MotherPie

Great Words...

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question. --Stephen Jay Gould

Never face facts; if you do, you'll never get up in the morning.--Marlo Thomas

(Always face facts with a question. -- MotherPie)

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.--Rene Descartes

Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. --John Stuart Mill

...and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know it for the first time. --T.S. Eliot

It is what it is (and the is can change).--MotherPie

From Valentines to Spring Fertility...

Sitting atop an iron layered display thing-a-ma-bob that was filled with pine cones for the winter holidays, then sprinkled with valentines, I stuck little folk art fabric dolls - an Adam and an Eve from Latin America.  Eve is offering up the apple and I thought this was an interesting topper for a Valentine display. 

So did guys who came to visit my husband and these little dolls were found in all sorts of positions, varying from day-to-day. So I'm told.  I was in Dallas visiting my daughters.

Now I've pulled out all the Easter eggs, the fragile shells decorated over the years by my children who stopped doing this awhile ago.  How they have made it through major cross-country moves must be because that Easter grass is ultra protective.  So I've left the naked dolls with their fig-leaf protection at the top of the display wire thing.  Now we've moved to the fertility idea of the eggs and all the Oester/Easter/Spring things this means.  If my kiddos were around, the dolls wouldn't be up there.  Would you have a problem w/ this at your house?  Want me to tell you where you, too, can get these dolls? (at Pachamama in Santa Fe on Canyon Road).

Easter is March 23 this year.  The last time Easter fell on so early a date was 1913, and the next time it will do so will be in the year 2160

Part II: Privacy and The (Watching) Eyes...

Part II: Privacy & Eyes Looking In:

Starting with the eye as the definition of self, artistically and symbolically in Part I, Eyes Looking Out, I am now in Part II looking at the issue of technology and privacy and wondering how this will alter our very sense of self, our soul and our way of seeing our identities and our world. 

For our children, things will be and are dramatically, radically different, far more different than they already are, tech wise.  Profound changes are altering us in ways that are complex and scary and unfathomable. Like the kohl used for protection around eyes long ago and today (this kohl-lined eye at right is from an Egyptian sarcophagus in the Met), what firewalls or metaphorical kohl and protections will we have?   What will we give up for convenience, for safety, for security and what are the long-term implications? 

Horserace?

While picking up my repaired (but totally empty and naked) Mac laptop from the Albuquerque Apple store yesterday, I wandered over to Borders (to see if Infidel was available on CD - it wasn't) and this is all I saw on one shelf.  Two shelves below were products of Bushisms.

Establishment?  Or was it for Hillary's speech today in Duke City?  Obama was headed over to Santa Fe.

Remember the Dead: Dia de Los Muertos...

Some people would have spent the last few days making sugar skulls with the name of the dead on them to keep alive the memory of those who have died and placed them on altars at home and elsewhere.

You get to die three times: once when you take your last breath, another when you are buried, and a third time when you are forgotten by the living.

Here, in our culture, death becomes a scary thing and we spend $5 billion on the Halloween holiday to dress up and parade around with this fall festival.  Last week at the International Folk Art Museum a lecture on Day of the Dead altars in Mexico gave details on how the dead are kept alive.  A three-tiered altar is made with marigolds and their scent and an archway above are to bring the dead back.  Water to quench the thirst of the soul and other favorite foods of the deceased are placed there, along with mementos that remind the living of the loved ones who have departed this world such as a photo, a favorite comb or such. Sugar skulls made with molds (purchase via link) with the name of the dead are placed on the altar and shared with others.  I've written elsewhere about Day of thte Dead here and here.

All Saint's Day (Nov. 1) honors the children, who are considered saints anyway.  All Soul's (Nov. 2) honors all other dead.  Something that I would consider adding to my folk art collection of Day of the Dead items would be a skull by award-winning ceramicist Jose Luis Serrano from Metepec via the Day of the Dead Folk Art Gallery.  But here we do the art but not the tradition of remembering that is behind the art.

Gone, but not forgotten. I think it is a great idea to keep alive the memory of those who have gone before in a structured holiday of the celebration of lives lived and the legacy of memories. Who has time to go gather at the grave?  Our families are all scattered, our focus is on our own living selves and death is a hushed thing. Our culture of individualism makes death a one-done deal.

Trick or Treat...

