Beautiful woman
Scattered hope as pink petals
Soaring now, singing

Today I went to the services to honor this young woman, who was a bright, cheerful, talented young business woman. When she was diagnosed three years ago with ovarian cancer, I asked her what I could do.

Tell everyone, she said, tell everyone that ovarian cancer is the silent killer and research to detect it needs to be funded.

So, I am telling everyone who comes by here. Give $5, give anything. The only single thing to be learned from watching this happen is to do what she asked me to do.

I wish I could believe, as her family does, that God called her to be an angel. My belief, however, is that she was far more needed here. What happened to her can be avoided for our own girls if we make the effort to eradicate this disease as fast as possible. Please, make a small donation to any organization that funds ovarian cancer research. Do it for Deandra. Do it for me, do it for the girls we raise and love, and the ones we don’t even know. Thank you.

©2010 Jill Berry Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I am excited to be a part of their journey, and hope you can check out their site and take a listen here. This group has been convening here for years, every Thursday night for practice. They just scored their biggest deal gig ever at Nissi’s, a great bar and music hall in Boulder County, June 23. Be there! After all these years this bunch is still having fun, and it is fun to watch them and listen.

My kids take this for granted. They think it is perfectly normal to have a dad who plays and sings in a band. Sydney once performed with them on the Pearl Street Mall, a small six year old singing her heart out. You bet that stopped the crowds, it stopped them dead in their tracks: the protesters, the shoppers, the couples out for dinner, anyone with a heart.  She sang a heartbreaker too, a ballad of death and dying that she loved at the time. Currently she is on to spunkier tunes, thank goodness.

It is a good day, full of friends and sunshine, and one project complete! Now I have the hundreds left on the table.

©2010 Jill Berry Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Anne and Pete have been together since high school. They have a daughter they call “Littles”. They smile at each other and laugh a lot. We all want to be them. This is a song Anne wrote, inspired by the words of poet/farmer Wendell Berry, who I also appreciate (some of you have his work in the handouts that I share in my classes). It is my fond wish that Wendell is related to the branch of the Berry family that I married into. Is is not unlikely, since he comes from Kentucky like my father-in-law, Horace. Don’t they at least sound like cousins?

Here is a poem by Wendell Berry that I use to inspire students. Sometimes we abstract it, into a visual expression of written words.

What We Need is Here

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

by Wendell Berry, who is hopefully my distant cousin

©2010 Jill Berry Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Posies from my garden

This morning my girl and I went out to breakfast, as we often do on Wednesday, which is late start day at her school. I always enjoy this time with her, this girly time. We go to Panera and order the same exact thing every time. Then we settle in by the fire and chat. I almost want to take a recorder, because for some reason, this is when everything out of her mouth is profound.

For example, we are talking about Greek and Roman mythology, which we both love, and she likes me to quiz her. I ask her, who was the angriest goddess, and why?

Immediately she responds, “Hera, for sure. Because she was married to Zeus, and he was just like Tiger Woods, only worse.”

Today she forgot something at home that she needed at school. She said “Everyday I have to remember this, that and the other thing. I am pretty good at this and that, but not so good at the other thing.”

I just LOVE this girl. This amazing wild girl with the grin and the mind that I adore.

We are making a map of the lunchroom at her school. It has all the tables labeled with who sits there and why, and all the rules and regs that middle schoolers have in the lunchroom. Remember that? The cool kids sit here, the nerds sit there. There is one table where no one sits, and no one knows why. Ah, middle school. The raw pain and wonder of it is not forgotten. I wish I could spare my children from the brutal edge of adolescence, but then, they would not have the tools they need to go on to high school. But as a HSP (highly sensitive person) myself, my heart hurts with every snub, every party missed, every love interested that goes unrequited.

Speaking of love, my boy is learning about sex education in his class. They use the actual words for body parts. In my day, we were shown pictures of cows mating, which my kids think is hilarious. Sam totally cracked up, and said “they showed you BEEF?” This is the funny part, the fresh and wonderful innocence of this time that we are moving through.

The art I hardly have time for is secret, since the publisher does not want me to show it here. The balance is way on the mother side of the scale, and the art side is dangling up in the air. I feel it, and I need it to even out a bit. In the meantime, I will try to remember the “other thing”.

©2010 Jill Berry Blog. All Rights Reserved.

The bodies, people, statues, exhibits, what does one call them, were in various dramatic poses in plexi display boxes. Artists were sitting, standing and kneeling with their drawing pads and pencils, all around each of the displays. It was dark. There was a glowing yellow light on each figure, and mystical music in the air. Words are not working for me right now, explaining this, and I can tell you that I went purely because I did not want to, and I knew that meant there was a growth opportunity there. I am glad I went.

Here are my sketches.

