sailing to Ithaca

During my August in Ithaca I went to Cayuga Lake with two lovely friends. It was the first time I'd sat doing nothing for a long time. Boats were passing by. There was a breeze of such perfect temperature it felt like it was blowing through my molecules. Something about that day and the friends I was with put a restless feeling in my hands to construct some driftwood boats which I couldn't shake till I got home to Connecticut and tried it. I found plenty of floaty bits on the beach. After some experimentation with ballast and wax, I put four little ships together. 

Seagull feathers make nice sails. 

Also good sails: pages from an antique hymnal. 

Catamaran configurations provide sturdiness for tall, multi-sailed vessels.

The fleet setting sail for Ithaca. My closet doorknob is the moon.

 Just as fun was the challenge of packing them for travel with the US Postal Service to the muses who inspired them. Tied down to a base...

with declaration of presentation...

and instructions. 

 

Another dear friend took this picture of their arrival. They made it! 

This was such a satisfying building experience. How to make myself remember to allow for more do-nothing-times so these ideas have a chance to get in? 

cost of living

I've had so many non-illustration commissions over the last two years --parade floats, puppet shows, mermaids, etc-- that the Winsor & Newton acrylic palette I've maintained steadily since 1996 went unused and dried up. With some new illustration work coming in, I had to start from scratch and purchase my entire palette all at once for the first time in 16 years. Ouch paint is expensive! Here's a comparison of my two purchases that day:

$200 of acrylic paint.

$100 of food.

Thankfully the paint will last longer then the food, and with luck I'll find enough illustration work to turn that paint into many more counter tops like this. And it does feel very good to have my tackle box full of shiny plump tubes again. I've missed painting. 

practical aesthetics

With my new food-centric life, I'm now in the grocery store and farmers' market 2-3 times a week. That's about 2-3 times more often then I was previously. This seems a reasonable amount when eating fresh. When I lived in Rome I noticed people would stop at the Campo de Fiori every day after work. Italians have tiny dorm size refrigerators they barely keep anything in because they mostly eat what they bought that day. This is common sense to them, so foreign to us.

Luckily I learned to enjoy the shopping. Partly it's that I like making a pleasing still life by filling my cart with produce. It's less fun shopping for unattractive, color-clashing packaging. The more beautiful my cart looks, the more healthy it is, really. And adding farmers' markets this summer has brought adventure and suspense to food gathering.

While I was getting the food part down, I was accumulating a mountain of plastic shopping bags I felt pretty bad about, as no trick could make me remember my reusable Stop & Shop bags. I read a blog that suggested buying beautiful shopping bags would make you remember them. I found these big sturdy ones, made of that flat plastic stuff used in bundle packaging. And indeed, I love them so much, I've never forgotten them. Aesthetics have practical applications.

good night, dreamers

I have a new blog. I can't even count what number this is, as I've left blogs littered all over the internet. This one is not of my own work, but collected videos I've been posting regularly on facebook in the evenings. They're all mellow, dreamy, hopeful, and beautiful. The kinds of things you'd want to fall asleep to. You can find it here.

food / love

I have an aversion to lifestyle blogs with pretty pictures of magazine kitchens and perfect meals, so I feel a twinge of ugh posting this picture. However, potatoes and a dirty stove aren't so pretty, and after all there is a heart potato here, found in a bag of goldens this morning. And I do love hearts.

Plus it brings me around to the primary subject of my life in the last year: (surprisingly) food. Before now I've never cared about food. It didn't make sense to me to put time and money into something that would disappear in a short time. I'd rather build or paint something. I ate whatever was quickest. I hated cooking. Foodies and nutritionists seemed to me people who had too much time on their hands.

I had this attitude till age 38 when I became severely gluten intolerant. I'd like to apologize at the start to those who find this gluten free thing absurd. I felt the same way. No need to get into details, I just know because of wheat contamination I can't eat most processed foods without getting violent pain.

