bricolage project day 7 [finding]
Finding the Frame Has Been Dissolved
Today’s randomly-chosen word is finding from Awakening the Heroes Within by Carol S. Pearson. I continue to be intrigued with the words that are coming each day. I open the book to a random page and point to a word without looking. Twice, I’ve pointed to a blank page but otherwise, these are the words I’m getting. The words thus far have been nameless, girlhood, alone, perceived, whimsical, beginnings, and now finding. Fascinating bits of randomness given the nature of my art and life.
Today’s rule for the art piece is: No frame. The frame has been dissolved by the rain falling in my lovely city today and has been replaced by openness, possibility, and poetry.
rain falling softly
like a lover whispering
“stay right here with me”
Today’s quote is actually a stanza from a poem that I was reading this morning. The poem is “Ocean Lady” from The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. I chose it because it stopped me. Each word is like a little found treasure at the beach that I keep turning over in my heart to see the way time has etched itself on the surface.
Remember: you carry the bird’s heart
in its cage: the debate of wings and song,
so many violins, soaring and flashing.
Gather, gather for me, the sounds and jewels,
until wrapped in air and fire, we voyage
accompanied by the congress of pure harmonies
to morning’s waterfall of shimmering ingots.
And may our love palpitate like a fish in the cold.
Perhaps this catches in my heart because it speaks to the tension I feel related to domestication and my heart’s deep longing for freedom and an embrace of the wild. The way we have been domesticated doesn’t work for me. I don’t have tidy hair or any sort of desire to appear respectable or professional to others. I embrace authenticity and admire it in others. I don’t aspire to live in the woods but I do have Neruda’s “debate of wings and song” happening at present.
Yesterday, I was introduced to the writing of Jeriah Bowser and his Wildist perspective. I found his piece Weeds in the Holy Garden: A Wildest Review of the Laudato Si’ to echo many of my own current thoughts about the very real problems we face on this planet and the way that transcendent belief systems are serving to calcify these problems. My desire to find harmony with life is often thwarted by the degree to which our world becomes increasingly controlled and carved up. As Mr. Bowser says, “…there is the daily reality of resistance to domestication.”
There’s a teaching story about how a mouse in a cage can wiggle through the bars if it stops eating the cheese. The question is: What will it find on the other side of the bars?
