healing magic of clay

In the summer of 1977 I remember walking home from the potter's studio with a view of the bay and loving the sensation of the clay on my jeans so much that I decided to collect it there for a while like some sort of earthen armor.So I'd hang them on a hook on my door.There was a poem there and if I shuffle through my boxes of old writing, I might find that hand written piece.Clay so sensual and grounding...it was the perfect craft that July and August when I returned from France.
For the longest time, I still had a couple of chip bowls I had made, but most of the things I have given away over the years. I did buy some wonderful tumblers from my friend Kim at claypatties.etsy.com that even though glazed and fired, are infused with that healing magic of clay.
An old friend of the family, Nancy passed away last year unexpectedly and her studio equipment was orphaned. If I could figure out the water issue in my garage, I might pick it up myself. I'd say the studio is about 3 hours from here. I was offered the equipment and asked if I knew any potters who wanted to buy it. At the time, I was busy with Claire's hospice to really get on that train. Nancy's partner, Don wasn't quite ready to sell itthen anyway. So we kind of put it all on hold. We get together more in the summer at the old family farm, a time capsule museum. It is in North Berwick, ME, only an hour south of here. I just got this list of items. Most of the things are still in the studio.

Kiln Model K-18 Econo Kiln 220V/20A/4.4KW (L&L Mfg) w/ Dawson NMFR Kiln Sitter
purchased 1/3/74 from Newton Potters Supply for $198.50 + tax
Kiln vent, Bailey purchased 6/23/95 for $311.45
Potters Wheel Shimpo model RK-2
Wheel shelf
Cabinet 30x16x72H
Table top
Table 36x48x30H
Shelves (2)
Counter/crates 73x22x32H
Table 36x62x32H
File cabinet
Shelf (disassembled) 38x25x71H
Chest + shelf
Desk 34x60x31
Craig's shelves 28x73x84
Egg crate-like shelves
Metal shelves 71x69x28
Ware cart 23x32x67
Chair
4 stools
Pots
Clays
Glazes

Not in studio:
Gas fired kiiln (outdoor, disassembled) purchased 1996 for $750
Kick wheel (?5/16/74 $61.80 from Clay Art Center)

some other etsy potters:

http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=6355661
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5404916
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=6355660

wordlesswednesday

yesterday's poem

When the World You Claim Seems Bigger Than It Is

When the world seems bigger than it is .
It’s easy to get lost in the crowd.

Everyone knows
that dazzlers are
accomplished at invisibility
when it all gets too close

Barely brushing humanity
as accustomed.


Mounds of split tickets in the shadows,
swept up with the dance cards
Forgotten except the applause.

In the moment….

That’s what footloose means

No time for haunting regrets
When perpetually in the moment.

When your world seems bigger than it is,
Toss your heart in the corner pocket
Of the ghetto you spin in
And call yourself free.


Susan Chandel July 22, 2009

the poem I am working on these days

Tourists at tea



I was drawn to the flourite talismans,
their ornate bezels and the silver tassels.
I cupped them between my fingers.


The news about bloodroot was timely.
We never used sun screen.

The trace of cynic in the tension tamer tea was not lost.

A pale Klimt lady in a trance most days
consciously reports
I bet it all on a seer, landed here
With a little bay …
She needs to believe beyond doubt
in that expanded circle of love that radiates
miles around her.
Scary to follow the whim of a seer and to lay around daily in a trance.
It isn’t ordinary. .. But that is what it is.

Motionless tours were not as exotic
without the transcendent component,
Though the extraordinary is becoming more common.

There is heart in the pretty little bay, she chimed.

What about the city shelter with screams into
the dark night where people stay to get a subsidy or a hot meal?

Desperate is a matter of degrees.
The scientist asks for twenty or thirty and gets twenty five.
Her need for precision is lost on us.

When bent on the true.
and by that I mean the resonant, all stones are upended.

At the retreat, no singing in the shower allowed.

The curtain is torn.

Susan Chandel 6/17/09

Nothing to do with the poem except I was tossed back into the scene this past weekend. One summer ( maybe the summer of 1981) on Ellery St in Cambridge my friend Wally Butts had just come back from Montana and was looking for a place in town to stay. even though while living in the city I often had great rent controlled one bedrooms. I enjoyed sharing them so I offered him the day bed in the living room. He remebersa the parties on the roof and how he almost fell off one time. He reminded me of this fathers day as we munched quiche and sipped 8 o'clock coffee.
I said that I would not have the stomach for roof side parties these days. Perhaps since having been a mother. Wally is now called Walter. Poetry fans know him as W.E. Butts the new Poet Laureate of New Hampshire.

gps world healing 101

The dimple I crouched in seemed like a quarry, shards of feldspar everywhere with a faint smell of gasoline. I could make out roads along the grid over the lip, but I dare not venture too far. Coordinating dreamscapes with GPS marks was only a decade new and I could not afford to miss my rendezvous.. The dark misty sky slowly became paler. I felt damp and somewhat impatient. I could hear the kids in the distance as the sky started to reveal its true color. Smells began to shift gingerbread, jalapeño, tar in varying values. There was often a bite to the mingled scents. It was never immediately sweet or homey.. A few bugs were left to work out with this new system. I had only found out about it a few years earlier in a hospital waiting room. A young man was talking about reenlisting as there was not other choice Lots of people were feeling the same way there was just no money. . As we talked and waited some video screen flyers were distributed. They were the new ones about the size of a quarter inch thick plastic placemat. Are Your Visually Attuned? Spatially Perceptive? Join us. An older guy recognized the program. “Heal the world with your dreams.”

