Earth Day this Saturday in Winter Park...10am-2pm
When did this five-year-old art student turn into a young man? I am working with ArtReach Orlando, the city of Winter Park, and the Multifaith Education Project to create an Earth Day installation on Park Avenue in Winter Park on Saturday, April 20th from 10-2.
On Tuesday and again today I joined Jewish, Christian, and Moslem students and their families to do some prep work for the big event and ran into former students who had miraculously grown-up. Before I even arrived they had collected and prepared 1400 bottles! We painted them in advance for Saturday's celebration and students learned the process so they can help teach the public how to cut and glitter the blossoms.
In my tradition, the Tree of Life has leaves for the healing of the nations. I am so honored to get to take part in this interfaith collaborative project which adds a layer of meaning to my tree project. There will be four trees, one for each school that participated and one from ArtReach Orlando, that will bloom on Saturday and then be on display in various places in the city. Stop by and see me and make a blossom!
Thank you Sargent Art and M Jacobs and Sons for again donating supplies. (Please 'like' them on facebook to thank them for me!)
Bigger shoulders...
Yesterday, I paused with a twinge of guilt as I scribbled down prayers on my yellow legal pad. I faltered, worrying that I should pepper my letter to God with enough praises to offset my requests. Whenever the word 'should' hangs over me like a cloud, I know I need to stop and consider. So I asked myself, 'What does God say about your needs?' and recalled the verse 'cast your cares upon him for he cares for you.'
There are points in life when burdens are so heavy and so many, it seems like too much effort to take a breath, let alone carry something. In the past I have pictured myself being held by Jesus, arms about his neck only because of the strength he gives me to hold them there. Yesterday, while contemplating laying my burdens down, I imagined being lifted up like a little child, my entire weight supported by bigger shoulders. From great height I looked out at the view and had a perspective I had never seen, a distant horizon I didn't know existed.
Today we grieve the loss of John's coworker and her 9-year-old son, both killed in a car accident, leaving behind her thirteen-year-old daughter. I am looking hard at a distant blurry skyline where the earth and the clouds meet in a confusion my eyes cannot differentiate, but I am on shoulders.
trompe l'oeil...
I awakened in the middle of the night thinking about pebble candy and why we love things that look like other things. Years ago, I watched a cake competition on TV in which a contestant made a Japanese doll out of spun sugar. I was delighted and so was the studio audience and I began to wonder why. What is it about sugar that looks like porcelain, marzipan that looks like fruit, and mushrooms made of meringue that captures our imagination? I love making glass that looks like rocks. If I knew how, I'm sure I would enjoy making rocks look like glass.
My mother used to tease the grandchildren by putting peas and carrot candies on their dinner plates and insisting they eat their vegetables. We love for our 'l'oeil' to be tromped and human hearts skip a beat when something 'looks so real.' It occurred to me that one message that resonates with us is: "things are not as they seem."
Last night I with awakened with a thought, I grabbed a Sharpie on my night stand and scrawled on a yellow legal pad: "Things are not as they seem, they are better, and they are deeply good."
All Saints gift shop & more thoughts on snakes...
I'm excited that my crosses and pendants (under $45) are available in Winter Park at the gift shop at All Saints Church on Lyman. I wrote little snatches of verses to let the wearers know what was on my mind when I was making the necklaces. Sometimes my thoughts are quirky (surprise) and the little tags communicate something unexpected. I especially like this piece. It's tag reads: "If your son asks you for a fish will you give him a snake?" and on the reverse side: "How much more your Heavenly Father ..." I hope the implied "He cares for you" is understood.
Ash Wednesday: snakes, crucifixes, and the eyes of Love...
My friend, artist Susan Meyer, came by yesterday with some lovely porcelain crosses she hand-paints. In brainstorming how to hang them, we came up with this chain. We love the look of the descending dove hanging over Jesus' shoulder. I kept the one pictured to the right since it accidentally blurred a bit in the process, lending a kind of mystical shroud element to the design. Susan gets her inspiration for the penwork drawings from ancient icons.
