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Spring - The Foodie Season

5/23/2014

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.  
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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.
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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.
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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!
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Doctor, My Eyes . . .

8/2/2013

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Dog Hair
    Once, after I had been  traveling, I woke up in the middle of the night with no idea where I was.  The most surprising thing about this  experience was that I was completely unafraid.
      
     I sort of walked around for a few minutes, and eventually figured out
where I was by noticing that the bathroom was on my right, and therefore I must  be at home.  It was all very  matter-of-fact.  It happened again,
months later and in a different place, and once again I oriented myself by the bathroom.  Which probably says a lot about where I spend most of my time, but that’s an essay for a different time.      
 
      I’ve written about undergoing vision therapy before (see Archive August 2011 and September 2011), and I thought that particular journey was over.  I was wrong.  I keep learning new things and seeing things differently and going new places.  And finding that I have no idea where I  am.

      This reminds me of Ellen DeGeneres’ joke about her grandmother taking up walking – and now they have no idea where the hell she is.  That’s me.

      I knew that the vision therapy was going to affect more than just my visual acuity – it would affect the way I see the world, not just the way I see.  That had already happened; you can’t change one variable in a closed system and expect the rest to keep chugging along unaffected.

      I was unprepared for how it would change my art.  At first, it was color.  I suddenly seemed to have a greater facility for, and desire for, great glaring gobs of color.  That’s weird.  There’s no reason that should have happened.  Vision therapy doesn’t do anything about recognizing or appreciating colors and the interplay between them.  But here it was.  I don’t know if I am unique in this.  I do know that in the 1980’s, according to the fashion of the day, I decorated my house all in shades of white.  By the early ‘90’s, I had become so color starved that I painted every room in my house a different color.  And I am never going back.

      Also, in the 2000’s, I went to a big exhibit of work by the late artist Andrew Wyeth, famous for his  rather bleak color sense.  By the
end of the exhibit, I was rushing to get through it.  When I emerged from the building, slightly panicked and breathing hard, I remember thinking, “I’ve got to get away from all those god-awful browns.”

      So I guess my color sense has been a developing thing, and vision therapy opened it up further.  It’s not supposed to do that, but okay,
cool.

      I figured I would be all about learning space, and how to depict it, and utilizing all this newfound depth perception in my pictures, creating vistas and layers and painting 3-D rooms you can practically walk into. That so didn’t happen.  The twelve-year-old part of my personality (about 97% of it) rolled her eyes and said “b-o-r-i-n-g.” 

      But I’ve really got a groove on for texture.

      Ooh, I just want to run my fingers through shag carpet and rocks and dirt and dry orzo and dreadlocks and tree bark.  I’ve become a surface pervert.  Pretty soon I’ll be wearing a rumpled raincoat and feeling up people’s tire treads in parking lots. 
      
     I guess I was texture-starved, too, and didn’t know it, because my lack
of depth perception had made texture, and tactility, unavailable to me.  Who would anticipate that a visual deficiency could also profoundly inhibit one’s sense of surface as well?  

      Okay, so vision therapy, combined with my own particular pathology, united to create some  unexpected results.  All of this has refracted into the art that I create. I have lost all interest in creating pretty pictures – you know, the kind that actually sell?  I’ve been sculpting, and creating weird three-dimensional art reminiscent of ancient artifacts, and abstract paintings with magic elements that can only be seen from certain angles.  It’s been really fun. The problem is that none of this stuff is photographable.  It just doesn’t translate.  I can’t make it flat, and fit it into a 2-dimensional medium.  It won’t squish.  It doesn’t look good on film – it’s not photogenic.

      It’s tactile.  It wants to be touched.

      I have no idea what to do with this website.  Most of the new stuff looks like it was made by a completely different person, because, in a sense, it was.  Not the same eyeballs.  Not the same brain.  Should I start over?  I’ve always been committed to following the muse wherever she leads, even if it’s not a marketable place.  I didn’t become an artist so I could do the same thing every day.  I admire jazz singer Dianne Reeves because she’s so daring. She takes a lot of chances in her singing and in her choice of material, refusing to be limited to any genre or style. She’s willing to let you hear her taking those chances, even when they don’t work.  I want to be like that. When I’m not fondling hay bales and the bottoms of cheap flip-flops.
      
