I'm loving angels instead.....

So,
the work is progressing, I am as well learning to be with the ending of the life of my father, together with my brothers. We spent the last three days with him in his hospice in Miami, we slept in the room (a total ridiculously cramped snore fest) my brothers played scrabble, we sang to my dad, played endless John Denver (take me home, country roads, to a place, where I belong....) stroked his forehead, kissed him, and told him how much he was loved and what a wonderful legacy he had created. Sometimes we laughed pretty hard, which was a sort of funny way to be in a room of a man who lay dying. We whispered when we said some inappropriate things because we knew he was hearing us. Early on, I was crying and talking to my dad and I said "it's so hard now dad, huh?" and he leaned foreward and gasped out "yes."
We tried to tell him to go in peace. "Go in peace, dad, we're okay, we're taken care of."

There was so much love there.

He is still breathing, 3 days after the breathing tube was removed.

I wanted to share a youtube lecture with you:  Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton. http://youtu.be/qFnNgTSkHPM

take a listen. We are not alone. We share a wonderful commonality with eachother and the artists who are making beautiful work for us to experience.

gifts

"Don’t make stuff because you want to make money — it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous — because you will never feel famous enough. Make gifts for people — and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts.

Maybe they will notice how hard you worked, and maybe they won’t — and if they don’t notice, I know it’s frustrating. But, ultimately, that doesn’t change anything — because your responsibility is not to the people you’re making the gift for, but to the gift itself."

thinking about thesis....is work a gift? 

Would You Consider Bringing a Little Bit of Fun Into Your Waking Life?

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): You Tauruses are customarily more grounded
than the rest of us. But this week, I'm wondering if you will be tempted to
escape the laws of gravity and rebel against the call of duty. I suspect
that your dreams, at least, will feature uninhibited forays into the wild
blue yonder. While you're sleeping you may float weightlessly in an
interplanetary spaceship, become an eagle and soar over forests, wear a
futuristic jet pack on your back and zip through the sky, sail across the
Serengeti Plains in a hot-air balloon, or have a picnic on a cloud with a
feast of cotton candy and sponge cake and mint tea. Would you consider
bringing this kind of fun into your waking life?

um, let me see now, YES! I have started up the studio practice and am exploring a few themes:  "EveryDay at Around Five,"   and "ReAttachment" are two videos in the works. Gingerbread is baking tonight, and I'm decorating the pieces before attaching them together to make the house. I have been rewriting the Hansel and Gretel story; I feel like the witch got the short end of the deal...it's not her fault that she eats children. What about that mother, huh? Abandoning the children to the forest like that. 

so, yes to fun. work is fun. 

Mindfulness and Presence

If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.” We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.    Alan Watts