TREES ARE POEMS Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness. ~  Kahlil Gibran Sleep is impossible as the sound of trees crashing and limbs snapping haunts me. 2024. The year this historic ice storm leaves our city tattered and eerily silent (except for the sounds of nature crying). The dark of night hiding the damage. White noise and meditative sleep music for the first time failing to lull me. The answer? Do art. This collage grid is an homage to the trees, their beauty, greenery, and enduring strength. Their strong trunks towering; their graceful branching shading. For many, the ice but a trifle; for some a deathblow.  Ice weighing down their canopies. Stay strong. Resist. Exist. 

  Refocusing: Intentions   Our intention creates our reality. If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. ~ Wayne Dyer Countless times art and writing have been the therapies that saved me. In this case, asemic writing and collage allowed me to express the overwhelming disappointment of delayed medical intervention for which I have waited years. To have my hopes so dashed feels like a slap, a cosmic act of Mother Nature. Yet I can refocus and set my intentions. Those intentions, scrawled in gray ink, are the basis for this collage grid. Intentions are the gold, hidden deep in the earth of our hearts but mineable, rewarding, and life-changing. May this gold burst forth and envelope me in rays of hope. 

My Barbaric Yawp I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world. ~ Walt Whitman Anger can be released through a primal scream (a barbaric yawp, indeed) or a therapeutic session of delicate china plate smashing. Fortunately, it can also be released through art. Red and angry I am; red and angry is my art today. Anger swirls through me like a hurricane, a black rage envelops me. I am stuck inside the thick black ⚫️ in the lower left collage in this grid. There is almost an exit but not quite. I am trapped against a brick wall, slumped in defeat, and seething. A brighter world, barely visible from my confinement, taunts me. I know this is only a temporary prison, that bright spot exists. That bright spot exists.