mY fRiEnd aRt

My friend
my best
friend
Art.
I'll miss you
so much.
Sorry you
won't make
your 90th
birthday
soon.
I'll love
you always
like a dad.
Always
in my
heart
and memories.
Please watch
over us.
Thank you.
xx

Nothing to lose but FeAR

Some of you may have read my previous posts where I have talked about the gospel choir I joined this past fall. Now I have had this passion for singing, music, dance since i was a child. Unfortunately I was not encouraged much as a child, otherwise I think I really would have flourished. Too late to teach an old dog new tricks? Well, who knows. I can play guitar, piano, and sing, sometimes. Anyway at an open mike coffeehouse recently I was talking with a friend about how I really wanted to go on stage and sing my chant a la Thich Nhat Hanh. She said well, what have you got to lose? And I said Fear. We went on about that for a bit. All I had to lose was fear, what a novel approach. Is it that simple? And recently I thought, maybe I can give up this lifelong dream of music and be at peace with that. Part of me did feel relief. Now maybe I will suceed at it with less pressure on myself. And all I may lose is fear. : )

Would that clear the way for more love?

LoVe is the LaP

Love is the LaP of the family, the comfortable couch.
: )

Another beautiful mosaic from Riverside Park NYC!

Love those you love.

the Queen of Deep

THe KeY

Are you the type of person who can chit chat and small talk? Can you also go deep? Can you share yourself with someone? Do you open yourself, make yourself vulnerable in order to love, and care about someone deeply? Can you laugh at yourself? Can you strive to evolve? Can you admit when you are wrong? Can you love a child? Can you see their perfect core? Their unaffected start in life, and how we shape and mold them. How we can consciously teach them, or not, our strengths and weaknesses. This is what life is about.

It is the challenge of life. To love, and to go deep. Deep into ourselves, find the jewels, hold them up high to shine the light for all we touch.

The photos in this post are from a stitchery piece I did, an exploration of love, of memories, of relating love, of exploring fibers, beads, and stitching, both by hand and on the sewing machine. The scene is about my memory of an event in my childhood with a boy with whom I had a rare friendship. I called the piece The Key. The image of the key itself is made from rolled cigarette foils in gold and silver. No I didn't smoke the cigarettes. Blach! (although i have smoked-so i'm not that perfect!) I bought a REALLY tacky pillow from a thrift store that someone had painstakingly made, with looped fringe all around the edge made from the cigarette foils. I was very affected at the time by a deep love, and my stage performance of the Vagina Monologues. It was a huge turning point in my life. My heart broke, but like the phoenix, rose from the ashes to continue to open.

Love, love, love to you.

PLANt HaPPY ness

I bought a plaque thingy the other day at the thrift shop it says: One who plants a garden plants happiness. I like that.

Plant love.

I've been taking yoga. I love it. And I've loved it since I was a little girl. My mom did yoga after we moved to Canada, and me and my sister joined in doing weird things like breathing out all your air and then sucking your abdomen in until it pretty much touched your spine. Tonight at yoga we did a headstand, which I also learned with my mom. With my mom we learned with Kareen Zebroff, on TV I think. She actually wrote back to my mom after she wrote to her when she had cancer.

I have been thinking a lot about how when I used to take yoga as an adult , I used to cry. Even last year at a cool type of exercise/freeform dance class on the Sunshine Coast, I cried. It was always weird for me , and I always felt so awful and alienated because no one else was crying and no one ever hugged me or talked to me about why I was crying. ... and mostly I just could hide the fact that I was crying so well, ...or people just don't care. Or maybe they think you are unstable when actually you have just had some incredibly traumatic things happen to you at a young age, and then you just shut down that part of you and you perservere through all those things that came next in your life. For years.

I don't know why I've been thinking about this, but the good thing is that I don't cry now at yoga, at least not yet. I may have tonight after my day, but a really good thing happened, and some people were really nice to me, so I felt better.

Anyway, now after all these years I can finally breathe. Breathe life into my lungs, love into my lungs, love into life, and into others, and into the world. Healing can take a very long time, and require a tremendous amount of love. Not too many have stuck in there with me through all this. Most don't even know.

Love all you can.

My yoga teacher says "forgive quickly, kiss slowly" .

I like that. I say hug someone until you can feel their heartbeat, which might take awhile.

FuLL CiRcLe

This design work on fabric is the result of another project we did in Youth Arts this summer. This was the first project.

This one was the one I made quickly to try out the methods. : )

I was explaining to the kids about fabric structure and the difference between weaving and knitting. We did some "de-weaving"; pulling out the weft to reveal the warp as fringe.

We also talked about the use of dye to color the fabric. We used the dye in crayons to color the fabric. We ironed out the wax to leave only the dye behind. The kids found this fascinating!

