Friday, January 30, 2009

Love Encaustic Painting? Check Out Jamie's Contest

Do you long to try encaustic? Well do I have a suggestion for you! Go to this website and one article down there is a contest that can win you an encasutis how to manual from one of my favorite artists right here in Maine. Go here you will be thrilled:
Jamie's blog giveaway! here---->
http://www.jamieribisi.blogspot.com/

and if you aren't thrilled come right back here and complain lol.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

a box of poems

While I was cleaning I came upon some old poems that may need reworking. Here is one for example...I did make a few changes. It was originally entitled Sky Spirit in Ivory I was inspired by an orchard in the White Mountains of New Hampshire:


In my bones
marrow shrivels into
grains.

I open the window
breathe in the sky
the sunset dance and all its turnings.

The trees of the apple orchard
are stripped and evenly spaced.
Late Novembers flame
snared in their black branches.

I feel
the tiny particles slide and catch within my hollow bones.
Seeds in a rainstick,
they shift in their ossuary and roll with the sky.

I see
the branches
slide into the shadows.

Vertebrae shudder rib against rib against rib
sliding down the clapboards of the kitchen wall
learning to catch the beat just right.

The dream was to soar through walls.
The trick is to soar with in them.
~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.


I'm toying with a new title for it something about change or freedom.


++++++++++++++++++++++
The there is this one:

On a late June day we were
the wild pacific wind
swirling down the coast
in the back of a red pick up truck
from Coos Bay to San Fransisco

Blowing five hundred miles nonstop through
Driftwood
Redwood
Marshwood sculptured huts.


We materialized
sometime after our feet hit the ground
in the mission district around midnight.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Magic is a foot

It seems to me that just the presence of Obama in the white house has created more job openings in my social service field. I am not sure how that worked so quickly. Though most likely the funding isn't all that hot. but I am hopeful that my original time frame for going back to work will be right on track. I am sending out resumes and applications.

I got invited to join the facebook group iPeace. Some of the pieces I am reading there echo my feeling the pendulum is definitely swinging towards a less fearful, less hierarchcial, pro feminist time where we work in a more cooperative, creative and respectful way. I remember those times and have hungered for them to be more in vogue.

I took one of those blog quizzes and feel that it goes along with where I'm at right now.


You are The Star


Hope, expectation, Bright promises.


The Star is one of the great cards of faith, dreams realised


The Star is a card that looks to the future. It does not predict any immediate or powerful change, but it does predict hope and healing. This card suggests clarity of vision, spiritual insight. And, most importantly, that unexpected help will be coming, with water to quench your thirst, with a guiding light to the future. They might say you're a dreamer, but you're not the only one.


What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Monday, January 19, 2009

The 6 things Tag

Write 6 random things about yourself

1 I have very green eyes. Which I found out today could make me a witch in catholic school.

2 I played the flute in the school band.

3 I like Greek food but there aren't any Greek restaurants around here.

4 I am allergic to aspirin and scallops

5 I qualified for naval intelligence until I came to my senses and backed out.

6 I give a great massage and did that for a living for a while.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

The activist comes out



When I was in Hattiesburg on December 30th 2008, I saw the news about Cynthia McKinney and the pleasure boat she was on delivering humanitarian aid to the blockaded Gaza strip. The yacht had been rammed by an Israeli war ship. This action was followed by the bombing of the Gaza strip a slice of occupied territory on the Mediterranean Sea.

I was later, inspired by a young woman who taught at a university in a walled city in the West Bank. I did more research. 10 thousand Israelis protested the bombing of Gaza. The Israeli activists are calling for similar measures to those taken to end Apartheid. Some of these Israeli groups are called Women's Coalition for Peace, Anarchists Against the Wall, The Alternative information Center, New Profile.
I received this email:
Israel’s Message

