Maybe you’re planning to hit the road…
Spectators at an Aviation Meet, c1910
Or maybe you’re daring enough to fly…
A Curtiss Byplane Taking Off, August 1911
Maybe you’re going to help out someone in need…
German Immigrants, Quebec, W.J. Topley, c1911
Or make a child happy…
Christmas Stocking, Frances S. and Mary E. Allen, 1900
Maybe you need some quiet time alone in nature.
Piping Plover, 2016
However you celebrate, there’s no maybes. Fill your holidays with happiness!
In my first Kaballah study session since the election, I realize how quickly I lost the grounding of this thinking. Fear will do that.
So today, I listened with an ear toward Tikkun ha Nefesh, repairing the soul. The old airplane adage ‘in case of emergency, put your oxygen mask on before your child’s’ applies. We cannot Tikkun Olam, repair the world, until we are actively working on Tikkun ha Nefesh, fixing ourselves.
Today, we talked about three elements for Unification, the soul’s mission of reunifying with spirit. Action, devotion, and contemplation form the Kabbalist’s path.
I’m committing to this path to re-ground in Tiferet, or the Essence, the Heart that balances giving and receiving on the Tree of Life and energizes all action.
From this place of a grounded Heart, I hope to reengage with the world in a more productive way. Perhaps these strategies will work for you, too.
Action
Take care of your body. Illness, pain, and stress are huge energy depleters. To be able to repair the world, your body has to be strong and healthy.
Exercise not for appearance, but with the intention to energize the body and relieve stress. See the above point.
Appreciate your food for its emotional pleasures and express spiritual gratitude that a vegetable or animal was sacrificed for your nourishment so that you can be strong and heal the world.
You may already be doing all these. You might consider adding a ritual.
Starting your morning with gratitude that your soul has reconnected with your body.
Look at your eyes in the mirror for 30 seconds to reconnect with your soul after its nighttime visit to heaven (love the Kabbalists!).
Take 10-breath meditation breaks twice during the day to be aware that you are aware.
Look at nature for five minutes, even if the weather prevents you from going outside.
At the end of the day, review your day; how can you improve your reactions for Tikkun ha Nefesh and Tikkun Olam?
Read a short spiritual or meditative piece before sleep to connect with your soul before its nighttime journey while your body rests.
Devotion
Yes, you can pray, but for me, I am going to increase Chesed, loving kindness. I am conscious of doing lovingly kind acts for others and of course, can add more. I want to also add kind thoughts, since mine have been elsewhere since the election.
Rebellion with awareness is also an act of devotion. I am working with this reframe.
Contemplation
Apply spiritual nourishment to your actions. You probably have your own ways to do this. I am thinking through mine.
Meantime, light a candle during this dark season and allow its flame to nourish all levels of your body and being.
I’m going to set my Kavanah, the intentions of my heart. Both inner and outer intentions are sacred. I want to live in a more sacred way through these difficult times.
What will you do?
I did my day backwards. Starting from a reflective, quiet experience, I ended with a quarreling barrel of noise and anger that fueled the Trump victory.
Story of my life at the moment. Escaping into art before being forced into reality.
Agnes Martin made over 600 paintings exploring emptiness, energy, seeing, and surprisingly, joy.
The show at the Guggenheim opens with this oddly shaped room hung with the entire ethereal series Islands I – XII from 1979. Here in Martin’s signature style, the paintings explore light and form and formlessness. She challenges us to slow down and look in order to really see. This is the work of art. To make us slow down and think, feel, remember, dream, and aspire.Martin wants you to experience innocence, freedom, perfection attained and resisted.
Here shapes emerge. Stripes of pale blue and gray. Pencil lines. All revealed up close and melt away at a distance. The pieces unite and converse, push against each other for space. They look stunning with the architecture.
Martin explained that she works in a meditative way, emptying her mind and waiting for inspiration. For her, inspiration is emotional, and the intellect does not produce artwork. So despite what you see, her works are not minimalist, mathematical explorations of line, color, shape. You can see the artist’s hand.
Untitled, 2004
painterly detail
Instead emotion fills her intention, and she argues the work, like the Abstract Expressionists. And not just any emotion.
Loving Love, 1999
Martin says she draws a line and chooses to live above the line, with happiness, beauty, and love. By this approach, I’ve been living below the line since the election. After 9/11, art pulled me above the line. I don’t know what will this time.
