3 Women Dancing II, ceramic and found objects wall sculpture by Tammy Vitale

Yesterday’s quote spoke of countries aging along the continuum of individuals:  childhood, adolescent, adulthood (one hopes – but sometimes adulthood is age only, the mentality gets stuck somewhere).

I was thinking about that this morning because I got an email from Tinker who for some reason can’t leave a message here.  I understand that because I can’t access Christine Kane’s blog – her main page yes, anything else, yes, her blog, no.  Quirky imps running amok in the interstices of the internet.  Anyways, I got to thinking how there are different lives in one human life – at least in mine.  Where is the young child and what she thought?  Some of my childhood is like shadows on a screen.  Most of it is behind a dark screen – I remember highlights.  Same for a lot of other periods, including motherhood (although motherhood continues it isn’t the same now as it was when they were little – then I at least thought I got to be the boss).  It’s just one of those odd things I think about from time to time.  Husband just shakes his head when I start talking about this stuff:  all the people on a road that you pass by, maybe share air with, but never meet, never know who they are, what their dreams are.  And houses – I love houses.  I always want to know the stories of all the people who lived in them.  So older houses or houses in decay intrigue me especially since I know someone must have loved them sometime, even if only when they were sparkly and new.  And why did they decay?  Who decided to just let them go? 

Then there’s my thoughts on animals:  how we keep finding out how smart they are, how elephants really do have memories and tight matriarchal bands.  And chimps that can sign (I always remember the story of a chimp who had been trained, the program lost funding and the chimp was put into the medical testing program and kept signing:  help!)(break your heart much?)  And whales and their long songs and how they change and yet all the herds know the changed song.  Could it be we really are one organism, that while we humans are congratulations ourselves on our latest accomplishment because we’re so smart we’re just traveling the road to being smarter with every thing else? (personally, I question some of this getting smarter self-kudos….some days I think we’re right in there with the pigs – which my mother was always delighted to point out in the encyclopedia hierarchy as smarter than my beloved horses – in our sloppy caretaking of the earth which is supposedly entrusted to us – to work with, not to overcome).  What if one day we are having a conversation with whales and we all look back with sadness at the days when we thought of them as blubber and oil. 

It’s been a long week. 

Yesterday I got my new Craft magazine in.  I have decided to go through these magazines (like Ceramics Monthly) and enjoy all the beauty everyone makes and gets published instead of going through them wondering why a chunk of cooked clay is considered great art and deserving of publication.  Paul Soldner is one of the greats that continuously eludes me.  Sort of like Jackson Pollock  (and here’s that little click-over that allows you to be Pollock for a minute (or hour) or so – don’t start unless you have some spare time to while away).  But I have decided that I need to be grateful that they were out there stretching the boundaries and that whether or not I get published I have been able to make myself a small space.  I have been able to follow my heART, and more than just in the left over spaces.  That’s a gift.  I’m going to concentrate on that.

thought for the day:  …grace….the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook.  It is unearned love – the love that goes before, that greets us on the way.  it’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you.  Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.  Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies