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HAPPY BELTANE friends..
Its the 1st of May, and these lovely pheasant's eye narcissii are blooming in my garden and at last the sun is shining :-) I planted them because my Mum used to grow them and I always loved them. This is the 1st year I have had a group of blooms like this, and their beauty seems like the right place to start this post..
Inspired by beautiful photos coming in on the email from friends who are celebrating this day, I photographed the the flowers this morning on my way over to our barn & looking forward to my daily spiritual practice.
When I looked up in the barn, there was a new image on the wall ..
Well, to me this looked like a dancing woman, with a banner, or is it a snake ..? I soon realised it was the shadow of a woodcarving that sits on a window sill and was made by a dear lady called Marjorie who was a fellow student of wood carving in a class I went to in the 1990's. I knew Marjorie at the end of her life, she was in her 80's, and became a friend. When she passed on her family kindly let me have this sculpture, which I had seen her make in the classes, & which was the last piece she completed. So it is dear to me, as she was -
So, this morning I felt Marjorie's dancing, playful, no nonsense energy there in the barn, which made me smile even more, on this lovely sunny day. Not only was this image at the top of my wall, but it was above two paintings -
these paintings are about meditation, death, and the communication between power animals and the shaman - ( I have written at length about them in posts last autumn which you can find in the blog archive ) . So all this is at the core of my shamanic practice, and it felt like a blessing to have the sculpture's shadow dancing there too.
On my One Spirit Interfaith training we are looking at buddhism this month and I am using a beautiful daily prayer we were given (thank you , Cathy Slow ). In buddhism , as on the shamanic path, we honour and celebrate the Ancestors, meaning all those who have gone before us in the widest sense, not just our bloodlines. So on this May Day I would like to share it here. It is based on work with the ancestors by Thich Nhat Hahn, that wise vietnamese buddhist teacher..
In gratitude and compassion, I reach up to my physical ancestors
In gratitude and compassion , I bow down to my physical ancestors
My mother in me,
My father in me
In gratitude and compassion, I reach up to my spiritual ancestors
In gratitude and compassion, I bow down to my spiritual ancestors
In gratitude and compassion, I reach up to the ancestors of this place
In gratitude and compassion, I bow down to the ancestors of this place
In gratitude, compassion and the spirit of forgiveness, I reach up to all those I have injured
In gratitude, compassion and the spirit of forgiveness I bow down to all those who have injured me
In gratitude and compassion, I reach up I to all beings
In gratitude and compassion, I bow down to all beings
I seem to be becoming addicted to playing with my sewing machine, and great fun it is too. Why stick with clothes you are not happy with when you can change them ?? Get out the scissors & cut off what you don't like!
That's what I did with the t-shirt below, I snipped its little sleeves off. I love the blue colour, that's really why I bought it, and for the cool drawing by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which I take to be of himself.
Well, JMB, I loved your drawings, but not the kind of texts in your paintings that were like this one, doing poor me about people with lotsa money... so I covered them up & got a nice little pocket into the bargain. I hope you like looking at the African drawings which I put there instead, and the fun I had with the shapes from t-shirt 2. That was another real favourite which had worn too thin, and was another lovely blue, so I am pleased with the colour mix too. Here's the back ..
For the next one I went back to the fleece material left from my 1st garment (2 posts ago) and used the central part of the blue piece, with red additions this time. Another useful pocket, of course,
and on the back a lovely design from another old favourite t-shirt the rest of which will be in the rag bag. Alas I dont know who JG is, but her initials are still on it, and the title - Lapwing. So this garment has a name too.
I have already been asked to make a garment for someone else, and offered some more old clothes, this seems all set to escalate.. watch this space !
I said I would post next about Interfaith - so here I am, 1/4 of the way through training to be an Interfaith Minister with the One Spirit Interfaith Foundation. This means a w/e in London about once a month with a wonderful group of fellow students, mentors & tutors going through all manner of experiential learning processes, looking at many of the great faith paths / religions, and learning about an inspiring form of deep listening called Spiritual Counselling. This will lead on to creating ceremonies in the 2nd year of the training too.
It was this latter aspect that drew me in initially, as an opportunity to explore ritual & ceremony further, I have so enjoyed helping create ceremony to mark important moments in people's lives already. I still look forward to that element of the training, but I am engrossed in the beauty of finding out about so may ways of honouring Spirit in our lives, that I am in no hurry to get to the next bit of curriculum. And I am reading so many wonderful books - many of you know what a happy bookworm I am..