It is our American Halloween week where we spend $5 billion for holiday fun and we culturally play with the spooky, like the cover of the New Yorker, out this week at right.  For us, it is a week of tricks (?), like today's NYT article by Maureen Dowd of a conversation between Tim Russert and Dick Cheney:

RUSSERT: How close are we to war with Iran?

CHENEY: Well, I think we are in the final stages of diplomacy, obviously. We have done virtually everything we can with respect to carrots, if you will. It’s time for squash. Not to mention mushrooms, clouds of them.

Sen. Dodd said today on Meet the Press that the Iran war rhetoric has stepped up. (for real). "The administration clearly is on a drumbeat here, given the Cheney speeches... Clearly this administration is moving in that direction, towards military action against Iran.  ... And I believe we’re getting precariously close to that happening."

Was Bush's WWIII comment a trick or a faux-pas?

Maybe this is the play way we deal with the dead, the evil, the scary, the spooky. Boo!

Inventing a Better Future: WAR

A facial reconstruction surgeon took a job in Atlanta in 2004 because the returning injured soldiers were surviving with injuries that would have caused death in earlier wars.  The difference: advances in protective gear. This doctor had just moved from NYC and told me that medical advances were sure to be an outcome of this war because of the challenges of dealing with the severely wounded.

Today's photo on the White House website showing President Bush jogging with two veterans who have lost legs in this war is a good illustration of advances we are beginning to see.  Bush says he is inspired by these two Walter Reed veterans. 

America's losses in this war on terrorism , including 9/11 victims and all U.S. military personnel killed in action in Afghanistan and Iraq, total about 2 percent of the forces we lost in World War II and less than 7 percent of those killed in Vietnam. 

NBA or NFL? Congress and the Dead Dog in the Suitcase...

Have you seen the viral email asking if the outlined behavior is that of members of the NFL or NBA (but really, the behavior is attributed to the members of Congress)?

Well, for the week of the 4th, here it is on the flip:

Sliding Through Life...

As You Slide Down the Banister of Life, Remember

1. Jim Baker and Jimmy Swaggert have written an impressive new book.  It's called "Ministers Do More Than Lay People."

2. Transvestite: A guy who likes to eat, drink and be Mary.

3. The difference between the Pope and your boss: the Pope only expects you to kiss his ring.

4. My mind works like lightning, One brilliant flash and it is gone.

5. The only time the world beats a path to your door is if you're in the bathroom.

6. I hate sex in the movies.  Tried it once.  The seat folded up, the drink spilled, and that ice, well, it really chilled the mood.

7. It used to be only death and taxes were inevitable.  Now, of course, there's shipping and handling, too.

8. A husband is someone who, after taking the trash out, gives the impression that he just cleaned the whole house.

9. My next house will have no kitchen, just vending machines and a large trash can.

10. A blonde said, "I was worried that my mechanic might try to rip me off.  I was relieved when he told me all I needed was turn-signal fluid."

11. My neighbor was bit by a stray rabid dog. I went to see how he was doing and found him writing frantically on a piece of paper.  I told him rabies could be treated, and he didn't have to worry about a will.  He said, "Will? What Will?  I'm making a list of the people I want to bite."

12. Definition of a teenager?  God's punishment . . . for enjoying sex.

As you slide down the banister of life, may the splinters never point the wrong way.

From my NYC friend Carol.  MotherPie's Award-Winning Post: Skating Through Life? Yea, Right.

Perfect Love and What Peeves Me...

Some proclivities can't be parented away and it is hard to change our spouses.  What we are, at our core, and the good and bad of it and how some of our behavior is just a sour thing to bear for those around us made for a very interesting family dinner converstion.  When I asked what I did that just really got their goats...well, they didn't hold back.  Funny, that I have forgotten what they said about me.

We have these things with our friends and our loves, these things we have to overlook, get past, endure or...maybe even suffer. One of my friends forwards me emails and never says anything personal.  I just hit delete.  What if we had personality delete buttons that could just delete detestable behavior?  In others, of course.   ha. haha.  Before my oldest daughter was engaged, I took her to see "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change."  Hmmmm.  Does this say anything about us culturally that this is the longest running off-Broadway musical?

Clarissa Pinkola Estes told a story in her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, about a woman who tried to make her true love perfect.  Her lover died and in completely embracing the rotting corpse he comes to life from a love that loves even the very worst.  It is a good fable about moving beyond infatuation to unconditional love.  The idea of love, warts and all.  Warty.

Even still, there are those warty things that really really push my buttons.  I can't stand it when...