All Categories - Amy Anna Gallery

Queen of the Lake of Awareness

10/4/2015

Listen,
O brothers and sisters,
you who have mastered the teachings -
If you recognize me,
Queen of the Lake of Awareness,
who encompasses
both emptiness and form,
know that I live in the minds
of all beings who live.
Know that I live
in the body of mind
and the field of the senses,
that the twelve kinds of matter
are only my bones and my skin.
We are not two,
yet you look for me outside;
when you find me within yourself,
your own naked mind,
that Single Awareness
will fill all worlds.
Then the joy of the One
will hold you like a lake -
its fish with gold-seeing eyes
will grow many and fat.
Hold to that knowledge and pleasure,
and the Creative will be your wings.
You will leap through the green meadows
of earthly appearance,
enter the sky fields, and vanish.

-Yeshe Tsogyel (757 - 817 C.E.)

Lady of the Lake

8/28/2015

Forest Lake

I was alone on a sunny shore
by the forest's pale blue lake,
in the sky floated a single cloud
and on the water a single isle.
The ripe sweetness of summer dripped
in beads from every tree
and straight into my opened heart
a tiny drop ran down.

-Edith Sodergran, trans. by Stina Katchadourian

Amy's Official Calendar

6/13/2015

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. Henry James

I need more summer in my life (don't you?), so I'm adopting the ancient Celtic calendar - in part. They had two seasons, summer and winter, each six months long. Now, six months of winter sounds like a giant bowl of suck, but six months of summer sounds . . . awesome. So, I'm going to have six months of Summer, almost two months of Autumn, and two months of Spring . . . which leaves just two months of winter. Look! See what I did? I just doubled the amount of Summer without increasing the heat and humidity! Amazing!

I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks to the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on summer humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Ann Voskamp

Summer now begins on May 1 and runs to November 1. Since October is going to be part of Summer, it will be officially "Indian Summer". Fall starts November 1 and goes until December 21. Or until Christmas, which would make Christmas like a celebrate winter thing as well as a commercial holiday - I haven't decided for sure. I mean, I'm remaking the whole calendar to suit myself, so I might as well go all out. Anyway, whenever winter starts, it will go to February 1. That means it no longer matters what the rodent sees on Groundhog Day, it's Spring, baby! And Spring will run from Groundhog Day to May 1. All of Amy's Seasons will be capitalized, except winter, which I am demoting until it learns to be a little more pleasant.

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability. Sam Keen

This seems like a good system to me. It corresponds roughly to the weather (are you listening, winter?) and doesn't disturb the solstices and equinoxes. In fact, the Summer Solstice, which in the UK and in old books was often called Midsummer, actually is in the middle of summer now. So, I cleared up that little misunderstanding in one fell swoop. Hey, if you can't change the weather, at least you can change the calendar! Happy Summer, especially now that there is so much more of it to enjoy!

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. Albert Camus

Danny Mills 1991 - 2015

4/14/2015

Crunch Crunch Crunch

2/3/2015

I ate dead ticks once. I probably don’t need to add that it was not intentional.

I’m betting that’s an opening I can’t let stand unexplained, so here goes. In the spring, which is peak tick time in terms of numbers, my dogs routinely come in from a long walk with multiple ticks on each of them. The highest was the terrible, wet spring when they were averaging 20 ticks apiece; normal is three or four. Out of necessity, we discovered that the easiest way to dispatch large numbers of ticks quickly is with the back of a spoon on a flat surface. You probably can predict where this is going.

Apparently a spoon with 20 or so dead ticks squished on the back can miraculously go through the dishwasher without dislodging any of the ticks. Who knew? Ask me how I now know.

So I looked down, completely unsuspecting, into my cereal only to wonder, “what is that floating in there?” That was bad enough. The true horror came when I (pretend you hear the creepy creaking-door don’t-go-in-there slasher flick film score) very slowly turned my spoon over, and . . .

. . . realized that my cereal had tasted a little different for a reason.

Surprisingly, I got over it. I even started eating cereal, and milk, and all foods eaten with a spoon, after only about six months. I guess I’m just that tough.

I keep hearing about “the Coming Insect Cuisine,” using just that phrase, like it’s a proper name. Apparently foodies (and others) predict that eating insects is the inevitable next big thing, that it will solve global hunger, help reduce global warming, provide low-fat, readily available protein, and be hipster-trendy as well. I don’t know.

