Jenny Mendes

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale by Dan Albergotti Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days. Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals. Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices. Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you. Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart. Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope, where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all the things you did and could have done. Remember treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

"Just be yourself everyone else is already taken"  Oscar Wilde

There is a large and powerful lake right near where I live, but I rarely see it.  A mass of freshwater in a world of drought but I usually forget it is even there.  Last night I visited a friend who was staying in a house right on the lake.  We walked down to a wild and private forlorn beach littered with debris.   Plastic of every variety, worn stones, old red earth bricks broken and softened by the water into rounded forms, and mounds of driftwood, pale and gray.  It was really windy, the water rough, but peaceful somehow, a Hypnotizing view.  I saw so many different things from varying lives that had found a resting place on that beach.  My photos aren't very good, but what stories those old rocks and debris could tell!  I felt like I had traveled through an immense space as I journeyed From the quiet of my home to the wilderness we met on that beach.  I shouldn't have stayed away for so long.

Pictures from the village of my dear friend in Nepal.  My heart goes out to all of the people affected by the earthquake.  It's hard to imagine.... 

Usually I don't think about it, and then something happens and I wonder, why, just now... This. You meet someone And connect in a way you would have never expected.... Or for the first time you see where before you were blind, or unknowing. Awareness triggers a sensitivity to environment, and just like that the world opens up.  Or it's just timing, and going for it in the moment....today someone contacted me about my birds, and I had just emptied my kiln with a dozen or so of them finished.  When I wrote back to her I told her that she had contacted me at just the right moment, and she said something like yes, more and more when I feel it, I am acting on it, I'm not waiting anymore.  I've been thinking that  I feel that way too.  Life might be so much shorter than I was expecting.  

Jeung Hwa is an amazing woman.  She makes beautiful scarves, but they are only an entry point.  Being in the presence of a body of her work for me feels like I am surrounded by a cathedral of color. It is a spritual experience.  Her colors vibrate, I want to breath them in and out...  But then there is the person, which was my initial and cntinual attraction.  She is lovely, and peaceful, and she has a warm and gentle touch that is unmatched.... Beauty inside and out that I experience deeply each time we meet.  How lucky I felt to see her today!

Gardens are waking up.....

Springtime colors in Washington DC... I'm here for a few days helping my dear friend set up her artwork for an exhibition...happy to be here for her in all ways.... And an added bonus...the cherry blossoms are absolute perfection!!!!!!

I was introduced to the work of this artist by my Dutch friend.  I would love to be in his studio surrounded by his world.  It feels so familiar to me, and  love it.  She is his friend and told me she would take me there, sometime soon I hope.  Until then.... a video and several images for you.  He has an exhibit up now:   http://centraalmuseum.nl/en/visit/exhibitions/couzijn-van-leeuwen-pleasure-garden/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv2nDaaSCOg

I have planted hundreds of bulbs at my house, but most of them have disappeared, probably eaten by hungry animals.  And so many daffodils nearly all of them gone.  I had a dream about fields of springtime yellow daffys when I first moved to this house... But there are a few still, mostly ones I transplanted from my friend Charlotte's house, and now that she is gone (Though she made it to about 97), I am happy that these are the little faces thAt greet me in the spring, reminding me of her unique personality and earthly presence.  She told me once that she had bought them from a catalogue, in the 40s probably, and had planted them in a row, that grew so full of flowers you could have picked buckets of them and not made a dent in the field of color.  I miss not being able to visit her anymore, but am so happy to be reminded now, every spring when I am visited by her spirit in these  flowers....

Going to wake up and walk all over see what has woken up while I was away...

It was a really long day.  Almost home.....but not yet.  Somewhere North Carolina.