     The truth is that I don’t really know what I am interested in
artistically anymore.  It’s sub-verbal.  All I am doing is putting the medium in my hands and seeing where I go with it.  
  
      I guess I’ll be all right.  As long as I can find the bathroom.
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Tree Bark Trio
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Spring Haven

5/14/2013

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If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.  ~Nadine Stair
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Crabapple Blossoms
    We must have heaven, at least a little once in a while, in order to navigate earth.   
    My husband and I bought ourselves a fountain for our anniversary.  I am creating a haven, and I thought it would add to the nirvana atmosphere.  It certainly does. There are many other components of a haven, too, though; some can be real and some can be pretend.  What you can't actually obtain can be summoned from memory or imagination or books once read long ago.
    When I was a kid, my haven was my suburban back yard.  It was a whole world to me, and the rabbits and the crows and the Queen Anne's Lace were my best friends.
    Now I have a fountain and bird feeders and wind chimes and chickens.  Yup, chickens.  That part is hard to explain.  You have to watch them poking around in their silly way to understand how they contribute to the bliss factor.
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Hi, my name is Rita, and I'm a chicken.
    You have to create bliss in order to withstand the grieving, when it comes.  
    But bliss is it's own reward, too - worth doing just for the doing of it.  Some say that paradise is a garden (the Koran) and some say it's a library (Jorge Luis Borges).  What if it's a garden where you can read?
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The Bliss Chairs under the Crabapple Tree
    I like to say "create your bliss" rather than "follow your bliss", as Joseph Campbell did.  To follow something means that it exists somewhere else, away from you.  And you might never find it.  If you create it, it's yours.  Always.  Now, and in memory forever.
    Spring reminds us to remember to create our bliss.  In fact, it forces itself upon us with a big sloppy kiss.  The Greeks and Romans and Norse all held wild bacchanalian fertility festivals to honor the power of Spring.  They understood that Spring, and the deities associated with the season, controlled mighty, far-reaching kingdoms.  The ancients said that all the gods bow before Venus.  That is how important love and flowers and sex and seeds are to life, and to living.
    Many cultures continue to celebrate Spring fetes and fairs and holidays today.  Even grim Soviet Russia celebrated May Day.  I think these Spring happiness parties are so ubiquitous around the world because they are so necessary.
    As a people, we have gotten away from this, to our detriment.  We expect ourselves to just keep grinding away in our offices.  I don't think it works.  It just makes us crazy.  Like if we just keep repeating these autonomic motions, somehow we'll forget how much we want to be outside.
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I ask myself why? Why? Why do I do it? Why do I keep crossing the road?
    The words "haven" and "heaven" must derive from similar roots.  We can surely survive without an actual, present heaven - we're doing it every day we're alive.  But can we survive without a haven?  A port, a refuge, a slice of goodness pie?  Why would we want to?
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River of Dappled Shadows
    So many people forget to make themselves happy. 
    It is tempting to think you need lots of "stuff" to make a haven.  After all, I bought a fountain.  It isn't truly necessary, though.  All it really requires is a state of mind.  Even the concrete and asphalt can be beautiful in the spring.   
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On Beauty May I Walk
    You probably don't need an actual fountain to find your bliss.  Maybe all you need is a fragment of lyric in your head:
On a mountain
By a fountain
Flowers blooming everywhere
With Venus and with Cupid
The picture's very clear.
        -The System, "Don't Disturb this Groove"
    The truth is, I don't know what it is that you need to create your bliss.  Yours might be different than mine.
    But I do know that you must create it.
    Let the Gods of Spring roll over you and have their way with you.  Celebrate your surrender to all that is bigger and more beautiful and stronger than your daily existence.
    Then you'll recognize heaven, when you get there.  
    Your heaven.
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Are you going to eat that?
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Light in my Eyes

6/28/2012

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Lighthenge
I signed up for a workshop to photograph the Bruce Munro exhibit at Longwood Gardens.  Bruce Munro is an installation artist who sculpts with light.  The exhibit should not be described; it should be experienced, therefore all I will say about it is "go."

