BooM!

'Volcano' necklace 18-20" chain 2-2.5" discs,
sterling silver, gouache, paper, glass lenses
Kathleen Faulkner

It's almost a new year.

Although the days now will be getting longer, they're not there yet.  

Heavy rain, short days make for some good pondering.

Career:  I have a plan.  My new year is already full.  It is what I've wanted.

Personal:  I also have a plan.  I'm breaking loops.  It feels good.  

Resolution:  be kinder.

“I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.”
― Gary Snyder

Ode to the wood

'The Wood Poets' 16x20" oil and soft pastel, charcoal;
Kathleen Faulkner

As for poets

The Earth Poets

Who write small poems

Need help from no man.

Gary Snyder

Turtle Island

Blood is thicker than the mud

'Family Affair' 16x20" oil and soft pastel, charcoal;
Kathleen Faulkner

"All that we did was human,

stupid, easily forgiven,

Not quite right."

                    - Gary Snyder

Some goals

Untitled Neckpiece 30x1.5" sterling silver;  Kathleen Faulkner

Another year:  Art Talk is two years old this month.  I must admit that I'm proud of myself for sticking with it this long.

Someone said that every drawing is a self portrait.  I tend to believe that to be true of all mediums and, if that's the case, I've put myself out there to the whole world  as all artists do when their work is viewed by the public.  The good news is that this blog is a vehicle for connection.  I feel like I'm talking to a friend when I write these posts.

I have two goals for this blog:  a place to view my work and think about art and a place to be reminded, now and then, of the mystery and beauty of wild places; vital, living environments that should be allowed to exist simply because they exist.

My hope is to move someone, somewhere, 

a millionth of an inch*

*HOW TO BREAK THROUGH:
“Have big dreams but focus only on what you can control: your own thoughts, words and actions. This was Gandhi’s way … in the words of poet Gary Snyder,
our job is to move the world a millionth of an inch.”
Eboo Patel

An important message:

'Message in a Bottle' 36' found objects, poem by Gary
Snyder, sterling silver; Kathleen Faulkner

An owl winks in the shadows

A lizard lifts on tiptoe, breathing hard

Young male sparrow stretches up his neck,

big head, watching-

The grasses are working in the sun. Turn it green.

Turn it sweet.  That we may eat.

Grow our meat.

Brazil says "sovereign use of Natural Resources"

Thirty thousand kinds of unknown plants.

The living actual people of the jungle

sold and tortured'

And a robot in a suit who peddles a delusion called 'Brazil"

can speak for them?

The whales turn and glisten plunge

and sound and rise again

Hanging over subtly darkening deeps

Flowing like breathing planets 

in the sparkling whorls of 

living light-

And Japan quibbles for words on

what kinds of whales they can kill?

A once-great Buddhist nation

dribbles methyl mercury 

like gonorrhea

in the sea.

Pere David's Deer, the Elaphure,

lived in the tule marshes of the Yellow River

Two thousand years ago - and lost it's home to rice-

The forests of Lo - yang were logged and all the silt and

sand flowed down,

and gone, by 1200 AD -

Wild geese hatched out of Siberia

head south over basins of the Yang, the Huang,

What we call "China"

On flyways they have used a million years.

Ah China, where are the tigers, the wild boars,

the monkeys,

like the snows of yesteryear

Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground

Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks.

Is man most precious of all things?

- then let us love him, and his brothers, all those

Fading living beings -

North America, Turtle Island, taken by invaders

who wage war around the world.

May ants, may abalone, otters, wolves and elk

Rise! and pull away their giving 

from the robot nations.

Solidarity. The People

Standing Tree People!

Flying Bird People!

Swimming Sea People!

Four-legged, two-legged people!

How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist

Government two-world Capitalist-Imperialist

Third-world Communist paper-shuffling make

non-farmer jet-set bureaucrats

Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil?

(Ah Margaret Mead... do you sometimes dream of Samoa?)

The robots argue how to parcel out Mother Earth

To last a little longer

like vultures flapping

Belching, gurgling,

near a dying doe.

"In yonder field a slain knight lies-

We'll fly to him and eat his eyes

with a down

derry derry derry down down."

An Owl winks in the shadow

A lizard lifts on tiptoe

breathing hard

The whales turn and glisten

plunge and

Sound, and rise again

Flowing like breathing planets

In the sparkling whorls

Of living light.     

                                                                  'Mother Earth:  Her Whales'

                                                                                     by Gary Snyder

Full Moon: Lunar Eclipse

'Animalia'  20'x various sizes, sterling silver, Kathleen Faulkner

We live in Paradise.

Saturday I walked along the shore at Washington Park. It was low tide.
 Living, breathing, the scents of ocean world
a whole universe that we usually take for granted.  

         the big trucks with their pleasure boats all lined up, waiting for the tide to come in

     while I wonder at the colors of the kelp, and textures.

The whales turn and glisten, plunge

and sound and rise again,

Hanging over subtly darkening deeps

Flowing like breathing planets 

in the sparkling whorls of

living light-

Gary Snyder from 'Turtle Island'

For The Children

"Dancing Trees" 28x32" oil pastel, Kathleen Faulkner

I recently heard about a new type of school called The Forest school. Kids learn outside in the woods all day, every day, rain or shine.  I can see it now:  little kids in rain gear, eating lunch on a tarp in the rain.. Not such a bad thing if you're a kid hungry for adventure.  I can't think of any child that doesn't like to play in the rain or just be outside.
It is so easy to love and appreciate nature and wilderness when it has become a part of one's life: what's not to love?

Humans tend to fear the unknown.  Children making friends with a forest might end up being what saves us..

"The rising hills, the slopes,

of statistics

lie before us,

the steep climb

of everything, going up,

up, as we all go down.

In the next century 

or the one beyond that,

they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to 

you and your children:

stay together

learn the flowers,

travel light"

                                                                               Gary Snyder,  Turtle Island