A friend whose experience was one of my inspirations to do this training spoke of 'having layers peeled away' , and this is certainly my experience too. It confirms for me that opening to the Divine is & always has been at the centre of my life; but now I am learning to recognise how I have ducked & dived away from this, how I hide behind my defences, indeed hide myself away. I need the challenge of working with these patterns to have anything to offer others down the line. The more I step into the enormous support that was always there to stop this , the more my relationship with Whateveryoucallit grows. Words are difficult, so easily laden with old stuff - but God / Spirit / the Mystery / Source / is beyond those hangups, and shamanically speaking my Spirits are backing me clearly and strongly.
This kind of focus stimulates creativity too, & I continue to play with my sewing machine - more posts soon.
And we have done fun things in the recent good weather, like have fish & chips at Newquay on the w/e .. under a watchful eye, as I thought, though when I saw this photo full size, the eyes seem to be elsewhere ..?!
Well, yes it has been a long time since I posted, & the 2 best reasons are
(1) that I am now a Student Minister with One Spirit Interfaith Seminary, and this training will take me to summer 2014. I will write about it in my next post.
and (2) my creativity is taking a new turn, which this post is about, I have circled back to textiles..
It started with upcycling clothing classes with the wonderful Carys Hedd and her sewing machines - she inspires & guides one to cut up old garments & make funky fun new ones. See http://wenchwear.co.uk
Luckily Sarah came to stay, I needed her help again to make a mannequin. Great way to use up rags, we wound each other's torsos in duck tape, cut each other out & stuffed them. A real laugh! You may note I have also edited my trousers - comfy army ones that needed some colour...
Once that was in place I happily demolished 2 old fleeces & I was away..
It took a while for the whole garment to take shape.. but it is an immensely satisfying process, which I look forward to repeating, though of course no 2 garments will be the same..
I enjoyed creating lots of seams up the back, but there were some spark holes too from bonfires.. so I have made a feature of them. The finishing touch was some text, copied from balloons given out at the end of a wonderful & inspiring play I saw in Birmingham last w/e - Flying Home by Deidre Burton & Tom Davis - which my nephew Edmund Caird was acting in..
So here is the final back view in the sun in our garden.. and this garment is called
LIVE HAPPILY NOW
Well, it has happened, and nearly a week has rushed by! Thank you to all of you who came & supported me, & especially those of you who bought paintings & prints - all the money will be donated to the Woodland Trust.
Luckily my friend, photographer & artist Sarah Knowler was there to make good use of my camera for me - thank you Sarah :-)
I am not going to post many of her lovely shots of friends & family, but have selected 5 that show off the venue the best. The beautiful Forge venue in Camden, London is well worth a visit ( details on flier on previous post ) and these pics are taken in their upstairs room - the Foundry Gallery - which is about to become a sought-after place to exhibit. I am proud to be the 2nd artist to do so.
It was lovely (once over my nervousness) to show various family & older & newer friends some of my work from the last 3 years, & celebrate after with a delicious meal there too.
Here it is :-
I must add that this last photo is of my nephew, Adam Caird, who dreamed up & runs this wonderful place with his wife Charlotte; and he is holding my irresistable great-niece Isla, who had dressed perfectly for the occaision !!
I am deep in exhibition preparation mode (see flier 2 posts ago ) & its amazing how much time it takes up putting hooks & string on the backs of paintings, cutting bubble wrap to size, making labels etc etc .. Probably wont post again till I have put the exhibition up next tuesday.
Luckily a friend came down last week for a long w/e and that stopped me spending too much time on it. Even better we had some consecutive days of glorious sunny but not too cold autumn weather, & took our cameras for walks. I am the proud owner of a new compact, & chuffed with the opportunity to take better photos - I hope my occaisional posts here will thus improve..
Here is an example of one of those lucky moments, & here's to friends that come & take us out of ourselves :-) .. you know who you are ..
Here are some photos I have taken at various time & places over the last year or so, all at moments where my attention was caught by colour, or texture, or both . I was simply going to share the most recent one, but when I look back I realise how regularly this happens, & I'm interested to put some side by side & see them as a group.
These moments of joy in seeing some particular combination of random things feeds my painting practice. When I am working on a painting & looking/feeling for the combination of colours that will , I hope, make each other sing, things such as these are feeding me. It is an unconscious source of support - I don't deliberately seek to copy nature's colours, that has never worked for me. Sometimes I will only see the connection from a painting or drawing back to a photo afterwards. I think my Spirit Helpers have this sorted ...
These 5 shots are taken in some of my favourite landscapes - S Wales, N Wales, & Scotland. I feel so glad to be able to spend time in these places,
I hope these convey something of their mixture of ancient presence & fragile beauty.
