I am Finally Rounding the Corner of Coming into My Own!!

I feel surrounded by it more and more everyday, this coming into one's own. This process of 'something' that is becoming more me that I know I have been building since I was a small child. Building this coming into me since I can remember as a small child, learning to navigate the chaos that surrounded my entire world. Building by navigating and constantly adapting my steps and abilities. Adapting to stay focused regardless of the circumstances, or chaos once forever beyond my control. Building and eventually learning to walk my own path, by every step or misstep, into becoming a young adult. Walking the steps that have led me literally solo for years and years on the path of parenting and art-making when no one, absolutely no one seemed to care to ever notice. When no one ever tried to learn to even care, or come close.

Never-the-less mysteriously, wonderfully, just very lately, positive acknowledgments are slowly finding me! They are true heart-felt acknowledgments reflecting such nurturing and offer unknowingly, such soul-quenching depth of nourishment that I am moved to tears of absolute joy at their coming! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh! Sweet manna from heaven, the nourishment of love! The nature of unconditional love I have always chosen and always will choose over just making money for its own sake! Not that making money is repudiated for its own sake, by me. It has always been the chaos between choosing love or money that I have ALWAYS rejected.

In the struggle of clarifying these dynamics within; in the face of heroically struggling to band-aid together the ability to pay my own rent, with employment that hasn't quite sent me to work that I can be paid for. In the struggle of possibly continued mistiming more hopeful applications-in-waiting for the opportunity to be called to interview for other employment options, more fitting to my long hand-built skills and abilities. Called to share my experiences, reflecting life-long passions in the arts and culture for pay, I am waiting. Waiting for the seemingly endless bureaucratic sluggishness to roll out arbitrary decision-making that may include not just looking at me seriously, but also more aptly for a constructive, long-ever-due change, actually hire and pay me, as a valuable 'member of the team' this time.

In the face of all of these on-going and overwhelming, (needlessly obstacle-strewn) challenges, I have also discovered that some of my images are currently included on the website, homepage banner of an arts advocacy organization in NYC, called Fractured Atlas! The same organization with which I have my fiscally sponsored art project posted, so as to receive funding enough that I might create more unfettered, full-time for a creative, novel change from the everyday responsibilities like rent, bills, etc!

All of this struggling aside today, I then opened this blog to also find one of the most endearing acknowledgments written yet in the comments section of my art blog! A comment written from someone I really admire a lot and who is in my fb network. A comment from someone who I have not always found a natural for me to communicate with, even as I have committed to myself over and over to win this person over to me so, we might become not just women colleagues and allies in the arts, but also friends!!

*Wow! CM! YOU Wow me today!!

And so, from another resource on my path today, I post acknowledgments in the best ways I know how_ by including the fortuitous words of the 17th Annual U.S. Poet/activist- Laureate, William S. Merwin:

Thanks

by W.S Merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

I am a new EI!

Today, I am posting a small joy being celebrated in this world! At the same time it's really big, when one zooms into focus what joy can represent in one's life on so many levels, and in particular, in no small way!!!
It is a BIG JOY because it does in part, reflect lifelong perseverance of hand-building a dream from my childhood: to be an artist in this world. A dream inside one person, to openly help share and spread truth, beauty and freedom on the soul level, in the creative voice, through creative expression and now, as an Exhibition Interpreter!

This joy came in the mail yesterday by letter, to tell me that I have been accepted into a fairly prestigious program at a local art museum!! Acceptance into 12-months of in-depth training for this important and valuable position. Important and valuable, for the service I can embody in a more public role and certainly, in an additional professional capacity at long last to share my desires, that others know how many ways there are to recognize the value of fine art in one's own world. I am ecstatic to show the art, guide the perception-building abilities of other people, and simultaneously educate how, any person can begin to build a relationship with greater personal depth, to one's capacity for conscious recognition of what value art has in one's own life and world. A depth of recognition no matter what age a person is! From very young to wise and life-experienced, art does hold great value on so many levels, that actively reinforces the quality of our personal and collective lives, in our communities and our nation.
Finally, this news is an invaluable joy to me today, for the long-term benefit a position of this nature has for a hand-built career such as mine, a career that means life to me in so many ways.

