Saint Jizo San, Buddhist Bodhisattva

Saint Jizo-San and Baby Pumpkin
acrylic on canvas 10x10 2011

Saint Jizo-San is a Buddhist bodhisattva who is widely loved for being the patron saint of children and protector of children's souls after death, as well as a patron saint of travelers. He is very often shown as a cute, happy, roly-poly little monk, child-like and serene. He is shown here holding a baby angel, surrounded by the Japanese kanji for protection, child, journey, and love.

Saint Jizo-San and Baby Pumpkin
acrylic on paper 4.5x4.5 2011

I made these paintings for my husband after our daughter, AdiaRose, was born at thirty-two weeks on September 22nd, 2011 and passed away an hour later. We wanted to share them with other parents who are living with the loss of their child.

My husband and I are having another family show at Artcentric in Troy.  We've been working hard on new pieces and new ideas and we hope to see you there!

There is a Michie Shaped Hole in My Heart.

On March 7th my husband, our daughter and I drove slowly through the snow on our way to the vet's office. Our beloved doggie, Michie,  swaddled in blankets, was cradled on my lap. The kidney failure we had managed to forestall for a whole year had finally caught up with her and in less than twenty-four hours she had stopped eating and drinking, and had four seizures. The day before I had spent hours cradling her in my arms, her warm, furry body slumped against me like a sleeping child, and we gazed into each others eyes as I alternately talked to her, prayed over her, and cried uncontrollably. This morning when I gently gathered her into my arms she leaned away from me, and by this I understood that she was ready to go and needed to get about the business of dying without the burden of my grief encumbering her. 

My son and I adopted Michie from an ASPCA adoption clinic in October of 2003, when she was almost seven years old. She has been my constant companion since that time, coming to work with me every day to the delight of my art students until my daughter was born in August 2008. She was my parents granddoggy, and an only dog, in fact, in our extended family. She would curl up near my brother on his hospital bed. She worked my mom and dad for treats. My dad made her special roast beef, which he cubed and kept in the freezer for her. My mom spared no expense on organic doggie treats, and I cooked all of her meals. At the time I thought I would have no more children. She was baby sized and didn't care how much I hugged and kissed  or baby talked her or smelled the top of her head. She was my furry child. She was a big deal, you better believe it. She had the greatest smile too. She made everyone happy.

My grief over her loss has been enormous. Her dish on the floor, her favorite spot on the couch, the nest she made in the sewing room of ribbon and fabric, cut me off at the knees. All I can see right now is her absence. All I can feel is how much I miss her. Life without her is surreal. I feel like I'm waiting for her to walk back into the room. 

I managed to pull it together for her, because after all it was about her, her death. I thanked her for the gift of sharing her life with us and the lessons she had taught to us, and I told her I understood that she needed to go.  I told her I loved her. She went very peacefully. We brought her back home and laid her on her blanket in the living room while we made her a beautiful box, and a pillow and blanket. We will have to wait for the ground to thaw before we can bury her here in our yard. We will make it special, and plant something beautiful on her grave. Maybe by then I will be more at peace. Maybe I will see all of the beauty instead of the pain. She so deserves to be joyfully celebrated: valiant heart, patient soul, independent spirit, strong will, playful romp, buoyant walk. Beautiful smile. Floppy ears.

Little face.

Michie 

March 2010

St. Milarepa

St. Milarepa
acrylic on paper

I heard about Tyler Clementi on the radio yesterday. As a mother, I felt utterly crushed. The shy, gifted young man took his own life after his college room mate outed him by secretly recording Tyler Clementi's romantic encounter with another man and streaming it live on the internet.

(From the Huffington Post)

The shocking suicide of a college student whose sex life was broadcast over the Web illustrates yet again the Internet's alarming potential as a means of tormenting others and raises questions whether young people in the age of Twitter and Facebook can even distinguish public from private.

(and from NPR.org)

Clementi's death was part of a string of suicides last month involving youngsters who were believed to have been victims of anti-gay bullying. Fifteen-year-old Billy Lucas hanged himself in a barn in Greensburg, Ind. Asher Brown, 13, shot himself in the head in Houston. And 13-year-old Seth Walsh of Tehachapi, Calif., hanged himself from a tree in his backyard.