I shy away from photography workshops in general.  I know for a fact from many past experiences that photography workshops, usually set up with the idea of giving photobugs an opportunity to shoot some interesting thing/place/situation/whatever, actually provide an opportunity to take lots of pictures of a whole row of photographers' butts as they jockey for the best spots right in front of the subject.  All photographers' butts look exactly alike, regardless of age or gender.  They take that Official Photographer Stance, bent over the tripod, and it's like a sea of endlessly repeating generic buttocks.  Not being a big fan of repetitive patterns in my work, I usually skip the workshop scene.

This was different: it was after hours, it was at night, it was the Bruce Munro exhibit.   Therefore, I thought I would be different, too.  It would not be the usual Festival of Idiocy that is my life.  I would take Great Pictures.  It would be Swell.

The weather was beautiful, I was not late, I did not forget anything (like my camera), all seemed to be going great.  Then I arrived, and that was when it all started to fall apart. 

The idea of the workshop was that we would get to see and shoot the exhibit after dark, after all the people had gone home.  And the people had all gone home.  But it was not dark.  It was not getting dark.

Last week was the Summer Solstice, a.k.a. the Longest Day of the Year.  When it doesn't get dark until Really Really Late.  So, we went to shoot the light exhibit, in the dark, on one of the seven lightest days of the year.  Excellent planning on somebody's part.

Then, right at the beginning, horrors, my holga broke.  It just stopped - taking - pictures.  Since the Holga is a camera (well, allegedly), this presented a problem.   But HA!  I had brought two holgas! Because I couldn't remember what @##$@# kind of film I had loaded into either camera, so I brought them both.  So for a moment it seemed that I was saved, God did not hate me, there was hope - and light- somewhere in my future!  What a geek!

Allow me to explain.  Bringing a Holga to a photography workshop is like showing up on the Autobahn riding a Big Wheel.  And then making revving noises with your mouth.   One of the four instructors for the workshop (they were all excellent, but shall remain unnamed so I hopefully don't piss them off) looked at Helga the Holga and said "what the hell is that?"  Photography workshops are great places to stand around and compare equipment and talk about how long your lenses are.  If you know what I mean.

In case I'm not being explicit enough, I'm saying photography workshops almost always devolve into big-penis contests. 
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M Theory
Luckily, I have a Nikon for when I do Real Photography, so I was equipped with penis and could keep shooting.  So I whipped out the penis and took some lovely photos of Longwood by daylight, since there were two hours of full light still to go for our night photography workshop. The wonderful people at Longwood thoughtfully provided a guide to help us navigate the exhibit sites we were to photograph.  Our guide was very thorough.  She was so thorough that I'm certain that she's in every single shot I took.  I finally gave in and just started framing her up, since I figured she was going to be in every picture anyway.

Longwood is big.  It allowed me to discover, as our intrepid group trouped about the grounds, that my tripod was really heavy.  I looked around, as I was gasping for breath, and noticed that everybody else's tripod was about a third the diameter of mine.  I decided I have the hurricane-strength tripod.  Next storm we get, I'm going to put the tripod out and see which survives the hurricane better: the tripod or my house.  Hey, I may carry a Holga in my holster, but my tripod is massive hardcore Triple X. 

It got dark!  Which was great!  Woo-hoo!  Except I couldn't see the controls on my cameras!  Luckily, I brought a flashlight.  The little flat kind, not too bright, perfect for not screwing up everybody else's night shots at a photography workshop.  Like I said, I did not forget anything for this workshop!  Not me!  

There was no way to use it and work the camera settings at the same time.  This is the kind of flashlight you have to press, on both sides, to make it light up.  I could have put it in my mouth, leaving my hands free to work the camera.  I could have.  I just couldn't bring myself to do it.  I don't want to die.  And I really don't want to end up on "1000 Ways to Die."  I had visions of putting this thing in my mouth and going "ZZZZTTTTTTT" as I electrocuted myself with a tiny flashlight at the Longwood Gardens night photography workshop.  Consider the earlier discussion about penis contests and let your mind wander.  The irony is too ripe.  I just don't want my obituary to read like that.

