Hello, my dear readers! Here I am, however fleetingly. I want to say hi and that I hope you’re all well and enjoying sunshine, fresh strawberries, lemonade, a fine novel, walking outside and eating the occasional bowl of ice cream. All is well here and the summer blogging hiatus, in which I report only at the beginning of each month, has given space for me to be a bit more mindless, a good thing! At least I think it’s good to have a time free from goals and industry even as we try to stay present and do the things we do. In this open space many things have happened.

First, I turned sixty! Wow. I seldom think of age but this one crept up on me and really couldn’t be ignored. Several months ago I considered just shoving the whole thing out of my mind but thought that really wouldn’t do. It’s something to be celebrated! Sixty years and all the people and places, all the phases of good and what seemed like not so good but was good all the same, everything with its purpose to bring us a little closer to ourselves, to real life and laughter. I thought of throwing a big party to celebrate all of those years only to discover that several friends would be away traveling at the time. I didn’t want to postpone. A birthday must be celebrated on the day, don’t you think? Anyway, I’m not really a thrower of big parties. I’m a thrower of many, many little parties so that’s what I did. I was very happy that my brother and his wife could join us from New York—so good to have them here with us. We all celebrated with a few fine friends in a fabulous South American restaurant, Casa de Pedro—the band played, the food was great and the wine flowed! A great night! And my beautiful children gave me a brand new bicycle and a helmet! It’s great to be sixty! To know who I am—who you are, that we’re all so fine. Onwards!

We’re just back from Montreal where we visited my dear old Mom who is still laughing at the age of eighty-nine. I think she’s laughing more than ever, truth be told—the bright side of senility, if you do it right. God bless her. She grows sweeter and sweeter. We had dinner with my childhood friend and her husband—many, many laughs as usual as well as crazy memories of our childhoods. I like to live in the present but with an old friend like this the past jumps in once in a while—so long ago but part of who we’ve become. I had lunch too with another old friend, aged 85, who was spry enough to come out to eat after getting out of hospital only a couple of weeks ago. Here’s to friendship in all its permutations!

We saw Leonard Cohen in concert at Place des Arts—truly, truly great and he’s 73! He’s from Montreal and expressed his thanks to that wondrous city which has been, he said, such an inspiration for him. It’s a city that loves art and artists, a very fine thing and not at all common, I have to say. It allowed those of us who came of age there to conceive of lives that might not otherwise have seemed as sublime as they actually are! Anyway it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen—so interesting to see him in the awareness he has now performing songs he wrote many years ago which are still brilliant, sharp and moving. His voice was strong and clear and the band was superb. Tears streamed down people’s faces when he sang Hallelujah. And did you ever think you’d see Leonard Cohen skip on stage? There was a big smile on his face the whole night. He was one happy man and we were happy too. I’ll never forget it.

And now home. The wee garden is bursting with life—lilies in bloom alongside nicotania, impatiens, geraniums and all sorts of other colorful things. And my five big pots of herbs and vegetables are surprising me everyday. Tomato plants are well over four feet tall, beans and peppers well over a foot and herbs all filling out. We’ve already had several salads with our own city-grown lettuce! And we installed a compost bin. It’s black plastic which holds the heat and composts matter more quickly than an open pit—very good in the city on a small plot. Between that and our town’s newly expanded recycling program we’re hardly putting out any trash at all now. Another hallelujah.

Just before we left for Montreal I got the inspiration that I need to get a studio. I’ve worked as a graphic artist and done a lot of writing for many years. I’ve also made paintings and been in numerous exhibitions. Curiously I sold a painting last week to a Boston collector when she saw it on the site of one of the venues where I’ve twice shown my work. I love it when things happen like that, without effort. It was a wee kick in the pantaloons! Not that I will change what I do. I will continue to write but a studio will give me more opportunity to do art too. No reason we can’t do both. So we’ll see if I can find one soon. Meanwhile I carry on.

So, my friends, wishing you happy summer adventures! I’ll be back here August 1rst after a trip to New York City. In the meanwhile please take good care of yourselves and don’t forget your sunscreen! And happy Canada Day! A fine and gentle country it is—another birthday to celebrate! Canada is now 141 years old. Just a baby as countries go but a wise one, precocious really. One day ll the countries in the world will take care of their people. They’ll see the baby had it right.

I’m on blog sabbatical but promised to check in the beginning of each month this summer. As chance would have it, I discovered today that Yoko Ono is starting a blog called 100 Acorns, ideas for bringing awareness to creating peace on the planet. Forty-four years ago she published a book of conceptual instructions called Grapefruit. I was sixteen when I bought my copy and loved it. I might even say that it planted a seed in me about how we might think about life as a creative journey—things happen but we also get to invent our response. It opened my mind.