This little guy loves Pokemon!, and he knows I love the swirly stuff of Polywrath, so he made this for me. : )

This little guy designed his to honor his love for his mom and dad!

The first time I was teaching Youth Arts, it was the same program that I taught this summer, in the same small town! Then was the first year it was run through the recreation Commission (1983). Now it is run through the Arts Council (where it has been for many years now). That first time I had been pushing for the program to the head guy, David Speed, for a year before he started it up. David was a good guy. I worked on the program with a guy who had graduated from Emily Carr in Vancouver.

I have never lost my joy of working with children. I have succeeded with that dream, now that I am a mother (thank god!). I have worked as a nanny 3 times over the years, I volunteered in a daycare holding babies in New York, and have also done two stints working for the summer recreation programs for kids, with the Recreation Commission.

Fibre Arts. This is what I know, and love.
I really
enjoyed the challenge, and
was thrilled to be asked to teach
Fibre Arts to
kids this summer. This is truly
the easiest, and most
joyful job in the
world to me. After years of personal
growth work, to
get in touch with that
little "child within" me. I am healed. I love,
understand, and
identify with little
children. When I was nineteen,
and I explored my
future career options
through aptitude tests at the college,
it became a
toss up for me to choose
between, the fashion industry, and early
childhood education. Fabric is a natural
for me, and teaching it to children (and the young of heart : ), well why
not?

Full circle, in this small town. Full circles are weird, but Hallelujah! They are what life is all about. Watch for them.

I like these words by Woodie Guthrie, (even though I AM GLAD to be grown up. I still feel the joy and wonder a child has). :

"Watch the kids. Do like they do. Act
like they act. Yell like they yell. Dance the ways you see them dance. Sing like
they sing. Work and rest the way the kids do.
You'll be healthier. You'll
feel wealthier. You'll talk wiser. You'll go higher, do better, and live longer
here amongst us if you'll just only jump in here and swim around in these songs
and do like the kids do.
I don't want the kids to be grownup. I want to see
the grown folks be kids."

ArMs oUtStrEtchEd FoR LoVe

I attended a two day MiXed MediA workshop this past weekend. The purpose was to look at self, and emotion in art.

I created four objects. A doll (self), an encaustic portrait (self), a rusty chicken (self as an animal), and a collage on board (who I am). (I'll post them all eventually...)

I chose the burlap fabric for this doll (yet uncompleted) because I yearn to dabble in rug hooking. I will attempt some rug hooking on her, possibly to create her face, or her heart.

This doll was sewn by hand, and was created after completing 7 minutes of writing around the theme "I remember"..... I cried and couldn't read my writing to the group. I wrote about remembering when love was simple, and when I was learning to walk pushing a little wooden box my brother had made me.

This brought me to losing my father; he left when I was two. I never saw him again. He died three years ago, with me never knowing who, or where he was. I believe this has affected me my whole life. I didn't write this on my paper, but it was there in between the words. I dreamed of it that night.

My writing was mostly about love. Remembering as a very little child how love was easy, and how free I felt, when love was there. I wrote about friendship, family, and love. About how when you can't feel love, it's hard to see love. How when you haven't had love, how it might be hard to give love.

I remembered wanting to learn to sew at age 9, and my mother would not allow me to use her machine, until I learned in school at 14 (which was, coincidentally, the year she died). I remembered how this created a barrier between my mother and me. Then, as a child, I received prizes for my hand sewn work at the fall fair. My mother was a talented seamstress (it ran in my family), but she couldn't share it with me enough, to find the joy to share with me. She did show me how to cut a pattern for a pair of pants, for my sister's barbie (I started with Barbie clothes), with the extensions for the crotch, and sent me on my way. I remember hand sewing them on the front lawn, in the sun, on a blanket. (..still have them, if anyone wants me to post them..)

I remembered losing my mother (at 14), missing my sister (separated through foster care), having no family, and how my cat had no voice to meow. ..hmm, is this getting symbolic, or what... I remembered after returning to the island, from NYC after 7 years (going through my Saturn return), how I discovered that my purpose in life was to learn about love. (My friends thought I was crazy, and couldn't relate.) I remembered how my son is my best love ever.

The workshop was very challenging, and put me way outside my comfort zone in many areas. I pushed myself to learn different techniques, and to forge through emotional zones (which actually diminished, somewhat, the joy of exploring new techniques for me)... it was worthwhile, but conflicting... Today I cry as I decompress. Some may wonder what all this has to do with art, creativity, and design. I say this: it is EVeRYTHiNG!

Thank you, Ken Flett, for the class, your friendship, and the opening in my heart for love.