The OGT Daily #12 Visionary Artists

 I am so grateful for Visionary Artists! The subject of a wonderful show at the Jamestown Art Center in Rhode Island.  https://www.jamestownartcenter.org/exhibitions-current

One of the first visionary artists was also a poet: William Blake.

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame they fearful symmetry?

Visionary artists see beyond the realm of the ordinary through eyes that experience the world through extraordinary visions.  This particular show was curated by my own sister Anne. Visionary artist is gaining traction as a new name for Outsider Art or Art Brut. Many visionary artists are considered to marginal by mainstream society and some are living with disabilities. 

What a magnificent show this was with the theme of The Tarot: Past, Present and Future. Thank goodness for their visions of a new kind of future.

What are you grateful for today!

The OGT Daily #11 Home

 There is definitely no place like home and I have not been here for over a month.

Nothing is quite as sweet as coming home and my cat was so happy to see me. I am very grateful to be here, but I'm mindful as I say this of the many people who fear being ripped away from their homes right now, or children whose parents might disappear, or those who no longer have homes because of war or fires or the need to cross borders.  I send prayers to all those who travel that angels may go with them.

What are you grateful for today?

The OGT Daiky #10 Just Breathe

This post is in honor of my students whom I had the privilege to support today as they processed the terror and sadness of seeing their clients, neighbors, and family being rounded up and taken away or threatened with deportation.

Sometimes in the darkness we need to learn how to breathe allover again. This is no simple gratitude prayer - breathe is really everything.

And gratitude too, the simple act of gratitude every day in social media spaces is an act of subversive positivity and for me necessary for survival.  

So join me in sharing what you have to be grateful for in spite of the horrors that surround us and are growing daily.  To be grateful is to hold your head high and breathe the air, not bow low and suffocate.

Share in the comments section of this blog, share on FB, share on all the other platforms that have been co-opted. And share on BlueSky which is relatively new and free.

The OGT Daily #9 Knowing Your Limits

 In my younger days, maybe even ten years ago, I imagined I could do almost anything. For instance I imagined that I could hike the entire length of the Appalachian trail from Georgia to Maine like Grandma Gatewood who hiked all 2000 miles 3 times after her 67th birthday. 

Or climb Mt. Everest into the clouds.

But what I'm truly grateful for is the grace to have grown into knowing my own limits. Knowing my own private Everest and how to scale it and then give gratitude and prayers at the summit. What are you grateful for today?

The OGT Daily #8 Simplicity

 Let's face it. It's not easy to wake up every day and feel grateful. Certainly not this morning when I, for some reason, did not want to get out of bed. But that's where keeping it simple comes in. It has always been my tendency to make everything as complicated as possible and to have twenty-five metaphorical pots on the stove with at least ten of them burning and setting off the fire alarm.  Ask my therapist. I'm genetically and environmentally predisposed to be too busy and it exhausts me, and then I do not want to get up and face the day.

So keeping it simple is a challenge, but it can be "just one thing" like just one foot in front of another. If I can just remember one good thing each day, then I'm already making progress and a positive change in my world.  Honestly, I have a list of good things all lined up, but today I just wasn't feeling it and so today I'm keepin' it simple. 

So here's to simplicity and to wool caps which hide a multitude of horrors, especially when it comes to my hair!

What are you grateful for today?

OGT Daily #7 Projects

 It is so darn hard to look at the news these days and know what to think or believe. Coming out of the woods to reality, credulity is being stretched thinner than a skift of snow.

Today I thank goodness for projects. There is a protection tin he purposefulness of active movement in a project. They can at allow focus and meaning when there are many forces at play forcing chaos and anarchy.

There is the big picture project of the book and its many chapters that I'm weaving together with my co-editors and many authors. Then there are the quick and impermanent projects made in nature on my last day at Catwalk Artists Residency.

Another kind of weave made from the dried reeds and grasses from the Primordial Pond.  A study and inspiration for new woven paintings.

A small sculpture made from the berry and thorn bushes in shades of purple and red. 

Being in nature and taking inspiration from its forms attaches me to a sense of place and is a antidote to the distancing that can occur with a fast paced digital world. What are you grateful for today?

 

Wildlife

 I am so grateful for the presence and intelligence of other creatures on this planet - intelligence beyond what humans can imagine. At Catwalk Artists Residency I am surrounded by wildlife and they are just as curious about me as I am about them. They became even more apparent after the snow.  I made tracks through the four-five inches that had fallen and the next day I noticed that the deer had used by tracks and then the coyotes, bobcats, or mountain lions had followed them. Three days later it was a well worn path.

I'm pretty sure there's some kind of cat although it could be coywolf or coyote following the deer.

Then there are the delicate paw prints of the fox - and they were everywhere though we only saw one once as a bright flash of red among the snowy trees.

The deer have come to watch me in the house and on my walks and are busy eating what they can of the trees. 

Two eagles perched outside of my window in the sun watching the river for about four hours yesterday while I did my writing. Occasionally they took off and soared up and down the shoreline.

This little fellow had the misfortune of slamming into the glass window. I heard the sound and then found him later on the snow, a perfect little bird.  Reminding me of the impermanence of it all and the need to be grateful for each day.  I gave him a proper funeral with grass and leaves. Later on I saw the pileated woodpecker again tapping on the dead trees with his long body and crested head. So much to be grateful for.  What filled you with wonder and gratitude today?

