OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Ninety Two CONNECTICUT RIVER

I am here on the banks of the Connecticut River for two nights.   Today is Halloween and I remember my father, who passed into the light seven years ago on "All Hallows Eve", as the sun begins to rise in a purple sky over the opposite bank.

I have a long history of waking early on this river.   When I was young my mother took us on a camping trip to the headwaters at the Connecticut River lakes in northern New Hampshire almost to the Canadian border.   There was very little there besides one remote supply store with yellowed postcards, fly fisherman casting into the stony waters of the young river, and a primitive campsite in the woods with pit toilets.   I was delighted and my brothers and sisters and I ran wild in the woods letting sticks and pine needles mat in our hair so it couldn't be brushed.  I had brought my Peterson's Guide to wild flowers and remember being excited to find an abundance pink striped oxalis or wood sorrel among the mossy rocks.  I picked one and pressed it into the pages.   There were also pink and maroon lady slippers which are rare and admired at a distance.

My brother Joe then bought a house in Massachusetts near the NH border near the Connecticut at its widest point.  He'd take us out fishing and we'd settle into a remote spot to eat lunch and swim or dig clay out of the river bank and slather it on our arms. 

Then there were times when we kayaked its length and other times when I backpacked camped and woke up early to see the sunrise.   While this painting is not from the Connecticut, but the Housatonic River some twenty miles west, the memories are similar.

OGT DAILY Two Hundred and Ninety MUSIC and ART

My show came down today and with no lack of ceremony.  The Westchester Choral Arts came to sing a concert of ancient, modern and renaissance music surrounded by my paintings and weavings.

What a benediction! 

My friend Aze closed her show at Topaz Gallery in Flushing Queens with music as well.

There were two wind players standing in her crocheted jungle forest.

Aze butterfly creations for dancing

Aze wearing a cap from her Jungle piece 

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OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Ninety One ESSENTIAL OILS

Essential oils are not something I think about a lot until someone sticks them under my nose.  Tonight  I am having a slumber party with two friends in a cute cottage on the Connecticut River because we're at a training.   One of my roommates has a ritual with essential oils before bed and in the morning.

This is a way to calm to body the down and anoint the self.     The cottage is smelling of clove and frankinscence and wild orange and sandalwood.

Ibn al-Baitar (1188–1248), an Al-Andalusian (Muslim-controlled Spain) Muslim physician was the first to use essential oils for health and medicine.

We are finding they are just making us giddy and silly and taking us back to the early years of our adolescence, when girls would sit around and compare everything from body hair to broken hearts.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Eighty Nine SPEAKING WITH THE OTHER

Dave Isay of Story Corp has started a new project in relation to the Indivisible radio show.
He describes it as "between us and them."   He brings two individuals from two very different political perspectives into the Story Corp booth together.   Much as I am partisan and have little tolerance with this administration - I applaud these efforts.   It's exactly where we need to be going in this country to understand the other side.   That is a true American value.   The Trumps, Bannons Kochs and Mercers in this world want us to be divided.    The stock market in futures actually thrives on chaos. 

The more we come together the less politics can lead us by the nose.

https://storycorps.org/podcast/storycorps-499-an-experiment/

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Eighty Eight BIRD FEEDERS

The new excitement in our lives.

Two feeders and a suet cage causing a morning party each day when we wake up: sparrows, nuthatches, woodpeckers in all sizes, bluejays, mourning doves, and black squirrels.   My parents named their retirement home in Rhode Island "Bird Haven."   Watching the birds in the birdbath out their kitchen bay window was a special joy and preoccupation.    I now totally understand it.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Eighty Seven DANCING PRAYER

Monday I had a new and enriching experience - the practice of Sufi chanting, prayer and dance.

Though generally one thinks of the whirling dervishes, we danced in a line while chanting a simple prayer and the effect was to become like one unit.   Synchronized swimmers or line dancers could relate.

Sufism is a religion, an off branch of Islam, rich in mystery and sensuality borrowing from many other ideologies to create a practice that celebrates light, music, mystery, and the senses.  Rumi and Hafiz are famous Sufi poets.  Nusrat Fateh ali Khan was well known for his haunting and beautiful chants.   Prayers are often to illuminated beings and spiritual guides all with the goal of oneness, unity with God.   Dance is one way in which this is accomplished with the chanting and trance of the movement comes a feeling of unity with others and the universe.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Eighty Six STANDING UP

Integrity and resilience in the face of continual degradation is a rare and precious quality.

