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On the way up |
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Walking up the Road |
Heading up the road this morning, my blood feels like clay. No flow, and many unanswered questions banging around in my mind. I’m a bit terrified because this was one of the symptoms my severely depressed friend complained about. “Thick blood, and feeling like being stuck in a bubble”. I go back in time to the many walks I took with her in order to cheer her up, pull her out, have some laughs. None of which worked. I was watching a light in my life, one of the main lights, dim and keep dimming, and I didn’t like it. Nothing to do. Now, when I feel under the weather and sort of depressed, I usually go back to thinking how my friend must have felt or she may still feel today.
A close relative once pulled me aside to ask me to please listen to “these CD’s about depression”. He told me he was depressed and he thought I was too. “A generational thing”. I was able to say “No, thank you, I will not take on your depression. It’s all yours”. At the time, I was in the middle of a break up of my marriage and I was sad. I was feeling loss. And yes, was probably depressed. After this depression, diagnoses, encounter, I felt so much anger. It was in the anger that I saw I was able to feel. It was in these guts of mine saying, “no”, that proved to me I am on my own path, and as much as it might be depressed, I am going to feel every bit of it.
Then there is the SAD Seasonal Affective Disorder which I wonder about now, after not seeing the sun for a few days, and knowing this is just the beginning of the season. I can feel what some of my Seattle/Portland friends have talked about. The food thing too. I am buying organic, but does trucked from California count? It doesn’t feel like it does. Down to the health food store for a quick lunch doesn’t happen here- neither socially nor healthily. Stolen hours, which I was accustomed, on a rock in the sun at the California trailhead, aren’t happening either.
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The Long and Winding Road |
This subject of depression is interesting, because as I started this post with being “terrified” of noticing the symptoms, I realize the true fear of depression which I actually have. Weather it being me, as a sponge, soaking up others’ feelings or the environment’s affects, who wants to feel clay for blood. I don’t, yet at the same time, when it comes up I don’t want to deny it. I recall Thomas Moore’s The Care Of The Soul‘s one chapter on depression. My introduction to the idea that depression is a gift.
Yes, a gift when, if I’m not so afraid of it, I allow it to happen. In the meantime, I notice the wonderful and tricky part about depression is that a simple sweat up the hill usually nips it.
And, today, walking back down the hill, I hear myself singing The Long And Winding Road….bum….bum…..bum…..bum………dummmmmmm.
Now, is that being depressed?
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Back down to town |
Austin and Her Art
Update on “Austin and Her Art”- Austin has just published her own blog.
http://www.austinbrayfieldpaintings.wordpress.com
This is Austin in her dining room…..
This is her art:
Most of these pieces are large oils. Some are collage.
I DO have some great stories to tell about my travels with Austin and I WILL. O.K. I’ll tell you now.
Of the time,
when,
it was June of 2007.
I met Austin’s plane at the Malpensa Airport.
We had a plan to meet so that she could fulfill her lifetime dream to buy an entire wardrobe in Milan. She had saved her hard earned pennies in order to make it happen. I was the translator.
We had a week.
We spent each day filled to the brim. From train to trolly. From the flea markets to Prada. We scrounged around basement bargain shops. We ate great food. With strangers and interesting conversations. We spoke Italian. We wandered the streets through the night into the wee hours. We LAUGHED! We laughed so hard! And piece, by piece the wardrobe evolved.
Into a busting at the zipper bag….as Austin continued on her way to Sienna.
This weekend!
The Painter and the Pose Part 2
The Painter and The Pose
I had been an artist’s model once before. When I was in the energetic heights of being an art student at Ventura College. The day the model didn’t show up for our life drawing class, I volunteered. This was back in the 80’s. It was one of the best exercises for me as an artist. To sit still and hold a pose. 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, then the finale of 20 minutes. It was a more difficult feat than I thought. I gleaned a new respect for our models.
While I was in Ashland,OR last month, Austin asked me to pose.
Painting is her passion.