Going to the Jewish Museum certainly wasn’t the answer. Although ostensibly I went for the John Singer Sargent portrait on loan, aching for his bravura splashes of color after the austere monochromes of Martin.
But I was literally swept into the bright noise of Take Me (I’m Yours). This democratic space lets artists express in the moment, and the below-the-line anger oozed through the rooms.
With objects to take ranging from pills to lemon water and t-shirts and ribbons to words on paper and words on the wall, I filled the bag provided. My bright yellow ribbon states “It is not enough to be compassionate” in hot pink serif letters. This was the cleanest saying hung for the taking.
The t-shirt: “freedom cannot be simulated.”
What tore my heart open was the poster created by Jonathan Horowitz before Election Day. I couldn’t bear to take one, although it was probably the most popular object in the exhibit. Now who’s face will join the portraits?
Martin’s Taoism that had so calmed and uplifted me vanished immediately.
I don’t know why I decided to follow through on my ticket purchase for Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat.” But I went and found the violent yelling and seething racism of working class plant workers just more than I could take.
Yes, the play was written and even opened before the election. I bought my ticket when I could assume my pedestal height to empathize with their struggles for work, which in my privileged way I share, so a connection. I couldn’t make it past intermission.
I get it: working class white America is angry. Now liberal America is angry. What do we do with all this anger? How can we get back above the line?
Untitled, 1960, looks like a textile
Or do we need to blur the lines or weave the lines? Try something new?
detail; see each one of us showing up
In the aftermath of the election, much that I have treasured now has a bitter taste. Even escapist entertainment seems to contain commentary on lost ideals. I’m working on the lessons learned. We’re all different, and we’re all the same. What is it we all want? To be heard and treated with dignity and respect.
Is this what protest will look like, as it did in the ’60s?
The New York Times reported this week that the one upside to global warming is that the foliage in autumn is more vivid. The drought we’ve been suffering means leaves make a vivid shout out to fall and cling to the trees longer.
Today, as I wandered toward B.F. Clyde’s Cider Mill, I jumped off the highway to avoid an accident and took some winding roads through scorching hot foliage territory. Spicy reds, sunshine-ing yellows, and sparkler oranges. Thank you, global warming, I guess…?
By the time I got to the Cider Mill though, the trees were already bare. I guess it’s just a tidge cooler there.
Operating since 1881, Clyde’s is the only steam-powered mill still in operation. Six generations of the family have worked the press, and I was there to see the apple cider get made. They can make 500 gallons an hour of cider. That might seem like a lot to you, but when you figure how many people had the same idea as I did today, well, maybe not so much.
The apples are loaded into the chute as you see above. Today’s were Honey Crisp. The cider and baked goods all shift in flavor through the long season depending on the apples that are harvested and used.
Once the apples are washed, they are funneled into a grinder, making a really thick apple sauce. The sauce is raked, yes raked, four times and put on a rack, swung around and pressed until the liquid flows. The smell is just wonderful.
The engine room powers the machinery. This cider mill is a, wait for it, National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark, for all this original equipment. They have a little historical display, and I was most taken with the pamphlets and articles on prohibition, one extolling the virtues of drunkenness. What?
Well, Clyde’s makes 8 kinds of hard cider. I visited the tasting area, where a long line formed so that each of us could taste four of the 8.
While waiting, Mary became my guide for all things cider. She had tasted all these various styles of hard cider and knew all about the subtle flavor shifts as the apple harvests come in. What a palette!
Mary also clued me in to the apple cider donuts, which I admit are pretty outstanding. Who knew that a Honey Crisp donut would taste different from a Micun!
I’m most grateful to Mary for turning me on to Shagbark Syrup. Turkeywoods Farm was there selling various syrups they create from hickory trees. Without Mary’s deft guidance, I might have fallen for hickory nut syrup or the hickory ginger syrup. They are wonderful.
Shagbark. That’s the find!
Now with wine tastings, you have all these descriptors that distinguish the various nose, mouth feel, etc. You know how it goes.
Same thing for syrup. Shagbark Syrup has a complex flavor profile, blending woodsy, earthy, nutty, smoky, even honey overtones. This from the bark of the hickory tree. Not the nut, not the sap like a maple tree.
So yes, I’ll be eating bark with my French toast for some period of years to come. That’s how long it will take me to finish a bottle this size.
