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PODS project seeking submissions

Here is my combination Intro blog to Art of Autism and description of my proposed project. Please feel free to submit. PODS

Updates to my website

I’ve been working on updating my personal author/artist website all week. Do visit! Tell me what you think. And if you’ve got a link you think I should add to the links page, send it to me. Here is the link. Kim

The day I met Polly (a.k.a. Donna Williams-Samuel)

The following is an excerpt from my book, with some changes. ————————– I was taming a steaming pot of wild spaghetti with a wooden spoon when the phone rang. The water had been boiling at quite a roil. If I didn’t stay alert, I sometimes had fires. I had fires a lot. “Hello?” “Kimbuhrley?” Said […]

Autism AWARENESS is Multi-Faceted

During autism testing when I received a diagnosis in adulthood, nearly 20 years ago now, it was ‘revealed’ that I have a college level understanding of many things involving words, literature, etc. but I have a 5th grade level maths ability. My skills are uneven. I struggle to imagine the difference between A million and […]

kudos Keri Bowers, Art of Autism

In Bulgaria, the idiom “Friendship is friendship, but cheese costs money,” is one I came across and puzzled over for a meaning. From what I have come to understand it means not to take advantage of a friend’s generosity. Even if a person prefers isolation as their natural state of being, the symbiotic nature of […]

Having A Walmart Brain

Above: This is an example of a 25 hundred dollar mirror with superb “psyche” tilt. That’s an actual term. Below: a French Budoir mirror (Etsy). And Below: WalMart mirror. Functional simplicity. There are some grand sounding words associated with mirrors. For instance: gadrooning (leaves, flowers, birds, etc. carved on the frame), psyche (the mechanism that […]

Feed Sacks are Cool and other Updates

My grandson likes to think he resembles Brick Heck (Atticis Finch) in mannerisms and looks. He does. Kinda. I identified with the recent episode of The Middle (as defined by Wiki: an American sitcom about a working-class family living in Indiana and facing the day-to-day struggles of home life, work, and raising children.) Sue, while […]

Rewire Your Brain To Regain Childhood Excitement About Life

“our genes are open to being influenced throughout our lifetime, both by what we do and by what we think, feel and believe. Much like the impacts of diet, exercise and environmental toxins, various thought patterns have been shown to turn certain genes “on” or “off.” ”

Visual Thinking…I love imagery.

Holy Dust Motes I wrote a poem in 1999 about dust and how it danced in beams of colored light from my church’s stained glass windows. For years I perseverated about anything dust related. Painting The Chameleon Every Day What does that phrase even mean? Well, chameleons change to suit their environment. For people who […]

on refrigerators, trees and dust

When the refrigerator door swings closed, it flattens a button located somewhere in the refrigerator’s interior. Once said button is depressed, a small light bulb winks out and the inside of the refrigerator is cast into darkness. Now that’s an indisputable fact. Some people cross-examine it nonetheless: “Fact or not, […]

BRAIN PLUMAGE

“You see yourself descending From the building to the ground And you watch the sky receding And you spin to see the traffic Rising up and it’s so quiet Then you wake”–Adam Duritz I went to an IMax theater in Boston last week and saw a docu-film in 3-D about South Pacific sea life. […]

A more interesting word without “U”

Obscure: the state of being unknown, inconspicuous, or unimportant. I forgot the library’s closed on Mondays and it was there on my shelf so I picked up my memoir. For some obscure reason, (imagine ME obscure? Right, I know) I decided to reread my book “Under the Banana Moon.” Well actually it can be […]

Sharp Little Pencil Addresses My Faux Pas and Makes Me Smile

I need to get something out of my system: “Fizzling Fireboxes!” “Well… Flatten my funnel!” “Oh! Trembly tracks!” There, that’s better. I’ve been watching CPTV’s Thomas The Tank Engine with a 2 year old. Thomas gets into mischief on that program. He’s called the “cheeky” engine for a reason. He’s also an example for […]

It Rains Diamonds on Uranus; Happy Mother’s Day Carol

…I was thinking that sometimes inspiration isn’t so bold that it’s wearing a velour jumpsuit. Sometimes it’s as simple as a cartwheeling spider or a rainbow tree. Noticing (and seeking out) beautiful eccentricities enhance my life. But I’m getting ahead of myself… So, picture this: A young black man is scheduled as keynote speaker to […]

it’s that month again, here’s what I’ve been up to, in part

the infamous puzzle piece? Yeah I know, it’s very cliche Here’s what I’ve been up to: (Keep in mind there are several links on this blog. Don’t forget to come back and read the rest…Or click them when you finish reading…) http://barkingsycamores.wordpress.com/current-issue/ The above link is from a “neurodivergent” sister site on wordpress who […]

Young Women making a difference: Amy Gravino, Dani Bowman, Erin Clemens

Living in the eastern part of the U.S. in this cold winter of ’14 (if you are anything like me) has made me somewhat of a bibliobibuli; that is to say; lost in books and not too involved in nature or in ‘the world.’ My standard book consumption […]

