Your silence exists as does my self gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world’s dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them.
Luce Irigaray
Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and my staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed.
Jeanette Winterson
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The Q: What is your ping, your creative whalesong?
“A Snowy Crossing” by Catherine Martzloff
I define my creative identity in the following way: As a creator, I’ve always been interested in working with color. I see my life as having a palette of its own and I seek to have the chroma of my experience come through in my paintings. Over time, I’ve realized the only way to achieve this goal is to risk exposure–to unveil my perceptions. Whether the approach results within the context of landscape or still life, the resulting narrative is always a story of merit, regardless of public perception or understanding.
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She swallows all my sins in dark matter that separates some of
us—each a world, a single atom forming under Jehovah’s tongue.
Like pearls begat by invasion, we’re birthed nameless as the space between knees.
Kneel and he will name you accordingly. Make
merry, you dance of fire, water, mud, light and fish.
Understand it all comes down to a short wait & letting go.
We didn’t ask for any of this, yet here loom gifts of appalling grace.
“The Lake Diva Briefly Considers Consequences of Heresy” by L L Harper
“Shore” by Lucy Aron
Even in stillness, when you listen, there’s a heartbeat.
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Led by women since time immemorial, the world’s last official matriarchal religion survives in the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa). My mother’s parents and all their parents were born on these islands. Mom never wanted to visit, and characteristically, would not explain why. This mystery always drew me to Okinawa. When I finally visited, my husband and I saw utaki or sacred groves roped off for the Kaminchu or holy women. We stumbled upon one utaki in the midst of a modern metropolis. Inches from a playground without graffiti or broken beer bottles. It was a small pristine stand of banyan trees, their aerial roots winding like the veins of a giant. Behind them, a cave as white as papyrus. I had found my doorway to the beginning and the end of all questions.
In Okinawa
Everybody knows
The gods speak only to women.
“Isles of the Wise” by Sharon Suzuki-Martinez, Waves: A Confluence of Women’s Voices
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