Snaking Sea

"In sacred space everything is done so that the enviroment creates a metaphor." - Joseph Campbell

Edisto Island lies among winding rivers and curving ribbons of sea. Snakes of water. The twenty-four mile road that leaves Highway 17 and heads out into the sea, twists and turns and carries me like a song, like a psalm, in its healing beauty and rhythm. The island is called Paradise, and is chock full of snakes, real, living snakes. Who doesn't long for Paradise?

startled at the grace

When the student is ready the teacher appears. How many times have I repeated this wise phrase? But to see it anew is another. To be teachable and open to seeing the teacher arrive is the great gift. Robert Henri, the legendary art lecturer, taught, in his wonder of a book, The Art Spirit, that there are two kinds of people in the world: students and non-students. True. It has always been so easy for me to tag others when I meet them as open or not. This week I am startled at the grace that has chosen me and enabled me to see my own smug self, the resistant self, the know-it-all one. "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." How simply brilliant!

I have a dream

This morning from my luscious bed office I pulled out an idea journal I keep in this messy pile of bedside books. Surprising me was this quote by Walt Whitman, one I wrote down after reading Lois Palken Rudnick's book, Utopian Vistas : The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture.

"We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake."

In light of our electing the first African American President of the United States, do you think that we are, as Americans, more than 100 years after he wrote this, finally seeing? How hopeful this feels.

the life you save may be your own

I am back in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the little house on the creek I call Belle Rive, after Blanche Dubois's homeplace in Tennessee William's 1947 play, A Streetcar Named Desire. It is a little house, made of cedar, in a bustling city of where lots of bankers live. The economy has me back, from Edisto Island, my dream diminished there by the squeeze of this economy. Dreams deferring.

I have been buried in my bed with all my books, Callings, by Gregg Levoy, which is all too worth another read, Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, the marvelous collection of stories that illuminate truth. Lately I have been completely reimmerced with midwives and birth. I used to teach childbirth classes and my own childbirth experiences were mind blowing doors to strength and self. My journals are filling with penciled pages rapidly, as Julia Cameron taught me to do. And I awake in the night to write down my dreams, with hints of what new door is opening for me. Yesterday morning it was "Women are dying!" ...the mortality rates worldwide for women in childbirth are indeed atrocious - a woman dies every minute from pregnancy related causes. And this morning, when I awoke, I had written in my dream journal, "Are you a nurse?" No I am not. I am an ARTIST midwife. I just walked into my library and staring at me was the spine of the book, whose title read, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own".

Socrates said it best. Know Thyself. THEN give. I am on to something about giving where I am supposed to, to a bigger place. I am awed and grateful for grace today.

light in the dark

I live on a wonder of a place. An old poet and boatbuilder here once said to me that Edisto Island is a hard place to live. How could he say this, I wondered? In my life I have been blessed with love, and like Picasso, I understand the new vitality and life a new love brings to one's heart and one's art. This time I am madly in love with an island, with place. For its breathtaking beauty, for its wildness, and its surprises. This place holds the history of my ancestors, and of the Indians who lived nearby in round huts hung with pearls. You can feel this here still. The virginal forests still whisper her history in the quiet. On nights with a full moon, the dirt road is lit with white light, quiet light. But I understand the poet's words tonight in the dark. Fire ants and mosquitoes, and these flying biting things that live in jungles also live here, and they are not all insects. Life is just this whole package and some of it is dark. God, give us all the grace to prevail. God be with my young minister on the island this night, who has been overtaken in the jungle. Amen.

anguish

I awoke in the night, feeling hopeless and inadequate. That being an artist was not enough. My next door neighbor here on this island lives with a blue plastic tarp on his roof to keep out the rain, and his sewage system is inadequate.
In my email were voices mirroring my own despair, from the Art 21 project. Watching the video clips, here, in the middle of the night, helps me put my own anguish in perspective.

New Orleans is a sister city, similar in many ways to my barrier island in South Carolina.

"Mel Chin describes the origins and motivations behind the nationwide art project Paydirt in a keynote address to the 2008 National Art Education Association Convention, and visits multiple sites in New Orleans adversely affected by both Hurricane Katrina and lead contamination in the soil.

The high lead content of soil in New Orleans — among the worst in the country — was exacerbated by the havoc wreaked by the hurricane in 2005. Discovering that “the disaster was in the soil before the disaster,” Chin felt he had to do something about it as an artist. Speaking before a crowd of thousands of art educators from across the country, Chin recounts, “I remember standing in the ruins of the Ninth Ward and realizing as a creative individual that I felt hopeless and inadequate. And I was flooded by this terrible insecurity that being an artist was not enough to deal with the tragedy that was before me.” Thus Paydirt, and its sister initiative, the Fundred Dollar Bill Project was born."

what is swimming below

"Perhaps - I say perhaps because I do not know how to reflect except by opening my mind like a glass bottomed boat so that I can watch what is swimming below"
Robert Motherwell

Ah, beauty. And what is underneath. Motherwell goes on to say that "painting becomes sublime when the artist transcends his personal anguish, when he projects in the midst of a shrieking world an expression of living and its end that is silent and ordered..."

Today I am awed by beauty. That is enough.

Where love rules.

"Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." Carl Jung

I like to tell my friends that when one door closes, another one opens. It is of course, the message I need to hear this week, as I reel from the spin of disappointment, leaving a job I considered a dream. Oh grace, I know you will meet me.

Within these gracious gates of live oaks on my beloved Allee de Lune, I wait.