Okay, bark with some processing. It is boiled and then aged. Yes, age your cheese and your bark. Then the aged bark is blended with natural sugars. It’s divinely delicious.
And no trees are hurt in the process. The shagbark hickory tree naturally sheds its bark starting at age 7. The bark is harvested when it falls from the tree or carefully removed when loose.
We can thank the Connecticut Native American population, likely the Pequot, for this wonder. They drank tea prepared by steeping hickory bark in hot water, sweetened with honey. It’s supposed to help with arthritis. But who cares? It helps with my spirit.
So did my visit to nearby Enders Island, home to the St. Edwards retreat/monastery.
I watched rocks and water for a peaceful retreat of my own.
As ever, the Aldrich Museum, a non-collecting contemporary art museum, makes a worthy stop to see what its clever curators have dreamed up. This summer, the show features four artists who have made site-specific works. That is, works that in some way reference the museum or the town of Ridgefield, CT.
The works of two artists made me really happy: Virginia Overton and Peter Liversidge.
Overton worked with a dead pine tree from the museum property to make monumental indoor and outdoor sculptures. I love the outdoor swing, which has attracted more than human behinds. Apparently, a local cat really likes to sit on the swing, as do birds.
The piece (actually three separate works, but I see them as one), though, that I lingered with, reveled in, and meditated on was Untitled (Log Stand) from 2016. Not naming a piece leaves the experience to the viewer, but in this case, the artist also didn’t share any intentions with the work.
Still, I had lots of experiences of it. As a dead tree trunk, something we all know, the thing has weight, heft. Yet Overton has lifted these trunks way up in the air. It doesn’t take long for the support stands to lose their seeming weight, too, and for the whole piece to seem to float.
One of the museum interpreters told me the only thing the artist really intended was to have each piece point to the outdoors. Which they do. I started to see more, like sea creatures.
I watched the logs’ spirit rise to heaven. I started to feel my spirits elevate, the way architects intended when people look up in or at a church or cathedral.
The kinesthetic sense of the lifting and lightening of this ‘dead’ thing animated it and me. Overton created a weightless sculpture, a defying of gravity that is so joyous and of the spirit.
Peter Liversidge lifted my spirit, too, with his seemingly insatiable wit. He made 60 site specific proposals to the museum, all framed, mounted, and on view in his gallery there. 24 were implemented in the museum and around town. Some were not, as they were philosophical…
…unactionable…
…and just silly.
A British conceptual artist (the concept is the art), Liversidge has a creative mind I relate to, so I’ll share my favorites of his works on view at the museum.
The first could be easy to miss. The above photo shows you why. The work is just a dot on a sea of white wall. Oh, but so much more.
(excellent shadows, too)
Ridgefield is a town with deep history. Keeler Tavern, next door to the museum, stills sports a Revolutionary War cannon ball fired by the British lodged in its walls. Liversidge had Revolutionary War re-enactors shoot a cannon ball into a new wall, then installed it at the museum. A Brit leaving yet another gift for Ridgefield. Wonderful!
A British philosopher Bishop Berkeley espoused that nothing is real but what’s in the mind. An early postmodernist? Samuel Johnson countered that matter is real, proving it by kicking a rock. Liversidge proposes, “I intend that, whenever I come across a stone in Ridgefield that is a larger or similar size to my foot, I will stop what I am doing, and I will kick that stone to The Aldrch…” He and his interns kicked rocks into the museum, into the elevator, then across the bridge to his gallery. A man true to his word.
Then there is Proposal No. 20: Wooden objects posted to the Museum from the artist’s studio in London, UK, installed on a shelf. Yes, you understand that correctly. Liversidge mailed found wooden objects to the museum. He had to work with the postmaster in London and get agreement in Ridgefield.
a little wear and tear, and the canceled postmarks
Liversidge mailed a tambourine and a scrub brush!
The postwoman normally delivers mail to the administrative offices, located in a church up the hill above the museum. She started delivering the pieces directly to the museum, so that she, too, the interpreter told me, became a creator of the work.
Delightful!
I leave you with this Liversidge proposal, one I resonate with deeply.
At the moment I seem to be attracted to stark images, quiet shadows, monochromatic palettes. Maybe because there’s so much color and noise in the world right now. Take a quiet moment with me.
