A recollection

I watched the cast shadows of leaves rain down upon the knoll.  Appearing like butterflies in a hovering dance above the clearing, clumsy in flight.  An embodiment of the sacred pause.

The potential for seeing anew

The flowerhead of an onion

Sunday

the arrival home
greeted by a swarm of moths

The gruesome always accompanies the lovely

echoes of grey ghosts
scratching between walls
and scurrying

a reminder of Idaho
where the headless circled my farmhouse
where their bodies burned in my oven 
(the charred melancholy aroma still lingering in my nostrils)
and where they did win one battle with Frida, under the pine tree 

kindred spirits, they and I


This weekend, I feel lucky to have inhabited the lodge with the mice.

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Compassion and Forming One Body

“While intellectually we may know we’re all connected, how do we truly make the boundaries between inner and outer-–our skin–-literally and metaphorically, more porous? How do we embody what we understand intellectually? What are some ways in which we can practice forming one body?”
  
A talk at the Church of the Covenant sojourner service in Greensboro, NC, given by me on July 24, 2011.  Click here to listen:  http://vimeo.com/26865778 

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A plan of what's to come

the greenhouse: a space of light, experimentation, and open possibilities.  A collaboration between myself, architect Robert Charest, and students.  A vintage lord and burnham model, in a gazillion pieces... in its finished form the greenhouse will be an experimental engaged-learning space for interdisciplinary collaboration, helping to connect science/art disciplines and foster community.

MJ

a west wind moves
by way of the golden wheat
and dissolves in salt

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One year anniversary

August arrived carrying hope, potential.  August arrives again, and with it brings the advent of what is.  The creeping jenny continues to fill the gaps.  Even better this year.  And it points me to the missing limb that was inside my own body this whole time.


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Through the heart

QUIETNESS Rumi; Translated by Coleman Barks

Inside this new love, die. Your way begins on the other side. Become the sky. Take an axe to the prison wall. Escape. Walk out like someone suddenly born into color. Do it now. You're covered with thick clouds. Slide out the side. Die, and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you've died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence. The speechless full moon comes out now.

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sigh

a sharp tear, from which
an intuiting blood flows
toward wholeness

so much of us stuck in a state of waiting... only gazing at reflections.


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What does the wind mean?

I am wired to hear only whispers.


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Mark Nepo, wise words

We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.  Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable.


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Responsible art-making

When the show concluded, I had over 80 onion rescues that needed a home. On March 8th I hosted a campus-wide "adopt-an-onion" program, which saw an amazing response.  Each participant received one "still edible, but not very attractive" onion, delivered by a special stork, with an official certificate of adoption.  The certificate included statistics on food waste in America, along with global hunger statistics, and practical advice on how to reduce one's own food waste.

I saved the "special case" onions (those with rot and mold) for myself and carefully cut out the edible parts.  (And of course the act caused me to weep--not without literal and symbolic significance).  The inedible parts were lovingly returned back to the earth.

http://www.locallygrownnews.com/stories/Threshold-An-Art-Installation-at-Elon-University,27663

they sprout

the onions at the close of the exhibition.  a few had sprouted several inches, some were just beginning.  

Sorrow and Longing, from the Medical Terminology Study Card series

the medical body versus the lived body

to break
glass-like
movement of the heart

and...

coughing up
star-like star shaped
breast pain







These study cards were given to me as a gift, found initially in a thrift store in Oregon.  My friend knew I would love them....

I did love them.  But they sat on a shelf for almost ten years.  On occasion, out of curiosity I would pull one, read it, and then place it right back into its container, not yet aware of its potential. Several months ago during a period of crisis and transition I again pulled a card, examined it, and, as a healing gesture, burned out the text that made no sense to me.  I repeated this over and over, forming poems from the text that remained.  Over the period of about a month I created over 50 elegies, each one a combination of three cards.  They perform as little haikus, transforming a vocabulary of pathology, objectivity, and detachment into meditations on intimacy and desire.

The name of the paint, that provides the stage for their existence here, is stolen kiss.

Threshold

They lay waiting, air moving their skins. With the sound of rushing water accompanying, they exist on the threshold of hope and sorrow.  If the onion is left, it sprouts, if cut into, a rush of tears.

A significant non sequitur

"It does not follow"...  or does it?

Sylvia's words

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Sweeping the garden