Forty years ago, Yoko and John Lennon created a series of events to bring awareness to peace. John Lennon wrote the gorgeous anthem, Imagine, and invited us to imagine what a world in peace might be like. As necessary to do now as then.

I lived in Montreal at the time that John and Yoko spent a week in bed in a hotel there for peace. It was incredibly exciting—imagine that! It was exciting that two artists would spend a week in bed in the name of peace and the media hovered around like lightening had struck. Funny and great. It felt that peace was within our grasp back then but the people in power are still living in fear. Last fall Yoko created the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik, Iceland, in conjunction with the Museum of Art—a beautiful beam of light that arises out of a wishing well and shoots towards the heavens. We’re all invited to send in a wish for peace that will be planted in the ground around the well. This is art.

For the last six or seven years a whole segment of humanity who dreams of and desires peace has remained more silent than we might have imagined possible. The Buddha says that everything is perfect and even in this most discouraging moment something new is being born—a new consciousness, courage, art. We’ve been reflecting and gathering steam. There’s so much that’s changing on the planet right now, so much that needs our care and our courage. Sometimes one radical emblem—a song, a book, a peace tower—shifts attention to the truth of our infinite capability and generates both energy and change.

The lights are on in the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik to announce that so many on this planet love and respect each other. Maybe we can each beam a little light up.

Check it out—Imagine Peace.

As I’m not going to be posting for a while I’d like to leave you with this video about consumption on our planet and how we might all contribute to making this a green planet again. The video is by Annie Leonard and she does an amazing job of explaining the straight-line model of consumption we have had for the last fifty or sixty years, a pattern that must now change if our children and children all over the world are to live on a non-toxic planet with the possibility of happiness. There is so much that each of us can do right now, as she explains. So, this is a happy video and gives us all a way to contribute to the planet and create a new earth. Thanks for watching!

The Story of Stuff

I’ve just discovered that Cy Twombley will be at Tate Modern in London from mid-June to mid-September. I love his work. Monumental scribbles and splashes of pure color. Words that can barely be read and some that can be read quite clearly. Dribbles of paint. Thoughts and explorations. Repetition. The human hand writ large. All that freedom and carelessness. All that open space and yet within it a rather loopy daring. We saw a few of his pieces at MOMA in New York this spring and they filled me with a great sense of expansiveness and what the heck. There was nothing careful about them and I know I can get caught in that game of excessive care as an artist and a writer. I can get caught in thinking something has to conform to form—to be a careful version of what already exists. I’m really trying to break free of that in everything I do and get to that experimental place where I’m just following what comes to me.

I had that freedom once, as a kid, we all did. I had it as a very young artist, for a very short time. For all sorts of reasons I side-stepped away from the open declaration of whatever it was I cared about then. I became an observer, a studier of life, and that’s okay too. I like to think it’s all perfect and I’m thinking about it a fair amount because I will soon be sixty and that seems like so many years. Yes, it is a little odd to say it. It will take practice and I am starting here. I want to be open about who I am even if women were not appreciated for so long as they aged. I feel more creative and alive and centered now than ever. I do not think I’m too old to do the things I am doing. I still want to do things! It feels vital to me to contribute somehow to this world, especially now. And I still think, as I did in my twenties, that when I get up in the morning I get to make art and write about things that matter! I still think how I might send these things into the world as little tokens of lightness and I still send them. I think it’s all just right even though it is not quite as I thought it might be back then. Like every other artist I envisioned a rather grander kind of success than the one I achieved which has been fine and well-rounded and a little cagey. And I know, now that I’m almost sixty, just how lucky I was not to get the kind of success I envisioned back then! And when I really think about it I know I envisioned the big bucks rolling in rather later in life. Ahem. Well, never mind—now I feel rich anyway. I have so much that’s good in my life!

But I’m aware too that what I do now can never have the innocent freedom of my younger days. I feel a little nostalgia but can’t stop there. It doesn’t take us very far to dwell on or in the past. I’m just giving it a small nod as it sails by—like, it was nice knowing you, you wild, sweet, crazy girl!

Which brings me back to Cy Twombley. He’s even older than I am, for one thing, twenty years older, and he’s doing this amazing art still. Imagine. Art is fabulous like that—the gift that keeps on giving. If you give to it it gives back, over and over. We are very, very lucky those of us who have these things we love to do.

