"It would seem we have been admitted to the spheres of dreams and magic." -Goethe

 

2024

What a year!

I traveled to 5 states (Iowa, New Mexico, New Jersey, Oregon and New York) and 5 countries (France, Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, and Mexico.)

I made lots of ceramics and knitted a bunch of hats, socks and scarves.

I catalogued hundreds of thousands of images of wildlife for camera trap studies in California run by my sister-in-law.

The days seem to go longer and longer but the years seem to go faster and faster. Where does the time go? I moved in Colorado when in my 40's and now I am in my 60's. I often go to bed at 9 and get up at 5. I am feeling my age but also the need for travel and adventure and movement still while I can.

I am ready for 2025, even if the political climate is dismal right now. I move toward JOY.

Working on a series of Wall Altars

Rumi said, "Feel yourself being quietly drawn by the deeper pull of what you truly love".

Reset to find bliss.

 

Hi rare reader - although this blog is something like 15 years old, I know I rarely post and rarely (never?) seem to have readers. So if you are reading this you are super special and I applaud you!

I am in Taos.

I am alone in Taos, subletting a way-out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere house, with a generously provided pottery shed. I am alone in Taos (well, an hour north of Taos in the middle of nowhere) following my bliss. My household where I actually live consists of one grown daughter, my 93 year old mom, a geriatric dog and my long suffering husband. My household is loving, but chaotic and full of conversation and trips to walk the dog, get coffee, buy a last minute grocery item, and constant input. 

This Taos month is a household of only one, me.

I am here to be alone. and it is, actually, quite lonely.

I am here to follow my bliss into a higher level of ceramic skill; I am taking an intermediate throwing class at the Taos Ceramic Center, and vowing to practice every day. Our first week was cylinders. Look at my cylinders! (See above.)

I am here in my own little Eat, Pray, Love retreat to find my happiness and find my focus. At home my mind is all over the place, often not great places; and even though I meditate and walk and shamanic journey and nap and try to eat right and make myself socialize at least once a week, and do all the things, I always have an urge to travel, to leave, to be somewhere else.

Thanks to Liz Gilbert, I know I am not the only one who needs these escapes. Maybe a month was a bit ambitious, I really am missing my family, but it is so good for me to have this reset.

Reset is healthy. Reset is very good for your spirit. Reset is to rethink goals and dreams and ideas. This reset is lonely, but here I am, finding my bliss.

What is your bliss? How do you find it?

#eatpraylove #ceramics #pottery

2*0*2*3

"It would seem we have been admitted to the spheres of dreams and magic."
-Goethe

Another year.

Another set of journal pages, blank and ready to fill.

Another dream journal to be seeded with the urgings of my subconscious.

Another 365 days to make, rest, move, stretch, enjoy, delve, read, push, pull, relax, motivate, splurge, save, laugh, cry, watch, perform, travel, and burrow into my home space.

How about you?

Fifteen Years

Congrats.

To me. 

I wrote my first post here 15 years ago, October 2, 2007. I know this blog did not take off and light fires around the world of creative journaling. I know I don't get many comments. I know that most of the subscribers from years ago aren't that active here. But I have cherished the connection over the years, and the words/images here make a record of me allowing my collage world a small spot in the Universe that is the internet. Forever, I guess, until the whole thing crashes and all that remains are a bunch of paper books that I filled with thoughts and quotes and images and doodles and the detritus of a mind looking inward to keep me going. 

Will the paper books will outlive the dots/dashes? Who knows?

I have no idea what my kids will do with these books when I'm gone. Probably nothing. But maybe somewhere in the digital world, maybe a small blip of my existence will live on.

Diaries and memoirs are my favorite genre, so how could I not share my own? 

My journal shelf:

2009 - a lifetime ago

I just randomly grabbed a journal from my journal shelf (which has journals going back to 1984!)

The year, 2009. This seems like yesterday, and also like a lifetime ago. Before losing jobs and houses and moving to Colorado, before kids going to college, moving out, making their own families.  Before car accidents, job gains and losses, trips to France and England and New Mexico and California.

Before Covid and surgeries and even before diagnosis of celiac disease. 

Turns out a lot happens in 13 years.

"I and me are always too deeply in conversation, how could I endure it if there were not a friend?"  -Nietzsche.

The pages:

 

MuSe

 

Welcome 2022

Oh, to be rid of 2021. It started January 6 with crazies storming our capitol building trying to topple our democratic government. It ended with a catastrophic fire ten miles from where I sit and type this, destroying 1100 homes. Last night a blanket of more than a foot of snow covered everywhere around me, and I am going to go out and rejoice that finally a new year with new beginnings awaits in this clean white world that has fallen from the sky.

This year I:

--learned to do ceramics, a saving grace in a lockdown year

--wrote this in my journal: "It would seem we have been admitted to the spheres of dreams and magic." -Goethe.

--remembered many dreams, and revisited them to learn patterns and teachings from deep in my own subconscious and perhaps from elsewhere as well. Payed a dream shamanic counselor to help me refine the teachings, invaluable.