She originally wanted me there so she could work off of Donna Granata’s photo of me in the “glass dress”. When I arrived and saw that she had started with a painstaking accuracy of the laying out a grid in order to get proportions correct in relation to the photo, I asked if that is how she usually works.
“No” was her answer.
I didn’t think so.
I see her paintings as spontaneous splashes of soulful color and shape, not the “thought out”, “get it right” type of work she was approaching. I asked her if she would consider painting me in her new bath tub which is cradled in a beautiful arched window.
Her eyes lit up.
It would be fresh.
For me, for her.
A scene of the moment, not from a photo.
With easel, canvas, and paints we hustled into the bathroom.
The college experience came back to me. I could just feel the scratch, scratch, grr, grr, of the brush on Austin’s canvas as she dove into the start of her painting. I had to laugh out loud as I heard the sound of her passion gnawing away. It is contagious, passion is.
The smell of paint, quiet concentration, and me in my model mind, forced into the moment of full attention by not wanting my foot to sag, my leg to drift out of it’s original position, or my body to slide in any way, all the while, wanting to relax enough and not be worried about moving. It is quite an experience.
The art of staying still.
As my time in Oregon was coming to an end, Austin wanted to make sure she had details to work from, so I agreed to do some modeling for her to shoot photographically. Getting in and out of the bath tub, drying off, close ups of feet, hands, face, water, etc.
While we were doing this, it occurred to me that Austin could model and I shoot images of her. A bit hesitant, she finally agreed, saying that she could use the photos to work from for a self portrait or two.
So off go her clothes and the classic, stepping out of the bath, gazing out the window poses continued until the finale of a serious Vitruvian Man pose that was beautifully framed in the window. Right at that moment, through the window, up on the very scarcely trafficked road, I saw a cop car, going super slow. “Austin, the cops” she jumped for the towel and we both looked at each other and just about died laughing.
Crying.
Laughing.
Later, while looking over the photos on the computer screen, up pops the image of Austin, arms and legs spread out, beautifully back lit, the front of the cop car to the left of her head and the back of the cop car to the right. I didn’t realize I got the cops in the shot and I’m glad I did.
OKOKOKOKOKOKOKOKOKOKOKOKOKOKOKOK
O.K.
O.K.
O.K.
When I was looking online for inspiration and found Margaret Fabrizio’s (Atree3 videos) The cover photo on the youtube video that caught my eye was of a sunburst/starburst. That was the feeling that I wanted….A center and growth. Pulling out from that center….I wanted a pattern to follow.
As I watched and listened, I found someone speaking a language that I used to know.
The familiarity of the unknown.
The adventure of it all.
The mother tongue that I was born with.
A way I know in my bones. No way.
I found permission to NOT follow a pattern.
Then I got excited.
Then I got scared. Even scareder that I was when I was surfing for a pattern.
Then I remember all of my preaching of that damn Miles Davis quote…”Do not fear mistakes, there are none.”
I have WORN it OUT! I have sucked that one DRY! EVEN used it as publicity for my work…..FORGIVE me Miles…….
All of those pieces of glass! wobbling! off center! cracked!
And……what happened to that kind of creativity? in me? from the core? that puts it out there regardless? Of the crack, wobble, off centeredness? I think what happened is TOO MANY SHOWS! Too many deadlines, competitions, galas. Somewhere along the way it became turned inside out….the wrong sides together ended up on the inside. OR WHATEVER!
I started making things for the audience. BECAUSE….I was DEPENDING on the audience. And I think by me doing that almost slashed my main creative artery. Or at least it has turned me off…..BIG TIME.
My hot glass tools got really heavy and melty like a Dali. My seamstress stuff got cold. Frigid. Iced.
SO STRAIGHT EDGED!
Aghhhhh
The threads that pull these pieces of material together…I parallel with thoughts of a tree of life or a branch at least budding out from…….kimono that Eileen gave me…..kimono from a bale that I bought at the garage sale where the lady let me pick the persimmons……silk from Suzanne…..and that safe purple filler material that I bought with Julie in Santa Maria. The safe purple filler I bought when I started to transition a few years back. I mean! Come ON! That store was filled with the most BITCHEN materials and I choose that safe purple filler(SPF)! Well today, guess which was the material that I cut into first? YEAH…..that SPF! AND….O.K…..O.K….O.K…….I DID!