Though it seems isolated and fragile.  A flame striving against a strong blowing gale.

Jeff Flake's performance on the Senate floor was a beacon for all who still believe in the best values of this American experiment in democracy.   Though storm of Bannon, Breitbart, Koch and Mercer family values may be wailing and prevailing, claiming victories and undermining free and fair elections all around country, I believe his voice will not be alone for long.

I spent last night phone banking for the democratic Westchester NY County Executive candidate George Latimer.   Despite his 8 years in office and the full backing of a Mercer family political PAC, Rob Astorino the republican is deeply mistrusted for his complicity with the sleazy duplicitous lies of the Trump administration.

I really believe we are going to have a sea change.  Until then I am deeply grateful to have become more politically aware and active.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Seventy Four DOLLS

Today I continued my eternal search for self improvement ( as well as necessary CEU credits for my license) by attending fibers seminar with a Jungian therapist Shirley Jackson. 

I arrived late and was delighted to discover that the class was engaged in making rope using a primitive system involving plastic cups and pencils!   Earlier this summer I learned to do this with a fancy rope maker - no need for fancy gear now!

Shirley peppered her teaching with mythology and examples from a book call Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myth and Archtype of the Wild Woman by Camilla Pinkola Estes - perfectly up my alley.
Shirley is also a Jungian sand tray teacher.  This is a form of therapy involving a sand tray and figures which often represent Jungian archetypes.  She demonstrated how to use fabrics as a substitute for the sand tray and how to use string and fibers in the sand tray.   They can represent networks and webs, knots and tangles.  So much room for metaphor.

The last half of the class was devoted to making dolls out of yarn which I knew how to do already.  Or so I thought.  Shirley taught an entirely new method which promoted collaboration between therapist and client in a way that creates bonds.   Always learning....

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Seventy Five PENDULATION

The pendulum is an ancient instrument which makes its steady progress across a prescribed path marking time.  Steady, predictable, calming. 

As human being we function best when we pendulate steadily between alert and resting.   Restful alertness is the optimal state for functioning.

However most of us become stuck in the state of alert - too alert - and perhaps alarmed.   Or we can get stuck in asleep, out of touch, out of it -  neither is a useful way of moving through the world, but is often our reality.   I am learning not just to breath again, but to try and learn to pendulate in a functional alertness.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Eighty One BREATHING AGAIN

Okay its one thing to catch your breath.  Its another to actually learn to breath.

I've been teaching my second year art therapy students how to do the Four Golden Wheels which are a focused breathing and grounding technique from Qi Gong.

I sorely need these exercise myself.   There is nothing more important to life than breath.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Seventy Three WALKING and STRETCHING AGAIN

Its a relief to be able to stop and take care of my body again.   Not so easy I might add.

But there is nothing like a good stretch even if I can't touch my toes anymore!

We walked out five miles down to the Hudson River museum and saw several red head woodpeckers on the way back.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Seventy Two COUNTY RACE

George Latimer signs have begun to appear around town - but just as many, if not more, Astorino signs.

This race is surprisingly important, I've come to learn, for an off year election.   Astorino has been county executive for decades now and gets elected because Democrats don't show up on off years.
He has run the county into the ground by borrowing bonds while promising low taxes. In the meantime he wants to privatize the local airports and lots of other public services like prisons for instance.  A typical right wing business plan to bankrupt local government. Astorino has his eye on the Governor's office and with the Mercer family backing he is hoping to flip NY State Government to Republican just as happened in North Carolina.  His campaign sends daily glossy mailers and makes robocalls with lies about Latimer, the Democrat.  Its all paid for by the Robert and Rebecca Mercer who are anti schools, healthcare, environmental protection etc... and very much pro big business and breaks for the 1%.  Basically the Trump agenda.

My lawn now has Latimer signs.   Don't forget to vote and if you value your civil liberties in NY support Latimer and help defeat the continuing threat of Rob Astorino.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Seventy One CATCHING YOUR BREATH

So I've been able to slow down only occasionally in the past month.  The end is in sight now with the show.  But I have to remember to breath...


It is amazing how easily I actually do stop breathing - meaning holding my breath because I am trying to complete something or I am waiting to hear back about something.  Maybe its an anxiety response - a shutting down of the vagal nerve which controls the middle of the body - but I have felt that I actually was shut off from mid body down. 