Hart House, Old Saybrook, original wall
Bartow Pell Mansion
Wallace Nutting, Tenon Arm Windsor Double Back Settee
John Henry Twachtman, Snow, c1895-6, PAFA
Charles Vezin, Winter Grays, Brooklyn Docks, c1900, on view at the Mattatuck Museum
Francois Clouet, Mary Queen of Scots, c1549, Yale University Art Gallery
Lilian Westcott Hale, Black Eyed Susans, before 1922, on view Florence Griswold Museum
Hedda Sterne, Annalee Newman, 1952, Vassar College Museum
Girolamo Fagiuoli, Penelope and Her Women Making Cloth, c1545, Engraving, Yale University Art Gallery
Charles Courtney Curran, Shadow Decoration, 1887, Vassar College Art Museum
Renee Iacone, Stacks, 2015-6, Mattatuck Museum
Vassar College Art Museum
Grotesque Mask, 16th century (?), on view at Yale University Art Gallery
Grotesque Mask, 16th century (?), on view at Yale University Art Gallery
Etienne Delaune, Music book plate, 16th century, Yale University Art Gallery
Etienne Delaune, Perspective book plate, 16th century, Yale University Art Gallery
Silas W. Robbins House, Wethersfield, CT
Corona Park, Queens
Lotus Pagoda Library Lamp, Tiffany Studios, c1905, Queens Museum of Art
16th-century frame, on view at Yale University Art Gallery, waiting for you to fill it
Having spent an inordinate amount of time in my own garden recently, I found myself interested in the low-maintenance variety. The Florence Griswold Museum is featuring a joint exhibit with the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts of American Impressionist paintings of gardens.
Here are a few works that caught my eye.
As you know, the Impressionists were all about light and color and thick paint application and that sensation of being in the moment captured in paint. For me, this lovely Harry Hoffman painting really works in all ways.
Harry L. Hoffman, Childe Hassam’s Studio, 1909, Florence Griswold Museum
The flickering light in the blossoms is accomplished through paint application which you can see here.
I could linger for hours in this place. The cool respite of the porch. That springtime moment when the fruit trees have burst open. I love the fresh newness juxtaposed against the comfortably dilapidated. The real dreaminess of the place.
Charles Curran’s A Breezy Day is visceral, too. Can’t you feel that gusting against your cheek and tousling your hair?
Charles Curran, A Breezy Day, 1887, PAFA
We don’t see the hard work of the laundry women, the backbreaking toil of scrubbing, wringing, and ironing. For a moment, we join them outside in the fresh air as the sun peeks through the clouds to bleach the sheets a clean white.
Most Impressionist painters, men and women, conflate their depictions of women with flowers–those ornamental things to be enjoyed for their beauty before it fades. We observe freely, consume for pleasure, reducing women to objects. What better way to understand the stifling moment that also spurred women to agitate for suffrage.
There are plenty such paintings in the exhibit. The one that caught my eye was by a woman artist.
June was created for the cover of a 1902 issue of Everybody’s Magazine, a monthly women’s publication. Even women artists producing images for women perpetuated the woman-as-beautiful-object trope. Violet Oakley may have enjoyed her women the same way as any man, if you catch my drift. Still, as usual, with Oakley, I’m seduced by her vision…
Violet Oakley, June, c1902, PAFA
…and the charming detail of cutting the frame to catch the full sweep of a skirt.
By the way, the red rose in Oakley’s signature references the group of women artists she lived and painted with – the Red Rose Girls.
As ever, I find Lillian Westcott Hale’s work refreshingly feminist. Yes, we have the girl with the flowers–our now familiar symbol. But the flowers are drooping, and the girl seems to be deep in thought, suggesting her worth lies with her mind, regardless of outward appearance. Her ideas bloom, even if her transient bouquet does not. Thank you, Hale.
Lilian Westcott Hale, Black Eyed Susans, before 1922, charcoal and colored pencil on paper, Private Collection
But we really don’t have to be analytical or political. It’s summer. We can simply relish the beauty of our gardens right now.
So join me in getting up close and personal with a rose and looking at its glories through paint.
I’m still musing on how I feel about two recent tours and guns pervading every aspect of our lives. During the Hartford Blooms Garden Tours, I went to the top of the onion-domed Colt Armory–the day after the Orlando shootings.
