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Wednesday, February 12, 2014.  Buying a plastic life all wrapped up in plastic with a plastic card!  Who saw THIS coming?  (Yes, Sandy.  I know YOU know who did!!  lol)

With the best of intentions right before Christmas I marched myself in the frigid darkness over to the only store I could get to without a car – Home Depot!  Walking around thinking about Christmas – which as a whole I detest as a “holiday” – I found a display with sticks of fake tree scents that people could buy to help them pretend their plastic trees were ALIVE!

Well, I bought a small live tree in a pot, wrapped it in multiple layers of plastic bags and hauled that poor thing home with me.  It survived just fine!  But I also bought a SPRUCE tree plastic container of scent sticks.

I laid one of these on top of my old 1980s television set and did not think about it again until I moved the TV across the room.  I was shocked to discover that I could NOT lift that fake tree scent stick off of the TV!  It had eaten a groove into the plastic as it sunk in and became a part of the TV’s casing.

That was SPOOKY!  What poison lurks in our modern world around us?  Do we want to know?

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In my thinking people who have suffered wounding to their hearts are more like actual living breathing growing trees deep in a forest whose life span is recorded in beautiful rings within them.  Some rings wide and far apart – times of relative ease and plenty.  Some rings narrow and so close together a toothpick could not be laid between them.

But PLASTIC people in a plastic shallow trivial embarrassingly EMPTY and pretty dang surface and meaningless life — WE ARE NOT!

Does quality mean anything anymore?  How much of our daily suffering as survivors of a So Real world of horrendous early trauma comes from a mismatch between the quality of who we have become in stark contrast to a plastic world that displays barely any SOUL DEPTH at all?

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If you look along both sides of the image for “Imagine” at the top of my blog you can see some mosaic pieces that came from the Bisbee dump that was closed in 1954.  That dump is off limits but during the horrible months I was undergoing chemo in 2007 dear friends and family took me on the 1/2 mile trek into the dump (a test of endurance in my chemo-weakened state!) on Sundays as we trespassed on mining property on the day there were no guards and hauled out heavy buckets of treasure.

I bring this up because the pieces of old dishes and glass delighted me then and delight me now.  However, it is the little figurine of Mary and Jesus that I want to highlight in my post here.  They were made in Japan in the era of my childhood – before the China implosion of merchandise into the US anything “made in Japan” was looked down upon by many people.

Yet as I retrieved this little piece from under a foot of soil that day at the dump and rubbed the soot off of it from the many dump burnings it had gone through – I was thrilled to discover this delicate image:

I found the broken tea-cup on that same day – Mary and Jesus on a tea-cup still tickles my fancy!  I can relate to this version of spiritual expression!

I did intend to keep the tea cup mosaic – but not the rest of these.  What to do with them?  They were heavy to haul with me – and I find they solace my heart in this @$*%Y(# place!

This one and the next one hang above my kitchen sink on one of my MANY WINDOWLESS WALLS!  And, yes, this piece is about homesickness for my desert home

Pieces of people’s history are in these dish remnants!  Beauty has very little to do with plastic in my world.

Latest batch of butterfly wing weavings!  Once the edges are knotted off the pieces are handwashed without agitation in HOT water in my sink – dried – pressed with my cheap old iron and brushed until they are soft and fuzzy.  At that point the white warp has been tainted by the residual dyes in the handspun yarn and everything blends together into a beautiful whole.

I liked these dancing clouds the other day.  As I watched them I could hear their music.  I could hear them talking with one another, with the sky and earth and with me.

Nothing plastic about that.

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Those of us who are survivors have honed gifts of sensitivities, perception and of expression.  We are different from ordinary and therefore utilize the powers of our mind in extremely creative ways no matter what our chosen outlet may be (even if it is not a VISIBLE outlet!).

We know how to hold our own or we would not still be here!  Holding our own against a plastic mainstream?  Well, truth be told, as we honor ourselves we just might find this is easier than we think it is!  More importantly — WE CAN DO IT!!  There is a quality to us in our lives that is so rich, so varied, so GORGEOUS!!!

But nobody can tap that source of genuine wealth but us.

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Here is our first book out in ebook format.  A very kind professional graphic artist is going to revise our cover pro bono – what a gift and thank you Ben!

Click here to view or purchase:  A STORY WITHOUT WORDS

It lists for $2.99 and can be read free for Amazon Prime customers.  Reviews for the book on the Amazon.com site are WELCOME and appreciated!

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