Important to remind myself even in the most intense situations to locate the breath.  Nourish the body.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Seventy Nine SEEING COLOR

As a young artist I remember loving pencil and line.  Even shading, light and dark, and grays were not a problem.  I was versatile and observant and knew that drawing was its own language which I was eager to explore.   My sister a few years old even gave me a book called "Zen and the Art of Seeing", which challenged me to really "see" and not just draw what I thought I saw.

But color?? Color I was afraid of.  I liked it well enough, but it seemed an overwhelming challenge.  I did paint in college, but kept it to a minimum and felt no mastery what so ever.   As I got a bit older, became a mother and began painting again, I felt an emotional maturity that seemed to allow me access to color.

As an art therapist I now understand the corollary between emotions and color.   It is a way that we can work with clients.   Drawing, especially with pencil ,is more controlled, cerebral and related to writing and language.  Color, painting, and pastels can be messy and hard to manage like our emotions.  My clinical supervisor has just introduced me to a wonderful book from an old friend of his called Arthur Stern.  It's titled "How To See Color and Paint It."   Here is a quote from the introduction:    "The mind stands in the way of the eye.  That's why most beginning painters don't paint what the eye sees, but what the mind lets the eye see.  They paint what they expect to see" (Pg 9).

Stern describes looking at a group of buildings with students and asking what color they were.  Answers ranged from red to orange and gray.   When he asked to students to look through a small lens that isolated to color the unanimous answer was "blue!"   To truly "see" must divorce ourselves from context and really see the shapes and color before us.

Truly color can be subjective like emotions which is part of the beauty.  We each have out own interpretation and experience, but to those of us who deal in color it can be everything.  As a painter and a reiki practitioner who works with color in a vibrational sense (chakra energy) color is primary to my experience.   Stern's book lays out 22 basic painting exercise which get you to "see" in a mor accurate way.  I look forward to exploring it.

Arthur Stern was born and educated in New York city where he taught painting at Hunter College, City College and the Hudson River Museum.  He created a PBS series called "Drawing from Scratch" which presented his curriculum for fundamentals of drawing.   As described by my supervisor , Stern was a wise and visionary teacher who only published this one book, because he was too busy acting as advisor to many famous people from artists to actors, writers and playwrites.  The publisher Watson-Guptill actually came to Sterns home, collected his papers, and published the book without him because they knew this genius would never get around to sharing his philosophy of life other than in his daily conversations with others.

I think this is a man whose life is ripe for a biography or documentary film.   Hmmmnnn - another project??

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Sixty CELLO SUITES

As I work non-stop, barely time to eat, nothing much helps me focus and any outside stimulation seems a distraction.   Put on the Cello Suites.  Nothing creates an atmosphere of resonance and focus like these remarkable circular and varied masterpieces.  I alternate between Yo Yo Ma and Pablo Casals.   One is strong quick and vital.  The other strong slow and steady.   Always present is the sense of a dialogue, a narrative, an emotional tone poem.

They have helped me complete my paintings.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Eighty Five HEIFETZ

One hundred years ago today a 16 year old Lithuanian Russian violinist made his debut at Carnegie Hall and was dubbed by some the "greatest musical genius" of all time. 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFaq9kTlcaY

Jascha Heifetz was already a celebrity in Europe where he began playing concerts at the age of twelve.   His violin music was one of my inspirations growing up as my grandmother used to listen to his records.   The pure tone and mastery of his playing is a marvel and was a great source of learning  for a young violinist.  Here he plays the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto.
Violist Miles Hoffman falling asleep listening to Heifetz play the Mendelssohn Concerto and says of his music, "It was both technically beyond anything anyone had heard and full of emotion and warmth.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Sixty One SUET

Dean has purchased a new bird feeder and it's changed our lives.   This feeder is posted behind our house and every morning we wake up to find a regular party going on.  In addition to seed there is a suet basket and the birds just go nuts.  Mostly they are little brown sparrows but this morning there was gorgeous large woodpecker with a red head.

Red Bellied Woodpecker

Dean was not so thrilled to find that same bird had decide to drill holes in our deck later in the day!

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Sixty Nine ESTATE SALES

Such a fun day.   We started out early going to the home of a local woman who had been a piano accompanist for many local music students.   She accompanied our son and his cello several times.   I am unsure if she died or has retired to a nursing care facility, but her home was filled with treasures - violins and bows and sheet music.