--welcomed my second adorable grandchild, and got to visit them both on her first birthday. We went to a petting zoo, picked pumpkins, walked to the playground to swing and play, hiked a beautiful Fall New Jersey trail, read books and cuddled on the couch, sang some songs, and I felt it was the best weekend of my life.

--continued my gardening with plant teachers and allies: lots of sage, some rosemary and echinacea, always roses and peonies and hellebore and daffodils. A few hot peppers, not enough to justify the watering I gave them. A first crop of apricots, most of which I got before the squirrels did. A overabundance of apples, plenty for us and all the critters. Only several raspberries (not enough water.) Catnip everywhere. Compost bags from the grocery store which created a food source for rodents, and then visits by owls and hawks. The wheel turned and created food. The teachings of the plants has always been women's work, and time in my garden helped to unbind me from the political realities of this difficult year. Green things rooting, rising, wilting, and falling teaching me that we will continue to expand and contract in order to grow. Joy arriving in the explosion of color in flowers.

--walked my dog on quiet paths, did some yoga, stopped anti-depressants, got a cataract fixed, ate mostly keto then lots of chocolate, started a new job and got a new (to me) car, tried to look forward hopefully instead of backward with despair, read a lot.  Spent lots of time alone: "I and me are always too deeply in conversation, how could I endure it if there were not a friend?"  -Nietzsche.

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.
Don't claim them.
Feel the artistry moving through, and be silent.
-Rumi

Travels

In these strange times, travel is hard to plan, difficult to execute, scary to embark upon. I always have used dreams of travel to alleviate stagnation. I read somewhere that the anticipation of a trip is more of a joy than the actual trip. Making travel journals with photos and notes of where to go and what to do always preceded any big trip I had. Then while on the trip, I would fill in pages of photos and activities. I treasure these travel journals and go back time and again to enjoy those adventures. Memories are preserved and kept alive for things I long ago would have totally forgotten.

After being homebound for two years, we did venture on two short journeys - a birthday trip for a long weekend, and a weekend to New Jersey to see precious grandkids (ages 1 and 2.)

Now with new variants of Covid lurking, new mask wearing restrictions, and inevitable travel plans halted, I am forced to get my fix from books.

Here is one fabulous book I am enjoying: "Eighty Days, Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bishland's History Making Race Around the World" by Matthew Goodman.

The year is 1889, and two rival newspapers challenged two young women journalists to race around the world in opposite directions, trying to beat Jules Vernes' fictional Phileas Fogg's "Around the World in Eighty Days."

One of the young women got to meet Jules Vernes and he was delighted in her adventure. I was lucky enough to spend time in his hometown of Nantes a few years ago, so I loved that he got to meet someone actually attempting his outrageously ambitious idea of going around the globe in less than three months. 

How is it that in less that 130 years, we have gotten to the point where we expect to hop on a plane and be wherever we want in less than a day?

This book makes me want to book passage on a freighter and leisurely explore the globe. Will that even happen again in this day of viruses?

In the meantime, the book is a great escape.

Here's to future journeys.

Literary whales, from the archives

 

precious soul . . .

 

Become birds, poems.

My mom turns 92 tomorrow.

I found this beautiful poem fragment by our Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo about a friend's 70th birthday:

So, my friend, let’s let that go, for joy, for chocolates made of ashes, mangos, grapefruit, or chili from Oaxaca, for sparkling wine from Spain, for these children who show up in our dreams and want to live at any cost because

we are here to feed them joy. Your soul is so finely woven the silkworms went on strike, said the mulberry tree. We all have mulberry trees in the memory yard. They hold the place for skinned knees earned by small braveries, cousins you love who are gone, a father cutting a

watermelon in the summer on the porch, and a mother so in love that her heart breaks — it will never be the same, yet all memory bends to fit. The heart has uncountable rooms. We turn to leave here, and so will the hedgehog who makes a home next to that porch. We become birds, poems.

C L A Y !

 Let the beauty you love be what you do.   --Rumi

Red Rocks

We did a thing. We went to hear Get the Led Out, and sat outside in Red Rocks Ampitheater with 6000 other people.

Like most of us, it's been a year and a half since we have joined any gathering.

and it felt good. Maybe we are getting back to normal.

God bless Led Zeppelin.

 

If whales could fly . . . .

 

I'm a little teapot, short and stout

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wheel thrown body and spout, hand built lid.

When I glaze I will return to show results.

Ceramics is pure therapy.

C L A Y !

I am smitten.

I simply love throwing on the wheel, trimming, firing to bisque, glazing, and firing again.

How did I not start this sooner?

Better late than never.

Out of Sheer Rage

Have you ever read a book so good, that as soon as you read the very last line, you turned back to the beginning and had to read it all over again?

Early this morning at 3 AM (when I am chronically awake due to teaching at that time) I finished Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, a memoir about his struggle to write a critical analysis of D. H. Lawrence. Then I turned back to the very first page to start all over again.

