LISA CHUN

summer randomness

All of these pictures were taken in the last couple of days - except one! I bet you can't guess which one! Okay, you didn't ask but it's not the last one, which would be the most obvious choice in some ways. Those are popovers I made the other night. I made a different version of these at Christmas and they were miserable, shriveled up, lame. (Which good friends ate and pretended they were good.) But not these, Mile High Popovers! The picture of the golden Buddha I snuck while in a Borders in L.A. earlier this year. He was just so glittery and content, I had to sneak taking a picture of him, and then I had to sneak the super sneaky picture of him I had taken into this line-up.

surrender

Available here.

The text in this piece comes from a longer poem called "Entering the Shrine."  I wrote and posted that poem here last summer around this time. What I'm thinking about lately is the nature of commitment. Surrendering is something you have to do sometimes once you've made a commitment. Because when you're truly committed you are inevitably going to hit some hard times. What I'm talking about is not just hard times but Haaaaaard Times, the squeaky places inside ourselves that refuse to love, to be loved. Places that were perhaps wounded long, long ago and will not be touched. The beauty of commitment is that we're saying we'll see ourselves through these moments when these places inside us get revealed - whether through dreams, a deeper awareness of our feelings, or the repetiveness of things that don't work in our lives. Addictive responses often get formed as a way of avoiding feeling the pain that surrounds these old and largely hidden wounds. Being conscious is staying awake and feeling the pain, not going into reaction mode as a response to the pain. This is very difficult to do but I don't think any healing can occur unless we stay still and feel it. I know I keep repeating different versions of this point but it's what I'm grappling with all the time and I'm doing it...and it's hard. Like a Charles Dickens version of hard. Believe me. And in my version at this moment I'm talking about being commited to my true path, whether in or out of relationship. So there's feeling the original pain, that's like a repetitive theme, and then the habitual response which is to run away, and there's also the work of pulling back one's projections - which is another form of running away, really. Marion Woodman, in one of her lectures, archived in a collection called Sitting by the Well says that this work of pulling back our projections is some of the HARDEST work we'll ever do, it's the work of a lifetime. This is the work some of us commit to do, in the course of living authentically, and in the living of this commitment we are also constantly surrendering.

Not for the faint of heart. But there's true vitality to be found there. And love. It's the true coming home to ourselves.

"If you suddenly feel very light, clear, and deeply at peace, that is an unmistakable sign that you have truly surrendered." Eckhart Tolle, Practicing the Power of Now

Pies, Color, Opera

Here are some exciting things from my world lately:

- Pies! Recently I got a hold of a book of pie recipes - including a recipe for depression era pie crust (which reminds me of a time I was in England when I was very young and very broke and we made pancakes out of flour and water - only - and then used that same batter as paste for some mail art collages! Yummy!) Yesterday, while soaking up the super hot evening weather, after sitting outside all day, which was like sitting in the furnace with the heat on full blast, I went into the kitchen to make a caramel pie and a blueberry orange cream cheese pie. All was good except for grouchiness at having to turn the oven on when it was so sweltering - and having to stand next to the on oven, for the duration, sweating.

Beautiful pies, though, which I am looking forward to enjoying, possibly poolside at K & P's house in a little while.

- Colors! Last night I dreamt about the artist's supply store and I was very affectionate (in the dream only) with the manager of the artist's supply store - which speaks to me of my lusting for more time with paints and such. I'm reading "Color - A Natural History of the Palette" by Victoria Finley. Yippee. She is telling the story of how artists' paints got developed, telling the story of colors and how they came from rocks, roots, twigs and insects and were once carried around in pig's bladders by the masters. Here's an excerpt:

"Colormen first appeared in the mid-seventeenth century, preparing canvases, supplying pigments and making brushes. In France some of them were originally luxury goods grocers selling exotica like chocolate and vanilla alongside the cochineal, but most of them quickly turned to full-time art supplying."

