Bemused, Boggled, and Bedazzled

Today we have an excerpt from Danny Gregory’s excellent book “The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to be the Artist You Truly Are”.

What if we treated driving like we treat the arts?

We’d assume that people were either born to drive or not.  We’d wait and see if, as children, they started driving on their own, if they had talent and a calling.  If they did, we would be careful not to interfere with their talent and possibly suppress it.  We would make sure to encourage only those who seemed they’d be able to drive professionally.  We’d pay some of them millions of dollars to drive and lavish them with fame; others we would refuse to support, encouraging them to do something more useful for society.  Everyone else would assume that they would never be able to drive and would just stand on the sidewalks and watch the traffic.  At least the ozone layer would be in better shape.

Today I have chosen some words from Abraham Lincoln, as we prepare to celebrate President’s Day weekend.  This is from Lincoln’s second inaugural address, one of the shortest recorded at 703 words total.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

Leisure by W. H. Davies

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

I love Dave Barry. Okay, I’ve never met him, but I can always count on his writing to cheer me up on a grey day. Not only can his writing bring a smile to my face, he is a master of the run-on metaphor (also sometimes known as “running a metaphor into the ground”). Today’s example is from his book ‘Dave Barry Turns 40′. Enjoy! Larkin

I believe it was Shakespeare, or possibly Howard Cosell, who first observed that marriage is very much like a birthday candle, in that “the flames of passion burn brightest when the wick of intimacy is first ignited by the disposable butane lighter of physical attraction, but sooner or later the heat of familiarity causes the wax of boredom to drip all over the vanilla frosting of novelty and the shredded coconut of romance.”

This is the inaugural post of something new here at BB&B.  I love reading, I love words, and oftentimes words will trigger or inform my visual art work.  And so, I have decided to share some words with you.  They may be poetry (as today) or prose, quotes, song lyrics, something from the morning news, or gems of language from the mouths of babes or babblers.  But the words will all have struck me as significant or meaningful in some way.  I’m going to try to post some words here every Wednesday, but forgive me if I am on the road and miss a time or two.

Enjoy, my little chickadees!

Halleluiah by Mary Oliver

Everyone should be born into this world happy
    and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started.

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
    almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
        and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
    is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more
And some days I feel I have wings.

It’s been over a year since I sat down to write anything here.  Life got squirrelly, and then it got busy, and then the habit of writing went away.  It’s amazing how quickly that happened.  After awhile, I no longer felt guilty about not writing.  But now that has passed, and I am back – hoping I have something to say.

Lately, we have been involved in the Great Studio Clean Out.  (I say “we” because my most dearly beloved has been helping out from time to time.)  Bags and bags of stuff have gone straight to the dumpster, and more bags and boxes have gone to other folks who might use the contents in their work.  And I am far from finished.  My goal is to lay hands on everything in the studio (and assorted storage places around the house) and make a decision:  keep, donate or toss.  The most I have been able to accomplish so far is to be able to actually see the floor of my studio, but a little bit every day ought to get me through it.  The bad news is that this could take months!

I find that the hardest decisions to make are the ones that involve things that I paid goodly amounts of my hard-earned money to acquire.  (Of course, some of the easiest decisions are those that start out with “what the heck was I THINKING??”.)  And then there’s all that stuff that was given to me by someone else that I have never figured out what to do with.

Also on the agenda this week is a full revamp of my long-neglected website.  Although the bulk of this work will fall to my most dearly beloved, I have a couple of pages of assignments for writing up information for him to use.  When all is said and done, there will be a lot more pictures of my work, including several new galleries, and everything should look much more coordinated.

In the meantime, I need to get out and take care of some errands.  We stayed away from the Black Friday shopping uproar yesterday, but today I really do need to go to the grocery store, pick up a prescription, drop off some art, etc.

I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving!  Cheers! my little chickadees!

Larkin

Once upon a time . . . okay, it was just last November . . . I took it into my head to have my salt and pepper grey hair highlighted with blue. And not just any blue, but electric blue. So I went to Cliff, my hairdresser, and he applied enough chemicals to do the job. Various folks have been asking me to post a picture of the finished product, and in fact, the day of the great transformation I came home and had my husband/photographer/ webmaster do a head shot for me. It started out rather blue-violet, but after a couple of weeks, most of the violet was gone and I was left with a good strong blue. Worked for me. At any rate, I have enjoyed this thoroughly, and will probably do it again just before I go to Santa Fe in March 2009. So for all those who have been waiting for this, here it is.