J. Moore’s Book, Memory, and Tattooed Pigs

JJ has this theory that memory is still there; like in a computer; in the recesses of your brain. Like you never really forget things; not even in regard to Alzheimers. He feels that you never really delete anything from your hard drive per se. As in with […]

Loss of A Dear Friend, Zsolt Megai

Please don’t be put off by the length of this. I’m not sure how long it will roll on; but I’ve lost a dear friend so here goes. It was October of 2007 when I first met Zsolt Megai. My husband had died in 2005 and The Ct […]

weather patterns, Donna Williams, fruit salad, Buddha

Donna Williams says (in a brilliant analogy) that autism is a fruit salad, which I infer to mean, that everyone’s fruit bowl looks a bit different. Mine has Aspergers bananas in it, with selective mutism lemons, sensory processing dysfunction prickly pears, and dysthymic mangos. There are other fruits in there too. Like anxious horned melon […]

Augusten Burroughs and me and also Egyptians and Stuff

“Guess I have to kill you now”, I joked during our ‘bathroom time’. He rolled his eyes and had this stern face which was his mask, the ‘mask of ALS’ (Lou Gehirgs) as it was called in the newsletter we got delivered to the house. His facial muscles were so weak that he had a […]

Here Be Dragons…When Pipes Are Not Pipes

Stephen King once wrote a short story about the heyday of youth with all it’s freshness and trials. He called youth: Pony days. We all have a brief time as ponies. There were two times during my pony years that I was given horses and both times my father said no, absolutely not, she can […]

Digging In Boxes

Digging In Boxes There are ‘noun friendly’ languages like English and then there are ‘verb friendly’ languages like Korean, Hindi, and Japanese. In the latter languages, nouns are frequently dropped and names for activities are emphasized in the earliest years of life when parents are teaching children to speak. On the other hand, parents […]

She asked me, How does Aspergers feel? Read my book Under The Banana Moon or start by reading this blog

I noticed a message in my facebook inbox. A person affiliated with a selective mutism awareness group asked me a question that should’ve been easy for me to answer. She said, “What does it feel like to have aspergers?” I was surprised at how difficult it was for me to reply to her. After […]

Trees, Glorious Trees!

Trees are some of my favorite subjects to paint. My love for them only grows as years go by. The wild pear tree that grew in my backyard is an early memory of my kinship with them. I grew up by a highway, so this tree was special. It truly was a delight to my […]

Dog Walking As an Exercise In Art Appreciation

The sidewalk I stand on is most common: pitted, crumbling around the edges, cracked, with the common faced weeds of suburban blight sprouting between those cracks. Between a “rock and a hard place,” yeah. Empty lots, exhaust-bathed roadsides and overpass embankments are breeding grounds for “weeds,” which are defined as undesirable, unattractive, or troublesome, especially […]

C’s Quest Toward Sophrosyne

Let me tell you a story about someone seeking happiness. We’ll call him C. “C” felt suicidal and he even concocted plans. He would slash his wrists and lay down in the tub so as not to create too much mess for whomever found him. C thought maybe pills would be less messy. Yeah, […]

A Dog smile, Eleanor, and Anxiety

Today it’s like my recharge light is blinking. I need to plug in somewhere and re-energize. Today I’m weary emotionally. Ever get weary of the whole wide world? Perhaps I have been weary a long time. It so happens we went to the airport to drop off a houseguest who stayed with […]

I have 48 years, I will do much more

A few years ago, my daughter came inside the house carrying something. She put the thing in my hand. It was grey, solid, an almost perfectly round rock, which fit in my palm. She’d found a keen rock-ball. Across the street from me are natural caves. There’s a mountain with a flag on top, and […]

A Kinship; A Means of Communication

Growing up, I never bothered looking at people long enough to see them as anything other than blurry models out of Matisse paintings; jumbled but interesting. I especially hated pictures of relatives hanging on walls. You could never ever avoid their staring eyes. I’d have to dash past them. I […]

Oil Slick Harbingers and Colorblind Crooner

Years ago, before my husband’s diagnosis of ALS, there were subtle signs; harbingers if you will, that times were going to be changing. We were at a grocery store. I live close to the eastern coastline and department store parking lots are often filled with seagulls that scavenge for french fries. They’re drawn in by […]

A Geometric Memory From H’s Terminally Disabled Years

There is a lady in a purple geometric block print pantsuit, so like one my mother would pick out for special occasions. But this lady has short cropped dark hair, so like the smartly coiffed styles seen on Liza Minelli. (My mother is blonde.) She walks briskly down the corridor and can see into our […]

First Blog: The Thumb Malfunction Quandary

It’s odd, this technology. Odder still this social media. If you can’t beat ’em join ’em? Yeah something like that. Why do I say ‘odd’? Well, listen to this… I’m an author/freelancer and an artist. So I have tried to embrace this stuff. In my own way of course. Sometimes I’ve got my feet up, […]