Big Leaf Maple Art

Big Leaf Maple Art

“Appreciate and don't take for granted the things and people you have. Better yet take the good out of the situations you may face, I think 2020 came to teach us that.” -Hopal Green

These Big Leaf Maple trees in our area will grow nowhere else, though people have tried. And they make the largest maple leaf of any other maple. 

These trees are everywhere around us as we meander through the rainforest. They light up the understory in dappled sun, drenching us in golden light.

Their leaves pile up into crumpled papery paths through the woods. They read like naturally self recycling newspapers, littering our way, with the stories of the last few seasons printed on them. Pick one up, it has a message for those who can read tree language. 

There is the news of wind, rain, and sun, gossip about the affairs of birds and squirrels, and from this fall, the tale of the great smoke. We kick through them as we walk.

The rain turns them into soggy cornflakes that squish under your feet.

Here in the great northwest USA, we have boring fall colors. There is green, for evergreen trees, and yellow, for the big leaf maple. That’s about it.

So, in this pandemical moment of embracing what is around, whatever it may be, I take a deep dive into the fall colors anyway. I gather some fallen maple leaves, and play with the color palette. 

I mix them with light on my ipad. 

I begin to pull out bits of dyed fleece and sparkles.

I spin the the colors into yarn, and knit them together.

The main body of the blanket is undyed natural tan brown merino wool, from a small farm near here, where every sheep has a name, and each one is special and loved, and has beautiful fleece. I spin the yarn by hand, from super soft, four inch stapes that I’ve washed carefully and gently, and dried in the sun and breeze.

The finished blanket will remind me of the colors of the season when we all had to learn to appreciate whatever we have around us now, wherever we may be.

“There are so many things which we have but have not paid any attention to them. If only we can learn to appreciate our blessings, we can enjoy great happiness.” -Awdhesh Singh

The Age of Sharing

 The Age of Sharing

“I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.” -Georgia O’Keeffe

(from “How to Do What You Really Want While Saving the World at the Same Time”:)

Some guy claims that “The Artist Is Dead”. He wrote a book. It whines about how you used to be able to make a middle class living at being an artist, but now, because of the internet, (He calls it “Big Tech”) sadly, everything is free. (In truth, he means IF you were a white male fancied by the gatekeepers like the record companies and galleries and rich art collectors and fine arts endowment founders)

Hmmm. I’d say the artist is very much alive. More like, it is the death of the gatekeepers. Now, it is a direct relationship between an artist and the discoverer of the art. It is now, yes, a game of discovery, not selling. A million books a year are self published. There are billions of beautiful photos floating around on the cloud, with millions more added daily.

Kids are making zillions of little movies every minute. More self published songs bubble up on the interweb every day than you could listen to if you played them all day for hundreds of years.

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.”- Dr. Seuss

Some just don’t bother to look for this stuff anymore, and allow the lowest common denominator to feed them cat videos or whatever. But the beauty, creative miracles, and free richness is here now, if you want to look for it.

“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.”- Neil Gaiman 

“But are they good?” (Scream the unemployed gatekeepers.) “ Are they professional?!” Well if you mean, “not free,” then, no...

“Every artist was first an amateur.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson

New curators will arise to help us sort through it all. Networks will arise to share this creative bounty. It is as if we have been through a long winter where the only flowers you ever saw were in some exotic orchid greenhouse and suddenly spring arrives and the fields and roadsides everywhere are thick with abundant carpets of velvet flowers blooming in every color.

Actually I like the lowly common dandelions. And cat videos. And Etsy crafts. This great blooming of art, from the most basic to the most highbrow, is to be celebrated. But it is time to mentally unhitch art from the cart we have been making it drag around, which is the stated need to make it pay us money.

This is the dawning age of everyone as artist. The age of the gatekeeper is over. You don’t need a degree in art. You might get one to help you understand it, but not to do it. Most of us do not get a degree in talking, or walking, or eating, or singing or lovemaking, though all of these things do require immersion in the culture to learn and do well. There is some technical mastery in involved, but this is no mystic priesthood.  Art is no different.

This is an age in which you can, for the first time since we lived in isolated tribes, just do it and share it with everyone. Only now the tribe is global. You have the whole world in which to look for and find the ones who like the things you do. This is not a problem!  This is awesome!

In the past, you needed to have money if you wanted to be an artist. You needed a patron. Customers, to buy your work. A job on the side at a university to train others that they needed to appreciate and buy your work. A network, a circle, a fan base, a mailing list, a go-fund-me, a spouse or relative to support you.

