Spring?

I think spring fever has taken hold of me today. The birds are chirping their heads off outside, the air temperature is warm-ish and I think I see mounds of greenery popping up out there. (Where did I put those glasses?)

The first harbingers of spring in my sorely neglected garden are the winter aconite and the snowdrops, followed closely by the spring crocuses. This morning, all I could find up and in bloom/in bud are the aconite and one lonely crocus.

A neighbor has a fence row of forsythia bordering his yard. When that blooms, I'll know Spring has arrived, no matter what the calendar or the weather says to the contrary!

(c) 2009 Martha McLemore

Going to Meeting - for Terry, as Promised.

When we congregate for meeting for worship, we sit in silence, awaiting the Light, that of God within us all.

However, on our way inside the meetinghouse, and after meeting, we are chattier than an entire roost of crows or ravens. These ravens reminded me so much of some of my favorite members of meeting, loved ones now gone forever, except in my heart. I miss thee, Marian, Posey and Aunt Ginny.


I don't know where I found this, and apologize for not remembering to record the URL when I saved this image. (c) 2009 Martha McLemore.

O-o-o-o, a Sparkly!

Of the many voices I hear in my head (come on, I know you have them, too, so don't go raising that eyebrow at me!), two I value are my Muse and my Conscience. Except today, dammit!

My Muse is entranced with the new sparkly that has caught my corvine attention, the Paint.net toy I mentioned earlier, and wants to play...to the exclusion of eating, cleaning house, visiting the throne room, doing laundry, reconciling my checking account and working on my personal taxes, a few of the items from my "To Do on First Day "(Sunday to non-Quakers) list. Not to mention responding to the comments on the blog, which I keep meaning to do every time I log on...arrrrggggghhhhh!

Conscience (aka "that cranky-ass, anal-retentive party-pooper" to Muse) keeps nagging me about all the things I just listed above. Add blogging, in the first place, to that list. Conscience usually speaks in dulcet tones, sweetly...for the first time or two she inserts her little reminders. After that, she begins to simper, then really whine, then SCREECH LIKE THE BANSHEE FROM HELL!!

SHUT THE F*** UP! (That was Muse, not me. I don't say things like that...out loud.)

I do not think the images I'm about to post are "all that," but they are fun, and I wanted to show those who might be interested a couple of things you can do with just a click or two (Conscience: "Make that more like 10 or 15, after half an hour of diverted, wasted energy!") of your mouse buttons.

Okay, this is the end result:

and this is what I started from:

BU-U-UZ-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z!

Okay, okay...I hear the dryer buzzing again for the fifteen-millionth time. I'm going, already, so shut ...

(c) 2009 Martha McLemore

While waiting for the laundry to dry and the dishwasher to finish...

...I'm playing with a free photo editing program I downloaded several weeks ago from Paint.net - just now getting around to exploring its uses. This is the original image I used:

It is a photo of fabric from Africa, one of several hundred design sources I've downloaded over the last several years. Regrettably, I didn't think back then to list the sources for some of those designs, so I cannot give credit where it is due.

I tweaked the hue and saturation of the colors, did a polar inversion and stretched that image out, flipped it horizontally, then pasted the two resulting images together on a separate page.

Here is the image I just finished butchering. Now, what to do with it?

(c) 2009 Martha McLemore. Altered fabric image by Martha McLemore

For Peggy

"Bipolar" by Martha McLemore

I have a thing for masks, their symbolism and their function in ancient cultures. We all use masks, though mostly of the psychological kind these days.

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My blog is a mask. It allows me to wander through cyberspace in a variety of 'faces', none of which expose the woman inside. What troubles me, at times, is that I see the mask and confuse it for the real me. I become lost in the mask.

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This painting is based on an antique African mask. I painted it last summer in response to the frightening experience my grandson Donovan had with medication given to treat him for bipolar disorder, an illness he does not have. The day he was diagnosed (misdiagnosed, actually), I went online to find what I could about the disorder. While Donovan was exhibiting some of the symptoms and behaviors associated with the illness, they were symptoms in common with other illnesses he might have had, as well. He had a dangerous adverse reaction to the lithium he was given and came close to lapsing into kidney failure and a coma. I was halfway through with the painting when we were told he wasn't bipolar, after all.

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I imagine the painting is more reflective of my anger and frustration with the inaccuracies of modern medicine than it is of what people with bipolar disorder experience.

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The African mask I used as inspiration for the painting shows the face in life and in death. The cool colors and the slackness of the one side are in strong contrast to the overly animated, warm colors on the other side. If you cover half of the face at a time, you see one aspect - "face" - of the disease. The colors are bright, garish, wild, depressive, over-the-top and disengaged, all at once.

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I saw a movie with Olivia de Havilland called "The Snakepit," about a woman's descent into madness and the treatment she received at a mental facility. I fear snakes, terribly, which is why the movie made such an impression on me when I was 13 or 14. I was thinking of that movie while I was painting the background around the mask. I had started painting flames, to suggest a descent into hell, but I liked these colors better.

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I think it is finished. It is, for now, anyway. I don't paint because I think I'm any good at it, but because it releases something in me that writing cannot. I started another mask painting, but when my daughter's world fell apart and she moved in with me, at the same time Donovan was admitted to the hospital where he now resides, I put all painting aside. I'll pick it up again sometime.