Dean and I wandered the various floors. He rejected the maidenhair fern I wanted, but settled on a 100 year old parlor guitar which he bought for our son.   It was cracked and he bargained them down from $250 to $100 - quite a steal for something which we found was probably used to play blues in NYC clubs and maybe worth somewhere three times that price.   Me - I bought an old fiddle for $60 bucks and then found the purple chair from Ikea.  $20 slightly faded, but so comfortable.  Dean was appalled.  "Not that," he said, but I insisted.   It was so light.  It now sits in my office where the parents of my clients gravitate toward it immediately and settle in for magazine reading. 

I can imagine Anita, as was her name, reading in a soft evening light or looking over a piano concerto.   I like that her spirit remains with me.   The most precious object of all was the enamel folding card table I found in the other bedroom all spattered with paint.   In addition to be a great musician maybe she dabbled in paints.   Dean drew the line - "No that's junk."   But it now sits in our basement as a perfect place to dry all the flowers I hope to dye with.  Thank you Anita...

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Sixty Three LITTLE WHITE LIES

Okay so I haven't been posting.   Yes it's true.   There has not been time.   I have however been writing at least a sentence each day.  No I have not been
posting OGT Daily, but yes I am practicing gratitude.

That's a little white lie I can live with.   In the current environment of slipshod ethics and bankrupt morals, lying has been common currency.  However, like dissociation sometimes we humans need to bend rules enough to create the fabric of a greater truth.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Eighty SLOWING DOWN FINALLY

I can say it now - I am finally done.  I can let my hair down.  I can breath!!!!   It has been a month almost - straight - head down holding my breath and ticking off the things on my list.   I have been lucky to go to the bathroom.

And you know what?   You think I have forgotten all about you my beloved audience.   You thought I'd given up the ghost and abandoned my commitment to gratitude; to the mission to find One Good Thing.   I have been grateful for OGT DAILY even if I haven't had time to complete it.   I have found a topic to be thankful for each day.   Now I am ready to post them all and get back to normal.

Thank goodness for the big push to get my show up and my class started and my chapter written and the whole list of my various variousnesses and thank God it is now time to stop and get back to breathing and knitting and watching Rachel Maddow rant about crazy politics.   I'm ready.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Seventy Seven REIKI CIRCLE

I went exhausted to the circle tonight.   My whole body is seized up after the treadmill of too much going on.   Not that I was compulsively over committing, it is just that it took this much effort to put up my show and continue with my teaching schedule and all the other errata that must be attended to.

What about mindfulness and attention to the body and what it needs?  What about it - out the window.  I haven't had my back adjusted in two months.

So when I arrived at my reiki circle on Monday night after two months of absence I just collapsed on the table and allowed the other members to work on me like a baby.

I am so grateful for this gentle, loving and restorative activity which occurs monthly no matter is we are two or twenty.

Reiki is kindness and giving and simple and all the best there is in life.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Fifty Nine SLOW but STEADY

I have so much to do in the studio that my eyes get bleary and I can't see anymore.   I have been here several days in a row until 11 pm - 13 hours straight.

I am exhausted and excited at the same time. Slow but steady, however, I finish each of these final eighteen paintings.   They are getting done and I can see the end of the tunnel.  It's there I can almost touch it.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Seventy Eight BASEBALL

During the mid to late nineties we as a family were obsessed with baseball.  It was the Golden Era of the Yankees - Joe Girardi, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Bernie Williams, Paul O'Neill, Mariano Rivera.  They won the World Series in '96 and then again in '98 and 2000.   Our son thought that his team could never loose as they never did when he went to the stadium.  Such excitement and power for a little boy.  His first word was "ball".  Born in 92 he began playing baseball in 97 and was a natural.  A slugger at bat, clutch as short stop like his hero Derek Jeter and pretty reliable on the mound as well.
I was an out-of-control, loud mouth, bench warming sports mother, who could and would cuss out the opposing Little League coach.  I was obsessed and spent much time making sure his cleats were new and his baseball pants were bleached and clean for every game.   Not a little vicarious gratification going on there.  I have never played a team sport in my life!

I'm happy to say I have calmed down and he has safely moved on to adulthood without becoming a professional athlete.  But those days of glory were sweet and fondly remembered.  The Yankee's dream team could not and did not last.  My son's belief in infallibility faded.  It was a sad day when "the Captain" had his last "at bat" and hung up his jersey.  I no longer obsess about the score when John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman come on the radio.  I don't even care if they are playing or know the team members.  They are so young and unfamiliar.  Not my team anymore - until this post season.  Aaron Judge a giant of player with a Derek Jeter-like energy has caught everyone's imagination.  "Here come the Judge.  Here come the Judge!"   This week my husband and son went to a post season baseball game and one that matters.  Pitted against Houston Astros for the Eastern Division title, they watched this new team sweep the other guys 5-0.  One more and their headed to the World Series.

