Mom’s cactus has returned home… REJOICE!

Add comment July 24th, 2008

in frenchtown… we do not steal each other’s plants… what is this!!!

It was a struggling cactus, kept falling over. It sometimes pierced curious childrens’ fingers - those children whose mothers would let them wander around the store unattended, making them cry and run into their mother’s arms. (you may read between the lines, here)

“Watch out for that nasty cactus, honey, stay close to your mom so it cannot hurt you!”…

In the summer, it lived outside my store - getting dry like all good cactus should - in the late afternoon hot summer sun. But after taking my daughter away for a short yet wonderful little vacation in upstate New York, it was gone. The cactus that my mother gave me when I reopened my store - was gone. I never even got to name it. Now it is just gone. Stolen. Absconded.

I hope it finds itself in Cactus heaven… And I think Cactus heaven would look this way:

Add comment July 19th, 2008

…on honey BEES, decorating christmas cookies, and creating paintings with left over frosting.

Do what you love, take care of those you love.. SAVE THE WORLD! 

A year ago last christmas, my daughter and some friends decorated cookies for christmas.  After decorating all of the cookies, there was a lot of frosting left over.  I just could not bear to throw away so much PRODUCT! I had some canvases in my studio that I was struggling to make sense of.  So I painted these canvases with the frosting. 

The paintings got hung here and there, talked about, hung again, looked at, got a little moldy over the year… Then stored in the studio warehouse building.  Eventually, this past spring, a lot of ants found themselves drunk on all that sugar, so it was time to cut the paintings out of the frames, and toss them away. 

One morning, before I left for work, I tried to cut the paintings out of the stretchers, my knife blade snapped.  So I left them outside and went to work.  Well, the frosting melted and was attracting all kinds of happy insects.  Early this morning, as I was driving Barry home, he noticed honey bees swarming the painting. We have not seen many honey bees this year, as they are in crisis, dying all over the place and not returning to their hives. We think the colorful paintings, attracted the bees - thinking they could be flowers - and found happiness in the sugar!

So… being a good Civilian, and taking care of your family first, before going out into the world and offering up your services there - is here proving to help save the honey bees - helping to feed the world, (okay, that’s a little dramatic, but you get my drift.)

Do what you love, take care of those you love - & save the world. 

2 comments July 5th, 2008

TREPANATION .. or did you say she had a hole in her head???

 image from wikipedia I read an article this morning in the bathroom… like  I always do. Well sometimes it’s on the tread mill. Regardless, there is this process, called “trepination” that actually drills a hole in the skull. Supposedly to relieve pressure, or to allow more blood flow into the brain.  Yuch,  you may say as I did say to nmyself. It seems that folks with holes in their skull are considered closer to god in some ancient, and not so ancient, cultures.   WELL…  I HAVE A HOLE IN MY HEAD.. I THOUGHT!I really do.  I have a space in my brain - not in the skull mind you - but in the brain matter - it is call a “cavernous hemangioma”. It is supposedly a weak link where cappillaries travel in and out of the brain matter, but there is no real matter.  It’s why I had 2 cesarean sections, instead of regular old childbirth. My friend, Carla once said (or maybe it was her husband), that was where my creativity came from.   At least I know where all the noise comes from.. all the stuff that rattles around all the time… Maybe if I drilled a hole in the skull, the good stuff would stay in and the confusing stuff could leak out. Who knows. I don’t think I want to drill any holes in my head.   Since I already got one. 

Add comment April 18th, 2008

For a Man, There’s an Order in Life by James Opie, from Parabola

 … page 3… “Dang it, I can’t accept that it’s the God that people in church talk about. It’s bigger than God. It’s . . . God’s God!”  John’s father sat passively through this, without any change of expression. Then he got up and came over to where John and I were half-leaning, half-sitting on the railing. Speaking without haste, he addressed his son and me at the same time.

“Well, you have these questions. You young men have taken this LSD and you have a lot of questions. You saw something, and it’s hard to put whatever you saw out of your minds. But let me tell you how, in my experience, life works—how it works for a man.

“For a man there’s an order in life. First he needs to get himself a good truck, and by that I mean a job—something he’s naturally good at that earns him a living and connects him with the world, with other people. First, a good truck.

“After that, with any luck he attracts a good woman. Maybe he’s got to look for one and maybe one just shows up. But you need to go at life in the proper order to be sure of finding one. If you mix up the order, things get harder. Maybe you find the woman first and then the truck, or maybe you don’t find much of anything. Either way, putting these big questions you like to ask before you get your truck can be risky. You’re apt to never find very much you can live by. Very big answers have a way of slipping through very small fingers. You know, boys, a man can get stuck looking at the cosmos, as you call it, or at other men’s wives. Sometimes a person doesn’t end up with a real grasp of the big things he thinks he’s after, and doesn’t get the most basic things right either.