Having passed the notable landmark so often on the highway, I was both curious and a bit repulsed. No one else on the tour seemed to make the connection to Orlando. So I decided to just experience and listen, not share my dis-ease.
We took an elevator almost to the top, only having to climb one flight of stairs. Then we walked through an industrial, attic-like area to the stairs to the cupola.
Yes, the view was interesting, as our guide told us how Sam Colt needed the nearby Connecticut River for transporting raw materials and manufactured guns. She explained how important the horse at the top is to people in Hartford, who clamored, when it was removed from the building, for its return.
Still, I felt restless, just wanting to go back down and get out of the building.
The fact that the factory now has been converted into apartments seems weird and ironic to me.
Who would want to let guns so palpably into the space where they nourish, refresh, restore, and relax? Their home?
My presumptions were challenged again, with today’s tour of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas and its tour with New Haven Preservation Trust of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. I have been curious about this site and the transition to living spaces, curious enough to overcome my distaste.
Yes, at its peak, 30,000 people worked here. Yes, they produced washing machines and sporting equipment, as well as rifles and ammunition. And yes, the factory buildings are being converted to office and apartment spaces.
Yes, I support adaptive reuse and get excited when old buildings find new energy. Yes, the restoration has preserved a historic character combined with modern sensibilities. Yes, wonderful Susan Clinard has created art from the wood no longer usable, now hanging on the walls and above the old fireplace (as seen above).
But somehow, I would rather leave the ruins (knowing that’s not good for New Haven).
A reminder that guns are not so central to every aspect of our lives. Or leave some of these dilapidated messes as a balance, a reminder that some things are better left in the past.
I asked one of our guides about bad juju, cleaning the energy. He didn’t know what I meant. He commented on how Winchester labor and workmanship are being celebrated with new life in the old building. They discovered and restored this ceiling mural from a 1904 wing. Reinforcing the complex’s past.
The apartments feature original wood with those fashionable industrial finishings. And the place is 90% occupied.
Obviously, many people don’t feel the same way I do. They aren’t put off by the ground water contamination and hot spots, the lead and asbestos (remediated, of course), the years of water accumulating in derelict structures.
They can look beyond whatever history happened here and throughout Connecticut (Remington was manufactured in Bridgeport) that led to guns, guns, guns, everywhere, all the time.
Maybe I should be celebrating the conversion from guns to apartments. I just don’t know. What do you think?
The New York day was jammed – with heat, with tourists, with smells, and with action. Three museums, two plays, a movie, and a partridge…
Best of all though was walking the streets and letting New York happen.
Seeing “Skeleton Crew” by Dominique Morrisseau was brilliant enough in itself-so assuredly written and acted, characters thick with their (extra)ordinary struggles that transcend when put in Detroit in 2008. The genuine acknowledgement of the craft at its peak with sustained applause through two curtain calls. The wonder of discovering a gloriously talented playwright.
After, I had nowhere to be fast or slow. As I strolled out the door onto the sweltering street, I smiled at a woman sitting on her stoop (Atlantic is on a residential street in Chelsea), and she smiled.
A tiny women, all bent over, asked, “so how was it?”
“Excellent”…”so good,” a young man and I answered together.
“I’ll get my ticket,” she said tottering toward the theater.
The young man, so pretty and sweet and gay and put together, and I compared notes, admiring the playwright, whom he worked with when he first moved to the City. Turns out he’s 39, although he looked 23 at most, and an actor. Of course. We chatted amiably until parting for the next adventure.
I turned the corner, scanning for Blossom where I was planning to have a vegan burger with the onion ring and vegan bacon inside–crunchy and yummy by the way. I stopped in front of a movie theater playing “Love and Friendship.”
Nothing feels so good as the cinema on a really beastly day. Okay, I thought, I’ll just see what time it’s playing.
In 30 minutes. So I got a ticket, now involving selecting an exact seat.
“You have such beautiful diction,” commented the ticket sales woman.
“I narrate for the blind.”
“See there? I’m so smart. I just at knew it,” she said proudly, handing over my ticket as she peered over her cheaters with a smile.
I smiled right back, then went outside to find Blossom. The girl working as a greeter at the entrance to the theater looked with me across the street. “I don’t know it,” she mourned, throwing her hands up in resignation.
I went across the street anyway in search and found its tiny storefront camouflaged behind the only tree on the block.
