angels

Today we opened Christmas boxes and put up the tree. Out of the tubs came my mother, embodied in several angels she had given me, some for the tree and this one, above, my favorite piece of Christmas. She's a holy wood nymph with a candle holder, carved from wood. Mom is all around me today, maybe it is her spirit I celebrate this year.

Lucky me, after my parents passed away, I of all the eight kids somehow managed to get the large Christmas Songs and Carols book we grew up with. (Shhh.) It was published in 1955, the year before I was born, and was illustrated by Rafaello Busoni (1900-1962). See below, more angels in his illustration for an Old French carol arranged by Franz Liszt "L'Enfant Jésus s'endort" ("While Baby Jesus Sleeps"). As a child and until I was an adult with my own children on my lap, I sat at my mother's piano while she played carols from this book. We sang together, and I turned the pages. Turning the pages now evokes every bit of love-music on that bench. See how my dad repaired the broken binding with duct tape. Oh, did my father love duct tape.

Maybe Lesley will play this at her piano in our house in a few weeks, while I turn the pages, and we sing. I play a little, but she plays beautifully.

thanks go round and round

Thanksgiving Day morning Aunt Ruth needed apples peeled and sliced for pie. So Uncle Don brought out the handy dandy apple-corer-peeler thingy that he just bought and was dying to use.

Chadd and his sister Kaeley watched and helped. Chadd, who is a student of science had to figure out how the corer mechanism worked. Just exactly which blade did what, and how?

Piles of apple peels for the chickens.

Each apple produced one smooth spiral of peel and one smooth spiral of apple flesh, which was then sliced in half in one knife stroke for the pie.

We'll do it again next year.

open air

Almost every day I read a few lines of Rumi. His words inspire me to be the authority of my own life. Remember when you wrote in school "I think" and your teacher told you to remove that phrase and just say what you think? I tried writing this poem that way, and in the manner of Rumi. I don't mean to compare myself to him, he's incomparable. But I'm happy to be a copyist of what inspires me, like painting students who copy masterpieces in the Louvre. Amazing! I'm not comparing myself to them either.


Open Air


Go outside at night
somewhere with trees.
See how the branches open to the moon.

There is love that is not hot.
Even on the coldest nights
its arms are open.

It is the warmth inside
that keeps you alive.
The sun in your blood as in a leaf
and in the branch
after the leaf turns red
and falls.

Close your eyes. Feel how like love
are the cool fingers of the wind
on your face.


- Ruth M.


Happy Thanksgiving Thursday.

new winter header

Elements:

• background rosebud fabric from my quilting days
• rosehips from Nature, photographed in Beal Garden at the university where I work
• pen and ink girl (who looks like my mom) from World Book Encyclopedia which Grandma Olive illustrated in the 1920s
• photos of a barn and a road from our country drives

I had fun designing this on PhotoShop, finally learning new things, and I look forward to working on the next one for spring. The red and shadow frames, and many others, can be found at Picnik.

(I've added the previous header to this page as a footer.)

8 random facts/habits

I was tagged by Vicki at Faint Heart Art to post eight random facts or habits about myself. Thanks for tagging me, this was fun to think about! It contains more memories than current habits.

~

1. I'm 52, and I have never ridden a horse, which is probably a good thing, if you consider #2.

2. I was run over by a school bus when I was 4. It's not as bad as it sounds, but it's a bit shocking, right? My brother Bennett was driving it around the dirt lot by our church. He was learning to drive, so he practiced in the school bus our church used to pick kids up for Sunday School, and I was playing train conductor, jumping up and down off the steps. Nothing broke. But there were tread marks on my rump. (This is why we have rumps. Why is there no good word for "rump"? Buttocks. Butt. Arse. Back end. Backside. Behind. Bottom. Bum. Derriere. Seat. Hiney. A**. Rear. Fanny. Cheeks. Posterior. Gluteus maximus. Haunches. Hindquarters. I don't like any of 'em. Well, maybe arse is ok. Oh and my sister's word was "buckets.") Bennett and I always loved each other, but after that we were bonded for life, which ended for him in 1996 at age 47.

3. I dressed up as Martha Washington (George's wifee) for Halloween in 4th grade. My sister Nancy (10 years older than I - same sister as per "buckets" in #2) made the entire costume, including white wig with ribbons and black lace gloves, shawl and lace trimmed eye-mask. It was an extraordinary costume, so was I stunned when my teacher Mrs. Woodworth recognized and greeted me "Good morning, Ruthie"!