Snow

Tomorrow is my last day in snow country, before I head back to the city and less wintery climes. I have truly enjoyed spending the month of January in the Catskills. This morning I walked down to the river with the main purpose of enjoying and photographing the snow in all its different variations. 

I dressed up in my snow pants and thermal socks with two hats and two pairs of gloves for the 15 degrees at 8:00 am and trudged out toward the meadow and down the hill toward to cracking ice. 

I grew up in Boston during the 60s and 70s, so my nostalgia for snow is huge. The blizzards in the winters of 1977, 78 and 79 were record setting and made for epic adventures of being snowed in and whole weeks of snow days.  December of 1977 had 60.7 inches alone. 

They used to say that the Inuit or Yupik cultures of Canada and Alaska had hundreds of words for snow, and they do have many, but that's mostly an urban myth. The culture that does have hundreds of words is Scotland with over 400! The Latin word is nix and if something is niveous it resembles snow. Sposh is soft slushy mud snow - onomatopoetic. The top image is probably névé or graupel, a firm granular snow which is exposed to sun and wind and forms on glaciers and the tops of mountains. Skift is the light drift of snow that falls from a flurry and disappears quickly.

Then there's grue or thin floating ice and snow. A word out of which came gruesome because grue can also be a verb that means shiver or shudder out of cold or fear. 

My favorite are the endless list of terms from the Scottish dialect blin drift, owerblaw, sneachda, clag, tirl, wauff, skirfin, haar-frost, smeuk, and snaw-wreath are just a few. Much appreciation for snow today. We need it because come spring it melts into the reservoirs and feeds the rivers and lakes as well as the earth. 

Walking

 It's always surprising to me how much better I feel when I get out to walk. How much better my brain works. This has been challenging for me lately because days have consisted of 12 hours of writing on the computer and the only thing I want to do after that is binge-watch junk on Netflix like Gossip Girl. 

Springay and Truman (2017) considered walking to be essential for embodied knowledge because it created a sensuous and "rhythmic understanding of place" (p. 31). Sound artists also use walking narratives to describe "emplacement" (Pink, 2015, p. 74) or emotional attachment to environment.

With so much engagement with screens and online spaces, it becomes important to get out and reconnect to the road, to the earth, and to sense of place to remember who I am.

Tomorrow, I plan to walk down to the river and look for eagles.

Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography. Sage.

Springay, S. & Truman, S. (2017). A transmaterial approach to walking methodologies: Embodiment, affect, and sonic art performance. Body & Society, 23(4), 27-58. https://doi.org/10.11771/1357034X17732626

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The Sun

 Up in Catskill, NY where I am for the next four days, I wake up to the light and color of the sun each day over the frozen river. It is a beauty and a feast and a delight. I understand, so well, why the earliest religions were sun worship.  You take it with you and carry its light even in the darkest moments.  And from now on the length of its light will stretch a little bit each day into June.

What one thing are you grateful for today?

Body

 Today I am grateful for my body. At 65 years of age with a little bit of care and stretching each day it remains my safe haven and physical presence on this planet.  

Especially at 4 degrees, every little ache and body injury is speaking very loudly. Two years ago I ripped a tendon and a ligament in my right ankle and was told I had to have surgery or would never have stability again. Then a wise orthopedist on a second opinion asked, "Have you tried physical therapy?"  Is it perfect? No, but my ankle healed itself through lots of PT exercises. This renewed my belief in the body's ability to heal.  So yes, today I am grateful for my body, my home, as well as for second opinions.

What one thing are you grateful for today?

Eight years ago on this day - Martin Luther King Day - I started a blog called One Good Thing, which became the OGT Daily, because I believed that if I could remember one good thing each day then I could survive the moment, the day, the week, the year and get by at a time when so many feared the worst.  It was bitter cold day in January, a day when we finally had a bit of snow which fell on the trail behind my home overlooking the Hudson River. As I walked on the trail, my boots crunching on the frozen film of thin snow, as I contemplated the recent turns in history, all I could hear was the sound of my own feet on the snow so clear and crisp in the cold air. A silent clarity. This is what I was grateful for. This sound and this moment, and their simplicity were so pure that they transcended the complexity of any feelings I might have had about the world. I felt gratitude and that felt good. And I thought, one good thing is all I need. One foot in front of the other and I would get through.  

Today was an eerie parallel to that day. Martin Luther Kings Day and the dread and fear of so many on this late January morning has amplified over those 16 years. Another day of snow, this time thicker and the temperatures more bitter, somehow appropriate to the mood and circumstances of the day. The heavy white blanket of snow, so clean in the morning sun after a night of blizzard.  It felt like a benediction, a cleansing, as I trudged calf deep this time down to the frozen edge of the Hudson to watch the ice crack.  And I'm reminded of that other morning so long ago when so many had lost hope and now on the brink again - I realize its time to begin again.  Time to start up this practice once again - this One Good Thing and to share it daily for 365 days or for 4X that if needed.  

And that one good thing is my gratitude for the beauty of nature to provide me this answer. My hope and belief in our ability as human animals to err on the side of community and sharing with each other, with other creatures, and with this planet, and to not succumb to the pull of greed, profit, and ownership. 

My gratitude does not suggest complacency. We must continue to stand up for what we believe and know is right, but when we are exhausted, when we think the jig is up, we must not succumb to fear but remember the one good thing and just put one foot in front of the other.  I invite you to do the same.  What one thing are you grateful for today?