I’m having chats with a printer person….looking through tons of my images….for a few ideas I’ve had. I’m okay with coming up with ideas, but I get distracted by doing the actual ‘work’…the drawings….and am not great at getting them a home. She thinks this one might make an interesting ‘business card’ (I don’t have a ‘business’ really….but as I can never remember my phone number….it might be useful)
When I need to ‘have a proper think’ I often take a walk. Today the weather was too hot to take the pooches out after 6am and before 6pm…..so I did the other thing that helps me concentrate my thoughts…I had a doodle. (Not a euphemism…see drawing above.) While doodling I received something in the post that made me realise the way I’m living my life doesn’t need as much revision as I’d been thinking it did. It also gave me the energy and resources to make a couple of practical moves towards something I’m hoping for……
A writer friend and I were chatting about Amy in the early hours, and she said if she was a painter she would draw her with actual bees in her beehive, humming the songs, keeping her awake all night long. I loved that idea, especially as it sums up the way thoughts buzz your brain at 4am, and how brilliant it is when you can turn the dark thoughts into a piece of writing, music or art. So I drew this…..
When I was at art college I got tired of all the white walls that ‘best displayed’ the art we spilled. My tutors weren’t happy when I jazzed up the walls…but I was making installations, so they couldn’t entirely object. I feel the same when I see graveyards….the perpetual white to grey sameness in rows. All those individual lives, spent in a myriad of ways, shapes, colours, textures, flavours….remembered as a grey tablet when they’re gone. I would like this as my tombstone, please.
My life has few consistencies, but it has one consistency since I got older: things arrive too late. I’m thinking in particular about opportunities and rewards, which are so tardy in arriving that I’ll have gone past caring by the time they turn up.
Today I have a poem up on Atrium Poetry. I would highly recommend reading and submitting work to this fabulous online magazine….
Angelica
The Inheritance of Loss afforded him
opportunity to leave her. The Other Hand
was saved for us, shaped how she raised us.
Intimacy meant getting close enough
to have our blocks knocked off. The Great Beast
was tucked behind curtains or under blankets.
Slaughterhouse fueled my nightmares; her
choosing from curtains of meat at Snapes’s
while I gazed at meringues next door in Burton’s.
Topped with angelica, I knew they were reserved
for The Most Beautiful Woman in Town.
Karen Little trained as a dancer and a fine artist. She is widely published as a poet in the UK and further afield.
I rarely put my drawings up here. Maybe I should. Today I wrote a poem and then drew this, using the (writing) prompt ‘Wearing your Charmed Life’
I believe we attract the very thing we fear and want to avoid. Probably by feeding it with attention and energy. I think we keep repeating lessons until we understand the message. I think life is primarily about learning. I believe we carry all of our learning into our next lives. I won’t label that belief with ‘reincarnation’. I would like to avoid labels . I believe labels are a convenient way for other people to squash us.
At this point in time I’m living in a trailer on a trailer park. The surroundings are beautiful, BUT I have a vindictive next door neighbour who is trying to get me ousted. This is not paranoia. Yesterday a friend on the trailer park came over to tell me that Jill is hammering on doors and trying to get neighbours on her side. I’ve done nothing wrong.
This is not the first time this has happened. That fact doesn’t mean I’m doing anything wrong. It means the thing that I most fear, being kicked out of my home is on a constant repeat cycle.
I’m happy with the kind of minimum, undecorated, mish-mash of an existence a huge swathe of my friends would be horrified by. But I really need to feel secure in the place I live. I need to feel (and it to be the case) that I can stay somewhere for as long as I want.
Three weeks ago my small Chinese crested rescue dog Noodles was savaged by a Staffie. During the attack my other rescue dog Chicken, a cross-breed. slipped her harness and tore off down the road. Both my dogs were on leash, a hundred yards from the Trailer Park where we live. The Staffie was off leash, not in the control of the owner who was a hundred yards behind his dog as it tore towards Noodles and viciously attacked him. When the owner arrived he couldn’t get his dog to release mine, who was screaming in pain. Then a blank. I’m walking down the High Street looking for my second dog, and someone points out where she ran to, then seeing the terrible state of my other dog, drives us to our vet ‘out of hours.’ A huge vet bill, a terrifying time at Pet Hospital where Noodles’s stomach was sewn up (it was herniated) and the puncture wounds all over his body treated. Stitches are now out, but we are all a mess. I am trying not to be a mess, because the dogs pick up on my emotions, but I am a mess. I have reported the attack, but as I was not in a position to take details from the owner, he and his dog are still doing what they do. I imagine in a new area, because I will recognise them. But who knows? Stupidity and arrogance very often go hand in hand.
Filled With Ghosts 