Meri's Musings

As the saying goes, the journey begins with a single step. Your mind may be a playground,  but unless you unloose your creativity, and make your mark, your creativity might as well be imprisoned. What single step can you take today to do something creative? It doesn't have to be painting or collage or sculpture. It might not be a symphony. It might be creating a new dish from scratch or making an artful arrangement of flowers from the corner grocery. It might be pulling together a vignette of pretty items to display on a shelf. Let your mind run riot with possibility.

Created this on Polyvore a couple of days ago. Woke up the next morning to find it had been included in the Top Art Sets for the day. Always a nice surprise. The surprise last night was a 4.1 earthquake. Not enough to do any damage, but unexpected nevertheless. Turns out we've been having swarms of small earthquakes  in our general vicinity. Wonder if that's a sign of something bigger in store. I'd better get the breakables off shelves and counter tops.

One of the cable channels featured Woman in Gold yesterday and I was reminded that one of the groups I belong to is having a contest where members are encouraged to do Klimt-like collages, using elements from his paintings. So here are some of my efforts.

As the saying goes, nothing lasts forever. Not even Saturday morning when I'm up at 5:30. Good thing there's another one in seven days.

The women in my maternal lineage, at least the ones I know about, seem to have a strong dose of psychic ability in their makeup. One of my aunts was living in Connecticut during the Second World War with her military husband and got on a train across country  to her hometown in eastern Oregon because she had a feeling that something was wrong  at home. She was right -- her older sister  had gone missing. Everything turned out fine, but Mona's intuition was spot on. Her daughter, my cousin, experiences a disturbance in the force when a loved one dies. Sometimes they appear before her at what she later learns was the moment of their death, often to deliver a message. When I was in high school, one day when my mother was 10 minutes late getting home from work, I waited (in a state of agitation) for the State Patrol to call to tell me that she had been in an accident and what hospital she'd gone to. They calle...

Hmmm. . . .  are you more like the umbrella woman or the sunglass woman? Left brain Right brain or a good balance? Oh and by the way  HAPPY BIRTHDAY in absentia SUSAN B. ANTHONY.

I very much want to believe in the magic of love -- the romantic kind,  the "I've got you under my skin" feeling, and that it's possible for me. It took me so long to recover from loving someone who had a tendency to love the one he was with that I don't know whether it's possible to love someone that much again. For those of you who've found it, cherish and celebrate what you've got. Love is a many splendored thing.

I'm not in any way equating a letter by Coretta Scott King with Janis Joplin's sometimes colorful vocabulary. There's no equivalence between Janis and the words read by She Who Was Warned, But Persisted. But one of the ways that men choose to exert their privilege and power over women, is to subtly or not-so-subtly squelch our speech. Make us feel wrong or stupid for what we say. They don't want us to speak out. We might expose some ugly truths they are trying to conceal. They want to control the narrative. Run the agenda. Be the bosses (of us). They want us to know our place and not make trouble. You know the old saying. . . well behaved women rarely make history.

Haiku My Heart a head of foam froth starting my morning with chai listen to your heart

I called this piece Post No Handbills. I've seen signs that say something similar posted on subway walls, on sides of buildings, on upright surfaces like telephone poles or fences. Those signs are most often accompanied by posters and handbills galore. One memorable place that images on top of images  had collected, some ripped back in places until there was a glorious collage saluting commercial and protest art, was on the wall of London's Tube. I stopped to take a photo of one enticing spontaneous collage. . .  much to the embarrassment of my son, who thought I was crazy for taking a pic of a dirty wall in the Underground. Some Moms are like that. Underground art.

Did I ever mention that I'm a bookworm? When I was a wee one, my mother worked in the library when my father was in graduate school. On rare occasions, I got to go to the library with her and hunker down in the small section of children's books. The smell of books and their heft in my hand never fails to enchant me. I love the semi-mystical feeling of losing myself in a great story.

NASA photo pinpoints of star light millions of light years away galactic magic Haiku My Heart

Back away from the screen, Meri. You've got a meeting in less than two hours and it's gonna take an hour to get there. (But it's cold outside.) (I like my nice, warm jammies.) (Can't I just stay home?)

January's over and with it, the Notes to Myself. Time for something new. February has always seemed like a doldrums month to me, at least. It's still chilly outside. Though there are some signs  that spring intends to return before long, it hasn't happened yet. Usage is dropping off at the Y, as New Years Resolutions lose their steam as motivation when you're tired or cranky or sore and you just plain don't want to sit on the exercise bike another minute. And then there's the U.S. political scene. I can't even bear to go there right now. My Facebook feed is a choice between political diatribes and puppies talking back to their humans. The future looks bleak right now, with climate change deniers in charge of protecting the environment. With "alternative facts" and the ascendancy of the alt-right. It's time to look inside for magic, because it seems in short supply everywhere else.