l'atelier

inside l'atelier

L'atelier, the studio, is going to get a wood floor.

prism from sunshine through the leaded glass window at the peak

For centuries artists have owned or rented studios for their craft. I'm not an artist in their sense, well at least not a visual artist, well I like photography. Ok, what I'm trying to say is that I'm not putting myself in a category with artists over the centuries, but I have a studio!

old jump rope

Sometime after buying our little farm in 2003 we decided to turn the old chicken coop into a studio. You know, I might as well call it a playhouse, because that's probably more accurate. I don't know how much work we'll do in it. Maybe we'll just read.

But I can picture writing in here. And you can see my grandma's easel in the top photo. I want to learn to paint.

We haven't spent much time here yet, mostly because the cement floor and foundation allow lots of bugs in, and it's hard to keep clean. They get stuck in the crevices.

But Don has bought pine planks, and he's going to install a level wood floor! (It slopes 6 inches now. They used to hose it down and the water drained out the back.) Don't worry, Don power washed this building several times and painted fresh paint. See the ceiling? That's my favorite color: robin's egg blue.

Like Mrs. M. and the Renaissance dress she's making from scratch for the high school feast in November, I'm going to show you this process. Don has promised to take pictures for me when I'm at work. This might take a few weeks, so please be patient. Don has other things to do also. He's on summer vacation for goodness' sake!

I'm glad this teacher husband of mine likes to vacation this way. (hehe)

P.S. Today's is my mother's birthday. She would have been 90!

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Today in 1868 the typewriter was patented

I learned to type in high school in typing class on a manual typewriter. I got pretty fast: 75 words a minute. It wasn’t easy to type all the keys with consistent pressure so they all looked the same. There were no letters on my keys, which forced me to memorize them.

My parents gave me a Brother typewriter for high school graduation in 1974, which I used for typing all my papers in college the next three years. Back then we had to use something like Wite-out to correct mistakes. It was a pain in the butté to put footnotes at the bottom of the page, let me tell you.

Later, when I worked as a secretary, IBM Selectric typewriters were on the scene, with a backspace key that pulled mistakes right off the page. What a lifesaver. I got so fast on those typewriters I would get ahead 0f its capabilities and it would freeze for a second, making me slow down. Man, too bad I didn’t use this agility to develop my piano playing skills.

In 1991, when Don went back to school to finish his teaching degree, we bought our first personal computer, a used Apple 2C – 6” floppy discs and all -- from his brother. With word processing, we could write, rewrite, move words, paragraphs, delete with a highlight and a button. We bought a new home computer every few years as old ones became obsolete.

Last year I got my first laptop, using a money gift I received just for writing a special report for a study abroad program. (That’s when I got my Olympus camera too. Pretty nice gift.) I use my laptop for work and personal use, and I have a desk “port” in my office for easy and quick clipping in and out. I take it home with me most evenings since our home computer got zapped by a thunderstorm last year. We just have dialup at home, bummer.


my office desktop

Before all this technology, I remember seeing dip pens in my father’s desk growing up, the kind with removable nibs, for dipping in an inkwell. My favorite author, Jane Austen, used these. The fountain pen wasn’t invented until the 1850s. If you’re into calligraphy (Ginnie, rauf), check out this in depth page about flex nibs. With carpal tunnel, I can hardly write a thank you note these days, let alone do calligraphy. My sister Boots (aka Ginnie) has beautiful handwriting. It could be its own font style.

I write poems on my laptop. I love starting with that fresh white empty page. Hit “enter” four times to start the first line (the title usually comes later) in Times Roman size 12. Stroke a key and type the first words. My friend Inge loves to write poems in longhand. It’s a beautiful mind-to-hand process, more organic. But me, I love typing on the computer. Sometimes I retype four lines 20 times. Imagine the paper I would waste if I wrote it out!

Out of curiosity, I’d like to know if you:

~ write hand written letters any more?

~ If you write poems, do you like to write them in longhand or on the computer (or on a typewriter)?

~ What’s your favorite pen or pencil? I like rolling ball pens, especially Pilot Precise or Uni-ball.