- Opera! Here in Santa Fe it's opera season and it's an incredible treat to sit at night in the open amphitheater with a soft summer breeze, a slice of golden moon and hello - Madame Butterfly, with it's music by Puccini that turns people like me into the super sappy, weepy cliche version of the opera watcher (before this opera I didn't know this was possible) - just so much beauty it overwhelms. I have to admit though that I was hoping, hoping by the end of it that she would kill herself because it's the only way a story like this can go, it's the only way. Hello, Madame Butterfly, love addiction at this order of magnitude can only end in death! It must end in death! And this is the beauty of fiction and of opera, the beauty of story that turns the human drama into something larger than life, like something wrought with a painter's palette knife, something so incredibly vividly hued it would burn through our corneas if it was real and not made up. Thank heavens for the unreal, it sure does satiate something, something deep down in there that wants to burn itself up but knows this is not sensible, we must wake up tomorrow and live another "real" day, a succession of all too real days.

Ooops, gotta go eat some pie. I'm late.

Cheese and Tenderness

 
I've been thinking about the art of manifesting and how this relates (or doesn't relate) to our meeting up with our True Selves. Because we are creatures of will in a physical world it IS possible to create or attract almost anything. (And as Americans we tend to feel entitled to this, which I find very interesting.) In my mind the problem is how, knowing this, we can then acquire a new house, a new job, a new mate, a trip to Italy - all outer things. We can in fact set our focus on manifesting all manner of incredible and dazzling things but if underneath all of this we have unconscious fears running the show then none of these things will make us happy for long. And the extra juicy problem of it is often these fears are UNconscious, they were buried long ago at some point when we experienced pain of an elemental sort, and it's this pain that we form patterns and addictions around and then place all of this under the radar of awareness - so we don't have to feel this original pain. That's an awkwardly constructed sentence because that's the nature of it, a circular kind of crazy dance that goes round and round and round. I was talking to my friend L the other day about something related to this and we were saying how we're like mice in an exercise wheel or whatever you call it. We keep thinking if we run faster and longer - not realizing we're on this wheel - that we'll get the cheese, we'll get the cheese.

Well, my message for today is: No cheese until we get off the wheel. If we want to "arrive" we've got to stop running, stop chasing ourselves in circles. And the trick of it is that "arriving" is really entering the present moment.

This does not relate directly or actually in any way to the collage above which is titled "Tender." But perhaps I can create a connection. Maybe the answer at any given moment is that when we become aware of our crazy-making, running around looking for some cheese - this awareness allows us the choice to get off the wheel. And what do we do next? We can be very tender with ourselves, with this scared or hurt part of ourselves that wants to keep on running, that we want to keep hidden almost at any cost. We can let the auburn coated fox show us how to walk back from the edge of doubt and buzz in the meadow ablaze with buttercups. We can just be.

And in just being we can find ourselves, we can find ourselves already there.

Just an idea. Something I'm sitting with lately.

i bought feathers

Available here.

It's Tuesday. A lot of deep stuff I want to convey but there's so much of it that I can't hone in on one thing. Would be better to just download it, from the portal of my brain to the portals of other receptive brains. This collage actually came from last year's efforts. My good friend L brought back some stamps from her trip to the south of France (I think this was last summer when I wrote here how I'd gotten a surprise gift on my doorstep of some super, mega out of control smelly cheese and some macarons.) The bit of a poem in the upper left corner was written with this one particular trip to Paris in mind. I think it was winter and I was traveling alone. But enough of that. It's summer now. Ants are invading my home. I'm burning hinoki cypress incense and lately listening - oh man, don't hate me and don't tell anyone - some hip-hop/light rap because I'm from L.A. originally and because I can't shake my roots. I listen to it secretly, like in my car and really loud. Only now it's not officially a secret. Technically though it needs to stay a secret because it's so incongruous to everything else in my life. Brother Ali says in some lyrics I'm listening to right at this very moment, "Puppy love is real to a puppy."

Yes, Brother, yes, puppy love is indeed real...to a puppy.