Here is the opening line:

Looking back, it seems, on the one hand, hard to believe that I could have wasted so much time, could have exhausted myself so utterly, wondering when I was going to begin my study of D. H. Lawrence; on the other it seems equally hard to believe that I ever started it, for the prospect of embarking on this study of Lawrence accelerated and intensified the psychological disarray it was meant to delay and alleviate. 

and here is the last sentence of the book:

The world over, from Taos to Taormina, from the places we have visited to the countries we will never set foot in, the best we can do is to try to make some progress with our studies of D.H. Lawrence. 

I, just like Dyer, am a person who can't always face the work in front of me, and often uses another creative project to delay what it is I am SUPPOSED to be doing.

The only time in my life I have been disciplined enough to actually hack out a rough draft of one of the many, many novels floating around in my brain was when I was supposed to be writing my Architecture thesis. The thesis certainly did eventually get written, but only in fits and starts whenever I was tired of working on that silly novel. I have found one of the best ways to get some big project done is to use it as a distraction from OTHER work you have to do!

The brilliance of Dyer's book is not really this recipe for procrastination, it more is how he weaves in the amazing (and challenging) person of Lawrence; visiting places in his life, Rome, Paris, Greece, England and Taos, New Mexico. Lawrence and Dyer are both people who always long to be somewhere else, and this resonated so deeply with me.

But why do we long to travel when it is so expensive, exhausting, and difficult? I think I have more understanding of this after reading this book. We are looking for something, that even though it is actually right in us, we will see more clearly when we are in new, challenging, inspiring surrounds.

Taos is where Lawrence's ashes are scattered, and where he took up painting and seemed happiest in his life. He had TB and died young, and Taos was the last place where he felt healthy and productive. My daughter lives near Taos, and is a painter, and the energy of this place exudes spareness, creativity, natural beauty.  It also allows emptiness.  I think Dyer admires Lawrence's ability to just BE, doing nothing. He also, of course, admires the boundaries Lawrence broke in his writing (Women in Love was banned for its 'pornographic language' and 'inappropriate content'.) The courage to just do something for sheer pleasure, not for any praise or critical success is huge in Lawrence, and perhaps the biggest lesson I get from him.

In fact, I have a memory of an experience of pleasure thanks to D. H. Lawrence. I lived in NJ at the time and there was a film opening of a three hour Lady Chatterley's Lover at a small art theater in Manhattan. Boarding the train, riding the hour into town, then walking to the theater, I passed an extravagant chocalatier, and on impulse went in and bought a perfect little box of truffles. As I enjoyed the movie I nibbled on these amazing chocolates. The beauty of the natural scenery in the movie, the poignancy of Lady Chatterley discovering pleasure, the taste of those chocolates. . . . all of it, divine. When the movie ended, and I stopped in the restroom, a beautiful young African American woman looked me in the eye (she had obviously been in the same movie) and said to me "Now, that is how we all need to live life!" We smiled conspiratorially at each other, and it was as charming a moment as any in the movie.

Thanks to D. H Lawrence for writing about pleasure and the pursuit of art.

Thanks to Geoff Dyer for knowing the seeking of the answers is actually as worthy as the finding of them.

Thanks to that beautiful young woman in the theater for bonding with this middle age woman over the glory of film, art, nature and chocolate!

Thanks that this strange year of quarantine is coming to and end and I can dream of travel once again.

Now to go read this book a second time. . . . .

 

 

 

Turnings

I have been learning to throw pottery on the wheel. I am taking a ceramics class at our local Rec Center, and it has been amazing for many reasons.

First - it is the first time in a year I have been in a room with more than the people I live with. We take precautions, like wearing masks and staying mostly 6' away from each other. But the casual conversation while we work is just a treat. The six other women in my class range in age, and it always surprises me that I am actually the oldest one! When did that happen???

Second - I simply love the wheel. The slow process of centering, the up and down coning to get all the air bubbles out of the clay, the wetness and smoothness of the surface. I love the way the clay bends and moves according to very slight hand pressure. With very subtle, even motions, the lumpy ball turns into a graceful, elegant form. It is so pleasing.

At this stage, half the shapes I start with end up collapsing, or rotating off center, or being too lumpy or thick or thin. But with more practice, I am growing in skill, and this growth really is satisfying.

Now and then, something catches, I move too quickly or lose concentration, and the whole shape goes off.

Trimming, as well, has risks and just a little push too hard makes the whole pot go wacky.

Third - I am not always upset with the surprises. After trimming, there is glazing, which always brings unexpected results. I spend hours watching you tube videos on throwing, trimming, decorating and glazing. It is a lovely new world of creativity.

Even the off-centered or thick-walled or drippy-glazed pots thrill me. And although I really admire the perfection of production potters, (who I spend hours watching on you tube) I know I will continue to be a person who experiments and admires the happy accidents.

Turnings of clay, of seasons, of years, changes that are expected and many that are not, it feels like a spiral of growth toward some peak. I am looking forward to what that might be.