He was brought into the program in its early experimental stages. On the pretense that he was indeed a risk to himself or others, they took him to the initial labs and validated his fears that he was unto something. The presence of snipers in the trees on the edge of his yard were more than a delusion. So he had signed up for the gig and reported that he and his crew had started on agriculture reviving barren apple orchards and turned deserts into wheat fields. “Yes sir wonderful landscapes from the mind’s eye to the ground.” So he was glad to see that the program was expanding and that there was perhaps a new peaceful goal for the armies of the world to focus on. Because when you can imagine abundance and create that sort of love every where in your minds eye , what need is there for war. Most of us signed up for the program that night. We thought might as well, we had nothing to lose really. Houses in foreclosure, no career but the army.



We had no weapons. Last night when the wild boar ran through the bivouac lit by the embers we were startled. My fear vanished as she seemed to smile over her shoulder. It is good to leave a trace of the past behind. The complex fabric of GPS World Healing 101 were laid on a soy gauze base. The new course of study a melding of art, science and spirituality fell under biochemistry in most university catalogs. The primary function coordinating individual dreams so they lined up with the satellite codes was elusive to all but a few. It was however one of the greatest innovations of the century.

Some times the instructors would wait for hours in dead zones where the faint grids rolled over the dimples to coordinate “picnics“ a term for revived war torn areas. Skies the unbelievable blue of a June day. You never know what can happen when restructuring the world in such remote areas.

We have learned to move beyond the past. It is getting better and better every day. New picnics are sprouting up world wide.

It's Deep in the Bones

I joked apologetically about the paper work at the kitchen table of the transitional shelter. A closely cropped blond tipped person sat across the table. I had heard about C from another client and the outreach worker said “she thinks that she is a black man“. It was considered a delusion and I thought well that doesn’t seem that crazy to me. If you can be trans gendered why not trans racial?

I don’t miss all the paper work of working for an agency, but I do miss the people and the advocacy. I miss the inside of the “not always so fun when you are in it” survival track. I miss the humanity of it all. Even though that does get lost sometimes in the paper work and the posturing. Since the company crashed, I fill my time with groups on the ground and on the net and my favorite pastimes writing and art.

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New to the local Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) Branch, I agreed to help set up last Saturday’s workshop. (Code Pink the women who brought supplies to Gaza via the Egyptian gate is part of WILPF). The workshop was the Beloved Community’s training on White Privilege. I don’t really think that I need a workshop on white privilege, but I was looking forward to playing some of Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed games and getting to know some of the members better. The workshop facilitated by a multi racial individual focused largely un the more typical contemporary racial injustices and encouraged introspection.

One of my haunting brushes with White Privilege was when I found out that my beloved grandfather lost much of his mother’s Wabanaki culture due to climate of his times and he was forced to “pass“. He told me this when I was very young and he showed me an article about the Penobscot people. It is not even clear if this was his tribe because his half sister has a different story. I try to catch up on this loss by going to pow wows and reading. I like to be positive and hopeful. Times have changed now and it is actually kind of cool to be of native descent. Sometimes when I go to workshops like this or even pow wows. I feel a grief in the deep mists of my soul. Whether it was cool or not I think that I would feel that way. Probably because the look of loss on my grqandfathers face when I asked him to tell me more and he couldn’t. My garandfather who took the time to teach me so many things was never at a loss.

Many people claim native ancestry and like me the lineage was lost by the melding process or on a bad day you might say the “dispersal“. In the 19th century Native children were taken from western tribes and brought east. Some of them had been displaced to the west by manifest destiny in the 17th and 18th century. This is how my partner’s family who was part Blackfoot a northern Plains tribe ended up in Maine. Maybe that is why there was always such a resonance between us. I like to think that even though my grandfather was told to deny his tribal heritage he carried it deep within him and I inherited some of it. If you met him you would believe that too. It emanated in the way he lived his life.

A couple of weeks ago at a Wabanaki festival at Bowdoin College, I met a man Hawk Henries who makes eastern woodland flutes out of beautiful wood and plays them. He is a member of the Chaubunagungamaug band of the Nipmuc Nation. Which recently lost its federal recognition as a nation, (I looked this up). This means that the traditional slices of land near Worcester, Massachusetts are not officially considered tribal. The Nipmuc would have had to maintain 7 criteria for the federal government to consider their land tribal. I suppose that these pesky hoops one has to jump through were not something that the majority were willing to do. I don’t know specifically what the hoops are, but I think that after all they are someone else’s rules and probably constraining in many ways and just not worth it.

Most of the eastern woodland tribes dispersed and basically went underground to survive. It is interesting to read how they confounded enemy tribes and white settlers by trekking through the swamps and woodlands that they knew so well. The survivors effectively vanished into the woods in the 1600‘s. Not naturally a nomadic people they became so, making them a difficult target. You can google this information to learn more.

Hawk is very interested in music in a spiritual way. He learned to play the didgeridoo as well and had one with him the day I met him. If I was more secure in my financial situation I would have bought a flute. They were beautiful. I bought a cd instead. Just as well because I don’t have time to relearn the flute. There are beautiful pictures of Hawk’s flutes and Maine here http://www.hawkhenries.com/

beauticia and pops periwinkle at peace rally copy

beauticia and pops periwinkle at peace rally copy, originally uploaded by suzeesjubileez.

Hello Peace lovers,
Is this business or is it art or is it activism?
I believe Art is activism and art dolls are not just for fun.
Pop Periwinkle ( one of my needle felted characters) hopes to have an audience with Obama. Yup he is going to hop in a priority mail envelope in two weeks and head for the white house. If you want to put in your short peace oriented two cents worth or perhaps some words of encouragement for the beleagured prez and his incremental steps towards peace go to my flickr and add them under Pop's pic. Or call me and I hope to collect some signatures and hand written notes before the big send off! http://www.flickr.com/photos/suzeesjubileez/3426913690/

Thanks Susan