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”- Oscar Wilde

But now, you can just do it. Yes, the math does not support superstars anymore, especially if we are all artists now. If everyone is either an artist now, or about to realize that they are, there will soon be a one to one relationship of artist to art appreciators, formerly called “consumers.” You will not become a superstar. Nobody will. But do we need superstar eaters? Superstar sleepers? 

Everyone and anyone can and does take photographs all day now. Gradually we are getting better at it as we share. Yes, share. It is a word that means give it away free. Not sell.

You can now turn your photo into a Van Gough, a Picasso, or a Peter Max, in seconds, with an app. Another app composes your tune as you sing it, into a fully orchestrated song in the style of your choice. And what is the limit to how many stars there can be? The more deeply our telescopes peer out into the universe, the more stars we see. Every pinpoint magnifies into a whole galaxy or something.

The age of the superstar is over. It actually peaked decades ago. There is no shared mass media anymore, so no superstars, except for the star of the day, or hour, or... minute? And only among your cohort of shared interest in that subject.

“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.”-Charles Cooley 

Art is just what we do. It is just who we all are, really. There are still some indigenous cultures left on Earth in which everyone sings. Pretty much all day, often together, in lovely intensely coordinated patterns and harmonies.

Give it up, gatekeepers, you time has passed and you are now historians.

“In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.”- Ernest Hemingway 

“The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint.”-Keith Haring

Words Matter

Words Matter

My mother taught me to ignore the mean things people say: “sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you”. But it was not true. Words matter.

There was a period in my childhood when I was in the habit of frequently and offhandedly saying, “I’m gonna kill you,” just as a way of casually disagreeing with my friends. “I hate you” was a way of expressing admiration. I knew a teenager who called anything he liked “sick”.

Nowadays I often hear success being described as “killing it”.

How about, let’s not. Even when we know what we mean to say, our subconscious mind hears it differently. This is abundantly illustrated by the bias research showing we make judgements about things we perceive, long before we are even aware we are doing so. 

Who has not had a few words spoken to them that changed the course of their life, encouraged them in a crucial moment, or hurt their feelings so deeply that they rang in their mind for years after?

And our conscious mind is really the tiny tip of the iceberg sticking up above the unconscious waters of our mind. Most of our mind is bopping along on automatic, almost all of the time. This part of the mind is the overwhelming majority, despite the impression, and conceit, really, that you, the Awake One, are in charge, calling the shots. 

And while we are on the subject, could we stop “shooting” each other an email? (Maybe we could chute it.)  We have so many violent expressions, remnants of former times and things we no longer do. Who kills birds with stones these days? Who even wants to?

We disempower girls when we refer to the generic person as a he. We confuse

dark skinned children when we constantly refer to bad things as dark and good things as light.

It takes extra time to compose our thoughts into words that truly are congruent with the meaning we want to express. But it is worth the effort, for we are not only putting forth the enhanced coherent power of these memes to affect those who hear or read our words, we are also reshaping and sharpening our own minds, and clearing the clutter. 

“Whatever words we speak ought to be chosen carefully for those who hear them will be influenced by them, for better or worse.” - Buddha

Mother Sky, Father Earth

Mother Sky, Father Earth

History is full of stories of the “Mother” Earth and the “Father” Sky.  But why do we have to think of it like that?

I do find one story of a Mother Sky and Father Earth, from ancient Egypt, Nuit and her consort Geb. Nuit, the goddess of sky, makes love with Geb, the god of earth, continually, by just lying over him with her infinite blanket-body of stars. Their children grow up to be the famous Osiris and Isis, featured in tales written in stone.

Why not Father Earth?

And Mother Sky?

I mean, if we must sexualize and anthropomorphize everything. Which, by the way, I do not advocate. But if we insist on going there, ok, let us notice that while the dna of men and wimmin is 98% the same, the two percent difference is mostly related to the sexual apparatus involved in making babies. The male contribution is sperm donation, and the female contribution is the egg cell and a nice place for the conceived baby to grow in. Each contributes half of the DNA to the baby.

Of course, one way to look at it is that the Earth is a nice place for a baby species such as ours to be nurtured and grow up. Acknowledged. It is all about us humans with that one. 

But what if the Earth itself, as one body, is the sperm? It contains all of the information needed to grow into the greater being of our destiny once it finds its Cosmic Egg and begins to develop into a post terrestrial being. Hmm, what a conception!

 Or, do we assume that we have already reached the apex of evolution? Oh Goddess, I hope not!

What then, if the Universe is that nice place to grow up into? Did not She give birth to our solar system and galaxy? Did not same Universe do just fine without the humans for billions of years before we came along?

