Friday, October 26, 2012

There has been a slow insidious sense of time wasting creeping slug like into my everyday every day.  Not in a depressing way.  Suppose it's something every person of a certain age feels.  When I was young I was immortal.  I would live forever and aging was as remote and alien as Centauri II.  Now it looms like the full Harvest moon on a summer night.  So as time dwindles it is imperative that I make the most of what is left.  Of course I waste enormous amounts of time in the usual technology based way.  But I am creating still.  The above is the current picture A Little Bird Told Me.  Needs more work, a lot more work but the gist is there. 

We're all going to die but we all want to be remembered.  There is more Death in anonymity than in death itself.  After my mother died and I was going through her things I found a dozen or so studio portraits of unknown people which were taken in Evanston Indiana.  I have no idea who they were.  They must have been relatives.  Why else have them?  Just Googled Evanston.  It has a population of 715, surely not enough to support a photographic studio.  Still those photos would have been over a 100 years old and perhaps much has changed.  At any rate, there were these unsmiling people in stiff clothing and even stiffer poses.  I threw them away.  The Death in Anonymity. 

People are remembered for a generation or two and then pffft! they disappear.  Is that why there is this unprecedented hunger for fame and fortune?  I say the creativity, the doing, is the thing and I believe it to be so but I also want some small part of me to live on.  I've painted many paintings, given them away, bartered some, sold very few.  Do they still exist?  Do these coloured bits waft tiny molecules of Self in other people's lives?  I don't remember the names of most of the people I gave paintings too - although I can see the paintings quite clearly in my mind's eye.  I think paintings must be like children.  Once born, never forgotten.  One was offered as a prize in a raffle.  I wish I could see it once more. There are favourites, like favourite children.  It was one of them.  It was a very still, very quiet painting of a boat floating in clear water.  That's all but I loved it.  Someone once said my paintings were very quiet.  I wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not.  Now it doesn't matter. 

I killed a cockroach in the shower the other night and felt terrible.  I get more and more that we are all interconnected and taking the life of another is killing a small part of myself.  In order to destroy life, I must destroy a small part of me that recognises Self in the Other.  Old habits.  The cockroach, not one of the big brown ones but a smaller brown and yellow type, was on the tiles at eye level.  I smashed at it with my fist.  I missed but it dropped to the floor and there, over the 10 minute period of my shower, drowned.  Its small body lay in the corner,  a silent accusatory exclamation point against the white.  I felt really awful.  I don't like cockroaches in the house - or ticks on the horses or fleas on the dogs or mosquitoes biting me.  Despite the regret of the cockroach I crush seed ticks I find on the horses.  One tick caused a large haematoma on Dakota.  I killed it without a second thought.   The Jains of India take the principle of not causing harm to any living being as a principle tenet of their religion.  Every living thing has a soul.  I remember in one of Loren Eiseley's books he tripped on a curb and bloodied himself.  While he was sitting dazed and in pain he spared a thought for the red blood cells which were dying on the concrete.  I can relate to this.  I understand this even as I swat mozzies and crush ticks.  I also carefully release beetles and baby mantis outside.  I'm not evolved enough to be consistent - although I still feel rather sad about that cockroach. 


Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Have run out of puff after dong the weekly BIG CLEAN  of the bird verandah.  Good excuse to come in here and sit.  Didn't realise I hadn't blogged for so long.  I've been writing about Balthazar on the Parelli Connect so that has itched my writing bump.  Creative juices have been flowing despite lack of writing.  Have a pencil sketch almost finished.  Unfortunately there is wax bloom especially on the central crow so that from certain angles, as the photo has shown, it appears pale although it is as dark as the other two birds.  Will spray with fixative to see if that makes a difference. 

My creative juices have been flowing.  I've joined pinterest and have spent hours pouring over their art pages.  So much so that when I close my eyes at night colours and shapes play complicated fandangoes behind my eyes.   Have yet to do anything about it but saw this fantastic vision of apple green and candy apple red on a black background I am looking forward to trying. 

And then there's cooking.  Now I understand why people like to cook.  It's a creative act.  I am living proof that people do change.