I've been thinking a lot about Jesus on the cross lately. Up until recently, I recoiled at the sight, maybe a harkening back to my Lutheran upbringing. Lutherans don't have Jesus on the cross since He is risen. As for me, it hurts my heart to see anyone that exposed and vulnerable, which I suppose is the point.
This week a dead snake on our sidewalk both repulsed and attracted me. It was grotesque yet beautiful, not unlike a crucifix. In the book of John, just before the famous 3:16 verse there is an odd reference that used to give me the creeps. "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life." The story John is referring to comes from the Old Testament. After being rescued from Egypt, God's people sin against Him and Moses by complaining that they had no bread or water in the wilderness. I guess they forgot God was their bread and water. God sends fiery serpents and His people were dying from the bites. Moses confesses their sin and God tells him to sculpt a serpent, put it on a pole, and raise it up. To be healed, the poisoned people had only to look at the bronze serpent. What a strange story and not the tactic I would use to win back friends. Not that I know the mind of God, but I wonder if He was making the choice they had already made more clear, to choose His way or to choose sin.
Jesus, a serpent? May it never be! (As previously blogged, Peter and I are of like mind. He said similar words when Jesus predicted the crucifiction.) I used to avoid the serpent story obsessively for fear of the snakes in it, which to my mind have everything to do with evil and nothing to do with Jesus. But one day I forced myself to read it, not unlike those folks in the wilderness turning their eyes toward the bronze likeness on a pole, and I realized that it is fitting for the image to repulse. In Paul's letter to the Corinthians he writes: "For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." So if Jesus, who knew no sin, became sin, as far as symbols go, a serpent fits the bill pretty perfectly.
Bear with me as I ramble. I have been musing on this for days. What astounds me is that when I have the nerve to fully face my shame, to turn my head and gaze into all my failures, meanness, faithlessness, anger, greed, lack of compassion, (the list goes on), turning fully, not stopping short to focus on my guilty feelings, when I am really brave and am ready to see my sin in all it's ugliness, what I am met with is the face of Love.
This is what Christians all over the world remember today, some of them bearing a smudge of ashes on their foreheads. As for me, I'm going to find the perfect spot to hang my cross.
TS Eliot, St. Therese, and shirts of flame...
"The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.”
― T.S. Eliot,
I am reading Heather King's Shirt of Flame: A Year with St. Therese of Liseux. Therese originated the phrase "shirt of fire." King opens the book with the portion of TS Eliot's poem I have quoted above.
Tree of life revisited...
I made this pendant during a PMC certification class I took a few years ago. I found it this morning while I was rummaging through my jewelry. It is one of my favorites, but it didn't occur to me until today that it shares something in common with my bottle trees. It was made out of scraps. I had a little pile of bits of PMC paper from a previous project and started playing with them and this is what I got. Now I'm wondering if all of life is like that... bits and scraps and leftovers we do our best to transform into something we cherish.
Grace upon grace...
My Natalie drew this for me in one of her classes. It comes from a portion of a passage from the New Testament that reads: "For of his fullness we have all received, and that grace upon grace." I took a silversmithing class at Maitland Art Center several years ago (highly recommend) and made a spinning secret decoder type of ring with 'grace' stamped on one side and 'upon' stamped on the other. I love the symmetry of the words and dot, dot, dot-ness they create as you can endlessly bounce from one to the other: 'grace upon grace upon grace.' My precious ring is lost somewhere in my house but the words it helped freeze in time continue to bounce in my soul like a heartbeat.
Here's to swimming with your clothes on...
I love Peter, the disciple. From what I can tell he is impetuous, adamant, and often mistaken. Try as he might, he often seems to just not 'get it.' I am no Bible scholar, and I confess that I fall so in love with my ideas, I lean toward not caring if my interpretations are right or not. And my fickle heart resonates with Peter. He burst out with pronouncements and whispers denials and is wrong much of the time.
People fault him for the whole walking on water incident, but I didn't see any other disciples getting their toes wet. He has faith, ardent faith, that wavers and is sometimes misplaced. Jesus called him 'the Rock' and in the same story 'Satan.' Seems to me that Peter was all over the board yet spends very little time in-between.
