Grab your brooms! Happy New Year 2011!

The past week has been frigid and overcast.  This morning, I awoke early, and was greeted a few minutes later by a beautiful sunrise.  Some rosy pink tinges on a few remaining wispy clouds, surrounded by the brilliant blue New Mexico sky.  Storms and grey all blown off to other lands.

It's garbage day, and while playing backgammon online with a new Italian friend who was already anticipating his New Year's Eve festivities in Naples, I heard the sounds of our morning, the recycling truck pounding away at the glass and plastic bins.  So, I was too late to be a responsible recycler again in 2010, but off I went to put on my boots and take out the trash.

It is still bitterly cold, and the garage door opener cannot manage to haul the door up all the way.  I stood there a few moments, pushing the button, up down up down, and at least I got it far enough that my car could squeeze out.  I looked out onto the bright snow, and became obsessed with the idea of cleaning the garage floor.

First I took the trash out - lucky me, the trash truck had not come!  So, the last of this year's detritus waits for the dump, and I thought about it going to live for years, perhaps thousands of years, with the muck that couldn't be recycled.  I will try to be more thoughtful about that in the days to come.  Then I shuffled over the icy drive of stones back to my house, and I turned the car on, and pulled it out, so I could sweep.

All kinds of dirt on that cement.  Old wrappers, old spiders, old stencils from an art project with my Little, old shreds of whatever.  Bits of broken eco lightbulbs from when the hazardous waste recycling tipped over.  Even fragments from last year - I collect glass Christmas ornaments in the shapes of foods, and while I didn't put up a tree this year, I did last year.  I remembered that the box containing my set of golden walnuts had slipped open, and one had fallen out and shattered.  It was hollow, and it was odd to look at the molded smooth shapes of the shell from the inside with its jagged edges. There were still broken bits of gold walnut amidst the dust and the grime scattered across the floor.

It has been far too long, since I have swept out the old.  Today is a great time to start again.  My toes and my fingers were frozen from the biting of the cold, but I set to work.  There was the broom, propped in the garage corner, part of its bristles missing from when I cut them off to try a casting experiment, which failed.  But the broom has plenty of bristles left, so swish swish swish, all the dirt and past and sharp edged bits are pushed easily into a pile.  The sweeping reminds me of the artist, Daniel Brush, who makes sweeping with a broom a part of his artistic routine.  A trip inside the house for a dustpan and a paperbag, so the glass doesn't cut the garbageman - and I think about the garbageman and how cold his hands must be on a day like today.  My hands warm up from the work, maybe his hands warm up, too.

There is more dirt than I expected, most of it grime, dust, and sand that nature has driven in through cracks in the walls and the door.  In the piles, I find gum wrappers and weird bits of hard plastic of unknown origin and then I find a penny, and then I find a second!  And I welcome them as a harbinger, to becoming one of two this coming year.

Not long ago, I wrote a letter to someone.  In it, I warned to be careful of what is created.  We all create things - we are human, we create things all the time.  The warning was about creating something by omission.  Something new is always coming along, and if we decide to do something, or not to do something, that creates something new whether we intend it to or not.  It is the way of the world - a new year, a new moon, a new obstacle, a new wish, always.  It is life.  But, by deciding not to do something, or even by not deciding, we may unintentionally create something we don't want.

These piles of dirt and dust were something I created.  I didn't put the dust there, but I hadn't shoo'd it out, either.  And that's fine, I am not judging myself, and now they are gone.  As I look forward into this New Year, I want to remember to carry my broom with me, sweep away the old, and create the new, with intention and not by omission.

Let's grab our brooms!  Let's poke around in the dusty corners, get rid of the cobwebs, and create something new for ourselves!  And this time next year, we'll be looking back once again.  Much will be the same, and much will be different and new.  Here's hoping that the same and the new will all be for the good, our best intentions worked on and worked out and realized, and that we enjoyed the journey that we start now - ready or not! - and again! - to create for ourselves.

Happy New Year!

hmmmm

I didn't realize it had been that long since I had posted!

I have been taking a class, and my teacher Diane wanted us to come up with a project.  Inspired by something I read in "The Seed Handbook" by Lynne Franks, I decided upon seeds.