I dealt with this at first by eating a diet of 90% gluten free brown rice pasta. Obviously I was pretty unhealthy. Then I went to Kripalu for a week and was introduced to some of the finest whole food cooking probably anywhere. I couldn't believe what could be done with such simple ingredients to make them taste so good. I was for the first time in my life truly seduced by food. The year of deprivation had turned me food-obsessed.

Since then I've been learning how to feed myself with mostly whole and raw foods. It's been a formidable challenge, made more complex by nutritional needs for 8-10 hours a week of strength and cardio training. Learning basic cooking, how to schedule shopping for perishables, calorie counting, protein and portion awareness, it's been a full time education. I've spent the majority of my free time this winter in my kitchen, reading cooking tutorials, and scouring the pretty lifestyle blogs for recipes. And after months of laborious practice, utter confusion, and vaudevillian comedy, I can finally quickly pull together a meal like a normal person. It only took me 40 years. But oh how I love, truly love, this beautiful food, as if I've never seen it before in my life. And I never felt so good.

Here are some not too pretty pictures of imperfect meals. Plate arrangement and color seems to be a motivating factor for me to spend time cooking too.

I take a picture with my phone of everything I eat to monitor myself and remind me what to buy at the grocery store. It works pretty good.

flying into the forties

There's been much going on to keep me away from Antinomia. A dozen things to catch up on, but let's start with the flying trapeze at the Trapeze School of New York.

I knew I wanted to be in the air on my 40th birthday, and I was lucky to score spots for myself and two friends on Memorial Day weekend. I've done it a couple times before, but it's still unnerving, thrilling, and amazing to climb to that platform over the Hudson and jump off. It's a feeling like no other.

The first step is getting up the very tall utility ladder strapped to the rig.

After you make it up, you get harnessed in. You look out across the water, you see 

the Statue of Liberty, you remember to breathe.

It was the first time for my rollergirl friends Jen and Jayne. That's Jayne's first time on the platform. It's shocking to have to lean out and hold the bar, which is much heavier then you'd expect.

And when they say "Hep!", you have to go! Here is Jen taking the leap.

You get reacquainted with the force of gravity very quickly.

Within the first hour they have you in a knee hang,

And somersaulting off the bar!

I got to work on a set split position, which you enter into like this.

Then drop into like this. It's intense, but oh how much it feels like flying! I never want 

to let go when they tell me to with this one.

And then everyone on their first day gets caught!

Which leaves grip marks in the chalk on your arms. Amazing!

Miraculously the rain held off until the very moment the class ended. Then it 

was a torrential downpour that canceled the rest of flying for the day, and drenched 

our run to the nearest restaurant with wine, where ElizaB joined us.

Now to figure out how I can keep flying. I could spend every day up there.

a couple nights at the museum

Luna's Sea, got picked up by the American Museum of Natural History. You know, the one in New York City with the giant blue whale. Really! We have 4 shows on May 12 and 13 you can buy tickets to here.

I took a few fuzzy iPhone photos on a tech trip. Their displays are unbelievable works of art themselves.

threshold

I've mentioned Rumi plenty on this blog already, and favored translations of his poetry for my Bookcrossing adventures, and quoted him over and over and over.

It's not many things that keep my mercurial attention for so long, but Rumi has been a constant companion, in the form of any one of the many books of his poetry stuffed into my bag at all times, and a personality that is always at hand-- a teacher, best friend, and kindred spirit. Humorous, full of joy and anguish at the same time, exuding the kind of reckless enthusiasm that gets you into trouble with everyone. Like me, but he really ran with it. And he can use words like nobody's business, while I'm most often unable to say a syllable about the things that really move me.

Rumi lead me on a wild goose chase that brought me to the doorstep of the whirling dervishes, the dancers of the dance he started centuries ago. When I put my foot in place the very first time, I crossed a threshold, I met Rumi on his home turf. The others I found there with their feet on the same path had the same feeling, that Rumi is a companion, and his is a call to dance they couldn't not answer.

Top photo: a dervish in the doorway after the Ithaca sema in December. Second: initiated dervishes in traditional dress in Ithaca. Below: my first class at Kripalu in January a year before.

