whole smelly, fleshy, disturbing human element.

When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards. But they don’t report everything. Or even most things. We’d collapse from sheer exhaustion. They filter experience, so that the brain isn’t swamped by so many stimuli that it can’t focus on what may be lifesaving. Some of their expertise comes with the genetic suit, but most of it must be learned, updated and refined, through the fine art of focusing deeply, in the present, through the senses. Once you’ve held a ball, turning it in your hands, you need only see another ball to remember the feel of roundness. Strip the brain of too much feedback from the senses and life not only feels poorer, but learning grows less reliable. Subtract the subtle physical sensations, and you lose a wealth of problem-solving and lifesaving details.

As an antidote I wish schools would teach the value of cultivating presence. As people complain more and more these days, attention spans are growing shorter, and we’ve begun living in attention blinks. More social than ever before, we’re spending less time alone with our thoughts, and even less relating to other animals and nature. Too often we’re missing in action, brain busy, working or playing indoors, while completely unaware of the world around us.

One solution is to spend a few minutes every day just paying close attention to some facet of nature. A bonus is that the process will be refreshing. When a sense of presence steals up the bones, one enters a mental state where needling worries soften, careers slow their cantering, and the imaginary line between us and the rest of nature dissolves. Then for whole moments one may see nothing but the flaky trunk of a paper-birch tree with its papyrus-like bark. Or, indoors, watch how a vase full of tulips, whose genes have traveled eons and silk roads, arch their spumoni-colored ruffles and nod gently by an open window.

On the periodic table of the heart, somewhere between wonderon and unattainium, lies presence, which one doesn’t so much take as engage in, like a romance, and without which one can live just fine, but not thrive.

"Touching Gaia" - A Solstice Ritual of Attunement

We humbly ask  Gaia to be among us.
 
To be with us on this day, the longest day, 
when life is full. Gaia, this shining, white and blue planet

circling, a living jewell
in the Great Dark of space.
Gaia.

Her waters are Her blood,
Her valleys and mountains Her bones,
the forests Her breath,
the Clouds, Her moods,
and we are Her dreams

and the fourlegged,  the ones that swim,
the winged ones,  the two-legged....all,
Her eyes, Her ears,
the mind of Gaia.

I invite you to feel the presence of Gaia,
a living, breathing Being.
Dancing as we are, in union
with the sun, the moon,
the stars:
Gaia's family, Her grove.

Feel your feet on the Earth.
Feel the heartbeat of the Earth.
Feel your own heartbeat
and attune.

Feel your arms like branches,
the crown of your head
the leafy crown of a tree, opening to the sun:
an aspen tree, or a flowering plum,
or a medicine tree, a eucalyptus.
An apple, a poisonous hemlock,
a rowen tree offering fruit to greedy sparrows.

A Boji tree, in the red lands, the dry lands,
a tree of bones
dreaming only of water.
A tall pine in snowy winter
dreaming of the sun's return......

Feel your hands like twigs, your feet like roots.
Feel the sun in your leaves.
Feel Gaia's heart
beneath your feet,
beating like a drum.

And feel your roots
go down from your feet, your hands,
down into fertile darkness,
into secret waters,
past pottery shards
and the bones of ancient antelope,
past cities long forgotten,
past stone and crystal
into the darkness,
into the dreaming Earth.

Go down,  into the heart of  Gaia.

Your roots are a web
of  intertwined roots
that sustain the forest,
strong, keeping you firm. 
Roots that touch all beings.
Go down, feel the fibers that touch each other,
this circle, this land,  the sky, the waters.
Feel the flow of contact, sustaining each other.

And reach out, expand your awareness.

Somewhere in the East a woman rises
to make bread for her family.
Somewhere in the South a child plays in the dust.
Somewhere far west a girl in a red sari
prepares for her wedding.
Somewhere in the far North a painter
stands before an empty canvas,
trying to remember a dream he had the night before.

Follow your roots.  Attune. 

Somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere a forest is burning,
somewhere in the West
poisons are pouring into a river,
and the river is dying, the land is weeping.
Somewhere in the North a song bird is gone
and the fields are silent.
Somewhere in the East acid rain falls into a barren lake.
Feel the sorrow of the land, the pain of Gaia.

And somewhere in the South, winter is beginning.
Somewhere East, the sun is rising. 
Reach out along your roots, feel the beat of life.

Attune, and return.  Follow your roots
back to your heart.  Feel that love, that light.
All one.

As we rise and stand, breathe in the breath of the world.
Take that  light, that pulse, that beat,
and gather it
in your heart, your hands.
Gather from your roots.
Gather and become
a vessel, a tree, a beating heart.
Gather to touch all beings.

And send it down:

Into the Earth, the best of us,
into the Earth, our roots,
into the Earth, our dreams,
into the Earth, our source.
into the Earth, our love.
into the Earth, our light.

Spirals

The first Monsoon came with great celebration to Tucson, and to Nogal, New Mexico, yesterday.  It looks good for Anima too...........wanted to share an article Jesse Wolf Hardin sent me recently.  

 Spirals In Nature… and Our Lives

Walking The Spiral:  Fern Heads, Replicative Patterns, Conscious Participation

by Jesse Wolf Hardin,  Anima School and Sanctuary

 We exist in a world of patterns that we are an unending part of.  I don’t mean just the patterns of individual and cultural behavior we call schedules and habits, the patterning of apartments in building or houses on blocks.  Notice or not, all around us are natural shapes and forms patterned according to design repetition and balance, and a thing’s gifts and functions, purposes and propensities, none of which are obeying some “laws of nature” or “laws of physics” so much as inhabiting and playing a part in systems of replication and enhancement.