All told, I actually had a great time and got some really nice mediocre shots, which is what I went to do.  They say you either have a good time or a good story, but I got lucky and had both.

There's another workshop in August, if you want to go.  Don't forget your tripod!
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Fair Folk
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Buying Eyeballs

9/28/2011

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Moonflower with Bugs
I've been having the kind of headaches that make you think it might feel good to drive a screwdriver into your brain.  I couldn't read without getting what felt like blisters inside my head, and watching TV was making me motion-sick.  Since I have been undergoing visual therapy (see August 2011 under Archives), it seemed logical to ask my behavioral optometrist what's going on.

He tested me, and for the first time since I was nine years old, the vision in my left eye has improved.

As far as we can figure, the headaches are caused by the fact that my brain is adjusting to using two functional eyes, instead of just one.  My optometrist took this in stride, but I think this is one of those low-flying miracles that comes in under the radar, and so goes almost undetected.

In order to explain how this qualifies for the Our Lady of Somewhat Unlikely Events chronicles, this might be a good time to reveal how I got legally blind in the left eye.  If you have no taste for gore, skip the rest of this paragraph.  When I was a kid, my older sister was a champion swimmer.  I was not, but my parents thought I should suffer just the same, so off to practices I went.  I hated it.  I did not try.  One night when I was coming in (slowly) from the end of a lap, the girl who was supposed to dive in after I hit the boards got a little excited, and dove in before I made it to the end of the pool.  She dove right into me, hands outstretched.  Her fingers and fingernails impaled my left eye.  I remember the world went red, and I remember screaming. 

Within weeks, my vision in the left eye showed a decline, which continued throughout my life.  Until now.

While I was explaining my symptoms to the optometrist, I told him "Oh, I got a new camera, too, and it has this diopter adjustment thingy which allows me to walk around and take pictures without my glasses on.  Which is great, because using a camera viewfinder while wearing glasses is a pain in the ass."

I am such a dumbass that for a few minutes after I told him this, I didn't realize the importance of what I had just said.  Or of what I had been doing.

This is huge.

Until recently, I didn't walk around my house without my glasses on.  It felt uncomfortable.  I couldn't see the floor, and never felt confident about my footing (I have dogs.  They have toys.  The toys sound like tortured children when you step on them unexpectedly.  And they make you trip).  I certainly could not walk around The World without glasses, since even my house felt hazardous.

I went out and walked around with my new camera and took pictures, all without wearing glasses.  Twice.  And I didn't even realize I was doing something new.  Before, I had enough trouble just identifying what was in front of me without squinting.  Now I could not only walk around confidently, I could determine what was worth photographing, and actually frame a shot, with naked eyes.

We suspect that my newfound comfort with maneuvering around sans lenses comes from the fact that I now have at least partial 3-D vision.  So I am walking in space, not looking at a flat screen with not much information on it. 

Further, this shift occurred during dark, grim days with no sunlight.  Previously, I always noticed a difference in my visual acuity - and fatigue - between bright and dim lighting.

In fact, I wear my glasses so infrequently indoors that I now spend 87.6% of my time looking for the bloody things, because I take them off and leave them and then do so many activities bare-eyed that I forget where I put them. 

So, my optometrist advised me to keep on doing these things I didn't realize I was doing, to see what happens.  The headaches will probably resolve when my brain catches up with what's going on in my eyes, since a lot of vision consists of the connection between the brain and the eyes, not just the eyeballs themselves.

I never thought paying for vision therapy would be like buying an upgraded pair of eyes.

Will it change my photography?  Or will the new camera?  So far, I haven't noticed any artistic changes to my picture-taking like I have seen with painting.  However, my photos used to be often Holga-fied;  I have always gravitated to the misty, moody, flawed, indistinct, obscure, and blurry, because that's what the world looked like to me.  I had never visited that planet where people take those sharp, National Geographic-like photos.  Maybe now I will.  I have a new camera, and I have new eyes.
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The Road Ahead
My Behavioral Optometrist is Steven J. Gallop, O.D.  His phone number is 610 356 7425, and his office is at 7 Davis, Avenue, Broomall PA 19008.  His website is GallopIntoVision.com. 
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Learning to See

8/4/2011

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Sunflowers I
If you had the chance to see the world with a completely different perspective than the one you are used to using, would you do it?

