Black Birds Just Want to Have Fun and, I might add, they appear unbidden when I am trying to get to sleep. Birds posing, flying, eating, pecking, chasing, somersaulting for no apparent reason. So I assume they just want to have fun and they come to me because I am willing to give them a form on paper on a Friday night, to reside forever in my Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal.
I sometimes worry that I might run out of images. OMIGOD, what if I go to the well one day and it is dry. It is a profoundly irrational fear – what can I tell you. I have more ideas for paintings than I can possibly produce in this lifetime. The ideas sometimes come from a place I visited – or a particular experience. But more often than I would expect, they emerge from the ethers, rather fully developed and all I need to do is put what I see behind my eyeballs on paper. So it is with playful black birds. A sketch now – and almost certainly the ingredients for a more developed piece later.
Perhaps they are giving me a tip: winter is nearly over. Buy some pink and yellow tulips and put them on the dining room table for your husband to see. Prune the roses, clean the winter drudge from the windows, let the February sun stream through the open door onto the hardwood floor.
Hot basalt Green salt Spindrift The light and hammered surface of the sea; the guessed-at life of gulls; pale chalcedony calm of anemones locked in the orange death embrace of a starfish arm. Agates: only think and the light catches the blood egg red in the black sand— What is still? The rock. What moves? The sea. What blows? The surf. What blazes? The sun. What rises? The moon. What gathers? The dark. What thinks a long, slow thought through time up through moss? Cedar ascendant and red. All childhood, all tragedies, all things both broken and complete rise up the resinous thoughtlines of wood. You and I are flat cedar fronds for this season only, extending over a remote bluff, itself millions of years old , itself crumbling into the sea. Fronds the shape of spindrift, the way we catch the light—no one sees us and yet this cedar rises. We point her anonymous fronds at the sea and the sun and the moon and the night and the dawn and the day and the sea.
February 13, 2008 In my Creative Writing classroom at Linfield College, we are using the book Writing and Being: Embracing Your Life Through Creative Journaling by G. Lynn Nelson. He poses an exercise: in personal quiet, search your body for places of tightness, feel where pain has created “fists,” and write that fist into a flower. I invited my students to first represent that fist in image, then transform it into a flower, and then move to writing that process.
I always work in the classroom with my students. This time, I imagined all of their fists together in the center, hands in different stages of unfolding to the flower they are, and as I thought of them, I drew.
I have often had the eerie experience of feeling that the classroom was my brain and the students all held within it, that my action of drawing or writing with them affected us all, moved us along through time as a more coherent whole, as I did on this day with this drawing.
This image, “Fists Into Flowers,” was like a Navajo or Tibetan sand painting–created in a room where I was centering others who were moving their emotional fists into flowers.
February 9, 2008. Very late at night, I conceived of this image as a ploy against depression. Willing the grayness in my spirit to lift, the picture worked so well that it took on a whole new life of its own. The depression went away instantly and the image had its own ideas about what needed to happen.
This meditating Goddess is connected to invisible source above. The life force moves through her endocrine system like sap through a tree, and indeed her body is deeply rooted into the earth. She provides a safe home for owls, ferns, leaves and stones, cradling them within her.
The night of February 3, the crows and the cormorants come with a message of major change. They fly over a calm ocean with an active, but not foreboding sky in the background. When they arrive this way in huge flocks, organized and purposeful, they always bring news – a psychic heads up if you like. The next day, February 4, I received an invitation to a wedding in Tulum on the Yucatan Penninsula in Mexico. This will be a very special trip. My husband Tom and I will be meeting the people who live there – our friend Xan is marrying a Mexican citizen.
To me, going to Mexico signals a major life change. My friend is moving there, opening a gallery there, offering me a place to show and sell my art. This is a passport to jungles, Mayan ruins, iguanas, white beaches and Mexican art. The crows have me learning Spanish and ordering books on Mayan art and culture. The crows have me painting 6 shaman, etched into a canyon wall. I will eat, sleep, think and dream of Tulum until I get there and perhaps for ever after.
In this dream, I am leaving a place which is both WSU, where I went as an undergraduate in 1968-71, and Camp Zanika Lache, where I attended Camp Fire Girls Camp for so many years when I was a child and young girl. Mom and Daddy are here on the campus, too, also getting ready to leave. I am walking just at dusk to find them.
I walk under a Doug fir past a closed up log cabin, following an old path that winds past the cabins and connects them through the forest. Quartz chunks line the path. In the dimming light, I spot a particularly large piece of rock crystal and pick it up.
It is a huge quartz crystal surrounded by crystalline shapes like petals. I look at the other quartz pieces lining the walkway and many are partially defined crystal blossoms, but none so fine. I decide it is okay to keep it, and I hold it in both hands as I round the backside of the cabin and walk into the deepening gloom of the forest toward my parent’s cabin. The crystal emits a low, yellow light.
Knowing how to approach or even think about the topic of spirit allies is a tricky one, especially when I’m trying to explain the concept to my students. I have chosen the term put forward by Kate Wilhelm in her book Storyteller, which is “Secret Partner.”
She says your novelist-within can be programmed to work on the story even while you’re doing other tasks. Students are receptive to the term “Secret Partner,” but lately I find that I also use the term “Wonderful One Within” for my students.
However, that is a simple binary of inner vs outer, and any artist knows the situation is more complex than that. So next, I introduce the idea of The Editor. I have them personify The Editor in writing and in drawing; in that way, they can externalize and begin to make choices about when The Editor does and doesn’t appear.
But the real situation is yet more complex than that. I have learned through Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art to externalize Resistance, which has revolutionized my ability to stay on task. So there we have four aspects of the personality externalized: outer me, Wonderful One Within Me, the Editor, and Resistance.