Sometimes you hear a voice through

the door calling you, as fish out of

water hear the waves, or a hunting

falcon hears the drum's come back.

This turning toward what you deeply

love saves you. Children fill their

shirts with rocks and carry them

around. We're not children anymore.

Read the book of your life which has

been given you. A voice comes to

your soul saying, Lift your foot;

cross over, move into the emptiness

of question and answer and question.

-Rumi

RollerDurance

I made a video from some blurry iPhone footage I took while rehabbing a sprained ankle at my weekly roller skating fitness class we call RollerDurance. When I was editing it in iMovie I realized how much I love the people I skate with, and how lucky I am to have had every Monday night with them for almost 5 years now.

Two friends and I started RollerDurance a month after my second hand surgery in April 2007 when I realized I wouldn't be going back to roller derby. I was deeply sad, and didn't want to lose the training or camaraderie of derby practice. So Jayne Bondage, Wender Bender and I called a roller rink and began running our own weekly non-contact derby practice that didn't require belonging to the league and scrimmaging.

Over the years we've helped train hundreds of people to skate, most of whom were headed for roller derby, and many of whom ended up back with us when they became injured or retired. There are not many things I've done consistently for 5 years, but RollerDurance is a fixture in my life. Whatever is going on, good or bad, when I get to the rink and put on skates, I know the next 90 minutes are going to be about nothing but the joy of hard skating, and great friends. Everything else disappears.

This video turned out to be a Valentine's Day love note to them.

the turn

Since 2002 I've been reading with endless enthusiasm about the whirling dervishes of Turkey, practitioners of an 800 year old form of sufism started by Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi, the famous 13th century poet I quote incessantly here. I first heard about them when a dear friend of mine called me a whirling dervish because of my obsession with spinning in ice skating. When I looked them up and found Rumi's poetry, I felt right away that somehow, someday, I needed to try the dance, called the turn. But as you can imagine teachers of this tradition don't come by the dozen in New England, USA. Finally in January of 2011 I found out one very rare teacher would be holding a week long workshop on meditation and whirling at the Kripalu yoga center in the Berkshires. And, by chance, I just happened to find out the day before the scholarship application was due, and I won it. It felt like the stars were aligning.

Though I've been taking classes in practical applications of meditation for 9 years, and done some yoga, and studied world religion, and been an on and off church goer of several denominations my whole life, I've never tried anything like a spiritual workshop of any sort, and had no idea what to expect. What I definitely did not expect was that the drive up to the mountains of Massachusetts was the first leg of a year long journey that would take me to many places, including India 10 months later. But those first 6 days spent at the dreamy snow covered nirvana of Kripalu, with a most extraordinary woman named Sheikha Khadija Radin and 7 other new whirling students, were magic. I took to the dance and the accompanying teaching like a fish that had been stranded on land all its life and finally thrown in the ocean. I couldn't get enough, and I followed Sheikha Khadija to every workshop and silent retreat she held, which summed up to 34 days by December when I was so fortunate to be invited to participate in a sema, the beautiful ceremonial whirling dance of the dervishes. What a year! I am still trying to recover my over-filled senses and process everything I saw and learned. It hasn't been easy to articulate it to myself or anyone else. I just know that I love to whirl, and I mean: I really really love to whirl.

The top photo is my friend Karen at the sema in December, with me and Joseph behind her, both who also started at that first class at Kripalu. When I met Karen there, just two weeks before she had technically died from complications from a traumatic brain and neck injury. She weighed 80 pounds and could barely eat, but she would come to class and whirl, very slowly and carefully, for a few minutes at a time. We spent the year together following Sheikha Khadija, while she got stronger. By December she was able to dance for the entire hour of the sema. She is quite extraordinary. Below is a video I took of her before the sema, of a dance she made for her equally extraordinary husband John.

popularity

For Illustration Friday's theme this week, popularity. A scan, instead of a photograph below. Sharper, but without the nice shadows of paper sculpture. I have to get with my photography skills.

etiquette

I've had an Emily Post book of Etiquette on my pile of nice looking old books for a long time. I started actually reading it this weekend. There are some truly bizarre gems, from so many generations ago the meaning is lost. But mostly, it's solid advice on how to be a considerate person, which we'd all be the better for taking to heart.

