Birthdays

Yesterday would've been my father's birthday. This is a picture of me with him outside our home in Bethune, South Carolina. We moved to Pageland when I was three and that's where I grew up and my parents lived out their lives till mother moved to Florida near me for the last six years of her life.

Today is my husband's birthday.

haiga

My Uncle Bayle as a boy against a current surreal Florida skyline.

In The Still of the Night....

Remember that old doo wap song?? In cleaning out a drawer, I ran across a newspaper interview by the song's writer. It's snall on this jpg, but a click will make it readable. We used to sing this on the band bus coming home after a parade, play it on our record players and dream to it about the man who would love us forever like the man did in this song. Sigh...

Fires out of control in our state now.

We awoke this morning to find a coating of ash on both vehicles. If you haven't heard about the fires raging down here, the online news says:

The Sunshine State is sun-dried, reports CBS News correspondent Jim Acosta. Officials say a few scattered showers over the last 24 hours have done little to stop the fires burning all the way down to the Florida Everglades.

Statewide, 103 fires were burning across nearly 25,000 acres, according to the Division of Forestry. Read this national online report for more.

This link is from The Palm Beach Post, our local newspaper.

Just Curious...

...to see if my slide show at MySpace will also play here. The first part is personal photos and the second part taken from photos posted by some of the people I know and like on that site. The show's a lot better with music. On my profile I can have MP3's of real songs, but a midi's the best I can offer here. If you wish, hit the right arrow to start and watch. Hit the square to turn it off when through. It plays twice.

Two more by Redon (Click to Enlarge

Note: I googled Redon at Amazon.com and the following describes his work, as well as a book I have my eye on about him. A link to the book is in the comments under this post. As I posted back to Pat, I was last at the MOMA in 1988, before they amassed Redon's art. If it had been there then, the museum would've had to evict me:-)

From Amazon:

Book Description
Caught between description and dream, the felt and the imagined, French artist Odilon Redon, whose career bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, transformed the natural world into nightmarish visions and bizarre fantasies. Closely allied with the Symbolist movement, Redon offered his own interpretations of literary, biblical, and mythological subjects; created a universe of strange hybrid creatures; and presented landscape in a singular way: we see grinning disembodied teeth, smiling spiders, melancholic floating faces, winged chariots, unfamiliar plant life, and velvety black or colored swirls of atmosphere. With a recent gift from the Ian Woodner family, The Museum of Modern Art is now the site of the most significant body of the artist's work outside France, and this book will showcase the full range of Redon's varied oeuvre--charcoal "noirs," luminous pastels, richly textured canvases, literary collaborations, and experiments in printmaking--and will illuminate the hold his particular kind of modernism has had on both 20th-century and contemporary artists. Essay by Jodi Hauptman. Hardcover, 9.25 x 11 in./256 pgs / 142 color and 160 duotones.

Another artist I love

Head With Flowers by Redon

I saw my first Redon in the Washington D.C. National Gallery of Art in the seventies while attending an APA convention, and was transfixed. I didn't want to leave the painting and didn't for a long time. The friend who went with me was an artist by hobby, a fellow Psychologist by profession. He later found and sent me a book of Redon's work. I still have that book and pull it out to look at this man's amazing work. Lenny's heart attack and strokes, beginning in his fifties, gradually hampered and finally halted his ability to paint. Thank you, Lenny, for being my friend, for knowing that beauty and caring are both essential to a full life.

As promised...

If you listened to that wonderful first link in the National Geographic site of music from all over the world, here are , first the Finnish words, followed by a translation, thanks to my friend from Finland.

Suvetar hyvä emäntä
nouse harja katsomahan
viitimä emännän vilja
kun ei tuskihin tulisi

Manutar maan emäntä
nostele oras okinen
kannon karvanen ylennä
kun ei tuskihin tulisi

Syöttele metisin syömin
juottele metisin juomin
mesiheinin herkuttele
vihannalla mättähällä

siull on helkiät hopiat
siull on kullat kuulusammat

nouse jo neitonen
mustana mullasta

Akka mantereen alanen
vanhin luonnon tyttäristä
pane turve tunkomahan
maa väkevä vääntämähän

Akka mantereen alanen
vanhin luonnon tyttäristä
tuhansin neniä nosta
varsin vaivani näöstä