Ilan Pappe
In 2004, the Israeli army began building a dummy Arab city in the Negev desert. It’s the size of a real city, with streets (all of them given names), mosques, public buildings and cars. Built at a cost of $45 million, this phantom city became a dummy Gaza in the winter of 2006, after Hizbullah fought Israel to a draw in the north, so that the IDF could prepare to fight a ‘better war’ against Hamas in the south.
When the Israeli Chief of General Staff Dan Halutz visited the site after the Lebanon war, he told the press that soldiers ‘were preparing for the scenario that will unfold in the dense neighbourhood of Gaza City’. A week into the bombardment of Gaza, Ehud Barak attended a rehearsal for the ground war. Foreign television crews filmed him as he watched ground troops conquer the dummy city, storming the empty houses and no doubt killing the ‘terrorists’ hiding in them.
‘Gaza is the problem,’ Levy Eshkol, then prime minister of Israel, said in June 1967. ‘I was there in 1956 and saw venomous snakes walking in the street. We should settle some of them in the Sinai, and hopefully the others will immigrate.’ Eshkol was discussing the fate of the newly occupied territories: he and his cabinet wanted the Gaza Strip, but not the people living in it.
Israelis often refer to Gaza as ‘Me’arat Nachashim’, a snake pit. Before the first intifada, when the Strip provided Tel Aviv with people to wash their dishes and clean their streets, Gazans were depicted more humanely. The ‘honeymoon’ ended during their first intifada, after a series of incidents in which a few of these employees stabbed their employers. The religious fervour that was said to have inspired these isolated attacks generated a wave of Islamophobic feeling in Israel, which led to the first enclosure of Gaza and the construction of an electric fence around it. Even after the 1993 Oslo Accords, Gaza remained sealed off from Israel, and was used merely as a pool of cheap labour; throughout the 1990s, ‘peace’ for Gaza meant its gradual transformation into a ghetto.
In 2000, Doron Almog, then the chief of the southern command, began policing the boundaries of Gaza: ‘We established observation points equipped with the best technology and our troops were allowed to fire at anyone reaching the fence at a distance of six kilometres,’ he boasted, suggesting that a similar policy be adopted for the West Bank. In the last two years alone, a hundred Palestinians have been killed by soldiers merely for getting too close to the fences. From 2000 until the current war broke out, Israeli forces killed three thousand Palestinians (634 children among them) in Gaza.
Between 1967 and 2005, Gaza’s land and water were plundered by Jewish settlers in Gush Katif at the expense of the local population. The price of peace and security for the Palestinians there was to give themselves up to imprisonment and colonisation. Since 2000, Gazans have chosen instead to resist in greater numbers and with greater force. It was not the kind of resistance the West approves of: it was Islamic and military. Its hallmark was the use of primitive Qassam rockets, which at first were fired mainly at the settlers in Katif. The presence of the settlers, however, made it hard for the Israeli army to retaliate with the brutality it uses against purely Palestinian targets. So the settlers were removed, not as part of a unilateral peace process as many argued at the time (to the point of suggesting that Ariel Sharon be awarded the Nobel peace prize), but rather to facilitate any subsequent military action against the Gaza Strip and to consolidate control of the West Bank.
After the disengagement from Gaza, Hamas took over, first in democratic elections, then in a pre-emptive coup staged to avert an American-backed takeover by Fatah. Meanwhile, Israeli border guards continued to kill anyone who came too close, and an economic blockade was imposed on the Strip. Hamas retaliated by firing missiles at Sderot, giving Israel a pretext to use its air force, artillery and gunships. Israel claimed to be shooting at ‘the launching areas of the missiles’, but in practice this meant anywhere and everywhere in Gaza. The casualties were high: in 2007 alone three hundred people were killed in Gaza, dozens of them children.
Israel justifies its conduct in Gaza as a part of the fight against terrorism, although it has itself violated every international law of war. Palestinians, it seems, can have no place inside historical Palestine unless they are willing to live without basic civil and human rights. They can be either second-class citizens inside the state of Israel, or inmates in the mega-prisons of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. If they resist they are likely to be imprisoned without trial, or killed. This is Israel’s message.
Resistance in Palestine has always been based in villages and towns; where else could it come from? That is why Palestinian cities, towns and villages, dummy or real, have been depicted ever since the 1936 Arab revolt as ‘enemy bases’ in military plans and orders. Any retaliation or punitive action is bound to target civilians, among whom there may be a handful of people who are involved in active resistance against Israel. Haifa was treated as an enemy base in 1948, as was Jenin in 2002; now Beit Hanoun, Rafah and Gaza are regarded that way. When you have the firepower, and no moral inhibitions against massacring civilians, you get the situation we are now witnessing in Gaza.
But it is not only in military discourse that Palestinians are dehumanised. A similar process is at work in Jewish civil society in Israel, and it explains the massive support there for the carnage in Gaza. Palestinians have been so dehumanised by Israeli Jews – whether politicians, soldiers or ordinary citizens – that killing them comes naturally, as did expelling them in 1948, or imprisoning them in the Occupied Territories. The current Western response indicates that its political leaders fail to see the direct connection between the Zionist dehumanisation of the Palestinians and Israel’s barbarous policies in Gaza. There is a grave danger that, at the conclusion of ‘Operation Cast Lead’, Gaza itself will resemble the ghost town in the Negev.

