We are in the fourth week of November with December quickly approaching and it is ironic that we go from a day of remembrance and thankfulness right into an all out hedonistic grab for material items that will enhance our lives. What do we need as a species to consider ourselves fortunate? Health is important, a comfortable home and loving family are essential; but what about our immediate habitat outside our front door?

Certainly there are those individuals that are quite happy with the pavement coming right to their very front door with little or no green space; I am not one of them. When my partner and I were in the heart of London a few years ago we visited the museums of course, but we also made time to visit the zoo and aquarium as well.

Nature is something that in spite of a package’s label reading, “all natural ingredients,” cannot come in a bottle or a box. It is another irony that the more mechanized and industrialized we alter the planet we still want to believe that the products we put on or in our bodies are 100% natural. There is absolutely nothing natural about our motor vehicles and yet there are those individuals who think if they take their automobile off-roading they are reconnecting with our roots in nature and of course nothing could be further from the truth.

If I need to recharge and restock my wellbeing and health nothing does it for me like a walk through the woods or a leisurely stroll on the beach collecting shells and bits of driftwood. Think of it: the roar of the waves filling our ears, the smell of the sea filling our nostrils and beautiful natural porcelain shells to clink in our pockets all while cool sand cushions our feet; beautiful. Every day at the beach is opportunity for adventure. What animals will I photograph? How many postcard perfect sunrises and sunsets will I capture? All this time to contemplate the beauty of our natural world and the desire to shop for nonessentials is completely obliterated.

It wasn’t so long ago my partner and I were flying back to Philadelphia from a beach vacation in the Caribbean when I overheard a fellow passenger comment on the hundreds of acres of farmland below us, “Look at all that land going to waste.” I shook my head because this was someone who had no idea where their food came from before they bought it at the store.

I am thankful in spite of all our modern amenities we still have wild, natural places where we can hear the roar of the ocean, the bellow of seals, the song of whales, and the sand between our toes.

Here we are in crisp November, Halloween ornaments, costumes, and masks put away. A new full moon before us and the fall television season in full swing, but is it what we really want? We human beings in spite of all our modern amenities are a tribal creature. Sure we have smart phones, and tablets we can view a sporting event or even a soap opera while waiting for an airplane to board. But what we really want is a story, a diversion from our real lives. We are already living the future foretold in animated cartoons such as The Jetsons’ or even a futuristic world Jules Verne might have imagined in his novels. Take it out of the future and knock it back ten thousand years and what we really want is an affirmation that our story will be told again to future tribes. It is why ancient Rome and Greece are the repositories of our early histories and why cave paintings are all the more fabulous.

The works of Homer were recited at festivals and Grecian plays immortalized their heroes and villains. It was in fact these great stories that fostered the imaginations of John Milton, and Dante Alighieri to compose their fabulous poems even hundreds of years later are still published and sold to new generations of people. These stories unite us as one tribe, the human tribe affirming what was great before is still great today. Great literature, like fine art is something that preserved keeps giving and giving like a fabled horn of plenty.

We hunker down in front of our giant television screens to see our favorite sports teams compete for the championship and the much prized trophy. We align ourselves with them by wearing their jersey to be a member of their tribe. Be it in the stadium or in the dark of our den seated in front of a glowing screen eating game food and drinking our beverage of choice what we come away with is that a sports team’s last season is much like an actor’s last performance; there is no rest for the victorious and always next season for the losers… Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Sophocles’ Electra has survived the test of time much like tomb jewelry buried with Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen Howard Carter uncovered in 1922. He brought it to light for us to be dazzled again thousands of years later. That story is still being told today as more of the history is revealed via x-rays and DNA. Is it possible that Super Bowl winners today will be immortalized and remembered a thousand years hence? It could happen; we as a society participate and rally around the Olympics every two years for the winter and summer events.

We should make time to embrace those activities and traditions that bring us together and celebrate as our tribal ancestors might have in a sporting event or perhaps a theatrical presentation or even in music. We want to believe that a thousand years from now someone will think our contemporary heroes had transcended our era to be something that stands the test of time, like the science of Nicholas Copernicus or the words of Sophocles or perhaps the skilled athleticism of the Pittsburg Steelers in their six, yes count them six Super Bowl wins.