Can we think beyond the blip of time when we Earth humans have been around, back into Great Time? And beyond the tiny sperm of a planet we are on, out into the vast Galactic Ovum or Universal environment in which it has been ejaculated?

If the Universe is self similar “above” as “below,” then each planet-seed is different in terms of the genetic information it carries, according to its adaptation to its particular conditions. Some planet seeds might carry sturdy creatures like polar bear people, bigfoots, stocky Neanderthal types, good at living mostly underground in icy worlds. 

Others might be teeming with elven bird people who perch in great trees on forest planets. 

Herds of horse beings with single central forehead horns and wings may run and fly in rocky grass worlds. 

Somewhere, massive Herbertian sandworms burrow through desert worlds, creating spice prized by spacefaring monkey people. 

Maybe some worlds are full of great telepathic whale super minds who sing to one another from all the way across the water covered planet.

Maybe even this imagines it in a too human centric way. What if most planets find oneness and enlightenment in self realized, whole planet mats of asexual one celled life forms?

One thing is for sure. Stretch out your mind! The story is not over. The love affair between the Mother Universe and her lover and planet creation donor, Father Earth, or WHATEVER it is, is ongoing.

“Humans are the most important entity in the universe …only to most people.” -Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Creepy Hallowen Stories

 “Be afraid... be very afraid.” – The Fly

It is the scary season. Polls say most people are walking around right now with anxiety about the upcoming election. But I am worried about the rest of them. There was a bumper sticker a few years ago, “if you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.” But the attention is just tension now. The outrage is all used up. It has burned to ash.

There is a scary old crone at my house. I caught a glimpse of her at the zoom call to the doctor. She looks like she might be two hundred and forty four years old, at least. She is missing one front tooth, and the other one hurts. She has fallen. Now she lurches about the house with an irregular, halting gait. 

The right leg is weak and painful. The left one is blocked, maybe clotted.

You cannot walk unless your legs, both left and right, cooperate. No progress will happen.

Out front, the pumpkins from the garden are pale, the result of mixing with the seeds from last year’s white pumpkin.

This year’s  jack o’ lanterns will be yellow, like the smoke damaged sky. 

The Concord grapes never quite got blue this year. The birds began to pick them off when they were still a reddish purple, so we had to bring them in.

Night comes too early these days. Every evening of late, Jupiter and Saturn, paired in this October’s skies, peer down over the treetops, into our bathtub, like peeping eyes. 

A heavy, overbearing, hotheaded, red Mars hovers each night, presiding over a heavily damaged moon. An angry red monster stalks the internet. He has been hit; he has been wounded. This is the dangerous kind. The red color is bleeding out of his hair and down into his face. Lies are flying all around him; or maybe those are bats.

Zombies with headphones stagger about the streets, mumbling to themselves. Almost everyone I see seems to be wearing a mask. This year, Halloween just goes on and on.

Notes From The Climate Front

“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, 

but by those who watch them without doing anything.”– Albert Einstein

Notes From The Climate Front

Sometime in September; Somewhere on the Left Coast; Somewhere in the Smoke Clouds

As the fires from climate catastrophe swirl around us, I become particularly aware of the flood of refugees. More numerous than in recent years, they are apparently flying in from elsewhere. 

Luckily, our house did not burn down last week in the firestorm, so at the moment we are in a little island of safety, despite the worst smoke I have ever seen.

People around us report that cougars, bears, foxes, and coyotes have been displaced and are helping themselves to any local cats and dogs they can catch for lunch.

But our refugees are of the feathered kind. This year they seem more present and close to our watered island and pond in the forest clearing. We have never used any poisons here, and have long ago stopped trying to grow anything but what the forest itself plants here, so it is bit of a refuge. 

So all day we watch through the filtered smoke as more than a few local birds, plus a lot of new ones, hang around, stop in, and move on. I have seen quite a few new visitors and species that I have never noted in this location before.  Whole flocks of species I have never seen. 

No one is outside or driving around in this pandemic combined with toxic smoke event. It is so quiet! Maybe the birds are just glad the humans are all indoors as they cower in houses to escape the smoke. 

Fall migrations are underway now, and surely this is disrupted. The entire west coast of north America is smoky from the fires that are sprinkled over the landscape. Each successive year seems to be record breaking over the previous one.

Each successive year, until now, there are fewer, not more birds, overall. But this year feels poignant and pathetic. The birds are more numerous, apparently, only because they are refugees from habitat they are losing elsewhere, so even more of net loss, overall.

Still, when I look out my window, I wish that I too, could fly away to a better place. As soon as I figure out where that is. Some other planet?