I am very proud of this opportunity and of myself, as it has taken almost everything to arrive at a moment such as this. Celebrate with me, small and large joys of personal achievement and accomplishment that are everywhere in this world today! Joys easy to recognize and celebrate if you know where to look_ you will find them!

Women & Power; Our Time to Lead

My goal this fall is to attend this conference! Meanwhile, I am opening my own doors on a vision; my business as an artist/healer. The time has come. This is empowering work that starts in an intersection in body-centered psychology, nutritional healing and in visual work; expressive arts.
Contact me, starting on the blog here, or via the email address on the top, right side-bar.
I am looking for investors and adding clients_ I hope to hear from you!

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY 2010

Like a Delicate Wallpaper, Busy Bees Use Flower Petals For Nest

(paraphrased)_ originally written by Kathleen Masterson

May 6, 2010

When we think of bees nests, we often think of a giant hive buzzing with social activity, worker bees and honey. But scientists recently discovered a rare, solitary type of bee that makes tiny nests by plastering together flower petals.

Jerome Rozen/American Museum of Natural History

This nest of the O. avoseta bee, a variety of bee not seen in the western hemisphere, is made of flower petals that holds a single egg.

Each nest is a multicolored, textured cocoon — a papier-mâché-like husk surrounding a single egg, protecting it while it develops into an adult bee.

'It's not common to us to see a bee use parts of plants for nests,' says (paraphrased), Dr. Jerome Rozen of the American Museum of Natural History, of the unexpected find. His team stumbled across the nests of the Osmia (Ozbekosima) avoseta bee in Turkey. Oddly enough, another team discovered the same bee and flowery nests in Iran on the same day. The two teams published their research together in the American Museum Novitates.
Multiple flower-lined nests of the O. avoseta bee are nestled in the ground.


Jerome Rozen/American Museum of Natural History

One mother bee may make around 10 nests, often nestling the single-cell berths near each other.

These nests are a fascinating natural work of art, and they're also key to understanding more about how the roughly 20,000 species of bees live.

"There's a demand for biologists to know bees nowadays," Rosen says. "They are the foremost animal pollinators of plants, and tremendously important for maintaining ecosystems — not only crops but also for conservation."

To learn more, the scientists watched the busy female bees. Building a nest takes a day or two, and the female bee might create about 10 nests in total, often right next to each other. To begin construction, she bites the petals off of flowers and flies each petal — one by one — back to the nest, a peanut-sized burrow in the ground.

Jerome Rozen/American Museum of Natural History

A bee closely related to O. avoseta bites off a flower petal with its mandibles.

She then shapes the multi-colored petals into a cocoon-like structure, laying one petal on top of the other and occasionally using some nectar as glue. When the outer petal casing is complete, she reinforces the inside with a paper-thin layer of mud, and then another layer of petals, so both the outside and inside adhere to one another, in what becomes a potpourri of purple, pink and yellow.

Jerome Rozen/American Museum of Natural History

Peeling back the outer layer of flower petals reveals the paper-thin mud layer.

These meticulous shells are just over a half-inch long and usually will house just one tiny egg. To prepare for her offspring, the mother collects pollen and nectar, which she carries back to the burrow in a nifty part of the digestive tract called the crop. She deposits this gooey blob of nutritional goodness in the bottom of the flower-petal nest. Then, she lays the egg, right on top of the gelatinous blob.

A closeup of an egg, laid on top of nutrients.


Jerome Rozen/American Museum of Natural History

The mother bee lays a single egg in the flowery bower, right on top of a nutritious deposit of nectar and pollen.

At this point, it's time to seal in the egg. The mother bee neatly folds in the inner layer of petals, smears a paper-thin mud layer and then folds the outer petals. The casing is nearly airtight, which helps protect the vulnerable egg (and later larva, then pupa) from flooding or excessive dryness or hoofed animals.

In only three to four days, the egg hatches into a larva. When it finishes feasting on the nectar, the larva spins a cocoon (still inside the shell, which has hardened into a protective casing by this point) and then hangs out. Rosen says he isn't sure whether it spends the winter as a larva or as an adult. But at some point the creature's tissue begins to restructure itself, and it transforms into an adult. Come springtime, the adult bee emerges from its flowery bower.