It's a good morning cracking oneself up. Back with deep stuff later.

we were so full of the beauty

Available here.

between the two of us

From the latest batch. You can get it here.

safe

This collage is not actually from this most recent set, it's from the batch before that. I tend to work in batches. I also work collaboratively sometimes - as in the case of the mail art collages with Lynne or with Lynne, Mike & Brian...a project I mentioned here before which is being wrapped up now. As I write this they are possibly even right this moment being scanned in Wisconsin. Soon they'll be ready for book form (that's the plan anyway) and then for exhibit, first in Wisconsin, in a special building...oh man, my memory is so bad right now...possibly a building dedicated to the book arts, something Mike is involved in. Yikes.

Anyway, when I work alone, we better stick to what I know right now, I work in big batches. I'll start 40 collages on blank chipboard and start to build the layers over time. In the prior 6 months or more I'll have probably been writing in a very concentrated way, a combination of journal writing, poetry and lame attempts at fiction, I'll go to writing group and I'll meet with Shannon in the mornings for a daily writing session, as we have been doing for the last one and a half years? I can't remember because this is a bad memory morning for anything involving anyone other than myself. But we'll usually have cereal and tea first and talk about how we're going to revolutionize the world with some techniques that employ Pokemon analogies as the only adequate means for conveying these uber powerful techniques. So, shhh, if you overhear us talking about Pokemon you'll know we're actually talking about our secret revolution. The other day I ate an ant that had snuck its way into my cereal. I'm still recovering from this. But I digress. I heavily digress.

This collage, pictured above, has one green butterfly wing and one moth wing, something I probably found at the flea market. Bear with me as I'm about to digress again. The other week my favorite little flea market boy found a moth and pinched the wings off of it, while still alive, and watched its body squirming and trying to fly - wingless - and I just didn't know what to do. I know boys are boys but I said to him what if I came along and ripped your arms off, for fun, that wouldn't be cool now would it? And last night two friends who are psychologists said isn't that lack of empathy, ripping the wings off of live moths, like the early indications of a Charles Manson type personality?

Suddenly I was very, very frightened. I've always had trouble reading men (for mate selection) and in the past have been attracted to the bad ones and maybe I'm taking it to a new level - spotting them when they are little boys even, bonding with them, unconsciously intervening with my superhero levels of codependent aid and support?

No, let us think happy thoughts this morning.

So, the collage, pictured above, has beautiful butterfly and moth wings which were obtained only after they each had died a natural and peaceful death, and on the right side is some paper that is made from apples, and underneath the paper made from apples are some medium format photos I took with my old Rolleiflex SLR of Ben's garden, a wonderful oasis of a place here in Santa Fe.

Happy thoughts, happy thoughts to you all this morning.

far away so close

hmm, today seems to be the day i want to talk about longtime and far away friends. my friend colleen lives in l.a. and i've known her a loooong time. there was a day when we used to hang out at the coffeehouse and she played music and i read poetry and i also used to watch her kids sometimes and they are all grown now and this makes me feel really ooooold. colleen has post office phobia, i-can't-mail-it-itis, and 15 years ago she got me some paper from bali and we still talk about how i never got it, only heard about it for years, or heard me talking about how i never got it...for years. well, yesterday she completely redeemed herself! this is what i got. (the cottonball looking thing is a hummingbird's nest! if one was ever to be concerned with this, this is the surefire way to romance me.)

thank you

Speaking of that time in England, maybe 20 years ago, I also met my friend Taghreed. She and Xena and I stay in touch online almost every day and share a real heart and soul connection - it's amazing how some people cross your path in a meaningful way and then manage to persist as a loving force in your life. Taghreed is a documentary film maker - I've mentioned her here before - and lives in Sudan with her adopted son who is, in addition to being blind, an extraordinary little human being. I haven't ever met him in person but my sense of him is that he's just extraordinary, possibly someone who has come here to do something very special. (You can see the film in which he is featured here.)  In any case, my friend Taghreed did me an unexpected and much needed kindness recently and this collage was in part my response to that.

You can get it here.