Creepy Halloween

Creepy Halloween sounds so much more fitting than "Happy Halloween", doesn't it?  Halloween is supposed to be creepy, because that's what makes it fun, after all.

Whether or not you believe that the gate between the worlds of the living and the dead will swing open on All Hallows Eve, a cemetery can be an intriguing place...

Please allow me to share with you some of my favorite "haunts'...

                                                                     Cemetery in Bloomington, IN

                                                              SpringGrove Cemetery, Cincinnati, OH

                                                                New Orleans Cemetery, photo by Louis Martinie


The festival observed at this time was called Samhain (pronounced Sah-ween). It was the biggest and most significant holiday of the Celtic year. The Celts believed that at the time of Samhain, more so than any other time of the year, the ghosts of the dead were able to mingle with the living, because at Samhain the souls of those who had died during the year traveled into the otherworld....Virtually all present Halloween traditions can be traced to the ancient Celtic day of the dead. Halloween is a holiday of many mysterious customs, but each one has a history, or at least a story behind it. The wearing of costumes, for instance, and roaming from door to door demanding treats can be traced to the Celtic period and the first few centuries of the Christian era, when it was thought that the souls of the dead were out and around, along with fairies, witches, and demons. Offerings of food and drink were left out to placate them.  ( Jack Santino, The American Folklife Center)

                                       shop window in Richmond, VA

                                                                          St. John's Church, Richmond, VA

The oldest gravestones I've ever seen were here.  At this church, Patrick Henry uttered the famous words, "Give me liberty, or give me death."

                              This burial is so old you can no longer make out any words or carving at all.

                                                                                        A beautiful place.

                                                               SpringGrove Cemetery, Cincinnati, OH

                                                           SpringGrove Cemetery, Cincinnati, OH

All Hallows Eve

By Dorothea Tanning

Be perfect, make it otherwise.

Yesterday is torn in shreds.

Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes

Rip apart the breathing beds.

Hear bones crack and pulverize.

Doom creeps in on rubber treads.

Countless overwrought housewives,

Minds unraveling like threads,

Try lipstick shades to tranquilize

Fears of age and general dreads.

Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,

Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.

Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise

You and the werewolf: newlyweds.

Who knew Dorothea Tanning wrote such things? Enchanting!

At Last, the Spell is Broken...

Well, that's what I had planned to title it, anyway...

I'm anticipating the inevitable questions here.  Like, "Is she turning into a bird?"  "Is she turning back into a human?"  "What's that weird thing on her head?" "Is someone chasing her?"  "Is she going to fly?"  "Is she falling off the mountain?" "What's the ladder for?"

Why do they always expect me to know this stuff? 

Story of My Life Story

There were times when I wondered if I'd ever finish this one.  It went well at the beginning, but as it progressed I kept getting stuck, so I would put it aside and work on something else for a while. When I did complete it, I had trouble getting good photos of the piece; I had to re-photograph it 3 times!  But here it is:

Story of My Life Story

ingredients: vintage book cover, vintage paper doll, found objects, image transfers, monotype prints, vintage fabric, map fragments, vintage book pages, child's writing paper, jewelry findings, stitching


Most stories, if you really think about it, are stories of stories. If the story is a recounting of the events, then each time the story is retold, even in our own minds, it becomes the story of a story.  By the time a person is, say, in their 50's, those earlier events are stories that we have told ourselves over and over again - altered by the passage of time, emotion, and tricks of the memory.  Changes in our perspective through learning, as well as intervening experiences, add new layers of color to our stories, probably more than we like to admit.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings.  It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that are forever blowing through one's mind. ~ Mark Twain

All the Doings at Shabo-Mekaw

 Welcome to Shabo-Mekaw

 

 mountain laurel

Scout, Sunny, and Arlo would like to welcome you to Shabo-Mekaw.  Well - actually, Scout would like to eat grass, while Sunny and Arlo would like run down the driveway.  You can follow if you like...

The field, formerly known as the blueberry field, and beyond it, the pond...

... which Arlo enjoys immensely on a hot day, as you can see.

