"I hope you are all creating every day according to the inner map you were born with. I know it sometimes seems that map is written in invisible ink... but you know to read invisible ink, you have to hold it over heat. Same with creative life, 'Fire, give me more fire!'"

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, from "The Creative Fire" mansuscript, this quote posted at her public site at Facebook.

where potential poems
lay like unfertilized ova

a thousand rise
new moons
on the landscape of the future

I have no chromosone
starmap to offer
or helixes of lunar pearls

I wasn't born with a vision

mapless, without signs

my fire is your fire

what bursts from this undifferentiated mass, a singular
moment, astral blossom of solarity, prism of
colour, strange sapient gloss

is a response,
a spark,
the lighting of our blazing






I like Dr. Estes quote very much, and am inspired by her words. I've written a poem - the creative fire like an Olympic torch alighting us. Her philosophy, though, has given me pause for thought. For me there isn't an 'inner map' that I was 'born with.' While there is inner pressure to produce, my creativity is a response. It's not about my 'feelings' or particularly 'confessional,' but sparked by something I want to address. Sometimes it can be a way to work out a puzzle. What I write or paint or produce occurs in relation to my world, the people in it, a sense of spirit, a need to discover truth, a way to connect, reflect, deflect, untangle, give, discover the depths of.


                                                        

direct link: from the Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems

This poem is now available at Jamendo, with better sound than SoundClick, and you may download it if you wish. Later on, I will be offering a reading of this abridged version of my Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems with another musician.

direct link to YouTube: birthdance

In honour of Mother's Day. Paintings and poem may be found at my website: BIRTHDANCE

On the paintings:

THE BODY IS FOR BLOSSOMING

...pigment of flesh flowing under my fingers, magenta, alizarin crimson, cerulean blue, cyan green, cadmium yellow, dark violet, colour so rich it's almost edible, bodyscapes of colour, landscapes of fertility, erupting in the swirl of water and paint...

When I was pregnant, my body changed in fundamental and drastic ways. It was a crisis: the freedom of an old self was dying to make way for the mother I would become.

The "Birth Series" paintings became a visual journey of my changing body, a way to comprehend what I was undergoing in the tumble of hormones as my belly grew. The paintings focus on the woman who conceives and carries a baby into life, who nourishes and awaits the child who will hopefully emerge from the nine-month gestation of her body like a dream become real.

In reaction to an increasing invisibility in the world: the averted gaze, perhaps arising out of a cultural discomfort with the swollen belly, I wished to present the pregnant body as sensual and sacred. Despite my desire to confound the categories of alluring woman and maternal body, I found myself deep in the mystery of creation itself.

At the beginning of the series, the body is portrayed clearly; as the forces of labour, birth and then breastfeeding unfold, the clarity shifts into flowing colours suggesting the transformative experience that carrying and delivering and breastfeeding a baby is.

These paintings are about a rite of passage, about the strangest body on earth, about the mind-blowing transformation of skin, belly, heart and perception of the self, as a woman ripens and delivers her fragile and beautiful fruit, the newborn, a miracle of the world.

On the poem:

BIRTHDANCE took two years to write. In 1987, after my first child, my son, was born, I tried to write about birth. At the time, I was unable to find any poetry or literature by women on what giving birth 'felt' like, on their inner birthing experience, and I wasn't sure how to express those powerful birthing hours. It took some years, and many revisions as I worked towards how to express this powerful moment of my life, and finally chose to allow the stages of labour to structure the poem. Each woman has a different experience of birth, the many stories, poems and artwork by women in the last decade or two have been an important sharing of what was previously hidden.

__
The Birth Paintings and BIRTHDANCE were painted and composed from 1986-1989.

direct link: Dailies by Ron Walker

Quietly uplifing, masterful compositions and playing...