Ilan Pappe is chair of the history department at the University of Exeter and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine came out in 2007.





and wrote this letter:
Lets stop funding war crimes

As we embrace change , the US must change its policies in Israel. Israel’s brazen and atrocious acts against the people in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank demand outrage from the world. Israel’s government has been given free license to commit genocide in the name of peace for decades. The bombing of Gaza is over for now, but I am certain that the siege of Gaza continues. The occupied territories are still walled by 15 foot walls and oft times impassable checkpoints. There are thousands of Israeli activists, both Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, urging the world to make sanctions against their own government such as those that helped to end Apartheid in South Africa. Some Israeli citizens are even asking the world to put their leaders on trial for war crimes in the wake of the bombing of Gaza.
Some say Israel needs to be a bully in the middle east to keep terrorists at bay, while painting them as the victims. Victims who have access to the best munitions in the world. The powers that be in Israel have ignored UN directives time and time again and recently bombed UN facilities in Gaza. Killing over a thousand innocent civilians in what amounts to a continuation of genocide. World pressure decrying Israel’s actions may have influenced the current cease fire. The world needs to do more. Gaza needs to be changed from the worlds largest open air prison to a free city. As we work towards a new integrity, the United States must truly turn over a new leaf and stop funding Israel’s war crimes. Susan Chandel
Refer to http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com

I am in hopes that more people will speak out to effect a change.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

eye of wonder live!

See that rainbow eye over there to the right it represents a bunch of my favorite people on etsy and we are going to be live.
The Etsy Freethinkers are going to be featured on blockhead radio on Saturday, January 17, from 1pm to 2:30 pm EST. We will be discussing the origins of the team and talking about our members and what they make. Names will be named and shop URLs given out.I'd like to invite everyone to tune in to listen at www.BlogTalkRadio.com and or call in questions. The phone number is 646-648-7320.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

This half baked ramble makes no sense



latest mitts and grandpa^
Robots robots everywhere. Some of my favorite folks are making robots notably http://www.tofunutloaf.etsy.com and http://www.psandqs.etsy.com. As I look at these robots and the knock off robots I can't help but wonder, what kind of a statement is this in our difficult times where the unemployment rate is sky high? Does it mean we have been treated like robots? Does it mean we have all been displaced by robots.Are we taking back the robots? "I'm no body's robot see. I have My own robot" "Do I look like a robot to you?" These were my first thoughts as I considered the current state of affairs in society today. People if they are working are grateful to actually have a job and perhaps are more apt to put up with being treated like robots?
It could be simply an ushering in of change.
Well in the wake of job shortages people are flexing their creativity to get by, which is a good thing considering all that has been done in the past 8 years to squelch the arts in the schools with this no child left behind left brained cookie cutter programming. Well I guess that we haven't been rote off yet :D.
okay with that ghastly pun its back to the drawing board or felting board as it were.
Labels: ramble, robots, umemployment

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Road trip Christmas 08




singing the blues, originally uploaded by suzeesjubileez.

Karaoke can be done anywhere but we happened to be staying in a hotel in Cypress, Texas just west of Houston where they happened to have a fun karaoke night next door at Henry Hudson's pub. The KJ didn't have a list like most karaoke jocks. He said he had anything and everything. He seemed to have a few tunes I hadn't seen at other karaoke nights.
We were on the road in a U haul from Austin TX to Fall River MA. I especially enjoyed Louisville KY where we did some touristy stuff. Checking out the Ohio Falls museum and several art galleries including the very cool 21c hotel and contemporary art museum. Not to mention The World of Swirl/Paradise Cafe.