So, they are all crying out in fear, these disciples, when they saw Jesus on the water. Peter demands proof: "If it is you, command me to come to You on the water." And Jesus says "come" and Peter does, but starts seeing all of nature stacked up against his defiance of same. At least when he sinks he knows who to call: "Lord, save me!"
Fast forward to post-resurrection, post-Jesus denying Peter, to the risen Christ appearing to the disciples at the sea of Galilee. It is John who recognizes the man standing on the beach, the one suggesting all the good fishing is on 'the other side of the boat'. John says to Peter, "It is the Lord." Why did he tell Peter? Was he whispering a fact he is just coming to realize? With Peter there is no hesitation, and here comes my favorite part: Peter puts on his coat and throws himself into the sea. (Oh, Peter, my soul-mate. I am ever throwing myself in and out of the fire, in and out of the sea.) But why the coat? I have heard sermons making fun of Peter for this, but I think it was his act of faith, his hope that maybe this time he could walk the short distance to the shore while the others rowed. I think he was hoping to greet Jesus, heart full of faith, arms open for embrace, with water on soles of his feet.
The Giant Despair, Dancing on Crutches, and Pretty Maids all in a Row...
My bride-to-be daughter was wanting something kicky for her bridesmaids to wear and we came up with these octagonal crystal earrings. The bead chain slides through the middle, so they are sort of 'kinetic', going cutely wonky the more you dance the night away. I love designing for special occasions. It nudges my creativity in new directions, like the architectural look of these earrings. Danielle insisted they be short, not chandelier, giving them a throw-back to the '40s vibe.
I had knee surgery shortly before the holidays, expecting to be up and about in a couple of days. Now in my fifth week of 'no weight bearing' I have new sympathy for anyone confined to a wheelchair. Thankfully I only have one week left after which I should pick up a paintbrush to repair all of my banged up walls. I have broken glasses, a rice cooker, spilled innumerable food items, knocked over a lamp and water glass onto a power strip, and almost fallen a hundred times. I am clumsy at best. Put me on crutches and I am a deadly weapon.
All of this has made me quite cranky, but my friends and family are bearing with me. I think they will be as happy as I when I can put one foot in front of the other again. I am reminded of a character in Pilgrim's Progress that I fell in love with as I plowed through Bunyan's work many years ago in seminary. Ready-to-Halt my kindred spirit, joins the journey on crutches. After a great victory against The Giant Despair, he and Feeble-mind celebrate with Christiana:
"Now Christiana, if need was, could play upon the viol, and her daughter Mercy upon the lute: so, since they were so merry disposed, she played them a lesson, and Ready-to-halt would dance. So he took Despondency's daughter, Much-afraid, by the hand, and to dancing they went in the road. True, he could not dance without one crutch in his hand, but I promise you he footed it well: also the girl was to be commended, for she answered the music handsomely."
Here's to a New Year of dancing, dancing, dancing even if it's on one crutch.
The scent of pine.
When I was a teenager, I used to walk out into the woods on my grandparents lake property in northern Wisconsin. Slipping between trees and onto ancient pine needle trails, I imagined myself with nimble moccasined feet, so at one with the earth they keep the silence in tact. Nostrils stinging with fragrant tannic whiffs released by every softly crunching step, I circled up a hill and then descended into a hollow of trees, tall thin birches peppered with oaks. I sat down, leaned against a sturdy trunk, and faced the lake where the water gently lapped the shore, slowed by rounded stones and cattails. “Take off your shoes,” whispered my mind, “the ground you are on is holy.” There was no burning bush, no audible voice, just a momentary thought so subtle I considered ignoring it. Was I trying to force a religious experience on myself? Feeling a little silly and dramatic, I slipped off my shoes and placed them on the ground beside me. In that instant, sunlight hit the rippled water and sent sparkling reflections through the trees, and I was enveloped in flickering patches of light falling like stars, or snowflakes, or angels all around me. I was astonished and have filed this image along with half-a-dozen others, when this world and the next fold in upon each other and I am in two places at once.