Gravity Pits and Other Unfortunate Stumblings

Sometimes we get caught in a tornado. there we are, minding our own business, and some crazy outside factors conspire to change our lives. I feel like this is what has happened to me lately.

the sound of silence

it is amazing how important silence is. there are many kinds of silence: awkward, pregnant, romantic, anticipatory, suspenseful, when you are alone, in a crowded room. my favorite is with one other person. not awkward, but satisfying. post coital. or the moment right before you wake up, alone or with someone. when you are both waking up and alternately looking at each other to try and catch them when they wake. we tend so often to think that we have to fill every moment with sound. when having a conversation, most people are just waiting for their turn to talk. we rarely listen to each other anymore.

i recently spent a morning in bed, just listening to the silence. falling in an out of sleep, and feeling my surroundings. the morning light casting a beam across the floor. its amazing how much more heightened your senses become if you aren't trying to fill the space with sound. i could feel the warmth of the body next to me, see him breathing. taking speech out of the equation opens up all of the other sounds we forget too. i could hear the dog in the living room, sniffing. its a lot like meditation or yoga. you become aware of your body. aware of the space you take up, and the sensations that you feel. i could feel my breath and hear his heart beat. the silence of that morning has made me think about taking time to relish in quietness.

the past months have brought a change in the world. our hemisphere is getting ready for sleep, and there seems to be more silence in the winter months. snow is an insulator, and for some reason, the cold sucks the sound as well as the breath out of you. quietly sitting, i listen to the sound of my pencil on the paper, and the brush on the canvas. a wet brush has a much different sound than a dry one. the scratch of the stylus on a board. these are the sounds of my trade. i get lost sounds. so many tiny noises that bring me joy. the sound of knuckles cracking, rain, a zipper, a deep breath or sigh.

sighs are like silence, they can mean so many things. taking a feeling and interpreting it into a visual representation is an amazing thing. how do you show the silence of post-coital bliss? or the sigh just before you say goodbye? sometimes my mind goes faster than my mouth, or my hands. i work hard to capture a moment in my work, but in the end everything is transient and impermanent. feelings are fleeting and change is the only constant. the beauty in art is being able to hold on to that moment and share it with others, to bring them into me for that instant, then let them go. if you could relive a smell, or sound, wouldn't you?

There's no telling where we're going, which direction we are blowing...

This fall has brought many things with it. the cold, my new niece, intense learning and hectic schedules, just to mention some. I find myself thinking of something else though. i recently became frustrated because i hadn't completed any new work. i became trapped in the daily routine that is my life, and on a lark went to a friends birthday celebration and was reminded of the amazing connection that we have as humans.

the inevitable spiral of time

so, it's july! what the crap! i know that i have been aware of time moving, and i have been present when it has happened, but now, all of the sudden it's like i'm watching my life in time-lapse! i can literally see people speeding past me, and the sun rising and falling at an alarming rate! the passage of time is now marked by weekly appointments and class assignments. i truly enjoy summer, but there is dome kind of something left over from childhood that makes me feel like i have to sleep 'til noon and watch as many movies as humanly possible! i can't live a normal life over the summer. being in education has really brought me back to the summer vacation. in college, i would work more over the summer because i didn't have class, but now i legitimately have summer off. weird! i have been using the time to work on my passion, i have gotten 6 pieces done so far. i also started teaching art classes in my home, which is cool. i am not doing nearly as much as i would like to though. my poor broken husband! he has had some terrible luck recently! he got bitten by a dog, threw his back out and broke his ankle in the matter of two months! he is resilient though and is healing really well. i feel bad for him, i can't imagine what it must have been like, and how frustrating it is for him. he is a healthy, active guy, and to be incapacitated for over a month must be torture! i know i need to be more sensitive to him, but i have a hard time with it. i have the opportunity to go out tonight, and i am not going to pass it up! i have homework and yoga, papers and chiropractors to see soon enough! peace!~

Mazel Tov!!!

Mazel Mazel!!!



i love spring!! so much happens, people graduate, get married, have babies! new adventures start and the world is a beautiful new place!

technology and textbooks!

I recently found out that texas produces most of the textbooks that we use in public schools. last month the state legislation passed new standards eliminating Thomas Jefferson, civil rights information and global politics. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/13/texas-textbook-massacre-u_n_498003.html#slide_image)

now, so far, this is only the standards in texas, but since they are one of the publisher's biggest customer, the books are going out to the rest of the country. regardless of the standards, the books will be taught. total bullshit. this brings up an interesting point. texas has long had a reputation for being pro-american. now one of the great things about america is that we have freedom of information. we do not live in a totalitarian regime in which information is omitted and hidden as in some countries that we are fighting against. we do not, as a country, deny the holocaust, or say change the events leading us into the first world war or the korean war. we do not, as a country, bann our citizens from accessing the internet. however, doesn't omitting one of our founding fathers from the history books exemplify just that? think of how we feel when we hear that people in foreign countries do not have access to the things we do as americans. when we hear that the leader of a country dictates that the holocaust does not exist, (http://www.iranholocaustdenial.com/)
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/12/14/AR2005121402403.html) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4527142.stm)
or that there will be no access to information outside of their borders, (http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2006/nf20060113_6735_db053.htm)
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/red/roundtable/internet.html)
this is the exact stuff that the people of texas have long been proud to rally against. so it would seem that texas has effectively put themselves in same category as these dictatorial regimes that exemplify all that we are fighting against. operation iraqi freedom anyone? how about operation american intelligence? we currently rank 18th in education among industrialized countries...
http://www.oecd.org/home/0,2987,en_2649_201185_1_1_1_1_1,00.html
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/11/19/US-slipping-in-education-rankings/UPI-90221227104776/
do we really need to be cutting out information from our textbooks? whats next, a good old fashioned book burring? i'm sorry, i thought we lived in the 21st century.