Update on Construction Progress

One thing we had to do this spring was to fix leaks in the chimney so rain won't get inside. Mainly this is done by shoving cement in all the cracks and in the holes between rocks where it has fallen out; this is called 'repointing'. The ladder was just to sit on, so my butt wouldn't slide down the metal roof.  It is not at all comfortable, btw.

We attached a porch to the front of the log cabin, complete with cedar posts and a metal roof, and it turned out great, if I do say so myself.  It will provide a cool place to sit, and most importantly, keep rain off the front logs.

Though we had already done the porch floor in stone, we decided to spiff it up with these old, used bricks.

First we had to cover the stone floor with sand and crushed limestone...

Here, Scout and Arlo are chillaxing on the finished left side of the floor while we continue working on the rest.  We cemented the bricks in place around the edges...

... and got the other bricks laid down, but have not yet filled in between them.  Obviously, the stone steps will need to be revised as well.

Todd has been working very hard on the inside floor,

 and has a lot of the sub-flooring in place now.

He's also been trying to seal up the space between the soffit and the roof, to keep the critters from getting in.  Now he says we have to lift up part of the roof.  Whaaaaat?!





Bird Morning

 A couple of weeks ago, I went down to the swirl hole (the part of the Kinneyconick Creek just below our cabins) early in the morning. Usually, I don't get a chance to take pictures until afternoon.
 

 It was glorious - still and quiet except for the sounds of birds, with mist rising from the water. As the sun was beginning to clear the hill on the other side of the creek, the contrast between dazzling mist and deep shadows was exquisite.

 While I had my camera on the 'macro' setting ...

... because I was so into photographing these really cool dew-covered spider webs,

two great blue herons flew directly over my head!  They're very fast, and the camera was on   

  'macro'...

So I switched  my camera back to the normal mode in case there were more...

... when suddenly a kingfisher flew right in front of me, going in the opposite direction from the herons. I aimed and shot wildly - it was even faster than the herons - and got this horribly blurry picture.  (No, I do not have a DSLR.)  I circled the kingfisher so you could at least tell that I wasn't making it up.

Less than a minute later,

a third blue heron followed the other two, heading upstream. 

Here's what they actually look like:

A few more early morning creek photos:

You can see the mist better where the light comes through the trees...

A view of part of the swirl hole, looking upstream from the island.  I'll never be able to show you the whole thing, unless I hire a plane...

The last time we left it, our sweet home-away-from-home looked quite lovely.

The tour guides would like to thank you for coming with us, but they're too tired...

See you later, alligator (or - whatever you are)!

Where Wings Come From

When I was a child, I was not very good at discerning what was real from what wasn't.  My parents often remarked that I had "lots of imagination." In some ways, I suppose it could have been an advantage, as I'm sure it must have been a large part of whatever combination of influences and  natural proclivities ultimately made me choose the life path of an artist.  I would lay awake at night, convinced that there were all sorts of monsters inhabiting my room. After finally exhausting my parents' patience, I knew there was no use calling them for help; grown-up eyes were obviously unable to see these creatures, and they were no doubt bound to tell me to go to sleep, because there was "no such thing" as monsters.  And though I tried very hard to convince myself that my parents were right, the monsters disproved this theory by continuing to appear in my room after dark.

Callanish Stones on All Souls Night

 Chrysalis
 
  

When I was about six, my next door neighbor and so-called 'best friend' revealed to me that I was actually an alien from another planet who had secretly been left here and adopted by Earthlings - the man and woman I now mistakenly regarded as my parents. Soon, she said, my real alien parents would return for me, snatch me from my bed at night, and take me back to my home planet.  Absurd as it seems, I believed her. I did not tell my parents about this - I don't remember why - but I must have driven them crazy with my frequent nightmares and tearful pleas to sleep in their room. I don't know how long it was until I got over this fear, because as we all know, child years and adult years are not at all the same, but it felt like a very long time to me.

Icarus Reborn

I was thinking about all of this today because I have started another piece depicting a person with one wing. It's a theme/motif I've been working with for many years, and is for me a deeply personal symbol of my inner self.  I knew these winged or half-winged figures were emotionally connected to me, but at first I thought they were just a representation of my favorite fairytale, Hans Christian Anderson's "The Wild Swans", which I had read over and over again as a child.

