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Masterpiece Monday – My Mother’s Pictures

Apr29

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Several years ago I participated in a combination gallery and performance art exhibition based on the tarot called My Mother’s Pictures. It was a dream of one of the TOILA priestess’ and we made it come true for her. It was based on the Major Arcana of the tarot but as I recall we had so many people wanting to do it we ended up with a few court cards and Minor Arcana.

Every card had a physical piece of art and a performance piece. All the would be artists gathered at one of the artist’s homes and we talked about the project and then people drew cards first for the physical card and then it went around for the performance art piece. I was lucky enough to do both.

The Lady Mother has a very strange sense of humour. M and I had decided to draw for the art piece together. We drew the Tower card for the art piece and two other friends drew the Tower for the performance piece. Three out of the four women had been struck by lightning, a key feature of most representations of the Tower card. Nothing to this tarot stuff, nah, it’s just a bunch of pretty pictures, yeah right.

M and I did a huge sculpture of a woman being struck by lightning with a city burning down around her. On the card we used for the book we handed out only the sculpture shows. It took us a quite a while to build her and finish her but I still like how she came out.

T & G did a poem on the transformation that being hit by lightning can manifest in your life. .

I also did a performance piece on the Strength card. I can’t for the life of me remember what the art piece was for Strength. I did a performance of smithing and forged a large silver heart out of wire as I spoke about how smithing and magic and life work together to make something strong and beautiful and how striking something tempers the heart and makes it stronger and no longer bends easily. I managed to do it and not whack myself on the thumb with my hammer. I think that went well or at least it felt good at the time. I surely felt like I was between the worlds when I did it. Somewhere there is a tape of the whole thing but I’ve never seen it.

Anyway, that’s my Masterpiece Monday. Memories of making good art.

Witches & witchcraft reading challenge

Apr24

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Just finished the penultimate book in Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series. This one has all the characters she’s introduced throughout the series.

I really enjoy her writing as her paranormal people are not weirdos or overly sexed up.

Can’t wait for the last one.

http://melissaseclecticbookshelf.blogspot.com/2012/12/added-to-bookshelf-12212.html?m=1

12 month Challenge – City Mouse or Country Mouse

Apr10

12 Month Challenge

Country Mouse, City Mouse

I think of the county mouse as living in a rural area so maybe there should be another category – Wilderness Mouse. I’m somewhere between Wilderness Mouse and City Mouse. Most of the time I’m living in the city but Los Angeles isn’t totally city. A lot of the LA area is really wilderness and some of it even near downtown can be inaccessible. This is why we have the Santa Monica National Recreation are spread through LA. http://www.nps.gov/samo/index.htm & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Canyon_Park

The geographical center of LA is in a wilderness park halfway between the San Fernando Valley and Beverly Hills called Franklin Canyon. There are wild places all over and my sister and I visit them all the time and I drag friends around them too. I spent every summer from 1975 to 1984 out in the mountains around Los Angeles working at camps.

At camp we lived and slept outside. Cooked a lot of our meals outside. Sometimes bathed outside. Rode horseback, canoed and swam in the lake or at an unheated pool. I led hikes and backpack trips. I taught Arts and Crafts outside. Shared our space with raccoons, deer and coyotes, foxes, squirrels, birds and occasionally bears.

We don’t really have hills in LA, we have mountains. The mountain right behind our house growing up called Mt Verdugo is 3126 ft and the mountaňin on the way up to camp, MT Wilson is 5710 and camp is higher still and at Teresita Pines we climbed Mt Baden-Powell and it’s 9399 ft tall. By comparison the tallest mountain in Scotland is Ben Nevis and it’s only 4409 ft tall. There are still places that are such rough terrain that no one has ever been on foot there. Search and Rescue in our mountains is no joke. The rangers used to tell us they have to comb the mountains every Monday for people who get lost or their car goes off the road. When I worked at the hospital which just happens to be the local trauma center I found out how true that was because every Monday morning we’d hear the whump, whump, whump of the copters landing on the roof. Even the terrain in some of our botanical gardens can be pretty rough like the CA native section of Descanso Gardens.

That’s one of the wonderful things about LA. You can start at the beach and be in the wilderness in some places like Malibu in about 15 minutes even from Santa Monica to La Caňada is only about an hour on a good day. On the other hand I like the convenience of being able to shop at Trader Joes and Whole Foods which are generally in the city. I like being able to take the Orange Line to work and not drive. I like knowing that hospitals and doctors are close by if I need them. I like knowing if I want an item to create something JoAnn’s fabrics and Michaels are not far away.

I like knowing both my coven and my temple sisters are close by. I like belonging to a huge pagan community with lots of options. I like that we have beach rituals and then go for walks in the woods. I like that even though I live in an apartment I have a yard. I like being 15 minutes from 2 wildlife sanctuaries and about 30 minutes to an hour from about 10 others. I like being able to go places like the Getty Villa http://www.getty.edu/visit/ or Huntington Library and Gardens if I decide today I want to see the Audubon folio or the Magna Carta or a statue of Aphrodite.

I like that LA is a city of trees and on my street there are redwoods, oaks, sycamores and orange trees among others.

So I guess I’m a City Mouse and a Wilderness Mouse