part of found object art trash stash – foto by Smith
There’s been a bit of a Creature looming large and invisible over Lady’s and my adventures these past twenty-one months which I’ve been walking and waffling and writing around but never quite addressing because it intrudes into my loved one’s business — and her business is her business, as they say in the trade.
But anyone who’s been following Lady’s Face Book entries these past weeks, or watched her recent videos, or read her WalkingThinIce blogs knows she’s not quite processing the same neural net waves we are – rather she’s exploring alternate mindsets where God and Mother Earth weave messages into her mind compelling her to help the Earth by saving the bees and picking up all the litter she comes across on her daily five-mile runs.
She’s solving the litter problem by bringing the trash back here and recycling most of it while piling the rest on our dining room table for later use in collage and assemblage.
Now this is not as odd as it sounds because we put a sheet of plastic over the table months ago and turned it into our art work area. And we both bring street trash found objects home for future art use. Our wonderfully charming little one-person side nook’s floor is currently half-covered with a plastic tarp piled with such trash treasure as old-fashioned pocket watches; Obama buttons; funny glasses with eyebrows big nose and moustache; funky plastic toy cat head (way cool); one pink kid’s rubber sandal; chair rungs; costume jewelry; plastic skeletons; checkers; bottle tops; odd shaped metal from the street; car pieces; broken lamps; bed springs; old dress patterns; toys; crosses; plastic flowers; knife handles; colorful plastics; crystals; advertisements; jigsaw puzzles; broken old art; wood wire rust glass paper proper plastic playthings.
In fact she’s working on a piece right now unlike anything she’s done before – a radically different 30″ x 20″ assemblage that I wouldn’t want to see coming at me in a dark alley but would love to watch folk look at it on the wall. Don’t know where she’s going with it, but as Melissa Jay Craig would say, “It’s got good bones.”
As for her main task – saving the bees – her current effort consists of making and posting QR Codes (a fancy sort of art deco barcode that the new 3G and 4G Droid fones can read) to help bees find the nearest gardens, and hopefully how to find their way back to their lost hives. The implications of what’s needed to accomplish this floods my mind with way too many problems like bee language, pattern recognition, teaching the bees to read our computer generated QR Codes, the bee/human communication interface required to return information et al — and I need to read some of the articles she’s linked to on Face Book before getting into that.
But I do have two thoughts.
1 – The bees certainly do need saving, as does Mother Earth, her oceans, and all the creatures, critters and cauliflowers growing upon her.
2 – I try to look at Lady’s creative output from her bipolar visits to these other quantum states of reality as scouting reports from the otherside.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making light of this – her mania costs her a lot mentally and emotionally, and my living with inconsistent random acts of reality 24/7 is often wearying and I frequently become churlish. It’s all quite a sticky-wicket.
Fortunately for me these past few days Lady has begun rebalancing from her recent mania — I say this for me because for her she’s higher and happier and more creative and plugged into the Cosmic Oneness when more manic, as anyone in their right mind would be, so for her this is a let down.
Artists and poets tend to be manic and obsessive creatures anyway when creating
Now that I’ve finally started writing a wee bit about this I can see it is a lot more complicated than I’d anticipated, so these reports from backside the mirror in tarnished brain land will trickle out inconsistently, a wedge at a time over time some time or another.
And I keep thinking as I listen to Lady saying how much immediate trouble we and the bees and the world are in of all those horror movies where the child sees real live earth eating monsters and runs to tell the adults about the monsters that are coming and the adults always say “Go away kid, bother someone else with your fairy tales.”
Of course it goes the other way as well – warn of wolves too many times without wolves showing up and they stop listening to you.
But in this case it’s the bees not showing up — literally 1/3 of them. Read this article
“One-Third of All Honeybees Died Last Winter, and That’s Not Even The Worst News Colony Collapse Disorder is still alive and well … even if U.S. bees are not, according to the fourth annual depressing survey of honeybees.
at thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/blogs/bees/colony-collapse-disorder-census-0430.
destruction of this sign violates federal law – foto by Smith
Much love going out to both you and Lady..
I follow your posts and Ladies religiously… also friend-ily… and find her observations and things she shares fascinating and informative on a number of levels.
First.. in how the mind works or doesn’t depending on what is going on with the rest of us.
Second.. that the base or root connectedness that she exhibits is always still there.. manic state or not. But her ability to feel it or tap into it fully seems to be affected by her mental state. It makes me wonder if spiritual teachers and shamans aren’t connecting into that same space but perhaps in just a more controlled and reliable fashion. Because her sharings sound so much like ecstatic visions that I’ve read about in various spiritual traditions.
So her coming down and feeling a loss might be alleviated with incorporating some sort of practice to re-establish contact but in a more controlled way.
Third.. it is interesting to see her heightened sense of creativity… tells me we all have to reside in that space some of the time to be creative at all.
Fourth… as friends we learn alot about from what you share on how to care for others who might be struggling with an altered mental state.
I’m also fascinated by the bee work… I think planting more flower that the bees can use is also a goal.. and fostering organic gardens to protect their delicate immune systems from the affects of insecticides… that is important too.
Yep. Sounds like a mystical experience to me. Yep. Just like shaman. Yep. It’s friggin’ difficult and when she makes it through she will have more tools to heal others with. Yep. Make sure she is given love but she has to find her own way to love herself mostly. Hopefully, Steve, you don’t get beaten up because that’s not fair.
Balance.
Gotta be there and here at the same time. Very tough time.
Good luck, Lady. Make sure you do your yoga or whatever you need to stay ‘grounded’. Find the peace because after all you don’t have all the control and nature has her say too. If the whole world collapses tomorrow it ain’t none of your business really but keep adding your part. Who says we are supposed to keep on going? Nature and man will add up to whatever it wants and you can only do what you can. Don’t take the world on your shoulders but just make your little ripples in your lake when you can.
A friend of mine once described a similar experience he had as “the Universe was mainlining me with information.” I felt the same once and it lasted for years. I think it’s natural and normal really. Mine felt like walking the edge of razor sharp black rock mountains with steep drops on all sides while being mainlined with paradoxical information to an extreme. Sheer beauty mixed with sheer destruction and to maintain in this “real” world was a challenge.
It puts things in perspective but it’s all for love.