In Progress, An Unfinished Church

So I’m doing this: My glasses are taped to the sugar canister in an attempt to stretch them. I’ve been doing steady at-home close work and so I’ve been wearing them more than usual… I ended up with a swollen and very sore scalp, which is painful even to rest on a pillow. My elbows […]

The Words We Speak and 7 Things To Never Say to a Selective Mutism Sufferer

Jerome Apt, a NASA astronaut who flew over the Pacific Ocean in the space shuttle between 1991 and 1996 said this: “I never really believed that seventy one percent of our Earth’s surface is covered with salt water until I flew over the Pacific. Sometimes it took 35 minutes of our 90 minute orbit to […]

You can’t go home again, can you?

It’s a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, or wistfulness for a home of the past.

Autism Through My Lens

The principal was furious! She did not care how he made his environment more tolerable on the bus, but when it came to her school, she was not willing to make allowances for him. She did not want to assign someone to be with him in the weight room, for example, even though we explained that this would cut out a very stimulating part of his day. He’d been walking through the door at home, exploding with pent up overstimulation! And he was threatening to his siblings and cutting himself too. She was not agreeing to ANYTHING we proposed.

Recollecting

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time. —H.P. Lovecraft The whole premise behind the “floating” or “illusion” or invisible” necklace, is that evenly spaced pearls, stones, and/or beads are strung along a nearly transparent nylon ‘fishing line’ which lays suspended against the throat. See image […]

Contemplating Bad News or What I Learned About Life By Being An Artist

I ponder, I recollect, I remember, I forgive, I pour over the pictures in my mind and also in my boxes and albums. Perhaps he does the same; but like the day he grabbed the shovel while I simultaneously held the potato chip bag, he gets down to the basics of things. We are different but not so different, really.

Spread It Like Fertilizer

A fresh faced Jack Klugman (of Quincy and Odd Couple fame) played an alcoholic horn player in an old black and white Twilight Zone episode. (Shows like Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock, and Thriller can be found on the ME network). His character couldn’t get a gig at a nightclub […]

Help Me Appreciate How Awesome This Is

“Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to God, to the Source, to yourself. When you look at it or hold it & let it be without imposing a word of mental label on it, a sense of awe, of wonder, arises within you. Its essence silently communicates itself to you and reflects your own essence back to you.” ― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

Art Is Important! Expression Is Vital To The Human Condition

Art Is Important! Expression Is Vital To The Human Condition! We’ve been in the midst of a so called blizzard here in the Nor’ East. Blizzard Colby to be exact, but I hardly call 15 inches a blizzard. Anyway the news was remarking upon the large number of babies that were born during the blizzard. Gee, I wonder how many of them will be named Colby… I was sick with flu for a week before the storm came with sweats, 103 degree fever, chills lasting hours, head pain, coughing, congestion, etc. I think without creative expression I might’ve had a terrible time of being a shut-in. But I’ll tell you one of the things I did.

Kid Things and Adult Reflection

Did you know that Play-Doh was originally an all white moldable wallpaper cleaner? There was a lot of soot on the wallpaper back then. People used to make a cleaning mixture mixing flour, salt, water and some chemicals to roll up and down the wall to take off the soot. Then Kutol, an early Play-Doh […]

We are all a part of the landscape

In 2001, (pre-nine eleven) when George W. Bush took office (after a close race with Gore… remember the hanging chad debacle?), dozens of computers were discovered with missing W keys. This “prank” did not extend to the West Wing, although in other areas of the White House, they were pried clean off the […]

The Art of Forgiving

When I was expecting my third child, I wanted to name her Georgiana; George or Georgie for short… but my spouse didn’t care for the name. So she was named Kerry. But since she is transgender, he wants to be called Silis. What’s in a name? Uranus wasn’t always Uranus. The astronomer William Herschel discovered […]

A BLOG ABOUT ____________ .

The process of blog writing has to start with a thought. Letters, words form, then sentence by sentence by sentence the thoughts become paragraphs. There’s a little loop like a curl; a threadlike line hanging off the last word in my last paragraph inside my head; so carefully […]

Note to the Child Me

NOTE TO MY CHILD SELF I’m an adult with sensory sensitivities and diagnoses of both Aspergers and selective mutism. I remember what it was like to be a child with those challenges. At the time, I thought that because I was so different from everyone else that I must have be an alien dropped […]

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 […]

Chaos Spaghetti With A Side Dish of Despair

That which is the source of the sun and of every power in the cosmos, beyond which there is neither going nor coming, Is the Self. This Self is supreme! – Katha Upanishad Him: The sun’s so hot today. Me: I believe it’s entirely made up of fire. That’s probably why. It all sounds […]

Broken Peace(s) and Coping with Life When Vultures Are Circling Your House

Something I owe to the soil that grew- More to the life that fed- But most to Allah, who gave me two Separate sides to my head. I would go without shirts or shoes, Friends, tobacco, or bread Sooner than for an instant lose Either side of my head. –Rudyard Kipling (Above: A picture I […]

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 […]