Smile, my little chickadees!

If you are expecting me to really answer that question, I am very sorry to disappoint you.  I don’t have a clue what the new year will bring.  I never have.  Oh, I have some things on my calendar – I know where I will be teaching and when – but as for the shape of my year, I really don’t know.  It’s a mystery.  And in some ways, I like it like that!  Without a little mystery, life would be a sterile, boring, all-too-predictable thing.

This is the time of year when people set goals, make resolutions, plan their attack on the year to come.  And these are worthy things to do.  I will be doing some of that myself over the weekend.  (Never one to rush into things, I delayed the planning process to a time when I know I can carve out some uninterrupted hours.)

My point (and I do have one) this morning is that amidst all the planning and resolutions and goal setting, we need to remember to be open to mystery and magic,  serendipity and surprise, blessings and beauty.  We need to keep our hearts, minds and senses open and available to receive what the world would have us experience.  There’s nothing new to this idea – artists, writers, explorers of all sorts have been doing it for millenia.  But as we become more and more bombarded by the “shoulds, musts, have tos, gottas”, it becomes harder to choose simplicity and wonder.

I don’t claim to have all the answers.  I’m not sure I have ANY answers.  What I do have is a wish for you – that among all the rushing and planning and doing, you will find some mystery and wonder to delight your eyes and heart in the coming year.

Blessings to you, my little chickadees!

Remember the old Sonny and Cher hit?  Oh sure you do: “And the beat goes on, the beat goes on.  Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain.”  Okay, maybe not.  How about Cole Porter:  “Like the beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom as the jungle shadows fall.”  Hmmmmmm.  How about the Anvil Chorus?

Well, whatever background accompaniment you care to conjure up, we have been listening to contractors and plumbers all week as they rip and tear and saw and hammer to get down to the studs of a bathroom with leakage problems.  Unfortunately, the bathroom in question is on the other side of the wall from my office, which seems to magnify the noise like an echo chamber.  I have taken to ingesting pre-emptive aspirins for the headache I know will materialize.  At last the tearing out is complete, and they have started to put things back together.  I have no idea how much longer this will last, but the noise level should be down a few decibels next week.

One good thing about the destruction of the bathroom:  the noise has driven me out of my office and down to my studio for some fabric fussing and fusing, and I have finished several new pieces to take to Raven Rocks.  I also have a few small pieces that I will be offering here in the not too distant future, so stay tuned.

That’s all for now, my little chickadees!    Larkin

Oh, my poor neglected blog.  I feel just awful about leaving you alone for so long.  Well, okay, not THAT awful.  And I have been busy.  And I have been on the road teaching.  Okay, that’s enough excuses.  I’m back, however sporadically it might turn out to be!

The biggest news is the opening of a new art gallery here on beautiful Whidbey Island at the Greenbank Farm.  My friends Windwalker and Mary Jo have moved their gallery from downtown Langley (where the rents are astronomical) to the farm (where things are a bit more reasonable) into a lovely space that was once an antique store.  Their place is the most recent of three galleries now in place at the farm, along with Rob Shouton and the Artist Coop Gallery.  Also in the building is a great cheese shop, a purveyor of fine wines, and the Greenbank pie shop.  Mmmmmmm.  It doesn’t get much better than that!  The Raven Rocks Gallery has their grand opening November 7 from 5 to 8 p.m.  For more information about the gallery and the artists who will be showing there (including me), please visit their website.  And if you live in the area and need more enticement to show up, that’s the same weekend as the Whidbey Weaver’s Guild annual sale, also at the Greenbank Farm.

In the meantime, we are enjoying the crisp night air that comes with Fall in the Pacific Northwest.  The wool coats, hats and gloves have come out of storage, and the summer clothes have moved into the back corners of the closet.  We know the rainy season is upon us, but those clear cold days that come around from time to time are a real pleasure.

Be well!