Quilts!
Just Photos
a HUGE grid of roads. The FIRST thing that I hear/see in the a.m.after a snow (after waking from….in a slight whisper… the quiet) is LOUD,HUGE trucks, red lights flashing. The plow, the sand, and the salt trucks.They are up and at it…they even cover all of those tiny dirt roads. We get them first here in town. And because there was only 6 inches total of snow last year…this year….. they are raring to get r’ dun!
Snow
Last night a semi truck drove by carrying a flat bed filled with people wrapped up from the cold singing Christmas carols.
So this is Americana.
The quiet of the morning wakes me.
So this is snow.
Three Stories
Third story.
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
― Søren Kierkegaard
On my walk up the hill, with the wind at my back, I feel my heightened energy. There is the snow, there are all of the let down people on the computer because the world didn’t end today (at least I think they seem let down), there is the holiday, and there is a lot of stuff that just goes on in my head. My pace is on high.
With the snow coming from my back I am able to see the actual flakes fall in front of me. Perfect crystals of ice. I have now been introduced to the graphic of snow. It is not the muddy mess that we, as Southern Californians, would excitedly drive up the mountain to see. It is far from that.
I turn to go home. The snow blowing horizontally into my face stings my eyes. There is no making out the tiny details now, the wind is too strong in this direction.
It amazes me how the first half a walk can be so different from the last half. The shift of the brain. The direction of the wind. The energy burned the energy gained. The last day of the Mayan calendar the first day of the rest of my life.
The Long and Winding Road
Heading up the road this morning, my blood feels like clay. No flow, and many unanswered questions banging around in my mind. I’m a bit terrified because this was one of the symptoms my severely depressed friend complained about. “Thick blood, and feeling like being stuck in a bubble”. I go back in time to the many walks I took with her in order to cheer her up, pull her out, have some laughs. None of which worked. I was watching a light in my life, one of the main lights, dim and keep dimming, and I didn’t like it. Nothing to do. Now, when I feel under the weather and sort of depressed, I usually go back to thinking how my friend must have felt or she may still feel today.
A close relative once pulled me aside to ask me to please listen to “these CD’s about depression”. He told me he was depressed and he thought I was too. “A generational thing”. I was able to say “No, thank you, I will not take on your depression. It’s all yours”. At the time, I was in the middle of a break up of my marriage and I was sad. I was feeling loss. And yes, was probably depressed. After this depression, diagnoses, encounter, I felt so much anger. It was in the anger that I saw I was able to feel. It was in these guts of mine saying, “no”, that proved to me I am on my own path, and as much as it might be depressed, I am going to feel every bit of it.
Then there is the SAD Seasonal Affective Disorder which I wonder about now, after not seeing the sun for a few days, and knowing this is just the beginning of the season. I can feel what some of my Seattle/Portland friends have talked about. The food thing too. I am buying organic, but does trucked from California count? It doesn’t feel like it does. Down to the health food store for a quick lunch doesn’t happen here- neither socially nor healthily. Stolen hours, which I was accustomed, on a rock in the sun at the California trailhead, aren’t happening either.
This subject of depression is interesting, because as I started this post with being “terrified” of noticing the symptoms, I realize the true fear of depression which I actually have. Weather it being me, as a sponge, soaking up others’ feelings or the environment’s affects, who wants to feel clay for blood. I don’t, yet at the same time, when it comes up I don’t want to deny it. I recall Thomas Moore’s The Care Of The Soul‘s one chapter on depression. My introduction to the idea that depression is a gift.
Yes, a gift when, if I’m not so afraid of it, I allow it to happen. In the meantime, I notice the wonderful and tricky part about depression is that a simple sweat up the hill usually nips it.
And, today, walking back down the hill, I hear myself singing The Long And Winding Road….bum….bum…..bum…..bum………dummmmmmm.
Now, is that being depressed?