With the permission of another co-creative artist, Patricia Patrick, here is a piece of mixed media artwork inspired by one of my Everyday Co-Creativity photographs. To me, this is a mandalic meditation on the power of the bee and its relationship to the marigold. The piece is so full of joy, honor, respect, and possibility. At some point, I’m going to pull myself away from my computer and get on with other things. But for now, I’ll focus just a little longer on that spot on the bee’s head (inviting me into focus and stillness), or on the gentle curve of its left leg (poised to make a move of one kind or another), or on the rhythmic patterning in its wings (that speak to me of both structure and freedom). What a blessed, beautiful bee…
"Bee," Patricia Patrick; graphite, colored pencil, ink on canvas (copyright the artist)
Since the 1960’s, the male Blue Whale song has been getting lower and lower in frequency, and today the Blue Whale pitch is about 30% lower than it was about three decades ago. Hearing this news story intro on NPR, my first thought was, “What perilous situation — global warming? aggressive human hunting? food source depletion? — is causing the whales to ’sing low, sweet chariot’?”
It turns out that a San Diego oceanographer (John Hildebrand of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography) believes that this steady decrease in pitch is related to the banning of Blue Whale hunting in 1966 — at which point in history the Blue Whale population was dangerously low. His theory is that the population decrease led male Blue Whales to sing at higher and higher pitches so that they could be heard more readily by females (who might be farther away, and certainly were fewer in number). Since the 1966 ban, Blue Whale population numbers have been rising, and Hildebrand asserts that without the strain of population scarcity, the Blue Whale song is returning to its natural register.
I find this a fascinating theory! The thought that a sharp shift in out-of-balance human predatory behavior could have such a dramatic effect on a whale’s existence in such a short period of time (30% in 30+ years!), is exhilarating. What other massive change is possible with immediate change in human habit?
Fascinating as it is, this theory is still, after all, just a theory. Other possibilities certainly exist for the tonal shift (including ones like global warming, food source depletion, and so on). Not being an oceanographer, I can’t comment of the validity of this (or any) theory. However, the feeling that “we can make a difference” has settled itself into my cells and won’t be easily dislodged. Even if it turns out that Hildebrand is incorrect — and the deepening of the Blue Whale song is peril-induced, after all — I consider myself now aligned with the idea that magnificent change is absolutely possible. That alignment is a blessing for which I am grateful.
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For full source article: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123420217&ft=1&f=1001
Last Spring, I sowed geranium seeds in the garden. All through the summer, I watched the plants grow from infancy through childhood and adolescence, and none of them blossomed. Just before the first frost, I dug up and potted five geranium plants and brought them inside for the winter. This week, a flower finally bloomed, bringing the first sign of the new Spring to my home (cue Vivaldi!). Blessed be geraniums in the bedroom.
At one point last summer, every insect that came into my field of reference was missing a leg. In a two-week span I saw not even one insect with six intact legs. (Honestly!) The first barely registered; the second was intriguing; but the third, fourth, fifth (and so on) became too bizarre to be a fluke. The kicker came when I sat down at my computer desk near the end of the second week and looked at the ladybug wind-up toy sitting at the base of my monitor. You guessed it — missing a leg. “OK,” I said, “I’m ready to hear what’s going on here.”
So, I started doing some research, both scholarly and meditative. It’s taken months for the missing-leg information to gel, and this passage from Eric Matthews, Merleau-Ponty: A Guide For the Perplexed (2006), helped me find a bit of clarity:
The insect with the missing leg therefore literally “faces a problem”, defined, not just in terms of external features, but of its own internal needs. It needs to progress, and something is an obstacle to satisfying that need, so it must adapt its functioning in order to solve that problem.
An insect with only five legs must learn a new way to walk and develop a new skill-set in order to continue its forward momentum. Something critical has changed in its experience — and indeed in its “container”, in the core of its being — and it absolutely must shift and adapt in order to survive. Far from hobbled, the missing-leg insects that visited me daily were vibrant models of perseverance and flexibility.
Over the past few years, something critical has changed, too, for me — in my experience, in my “container”, in the core of my being. And, yet, in many ways I have continued to walk on the set of legs with which I’d grown comfortable, instead of hearing the call for adaptation and shift. Over the past few weeks, I have experienced significant physical pain in my left leg, and I realize that by walking down my new path on my “old legs”, I am becoming hobbled.
To all the insects with missing legs: “OK, OK, I hear you. It’s time to stand on my new set of legs — and to do so with as much vibrant grace as you have shown to me.”
I’m exploring Sacred Geometry…finally! (I’ve been hearing the call to delve into this arena for years.) Last night, like a lightning bolt, the opportunity to work with the Shiva triangle smashed into my awareness. I’ve been playing today, and — hoo-hoo! — am I excited.
Shiva Play Mandala
All images and text copyright (c) Anne Sailer, 2010.
Last weekend, I put my soil garden to bed for the winter — something I technically should have done weeks ago. Yet, I learned something profound from arriving late to the bed-putting party.
