Friday, April 20, 2012

Rumination on the Shape of things

iud
broken spoons and pictures from the informative brochure, coathanger (of course), floss, wishbone, indecipherable plastic bits. Probably a fishhook in there somewhere.

Old dead roses and strange new blooms.

token offering of the sexual parts of plants
The pitcher has a crack in it where the light comes in.



I found this on F*cebook, before it infested my internets with a nasty virus - the kind that eats money - LAME. I'm back now.

“Stories are masks of God.



That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brothers Grimm.


Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceivable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.

Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.

So it seems to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them.”
― Melanie Tem, The Man on the Ceiling




the Storyteller


Thursday, April 19, 2012

April 19th

My grandpa had a tattoo.

a reasonable facsimile
 of his own middle name. Sounds like indigestion, he said. Your name? I asked. It's the name of someone I'll always love, he said.
He died 17 years ago today in the Oklahoma City bombing. We waited too long to hear news of him, with a rain of dust and rubble and tiny shards of glass falling silently on our hopes.
I will not make the trip to lay flowers on his chair, for I have been there many times, and today I am busy in loving my living ones. But I'll proudly wear my Sharpie tattoo, and tell as many of his awful cornball jokes as I can remember.

and also it's the feast day of St Alfege of Youtube.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Minutiae

more paintings to come! Much thanks to my friend Nina for sharing my art with a wider part of the world.


all the fashionable blogs say ombre nails are "in the moment",
which sounds like the place to be
clematis

Lots of flowers around here. Some old girl keeps planting them.


Mom likes playing in the dirt...

...but hates to be photographed.

That's almost the face she made when Kid & I conspired to dump a large number of maple seeds on her, from the roof. She also made a sound which I'm unable to properly describe, except to say it made us giggle.

A dramatic reenactment of these golden wings slicing spirals thru the air, without indignant shriek:

That's my mop bucket cuz I'm cool like that. The dog is another story.