Ephemeral Art

I've been writing about beginnings and endings, that perhaps they're imaginary, they're just little steristrips of continuity. And as a blogger, I've always wanted my posts to follow one another in some sort of satisfying sequence, one evolving into the next. Continuity of time really helps with that, and lately I haven't had that. So I guess I'm proceeding in a more fragmentary vein--which has its own "fit", in that I've been writing about my work translating the dictionary, and thinking about how fragmented an experience of words and life a dictionary offers.
I've also been thinking about Ephemeral Art. This last Sunday was the Burning Basket celebration at Homer: a homegrown local festival celebrating all that grows here, creating a thing of beauty, an art object, from it, inviting people to write and tuck in notes listing what they want to let go of, what they want to celebrate...

Inviting the community to be present and witness, and celebrate with drumming and flowers and shared food...

 And then letting it burn to nothing, exploding with hidden sparklers, mimicked by poi-spinners and the caverns of drums.

So often when we make art, we are concerned that it should be lasting--last forever, even--and that it should affect or impact people in meaningful ways. But we often practice obscure arts, indoors, concealed inside pages, lasting only because it sits on a shelf or inside a hard drive or in "the cloud'. But this piece of ephemeral art gets the whole town out, practically, and people of all ages are just so into it. This is art that makes of itself an event. Even people who don't have any thoughts about art, or of fire as cleansing, or of praise for the plants that grew themselves and have been woven into this beautiful structure, are having an experience generated by the art.

As the leaves turned this week, as the temperatures are mostly below 50 degrees, as seeds sink and the harvest dwindles, I've been thinking how everything is ephemeral and everything is art.

Every year the oddly shaped roots for us to interpret as it strikes us.
The fireweed webbed in seeds, which seems impossible since the air has been filled with fireweed seeds for a month. Each cotton-candy spire a work of art.

Even a sample pack of two gluten-free chocolate chip cookies.

I ate one, a 60-calorie sub-in part of lunch. The chocolate chips, firm, spreading, stimulating. The matrix of
flours and gums and sugar and palm oil and natural flavors crunchy and evanescent, the snap of the crunch melting away as soon as it passes the teeth--a mirage, shimmering and waning. Pure art. Pure ephemeral art. For sixty calories you could have nine almonds or a small apple, or several carrots, or many other things that would be far more hunger suppressant. So why would I ever choose the cookie?
How many calories should one allow for art?
I don't know the answer.

In the Flux

I apologize for having left things hanging in a scary place!
Since I last wrote, I have returned to Homer.
I have moved from far in the beautiful back of beyond down to town, house-sitting for dear friends, getting around temporarily without my car.
I'm not running sprints yet, but my energy does seem to be steadily increasing.
I have been harvesting what others planted.

Feeling grateful for the abundance, warding myself off from the disappointment and self pity at not having planted a whole lot myself this year.

In this intense and poignant time, giving humor its space, narrow though its berth tends to be in my psychic space--thanks always to the carrots.

I don't yet know what room or apartment, and what fellow-dwellers, will be in my life this winter (if you have the room I'm meant to live in, please let me know!) and, as with everything else right now, I interpret that it's my job to be okay with that uncertainty.

Kidneys are all about water, flux, fluidity and shifting; in the Chinese cosmology they're associated with winter, the season into which we're moving now. I suppose it might be ideal if that energy were balanced with a rock of security in my life now--of warmth, comfort and safety--but perhaps the lesson and blessing here will be to sink down and find that security and comfort in each moment that I live from boxes, packed and ready to move, each time I throw out freezer burned veggies that have moved with me three times now, each time I release my habits of buying in bulk and storing as neither appropriate to my lifestyle nor actually providing of any real comfort or safety. Each time I let go another specious tie to safety, each time I invite the universe to show me real safety. Sinking means finding depth. The water bloat from the IV that troubled me so much when I left the hospital barely able to do up my jeans dissipated in less than a week--a little flag that told me to have faith (and not freak out over engorged body). But yesterday I got stung by a bumblebee (first time for that) when working in the garden, so I have a little reminding reservoir of fluid on my right wrist. Ebb and flow.

On a good day, this makes sense! What is also there for security is the writing and translating. The writing which has gotten all serious and intent and goal-oriented and "thesis year of the MFA program" titled. How did that happen so fast? And why don't I feel any less of a novice as a writer? And now I must make time to write as never before, and yet not feel that I'm up to the ankles in time's spilled milk when I sit a whole evening and morning, as I did recently, trying to 'catch' a poem and get barely a pair of consecutive words down. My dictionary translating job is marching toward its completion, and in order to stay on track, I must translate a certain number of words each day, an intended lemma on which to close the day. As time bound and time sensitive as the MFA completion is, I somehow have to admit the space for the 'get nowhere' times, the times when the blank page stays obstinately blank, the times when the scribbles stay obstinately obtuse and uninspired.

As for this blog, I intend to continue updating, more frequently than of late but not more than three times a week. I'll be musing mostly about writerly things, I suspect, but also some on sustenance of other kinds.
Thank you for letting me share my voice.
With love.