Topic: Life
On Fall watercolors, Marvin Prechtel, a Halloween page, "Lost Mother Moon" story, Van Gogh and Gaugin, from a letter to a fellow blogger from last fall:
Hello dear K,
I've been woefully amiss in my letter writing. I started something below (9/17/06), way back when, and then got stuck on it because I couldn't do it justice. I had also spent quite a long time trying to find the referenced speech online so that I could explain it better. I could not find it and so, let it lay. The original subject line for this draft was: Continuing on.......earning money w. crafts, art,education, school. But I don't think I've touched any of these threads, at least not in the way I had in mind then.
Today I've finally popped by you and Tighe and see I must say a proper hello. Thank you for noticing my fall watercolors. I painted them (now several years ago,) when someone requested something for fall but fall had not yet shown its colors. I had to make it up. I sat in a bagel shop painting these miniature watercolors with fall right on my table while the world bustled around me. It is that feeling of having a world in one's hands that is one of the things I enjoy most about painting. And painting big is the other side - making a world one can step into (remember Mary Poppins and the sidewalk paintings they jumped into?) ..... Your fall leaves hall runner rug is beautiful.
I've been taken up with the halloween page I put on my site. It is not much, not a big deal - the same halloween coloring pages I put on my blog last year, but I included the most interesting halloween links that I could find, to ie. some good origami, some fun craft projects, and a few others. The page (and my regular coloring pages page) got some traffic because somehow it ended up high enough in google search pages for either people or robots to find it. The traffic jumped wildly last weekend as one of the images ended up in google's image search with a higher placement. I find it so fascinating (and quite obsessive) to watch how visitors get to the pages. (I know I have to give this up because it is essentially meaningless.) For all I know though, these are just robots from link farm web sites looking for sites to add to their sites. I also find myself responding to the searches by which visitors come. When I got a few hits for origami, I went looking for good halloween origami myself, and put my findings on the page. I bet a lot of other people do this and eventually perhaps the same bunch of information is found on every site.?
9/17/06 I heard a wonderful interview this morning with Martin Prechtel on New Dimensions Radio . He spoke of many things we've been touching on. Back in hippie days he'd ended up in a Mayan Guatemalan village being an apprentice to the local shaman. He did this for 10 years there, finally taking over the village shaman role when the old man died. During the so-called 'civil war' he came back to USA, and has been working to lead people here to find their own 'indiginous soul' in their own back yards rather than thinking they can find it in another country, another technique. These Mayans believed, or all indigenous people?, that the 'other world' is what gives the physical world, ie people, life. We cannot exist in it without taking from it. We are therefore constantly in debt to it and required to ritualistically repay the debt by rituals of eloquance, creations of beauty, in short, we must feed the other world so it can continue to live and therefore we can continue to live. --- when I write this though it sounds so trite. It can hardly even be set in words....
I got the impression that he believes we have to get back to expressing sacredness a lot more to heal ourselves, our world(s), to make ourselves whole; and that it is because we don't do this that we are so impoverished (spiritually). -----------------------
10/7 again ........... and I'm just coming upon your blog re-post of 9/27 Lost Mother Moon - wonderful story, inspiring interview. .......have just read your blog comment in your Ouspensky (In Search of the Miraculous) post, where we talked of getting at the truth of our ways of being, in that case it was about teaching. You advised 'observing' oneself. I know I try to observe but one hides one's self from one's self! I am fairly sure I teach for the right reasons, but I'm realizing its the context that is not feeling right. I haven't found an appropriate outlet for it yet. I want something more from it. That is what my quest has been, tho not yet fulfilled. And all my talk of how to view the question of money - do not think I have that one solved either! ... My desire is to have this all working in a simple, full, whole.
A book on VanGogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art, by Deborah Silverman, I bought recently has some photos that echoed something you touched on. It quite surprised me. They each had made some sort of decorative wooden boxes for different purposes. Gauguin's is an allegorical somewhat morbid jewelry box (I hesitate to include it here) and VanGogh's holds balls of colored yarns relating to the weavers he worked around at that time. He also apparently played with color with these yarns. I took pictures to show you quite a while ago, probably should have included text so you could read for yourself: .............I am not one to be tidy with my threads... 
Warmest Regards, Catinka
Posted by Catinka Knoth
at 6:45 PM EDT