4. When I am afraid of flying I do a meditation that includes picturing the plane inside me, and I stop feeling afraid.

5. Around the same time as the bus incident in #2, I learned to read on my siblings' laps during daily evening devotions when everyone took turns reading the Bible.

6. When I was 12 Nancy cut my hair like Twiggy's. Wow, I just realized I had my own personal stylist in my sister.

7. When Don and I were first married, and I was a waitress, I waited on John Houseman in little Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, when he was on a book tour. I was the only waitress who knew who he was, which was what the manager guessed and seated him in my section. Was I shocked when I tonged ice cubes into his glass while recognizing that face I loved from the movie "The Paper Chase"! Of course the British actor asked for prime rib, which we had run out of. So I recommended filet mignon. "Fine," he said drolly. "Do you have any English mustuhd?" "But of course!" said I. Only we didn't, and someone had to run to the grocery store for Grey Poupon (there weren't any Rolls Royces around as in the TV ad). Mr. Houseman never smiled once. I would have been disappointed if he had, very disappointed.

8. I dream about babies, a lot.

fire and ice

We've had snowfall already, a couple of inches on the ground.

I remember hearing a man who moved here from Arizona gripe, "Every time I say 'hi' to someone they say something about the weather!" and I realized I had never once thought it odd that here in Michigan our prime topic for small talk is meteorology. It just is. We talk about weather here because it's dramatic, unpredictable, annoying, inconvenient and for some of us, why we stay.

I love the four seasons in Michigan. We lived in Pasadena, California five years, which is where our kids were born. As lovely as palm trees and birds of paradise are, there was too much concrete for me. "L.A. is a great big freeway . . ."

Also, I missed the drama. You might rightly ask, No drama in L.A.? All those mudslides, earthquakes, Santana winds? And oh so horrific wildfires that devour millions of acres of brush, trees and houses. Yes, but I don't want that kind of drama.

I'd rather have the fiery reds and golds of autumn, the cold, snow and dormancy of winter, and the exhilerating birth of spring in the North. I've never quite understood why people complain about the cold weather here. Why do they stay, I wonder? Well, maybe they don't have much choice. It's a lot of work to relocate. And maybe they'd miss the drama too but won't admit it.

In spite of extra time and effort putting on boots, scarves, gloves, hats and coats (and all that multiplied by however many children you have), in spite of the sloshy yuck of puddles on the street, despite icy roads driving all the way in to the university, I adore winter in Michigan.

When a walk in the meadow is quiet from two feet of snow absorbing sound, muffling the scrunch of my bootfalls. When trees are bare of leaves, revealing black or blonde bones ending in fine fingers against a white sky. When snowflakes as big and downy as duck feathers float down in rapid succession. When the pond is frozen for sliding, spazzing, falling and laughing. When skating 'round and 'round an ice rink becomes meditation under city lights. When building a fort of snow-ice bricks makes my brothers and me feel like Eskimos before transforming into soldiers with snowball amunition. When blue moonlight reflects off snow-covered ground and a light in the window warms the house, calling me home to Don. When wind screams outside, blowing snow sideways, and I'm indoors lying on the couch with a poofy blanket, a book, and a fire in the woodstove, sleepiness weighting my eyes. This is winter at its most satisfying, and fire is a well contained and welcome mystery.

Two photos from this morning:

earthy yums

Home grown carrots that Don and Lesley planted in May . . .

. . . simmering with chicken and a fat onion in the stock pot.

A parsnip, rutabaga and cauliflower from the store, chopped and cooked in the stock . . .

. . . spices sprinkled in from the East, all puréed, then blended with a roux for: creamed vegetable soup. With a side of hot cornbread like my mom baked in a black iron skillet, spread with butter and honey that quickly melt and infuse the crumbly gold.

Let winter come.

Wow, look at this delectable recipe blog I found, with great recipes, photos and writing: Laylita's Recipes

welcome the wild

This is me. Not very wild looking am I. But it's not just my fault. I'm sure it's partly my environment that helped make me this way. There are certain restraints on preacher's kids. And well, such kids either comply or break free. Example: I never went to high school prom, or any other dances for that matter, much to the consternation of my football player boyfriend one year: "What! No prom??" I offered that he should take one of his friends who happened to be female, which he did. Magnanimous of me, no? To be perfectly truthful, I went to dances in the high school cafeteria a few times after football games, but I stood in the darkness at the back, away from the rotating disco ball above the dance floor and watched, smelling the weed on my friend Jeff's breath as we talked. Jeff didn't dance because, I don't know, maybe because he was high, too shy or too cool. We in my family weren't supposed to dance as it was too worldly. So, I've got Baptist feet. (The Methodists, in their church across the street from ours, danced right in their basement!) Happily, dancing commenced when my nieces and nephews started getting married. We Baptist-footed siblings have tried our best to move and not embarrass our children too badly at those weddings. I don't think we've succeeded at that, but we sure have a good time. (Sadly, this came after my parents had left the earth. I think they would have enjoyed watching us, and maybe dancing themselves too, in another life/world.)

