Mystery

Honestly. I paint but often I really do not know until later what it all means.

Beginnings

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power & magic in it. - Goethe

This furry chicken egg is from my neighbor's chickens here on the island. He and his wife are one of several friends I know with thriving organic gardens, one of several people on the island who have inspired my start at a more sustainable lifestyle.

What a project this dream is! My summer has been completely consumed with the infant baby I call my garden! 37 by 16 ft of blossoming food, which cries like a baby, for picking, feeding and loving! But like the children, what joy amidst all this work. The day I discovered that the exotic leafy bush was OKRA was big. My neighbor gave me handfuls of seeds and in my rush I just got them in the ground without labels. It made for lots of excitement though next garden I will plant considering not only sunshine how enormous some of this has become. Gotta run. Tomatoes to blanch. :)

Brave New World

"Parzival's Quest is not one of perfection but rather to forming a right relationship to our imperfections." - Linda Sussman, from Speech of the Grail

Beginnings are out of our hands, poet John O'Donohue writes. They decide themselves, like our heartbeat and our breathing. It precedes us, creates us, and constantly takes us to new levels and places and people. There can be no growth unless we remain open and vulnerable to what is new and different. Martha Beck says, "everything is changing and that's ok" quite simply.

And the universe opens up to us concepts that seem to be coming from everywhere sometimes all at once. This is one I keep bumping into. In my books, in my 12 step meetings, online. Having the right relationship to my imperfections. All of my painting for years was about relationship. Carl Jung believed that spiritual growth was essentially tied to relationship. Joseph Campbell taught that where we stumble there will be our treasure.

The tale of the search for the Grail in Parzival and the amazing book by Sussman that I have studied over the winter, is a blueprint for the ages, particularly for we Westerners, whose task now in our age, is to discern what real truth is within ourselves. We cannot really rely on the church or the President for our truth. Our task, like the one we humans have been assigned from the beginning, is to grasp wisdom.

Here is to brave new beginnings.

Duende

To log on to your own blog to find comfort is serendipidous and as crazy as it gets. Reading Mary Oliver's poem Love Sorrow was a soothing surprise.

For two days I have been experiencing waves of the deepest kind of oxygen sucking pain, deep in my chest where my breath starts. My world of photographs and music and letters and writing got lost this week, in a freak wipe out by the gods at Apple. I had no idea I would fall so hard and feel so powerfully shaken.

The power has visited me before: duende is the word that comes to mind. The Spanish say tener duende, having duende - the emotion associated with "irrationality and earthiness, one which includes a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical".

According to Wikipedia:

"The duende is a demonic earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence, reminding him that "ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head"; who brings the artist face-to-face with death, and who helps him create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art.

The duende is seen, according to Federico Garcia Lorca, as an alternative to style, to mere virtuosity, to God-given grace and charm (what Spaniards call "angel"), and to the classical, artistic norms dictated by the muse. Not that the artist simply surrenders to the duende; he or she has to battle it skillfully, "on the rim of the well", in "hand-to-hand combat".

In some strange way, writing this, re-writing what some good writer posted for me on Wikipedia, helps me see a little, feel a little, like this visitor will leave. And perhaps will leave me richer, stronger and maybe, just maybe, on the sunny side of death.

Wakefulness

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." - Rumi

This sun is out, shining her warm growing heat on the earth this morning, and luckily, on me. I am in North Carolina, in Charlotte, the city of my name, and the blossoms are everywhere: redbuds, daffodils, cherry trees! The pale pink snow all over the streets wafting like waves on the streets, in the air.

Ah, spring, your newness is such a gift to me this year. I am so awake to see and ever grateful. I decided a little over two weeks ago to quit drinking red wine. Being really aware is the only way to get the lessons life is trying to teach me right now. Emotions rolling in like waves, and I am not running away. This feels like such an enormous step. How grateful I am for the strength at this very moment to have the courage to stand still and let the waves hit. Sweet center, thank you. Sweet rhythms of earth, thank you.

Solitude

Rosy the RV, where I live, is within hearing distance of this ocean. But this post is about silence. Rosy has become my cave. But a cave of delight now rather than dread. It was here that I grappled with loneliness in a very cold, wet February - when I realized I was completely mateless and alone, for the first time in eight years.

Maybe it is that spring is beginning and the sun is coming out. Or just grace. But I am honestly relishing this completely private space. I am not only learning to truly value my own voice, to love her, to cherish her. I feel the inner peace creeping in, growing strong and proud, like a scar over the wound of this winter. My heart is dancing freer with every day. I hung blue bottles, wrapped with silver wire, in my still naked crepe myrtle tree yesterday. They will move a little in the wind. The Gullah people taught that the evil spirits would be caught in the bottle trees, that the even the color blue protects us.

The German mystic Meister Eckhart, believed that nothing resembles God like silence. John O'Donohue, poet, priest and writer of Anam Cara, a book I am reading now (and quite seduced by) suggested that "the highly strung character of western life was explained by the absence of silence. "When you acknowledge the integrity of your solitude, and settle into its mystery, your relationships with others take on a new warmth, adventure and wonder."

I am called to more integrity. "The duty of priviledge", he said, "is absolute integrity." Wow.

Love Sorrow

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,

what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so

utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment

by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,

as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.

"Love Sorrow" is a poem by Mary Oliver, from the book, Red Bird, that was given to me last summer by my long time sweetheart, just as our love got lost. Funny. He is a poet, and learned to love her poems because I began to love them. Part of kissing an old love goodbye is welcoming sorrow and grief and that wounded child, too, that shows up all pouty out of the blue. Mary Oliver, whose work sustains me over and over, describes just what I have been trying to do.

What a surprise to find this poem only tonight, seven months later, in the book he gave me. Maybe that is love after all. The gift of these healing words is just that.