How sweet it is!

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Eighty Two MARGARET MEAD

Fifteen years ago a woman named Fran Stone started a film festival at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC in honor of the great anthropologist Margaret Mead. 

Just one afternoon at this marvelous event allowed me to travel to Kenya, Syria, the Netherlands and Dharamsala, India within the space of three hours.   You can see films and stories you won't see anywhere else.

Jiska Rickels film "In Procedure" should be mandatory screening for anyone who believes we should block the entrance of Syrain refugees to this country.  We are privileged to witness Hassan go through the endless machinations to transcend the bureaucracy of Dutch immigration in order to be given asylum.   He lives in a tiny room at a former prison while waiting and receives desperate texts and phone messages from his wife and daughter back in Hama which is being bombed by allied and insurgent forces.  The daughter is sick with Hodgkins lymphoma and has no access to treatment.   At one point we see the family, including small boys, on a boat at night headed for Turkey and my heart sinks.  What if they drown?

Equally compelling is "Gunrunners" a film about two former Kenyan cattle rustlers who struggle with the choice to give up their guns and criminal lifestyle.   The do so only to face the perils of political life and international marathon running.

A worthwhile way to spend an autumn afternoon.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Seventy Six EMINEM

I never did much like or understand Eminem and his music.  This was true even when I worked with adolescents in foster care and they understood him and his life because it was like theirs.   He's just not my generation.  I am not a rap appreciator, that is until this week.


I so appreciate Eminem speaking up for the athlete's who are "taking a knee" in protest to violence done to black people.  I so appreciate him taking on Donald Trump at the risk of offending his own base of white, right wing fans.

That is leadership.  That is the power an entertainer has to effect society and change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1TPjASEUOQ

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Eighty Three MONARCHS

Its been 2 years to the day since my mother died and almost 7 years since my father died.  The monarch butterflies appear in the bushes, mating and leaving their legacy behind before they die.

I remember in early October before my father died in 2010 that the monarchs appeared fragile and reminded me of winter's coming.  We go the call on Oct 30 at 10 in the morning three weeks later my father had passed away in his sleep.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Seventy OPENINGS

Today was my opening for WOVEN at the Upstream Gallery in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.  So fun to see the work up and everyone enjoying it! 

Dean and Nick even made a giant potholder loom for kids to play at weaving.

OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Sixty Four ARGAN OIL

I traveled to Morocco for the first time in March of 2012 and discovered Argan Oil there.  It is the product of tree which goats like to scale to get the nuts.   The oil is extracted from the nuts but they are so hard to crack that the goats are actually an important part of the process.  Women in argan oil cooperatives poke through the poop of the goats to extract the nuts.

Not such an auspicious beginning for such a lovely product.  My experience was to buy a glob of greenish slime in the Rabat medina (market) for a few dollars.   That green slime became part of my daily hammam ( or bath). 

Slathered onto skin and hair it is the most emollient substance rendering skin and hair smooth and silky.  Men, women and children make regular visits to the public hammam to indulge in this ritual.

Argan oil has become very popular here in the States and is very expensive here unlike the humble "soap" I bought in the medina.   My colleague gave me bottle of the oil for Christmas a few years back knowing my fondness for it.  I just used up the last drops, but I've saved the pump bottle savoring its meaning as a dispenser of kindness and gentle beauty.   

OGT DAILY Two Hundred and Eighty Four BOREDOM

Manoush Zimorodi has some words for you:  Be bored and be brilliant.  She is the host of podcasts on NPR called Note to Self and Tech City as well as a regular contributor to the ever thought provoking Radio Lab.  Most of us now grab our phone whenever there is a spare moment; waiting for the train, in between other activities; waiting in restaurants or dental offices.  Manoush suggests unplugging and resisting the urge to check Facebook or Instagram. 

Why?   Because being bored can lead to being more reflective and more brilliant.  When we are bored we tend to daydream, to ruminate, to do what is called "autobiographical planning" when we sort through our memories, our thoughts about our lives and actually make plans for our future.  So boost your creativity and resist the urge for instant gratification from the nearest electronic device.  Listen to the silence, watch the scenes go by and let yourself just think about life.