There were times when people thought Cy’s work was just scribbles, that it made no sense. He just kept doing it and, in fact, he used bigger and bigger canvases. Let’s take note of that. He was bold and brave. What an inspiration! If we’re going to try something new do it big! Make big mistakes if that’s what they’re going to be or maybe there’s no such thing as a mistake. Maybe there are just experiments. Maybe every honest gesture of our hand is worth something. I think Cy may be saying that too.

Because of this I’d really like to see this show. My mother-in-law lives in London so I go most years to visit. But now the exchange rate has become so unfavorable it seems almost prohibitive even when we have a place to stay. I will ponder a little more. There is work to be done here. Even if I don’t actually make it over I’m very excited because there will be a catalogue. I gave a Cy Twombley book I once owned to a dear artist friend some years ago and now it sells for $300. on Amazon. There’s nothing else affordable in print but soon there will be!

A chore-based day here and now almost supper time with absolutely no work done save for cutting the grass and planting a few blooms which does not count as work work. The soil test report came in this morning from U Mass regarding the quality of the earth in our back garden where I had grand visions of a small vegetable garden this summer. It was not good. Our plot has a medium lead content and our friend and neighbor Sally’s is even worse. The note said that it was recommended we NOT plant vegetables unless we want to grow an extra nose or something.

I emailed Sal who is on her way to China for work. Then I went to a fabulous Italian vegetable / plant market in our town called Russo’s to do some food shopping. It makes me happy just to be in that place because they have varieties of vegetables and fruits that I hardly recognize, all piled high and oh so fresh. AND it’s half the price of Whole Foods Market which has become so ridiculously overpriced. Why do they have to charge more for something than another place? Well, beats me. Anyway, back to Russo’s. They have almost but not quite everything that Whole Foods does, even goat’s milk and a wondrous cheese counter with hand-made tortellini stuffed with various cheeses and spinach etc. They have fresh baked bread too, whole grain, and sweet little tea cakes which are extremely yummy. I bought a tiny banana-pineapple one and had a slice with a cup of green tea late this afternoon just to make a good day even better. (I’d been for a long walk so the guilt factor did not intrude too much.)

AND outside at Russo’s they have rows and rows of pots and trays with herbs and veggies and flowers. I needed to buy a few geraniums and other annuals to put in pots around the place but, given the news about the soil, I did not expect to end up buying little parsley plants, cilantro, mint, basil, sage, several varieties of tomatoes and even lettuce—but I did! Tomorrow I will buy big pots for them and fill them with organic matter then hope that they’ll thrive. Gardening is a tad challenging in the city and after a winter indoors I just need to get out into the dirt. I’m hoping that a container garden on the patio will satisfy this yearning for nature and the desire to grow some of our own food. With luck, we’ll get to pick our own salads and even get a tomato sandwich or two!  Could be a $500. sandwich by the time I’m done with all these pots etc. but whatever.  All part of the fun!
Sal called from the airport in Chicago after she picked up the soil test news on her laptop. I was out at Russo’s so missed the call. I do hope she isn’t too disappointed but really it will give us lots more opportunities to support our local farmers at the markets this summer and that too is pretty damned fine. So, on we go. Tomorrow I’ll pick up a few more pots then post a photo or two next time when things are planted. It’s a rainy day here and looks like the weekend is meant to be the same. Perfect for my little plants! And maybe it will force me to do some work work tomorrow after the drawing class.

I scooted out to the art store after tea and bought some really big paper for everyone on sale at $1.29 a sheet. (Amazing price.)  Can’t wait to draw big again tomorrow. It’s our second to last class then the summer off to tend the plants and other things.

Eliza Petrow, who put on the wonderful fundraiser for AIDS orphans in China last week in Cambridge, wrote to give me accurate details about the project. This is the project where they are working to care for AIDS orphans from a small village in China where the adults were infected by HIV when they gave blood to make money and the needles used were unsterilized. I thought some of you might like to know and also to hear that Eliza received a gift of $1,300. yesterday from a woman who was not even at the fundraiser.

Here is what Eliza wrote—

“The organization in China is called the AIDS Orphan Salvation Association (AOS). Because they do not have NGO status in the States, we borrowed another NGO, The Alliance for Children Foundation of Wellesley, who agreed to take donations on their behalf and not take any overhead. They have done that for AOS in the past so they agreed to do it again.

AOS was founded by a Chinese woman, Zhang Ying in 2004, but Dr. Kay Johnson gave Zhang Ying funds from her first book as a way to help Zhang Ying have the finances to start AOS. Kay has been working with AOS as kind of a volunteer since then, helping to get meds for the kids from the states as needed, and linking up other student volunteers to the organization.