When the cycle starts all over again.

Continuing A Woman's Worth

EMBRACE YOUR INNER GIRL



Pain to Power

A Woman's Worth

I am still searching for reasonable information sources about two creative and independently ambitious women... Séraphine de Senlis and Edith Gregor Halpert. One born in France and referred to as a 'foundling' and the other born into a well-to-do merchant family in Russia; who upon losing everything, migrated with her family to America as an infant. Edith, unbeknownst to nearly everyone, grew up to become one of the most influential persons to shape the very foundation of modern art in this country! Her legacy was at risk of slipping into oblivion, until it was unearthed a few short years ago and written about by Lindsay Pollock. The story of a creative and resourceful life, as Séraphine uniquely lived her own, is still to be uncovered and told to the world! Who will be called to complete the project of telling about Séraphine de Senlis, possibly as part of their own development of becoming?

Along with these two examples of women nearly forgotten, or not recognized at all for their preciously valuable contributions to this world and humanity, I could point to the poverty of detail in my own female biological family history! As far as the impact this reality has had on the quality of my own development into adulthood, it is no wonder that I may be just emerging from my own struggles to find and shape my own sense of worth as a woman and human being. Just emerging into awareness to understand what my responsibilities are, in shaping my own successes in life. Just beginning to clearly envision a life of value for my own self, contributing to the world in which I now live, and understand that I have arrived internally to a calm that I may just leave a legacy of conscious worth for my daughter. Not that any of this knowing or shaping can be done in advance of the doing; in advance of the living it into reality. Yet, in light of the struggle to simply locate records of the value of other significant women's lives, that a general lack of awareness for the value of self has been such a struggle, a struggle to break through the external layers of cultural amnesia caked on top of the prism of personal experience and history, I must ask, do we need to continue this standard amnesia approaching recognition, orientation and familiarity for the valuable in defining human consciousness evolution? I am searching for a simpler, shared language to do this, learn this, to share this!

This post is not a lament of personal difficulties but only a brief comment out loud for the recognition of my own propensity for naïveté. To somehow always expect what is not already in place in the world, as though it is my right that my expectations of life, ought already be so in manifest reality. Yet too, this consciousness which Western societies define as confidence, this consciousness of expectation is in reality, a tricky balance to learn; to consciously cultivate internally. Learning to abandon the ego in the process.
At risk of sounding egotistical this post then, is an act of my own recording for all the world to find. That I am experiencing recognition for the significance to learn conscious, internal self-worth as a woman, as a human being, on a global and microcosmic level today, this week, and I am posting about this recognition for it's own sake at this moment.
My worth, any person's worth is up to me/each one of us_ to define by living that inherent worth we are each invited (by birth), to bring into reality.
The only expectation then, is to truly consciously become all that we can each be. I am recognizing this is my job to do in, and with my life from here on out...

Life lived in pursuit of clear truth, seems to be a process of distilling everything down to its essential nature. Henry David Thoreau is someone whose words I have paraphrased before, where my own path seems in relation to his wisdom in quiet hours. Having just come back across this quote, I add it here where it seems relevant (in my life) again: "In proportion as she simplifies her life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." ~Thoreau, paraphrased


Tokens of well-wishes sent in support of my very first public exhibit, 1988.

Séraphine de Senlis

This image is (original to me) posted on flickr by, Dalbera

I first learned about Séraphine de Senlis in 1999, as I was beginning to build my undergrad research on French women artists. I chose not to use her work in my research at that time, because there was so little to find out about her. However, I was recently greatly enamored to have rediscovered her as subject in the movie snapshot last fall, about her work, her experience of being discovered as a naif artist & that all too brief time frame the movie covered on her personal life.
My rediscovery of the life and work of Séraphine, occurred through amazing coincidences I was experiencing on line; my own naïve discovery of a phenomenon called blog swapping!
Today, I have decided to renew my (again!) all too brief_ research about this woman and artist, by committing to write more about her, as I unearth the gems of info on Séraphine de Senlis, there is yet to discover!!