Suvetar, fine matron
Arise to see the seeds
Raise the matron's corn
So that we may be spared pain

Manutar, matron of the Earth
Lift up the shoots from the ground
New shoots from the stumps
So that we may be spared pain

Feed us with honey-hearts
Give us honey-drink
Delicious honey-grass
On a blossoming knoll

You have shining silver
You have glistening gold

Rise up, O maiden
Black from the soil

Underground crone
Most ancient of Nature's daughters
Make the peat shoot forth
And the ground turn over

Underground crone
Most ancient of Nature's daughters
Lift up a thousand seedlings
To reward my efforts.

Musing in Violet and Blue

National Geographic presents...

I've been resting, still slowly improving slowly from that med reaction and just checking my email, when my online National Geographic newsletter arrived with this wonderful site of vids and music from all over the world. I'm featuring a special one from Norway/Sweden, but click on the links above to find music from all over the world.

I gave this link to an online friend from Finland who directed me to a site describing the music in the video in this way. This poetic song tradition, sung in an unusual, archaic trochaic tetrametre, had been part of the oral tradition among speakers of Balto-Finnic languages for two thousand years.

She also offered to translate the video for me since they're singing in Finnish. When I get that, I'll post it either here or in a separate blog. Another reason I find the internet so wonderful.


I also found a video from Africa that entranced me! I don't know anybody in Africa, but if you do, pass it on.


Pris

Two Days

The last two days of my father's life
he mumbled to himself over the hiss
of the oxygen tank.
Breathlessly.
Frantically.
Eyelids lowered like windowshades,
pulled tight against that encroaching storm.
It's possible he was talking to angels,
messengers from another world come to claim him.
Perhaps old ghosts from his past, but
I'd like to think, at least part of that time,
he was recalling how my mother's hair
moved in the breeze when he first met her,
how pleased he was on the day
I crooned 'da da', the taste of fried green tomatoes
shared round our table late on a fall evening.

At the end of the second day,
I lay my head on his chest,
strained for one last glimpse into his eyes.
The shade finally fluttered.
For that second,
that one halleluja chorus second,
he saw me.
A tear slid down his cheek to my hand.
A baptism of sorts.
A christening.
A blessing of our time here on earth together.
A goodbye.

west wind

the west wind
ruffles my bottlebrush tree-
a mother's touch


(Thank all of you for your comments yesterday. It was a difficult day on many levels and I'm awake today with my throat throbbing and my head still bleary and throbbing, too, from the massive antibiotic I have to take when I have my teeth cleaned, due to a mitral valve occasional click. I don't do well on medications, as some of you know. And today is my long CFIDS day. I'm exhausted. I have notes for my doctor, since talking to him will be impossible. I may not see you, my internet friends, but I know you're there and I feel you. Know I appreciate you!)

New Posting Habits

I'm going through a really low energy period right now. It happens. For a while, instead of trying to post every day, I'm going to a post every other day until I feel a bit stronger. I enjoy my blog and want to keep on enjoying it, so I have to take care that it doesn't become something that's too much to do.

Featuring Frida Kahlo

In 1953, when Frida Kahlo had her first solo exhibition in Mexico (the only one held in her native country during her lifetime), a local critic wrote: 'It is impossible to separate the life and work of this extraordinary person. Her paintings are her biography.' This observation serves to explain both why her work is so different from that of her contemporaries, the Mexican Muralists, and why she has since become a feminist icon. Her paintings were nearly all of herself and unflinching in their honesty and surrealistic expression of her struggles and experiences.

Frida Kahlo has earned my admiration, not only because she was a gifted artist, but because she overcame the obstacles of an extremely difficult life to do so. She had polio as a child and was housebound, recovering only to be involved in a horrible bus accident at the age of sixteen. Her body literally had to be pieced back together bit by bit and she was never free of pain from that time on, often bedridden again for periods of time. Before her death, the lower part of one leg had to be amputated. Her private showing in Mexico was a triumph. Her doctor had told her she must not leave her bed or she would risk her death. Instead, she had her bed carried to the opening in an ambulance so she could attend. A determined woman. A strong woman. A gifted woman. The love of her life was artist Diego Rivera.

I would highly recommend renting the doco 'The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo'.