I won't pretend to even know what was happening in the minds of Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, the two students who have been charged with invasion of privacy. I can only say that deciding, somewhere in our consciousness, that another human being is not worthy of respectful treatment is just as hostile, just as hateful, just as damaging, as overt hate speech and physical violence. Excusing such disrespect as a "joke" or a "prank" is not acceptable. We all must be responsible for understanding our motivations. If our actions are not coming from a place of love, then where are they coming from? It is very, very dangerous not to understand the consequences of actions whose inception is in hate, disrespect and disregard. Ravi, Wei, their families, and the Clementi family will live with these consequences for the rest of their lives.

There are many spiritual teachings about the responsibility we bear for what resides in our hearts and how we allow it to direct our actions. My favorites are these:

"I have understood this body of mine to be the product of ignorance, composed of flesh and blood and lit up by the perceptive power of consciousness. To those fortunate ones who long for emancipation it may be the great vessel by which they may procure Freedom. But to the unfortunates who only sin, it may be the guide to lower and miserable states of existence. This our life is the boundary mark whence one may take an upward or downward path. Our present time is a most precious time, wherein each of us must decide, in one way or other, for lasting good or lasting ill." - St. Milarepa (emphasis mine)

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." - Jesus Christ


and finally:

"People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, It is between you and God;
It never was between you and them anyway."

- Author Unknown

I really wish Tyler Clementi had read this last part. If he had, he may have decided to live. As a mother, I want to say to any young gay person who is contemplating suicide: don't. You are loved, even if your family and community aren't accepting you, you are loved. There isn't a damn thing wrong with your being gay, except that a narrow minded, ignorant society is trying to make you suffer for it. Be strong, thrive, live your life, because the next generation is going to need you. The world needs you.

Amen

Up-Cycled Cuteness!

Peaceful Earth Panda

As a person I'm very concerned about our environment. As an artist I love to make stuff. As a mom I enjoy surrounding my children with cuteness. The result of this equation is Baby D, a line of t-shirts featuring my original designs on up-cycled t-shirts and onesies.

Mama Bear

Why up-cycled? It's better for the environment! What good is a killer cute t-shirt if there is no world left to wear it in? The actual designs are printed in the United States on 100% cotton using an eco-friendly process and water based inks. Each shirt is lovingly selected from the thrift store. After being washed the design is ironed on to the front and the edges are machine sewn by me.

Bunny Luv

There are eight designs to choose from in sizes from infant to adult and more on the way, and upcycled Baby D tote bags are in the works!

Long Live Planet Earth!

The Truth Is Out There

St. Dominic De Guzman- The Truth is Out There
gouache on paper 4.5" x 5"

In her book "The Verbally Abusive Relationship" author Patricia Evans writes that abusive personal relationships are a microcosm of abusive societal relationships, drawing parallels between the control an oppressive regime struggles to exert over it's citizens and the control an oppressive partner struggles to exert over their significant other. She points out that in both cases fear is at the root of these evils- fear that people will recognize their own power, fear of abandonment, fear of inadequacy, fear of exposure. Does the root of all evil stem from fear?

I have been thinking about this for a long time. I have been considering it in the light of recent events, including Arizona law SB1070, the argument over the cultural center near Ground Zero, Dr. Laura's racist verbal crap explosion, and various and sundry things being said by Sarah Palin and members of the Tea Party, and local cases of child abuse, domestic violence, and homicide. To name only a few. The sadness of the harm done, the ugliness of the rhetoric, the wrongheadedness of the self righteous, the shocking disregard for our fellow human beings. Ten years into the new millennium, this is what we've got. It's a damn shame.

The common thread I see among all of these things is fear, but when I think where could that fear have come from, what I get is : ignorance. Some ignorance is very easy to identify—words or actions that reveal a deficiency in knowledge of a subject. Some ignorance is very willful ignorance, serving an agenda, a play for power, stoking the fear engendered by the ignorance of others. The most basic ignorance, though, is the ignorance of self. When we fear to look within, to address our hurts, to know ourselves and to heal ourselves, then we can't know peace. We act out- whether it is by violence towards our spouse or children or by getting up on a podium or a radio show and spouting really hateful, condemning words about people we don't even know, we are acting out. Fear, not love, is what motivates our actions when we are ignorant of our true selves. We live our lives in knee-jerk mode, and a lot of other people get hurt, maybe even in spite of our best intentions.