It’s not the yuck factor. I’m way over that. Once you’ve eaten dead ticks for breakfast, the world becomes a much tamer place. You just can’t scare me anymore.

I keep bees. That means I spend an inordinate amount of time taking care of them and spending big bucks on supplies, and yes, worrying about the welfare of a bunch of insects that sting me if they get the chance. I not only worry about the bees, I worry about their society. And their future in a world full of poisons and pesticides which seem almost designed to render the bees extinct.

I don’t kill spiders. Once upon a time I read that you shouldn’t kill household spiders and centipedes because they are excellent predators and they keep the populations of all the other insects in the house way down. I think it’s true. I never have any stinkbugs.

After a while, I started observing the spiders, and thinking about the task they were performing in the ecosystem of my house. I started thinking about ants, and how they, like bees, have a whole society. Bees and ants can go out foraging in the world, find good stuff to eat, report back, and other bees and ants can follow their directions to where the good stuff is. I know people who can’t do that.

I have a friend who is a militant vegan. I am not vegan. Left to my own devices, my diet consists, literally, of yogurt and Kit Kat bars. I am not exaggerating. I shouldn’t be alive.

Yet here I am. All this has me wondering – about the sanctity of all life, about the nature of consciousness. I like to amuse myself by thinking about the next nearest parallel universes, and alternate timelines. I wonder: in any of them, have we gotten it right? And if I am going to muse about the wisdom and ethics of eating bugs, shouldn’t I at least have the street cred of being vegan? Or vegetarian? But I’m not, and I don’t.

I think life is sacred, especially if you include nature within the definition of “life.” Some people don’t. I also know the cold, hard, truth that not everything can live. It just won’t work that way. How do you choose? Who gets to choose? What if we choose wrong?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. As an essayist, you’re supposed to write what you know, but I don’t know anything.

Animals and plants are disappearing. Scientists consider it a major extinction event akin to the dying of the dinosaurs. It’s caused by the proliferation of human life. I don’t know if switching to eating insects will help this world in crisis. I do know that adding another whole category of creatures to the list of things we feel entitled to consume makes me sad.

This is the biggest dragonfly I ever saw. I found him lying on top of a pile of leaves near my driveway, near death. Called a Giant Darner, he was 5 inches long, and his wings were about 4 1/2 inches wide.

Addicted to Film

1/15/2015

"Mother and child" by Lee Ruk - via Wikimedia Commons (Such a great photo - so many things going on, like short story encapsulated in an image).

Hi, my name is Amy, and I’m an addict.

I have a new obsession, and I’m enjoying it way, way too much. I started contributing to the website Cutprintfilm (www.cutprintfilm.com) as a writer of editorials and reviews. Since my favorite things to do are: 1) lie on the couch; 2) eat; 3) watch movies; and preferably 4) all of the above at the same time, this is like hiring a hopeless stoner to man the cannabis shop.

It’s awesome.

I get to riff on all the weird film things I like, including things I can’t indulge in my film classes for one reason or another (time constraints, possibly disturbing content, just too freaking weird for the students). Apparently, sometimes people even read the stuff I write, which just goes to show you that there’s no accounting for taste.

So far I’ve written about Neil Jordan’s Company of Wolves (http://www.cutprintfilm.com/features/the-company-of-wolves/) ; ballet as an eater of the soul in the Red Shoes and Black Swan (http://www.cutprintfilm.com/features/red-shoes-black-swan-ballet-and-the-loss-of-the-soul/ ); what vampire flicks can teach us about our humanity (http://www.cutprintfilm.com/features/vampire-movies-teach-us-humanity/ ); and a woman’s (scathing) response to The Trip. I also got to review A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (http://www.cutprintfilm.com/reviews/girl-walks-home-alone-night/ ), which was probably the most fun yet, since it’s the best Western about an Iranian female skateboarding vigilante feminist vampire that I’ve ever seen.

I just reviewed Match (http://www.cutprintfilm.com/reviews/match/ ), with Patrick Stewart. That’s quite a treat, because it’s not playing that many places, and I might not have gotten to see it until it was on Netflix.

