Imbolc New Life Moon
Red Herring Art Supply: Life is a Red Herring for Art. Life distracts from creating your next master piece. Be strong. Take control. Make your Art.
This odd little gallery cum art supply store sits at a right angle to the biggest Mexican restaurant in Denver, Casa Bonita. Not to get too distracted but Casa Bonita has cliff diving! inside. It defines whatever Spanish is for kitsch. And pink at that.
Kristi, the owner of Red Herring Art, is a pleasant, voluble person. The Colorado Sumi-e Society meets at Red Herring, so when I gravitated to the brushes and rice paper and ink sticks, we started to talk. She showed me a brush with faux jade beads as handles. “Would you like to try the rooster tail brush?” Say what? “Yes,” she said, “since we raised chickens when I was a kid, I was surprised to see rooster tail feathers uses in a sumi brush.”
I picked up the brush, a bigger one, with, sure enough rooster feathers hanging down where the usual goat or sable hairs would be. Dipping in the pot of water she offered me, I brushed a zen circle on a board she has that is reactive to water. It surprised me. In that it worked. “I don’t think I’m ready for this one yet.”
After buying a pad of larger rice paper and a larger roll, I picked out a new goat hair brush and a set of Japanese water colors for sumi-e. All the while we were talking and Kristi invited me to come to the Colorado Sumi-e meetings on the last Tuesday of the month. “You know, I use Kraft paper and plain old newsprint for practice.” Huh. Kraft and newsprint is cheaper than rice paper, for sure.
Kristi liked me, apparently, because after she rang me up, she said, “I’m going to give you the 40West discount. Because you should really be in it.” Took 10% off my bill. Nice. 40West is a Denver creative arts district that includes the area around Red Herring and Casa Bonita. Just up a slight rise behind Casa Bonita is the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.
“Oh, I’m just playing I said. I don’t have any real ambitions.” “We’re all just playing, especially when we take up a new medium.”
Pushed me back a bit to Thursday and those instances of joy. Play and joy go together, too. Maybe, come to think of it, that was the real message behind my last melancholy. Stop being so serious. Let go, lighten up. Have more fun.
Last week at mussar we had a fascinating conversation on the essential dourness of both Jewish and northern European cultures stimulated by the Norwegian concern that they had won too many medals in the winter Olympics. In both cases happiness, and by correlation, joy, are suspect. Why are you so happy? What makes you think that will last?
Hippity hop to the ortho shop. Kate’s got an appointment at Panorama Orthopedics today. Her right shoulder. She can no longer hold things up with her right arm and has to use two hands to put dishes away, sometimes to lift a cup. Annoying and painful. Screws up her sleep, too. She needs some kind of solution, more than likely a shoulder replacement. This is the first step, a consult to see what her options are.
An interesting week ahead. A session on green burial tomorrow night at CBE. It’s part of a conversation about creating a Jewish cemetery up here in the Evergreen/Conifer area. Oddly, I think I’d like to work on that. The next night, Wednesday, is Tu B’Shevat, the New Year of the Trees. Judaism has a lot of pagan inflections, Tu B’Shevat and Sukkot, a harvest festival at the end of the High Holidays, for example. Looking forward to this one because there’s a seder, too, with seven species of fruit and nuts. I’ll explain more on Wednesday. After the this celebration is another Kabbalah session, more double letters in the Hebrew alphabet.
Rigel has her second appointment at the Vet Referral Clinic with Dr. Bayliss this Friday, too. I’m excited about it because we’ll get a clearer picture of what’s going on with her. And, it’s not the dire prognosis we anticipated when we took her in a week ago last Friday.
Kate sewed most of the day yesterday. May not seem like a big deal, but it is. Her energy and her energy management skills are both improving and she’s enjoying life more. I’m so glad to see it.
Work on online education for Beth Evergreen will continue today, too. Marilyn Saltzman found some mussar sites and I’m going to add Coursera and EDx courses. I also plan to look at other, more general online education sites. So far I’ve focused on online education focused on Jewish studies, but I imagine there are more courses. A fun project.
Here’s another one, which he titled, Can’t. This is forward art, playing with the notion of found objects and the limits of traditional print making. As often happens with art, this work came out of the struggles he had during the long divorcing.
I don’t miss the heavy lifting (the literal heavy lifting) for the most part, though part of my time at Beth Evergreen involves setting up for Adult Ed events and I do like moving chairs and tables, that sort of thing. Go figure. But I also need purposeful, intellect engaged physical activity. Different from exercise, which I also need. Cooking is physical and intellectual, also creative.
The sumi painting I’ve not yet fully engaged, still collecting materials, setting up my work space, learning techniques, but I intend to stay at it as long as it takes to get some proficiency. Precise or artistic hand work has never been my thing, but I’m going to change that, at least to some degree.
“The more I have looked into the Quest for the Grail, it is clear it is a Western form of Zen. There is no grail, it is understanding that the veil is the mystery of existence, it is nothing, but our interactions with everyone and everything.” Woolly and friend, Mark Odegard
The Woolly Mammoths have been my companions, fellow pilgrims, on the way to Canterbury. Or, fellow Tibetan Buddhists inch worming their way around the sacred mountain, Meru. Or, my fellow Torah scholars, davening as we read the sacred texts. Or, fellow Lakotas, our skin pierced and tied to the world tree during the Sun Dance. Or, friends traveling through this life together until it ends.
The solstices mark swings to and from extremes, from the longest day to the longest night, there, and as with Bilbo, back again. Darkness and light are never steady in their presence. The earth always shifts in relation to the sun, gradually lengthening the days, then the nights.
In these long nights the cold often brings clear, cloudless skies. The wonderful Van Gogh quote that I posted a few days ago underscores a virtue of darkness, one we can experience waking or asleep. Dreaming takes us out of the rigors of day to day life and puts us in the realm where ideas and hopes gather. So, the lengthening of the nights increases our opportunity to experience dream time. Whether you believe in Jung’s collective unconscious or not-I do, the rich resources of dreaming are available to us with greater ease when the nights are long and the cold makes sleeping a joy.
Winter break continues. The identity crisis has passed as I knew it would. The crisis focused on my passive choices, taking the path of least resistance after college and I did do that, giving up my intentionality about career to a socialization experience with clergy-focused fellow students. But. Within that decision to just follow the education I had chosen as a way to get out of a dead end job and an unhappy marriage, I was intentional.