 A wonderful illustration from the story, by Russian illustrator Nadezhda Illarionova.

Here's a short summary, if you don't want to read the whole story, but it basically involves a girl whose 11 brothers have been turned into swans by - who else? - their wicked stepmother.  A fairy tells their sister she can reverse the spell by knitting shirts out of nettles for her brothers, but of course everything goes wrong, and she has to dress them in the shirts before the last one is finished, leaving the youngest brother with one wing instead of an arm.

Book of Dreams, first page spread

At some point, I realized that that, subconsciously, the one-winged figures represented more than an attachment to a favorite storybook character; on some deeper psychological level, I identified with them.  Too bad Carl Jung's not around to figure that one out, I thought. I briefly researched Jung's archetypes, but none of them seem to shed any light on this. Perhaps I unconsciously see myself as  not fully human; it's true that in many ways animals make more sense to me than people do. Some sort of transformational process feels closer to the mark, though; maybe it represents the hope for change, a desire to become something better than I am. Or, could it be that my neighbor's alien theory wasn't so far off after all...? :~)


Anyway, here is the new piece thus far:

No, she doesn't have a wing yet - but stay tuned; I will post any further progress as it happens.

Lessons

Well, it's the beginning of a new school year, i.e. "real job" (thanks to Deb Eck for that terminology) which has, of course, gotten me thinking about lessons. My great hope has always been that somehow I'll be able to teach my students something that they'll take with them, just one little thing that might benefit them for the rest of their lives. I'm not talking so much about academics as I am about how to live -  how to become the person they truly want to be. It may be a pretty tall order, but it seems to be what they need more than anything.

Here's an example. Back when I used to teach art, one of my greatest sources of frustration was the students' wastefulness. They would draw one line in the middle of a piece of paper and then say, "I messed up. I need another piece of paper." This would inevitably lead to Lesson # 1: Why Paper Has Two Sides. You would think this would occur to them, but for some reason, it does not.
Unfortunately, there were always some who repeated their mistakes on both sides of the paper. I tried not to give out extra paper at all, but two pieces was the absolute limit. Of course, this became Lesson # 2: Don't Waste Paper, Because We Do Not Have an Endless Supply of Trees.

One day, a little boy who made a regular habit of this came and asked me for another piece of paper- again. I'm not sure if it was his first or second piece, but in my exasperation, I told him he couldn't have one.  "Think about it," I said. "You can probably figure out a way to fix it if you try."

I promptly forgot about him, being very preoccupied with helping the other 28 kids who had their hands raised. A little while later, he came up to me with a big grin on his face. "Look! I fixed it!" He was very excited about it, so I can only assume that this was a new concept for him. It was then that I realized that he had learned something much more important than anything he would ever learn about art itself: Lesson # 3: Creative Problem Solving - Thinking About Things in a Different Way. 

I'm not saying that this one experience changed his whole life, but it's possible that some little spark of a concept had entered his consciousness (or subconscious), and that in the future, instead of immediately giving up, he might be more inclined to look for other, more creative solutions.

This takes me to Lesson # 4: Don't Give Up!  This is the hardest lesson for my students to learn, because I don't teach art now, I teach kids with learning and behavior disorders. My students are failed learners; it's a prerequisite for qualifying for Special Education. For the most part, they have already given up. And so I ask myself, How can I convince them to keep trying?  Why should they believe me when I say they have to persevere, if they have never seen the evidence?

 They don't have enough experience to realize that everyone is good at some things, and bad at others. They don't understand that most people who are good at something got that way mainly because they practiced - a lot.

 All they can see is that for them, every day is a struggle, and everywhere they look are people who are more successful at school than they are, without trying nearly as hard.  It's difficult for me to explain to them that everything we do in life has a learning curve, when their curve is so much larger than most. And how do I tell them that although they may someday get to do something they're really good at, they have to first make it through school? And that whatever that something is, they're probably not going to be good at it at first, but that they may indeed fail many times before that happens.



I'm pretty sure my students don't know who most of these people are, but it makes a case for perseverance, doesn't it?

It is. Really.