Next up I’m going to write about actress/director Ida Lupino’s influence on my life and taste in music, followed by a survey of the dance and music films of Carlos Saura. Why, oh why, aren’t they better known in the U.S.?

Even if I wasn’t indulging my inner perv with the writing, the website is like candy for the brain if you like movies at all. There’s new content every day, and I find all the writers interesting and worth reading. It’s a privilege to be associated with it. Even if my writing does nothing for you, the other contributors all have unique perspectives, and they can all write their asses off.

I know, I’m gushing. It’s not like me. Actually I’m not gushing so much as bouncing around giggling and chortling like a cat with a mouse that looks especially tasty.

Nom nom nom.

Forget heroin and Pinterest. They’re for amateurs.

Pardon me while I go get another dose. http://www.cutprintfilm.com/

Seeing in the Dark

11/28/2014

Further Adventures in Vision Therapy

Soundwaves

If a tree falls in a forest but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If color, like sound, is a vibration, and no one sees a bright red flower, is it really red?

If rhetorical questions cause a reader to stop reading, does the rest of the essay matter?

I am still trying to figure out why vision therapy has affected my ability to perceive and utilize color. I recently started a new round of vision therapy “tune up” sessions and discovered even more surprising things.

I restarted therapy after a long absence – longer than intended (see August 2013, September 2011, and August 2011 in the archives for earlier episodes in this serial). I was supposed to come in for assessment and maintenance sessions, but life intrudes on the best laid plans, and I went a whole year without therapy. I expected that testing would show a little slippage in my acuity and functionality. If you don’t do any exercise for a while, the muscles get slack, and I assumed the eyes are not an exception.

Blue Veils

I had improved. My vision had continued to improve, even though I had discontinued therapy. Cue the Theremin music in the background.

Now if I could just get my damn stomach muscles to do the same thing.

The artwork I have been doing is nothing like the artwork I used to do. It has evolved (devolved?) into abstract swaths of pure color, some of which seem to move as you look at them. If they start to talk to me, I’ll let you know and you can send for the head doctors. I have no idea how this came about.

Untitled

Or maybe I do. When I was in high school, I fell in love with the work of Morris Louis. He was one of the color field painters, and with Helen Frankenthaler, one of the giants of modernism. Later, in art school, however, I was all about contrast and value and tones – in other words, black and white and shades of grey. In fact, my father, who I always bounced artistic stuff off of, thought I had an unusually muted sense of color. He thought some people see colors more brightly than others, and I wasn’t one of them. I remember talking to him about driving and how he hated to drive at twilight because it is so hard to see. He said he would much rather drive in full dark. My husband feels the same way. I never knew what they were talking about, because I can see perfectly well to drive at dusk. Nighttime is a different story. We concluded that I have owl eyes – all rods, no cones. The monochromatic blue-greys of twilight don’t limit my ability to see, but unfortunately I don’t have the acuity to see well in full darkness.

In the Darkness

Now all I want to do is play with color. I have no use for the tonal work I used to find so fascinating. I wonder if my eyes and brain have progressed/regressed to the same level it was a few years after the injury that affected my vision, when my ability to perceive and enjoy color was still strong. I suspect that that ability faded as I got older and my vision continued to deteriorate.

I’m like a kid in a candy shop. I have no interest in making pictures of things. I just want to see what happens when certain colors start to dance, with themselves and with each other. I want to explore the emotional responses that colors create.

Purple Veils

A funny thing happens when you start making all abstract art. Your friends stop asking if they can have some of your stuff.

I started researching color as a result of these weird things happening with my eyeballs, and discovered that the science of color is even weirder than my experiences. For instance, when you look at an object, that object is absorbing all the colors but the color it appears to be: the perceived color is bouncing off that object. That suggests that the object might be all the colors except the one you see.

Wait, it gets freakier. Colors, like sounds, are wavelengths. Synesthetics, people with synesthesia, perceive that each color has a corresponding sound, and sounds have colors. Apparently, it’s more like a chord than a single note, in most cases. It used to be the conventional wisdom that people with synesthesia had some crossed wiring somewhere in the brain. Now neuroscientists are considering the possibility that “normal” people have a mild case of combined blindness/deafness. Since color is a wavelength, and sound is a wavelength, we should be able to read them both as frequencies.