I've been learning to put my arms around chaos for a while now (yay Beato! yay chaotic oscilations! yay Bishop!), to be more uninhibited, reckless. Since moving to the farm, I feel myself aligning more with the cycles of Nature. But outwardly, I don't seem to veer much from disciplined order and self-control. What's up with that? It's time to start some Druidic jumping over bonfires!

"a carpet, rich and rare"

Today is Sunday. Looking out the window I saw gold leaves that needed to be photographed. I went out into the November Michigan air, which was dark, chilly, damp and about to snow.

I heard my pal Bishop meow.

In spring 2004, when she was a kitten, I had to close her up in the garage while I planted seedlings, because she wanted to cuddle with me and the plants. She'd paw those tender little seedlings like they were the most fun toys ever. Especially herbs, which no doubt had some relation to catnip. She wanted to tear them apart in an orgiastic frenzy. I'd get so aggravated that I'd grab her, put her in the garage and not so gently close the door.

She can cuddle with leaves all she wants, that's fine with me.




"Isn't this a pretty leaf on my paw, Ma?" (below - Thank you to Mary for template help, and how to make photos bigger here. Yippee!)

Today it wasn't too long before Bishop and I were lying on the damp ground together, and she was nuzzled up inside my coat. We had a good, long relaxing November pause in the leafy grass. We almost fell asleep.

An hour later it was snowing. Which brings to mind this poem:

Leaves

How silently they tumble down
And come to rest upon the ground
To lay a carpet, rich and rare,
Beneath the trees without a care,
Content to sleep, their work well done,
Colors gleaming in the sun.

At other times, they wildly fly
Until they nearly reach the sky.
Twisting, turning through the air
Till all the trees stand stark and bare.
Exhausted, drop to earth below
To wait, like children, for the snow.

- Elsie N. Brady

replicating Beatrice

photo by William Gray Harris

I first heard of Beatrice Wood ("Beato") after buying Chris Casson Madden's 1997 book A Room of Her Own (about women's personal spaces). I fell in love with her and her work from seeing this self-sculpture, shown in the book's photo, below. Such ingenuity of the artist to have her face and hands coming out of the wall!



It's impossible to summarize her - thinker, potter, sculptor, artist, writer, lover. If you don't yet know her, think of this as an introduction only. You can explore the web site embedded in her name, above, to learn about her story and her earthy art.

Beatrice lived to be 105 years old (b. March 3, 1893 - d. March 12,1998).

She was called "The Mama of Dada" because of her participation in the Dada movement in New York, which rejected conventions in art and thought. When asked what Dadaism is, she replied:

"What is Dada is that I know nothing about what is Dada."

I know less than that obviously, but one thing I like about the Dada movement is that it began in protest of WWI and its stupidities. Below is a litho she made for an avant garde journal Blindman's Ball she helped edit. It's a guy thumbing his nose. Maybe "Blindman's Ball" is a good name for the days in which we live, and maybe it's time to start a national "Thumb Your Nose" day. Thumb your nose and say dada.

Beato was influenced by Eastern thought, she was a follower of Krishnamurti - so much so that she followed him to Ojai, California and set up residence there. You can see her in a sari, below. She always wore saris.




photo by William Gray Harris
She said:

"Women are the strength of the world."

And: "to women who have diamonds – it can’t touch the joy of opening a kiln.”

Her pottery was what she spent her last 50 years doing. Incredible! She created her own glaze recipes, making such play with light that the luster becomes ethereal.

“I never meant to become a potter,” Beatrice later offered. “It happened very accidentally… I could sell pottery because when I ran away from home I was without any money. And so I became a potter.”

Drinking vessels like this are hallmarks of Beato's work:



Her art, she said, was not replicating nature, but "replicating Beatrice."
She died just after turning 105, in 1998. She had said:

"In Heaven, I’m going to be married to five wonderful men: Gorbachev, Prince Albert, Bill Moyers, Charlie Chaplin, and Trader Joe.”