a rose by any other name...

rose, nam toe, s'est leve, stieg, e aumentato, levantou-se, se levanto. it still smells like a rose. god, a higher being, something else, someone else... something more. yahweh, allah, elohim, ishvara, achaman, deus, vishnu, krishna-vasudeva, dio, gott, dios, lord. the basic tenets are the same. i take inspiration from bill and ted: be excellent to each other. it is so simple, yet so difficult for some. karma. do unto others. don't covet thy neighbor's ass. we have lost sight of the allegory of religion. reasoning and literalism. metaphor people! how is a raven like a writing desk? much of philosophy is based on proving the existence of god. religion though is based on faith. our reasoning cannot prove that god exists any more than it can prove the existence of love. feelings can be boiled down to electrical impulses and binary functions of the brain, but not the outcome of those impulses. when you hear mozart, or britany spears, or led zeppelin, or keith urban you undoubtedly feel something. the song does not change, only our perception. each of these people, i am sure, illicits an emotional response. good, bad, what have you. yet there is no proof that any of these people should ellicit any emotional response.

why do we feel something when these images are put infront of us? what about logic? why did i pick that image of a rose? does it change what we believe?

the policy of truth

it is officially spring break! my job and my classes line up and i have an actual week off! i am excited to get some work done. i started a painting last week and have not had any time to work on it what with report cards, parent/teacher conferences, and midterms...i am leaving for vegas on tues and have the goal to finish before we leave. i have been
drawing a lot of inspiration from pop-culture as of late. i saw some paintings a while back that were snapshots of iconic scenes from movies. such as ferris bueller. i thought this was great! now, i have never been one to coop ideas, but i have since not been able to find this artist, not any info. now, this got me thinking and i have been watching a lot of movies recently so... my new work is not so much replicas of a scene from the movie, but a moment that happened off camera. i like this idea of the characters having a life outside of the movie. so i have a painting based on the fisher king. the red knight, you know? i think the exploration of these characters and their identity is fascinating. what about ferris and cameron taking a road trip? what about inigo as the dread pirate roberts? did the dude win the bowling tournament? these are the questions people want answered. when acting, you become the character, any actor will tell you that they have some strange background story to create a history, or they came up with a conclusion that happened after the credits. there are a lot of these type of art pieces around, it has become this surreal "other" reality with characters in various different activities... Brandon Bird does this effectively, but i feel that his work is largely absurd. in this pic, ian mckellan, as magneto, is covered with gerbils. not to say it isn't a great painting, but i think there could be something else. so, now i have the red knight and the cosmos and it is good. so back to honesty, and the policy of truth. as it turns out jon and i have been the unwitting participants in stolen goods transfer... we bought a macbook from e-bay recently, after about a week it died. jon took it to the apple store to get it checked out, it was under warranty so they said they could fix it, however the hard drive was 60 gigs and all they had was 160 gigs. i thought this was our lucky day because they gave it to us for free! well, on his way home he got a call from apple corporate, this guy tells him that the computer was stolen from a shipment in california, and wanted to know where we got it. jon gave him all of the info h had, e-mails, paypal info, shipping and tracking numbers, etc. this guy was so impressed by jon's honesty that he told the apple store to hook us up and fix the laptop! this situation is totally interesting because they could have just kept the stolen merchandise. so now we have a sweet up-graded computer and might have helped catch a criminal. so, believe in the policy of truth! that is all.

spring is in the air..

so, we are a week from spring break! i have parent-teacher conferences this week and i was a little freaked out, but feel ok now. i speake to the parents pretty often, and i know where the kids are and what is gong on and i feel pretty good. my sister is 26 weeks pregnant and doing well, although she is on house arrest for the time being. we are going to visit her next week and it will be great! i am working on two pieces, one is a scratch board and one is a painting inspired by "the fisher king". i really feel good. i was having a hard time, but i came home and shut everything off, put on my ipod and started painting. my grandmother just had her 90th birthday! it is amazing, she is still sharp and active, i love her! we also got our new door! we have a custom, one of a kind mahogany door! it is beautiful! i am very happy to have it, and the value of our house just went up! i am very excited about the summer, can't wait to have tiem in the house and to do my work! peace!

edjumication!

well, it is a new year, a new house and a new job! i have settled into my new job, as a third grade special ed teacher, very interesting! kids are kool!! my classroom is all set up and we have plunged into the routine right off the bat! routine is sooooo important! i have started clesses at cnm as well, and that is different. the classes are set up for people who already have a degree, so we hit the ground running! the philosophy is: you are an adult, you are taking this for a reason, get it done! so it is nice. the house is going through growing pains, and already we have repairs and fixes...annoying in a way, but cool because i get to make it mine. i satred a painting in the bathroom...trees and vines. working and studying A LOT!! well, that is all for now. i will post pics of the mural... be well.