The Sound of the Aurora

It must be cool to listen to music and literally see it as a kaleidoscope of colors as well as sounds. Similarly, I would love to brush a swath of paint across a canvas and hear it sing its own special song.

If it ever happens, I will let you know. Please promise not to alert the head shrinkers.

My Behavioral Optometrist is Dr. Steve Gallop: 610-356-7425 http://www.gallopintovision.com/

Spring - The Foodie Season

5/23/2014

People say that Summer is the best time of the year for fresh produce, but Spring is "not half bad," to make a Yorkshire understatement. You have to buy or grow the good stuff of Summer, like tomatoes. In Spring the edible goodies are, literally, growing like weeds. That's because most of them are weeds.

Nettles. So nutritious that they are good for whatever ails you. Touch only with gloves and tongs until dried or cooked, or you'll tingle - not in a good way - for a day or so.

Nettles are one of my favorite wild foods. I love the tea, made from leaves desiccated in the dehydrator until crumbly. I love the fresh greens, cooked like spinach and substituted for spinach in any recipe, but without the slimy, unappetizing gooey black mass that cooked spinach becomes.

I understand that there are contests around the world to see who can eat the most raw nettle leaves without vomiting, despite the sting. I've never tried it (and probably never will), but supposedly you can roll a fresh leaf upside-down, from base to edge, and eat it raw without getting stung. I think I'll skip. Nettles are too good cooked to bother. Creamed nettles, nettle pesto, nettle dip, nettle green sauce, nettle fak'a hoy - the last two are African recipes worth dying for. It's probably unfair of me not to print the recipes here. Sorry, I can't give away all my secrets.

Dock. If you get "nettled," grab a leaf of dock and squeeze the juice out of it onto the sting, and it will reduce the zing.

Another workhorse of the un-rototilled garden is dock. Dock is used as a green or potherb, and has a slightly lemony, faintly sour taste. We like it in spring soup, for chilly days. Dock doesn't reduce as much as other greens when cooked. Because it likes disturbed ground, it often pops up in the garden before the domesticated vegetables are even in the ground.

Last year's Japanese Knotweed (which looks a lot like bamboo when growing). Find a patch in fall or winter so you know where to "shop" for the shoots in Spring.

I prefer many of the wild weeds to their more commonly available domestic counterparts. Just as I prefer nettles to spinach, I would rather eat Japanese Knotweed any day over asparagus. Asparagus is nasty. The stalks are either like chewing on the branches of small, flavorless trees (undercooked), or mushy rolls of wet newspaper (overcooked). Yuck.

The flavor of Knotweed isn't like asparagus. It actually has a flavor. It's just a little tart, and the texture has a little crunch to it. It's good enough prepared simply, sauteed in butter or oil with salt and pepper, that you may never try it any other way. It's the young shoots - eight inches tall or less - that you eat this way. Older, taller shoots can be peeled and sliced and used like rhubarb. Don't confuse it with Poke, another Spring shoot which grows under last year's stalks; Poke needs to be cooked in two changes of water.

Dandelion greens. Pick these before the flowers come up and the leaves become bitter. You want to catch them when they are still light green and before the leaf edges get very jagged. Plants growing in the shade may be less harsh and more tender.

I do not get it. I just do not get it. People spend so much time, effort, and money trying to get rid of their dandelions. Eat them! Eat the greens, use the roots for a decaf "coffee," put the flowers in salads or use them to make wine. Or just let them be - they are so pretty. How many places can you go in the spring and see people trying to get rid of dandelions - with their yellow flowers - so they can put in things like daffodils - which have yellow flowers. Besides, dandelions are a huge early spring resource for bees. If you poison the dandelions, you poison the bees, which will cut into the supply of that worth-it's-weight-in-gold, highly in-demand local honey everybody wants.

Plantain. This common weed, which is everywhere, makes a nice salad green when young.

I went on a plant walk, and one of my fellow walkers told me that he is highly allergic to bee stings. When he gets stung, he mashes a plantain leaf in his mouth to release the juices, and puts it on the sting like a poultice. I got stung on the face a couple times (veil fail while working the hives), so I tried it out. I munched up the leaf, stuck it on the stings, and kept it there about 15 minutes. I also got stung on the hand, and I didn't do the plantain thing on that sting. The stings on my face did not swell, did not turn red, and did not itch. The hand sting drove me crazy for a week. Apparently one of the properties of plantain is that it removes toxins. Good to know.

