The tides, rising, falling, following the moon...

Welcome to my story. It is my daily story. An artist and art instructor, writer, and teacher, I hope to provide some solace, some laughter, some suggestions, some stories; and, a few ideas to those who decide to read me. Come sit with me on my deck, overlooking a constantly moving river. I'll have an iced tea with lemon, or a glass of wine if the sun should set just so. You are, of course, invited to sit and enjoy along with me. But know this: I'll want to know if you have any stories, and I always take pictures to preserve the moments.































































































































































































































































The river serves to remind me that we live out cycles much as the river washes in and out according to the heartbeat of the ocean. Can you hear the heartbeat of the universe?































































































































































































































































Well, you can try. Smile.































































































































Thursday, May 27, 2010

Beautiful Agony

The title of my novel :: I hope to submit at least 50 pages for consideration by a few publishers. Hopefully someone I know will know someone and show up on the scene. haha if you think that happens. Anyway, I'm in the middle of Sue Monk Kidd's novel, written actually by both she and her daughter. This novel is so well written. Both of them are marvelously skillful in turning their insides out for us to cipher for ourselves. Coming to know her Jungian application of her life's insights the reader comes to identify and define herself based on a similar set of archetypes. I, as reader, marked my own life according the phases of the archtype of Mary, mother. And I would stop there, and just say, mother. The inward journies of the two women who travel together, while they make emotional contact in the beauty of what they see and what it means, made for a deeply satisfying read.

While all of women will, I think, experience all of these archetypes sooner or later, I would not have known them in the way I know them now, if it weren't for Sue and Ann Kidd's attunement to what went forth before them. Beginning with the symbolism of iconic images as they toured, they took the psychological dive into metaphors and found themselves faced with the human fears few of us desire to wrestle with. Only halfway through Traveling with Pomegranates and I am awed by the threads Su and Ann weave in their proactive work to dig for the bones and put themselves together. Seems akin to our thought of "reinvention."

Sue's link of death to life's exercises in loss, that end up as loss of "self", made me feel as it did Sue, a bit more embracing of the concept of death. Going fighting and screaming will be difficult I suppose, but  none the less, all will go. After her visit to the island of the Gavilry and the tumulus, she sealed in her mind the connection that letting go of this place would take one into the womb. Womb to tomb, she said. I've heard it before, that phrase. She wasn't sure she made it up.

When a writer can change your life, your outlook, your belief in yourself (from beat to conqueror) then that writer is a wordsmith and a phsychologist, an artist, and an accomplice to your self in changing what you know and believe, perhaps even, in co-creating a new reality that you can live with for awhile.

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