Age & Beauties
Recently, I displayed and sold some handknit items at Aida's Boutique. Here's Lilah Rae, modeling a child-sized sock monkey hat off the knittydotcom free pattern service. She doesn't look too happy, but she was sooooo cute & cuddly!
I had flown up to San Francisco for a friend's performance. One of the members of his ensemble is shown here dancing "Robam Tiyae" in the classical Cambodian dance idiom. Dancer and instructor Sothavy Khot holds up her hand and the lighting of the Red Poppy Art House kept catching the light of the dancers palms. That particular lightness of their palms looked like it was holding light. I haven't seen hands highlighted so well before and even though the lighting was not professional stage quality, I found it lovely -- the venue, its location, the volunteer staff, even the audience.
Back at home again, it was time to do work. Lots and lots of work. Some work is for money. Some work I take on because I am following a question, a curiosity, a dream, an open-ended situation, a feeling.
Here I split up a photo of a dancer from Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taipei Taiwan into two frames. In some ways the photos is an inspiration, in other ways, it shows how far I've traveled. I never had one original love, but I did so love dancing and choreographing. I still do, but the instrument has grown testy with age. Last week, for instance, I strained a buttock muscle and am unable to really workout and definitely cannot take dance class until it heals.
Some people think I'm into EVERYTHING -- the domestic arts, the performing arts, thinking & reading too much, and the plastic arts as a hobby. Here's something I saw at the Asian Art Museum that inspired me to go home and do ALL my old and wannabe-created projects at the same time. It's from late 19th century China and it's a detail from a woman's skirt.
And take a breath. Just look at something beautiful for a moment:
These are tulips from Judes on Easter. Sure they're not fresh and they're growing older. So am I. I try to find beauty in each phase of my life, frustrating as that can be. I am not aging gracefully. I am fighting too much by holding onto old ideas about How Things Should Be.
One reason why I am not an adult in a thirteen-year-old dancer's body is because I love the domestic arts of cooking, eating, and hosting meals. Recently, this season's loquats came to ripeness and fell on people's sidewalks and uneaten on their backyard grass. I thought many, many times about begging people for the opportunity to pick their loquats -- so good for coating the throat when SoCal allergy season kicks up and I cough as if I was wracked with tuberculosis. Last year I asked. This year, I just wanted to take the fruit. Instead, I took this picture:
For a while, I had successfully grown a loquat tree sprouted from a loquat seed. Out of 10 seeds I planted, only one grew. And then it died. This local garden inspires me to keep plugging away when I have the time and energy on our landlord's property, on the 2 front, the back, and the side gardens surrounding this rental property. Someday, I hope it looks like this:
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And I see all grace when I look at you.