Our November full moon is an opportunity to look up from the stadium or away from our television to glimpse something that our most ancient tribes hunted under, fought under, danced under and even loved under. While there will always be next season for our team to win there will only ever be one November 2017 full moon; enjoy!

All Hallows’ Eve is for much of the world a day of many different interpretations. When I was very young we lived for a brief time at the home of my maternal grandparents in the small village of McConnellstown, Pennsylvania. I do remember that Halloween as it was different from the very first I remember in Hampton, Virginia, when the temperatures were so warm that it seemed more an extension of summer rather than an autumn holiday.

In McConnellstown, at the top of the hill on the street where my grandparents lived was the grange hall and for most of the year it seemed a dark and shrouded building, but for Halloween it was lit up and there was candy and games. The strangest of all to my young brain was bobbing for apples. I could not see the point if we wanted an apple we could simply reach in for one, but better still were all the cakes and cookies. I mean seriously when we’re three years old and allowed to choose between chocolate cake or an apple, who wants an apple? I love cake why would I stick my face in the water for an apple that already had someone else’s teeth marks in it? I was told if I wanted a piece of cake I had to bob for an apple; if that was the game than get out of my way because I didn’t get dressed up with makeup and jewelry for an apple.

I believe I was dressed as a Bride that year, I still don’t think that’s a real costume; it wasn’t like there ever were any little boys dressed as Grooms for Halloween. Being the only girl with two older brothers I had to let my mother indulge in the girly thing for a costume. It is so refreshing to see little girls dressed as pirates these days. I had to wait till I was at least twelve and pilfered my older brothers’ wardrobes for all their gear.

How lucky I was as a preteen to have such fun and adventurous individuals near me to teach me that being female doesn’t mean that I always have to look and act like a girl. Boys have oodles of role models, but it is slim pickings for girls. We really cling to the imagery of Amelia Earhart and Joan of Arc to see us through though those awkward moments as in “Well this feels really awkward but at least no one is going to torch me at the stake.”

We got up to all kinds of things and as I was the youngest in the group by at least a year, they were my mentors before I knew the word for it. Like me they were only daughters too except for Jane and Nancy. We who had only brothers saw that actual sisters could disagree and fight as well. What follows is the type of story that we would wish to tell at one of our sleepovers. Happy Halloween!  

The Witch’s Tomb

The candle’s flame flickered in the night breeze and we listened to the oak leaves as they rustled in the tree above. Jane leaned in with the flashlight held under her chin illuminating the hollows of her face and she asked, “Do you all know about the Witch’s Tomb?” Jane looked over each shoulder and she said, “It was here before any of the ships came from England, before even Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.” We nodded and huddled closer together aware that the flame from a single candle was our only guardian.

Jane looked carefully around the corners of the porch and she said with a sly glint in her almond shaped eyes, “When the colonists came it was like they were landing on the very edge of their universe. Sure enough they brought their bibles and preachers to teach the natives about their god, but the natives just nodded and went back to their own ways. The natives knew something or rather someone that the colonists did not, the witch. Heka, she was to the natives. She was older than any tree, and they knew she was here long before them,” Jane pointed her index finger at the terracotta titled floor we sat on and she said, “this was her land and the colonist were only trespassers here.”

Nancy bit into a rice crispy treat the crunch crashing through the seriousness of the moment and we flashed our gaze on her and she put the treat back on the plate. Jane winked at her sister and continued, “Difficulties began, making it impossible for the colonists and the natives to share the same territory. The natives wished to leave but they would no more leave Heka to these white strangers anymore than she would abandon them so they looked for a new place, a secret place where the explorers could not find them. In their canoes they went inland up from the big waters where the strangers would anchor their ships and they came to a place where no people had ever lived, only trees and animals. Here was the place for them to start new, far away from men with hair growing from their faces, false hair on their head and women with faces of paint and powder and no wood skills. Here they established their camp and in the high bank of earth they brought Heka to her new residence.

For a time they lived as they ever had tucked in among the forest on the banks of an inlet of what we now call the York River, but the settlers kept coming more and more until there was no more places for the natives to live in seclusion. Men with muskets told them to leave and when they would not, they killed many natives and others were chained and sold. When this was done it brought a curse to those who had done it for the Witch would not have her people treated as we treat animals.

