Worthy Cause! Yo Espresso Mobile Project!

Please check out this campaign! If you live in Portland and want to be a part of something awesome, or  even if you don’t but wish me goodwill and/or take my word when I tell you trust me about awesome things– go here and donate to these incredibly lovely people.

I know this couple in real life! Yo has had an espresso cart at PNCA for the past 12 years. He has an incredible relationship with the community. Since PNCA is moving to a new location in the North Park Blocks, he is trying to raise money to purchase and transform a  unique Citroen van into a mobile espresso operation.

Yo (Yothin Amnuayphol) is also a PNCA alumni and ceramic artist. My friends are also funny and kind (I’m not just saying that- I can say without reservation they are the NICEST couple I’ve ever met! Seriously!) You have to check out the perks for donation, which range from “a big Asian hug” (their words), to one of Yo’s beautiful ceramic artworks from the next show (normally valued at $1500-2000)!

Please help my friends continue to be a feature in the amazing artistic community that they have been so long a part of.

Follow this link to read the full description, see the perks, and some examples of Yo’s art!

Under Construction!

I am playing around with redesigning my blog. So it will be changing while I fiddle around with it. I did get a few ideas but now am too tired to mess with it more tonight. Just fyi. 

Empty and Stuck

“Empty and Stuck”, collage, 2012 by: Chrissy Miles

Spontaneous art therapy.

 

Poem in Your Pocket

Today was poem in your pocket day. Do any of you participate in this? You leave and take poems and carry one around in your pocket. I did not find any, but I left a few copies of an old favorite around town today. I wonder who found them? If any.

I know I am deathless, 

I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass, 
I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt 
stick at night. 

I know I am august, 
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood, 
I see that the elementary laws never apologize, 
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, 
after all.) 

I exist as I am, that is enough, 
If no other in the world be aware I sit content, 
And if each and all be aware I sit content. 

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, 
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten 
million years, 
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite, I laugh at what you call dissolution, And I know the amplitude of time.” 

-Walt Whitman (from “Song of Myself”)

An old favorite. I know much of it by heart. It comforts me and helps bring me back to the present moment. It reminds me to slow down, have patience. The last lines are good for feeling grounded.

Another phrase keeps coming to mind lately, simply, “It is what it is.” For some reason, it comforts me. About situations which are beyond my control, that I am unhappy with, it helps me let go. Helps me be present.

It is what it is.

Bubble

“Bubble” pen and ink, 2013 by: Chrissy Miles

Sometimes I’d just like to crawl inside one.

Merlyn, on the language of birds

It was a beautiful foggy morning here, everything covered in fuzzy painted on frost. Saw hawks circling and crying and some lovely, entertaining close-ups of crows at play. Then later on the bus ride home reading T.H.White’s The Once and Future King, I stumble upon a passage with Merlyn speaking on the language of birds. I just had to share it:

“The conversation, observed Archimedes, “arose out of whether birds could talk.”

“Another friend of mine,” said, Merlyn immediately, in his most learned voice, “maintains, or will maintain, that the question of the language of birds arises out of imitation. Aristotle, you know, also attributes tragedy to imitation.”

Archimedes sighed heavily, and remarked in prophetic tones, “You had better get this off your chest.”

“It’s like this,” said Merlyn.. “The hawks scream like their prey. The mallards croak like the frogs they eat, the shrikes also, like these creatures in distress. The blackbirds and thrushes click like the snail shells they hammer to pieces. The various finches make the sounds of cracking seeds, and the woodpecker imitates the tapping on wood which he makes to get the insects that he eats.. 

There are other things besides the things you eat. Even a bird drinks sometimes, for instance, or bathes itself in water. It is the liquid notes of a river that we hear in a robin’s song.”

A Poem to Get Rid of Fear

“I release you, my beautiful and terrible
fear. I release you. You were my beloved
and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you
as myself..

Tattoo of Kerry Cohen: http://www.kerry-cohen.com ~via Contrarywise: http://www.contrariwise.org/2012/06/26/i-release-you/

I take myself back, fear.
You are not my shadow any longer.
I won’t take you in my hands.
You can’t live in my eye, my ears, my voice
my belly, or in my heart my heart..” -Joy Harjo, Fear Poem

Full poem can be found here.