Here are the results of the project so far:

I had a lot of fun experimenting with the different shapes - these are the pieces just after casting.  The sprue in the back I include, simply because Diane made the comment that it looks like the tree one would find outside a hobbit's house.

I would like to continue with the seeds idea - I greatly enjoyed the boundary of "what is a seed?" and trying to develop a vocabulary of form.  As you can see from these examples, I went all over the map.  But so far, I think I have nine in the series that are cohesive.  Or slightly cohesive.

I'll show the finished product soon - I'm excited about making these into earrings, bracelets, and pendants in various combinations.

nearly done

A little more filing, getting a mold made, and then it is complete.

slowly....

slowly......

careful....

ooh, careful...

This is my third attempt at carving these very tiny oars.  I have broken the last two, they were too small and I was not delicate enough with them.  This third time I started in a different way - so far so good.  I also drove to Albuquerque yesterday and invested in some new tools, so hopefully that will help.  The goal is to get them completed by Monday and off to the caster.

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heaven will be dripping...

An almost perfect day...

Up at sunrise...

Pick up little sister... (and she's ready to go!)

Breakfast burritos and coffee to begin...

A long drive filled with talk and laughter - boys, school, more boys, more laughter... my own troubles are left far behind, and I am able to be fully present in her life, in the moment...

We arrive and spend a few hours in this...

Yes, the UPickIt field of raspberries.  Heaven.  Literal heaven.  The field worker flirting and warning us not to eat too much (but they don't watch, we try not to be lil piggies), the rows are slightly squishy from the rain during the week, but the weather today is divine - not a cloud in the sky, a light breeze, the grasshoppers and bees have come out to play.  And in this bright green field of orderly rows under a perfect blue sky, haphazard dots and dots and dots of raspberry red, just waiting for us...

Then when we've tasted and picked 4 pounds and wandered the property and visited the store and picked 4 more pounds, we drive home.  We stop for ice cream as lunch, and we play the banana game (slap your friend in the arm if you see the yellow car first, and shout "banana!") and we add an orange car variant and we listen to new music and decide which we like....

I take her home and leave her with 4 pounds of raspberries, her little brother trying already to get at them, and then I drive home with my 4 pounds (let's guess how long they last... tomorrow?  maybe the next day?  if they're lucky...) and I carve oars and feel the sunburn start to sting on the back of my neck and think about making a raspberry charm...  silver raspberries, how lovely that might be...

I believe heaven will be dripping with raspberries.

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why Shambhala is related to creativity

I remembered to ask my teacher yesterday.

Courage.

Shambhala is about courage.

Making art is about courage.

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how to float

I am a visual thinker.  For the most part, I can't understand or learn anything without seeing it. When I was trying (and failing) to learn Spanish, I had to visualize the words and sentences in my mind in order to comprehend them.  My teacher, who was very good, cautioned the class against doing that, but I couldn't help it.  Consequently, I got as far as the conjunctive tense and felt like I couldn't go any farther.  Maybe someday, I'll try again.

So, I have a tendency to mentally see things in visions or imagery, but not in a predictive or supernatural way.  Not even usually in a dream, although these things come to me sometimes just as I wake up.  It's just the way my mind functions.  It's how I understand and process things, lots of visual analogies and metaphors.

This is the vision from the weekend.  I pictured someone in the bottom of a well.  Terrible.  Dark, slimy mossy walls, damp, a circle of daylight and sky above faraway out of reach. Cold. Then the well started to fill up, water seeping in at the bottom, wafting around her shoes and creeping higher and higher.  Touching her hem, rising, rising.  She panics, starts to claw at the walls, trying to get a grip, but the rock and the moss are unyielding to her fingers.

The water gets higher, more volume, so it's swirling around her, and she's frantic, and suddenly I realize!  Don't panic!  It's water!  Don't struggle!  Just float, and it will raise you closer to the top...  float...  FLOAT... please...

I realized later, this is what I hope this Buddhism study does for me.  I hope it teaches me how to float.

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I have started listening to some lectures that are offered by a local Tibetan Buddhism center online.  I liked what I heard, so I have gone ahead and contacted them about a meditation class. I start next week.

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The rowboat is the result of a similar vision.  I'll go into detail about that one when I finish it, and post it for sale.  As I move forward in this charm business, I have the feeling that many of my pieces will have stories like this attached to them.  I have already added a "well charm" to the list - the ever-expanding list! - of charms I need to carve.