~ When you post a blog, do you type the text out in a word processing program first?

~ What's your favorite font? At work I use "Comic Sans MS" size 10 in most emails and other documents. When writing poems I use Times Roman size 12.

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slowing down

tin can reflection: rock rose

After almost 10 months of posting a new photograph daily at my Flying photoblog and before that, East Lansing Daily Photo (no longer exists), I can feel my pace slowing. Maybe it's a phase, but I feel that intense photographic energy ebbing. And the daily practice of visiting several photoblogs is losing its pull.

Eckhart Tolle talks about three states of mind that are preferable for looking at the world. In other words, if you can find one of these for any circumstance, you will have peace. They are acceptance, joy and enthusiasm. You can't always be thrilled with your circumstances or find joy in them, but you can accept them. Sometimes acceptance even turns into joy, and I've experienced that. Finding joy in something mundane that I used to find tiresome is a great feeling.

The enthusiasm one is a temporary state, he says, for certain projects or visions. I think that's what I had for photography and the photoblog. I was enthusiastic for almost 10 months! That's actually pretty startling if I think about it. I don't think I've ever had such a long attention span for anything, well, except maybe quilt making. But it was always hard to finish one after I'd designed it.

So, I think I'll post a photo every other day, or when I feel it. If I've learned anything in the last 3 years, it's that I get to decide my own pace, what's right for me. I'm glad to have learned a bit about photography, enough to go forward and express myself in it as I do with poetry, without being compelled to answer a daily call.

And hey, Don plans to put a wood floor in the atelier this summer, so maybe the next thing is painting on Grandma's easel in that little building that feels like the center of the universe.

What I long for is human interaction and love, artistic expression, shared ideas, and finding ways to make the world more like heaven than hell. There is joy.



tin can reflection: geranium (pelargonium)

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stolons

Spider plants come from South Africa. We have one as a houseplant.

Don got this one from the MSU gardens along with many plants he was given when he took his students last year. It was the size of this little sprout.

The plant has grown, as you can see.

Spider plants send out stolons, or stems. At the end grow new plantlets.

When I was growing up, everyone had one of these plants in their house. I thought they were nice, ordinary plants.

Yes, they are ordinary, as ordinary as Life. They are also extraordinary, as extraordinary as Life.

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to a Captain in Iraq

My friend Carrie's husband is a pilot in Iraq.

Don's 3rd graders wrote him letters.

Some of them said they want to be like him.

Derek is a wonderful man.

It makes me sad that he and Carrie are apart.

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in the garden

Saturday and Sunday were days straight out of the halcyon definition in the dictionary:

hal·cy·on /ˈhælsiən/ [hal-see-uhn] –adjective

1. calm; peaceful; tranquil: halcyon weather.
2. rich; wealthy; prosperous: halcyon times of peace.
3. happy; joyful; carefree: halcyon days of youth.


I potted flowers.

We installed a birdbath in the herb bed. I suddenly thought of putting in stones from my collection, many of them from Inge, two of them gray spotted Petosky stones. We haven't seen any birds take advantage yet.

We planted 18 lavender plants. The sight and scent of lavender part the curtain into a universal place of beauty. Don, who thinks he is not an artist, made the half moon sculpture last year.

The Adirondack chairs we built our first year on the farm (2003). Good place to sit after working in the yard.

Or lie on the hammock and rest.


Or sit on the side porch and watch "Pipsqueak," our resident hummingbird. (No photo yet!)

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Rob Brezsny's horoscope

I'm not a horoscope fanatic. Sometimes I don't read them at all. When I think of it, or when I get my weekly email from Rob Brezsny, it's fun to see if there are connections with what's going on.

This one is so beautiful, I just have to share it. (You can see your own by clicking on this post's title or "Free Will Astrology" on my sidebar.)

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The geography of your heart is evolving. In places,
coastlines are disappearing. Elsewhere, new islands have risen out of the
sea. Boundaries are shifting, as some nations dissolve and others are
born. Even the climate is changing, with warm winds blowing where once
there was year-round chill, and monsoon-like conditions invading desert
ecosystems. Roads that formerly led to the center of the action no longer
do, and highways that used to be peripheral are now main routes. I
suggest you take note of all this by redrawing your map, Leo. Get up to
date with your heart's new landscapes.