After my burger, I found the same girl stationed by the door, and she seemed delighted I came back to report to her. We shared a moment about that tree.
The movie based on Jane Austen’s Lady Susan promised to be her most biting, with its true antiheroine. But alas it was unfinished, and the movie feels the same. Its sour cynicism is enormously amusing though.
After, even though the evening was still oppressively hot, I decided to walk the 20 blocks to the Broadway theater. Still in Chelsea, virtually everyone responded to my sparkly glasses and goofy grim with a smile right back. The tall, slim young man waiting for the 8th Ave bus, the bagel peddler, the barista selling iced, cold brew coffee.
My first sip exploded like a crunched, toasted coffee bean in my mouth, round, smooth, and strong. Was anything ever so delicious?
Of course, entering the Penn Station area, then Times Square, sobered me up fast, and I got back to people watching with my game face on. The two girls, all brown flesh and swagger, in their rainbow-colored, twisted balloon crowns. The three sailor boys in their Navy whites. Wait! One was a girl, her blonde hair braided and tucked under her cocked cap, and her thin, wire-rimmed glasses just cloaking her Times-Square-neon blue eyes. The long, sweaty lines of theater goers waiting for that first whoosh of theater-cold air and relief.
Summer in New York can be horrible, but its neighborhoods and people never are. The best part of any day.
Wonderful exhibits. I was captured by the shadows, creating new works of art.
Moholy-Nagy, Twisted Planes, plexiglass and steel, 1946 at the Guggenheim
Hellenistic Wrestlers at the Met
Zeus’ head and fist at the Met
Greek theatrical masks at the Met
Today, New York was the stage for nostalgia, reminding me of my mother and my mother’s mother.
My grandmother was a seamstress, quite an extraordinary one according to my mother. As a girl though, Mom hated wearing her mother’s hand-stitched garments to school, when all the other girls wore store bought. How she regretted later that she didn’t have any of those garments when she would have appreciated the fine craft my grandmother practiced.
What she did have was her mother’s jar of buttons.
She and I would pull the jar out and gaze at it, jammed with all sizes and colors. “Nothing ever wasted,” my mother told me, long after her mother had passed.
After my mother had gone, I opened that jar of buttons. Big mistake! It let out a stink so intense, it made made me choke. Something like a cross between formaldehyde and a poorly cleaned public bathroom. Phwew!
So I had to throw all those buttons, hundreds of them, away. But not the memory.
Today, I made my first pilgrimage to Tender Buttons, a tiny store on the Upper East Side.
Nothing but buttons.
I bought a button for grandma, a button for mom, and a button for me.
Czech glass for grandma, a rose for Mom, kitchen kitsch for me
The new musical Waitress is tangentially about pie. Well, it’s a lot about pie. Pie and love.
Jessie Mueller in Waitress
I think about pie and love and immediately think about my mother. One of her best homemade dishes was peach or cherry pie. While she rolled out the dough, I would have a little bit to play with. “Roll it like a cigar,” I would giggle.
She would trim the edges of the crust dough, then re-roll that dough out, fill it with cinnamon and sugar, roll it into a log, slice it into little dimes, and bake them for my brother and me to snack on. Better than the pie!
At the musical, a pie was baking when the doors opened for intermission. Oh my, the aroma!
My seat mate encouraged me that getting some pie was worth it, and she was right. The clever little jars of pie were peddled by diner waitresses around the theater. Apple, key lime, and cookies and cream. I went for the key lime.
I certainly wasn’t alone. Apparently, the baker makes 1000 pie jars per performance. That’s a lot of happy audience members. Like me!
Of course, the show was sweet, too – all puns intended. Lots of humor balanced the maudlin. A great comic character is born with this show. Ogie has the two best numbers: “Never Ever Getting Rid of Me,” with its unforgettable choreography, and “I Love You Like a Table.”
Although the music is actually pretty forgettable, the whole experience is so full of delight, you might want to take your mother.
If you’re near her, give her a kiss on the cheek. If not, remember and tell a good story. Happy Mother’s Day!
In case you missed the conversation on the radio today, you can listen to it here. I was privileged to be interviewed by Daniel Fitzmaurice, Executive Director of Creative Arts Workshop, and to join in the conversation that included installation artist Laura Marsh and her brilliant perspective on the contemporary art scene.
Thank you to Daniel and Laura!