Plantain leaf close-up showing the distinctive "guitar strings" structure where the stem meets the leaf. This is an identifying feature of the plant, if you make a horizontal cut across the bottom of the leaf with your fingernail.

Please don't think that reading this brief essay gives you enough information to go out and safely start eating your backyard weeds. As I tell my foraging students, get a book! Go out with someone who knows what they are doing. Look at Wildman Steve Brill's website, or Sunny Savage's Youtube videos or VeriaLiving TV shows. Whenever you try a new food, take just a little the first time, until you gain experience with both identifying and eating wild foods.

Once you start eating wild foods, you'll be amazed at how many there are around, and how prolifically they grow. They are there for the taking. Spring is here, and it's time to eat some weeds!

Winter's Last Hurrah . . .

2/28/2014

. . . I hope.

Coral Glory

Fog and Ice and Snow

Written in the Snow

glass

Oasis

Into the Mist

Crystal

Three Wise Men

Waiting for Spring

Creation Stories

11/21/2013

The thing about creation stories, no matter how old they are or where they are from, is that they are all true.

Tefnut

    They all begin the same way. In the beginning there was nothing. Then there was something.
    Or, first there was time. Then there was space. Then there was us.
    Once upon a time.
    The ancient Egyptians had multiple creation stories, depending on the epoch and who was in power and who was in favor and where you were from. They were all true. Still are.
    I like that. No need for dogmatic arguments, when every explanation of the cosmos makes sense on some level.
    At first there was only black water and darkness and silence. Then a lotus formed and rose out of the muck amid perfume and light. That lotus was Amun, who created himself out of nothing. Then he separated the nothing and created moist air, the Goddess Tefnut, and dry air, the God Shu. Then he multiplied the nothing and created Geb, the earth. And so on.
    Or, at first there was only black water and darkness and silence. The silence's name was Nun. This primordial watery abyss existed before all creation. Not even the gods knew the extent of Nun's realm.
      Or, at first there was only black water and darkness and silence. There was only the Lady of the Place of the Beginning of Time. She is still here.

Ptah

    One of my favorite Egyptian creators was Ptah. Ptah created himself out of thought and speech. He thought of himself, then spoke himself into existence. Then he created the other gods by thinking of them, and speaking their names. He was a self-made man.
    We come from a literal culture. We are very literal in our speech and language, and therefore literal in our conceptions and understanding. We talk about the ancient Egyptians as an archaic, primitive culture, but their understanding was greater than ours. They thought symbolically, and abstractly. When they wrote about the Gods and Goddesses being brother and sister, they didn't mean that they were literal, incestuous siblings. They meant that they were made out of the same primordial stuff. After all, what else was there? And they didn't have deities with animal heads and human bodies. They depicted their pantheons that way because it was the best way to depict a concept; not an actual being. To them, it was the best way to show something that had qualities way beyond the human or animal.
    Can you think and speak yourself into existence? Or into a new existence? I mean, of course, once the anatomical stuff is done. My father once told me that all relationships either progress or regress. He was right. As I get older, I begin to realize that what he said applies to everything, not just relationships. There is only creation, or death.
    I have learned that there are things I can depict with abstractions that I cannot depict with pictures of things, or images from the visible world.
    There are many creation stories in which the first primordial deity rips itself apart, or is dismembered by later gods to create the world. It sounds violent until you remember, what else was there to use? The stars are part of us.
    Some scientists say that we are not really here and nothing really exists, outside of a kind of film stretched across the opening of a black hole. All the rest is projection. So, all of what we think of as physical creation might be only symbolic, and abstract. It's all speech and thought, not matter and structure. Maybe.
    Of course, all creation stories are true.
    Like the Egyptians, I am finding that some things can't be depicted literally. You have to chuck your best concept into the void, and see what comes back.
    As I get old, I see that there is only creation and death. Create, or die. All I have to work with is myself. I may have to rip myself apart to create something new, and all I have to build with is speech and thought. For all that I know, those might be the right tools for making pictures out of the un-picturable. It seems to have worked for the gods.

I am trying out a new Virtual Exhibit page; check it out.