As one might expect, most of the plants had completely wilted and died back after the last few weeks of sub-freezing temperatures, so it was clear that nature was “taking its course” and had moved the garden into a period of wintertime rest. However, I still sensed a kind of incompletion, similar to the feeling I get when I hear a piece of music stop right before the final, resting chord. The garden’s energy felt like it was “left hanging.” I turned to Machaelle Small Wright’s Perelandra Garden Workbook* for some insight into what I was experiencing:
…since the [co-creative] garden is by definition a creation between humans and nature, it is quite reasonable to assume that all aspects of the blueprint have built in the dynamic of teamwork between the two. This includes the closing-down portion as well. (p. 232)
OK, this makes sense. I planned and planted the garden in concert with nature intelligences, so it’s just not logical (and not fair!) to leave all of the final work to nature. And then I read a bit farther:
The closing down of the garden is primarily an exercise in energy, in that what is being done establishes an overall dynamic of attitude and intent for the benefit of the garden environment as a whole…this important attitudinal energy is infused into the environment. It is an energy infusion through the vehicle of purposeful action. (p.233)
Oh, goodness; that’s it. Not only is my physical action required to effectively put the garden to bed, but the energy of my intention is also an indispensable necessity. This absolutely explains my experience of the garden waiting for that final chord to sound. When we’re waiting for those last notes, it’s an energetic imbalance, or insufficiency, that we feel — and then we pitch forward in our seats, as if our bodies are begging for the tonic resolution. Until I did my part to put the garden to bed — until I engaged in that purposeful action that the co-creative garden (and gardener) truly needs — I could feel the garden’s own off-kilter pitch in response to the energetic insufficiency. I am grateful to have sensed that imbalance, and I am thrilled to have finally, blissfully sounded the final notes in our co-created garden-symphony.
With this post, I am starting a new “Inspired By…” series. From time to time, I will post a snippet of something I’m working on and label what has inspired my creative work. Today, I’m kicking off this intermittent series with my old friend, Pokeweed.
I have a dried Pokeweed berry cluster hanging on the wall of my studio, and I recently took it down and spent some time studying it and sketching the graceful line of the center stalk and the highly-textured shapes of the puckered berries. I selected a portion of the sketch that had graphic excitement (the design kind, not the bedroom kind ;-) and began playing with that segment, digitally. The result is my most recent nature-inspired mandala.
Pokeweed Berries Mandala 1: See What I Can Do?
All images and text copyright Anne Sailer, 2010.
My children brought home Paperwhite (Narcissus) bulbs just before school let out for the winter break. I’ve been dutifully taking care of them ever since, keeping them watered and reporting daily on their kitchen-window-sill-progress. The bulb rooted in pebbles and water, nestled in a plastic cup decorated with foam shapes and permanent marker, bloomed first. The other one, covered in soil inside a terra cotta pot, followed about five days later. Wow, does my kitchen stink! Strike that. Wow, does my house stink!
One morning this week, after sending the children off the school, I walked in the front door thought, “Oh no, there’s rotting food somewhere in the house.” I spent the next 15 minutes searching for the piece of meat, cabbage leaf or open can of black beans that could cause such a stench. And then it hit me: It’s the paperwhites. I actually banned them from the house last year, knowing how adversely I react to their scent. This year, though, I forgot…until now.
Yet, my heart is softer this year, and I won’t banish them from my home. The blossoms are sweet and lovely, straining to reach for the bit of sun that makes it to my kitchen’s north-facing window. I have conversations with them as I wash dishes; I play a guessing game as to which flowers in the clusters will fully open first; I share the thrill of growth and emergence with my children (and those thrills are few and far between in the chill of winter). Sometimes the garbage can smells, but I still keep one in my kitchen. Sometimes the dog smells, but she remains an integral part of our family. And sometimes the plants smell, but I focus my attention on the beauty and growth opportunities they bring into our home. That said, once their bloom season is complete, my nose will be quite happy to see them go.
“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.” ~ Georgia O’Keefe
This week, I (and my date for the day: my mom) had the glorious opportunity to see the exhibit, “Georgia O’Keefe: Abstraction,” at the Whitney Museum in NYC. Of course, I knew of her work and in fact had seen her work exhibited a few times before, but I now feel like I know her work on another level — on a co-creative level. I wish I’d had the presence of mind to jot down the O’Keefe quotes written on the museum walls; a couple were jaw-dropping, from a co-creative perspective. Since I didn’t, the above quote (found somewhere on the great, vast internet) will do. “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment.” My gosh…I’m reminded of my bird’s-eye jasper post earlier this week — how something so magical is waiting for us on the surface of a rock, but we miss it if we’re too far away to really see.
Many times while experiencing this exhibit, I felt a shared language and sensibility with Georgia O’Keefe. The most powerful moment came when I read a quote in which she spoke of going to a place of dark nothingness and bringing something into the world that did not exist here before. “She’s talking about the void,” I leaned over and whispered to my mom. We both breathed, taking it in. One of the deepest pieces of learning I received from Machaelle Small Wright was about the void, about how everything that is created starts there, about how it is necessary to go into the void before we can bring something new into this world. Standing in front of Georgia O’Keefe’s words, in front of a painting with an area of black nothingness filled with absolute potentiality, I realized that I’d forgotten to be conscious of the void. Without that consciousness, creating is (I have found) far more challenging and difficult than it needs to be. I am now ready to re-discover my void-awareness and to release to that place of nothingness where everything-that-can-be is waiting to be brought forth. Thank you, Georgia, for reminding me about the void.
The stone in this photo is actually about two-inches in diameter. Look at what we miss by being so far away from a little rock we hold in our hands.
