Playing catch-up. today is mine all mine. I’m going to blog here for Reverb10 both 4 and 5 (though I think I will do them in separate posts) and then I will be caught up. Then I’m going into the studio and make more sea nettle caps as Sea Nettles as of yesterday are best sellers: both the already made ones and the make-it-yourself ones. Lots of beaders in this area. Nothing like a Sea Nettle to use up all those beads you bought in the beginning that you don’t know what to do with now because you use better quality, or the ones that spilled all together and you don’t want to sort, or the left overs (great beads, just not enough). Sea Nettles it is for all of your bead recycling needs. And they’re not just for ornaments, they can be sun-catchers or hang outside your window in the trees all year round. Woohoo!
Okay: If you read yesterday’s post, you know why I’m doing Reverb4 and 5 today. And it has nothing to do with being a slacker. (But sleeping until 8 am this morning after going to bed at 9:30 may put me in the running for slacker anyways).
Prompt: Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year (by Jeffrey Davis, The Journey from the Center to the Page)
This prompt fascinates me. Because I don’t cultivate wonder. Wonder sneaks up on me when I’m having a day. Most often an ordinary day.
There I am taking the dogs out at night, watching their fawn bodies in the bit of light I get from the back porch light. There might be wind in the trees. Or if it’s summer, peepers are singing. Fall: crickets. Winter: branches creaking. Spring everything in an uproar. This is ordinary. But sometimes, when the dogs are doing their snuffle in the leaves thing and the oldest one isn’t looking inclined to pretend that movement is a squirrel which she must chase (in the opposite direction) into the neighboring yard (an acre away), I remember to look up. And see the stars.
My backyard is dark. Very very dark. No street light reaches it. No porch lights (save mine, mostly blocked by mature trees except for our walking lanes). What was that fiction about stars – was it Isaac Asimov? Writing about a people who lived on a plant that had multiple suns and no nightime. Except millenia when the stars came out and everyone who hadn’t secreted themselves away went mad. Well, that’s me. I look up at those white twinkles and see they aren’t all the same – size is different. The Big Dipper handle has itself dipped out of the straight line it was in when I was a child in the 50s to a right angle midway down. Orion’s belt seems to have stayed the same. I wonder about that. I had a comic book that said the Dipper’s handle would change. And it did. Why has Orion’s belt stayed the same all these millenia (no, I’m not looking it up. I like the mystery). The sky is black dark around the stark white of the stars. The very air seems to shift when I am in the madness of star-gazing. And time stands still.
How does one cultivate this?
Wylde Women’s Wisdom
Stare hard. White splinters. At vision’s edge: green, blue, a surpise splash of purple. And at the center, spinning, Red – unaware of a watcher, or perhaps only pretending – all the while preening its hues like an exotic bird. Tammy Vitale.