I think she would be woman enough for that. I guess she's in training for it, as she's still waiting for Gorbachev, Moyers and "Trader" Joe Coulombe. Can you picture her and her studio apprentices Prince Albert and Charlie in the meantime? "A little more cobalt, Al!" - "Charlie, quit drinking the barium!"

letting out a sigh for these centuries

“We ain’t what we ought to be, and we ain’t what we want to be and we ain’t what we’re going to be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr., quoting a former slave, as quoted in Kristof's piece last night

This election was not about race for me, but today, this is what I'm relishing and crying and gushing about. I'm not blind, I know he isn't perfect, and I know the ship of our country might have only turned a degree or two last night. But it's an incredible moment that I have to mark here, almost 400 years after a Dutch slave trader exchanged his cargo of Africans for food on our shore in 1619, and I can't help but weep, along with ". . . the souls of black folk, living and dead, [who] wept – and laughed, screamed and danced – releasing 400 years of pent up emotion."

From his victory speech last night:

That’s the true genius of America: that America can change. Our union can be perfected. What we’ve already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight’s about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America — the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women’s voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

AUDIENCE: Yes we can.

OBAMA: When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

AUDIENCE: Yes we can.

OBAMA: She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that We Shall Overcome. Yes we can.

AUDIENCE: Yes we can.

OBAMA: A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

AUDIENCE: Yes we can.

You can read his whole speech here.

starling symphony

Serendipity led me out to the garage to fetch my camera from the car. I was going to take an indoor photo for this blog, so I slid open the deck door and was immediately amazed by a phenomenal sound: a starling symphony. Not a startling symphony, although I guess you'd have to call it that too.

Once before, Don and I heard the starlings flock and gather in the trees around the farm. The blended assortment of squeaks, whistles and squawks is unlike anything else I've experienced. As wiki says, their song is a mix of "mimicry, clicks, wheezes, chattering, whistles, rattles, and piping notes." Imagine that times a thousand.


Starlings are famous for traveling in flocks, even when they're not migrating. They are not native to North America, and my father-in-law tells me they are a problem because they have few predators. Apparently they don't taste good, and hawks don't like eating them. So their numbers continue to grow, making these flocks more and more vast.

click on the photos to enlarge and see the birds just a little bit better

Within five minutes they were ready to leave. I'm assuming they were migrating south, although they disappeared into the northeast when they flew away beyond the poplars.

Common Starling

Sturnus vulgaris

Please watch this five and a half minute video of starlings at Ot Moor, England, by Dylan Winter, in aerobatics in which they miraculously form a moving fabric of birds undulating and maneuvering without colliding. My experience this week did not quite get to this expanded dance:

art: a gallery of favorites

I'm posting this mostly for myself, to document some favorites of the art works I've collected in computer files. If you're interested, please click on the collage to see them better, and then you can come back and browse the virtual museum, below, by clicking on the titles of these beautiful works to see them bigger and learn more about them. Also, click on the artist's name to find out more about her or him, or the link following their names to see more of their work.

Top row:

1. Succulent Eggplants, Beatriz Milhazes. See more of her work here.
2. Parrot Vase with Tulips, Gwen Buchanan. See more of her paintings here.
3. The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1835. The link in his name also shows more of his work.
4. Clouds and Water, Arthur Dove, 1930. The link in his name is his home page, showing more of his work.
5. The Siesta, Vincent van Gogh, 1889-90. A seemingly exhaustive catalog of his paintings is here.

Middle Row:

6. St. Mary Magdalen, Gregor Erhart, 1510, and at my Paris blog
7. Prelude to a Kiss 1, Denis Fremond and at my Paris blog * Please click on "Denis Fremond," and then click "Huile" to see more of his phenomenal paintings.
8. Portrait de Jacqueline Roque aux mains croisées, Pablo Picasso, 1954. At my Paris blog. Here is a comprehensive catalog of Picasso's work.
9. Peace: Burial at Sea, Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1842. The link in his name shows more of his work.
10. Jeanne Hébuterne in a Yellow Sweater, Amedeo Modigliani, 1918-19. See a gallery of his work here.

Bottom Row:

11. Keelman Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1835. The link in his name shows more of his work.
12. Jean Monet, Claude Monet, 1880. Here is a searchable gallery database of 300 Monet paintings.
13. Le Lit, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1892. Pages and pages of Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings can be found here.
14. Woman Bathing in a Stream, modelled by Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt van rijn, 1654. This site gives Rembrandt's biography and a complete catalog of his paintings.
15. Norham Castle, Sunrise, Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1845. The link in his name shows more of his work.