Under the intuitive eye of the mystic, the artist, the aesthetic, these patterns have always appeared manifest and childishly obvious, a clearly sequenced repetition of forms that interlock like puzzle pieces, building bridges of content, beauty and meaning between the supposedly dissimilar, and between the micro and macro.  From the scale of the stars in the sky, down to the  repeating shapes that make up the landscape, the balanced eruption of branches from a tree trunk, the mountain and valley texture of its bark and the composition of fingertips and fingernails when viewed really, really close.  They cannot help but sense or assume, that this trend continues down to the invisible, down to fluctuating but largely predictable and wholly amazing arrangements of minute organic cells, sensed molecules and imagined atoms.  And now, these patterns are revealing themselves to the discerning scientific eye as well, as fractals defining the replicative roughness of expanding borders, mathematically measurable, mappable, extendable and therefore to some degree extrapolatable; as natural forms to be copied by human inventors in a process they call biomimicry; as time-lapse captured lightning mirroring the patterns of veins in one’s own hand; and as mysteriously similar galaxies, whether summoned to view through the ocular of an electron microscope. or the polished lenses of a telescope racing through space on the nose a satellite.

The organic blueprint that all things follow, is that of rivers making their way through the mountains to the sea, the patterns of turbulence witnessed in the roiling of bubble-laden streams and the swirling of sunlit smoke in the morning’s air currents, the topography of coastlines and radiating petals of flowers.  Because these patterns are ever growing, transitioning, evolving, moving, we might better describe their pinnacles and valleys, peaks and drops, their waxing and waning, build-up and climax in the terminology of music, the patterns of motive visual forms themselves being rhythmic.  All rhythm, no matter how complex, involves a repetition of patterns that could be drawn out as leaf shapes and snowflakes, coastlines and twisting vines.

Rhythm made visible to the eye, is symmetry… the correspondence of exact or similar parts facing each other, or extending from a measurable center or axis.  And is the propensity of energetic nature to symmetrize.  The ubiquitous fractals are geometrically symmetric, as can be mandalic plant blossoms and crystal formations, but there is also a symmetry expressed in curling wisps of cloud, the lime green coils of a plant’s outreaching tendril, and especially in the spiral… the spiral fern head and spiral snail and sea shells, the inner ear’s cochlear nucleus vortices and the spiraling of Earth’s atmosphere as seen from space, all spinning out from a common center “eye”… a mystical “golden spiral” suggestive of a dance with no possible beginning or end.

“It is only slightly overstating the case, to say that physics is the study of symmetry.”

-P. W. Anderson, Nobel Laureate

The “known” universe is also repeating a pattern, as exhibited by its discernible elements, and moves or unfolds in a spiral orbit, with repeating patterns resulting in ever greater superstructures that apparently repeat themselves infinitely (Joseph, 2010).  The search for a “theory of everything” could be likened to the search for a unifying symmetry, in which repeating, spiraling patterns help connect us to, thread us into and propel us through an infinite universe that may well prove as eternal as it is limitless.

The perceiving and experiencing of this micro and macro patterning can lead to a feeling of rooted connection, of a kind of immortality by extension.  It can help us recognize the motion and direction of individual and species’ intent, and to find beauty and purpose in what might otherwise have been dismissed as ordinary and purposeless.  It can be a tool in our healing of ourselves and others, by helping us recognize and visualize patterns of constitution, energetics, gifts and challenges, perception and direction.

For several years now, Kiva and I have been developing our Anima Medicine Wheel for use in energetic understanding and diagnosis.  More like the Chinese five-element model than the Native American Wheel, it features not only the four cardinal directions or “sources” but also a fifth in the center.  While it makes perfect sense to us conceptually, when I’ve tried to draw it out on paper there has always appeared to be something lacking.  Everyone begins their life embodying the energies, gifts, challenges and propensities of one of the five “directions” or points, yet usually we are moving at one speed or another towards or through other directions as part of our integration, growth, and becoming whole.  This motion, we realized, might be best conceptualized as a three dimensional spiral rather than a two dimensional circle, in which form and being are forever reaching back to their source point, origins and earth, and simultaneously reaching outwards in progressive or widening arcs that weave together as they encompass.

….

We naturally exist in and are inevitably factors in the patterning of the world.  And it is impossible for us to remain securely immobile and unchanged no matter how much we might try.  If we are not integrating and moving forward on the spiral, then we are sliding down it.  How much better it is, then, to walk the spiral consciously, deliberately, purposefully, taking in the lessons and crafting our effect, not only participating in but helping design our contribution, a song worth repeating, a pattern worthy of being extended beyond not only our immediate beings but our finite lives.

It is to honor both spirals and plants that we share with you these photographic images of natural, human and botanical spiraling, visual reminders of that beauteous pattern of corporeal as well as energetic continuation that no amount of dying can ever remove us from.

synchronicities

Tuesday night I attended, for the first time, an Art Salon group that met for dinner and then to share their work.  There were 6 people besides myself, and for my part I brought a Power Point presentation about my "Spider Woman" project. I received a fellowship from the Alden Dow Creativity Center in Northwood University in 2007 for the project, and the show was at the Midland Arts Center, in Midland, Michigan.  In 2008 the Creative Spirit Center, also in Midland, Michigan, did the project as a community arts project.  And in 2009 I was  resident artist at the Henry Luce Center for the Arts at Wesley Theological in Washington, D.C.

Of six people at the Salon, one woman was from Washington, D.C. and knew Deborah Sokolove, the Director of the Luce Center, and another woman was from Midland, Michigan!  What are the odds?