Then I cut a paragraph and some tentacular shapes up out of a few pages, and stuck them in my sketchbook. A proper octolady occurred.

The Wiz

While I was doing City Wide, I also rebuilt the giant sea spirit puppet to be used as the wizard for Sacred Heart Academy's The Wiz, at the formidable Shubert Theater in New Haven. This required a new head, which I built out of cardboard so it would be lighter then the massive chicken wire torture devise I originally made. Here it is not quite finished, and then filling up the back of my car in transit.

Here's a video I took during their first half hour working with the wizard, (while it's still unfinished- excuse the drooping fabric and unfinished hemline and all). You can hear how giddy I get when I get a group of great kids playing with puppets like this. It is crazy fun. And they came up with their first choreography like pros by the end of just 30 minutes.

I again wasn't able to be at the show and didn't get photos!

tent of pants

Right after the float came City Wide Open Studios. I didn't know the float was going to happen right before when I signed up for CWOS, nor did I know India was going to happen right after. So this little installation of a tent made of blue jeans was squeezed as tightly into the weekend as it was in the tiny downtown office mail room I was assigned to. (Also for some reason, all this fall I failed to get decent pictures of anything. Luckily ElizaB took these for me.)

In my head were tents, horse skeletons, eyes, and the Vermont floods. At hand was an mountainous surplus of blue jeans and a new skill for jigsawing plywood. I made another pavilion for an exoskeleton structure, and sew-sculpted a tent of jeans right into it. And with all the extra jeans I made a rippled flood of denim flowing out of the tent to fill the rest of the room. I'd originally planned to be a living sculpture within, but with the soundtrack of rain, dim blue lighting, and the bizarre halloween weekend blizzard, it was too cold for anyone to stay in this space for very long. I left my horse skull mask to take center stage on its own. But I've got more to do on this.

On the wall, eye clouds.

paint parade

I made a time lapse movie of me painting one of the arches because I finally discovered the timer function on my camera. (Parade float making begs for the accompaniment of Nino Rota music):

.

float!

Phew is there a lot to catch up on. Let's go bird by bird, starting with my first ever parade float in October.

The Mystic Aquarium asked me to design a permanent float structure that incorporated fiberglass animals made by their shop carpenter Gary Grimm, including a 14 foot beluga whale. It had to come apart so it could be stored in a small space, and be able to change from season to season.

For the pitch I made a model of a wave pavilion, two crossing arches that could come apart to be stored flat, and sides to cover the trailer. Then I had fun making a stop animation of how it would look as it traveled by (the column in the center represents a human figure for scale):

By the time I got the green light I had two weeks to build it by myself, the staging, plus 3 penguins and various sealions, corals and seaweeds. And all on this challenging metal U-Haul trailer. Hello float marathon!

Thankfully my mum lent me her ballsy jigsaw, and do I love cutting plywood with it.

With cutting, painting and carving all going on at once, my makeshift studio expanded from my living room, to the dining room and kitchen. And with the pieces all being BIG (and almost always wet with paint), I was at over capacity.

And luckily my mum lent me herself for a many long days and nights. I worked her hard. Here she is carving penguins. The picture is fuzzy because she made me promise not to post her.

A few days before the first parade I drove it all up to the Mystic Aquarium shop where I spent the day helping to cover the U-Haul with my staging together with Gary's amazing whale and Ron's beautiful fish. We found a spare rock from the aquarium grounds that fit perfect.

Here's Gary and Ron, who were so gracious to let me in their shop:

I couldn't be at the first parade, but the aquarium took some photos.

I'd loved this project, a float was so right up my alley. I hope I get to keep working on this one, and get more opportunities like this. Though I could really use a warehouse next time.