If you had the chance to see the world with different eyes, would you look?

I did it.  Or rather, I am doing it.

What if you were given the chance to change the way you see the world, but you might never be able to go back to the ways things were?

I'm doing it anyway.

I went to the library for a summer novel but came out with Fixing My Gaze: A Scientist's Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions, by Susan R. Barry.  It's about how a neurobiologist with a lifelong vision defect learned how to see stereoscopically by undergoing vision therapy.  Previously, she could only see two-dimensionally.

For explanation: Two-dimensional vision, or 2-D, is flat, like a drawing on paper.  3-D means that there is also depth: an actual room with furniture in it, instead of a drawing of such a room. 

It's a fascinating story. At the end of the book, the author listed little tests you could try online to check your own depth perception.

I failed every single one of them.

I discovered, to my horror, that the world did not look the way I saw it.  There were layers I couldn't use.

I called my sister and said, "I have no depth perception!"  And she said (like "duh") "Yeah, I know.  That's why your paintings have that compressed space."
I said, "My paintings have compressed space?"

So I made some calls and started vision therapy.  Now, a year later, I can see in 3-D.  Most of the time.  What's really cool is that I can pop it in and out by thinking about it.  Although, the longer I go to therapy, the more I lose the ability to retreat to flatspace. 

I used to walk around as though I had a flat screen TV in front of my face.  Not a good one.  Not HD.   Certainly not 3-D.  Everything I could see was on that flat screen.  There was nothing beyond it.  

Now I move in space, and it is a totally different experience.  It's not just that the world looks different; it feels different, too.  In fact, it's like a different planet.  A friend, who is undergoing therapy as well, describes it as the difference between mono and stereo in music; there's stuff you just can't hear in mono.  

I think it's more like the protagonist's experience in the movie "Avatar,"  who went from seeing the world from his wheelchair, to being in the world a completely mobile and free-moving person.  Before you get offended about my use of a handicapped person in my metaphor, remember that I am legally blind in one eye as the result of a childhood accident.  That's what caused my inability to see in three dimensions.   

I knew that this course of therapy would probably change my art.  Drawing is the act of transferring a three-dimensional subject to a two-dimensional image.  I was able to do that with some ease, because I was already seeing in two dimensions anyway.  So there was a danger I might lose some of that ease.  Or all of it. 

I thought that of course now my work would have depth (hopefully both kinds: depth, and depth, if you know what I mean).
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Sunflowers II
Not so.  My use of space in art hasn't changed a bit.  Apparently I'm not all that interested in portraying space, though I love moving through it.  I suppose I spent too many years without it. 

What has changed is my use of color. 
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Sunflowers III
There are animals who have organs that see infrared and ultraviolet light, the way that our eyes see visible light.  I feel like I grew new organs within my eyeballs that see way beyond the spectrum of my prior existence.  Do other people always see color the way that I am seeing it now?  Without having been "blind" for awhile like I was, do they appreciate it?

It's like the e.e. cummings poem: "now the eyes of my eyes are opened."

It's like the gospel version of Amazing Grace: "was blind, but now I see."
 
If a person is the sum of her perceptions, then I have become a whole different entity.  It's so worth it. 

My Behavioral Optometrist is Steven J. Gallop, O.D.  His phone number is 610 356 7425, and his office is at 7 Davis, Avenue, Broomall PA 19008.  His website is GallopIntoVision.com. 
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Growing Things

5/11/2011

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 I didn’t know I wanted to be a farmer when I grew up until I was 45 years old.
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Pomeranian Puppy - Ten Days Old
It’s irresistible: all these living, growing things popping into life around you, and you get to play a part in the process, too.

 There is a saying in the Talmud that every blade of grass has its angel which leans over it and says “Grow! Grow!”  It is exhilarating to be that angel.