So, ignorance: the root of all evil. The solution? It would be really nice if human beings could just agree to acknowledge that by the time we are twenty some one or some thing has probably seriously fucked us up in some way—a trauma, a messed up set of beliefs about our selves and the world, some jerk messages our parents instilled in us—whatever. And it would be really nice if everyone accepted that before they got married, had children, went into a professional practice, spoke in public or held a public office, you would get some kind of therapy, get to know yourself, heal whatever your wounds are, and learn to be at peace. How else is anybody going to act with pure intentions? Because otherwise, there is a whole lot of fronting going on, a whole lot of the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, a whole lot of nastiness and needless suffering.

I will end with some quotes from the Dalai Lama:


"If there is love, there is hope to have real families, real brotherhood, real equanimity, real peace. If the love within your mind is lost, if you continue to see other beings as enemies, then no matter how much knowledge or education you have, no matter how much material progress is made, only suffering and confusion will ensue."


"I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion, and elimination of ignorance, selfishness, and greed."

And lastly:

"Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace."


Amen

What I Found Out

"St. Dorothy, Patron Saint of Gardeners, Buries Land Developers to Make Room For A Field"

7"x8" acrylic on paper

I don't believe in statistics. I just don't believe in them. I don't believe that the bad things people do to each other have to happen. I don't believe violence or dumping toxic waste in a river are probable based on sheer numbers. Pick any one of those numbers and you will see a whole chain of decisions that were made, perhaps even generations before the incident of child abuse or environmentally caused cancer occurred, you will see individuals making choices. Assuming these events are just the roll of the dice or somehow inevitable allows us to abandon our responsibility to each other and to our planet. There may be reasons why people do what they do, but they are not excuses. Excuses let us off the hook, but understanding the reasons allows us to effect positive change.

My rejection of our dependence on statistics is the result of 40 years of struggling to understand the nature of evil. I grew up in the very incubator of American bad behavior-the middle class suburb. I never felt comfortable here. I was very aware that I didn't "fit in": my weird last name, my hand me down clothes from a sister who was several years older, my autistic brother. More than that, though, was the awareness that others suffered and I did not. It was personal in the case of my brother: why was he autistic and apparently doomed to a terrible life, why not me? Couldn't it just as easily have been me? I felt guilty for getting off scot-free. As for the rest of the world, I had seen the plight of Cambodian refugees and terribly malnourished African children on the news, I had read enough books about children during war time. I somehow knew I was living in an illusory bubble in which people were focused on things like having designer labels on their clothes, and that somewhere else at that same moment other people were in grave danger. It was the unfairness of this arrangement that troubled me. I could not have expressed it in words, it was a feeling, a feeling that I was enjoying safety that I wasn't entitled to, that I didn't deserve, yet here I had it and other people didn't. Why? Why? It drove me nuts for years.

Fortunately, among the gifts afforded to me in adulthood is faith in a loving God, and the knowledge that I'm not any better or any worse than anyone else. What a relief. I know for a fact that every single person who shows up on this planet is loved by God, from the baby who barely gets to draw a breath because she was born in the midst of a famine in Ethiopia to the Emperor of Japan, we are all loved. We all deserve to live in safety- whether we get to or not is an accident of birth. And that still isn't fair: that Ethiopian baby didn't have to die, neither did the victims of Union Carbide in Bhopal India, or Karen Silkwood, or Reverend King, but it isn't God's doing, it's the direct result of humankind's shortcomings, the dire consequences of our hubris and our miserable failings. So the question for me next became: are we all so completely broken that this can't ever be fixed?

It occurred to me long ago--as I observed the "norms" of middle class America with bafflement--that just because something is "the norm" doesn't mean it's normal, or even a good idea to begin with. The very institutions we made that condition how we think and perceive ourselves in relation to the world, and that dictate our social and economic structure are directly causing much of the suffering in the world. But how to resist the seemingly inescapable pull of the social/political/economic moral black hole that is just "business as usual" in the United States: driving and polluting, working far too many hours so we can buy things that are produced at the cost of human life and health, eating food that is so far removed from nature it maybe shouldn't be called food, every dollar spent funneled into a large corporation that is murdering the poor and killing the environment? Why are we as a nation driven to be like gerbils on a wheel that never stops? Why are we so technologically advanced and yet so spiritually under developed?

Well, seek and ye shall find: last year I picked up a back issue of the excellent Orion Magazine and read an eye opening article titled "The Gospel of Consumption" by Jeffrey Kaplan. This illuminating history of the birth of American consumer culture answered some of the questions, born of helpless frustration, that have dogged me for years upon years. Kaplan writes:

In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”

Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”

By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”

-Jeffrey Kaplan "The Gospel of Consumption"
Orion Magazine May/June 2008

Finding out that our soul-sucking, resource draining, money driven way of life is just a big trick perpetrated with malice of forethought by a bunch of rich industrialists was such a relief. It means that it doesn't have to be this way. Stop the gerbil wheel, I want to get off. And that equally culpable partner in crime, the United States government?

