The light of the world is a little dimmer now.

 

Lana (December 30, 2007 - May 23, 2021)

Some people do have very short lives. But within that brief time, they radiated so brightly that they touched everyone who ever knew them. Lana was one of those people. For thirteen years, she was a burning star in the lives of her family, and friends, and community. She loved God, her family, and basketball.

It's summer time and the roses are blooming.

 From Ben's lawn. May 22, 2021.

I've had a very good day but I did something silly.

 Today I accidentally deleted links that had to do with my work.

(((omg)))

As I have been saying the last six months, "oh, well..."

Art is not a democratic act.

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”

                         ― Flannery O'Connor

This is one of my favorite paintings.

 

Simeon Solomon

Poetry c.1864

Watercolor

I am feeling low.

 

Painting by

Ion Vincent Danu

Enslaved By Your Roots

This is not the first time I have written about changes. Since 1998, my life, nearly every single year, has been one of major change. Not small things, though I have voluntarily made those, too, but very big emotional things like careers, and marriages, and illnesses, and deaths and those involuntary things that happen to us if we live long enough and love enough. In his incredible book, Life is in the Transitions, Bruce Feiler calls these "Life Quakes" or as I call them, "The Big Assaults On My Stability." I have experienced an unusual amount of them. Nothing is to be done, but how I react. I learned this the hard way at first, and then I mastered a method to deal with crisis so that I could exist AKA How we make meaning in times of change. I am there again, right in the middle of making seriously big creative changes. I did not expect it. Of course, it is never expected. It, this THING, this DISRUPTOR, began last November, though it was probably dormant before that. Who knows? Doesn't matter. Much of it is rooted in me, in various ways, hence the painting. We are all rooted in ways we cannot fully understand, physically, environmentally, and yes mentally. This DISRUPTOR has been of my own making and now I must endure by unmaking it in what ways I can. I will never fully unmake it. I will have to endure its existence to a certain point.

It's going to be chronic.

I am quite familiar with the "chronic."  But I do not like it.

So while I know what to do physically (this is very hard work). It's the mental issues that are going to drag me down. It's the emotional fallout, and today I wondered if I should go back on Prozac and if I do, what dosage. It's not like I have not been here, in this exact place, previously. So I have written it here on my blog because this is a major decision that will affect everything else in my life, especially my creativity. But if I fall into an anxiety/depression cycle, things could get bad, and guess what, I am feeling low right now. I keep journals. I know when I am winding down. It's been over six months and the downward spiral is really clear.

I'll have to choose at some point. But not today. But the choice is there.

Update: NO PROZAC. No sleep.

The bee buzzes in the night.

“White bee, even when you are gone you buzz in my soul. You live again in time, slender and silent.”  

― Pablo Neruda

What is the self?

There is no static, solid self. (mjh)

Desperate Romantics - The Kiss by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Happy Birthday to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of my biggest influencers. I would not be the person I am today without his work.

Vampires still resonate with me as one of the most frightening of creatures.

"His heart has ceased, his breast stone-cold His lips sealed, his eyes blank Still in this world, yet no longer a part! Who is this man? The deceased."

— Part of "Upiór" poem by A. Mickiewicz

My mother was once a baby, too.

Sometimes I like to think of my mother as this baby, sitting on a porch in the warm sunlight, somewhere in the Mississippi Delta. I imagine her later as a toddler and then the young girl and I never go beyond that. I stay focused on those years so that I am not the center of the perspective, that I don't remember her as she was to me, but what I imagine her life was when she was attached to her own mother. None of us really ever think of our mothers outside ourselves and egos. We never think of them without us. We should.

The problems with beauty are many.

“They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.” 

                    

                            — Donna Tartt,  The Secret History

Happy Birthday to Angela Carter

Late October...the stark elders 

have an anorexic look; 

there is not much in the autumn 

wood to make you smile but it is not yet,

not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. 

Only, there is a haunting sense 

of the imminent cessation of being; 

the year, in turning, turns in on itself. 

Introspective weather, a sickroom hush. 

Angela Carter, from “The Erl-King”, The Bloody Chamber

Doing a handstand was always fun.

 

Albert Tucker. Joy Hester Doing a Handstand, c. 1940. 

 (This image took my breath away. Young girls/women doing handstands. Summer light. A field. Carefree. Youth. When you get old, you will miss these simple things the most. These treasures of idleness. Your body free of physical constraints, flexible. You will long to do a handstand. Such a simple beautiful thing.)

The image is Joy Hester, an Australian artist. You can read some about her life here.

https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/hester-joy/

Once you know something, you can never erase it.

"Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock." —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)