Category: personal growth and spirituality
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When We Face Ourselves in Daylight
Pieces No. 14, paper collage, 2022 Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. Viktor Frankl even now an atom in the drowning sun a wilderness on its knees invokes a whisper as if to suggest absurdity is a prelude to happiness a woman underwater is an orchid without wings don’t be […]
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Productive Perceptions
Perception, paper collage, 2022 When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending. Thich Nhat Hanh It occurs to me that, in every situation, I am capable of viewing other […]
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When You Don’t Know, Then You Know
The Impostor, paper collage, 2021 It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement. A. H. Maslow How easy is it to answer the question, what do you want? My answer: not easy. If I’m being asked what I want for dinner or what I’d like to do […]
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The Saints Are All We Have Left
Woman No. 9, paper collage, 2021 we have names for souls even now it’s only a matter of time before the ghost-keeper fools us as if death won’t follow us if we never leave the ground won’t untie the kissing thread and the antidote? spray paint your failures on the walls deliver the crow from […]
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Not At All
Not At All, mixed media, 2021 goodness is wild a solstice of passion an aria for a flannel shirt Goodness is wild. I believe that. I also believe that goodness is something we can see—not with an inner eye, but literally see with our eyes—and would perceive much more readily if we weren’t conditioned not […]
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As If for the First Time
Blue and Sentimental, mixed media collage, 2021 Meditations on art, nature, and femininity: I begin with the image of a naked woman, of a woman who is at once very much alive and long dead. She is me and not me. Every woman. Every woman in my collages—in the Nude Collection, in particular—is me […]
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On Gratitude
It seems popular these days to speak of gratitude as an almost magical inner experience. As if feeling thankful is, quite literally, some sort of magnet, a means of attracting the good life and all it affords. That is, love, abundance, freedom, and general life satisfaction. I emphatically disagree with this viewpoint. Of course, I’ve […]
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Of Sacred Seasons
This is time of year, my creativity seems to transform. Becomes almost corporeal—that is, more hands-on, more nurturing, more intensely connected to the rhythms of nature. Instead of spending my days in the writing room tinkering with poetry or experiments in collage, I find myself outdoors tending to the garden, to the wildlife that lives […]
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On the Art of Responsibility
Why not make a daily pleasure out of a daily necessity? Peter Mayle There are a number of reasons why I love reading Peter Mayle’s narratives of life in Provence. None the least of which is the culinary adventure that invariably takes center stage in every story. Three-hour lunches over bottles of rosé, assorted goat’s […]
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Butterfly Effect
Butterfly Effect, paper collage, 2021 This post is formatted to reflect an original journal entry. 5/22/21 I buried a dead butterfly yesterday. I’d picked her up along the side of the road when I was out walking the night before. She could no longer fly, and I knew death was probably imminent. So I scooped […]