Well, this year I have been reading "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn. I had long been aware that what I was taught in school about the founding of the United States was a load of happy horseshit, but this book really reveals the the dirt, and dirty it is. From the murder of the Arawak people by Columbus to the deliberately constructed architecture of racial discrimination that allowed the depraved, barbaric treatment of kidnapped African men, women and children caught in the American system of slavery, to the classist economic privilege that existed from the time the first European set foot on this continent, this book is answering all of my questions, born of years of disappointment, mistrust, and disgust, about why our government is so broken and corrupt. Why are lobbies allowed to exist? Why are our elections privately funded, effectively shutting out everyone but the rich from running for office? Why are the interests of corporations set above the good of the people and the environment time and time again? Why is there such a disconnect between our ideals and what actually happens? It turns out that our "founding fathers" were all a bunch of rich guys who wanted to protect their wealth from the king of England. Our purported ideals were what they waved around to get everyone who wasn't rich to help them out with the revolution. It worked, and they structured their new government to first and foremost benefit their business endeavors and real estate schemes, and to protect their wealth and privilege. Oh.

And yet, a relief still, because it doesn't mean that Americans are too inept to run a healthy, fair system of governance, just too greedy and self-interested to actually create one in the first place. Ineptness may not be curable, but I'm enough of an optimist to believe that greed and self-interest are choices. Knowledge is power, and finding concrete answers to the questions that have plagued me has allowed me to examine my own role in our current system, think about solutions, and try my best to change what I don't like about my own behavior.

And if we don't decide to change? I don't know about you, but I can feel the wobbly, reckless, blinding speed of our downward trajectory. I've been expecting a crash for a long, long time.

Which is why I've just re-read Margaret Atwood's two most recent novels, "Oryx and Crake" and "The Year of the Flood". Set in the not too distant future, science and technology are still in the hands of large corporations and profit, as an ends, still justifies any means. More species are rapidly dying out as all of the world's resources are used up and global warming gains momentum unchecked, and the only government that exists is the creepy Stasi like CorpSeCorps, paid for by the corporations to maintain law and order so that their profits can continue to grow unimpeded by citizen protests, conscientious objectors, or anti-establishment free thinkers. This world is inhabited by bio-engineered super viruses that can dissolve people into puddles, new species of bio-engineered, gene spliced animals-including the horrific chickie knobs, a chicken that is all meat and no brain that grows in a lab- and cyborg bees developed by the CorpSeCorps for spying and surveillance. Margaret Atwood's genius is not only that she presents her warning about our probable future as an involving and masterfully written story, but that you can see the future she writes as the logical, natural consequence of, say, our current decision to buy a pair of sneakers even though we know they were made in a sweatshop, or any other of the seemingly innocuous moral lapses we citizens of the first world make a hundred times a day-decisions based in the blissful ignorance of safety and plenty, or by throwing up our hands in frustration and saying: I'm one person, I can't change anything, or by simply deciding to not care. We have that luxury now, but our time is running out. We are caught in the gears we have made out of material gain and creature comforts. The global economy in it's present incarnation is running every aspect of our lives-we serve it, and it only really serves the very few. It has sneakily fostered a self-indulgent way of living among the better off that directly causes much suffering to the poor and is destroying our planet. But-it doesn't have to be this way. Margaret Atwood's warning doesn't have to be our future. About this, I'm not terribly optimistic, but I remain hopeful. So far.

The very heart of all of this mess is, of course, that our abilities far exceed our wisdom. Any parent of a toddler-or a teen for that matter-knows what I mean. Human beings invented the wheel and a ton of really good and helpful things since, but we've also made nuclear weapons, various other killing machines including SUV's, and a billion of those cheap little plastic McDonald's Happy Meal toys that are toxic as hell and wind up in landfills. We've done terrible things with even good inventions, tainting them with unfair and unsafe labor practices and pollution. Not to mention we're still bashing each other on the head with rocks.

The Dalai Lama said, "Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive." I pray and pray that each individual person on our planet will gain in spiritual wisdom so that the choices we all make will be more responsible towards our fellow beings, healthier for our children and our planet, and motivated by kindness and compassion. That world is possible. I don't care if it isn't probable, because I don't believe in statistics.