Time for a pause-and-refresh during this busy, busy season. Here are some eye-treats from contemporary artist books of “The Song of Songs”–that lyrical book of wisdom in the Bible that centers on love, ecstasy, and joy. These are now on display downstairs in the Yale Art Library.
Zeev Raban, 1923, Art Nouveau style
Look at the beauty of the script and border illustrations…
…and the elegance of this script. It looks Arabic and comes from Jerusalem.
Typeface: Yits’hak Pludwinski, 1999-2001
“He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.”
Ronald King, 1968
The bold, inky lines.
Hanns H. Heidenheim
A linear style that adds up to a powerful woman.
Mordechai Beck, 1999-2001
…and here, too.
Tamar Messer, 2006
Simple, pleasing lines that are nonetheless fresh.
Angelo Valenti, 1935
Contemporary, sweet.
Rita Galle, 1990
A more graphic approach.
Inspired by Goethe’s color theory with “The Song of Songs” text in German.
Robert Schwarz, 2012
Your moment of joy and love.
This is my first winter in the house, and what I’m noticing is how very, very dark it is here at night. For so many years, I have lived with the ambient light of high rises and the urban scene. So you can imagine how warming those Hanukkah candles have been each night.
The trees of downtown New Haven wear knitted warmies
We’ve done it! We’ve reached the Solstice, which is all about light at the darkest time of year. Now the days start getting longer.
Thank goodness for these traditions that invite us to light up our worlds in this time of deep darkness. I light a candle for the important women in my life who are now gone. The first night and each of the seven nights that follow, the first two candles are lit for my mother Rose and her mother Nettie.
Fourteen years ago, I had a remembrance published in Grand-Stories edited by Ernie Wendell. Here’s my memory piece from that book. Enjoy, and may your light shine brightly every night!
Let the Candle Burn
Every winter, during the season of darkness, I light candles to honor my grandmother. Whether lighting the menorah for the festival of lights, Hanukkah, or warming a room with a scented candle, I remember a long‑ago moment and a story.
When I was a teenager, years after the novelty of dreidel games of childhood Hanukkah celebrations wore off, my mother and I would light the candles of the menorah and sit together, lights off, to watch their flickering. Sometimes we were quiet. Sometimes she told me stories.
One year, she told me a story about my grandmother. When mother was my age, in the 1930s, they lived by the railroad tracks. Hoboes would jump off the passing trains and knock on their back door.
My grandmother would give the hoboes food and coffee‑‑for anyone was welcome at their home. Even though times were hard and everyone was poor, my grandmother always found something to share. Her mother taught her to never let someone who was hungry pass her gate. For the weary traveller, an open home is a healing sight.
How did others know this home welcomed them? A notch on the back gate. A candle burning in the window.
For my mother, and for me, the lit menorah belongs in our windows, with its drops of light letting passers‑by know that this is a Jewish home, and they are welcome here. Similarly, I want my life to be equally hospitable, welcoming the weary and the joyful alike.
Sitting in my darkened room, I watch a candle burn and notice the reflection in my large windows to the world. I remember my grandmother and my mother with the tender, poignant candlelight of memory.
I hope that who I am flickers light and hope into the darkness of our winters. Let the candle burn from the window of my spirit to yours.®
This time of year makes me think about abundance and want. Thanksgiving, to be thankful for bounty. Today, the Boy Scout’s collected canned and packaged goods for the local food bank. Creative Arts Workshop had their annual Bowl-a-thon, where they sell hand made bowls made by students and faculty, filled with homemade soup, proceeds going to the Community Soup Kitchen.
Here are the bowls I bought, both by the same artist.
Then there was the line around the corner at the Apple Store, waiting for the new iPhone 6, a month after its introduction. And me at Whole Foods, spending needlessly on a Buddha’s Hand at a wasteful $3.99 per pound–the excess of a fruit I won’t eat, but does fill the room with a divine lemon scent.
So I acknowledge the contradictions in me. I spend $10 on a temporary decoration and deliver meals-on-wheels on Thanksgiving. For someone who doesn’t eat turkey, chaffeuring hot meals will no doubt fill the car with smells I won’t love. Maybe I’ll put the Buddha’s Hand in the car, too. A good metaphor to remind me of what’s really important.
Hope your Thanksgiving is full of gratitude, good smells, and Buddha’s Hand, in all its forms.