Tumbleword

me & r @ fox and hound pub ~ a toast

.

The wonderful Ms. Andrea pasted my forehead with this stamp. I wear it everywhere I go.  I am so pleased -- The You Make My Day Award.  I am glad it isn't the *You Must Make My Bed Award* which I hear is also going around! I am not too good at... doing some things.  : )

"You make my day-Award" works like this:
1. Write a post with links to 5 blogs that make me think and/or make my day.
2. Acknowledge the post of the award giver.
3. Display the "You Make my Day Award" logo with a link to the post that I wrote. (Optional)
4. Tell the award winners that they have won by commenting on their blogs with the news.

I am so new at blogging, the brilliance out there stuns me, people are all linked up, sharing art and links. People are so generous and so many make me think, write, want to drawing or paint or go back into the ceramic studio or dark room.  Its a true celebration of human brilliance and humor, to peek into some blogs, all over the world, in any language and make comment, thank them for sharing. I hope they can understand me sometimes--words translate tricky... ? Art and images always translate language barriers... like one American poet once wrote, "Love is the only language." But we all share the same world...

Sometimes I fear I could get lost in blog space--I get dizzy and can't imagine how much is available--i am a rather slow woman; live with deep conversation, not comments, so its weird that I began this journey... but there is so much amazing bounty! So many people have already been tagged (many times) and I choose these:

Andrea who I give this award back to.
Alexandra Hedberg who just dazzled my imagination with her sharing from Bibbi's tag (to me).
Diane Koehne : Yes!
Dave and Megan in Alaska (living a Thoreau like Walden Pond dream in snow).
Camilla Engman (who needs another tag the way a fish needs a bicycle ...) but the part of me that writes thanks her for taking Little Red Riding Hood out of a book, giving her sneakers to skip around the globe! I think this kind of re-inventing of story is important to me; to extend the boundary of how we communicate... because Little Red Riding hood has evolved as a symbol within the human psyche; art represents changes in our thought patterns.  The Little Red Riding Hood in all of us is set free--she now skips out of the page, into a new adventure, one she (we) are ready to tell in photos and art and words and dance.  This design of Camilla's marks that evolution in a very simple, powerful way!
.

of 3 sisters

.
A day full of much small ecstacy.  The in and out of living in the self, a simple activity we've made so difficult.  All it takes is to stop, pull the attention back inward and lean back into it. 
.
Once, I found myself surrounded by windowless people.
There must be light inside, right? So I start to throw rocks, bricks, anything
to break a window into the dreariness cast.  We are all
so dependent on this light.  Do you understand the task?
Why do I wonder then, how cruel am I...
.
Anthony Goicolea Website:  Very multi expressive: Fairytale Series. Drawings : Underwater:: Belga Series. 
.
Since I started this blog in September, I get awesome private notes.  The blog on a beauty mark brought wonderful comments.  I wanted to post this one ... it came with a wonderful poem about hands.  I love hands.  I asked permission to post it publicly because (its always right to ask) and some literary journals won't accept a poem once published, even on a blog (small as mine).  Here it is:
~
Dear Mansuetude, I have read about you because I could never have thought someone would write something about my rather ranting latest blog that was basically indignation after the fall of our government in Italy...
 
I have read about your "reflections" on genetic "marks", I too have two marks, brown spots on my body on the same, exact place my father had them... I have written a very particular poem on this, not so happy--my relation with my father was rather difficult--but representing as much as possible the truth of what I feel about the matter, I enclose it here below, I hope you enjoy it a little.

LEGACY

My hands on my knees
while I am being idle sitting on the train
waiting, with little patience, to arrive.
The way my fingers lie on my knees
or grasp them for a moment, long,
bony, thin fingers, easily cold,
easily pale, with wrinkled tips.
Shrivelled souls, lost in themselves.
The way the thumbs want to disappear
into the fists, the way the fists
are tightened, tense, looking for warmth,
enclosing the anxiety of refugees
who know they have landed on their last beach.

My hands on my knees, their backs,
the film of dry, thin skin,
the veils of brown spots
like the prints of tiny leaves.
I stretch my fingers, the palms of my hands,
I try to feel them anonymous, aloof.
No way, if you look at them
you know at once where they come from.
You know their nerves and in them
the grasp of the gaze.

By this sea that waits
and lets us wade
in our reflection’s chains.

Best wishes and thank you
Davide Trame
.
Peace 
  

fortune

taste
.
The New Year is 3 weeks old... I hope you all taste a bit of the new fortune it brings. 

My 8 year old neice Ashley just called to ask donations for St. Jude's Children's Hospital--something doing at school.  She couldn't stop giggling.  Nervous, she tried to speak and only giggles came out... no words. I can not get her good giggle sounds out of my head.  Its so awesome. 

Two summers back  saw on her leg "my" exact beauty mark.  Same place on the upper thigh.  My mother's mother had the same and noticed mine.  It surprised Ashley to see the genetic code had fingerprinted us.  Other women on that genetic line behind us proabably had this mark too.  I wonder who they were; if they were smart, kind, sensitive, inwardly wild.  There will be girls born in the future bearing this same dark circle on their left leg.  But who?  We should document it in a special box to pass forward.  Ashley's mark is lighter than mine, but otherwise, its weird to see something that was "mine"(private) and inscribed at birth on my skin on someone else's leg.  It made me realize that the bodies we're born with are so "ours" ... and yet inherited.  We grow within them, and yes, are attached to their special marks. 
.
These people wear the same Beauty mark and even toast to its maker. 
A man with the will to mark many faces Russell higgs

I like the paper cut video with this poem...
Kudzu is an imported vine that will choke over a whole forest in the South.

 

.

comrads~

moth & mountain
.

Little matters when the essential engine of our lives--the body--fails. Once I almost drown. Yesterday while showering water ricocheted into my inhale and my throat closed.  Can you spell p-a-n-i-c ? My lungs started heaving inside me against the locked windpipe.  I couldn't scream, couldn't make my throat open, my nose was stuffed, i bent over, tried to focus; hot water streamed obliviously over me.  

It took loooong seconds of focus before a surreal patience came.  I was weazing more water drops into my lungs, almost smothering and almost passed-out.  My mind seemed like a passive observer witnessing someone else.  It was weird.  A third part of me (not my body or mind, but soul maybe) in a soft voice said, "relax, either way, you will live."  It was like a loudspeaker in my head, the words.  I experienced a shift, relaxed, and somehow knew, I am not just this body I know as "me: and mine" but am also a living consciousness. 

To live or die, my mind didn't panic; my lungs played the part of lungs and acted to live; they really tried to get the air... the throat acted --it closed against the intrusion of water--and the me of me who has lots of plans for tomorrow, she didn't want to stop living either, she was pissed off while this was happening! That's when I knew...Anyone sick to the point of wondering if life will be taken from them must be pissed off.

I have heard people talk about experiences where they are aware of the mind's "indifference" to living,  Heroes forget themselves when they act to save another person's life and drop their own in the process.  I was no hero.  When I could, I simply breathed, dried off and immediately went into the mode of normal, of taking life for granted.  But later, cooking and talking and eating last night, I felt something deep pulling me by the arm; asking me to go off in the corner and pay these moments some attention.  Something real shifted in my consciousness and I hadn't honored it.  I was alive... I hope you are alive--really alive when you read this.  In a breath not taken, a step, life can just (yes, its true...) life can just end.  Its strange we forget this at all.  But necessary, too.  Don't you think?  Its easier to forget in order to live?   
.

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about herself?  The world would split open."   ~Muriel Rukeyser  
.