...but perhaps you may falter along the way

Allow me to tell you a story about my first life-casting sculpture:

Chapter 1: Girl, learning how to love
I actually had a breakdown last night... it was the first time I've cried in a while. I was dealing with lots of things, but my struggles in painting set me off. luckily, I have lots of people to surround me and lift me up when I have a bad night.

Chapter 2: Friends, putting love into action
So I have a favor... I need some people to model for my sculpture project... could you come up to the studio early Sunday morning?

Chapter 3: Hands, love takes risks
I have learned that friends will put their hands out there for you, no matter the risk involved.



Chapter 4: Cry out, the hard part of love
When the plaster hardened and was getting very warm, we started excavating their hands from the cast. It hurt. Just a little. Never before did I realize the extent of my friends' love.



Chapter 5: Smile, love breaks through
After pouring resin and autobody filler into the plaster cast, it was finally time to break the plaster... I felt kind of like a kid eagerly ripping open gifts from Santa on Christmas morning


Chapter 6: Persevere, a labor of love
There were a few cracks along the LONG way, but with perseverance, the hands turned into a wonderful reminder that, indeed, love holds us up even when all we can see is down.

You Will Not Fall Below My Open Arms

We begin the journey, though, knowing that if we fall, there will be arms to catch us... if we get lost, we are never alone.

Color-Paper.xml

Just also wanted, briefly, to add this sweet picture of a trail-blaze. (I'll probably wind up re-posting this post because I have a lot to say about trail-blazes. They are so low-tech, so simple. The concept is so basic, so Hansel-and-Gretel. And yet... We have no IDEA where they'll actually lead! And when you lose the trail because a blaze has fallen with a tree or burned up in a forest fire, it is the most gut-wrenching, unsettling feeling in the world.)

In which we embark

While we're still in "safe mode" on this blog, I wanted to set out a few points of embarkation that may (or may not) supplement the thematic basis of this blog.

We are artists--all of us. Or, if you simply cannot bear the self-importance of agent nouns, it will suffice to say that everyone, in some sense, can appreciate creation as both process and product, pain and salve. The purpose of this blog is to explore what we (the authors) believe is fundamental to the human spirit. As individuals, we each set forth on this expedition aboard a raft of perspective--our experiences lashed together--a raft that determines how we will feel and react to the rapids and eddies we traverse. With resolve, above all, to celebrate creativity in all of its protean forms, we embark. We do not know what awaits us on the journey; nor can we comprehend the location of its terminus. At times, we may feel inadequate. (We may feel like a child who wakes up frightened from a dream, feeling compelled to muster the courage to break the night's massive stillness with her tiny voice but uncertain as to what a cry for help will bring about. Will it wake and upset her parents? Will there even be a response?) Despite these risks, we press on out of necessity, for therein lies the impetus for our acts of creation. We will learn boldness along the way; we will lash its colors to our rafts.

Friday haiku ("Fri-ku"? Bwaha)

Friday night, I glimpse
the stars: holes in the lid of
a firefly jar.

A World Studded with Pennies

Sculpture by Ellen Schroeder

"It is still the first week in January and I've got great plans. I've been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But -- and this is the point -- who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded with the site of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you ount that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get." -Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Solidarity

Photo and Drawing by Ellen Schroeder



This past May, I spent some vacation time in Colorado, hiking amongst the Rocky Mountains. During my time there, I was moved by the aspen trees— their unique white and lime green coloring, their scars from animals that covered the lower trunks, their branches at the top that reached for the heavens in such a stunning way. But I was also fascinated by the fact that they always came together—in groves scattered over the hillside—never alone, never too beautiful to be seen with others. And indeed, those groves are really one organism underground. We look at aspens and see individual trees, when they are all connected in a web of solidarity with one another.

"We are caught in an inescapable web of mutuality." Martin Luther King, Jr.

From Wikipedia: "All of the aspens (including the White Poplar) typically grow in large clonal colonies derived from a single seedling, and spreading by means of root suckers; new stems in the colony may appear at up to 30–40 meters from the parent tree. Each individual tree can live for 40–150 years above ground, but the root system of the colony is long-lived. In some cases, this is for thousands of years, sending up new trunks as the older trunks die off above ground. For this reason it is considered to be an indicator of ancient woodlands. One such colony in Utah, given the nickname of "Pando", is claimed to be 80,000 years old, making it possibly the oldest living colony of aspens. Some aspen colonies become very large with time, spreading about a meter per year, eventually covering many hectares. They are able to survive forest fires, since the roots are below the heat of the fire, with new sprouts growing after the fire burns out."