“A man needs what he really needs. No one can change that. First, get yourself a truck. Then a good woman. After that, you’ll be surprised how these other things, the cosmos and everything, find a way of working themselves out. Then you can question things from a patch of ground you’ve earned, and everything means more to you. From his own patch of ground a man can see a long way.”

 I just loved this..   so I am sharing it here… but please look at the ENTIRE story in UTNE and PARABOLA.

… page 3..John and I were silent. Not wanting to stare, I glanced at Oldie, trying to comprehend what he had just said.

Did he know, somehow, that at least one of us was ready to hear that?

 read the whole thing. i just loved it… 

http://www.utne.com/2008-03-01/Spirituality/For-a-Man-Theres-an-Order-in-Life.aspx 

Add comment April 16th, 2008

The Universe & The World via my Frenchtown. by Val Sivilli

In 2008, the Internet is how we find anything, advertise anything, share anything, and depend on for everything. Whodathunk?  The “World Wide Web” has actually arrived!

In the 70’s, when I was in high school, there was one very clunky computer sitting in the main office. We were allowed to type on it and watch the screen fill with mysterious hieroglyphics.

I quickly decided that I was NOT a computer kid.

Anyway, that has all changed, as it has for most of us who still had enough flexibility in the learning center of our brain mass to absorb and process digital tasks.

My son is trying to decide whether or not to go to college. He cannot figure out why he would go to college if he were not studying to be something specific – a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher -  all of which require college degrees to further the path that society has dictated. He does not really know what he wants to be.  He only knows what he likes to do.

So, this morning at breakfast, we talked about the fact that he loves woodworking and he loves music. We have talked about this before, but this morning I think it actually made sense to him that if he began to take community college courses in these 2 subjects, his knowledge of these 2 subjects would become increasingly broad, making him happier and ultimately creating a possible source of income from whatever he chooses to do that relates to these 2 subjects.

So I said to him “Even if you decided to do something as mundane as opening a music store, you would know more about music, making you more valuable to your customers, thus making you a better and more desirable store to buy stuff from.”   When I was a kid, owning a store seemed the most ludicrous, anti-art, un-intellectual, commerce based, commodity driven career and I would not have anything to do with it! 

Sigh… 

But that has all changed… I have a store.  I have had a version of a store for the past 15 years. I sell my art, others artists work, but mostly I sell tee shirts that have my images printed onto them.  I LOVE MY STORE!  In my store, I teach all the time. I teach people about the work I do, talk to customers about the ideas I have, they talk to me about theirs. I am always learning from them. I am always making art. I am always selling something that is related to art. I am connected to my community in an amzing way.

I have confidence about the imparting of knowledge and the creation of my product much because I have an education in my field. I am not wondering if there is some secret art making language that I am not privy to. I am privy to it. I have made art in the most sophisticated of places. I have made art with the best of them. So getting your education, then choosing where to live, is filled with more options than ever before.

The internet creates the possibility to know something – know someone – create a relationship of some sort – impart knowledge – share stuff – affect each other – without needing to be living in what happens to be the most trendy part of Brooklyn this year. It allows us to live where we are comfortable.  Possibly where our family lives.  Wouldn’t that be magical? To actually live down the street from your parents while you are raising you kids and be able to make a decent living? Maybe we can reclaim the inter-connectedness of our family life. Maybe we can reclaim some of our lost sanity that was stolen through the 20^th century. That so-called “ANGST” created by the fragmentation of the family in the 19^th & 20^th century can possibly be undermined. Maybe we can reclaim part of our sanity, our birth right as human beings.  Maybe we can finally place Nietzsche in the past – where he belongs - as a part of the time line of evolution.  Maybe we can truly evolve into the genuine, compassionate, earth-loving, community embracing species that we began as. Maybe we can dissolve the psycho-insanity that pervades our culture.

It is now not weird to be from a small town and to stay there and work. We can stay in our small towns. We can buy local produce. We can support our local public school because our business is in the community. We can walk and bike more often. We can advertise in our local newspaper, talk to our community through our local paper. Sit at the local luncheonette, or by the river, or at a playdate with our kids, or in our kitchen over coffee, and read our local newspaper and KNOW our local community.

We can still make a living in the big world. We can still teach and learn from others. We can write about ideas, share them, make art, show it and sell it , play the drums at our local tavern, our local festival, play at a local open mike, and then post the video that our friend made of us on utube. We can still have all the best of what we absolutely love, what makes us happy AND can be connected in the most intimate ways the big, big world.

Add comment April 4th, 2008