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Should some mistakes not be forgiven?

Photo of Günter Grass courtesy wikipedia under their free documentation license


I’m in the middle of reading Günter Grass’ personal history article in the New Yorker. More about that in a minute.

I was born in 1956, just eleven years after the end of WWII. Our kids were born about that length of time after the Vietnam war. Sometime in my youth I saw photographs from when Allied troops opened concentration camps in Germany where living skeletons with caves for eyes, and piles of bones like bonfire wood, awaited them. In 1975, on study abroad, I visited Dachau, saw the former factory buildings, the large shower rooms where people were to be gassed, their last memory seeing others dying, naked. Unlike Auschwitz, I don't believe Dachau was used for gassing after all, but many of its 200,000 prisoners died of malnutrition, disease and suicide.

Polish born German Günter Grass won the Nobel prize in literature in 1999 for his “frolicsome black fables portray[ing] the forgotten face of history . . . When Günter Grass published 'The Tin Drum' in 1959 it was as if German literature had been granted a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction.” He became a hero in Poland, and the world, for telling the stories that hadn’t been told.

In 2006, Günter Grass revealed that he had been a member of the Nazi Waffen SS after being silent about it for 60 years. Many criticized him for hypocrisy. He had been a hero in Gdansk and other places for his healing perspective on history through his writing as one who had been drafted into the armed forces. The Waffen SS, on the other hand, was originally not part of the armed forces, but was a brutal and ruthless arm of the Nazi party. He said that he thought his writing had been enough of a redemptive act and that the 1950s was not the right time to confess.

Many, including Lech Wałęsa, who had criticized him initially when he revealed his Wassen SS membership, eventually forgave him for making a mistake in his youth.

In the personal history he wrote for this week’s issue of the New Yorker, ten months after his Waffen SS membership revelation last August, Grass describes in horrifying detail what it was like to fight in the war (on the “wrong” side).

In the paragraph I just finished, he wrote:

“But I had already read everything I write here. I had read it in Remarque or Céline [WWI], who . . . were merely quoting the scenes of horror that had been handed down to them . . .”

It seems to me that when humans don’t learn from mistakes, they will repeat them, as the saying goes. When humans don’t forgive mistakes, they are making the kind of mistakes that start wars. And every war that’s started is just another mistake that begets the next generation of wars.

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"Horsing about on the lawn"

Our old friend from California days (where Lesley and Peter were born) Brad, his wife Sara, and their kids Mera and Carl, spent the night, visiting from Ohio.

Mera, age 8


They spent a few years in London, so we didn’t see much of them for a while.

Carl, 7, in the atelier with the prism on his face as light shone through the leaded glass window.

It was supposed to rain and storm, but the storms thundered all around us and never hit.

Sara on the porch with me while the "kids" - Carl, Don, Brad and Mera - horse about

So there was croquet and other sorts of “horsing about on the lawn” while thunder boomed in the distance.

Don and Carl, instant buddies

Let me ‘splain. When Don and I were in Scotland in 1980 (when I was pregnant with Lesley!), staying at a b&b, a British couple met us at breakfast and became excited because we were Americans and they could finally ask Americans a burning question.

“When we were touring Windsor Castle last year, we heard an American couple talking. The husband said he was going to go inside, and his wife said, I’m going to stay out here and ‘horse about on the lawn.’”

“What does that mean, ‘horse about on the lawn’!?”

We had to explain that they’d gotten the idiom slightly wrong; it was “horsing around on the lawn” and that “horsing around” just means doing nothing productive except relaxing, playing, whatever.

I had to look up this idiom online and see what the origin was. I found this site called “Sports Talk” which says that it came from horse racing.

Horse around–to waste time; to be careless
"During the meeting the boss shouted, 'Stop horsing around and get to work.'"

Maybe not too tough to guess that one, eh?

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