American Management Styles:

This old pencil sketch is from a series I made years ago, called American Management Styles. Wish I could find the rest of them.....

My three cats: the morning meeting

My three rescue cats from DAWS decided they want to hold a daily meeting. By feline decree, this meeting, sort of a greeting ceremony, should occur at the corner of the couch in the center of the living room every morning right after the human starts walking around. I don't know what happens if I move the couch. The world will probably end.

The two boys, Crow and GreyHawk scurry over, wind around my legs and each other, tails up, making funny little sounds, giving head butts and cheek rubs. At the commotion, our little cat-colony queen Fiji Phoebe, decides she really should participate and strolls over. She tries hard to make sure one of the boys is strategically positioned between her and the huge horrible human. She speaks to me, but usually only gets close enough to sniff my hand. Yesterday for the first time she allowed me to pet her during the ceremony. Progress!

DRAWING: from a writing exercise

I once belonged to a poetry writing group or two. This side-long looking doodle is what resulted while words for a writing exercise were being chosen. Yes, she is quite asymmetrical with hair askew -- and I don't care..... Though I often digitally clean up these little drawings, this one is just as exists in my little book of paper.

Originally posted (and in the present tense) on 8/15/2010

A certain lack of something

This was how I felt before I adopted my three kitties.

Weathered,
patched with odd bits,
a jumbled collection
re-assembled without instructions,
left outside everything to rust away.

I carry on though. Not so sure. Positive but aware of reality. Carrying memories. And a tiny spark of hope.


originally posted 8/16/2016

Art: where the broken wings fly after all

Originally posted April 4, 2008. Thought I'd haul it up here again and update it a bit to remind me.

Every person has beauty and value. Some have other unsavory aspects which obscure the beauty and value, but it's there.

Some of us are eccentric, obviously old, ridiculously odd, too fat, too thin or perhaps misshapen or unpleasant or unreliable. Some folks, though beautiful, are misshapen in ways more difficult to see - disfigurement by the constant prejudgement of others, where every word was twisted, shaded, weighted and measured against some mythical standard of perfection. Or by constant criticism during childhood where every flaw was carved up like a roast repeatedly. Or by constant underserved praise and by life passages bought and paid for by blood money rather than earned. This unhappy learning is latter replayed on others.

Sometimes people find it really difficult to get past it all. Some are like moths that have emerged from the cocoon in a jar that was too small. (See my pencil drawing above) Their wings unfolded only midway and are forever bent. Yet even in this there can be value.

Like many other resources, the past can be transformed. Rather than repeat it, and live it out again and again, rather than turn the bitter criticism or the too clever manipulation on others or measuring them against an imagined perfection, or insulting them for dramatic effect (sounds familiar in the current political scene) -- the best use of the past is to render it down into art. (Not the so called Art of the Deal,  but art in the expansive sense - whether literary, musical, visual, theatrical etc.) In that way it is an offering, and something is given to world.

It doesn't even matter if the world accepts it. It is the making of it, and perhaps the offering of it, that heals in a way that golden toilet seats and hair implants never can.

- Mar  Walker

Short Poem on Aging: Surprise

Can't understand how I grew so grey.

It crept up over 10 years or more.

Inside I feel like I'm 22,

except when I feel like I'm 94.

......

Cumulative power of tiny specks....

Landscape at Saint-Charles, near Gisors, Sunset  by Camille Pissarro

We always doubt the power of the small, the contained. We doubt our single, individual lives, wonder if we can matter at all.

The power of a bit of dust lies in juxtaposition with other unnoticed specks. It's in the whole where a speck has its best effect. One star in a sky of stars. One life in a history of lives.

  This is my favorite picture from the current Clark Art Institute exhibition. It's called Landscape at Saint-Charles, near Gisors, Sunset  by Camille Pissarro, 1830-1903. The application of color is in spots and specks. The effect is cumulative and it almost glows on the canvas.  

Specks, little dots or points of paint are featured in a technique called pointillism pioneered by Charles Seurat. In this picture the museum notes, Pissarro was experimenting with that technique.  We could experiment too, try to see ourselves in the context of our country, our continent, our planet, our solar system, universe, multiverse.  As we zoom out, our speck-ness seems more and more natural, comfortable. We are in places as it were. Right here. Right now.