The holiest Jewish holidays fall in autumn – the Days of Awe they are called. Usually we gather together in Synagogue to observe them….but not in the fall of 2020. A few friends and family members gathered at Groton State Forest instead. We invented our own ceremony. Each of us went out into the woods and fields to collect objects from nature that spoke to us of the significance of the holidays in some way. Then we gathered together to speak of what we found and make an assemblage of our findings. Here is what I found:

Not in the order they are in in the photograph but:

Something who’s tiny blossoms announce summer’s end.

Something that has died.

Something that takes sustenance from a dead thing.

Something whose seeds can root and create new life.

Something that nourishes us during the lean times.

Something to cushion our fall.

Something that surrounds and protects us.

Something for life everlasting.

And something that announces “Hineini! “Here I am. I am here.”

Blessings!

It’s getting late but I’ll get this out to you soon. My theme today is hearing aids. Around November into the first year of the Pandemic it was time for me to get a new pair of hearing aids. It had been seven years since my last pair. My hearing was getting worse, hearing aids were getting better (Bluetooth capability essential since everything was on Zoom)…And more and more expensive.

First a poem and then a board game which I will explain in a moment.

So, I am a closet hoarder (pun intended). I always look at stuff and say “This could be used for an art project!” and then I stash it someplace where I’ll never find it…but I knew exactly where my dead hearing aid batteries and tabs were and MAM has spurred me on to actually create something from them.

I can’t claim total originality for this. Someone showed me an article about an artist with diabetes who made a huge sculpture out of her used syringes in order to make a point about how ridiculously expensive insulin injections are. So with this “board game” made of dead hearing aid batteries and the tabs they come on I am making a similar point. Hearing aids are ridiculously expensive and almost no insurance or Medicaid or Medicare will even contribute to the cost. There have been bills brought up in both the VT and the national legislatures to change that but nothing has been passed. So if you see a bill come up, please support it. That’s my plug for tonight.

This took me longer to make than I thought. My manual dexterity and hand eye coordination ain’t what they used to be. My O.T. if I had one would be proud!

That’s all for tonight. I’m taking out my hearing aids and going to bed.

In the dead of winter with the pandemic grinding on I took a workshop. (I’m always taking workshops. They call me the “Workshop Queen”.) Evan Premo was giving a workshop (on Zoom of course) called ”Deep Listening” based on the practices of the dancer, composer and philosopher Pauline Oliveros. One of our “assignments” was to do deep listening floating through the time/space continuum. Here are a couple of my responses on that theme from my deep listening journal. The first is a response to the confluence of Jupiter and Saturn in the night sky.

I hear Jupiter whispering to Saturn, “Only once in a thousand blue moons do we get to be this close…even if it is just an illusion of the human eye.“

The second was a birthday listening:

My brother and I are wombmates. I hear each of us sloshing around in our respective amniotic sacs. I hear him kicking and flailing his arms about, bumping into me, the sound amplified through the liquid. My mother’s stomach is gurgling, digesting. I hear the double beat of my brother’s and my mother’s heartbeats and feel my own in sync. There are muffled sounds from the outside world – a voice (maybe my father’s?), loud startling noises I can’t identify. I feel safe and secure with my brother in our mother’s womb but at the same time extremely confined. I’m eager to burst out into the world though I’m terrified. He goes first. I hear a scream…then it’s my turn – the baby no one was expecting.

The next was a listening exercise just walking around my backyard:

Deep in conversation with my chickens, they decide to teach me how to sing. Quite operatic they are. They remind me a bit of Mozart’s Papageno from the Magic Flute. I never realized what an incredible range of sounds chickens have beyond “Bawk be bawk bawk”. What a choir we make, singing to the heavens!

Guess that’s it for today…Stay tuned.

Theme for today: The Sunflower

The sunflower (Helianthus), called “sunyashnikiis” in Ukrainian, is the national flower of Ukraine. The bright yellow blooms are an integral part of its culture, heritage, and even its economy. Sunflowers were first imported from North America to Ukraine in the 1800s.

Throughout Ukraine’s history, the flower has been used as a symbol of peace. In June 1996, to celebrate Ukraine giving up nuclear weapons, U.S., Russian and Ukrainian defense ministers planted sunflowers in a ceremony at southern Ukraine’s Pervomaysk missile base.

My paternal grandparents were from the Ukraine. They lived in a little shtetl called Polonar near the ever changing border between Russia and Poland. They fled persecution in the early 1900’s and landed in the United States to settle and start a new life. I always wanted to visit the Ukraine though I seriously doubt their little village still exists.

Well folks, we’ve just about made it through the first week of MAM. Hope you have been enjoying the posts.

Here are two poems (one with a colored pencil drawing). The first poem could be a response to another MAM artist’s poem which references the moon in a different context. (I think you know who you are NM).

So what to do when almost all one’s activities have come to a standstill because of the pandemic? Make a crankie. (Auto-correct please don’t correct this, I’m not cranky, just making a crankie.) My very first. A little rough (shadows on the screen, crackly sound from crankie cranking) but it’s a start. Done for a joint poetry and prose project by Rogue Artists Ensemble and PEN. I was sent (randomly?) a prose piece (by Carl Peel who also narrated the crankie), and asked to make a puppet, object theater, or similar video to go along with it. The prose piece I got seemed perfect for a crankie…So here it is. Some of you may have already seen this video, but if you are like me, you may have forgotten all about it, or maybe you would like to see it again?

A few photos giving a glimpse into how I was feeling in the early days of the pandemic.

This is BaaBaa, my faithful pandemic companion. You’ll see more of BaaBaa again later.

I just needed a punching bag – someone I couldn’t hurt – to take my frustrations out on. Disclaimer – No resemblance to any persons living or dead. Used my mother’s awesome cane that could be pushed as hard as could be and still always righted itself.

Little did I know…

So, yes I got sick. Stayed sick for quite awhile. The tulip in my vase was fully open, suspended in the moment before it’s petals dropped, but still and all outside spring was coming. I could go outside, sit on my front steps, my trusty binoculars by my side. I could breathe in the cool fresh air, smell the crocuses, the snowdrops, and watch the woolly bear advance ever so slowly across the stone paver on my front path….And like the woolly bear little did I know what was in store for us all during the next two years.

Stay tuned for Day Four!