While I was sketching I was thinking how beautiful they were, how so many parts of their bodies reminded me of feathers and flowing water. It scared me a little too.

In Rome there is a chapel made of the bones of the Capuchin monks who died there. It is called the Capuchin Church of the Immaculate Conception. The first time I went there, somewhere around 1980, I remember walking through those skeletally decorated rooms with the hair straight up on the back of my neck. At the end, there is a sign that said something like “Where you are now, we once were. Where we are now, you will be.” I really don’t like that idea. The same with Body World. Maybe I am just too immature to discuss death, perhaps.

Today is gray and wet, my dog is here at my feet and I am drinking a really good cup of coffee, very glad to be alive.

©2010 Jill Berry Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Arugula, red pepper, Brie and red potato pizza with whole grain crust.

This week has been fabulously textured. We have been cooking, and eating great food. I have actually left my house for social events, and made great headway on my book. The highlight of the week was connecting with the Hallberg Family. You can read that story here. You need to read the comments, towards the bottom. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience connecting with them.

We had sushi night on the deck, it turned out great. Salmon, Ahi, avocado, cucumber, carrots, wasabi and saki. Yum.

Melinda looks skeptical, but the sushi was great.

I had the perfect cup of coffee at OZO coffee in Boulder. It tastes better when it is so pretty.

On Saturday I did what every housewife in America should do. I went to the Roller Derby with 13 other wild women.

I have to say that the Roller Derby is a distant cousin to its bawdy original. The women were not bursting out of their clothes, and they kept their non-manicured hands to themselves. The only similarities to the original experience were the names. My favorites were Dharma Gedden and Kimmy Kimmy Bang Bang. They were polite, nearly, and it was hilarious how jumpy our crowd was to stir things up.

We had regulars sitting behind us, so they explained what was going on, not that our ladies cared much. We were loud and happy.

I have been playing with the Toy Camera app on my iPhone, which I can tell may be turning dangerously toward an addiction. This is the colorful me.

My studio is a train wreck, and I am busy making art for my book, which is a big secret. The first deadline is coming up, and I am trying not to be nervous.

Writing this I realize how much happened here in the last seven days, and yet it seemed so much slower than it usually is around here. What does that say about my life????

Tonight I am going to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to see Body Worlds. It is artists sketch night, and I am going with my friend Helen. It creeps me out, but that is why I am going, to keep myself perked up. Will post my sketches later, along with the rest of my Artfest stuff, which I am way late in posting.

Today is a full fresh day just waiting to be addressed. Better get at it.

©2010 Jill Berry Blog. All Rights Reserved.

This is a sample of the "Make a Scene" class I am teaching at Art & Soul in Portland

This is my favorite paragraph from another book, written by T.H. White

The Once and Future King

Spoken by Merlin to the young King Arthur, who apparently was feeling like I am feeling today.

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” —pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics—why, then you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”

©2010 Jill Berry Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Come on-a my house, my house I’m gonna give a you
Peach and pear and I love your hair ah

Another of my habits is keeping track of my favorite paragraph in every book I read. I often copy them in my journals. Last week I liked this one, from Amy and Isabelle.

“There was all sorts of unhappiness in Shirley Falls that night. If Isabelle Goodrow had been able to lift the roof off various houses and peer into their domestic depths she would have found an assortment of human miseries. Barbara Rawley, for one, had discovered in the shower the week before a small lump in her left breast, and was now, as she waited for arrangements in Boston to be made, in a state of panic the proportions of which she never thought possible; for alongside the dark terror of waiting for the future (was she actually going to die?) was the private realization that she had married the wrong man: her husband, lying next to her in their dark bedroom while she spoke quietly of her fears, had had the audacity to fall asleep.”

It is snowing today, and I am going out to breakfast with my girl. We will have chai and quiche, and chat next to the fire before she heads off to Middle School, where the big worry is whether her best friend is actually going to kiss her boyfriend of one week, or whether it is at all fair for her to be the only sixth grader on the volleyball team, especially since she is tiny, it is so unfair we can hardly believe it. And that boyfriend, well, her friend went to the movies with him on Saturday but her parents had the audacity to actually go too and watch them while there, how gross is that. Nobody has any privacy anymore, and that is so unfair, and on top of that homework is boring.

All is well in Superior, Colorado.

©2010 Jill Berry Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Came back all ready to roll, and willing not to force the river. Sometimes it is a walk on the beach that my muse needs. Now she is happy.

©2010 Jill Berry Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Last night I sat outside until it started to rain.

My lilies are starting to open, filling the room with wedding memories.

I have a little studio here, surrounded by the sea.

Finished my  map of Port Townsend. On to the rest of my work.

©2010 Jill Berry Blog. All Rights Reserved.