(c) 2009 Martha McLemore. Painting, "Bipolar" (c) 2008 Martha McLemore

Crocitation 1: I am Crow

Shortly after I started this blog, I googled to see if there were any other blogs about crows on the Internet. Turns out there are quite a few. I read some of the blogs they were following and now most of those are in my Blogs I Follow list.

,,,

All of which is leading to an explanation of the piece of "art" pictured above. I found blogs by artists whose work I admire, whose work has inspired me to try my hand at creating something more than a pile of dishes waiting to be washed.

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I used an image I mentioned in an earlier blog, altered it with pastels and pencils and ink, plus some scrapbooking papers and stickers. Then I scanned it and altered the image some more using Paint.net's photo editing program. Enough about the picture.

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...

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I am Crow.

I rule the sky.

The Universe is my creation.

I am eyes and ears to the Great Spirit,

who made me his Totem.

I taught Bear to hunt,

and Man to sing.

I am Crow.

...

I am Crow.

I am smartest of birds.

I taught Raven

everything he knows.

I sing the Sun up each morning

and put it to bed each night.

I am Crow.

...

I am Crow.

I taught the rivers to flow

and oceans to tide.

I bring each season in its time.

I taught Man the importance of

fidelity and the value of family.

I am Crow.

...

I am Crow.

I taught Man to laugh, to

love and to Dance.

I taught him to solve problems,

and to make tools.

I gave the World fun and games.

I taught the World how to mourn.

I am Crow.

...

I am Crow.

I am the Keeper of all secrets

and spiritual wisdom.

I am the Watchman.

I am the Teacher.

I am the Giver of all things good.

I am Crow!

(c) 2009 Martha McLemore

Michelle's Challenge

Several days ago, Michelle, http://crows-feet.blogspot.com/2009/02/save-words-meme.html (sorry, I don't know how to embed that or make a link to her blog--still learning), issued a challenge to several people to visit a web site and adopt a word or two or more that were about to be dropped from dictionaries. I chose three; all seemed appropriate for my Crow persona.






An aretaloger is one who writes or recites aretologies, the name for sacred biographies. See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aretalogy. Another definition of aretologer is braggart, one who is annoyingly boastful. Crows sometimes seem excessively boastful, especially after they've put one over on some hapless cat or human who had the effrontery to cross the crow's path.

Crocitation means caws, cawing or croaking. Crocitation can refer to the sound of frog and toad songs, or the cries of seagulls, too. The word makes me think of "recitation," which is how I'll use it in a separate post.

Nidifice means nest. I used to have a blog titled "Sofie's Nest," but I closed it out. It was full of pain and angst about my crumbling marriage (non-marriage, actually) to a man who turned out to have one too many psycho-sexual disorders than I could handle. Who needs the reminder?

So, if I can get my crap together, I'll post something using the words I adopted.
(c) 2009 Martha McLemore

Flotsam and Jetsam II

Technically, flotsam and jetsam refer to the junk that floats on water and ends up on the shores or collected in small eddies and pools of water...a mish-mash of assorted, sometimes unrelated pieces of debris.

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Sort of describes what's in my mind right now, a collection of debris. I am burned out from doing taxes for the company where I work and for the Quaker school where I volunteer as treasurer. When I get burned out, about anything, I "pull in my horns," as the Chinese fortune telling I Ching advises me to do upon occasion. I take that to mean to back off, to return to the cave, to disengage. I float on my internal ocean among all the flotsam and jetsam bobbing up and down, back and forth in my mind. Eventually I come out of burn-out, re-enter the universe around me and carry on with whatever's next.

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"Pull in your horns" is good advice, actually, because I don't think clearly or carefully when I'm burned out. I've been known to say and do some pretty stupid, dumb-ass things when in the state of burn-out. I am convinced one or both of my marriages took place while my inner-moon was in burn-out phase.

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Anyway, today is the perfect day for making one of my favorite soups, as seen above in the photo. I don't know the exact name of the soup, and the recipe changes from one batch to another, depending on what I have on hand when the soup-making urge hits me. I call it Italian bean soup. I must have seen someone making this on the Food Network or maybe Julia Child's show on PBS...who cares?

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The wild winds of March have arrived about 15 days too soon, for those who set their watches, plant their peas and shear their lambs by that sort of thing. They are fierce today.

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I love wild winds, the wilder the better (except hurricane force winds). I love how they howl and moan and shriek, like the wild being I sometimes am inside. They roar down the chimney, scattering spiders and the cats' equilibrium to the four corners of the house. They sweep through the darkest, spookiest recesses of my psyche, flushing out the ghosties and other nasties that like to hide there. The only thing that could make these winds any better would be if I were standing at a cliff's edge with a jagged, rocky coastline below me, on a night brightened by a full moon, with silver-lined clouds scuttling by, as if trying desperately to find a sheltered cove out of the winds.

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Wild wind makes me feel alive like nothing else in this world, not even multiple orgasms or the silkiest dark chocolate melting against my tongue.

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Too much information? Okay. Back to the soup and perhaps the other stuff I intended to write about.

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Soup is chicken broth, canned beans - cannellini or some other white bean - like navy beans; garlic, onion, diced tomatoes; greens (broccoli rabe, mustard greens, kale, spinach, collards-whatever you like), Italian sausage (substitute whatever you like). Leftover pasta is optional. I had some so I tossed it in the pot.

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I found seasoned broth in the market today...has white wine and herbs in it. Smells rather enticing, in fact.

Excuse me; soup is calling and my gut is growling in response. Gotta go feed the Beast.

(c) 2009 Martha McLemore