Then who are the rest of the figures who recur repeatedly in my drawings; for example, Turtle, and the woman named Nightwinds, and the crazy-eyed Cubist screaming head called Teecher, and the Silver Fox who showed me the way to the past and to a new direction in art, and the tiger cub who embraces turtle?
Spirit Animals Hoping to Be Adopted Together (Tiger Cub and Turtle)
These aspects of the deep personality enchant and empower even as “they” lend “us” –who ARE all these people? 🙂 — their unique gifts that help “us” navigate “our” lives. Secret Partners, Allies from the Dream World where our Night Vision guides the way…
Friday, February 1, 2008. Late night drawing-colored pencil. I am still on the market for gel pens which will provide more contrast. I have painted a lot this week. I am starting to log in long hours at the easel on consecutive days.This is my first ever opportunity to do that and certain things are becoming apparent.
I do not paint alone. I seems to me that I have many, many supportive helpers and I do not know exactly who they are. Sometimes I think a specific famous painter – I hear a wry comment from Kahlo in my head. But more often I sense entities that certainly help me and oddly enough, I think that sometimes I help them. I do not have elaborate theories about who these people are. The more I read about science, the more I realize that the idea that man is the only intelligent entity in the universe is almost certainly as ridiculous as the idea that the earth is the center of the solar system. As ridiculous as the idea that men are somehow closer to God than women. As ridiculous as the tragic and mistaken idea that man should have dominion over the earth.
It seems almost certain to me that there are many forms of life and I hope to the Goddess that they area more intelligent than we are. I am beginning to be suspicious that parallel realities are abundant and that none of this is even slightly woo woo. I am reasonably sure that science is a long way from nailing down the answers to most of the really big questions. I feel that it would be dishonest of me and a waste of time to develop a strong belief system. I guess I do not put a lot of stock in belief systems. In the meantime, I have allies in unusual places and my life seems to be working better because of their welcome presence in my life. And no, I do not hear voices and they do not tell me to do anything more threatening than “more thalo blue please.”
This blog post is commenting on Cheryl’s post and her dream sketch of 1/22/08 titled “Many dreams of a chicken with a golden egg.”
I read an article by Martha Beck, a life counselor, in current issue of The Oprah Magazine about the power of making a list of what you want. Several stories were recounted—one was about a woman named Helen who had been given a terminal prognosis of cancer by her physician. She pared her life back to the core (sound like anyone you know?) discovering only what was of supreme importance to her. Then her doctor said the diagnosis was in error—and she lives on a new woman.
However, she finds now that whatever she wishes for weirdly and magically appears. It is she who said the pull quote, “[From my Core of Peace] everything I think seems to materialize…I swear, if I held out my hand and said ‘apple,’ one would appear.” The author goes on to say, “She held out her hand in illustration. Another friend pulled an apple from her bag and put it on Helen’s palm. We laughed…nervously” (Beck 68).
Beck said that is because Helen’s desire now comes from her Core of Peace. She no longer concerns herself with living in The Shallows. She has passed through the Ring of Fire where all desire is burned up and come to dwell in her Core of Peace. From that center point “ask and it shall be given to you.”
I see this as a correlative to where we both are in our lives now; we have had experiences that have peeled us back to the Core; however, in part, we still know what it is to want something from “The Shallows.” And we know the heat from the Ring of Fire when we try to drag something from the Shallows through the flames to the Core—it gets burned up!
If your grant is written from your Core of Peace and sent out into the world, the answer will come one way or another. If not the grant, then from some other devious angle. But you cannot win if you do not play!
Your picture is interesting because the goose that is laying the golden egg is on top of the figure’s head where it can’t be seen! The brain is bubbling and the brain bubbles are coming out of the mouth—what is that? Soap for Truth? Rabindranth Tagore talks about laughter being like “foam on the flood” of being. Foam is a transitional substance combining air and water—so something about transition?
If I look at the face in another way, the foam represents hair coming around the shoulder–and is that a yellow ribbon or a pink ribbon and what does it represent to you?
The face looks like a Greek or Trojan mask–perhaps even Aztec?
Works Cited
Beck, Martha. “Go Tell Alice.” The Oprah Magazine. February 2008, 64.
So this is a learning curve, the technology needed to make this blog work well. I cropped this image but could not retrieve it to use it here. No matter. This is a scribble drawing and it is as good as anything to speak to my life right now. I finally renounced working a day job. It is now up to me to see what my life can actually generate. I never wanted to be an entrepreneur but now…
Today I packed my beat up 1999 red Subaru Forester full of paintings, carefully wrapped and packed. Expensive frames, original art. I made the short trip into Kent to hang the paintings, only to find that the facility was locked. No one there. I called of course. The woman I talked to was not drunk but maybe something more serious. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t string words and thought together. Lots of that going around these days. What is wrong with people? Really? I finally called her sister and she was well grounded. Hang art tomorrow at noon. This is good.
Today I received a new print order for a Mickey’s Dragon. This early evening, a call from someone that owed me money. A credit card number and then a new commission from the same person. I am giving art and my art business just about 100% of my focus and attention and many things are falling into place. I couldn’t prove it by money just yet but the art itself is moving along by light years, or so it seems to me. I feel just slightly crazy -it feels so right and yet so out there to concentrate so intently on what I have always wanted anyway. Giving in to such a lifetime compulsion could be viewed as neurotic. I think that many artists go down in history as somewhat crazy. I am beginning to understand how that happens.
I do not see myself as mentally ill but I suspect that most people do not ever become consumed by art. It is not something we choose – art is more invocation than inspiration and I can feel that in myself. I did not imagine this compulsion toward art – I do not have that power; it started so young. By 3 years old and unrelenting throughout my 61 years. Art is a stalker and a deadly one at that. I truly believe that it would have taken me out in one way or another if I had not said yes.