My project, the Pediatric HIV/AIDS Treatment Support Project, is part of AOS- kind of a program within a program. It just focuses on the 36 HIV+ kids currently in AOS (there are over 500 kids in the organization but the others are not HIV+). Since they are the most vulnerable and needed the most support, I decided to focus my work on them. Kay has been a great help to me since she is the one who has the contacts to get the second line AIDS medications from the US and so I have left that part of the job to her.

There are two websites for the AIDS Orphan Salvation Association. The English version of the organization’s Chinese website is:

faaids.com

The organization in the US handling the donation also has a site and has some information about AOS on this site:

afcfoundation.org

Neither site has been updated in a long time to include specific information about the medical treatment support project, but they have a lot of information about the organization in general for those who want to read up on it. There are also some great photos and they explain the history of doing AIDS work with this population.

For those who would like to make a donation, the best way is to send a check to:

Alliance for Children Foundation
55 William Street, Suite G10
Wellesley, MA 02481

May sure to mark 5/8 AOS fundraiser on the check memo so that they will give 100% of donations (and take no overhead) to this project.

Alliance will send a letter to you for tax purposes once they receive the donation so be sure to include your address.”

So, this gives an idea of the way the support is structured and how you can make a donation!

The $1,300. Eliza received yesterday will care for 1.5 children for one whole year—that is housing, food, education, and medical supervision. The medication is provided by the Chinese government unless second line drugs are needed should resistance to first line drugs develop. In this case the drugs are provided by the U.S. With proper care they will be able to live full productive lives. If any of you, my fine, good readers, wish to make a contribution, small or large according to your means, it will be most welcome, for sure.
Eliza’s email ended with a little poem from Emily Dickinson—

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Such a nice gift to read those words. Sometimes it’s the small simple things we do that so enrich our own lives as well as those of others. Thanks Emily! And Eliza!!

Last night we wet to a screening of a documentary film, ‘The Blood of Yangzhou District,’ about Aids orphans in China. The film won an Oscar for best short documentary on 2006 and tells the story of an impoverished rural village in China where residents sold their blood for money. The needles with which the blood was extracted were not sterilized and soon most of the adults in the village were infected with HIV/Aids. Some of their children were infected at birth and are, sadly, now orphans. When American aid workers arrived in this village they encountered squalid living conditions and people dying without any medical help at all. It was mostly children who were left and no one wanted to care for them because they have Aids.

It was heartbreaking to see these stories and to see the truly distressing conditions in which these people live. Although the Chinese government now provides medicine so that these children may become healthy and live normal lives there was still no one to care for them properly and to oversee their medical regimen until the arrival of the American organization, The Alliance For Children Salvation Association, founded by Dr. Kay Johnson in Boston. They designed a program in which the children were placed in foster families in cities so they might be situated near a hospital should they need help. They are each assigned a health worker to oversee compliance when it comes to taking the regular doses of medication they need to stay healthy. Their lives are vastly improved now from when they were first discovered in their villages, neglected and ill.

The film was presented as part of a fund-raiser for the kids by my daughter’s childhood friend, Eliza Petrow, who was instrumental in designing the program for their care. I felt so proud to know Eliza and to see the way she has grown into such a compassionate, wise and effective advocate for these kids and others. It’s the kind of thing that gives me a great deal of hope for this world. When I was a young woman few people thought of service careers. I’m truly in awe of what so many young people like Eliza and my own daughter, who is a teacher, are accomplishing.

There are so many worthy causes, it’s hard to know sometimes which to give to. I’ve decided to give to the ones that come my way as this has done. 100% of the donations go to helping these children. If you’d like to contribute please go to The Alliance For Children Foundation website. Pretty amazing to look at those smiling little faces.

Today I dug up samples of earth to be sent for soil testing from both my friend Sally’s garden and mine. We are planning to try our hands at growing vegetables, trying to go a bit green here in the city, a bit self-reliant and to cut our use of the car running to the shops etc. I called a man at the University of Massachusetts and he instructed me to take 12 samples from each garden and to dry the soil on newspaper in the sun then sift it and send one cup’s worth of each garden. Right now the soil is spread out on paper on the grass in my back garden and I hope it will be really sunny and warm tomorrow to dry it out. It’s important to test it for nasty things like lead, of course. No point planting seeds in poisonous earth.
The garden is part of my increasing interest in what’s happening to our planet. It’s a small thing but if we all did small things there would be a shift in the way we use energy. There are now 6 billion of us on the planet, that’s 4 billion more since I was a child and I can totally feel it. I think of the city of Toronto where I grew up. Next to our cluster of houses were farms on all sides. They were gone by the time I was a teenager and our house which was on the edge of the city limits is now considered a prime city location. I can only imagine how places like Calcutta have changed.
The man at the lab was rather funny and vague—the absent-minded scientist! He was in the midst of testing soil! He’ll tell us what we need to know. If we get the go-ahead we’ll be building raised beds next week and getting started.