I have many of these songs already, being a friend of Ron's partner, Laura, and listening it all comes back... why there are some nights I head out with my dog into the dark city streets and only Ron's music will do, gentle, enlivening, uplifting, a way to take you from your gloom to joy, a quiet exuberant inner pleasure that brightens the whole world... the album is composed of journey pieces, the way we journey through each phase of our lives, how each day is a journey, how we journey to each other, coming home to ourselves... love the distant Windham Hill sound, the muted Steve Reich influences... the way that tonal building increases the pulse brings excitement into the body which pours into our emotions... the piano and the flute, oh I melt... played with such sensitivity, then the rhythm catchers of the drums... simply delightful, the whole album.

The way the waves lapping at your feet that you walk on the sand through are part of and reach out to the vast ocean, the tracks move between the lyrical just edging onto the symphonic, though are fully grounded in jazz.

Makes you wanna dance on a moonlit evening in a jazz club afterhours by the ocean...

Great work, Ron... so glad you've offered this album on Jamendo.

a fragrance of bouquets of petaled crabapple flowers



into a pink florae of wild apple-scented beauty



feathers of blossoms pass us by



do you see what deeply peers?


These are stills from a video where I gently shook the camera - manually, no Photoshop filters. The final one is my favourite. (Click photos for larger size)


I also experimented with Picasa's 'slideshow movie' capabilities and was impressed. I uploaded this .43sec video directly from Picasa to YouTube, and you'll see if you play it full screen that the resolution is excellent.



direct link: A Kora of Blossoms

Walking along a Toronto street in Spring, I came across a tree of dancing bouquets of crabapple blossoms.

Music from 'Zaman,' by Myriam Matoussi & friends: http://jamendo.com/en/album/57325 (used with permission)


 Doggles and I walked 6 kilometers today through Toronto neighbourhoods unexplored before. With a thermos of Earl Grey tea, steamy, redolent with bergamot orange, and kibble and water for her, we stopped at three lush parks while I sipped and she sniffed, nibbled grass and chewed sticks. I took a shaking-camera video of a crab apple tree in blossom. Music from Mali the whole way -yeah I was wired, that kora, man it's beautiful. We came home after 3 hours. She's 11 this Summer and aging extremely well, I must say.

                                                        

no birds, insects, or animals,
nothing but the sludge-brown sea
singing
smacking under the red sun
a rotted post that was once a dock

can we sacrifice our oil-hungry cars, our plastics,
the petroleum
of our lives

for the fish to frolic
the birds diving
while children build buckets of castles
on seafoamed sand?


(photo to right from NASA, satellite image May 1, 2010)
_
We need to rant. We need to get good and furious with ourselves, with manufacturers, with oil companies. These accidents are so huge that they continue to decimate the eden that is the birthright of every creature on earth. When I painted the sludge, I knew it was the oil slick... bubbling up in my vision, so far inland, so many thousands of miles away.

The painting is oils (oil paint is made from pigments mixed with linseed oil, which is from flax seeds), except that brown slick which is acrylic. Crude oil is used in the manufacture of acrylic polymers. While I know that there are many additives for acrylic paints that enable different effects so that it can look like watercolour or oil paints, I don't particularly like them except for underpainting because they dry quickly. This image was composed of leftover oil paint, scraped on with a palette knife, except at the end when I painted in the sun, so of excesses on my palette. The sludge of brown that represents the oil spill devastating the Gulf ocean and the coastlines of Louisiana is a scraping of acrylic paint, a plastic polymer which requires crude oil in its manufacture. It is what it represents, we could say.
__
And what if: "What has happened in the Gulf of Mexico is about to open a direct link to the molten core of the planet that we may not be able to control; much as the fallen being above, having become paralyzed by his obsession with the weight of his excessive dreams, now finds himself starring down into the unknown abyss of his own creation-the world may soon find itself nearly powerless before the primeval forces that we have allowed BP to disturb in the unholy name of private-profits over the survivability of this planet." Jim Kirwan, Declaring War on the Universe?

Yikes, trying to post the piece that I just added to my website Birth Paintings page did not work in Blogspot! I spent many hours composing it in Google Docs in a table, but cannot download it in a readable format, Word or even PDF, to my desktop. The 'public' page "url" is not properly formatted and to my eye unreadable too.