My family and I are starting a small farming business, and the planet has gotten much bigger and a lot more interesting. We have conversations about good dirt and watch Youtube videos on how to shear sheep.

I never had such a visceral sense of all the plant life being around me being alive – as actual living beings – until this spring.  Somehow I never noticed that I was surrounded by aliveness, even though this area is like a jungle in the summer.
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Tomatillo Seedling: I Hear Salsa in the Distance
Maybe I finally grew new senses because this winter was particularly deadening and full of death. Now it seems that the planet is bursting at the seams with life and potential, stretching and growing in a leaping, bounding, exuberant way.

 A goat smiled at me (they do, you know), and it opened my eyes.  To use a metaphor that feels like an archaic expression from a dead language, I awakened immersed in a live green world which previously I had scanned but never downloaded.

I guess I’ve been doing this all along, because art-making is a lot like farming; they both involve growing things.  It’s just that the materials are different.  In fact, I think I had been farming art for so long that I had lost some of the excitement of creation.  I had forgotten how cool it is to make new forms out of raw materials. 

Farming is more custodial, though.  While all art projects have a life of their own (and some of them are bloody willful pigheaded little brats), there’s not quite the same sense of responsibility for new life.  That’s a different feeling altogether.
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Dandelion Hope
R. W. Emerson said that the earth laughs in flowers, and I need to laugh more.  So we’ll see what grows and develops in the coming months.

 Watch this space.
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Ed 1998 - 2011

4/11/2011

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Companion
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Il Bianco Gallo

3/8/2011

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My sister, nieces, and I are starting a new endeavor.  We have created a business, called Il Bianco Gallo (The White Rooster in Italian)(yes, we've been told it should be Gallo Bianco, but hey, we're Italian-American).
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Mermaid's Treasure necklace
We are selling handcrafted jewelry and accesories, and will be adding home decor, indoor and outdoor sculpture, and all kinds of handmade, vintage, salvaged, revamped, refitted, shabby chic, and generally cool stuff.

So far, my sister Ann makes the most of the jewelry and accessories; my niece Amy is the Webmaster, jewelry-maker, bottle-washer, and mastermind; my niece Molly makes this awesome industrial jewelry (that's going to sell out as soon as it's posted); and I crack the jokes.  Well, okay, I made the scarf below, and a few other things, but don't let that scare you off.
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Rainforest Ferns hand-dyed scarf
The website link appears below the picture, if you want to look out our wares.  We will adding new stuff every week, so check back to see what's new.  http://www.ilbiancogallo.com/

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In the Grip of the Ice Princess

2/12/2011

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Surely some one of us has angered the gods and/or pissed off the fairies. This winter never ends.
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Winter Gazebo
When I was a little girl, I became so concerned during a long, unrelenting winter (like this one) that I asked my mother if spring was really going to come. I remember saying, “But what if this year is different?” It must have been February, because she said, “Oh, I've seen it snow well into March some years, and even early April.” 

 That night I had a dream in which the exact same conversation took place. Except at the end of it, I exclaimed, "But Mom, this is May!"

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein because a volcano exploded and killed summer with a massive cloud of ash. She and her husband and her friends had nothing better to do than sit inside and write ghost stories. The cold and the damp and the endless grey somehow made her think of forlorn, abandoned monsters who run amok, killing out of sheer love-starved despair.
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The Brightness
I get that. Winter is a kind of monster. Rather than a huge man pieced together out of cadavers, I picture her (or at least, this particular winter) as one of those cold, malignant women who smile so pleasantly while they talk elegantly about how fat you've gotten. A woman you realize, too late, you never should have invited to lunch, because she's going to stay. And stay.
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Stone and Ice
I guess Princess Winter brings out the monster in me, too, because I'll be glad when the bitch is dead, murdered by sun and crocus and equinox breezes. I will dance on her grave, feeling the earth warming beneath my bare feet. I will exult in her demise, despite her beauty. Then I will turn my face to the sun and forget she ever existed.

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Long Shadows
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    Hi, I'm Amy Anna, and I'm an artist, photographer, and writer.  I'm a Person of Unrelenting Curiosity, so come explore with me.

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