They Tell Me...

I guess while I am painting clouds, the rest of the world is angling for war.  I guess it sucks to be you day if that is what you are into.  I will show you more when I get results,  I still don't know clouds at all...I promise you.  I am doing this activity, as my own government is posturing for war!  I could just hide under a blanket.  Anyway....I am not pleased that my government seems bent on war.  So...I am bent on trying to balance that out.  Clouds are first in my book.

Bowls And Rings...And Magic Things

How I miss my kiln, and my classes in Columbus Rec centers where I could make and fire my pottery?  Let me count the ways...I miss the throwing of pots on the wheel.  I miss putting glazes on them after firing them into bisque ware.  It was so elemental for me.  I used earth, water, fire, and air.  How perfect an art.  I grieved when we bombed Babylon as we destroyed perhaps the oldest kilns in the world as well as libraries.  Sure hope we knew what the hell we were doin???  As an artist, I am deeply offended by useless wars....by ongoing senseless wars....by wars that only line the pockets of the war machine.  I sign my pottery with a mark, two C's in crescent intertwined for my signature.  I have also crafted signature rings for other potters.  Usually the initials of the potter have to be reversed...but not on my mark.  Sometimes, that is just how it works out...truly magical. 

  I don't know what else I can say about ceramics and how hard it is in the first place to get a pot made and put to the first firing...let alone all the stuff in between the second firing....when I think about it, it is a miracle...a sort of birthing....twice to get a piece of pottery to come out like it needs to be.  These three are an attempt to making nesting bowls.  I don't have a kiln right now.  The parallels in how my kiln was destroyed on a personal level....by a landlord, and our country bombing the hell out of the oldest most precious kilns in the world did not escape me.  Shame on the USA for destroying the middle east, and shame on my landlord (past) for destroying my kiln...Amen

PS  And shame on me for letting it happen....amended amen:)

Nine Eleven Two Thousand Eleven

I was living at the YWCA downtown Columbus on this day 10 years ago.  I remember it vividly.  My life reduced to a 8 by 10 cell (room) because of systemic poverty, persecution, and prosecution.  The trade center represented my oppressor at the time.  Grandiosity, unsustainable, arrogant waste was my attitude and definition of Wall Street and the Patriarchy that had burned 9 million witches, carried out genocide to Native American people, slavery to Africans.  Colonialism 101 would teach that Native Americans could not be enslaved and were too frail for the work.  We exterminated most of them as they were useless for our purposes.  So we enslaved Africans and bread them like cattle in order to do the work of so called colonialism.  The so called tree of liberty has been watered with the blood and sweat of other races from the very beginning.  Our sense of national pride has been very expensive for other races.  And I remember them this day...thousands of people prior to the 2999 who died September 11, 2001.

  I knew that it was Ben Laden and retaliation from the brothers, cousins, and countries that we had occupied in our pursuit of foreign resources.  As we remember this horrific day that changed our nations course, I realize that the terrorism we experience is karmic.  How many Muslims did we exterminate before angering foreign powers to come after us here and wreak destruction comparable to what we did in their homeland.  Most people do not ask why when our attackers were all from Saudi Arabia, that we went for the throat of Iraq.  Freedom is expensive and it is not a given, it is a privilege.  There are two towers in the tarot.  You can see them intact on The Moon card which stands for intuition.

*Post Script:  Diane Sawyer just made a comment that the US is attacking Pakistan with our drone missiles.  Even before the memorial ceremony is finished, we are attacking another foreign country in our pursuit of global dominance.  We can't even take one day off!

Hearts And Minds

Instead Of The Superbowl, I watched this documentary. There is football comparisons to war, and some great football coverage...just enough that I won't get sucked into the fanfare of it this year.

From 1974, by Peter Davis. Essential viewing if you want to escape history. From IMDB: "This film recounts the history and attitudes of the opposing sides of the Vietnam War using archival news footage as well as their own film and interviews. A key theme is how attitudes of American racism and self-righteousness militarism helped create and prolong this bloody conflict. The film also endeaveors to give voice to the Vietnamese people themselves as to how the war has affected them and their reasons why they fight the United States and other western powers while showing the basic humanity of the people that US propaganda tried to dismiss."