Hey, wait, this might work. A way to 'view' the Google Docs document with a 'read only' permissions to anyone who arrives there:

The Notebook of the Maternal Body

Free music for professional licensing
direct link: Creix, Journey at the corner

This is a single track, 8:21min long.

So many indications to me of the virtual world... it's such a rich world, traversing site after site, endlessly exploring, channel after channel, the musical landscape keeps changing as we move on, visiting worlds, disturbed, inquisitive, conversational, dreamy, the instruments sonically layered indicate the experience of the virtual traveler.

Yet I feel a longing within, under the surface of the beauty of this music, a longing for touch, to meet, to speak, to see each other. For us to come out from behind our screens and meet in some large emporium, a clearing in a forest, a beach, a huge tavern in the city, and hug and laugh and dance and jam the hours away with our music and embraces.

It is as if the musician loves the world that allows his music to be played many thousands of miles away, anytime, and yet misses the contact with the audience. This is the loneliness I feel most strongly in this exquisite track. It is such a rich track it needs no others to accompany it.

The message is clear. It's impossible, but beautiful. Like all desire - a longing that opens us, for we need to be opened.

After watching many hours of NASA's amazing SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) footage of the sun at the Internet Archives, I downloaded some short videos and from them distilled the clips you see in this video. I am delighted to find this footage and to create a solar videopoem.

A vision of such power that what went before falls away in a rapturous death. A rapturous death of the ego. An unerasable enlightenment. That Rubicon. I was inspired to write this piece after seeing the movie, 'Sunshine,' which also uses footage from NASA's SOHO Observatory.

A fascinating article from Escape Into Life by Lara Cory on The Etsy Phenomenon, a "balanced account of the success of Etsy with much room for opposing viewpoints." The comment stream is interesting. I post mine here to encourage you to go there, and because this blog is my personal archives.

Brenda Clews (unregistered) wrote:

I think being able to craft an item must be an enjoyable activity - using well-worn and true tested techniques, one can simply fill in the blanks, make the item and then sell it at a craft show or on a site like Etsy. That item has a function. It's a bright teapot, or a plier-knotted silver wire around a crystal to make a magik pendant, or a familiar pastoral scene for the kitchen or bathroom or hallway. The price is right. These items brighten our daily lives, fill in the spaces in our homes, or adorn us as clothing or jewelry, are lovely little gifts for each other.

Art, on the other hand, is hard, tempestuous, fickle, uncertain, a very painful execution of the unknown. While I sell very little work, and my work may sometimes seem decorative on the surface, each piece has torn me open, exposed my core - art-making is a fragile endeavour. Where I start with a piece and where I end are never pre-known. I think making a familiar object, a basket, or sewing some oven mitts with applique of flowers, must be a pleasant activity. To me, craft has a security where the ending, the product, its niche is known, and this must be comforting to the artisan, the person selling their wares.

I can't pretend to know what art is, or even if I do it. Personally I find much museum art - or the contemporary art museums support in traveling shows, not the main collections of historically important artists and art - to be on the whole dry, academic, requiring the knowledge of a vast body of critical art theory and it often seems so abstracted as to be removed from the pulse.

Etsy's too large for me. I've taken a peek now and then, and scurried away quickly. Though of all sites selling goods on the NET it's one of the best, hand-crafted, yes, lovely, let's support the makers of the items, the artists and artisans, and vintage, oh vintage is so beautiful, I love vintage since it's often what was formerly haute couture, fine clothing, what only the wealthy could afford, and now its lace is under our adoring fingers, in our hands.

As for being in the midst of an evolutionary shift in the world in art, yes, yes, yes... surely we are, as surely as in music, film, literature... where the people speak, create, offer. There has never been so much public writing in the world, blogs are booming, and we can upload our videos for public viewing and do in the millions, with the development of Creative Commons licensed music, on sites like Jamendo, music is experiencing a revival too.

Perhaps we are entering a period of high Renaissance powered by the people.