A bit of a backwards step working on the rowboat over the weekend though.  I attempted some texturing, I'm not entirely happy with it, and I may have made it too thin for casting.  I may have to start over.

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wrestling with roller coasters

Listening to the radio has become a joy!  Where I used to flick the television on to see if there are any disasters, now I flick the radio on when I go downstairs in the morning.  I hear music instead of commercials and chatter (mostly), and it's oriented around my town, instead of New York, or Los Angeles.

Yesterday, listening to the local public radio station, I heard part of an interview with Natalie Goldberg.  I was busy doing other things, but I caught a section where she talked about making her creativity part of her practice.  Very interesting... I already have her "Writing Down the Bones" ...  OH!  I just checked.  I have "Wild Mind" in my creativity library as well...  Yay!  Hmmm, I suspect the next few evenings will be quite busy re-reading these.

Anyway, I decided to go to the library to see if any of the available books of hers were directly about creativity as practice, and if I could maybe translate her writing instruction to my wax carving of silver charms.  I found two books.  One called "Thunder and Lightning", which seems more directly related to questions of writing, and a book called "The Great Failure".

That title grabbed me.  I have had some major failings in personal relationships recently, and I was hoping, hoping, hoping that her failure (was this about her failure?) could help me with my own.  It did.  I read the whole thing in one evening.  It also helped open up my perception about the Pema Chodron and Shambhala reading I've been doing.

"We spend our life on a roller coaster with rusty tracks, stuck to highs and lows, riding from one, trying to grab the other."

Yes.  I need to buy this book now.  I think I'll get some Beyonce too... "to the left, to the left"...

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The rowboat is almost complete.  I need to refine the shape a little more, carve the oars, and texture it, and then it's off to casting!
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the void part deux, or illusion illusion all around

Not long after I posted the last post about the void, I went back to Start Where You Are and almost immediately came upon a section that deals with dualism.  I realized, my whole void spiel could lead to a sense of duality, which is not where I wanted to go.  (By dualism here, I mean an idea of separateness, a convenient setup to categorize one thing as an "other", or different.)

I also chanced to look out the window, and the shadows of the leaves dancing on my roof made me think about the void being present.  Not outside my little sphere, not somewhere else, but the void is here too.  Shadows are absence of light - they can be seen, but are they manifest?  Are they... something?  So many things are not manifest, not "here", but are - thoughts, emotions, for example.  They are causations, certainly - we say we do things because of them.   But are they things?  Do they have existence?  What about the soul?  What is that?  Or spirit?  Or personality?

Yeah.  My little sphere of what I can hear, touch, see - it's an illusion.  If nothing else, it's as full of the void as what I imagined outside of it.  Nothing can be put safely away somewhere else.

I had been thinking of what was in the void, what I would have liked to relegate to the void.  Out of sight, out of mind.  Death.  Death practically equals the void.  The boogie monster, or whoever that is who is hiding under the bed/in the closet/beneath the stairs to the basement.  He lives in the void, and if only I could find a way to keep him from leaping out at me when I least expect it!

Never.  Never is of the void.  Never has become the scariest word in the English language to me.  I hate never.

But none of these things are really in the void, just as the void really is not somewhere else.  The void is right here, by my side.  Shadowing my every step.  Containing the monsters and the demons and the never.  They don't need to leap - they are right there.  Not a far distance at all.

And back I go, trying to learn how not to struggle anymore.

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I had my first after-school-let's-do-the-homework session with my Little yesterday, and I'm already fail!  We worked on science, not math, because the science was mathlike and she didn't have her book to do the math.  It was fine, until we got to the extra credit problem.  She said, "I don't have to do that", and I said, all enthusiastically, "Oh, but we do, it's extra credit and it's practice and it'll be great!!!"

Then we proceeded to stare at it for half an hour, until she finally said, "Maybe I should just ask my teacher..." and I had to concede I couldn't do it.  Now I'm determined to figure it out.  I know someone who is going to laugh at me heartily when he hears about this.
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Today I feel like a cork bobbling on the surface of a slightly wavy ocean, wondering where am I going and how is this going to all end up?

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