Meanwhile, Allan found an injured cardinal beside the busy road today. The poor thing has a gash in its head and we think it may have been hit by a car. Allan came home, retrieved a cardboard box, gently lifted the bird into it and brought him home. He set the box on the table on the deck outside our kitchen door and gave it a little dish of water and a crust of bread. But it’s not moving much. I think he may soon leave this life but he’s comfortable and safe right now and we got to stand very near him without him flinching. Maybe he could see that we were friends. I have to hand it to my dear Allan for noticing this wee bird and going to his rescue. Now we wait to see how his life will unfold and wish him luck.

I’m a lifelong city girl but this year I’m going to plant a garden, one that grows vegetables! Our city house does not have a lot of earth around it but it does have some and one side of the house gets glorious sunshine for most of the day. I’m inspired by my friend Kelly who has an acre of land and grows all kinds of things. But I’m also inspired by what’s happening on our planet and by the movement towards being more conscious about the energy we use both in going to and from the shops and in having our food shipped from far away. I’ve always been very conscious about the quality of food we eat and having fresh greens and tomatoes right outside our kitchen door will be great. I was just visiting my friend and neighbor, Sally, this morning and she too is going to put in a wee vegetable plot. My wonderful son is coming to do some work here on the house this week so I’ll get him to pick up some timbers for Sally and us to make raised beds.

There will be things to learn, of course, but that will be fun. Allan and I tried our hand at a community plot a few years ago but we weren’t good at getting ourselves over there. It felt difficult to pull ourselves away from work and will be much easier to have the plot at home. We’ll have to get a delivery of good earth. I’m not quite sure how the original settlers in Massachusetts actually survived on the stony soil here. But once we’ve got some good earth going we should be able to get the vegetables planted and be off to the races. Could be famous last words but I think not! We can’t have that!
Now I will have to plan out what we’ll have—tomatoes for sure and a few herbs like basil, dill, parsley, coriander. Then lettuce greens. I love salad every single day in summer. It is my favorite, favorite food, for sure. I want to put in a rhubarb patch somewhere though maybe not in the same spot as the other stuff because it takes up room. A few zucchini would be nice and perhaps other squashes. I might just start with that and see how well we do this first summer. There’s also the possibility of a second plot beside the deck. That would be for carrots and cucumbers and maybe a few spuds.

When I was in San Francisco I bought a wonderful book called—World Changing. Al Gore wrote the introduction and more on this soon when I get a bit farther into it. The problems in our world are so very complex and challenging now but every little thing we do can make a difference and join us to the spirit of positive change. Even a little city plot. And I think this plot will make me more conscious of others things that can also be done, that I can do. It does feel like time I did more. Some of it is just old habits that need changing. But by next weekend I should be up to my elbows in dirt! Yay!

Isn’t it beautiful? The photo is by Sarah Laslett for Royal de Luxe, the French theater company that created The Sultan’s Elephant, a performance piece in which this gigantic mechanical elephant walked through the city streets of London in 2006. It was produced by Artichoke, a theater production company and funded by the city of London. To think that ordinary Londoners had no idea what was happening when this elephant appeared is extraordinary and thrilling. On Thursday and Friday, this week, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, sponsored by the Loeb Fellowship, will hold a two day exploration—Art in the Life of the City: London Stories.

The photo is one side of the program I designed and, yes, even after the computer hassles of yesterday it is now printed and looks great! I popped over to the printer in Harvard Square this morning to see it. It’s tabloid sized and I now have the photo on the wall of my studio. It’s great to think how art can be a collaborative venture that gives joy in mysterious ways. What a preposterous idea to have a gigantic elephant appear from the wreck of a wooden ’space ship’ that has crashed into one of London’s main streets! It’s even more preposterous to think that no-one, not even the media had any idea what was happening. But all of London got caught up in it. It’s magic that no one in London will ever forget. How fine is it to carry a little magic with us as we move through our lives?

The computer problems of yesterday are now forgotten. Funny how they can trip the stress switch. The printer, Derek, was very kind today to say he knew just what I was talking about. Perseverance pays, as they say. Things can always come right.

I’m so looking forward to the event and will report. I’m expecting to be massively inspired as if I’ve seen an elephant walking down the street. Stay tuned!