Once the tribe was removed to the satisfaction of the colonists they established their own homes, but Heka is still there. On dark nights without a moon to illuminate she walks among them choosing the most greedy and false to skin for their hide. These hides are what she sells to the Devil for he is always looking for new britches as the old ones burn up so quick when he goes back down to hell. The skulls she keeps stacked in rows on the wall so she can keep a reckoning of all the ones she damned to hell.” We all just looked at Jane and Debbie asked, “But why?”

Jane looked at us and clicked off the flashlight and picked up a rice crispy treat and she said, “Are you seriously asking me why a woman would keep score of what she has given a man? A liar is a liar, and when you’re in business with Ole Nick you better have your accounts straight. Besides she receives a plate of devil’s food cookies for every six hundred and sixty-six souls she sends down to the Fire Goblin Academy. Chris you’re up next after you pass me the orange soda. I want to hear more about, this Dark Planet.”

October is upon us and all the stores are stocked with candy and costumes for the holiday at the end of the month. Whether we live in the countryside or in an urban community the full moon is our opportunity to be reminded of a time when people didn’t have electricity. For those communities still working their way through the devastation of the many hurricanes, they will be more appreciative of the night sky as there will be no other light available to them.

When people still lived without power and had only candle and starlight to see them through the night a full moon was an event; it affected the tides and trade as well. We today in the modern world don’t think about living without power until everything goes dark. The full moon is that globe in the sky that our ancestors watched perhaps around a fire or in the quiet of night from a balcony. We have electricity and for all the modern glow of an urban setting I still like having that time to gaze up at our partner through space in the quiet of night.

In my life I have lived in busy cosmopolitan cities such as Orlando Florida, Charleston South Carolina, and Newport News Virginia, but the moon shine there wasn’t as loud as it was on a mountain top in Huntingdon County Pennsylvania or in Quinton Township New Jersey. In upstate New York we lived north of Saratoga Springs and the ground was covered with dazzling snow much of the winter and reflecting the moon’s glow brilliantly. The yard and woods sparkling like a field of diamonds, only it is very, very cold and did I mention that in temperament I am a southerner and not suited to glacier living. As such my moon gazing was limited to our nocturnal excursions in town sampling warming elixirs at the pubs in Saratoga Springs along Broadway or by window enjoying a delicious meal at the historic Olde Bryan Inn.

Living in the tri-state area has many advantages in that we may enjoy a show at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, or a day trip down to historic Cape May, and even the beautiful museums and famous homes such as Nemours Mansion and Gardens in Delaware. When it comes to welcoming in October’s full moon I will be partaking of the best seat, my own backyard. Candy and costumes aside a glass of rich garnet colored Chianti in hand and our local barred owls hooting a lovely duet, is something I will always value. No matter how bright and shiny our neighboring cosmopolitan communities are, they are missing that primitive call harkening back through the ages when the night sky is more magical and more marvelous than the mini-computer in our pocket.

On September 1st I flipped the page of my Vincent van Gogh calendar up and was rewarded with The Starry Night and immediately came images of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow animated by Disney to my mind. Both are a narration of something that may happen at night, and we are excited and a little afraid of what that outcome might be.

When I was a girl by September I would have waved good bye to my relatives in Pennsylvania to return to Virginia to begin the school year. While my cousins were harvesting apples from their orchard in Pennsylvania to press into cider my friends and I in Virginia were hiking the battlegrounds and woods surrounding old York Town. Sure it would get cold eventually, but meanwhile we could gear up for our own traditions like ghost stories told under the full moon.

One of my friends lived in a house that had a screened-in porch that we would camp out in slumber parties until it was simply too cold. I have family and friends in both the north and the south and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but when it comes to ghost stories southern girls do it best. On the peninsula we had an amazing variety of history to draw on; the original natives, the colonists; Massachusetts wasn’t the only place rumored to have witches. Cruel slavery imported a people along with their traditions and mythology as well.

Our particular favorites usually involved the full moon and houses long forgotten. We knew exactly where to find an abandoned drive long since overgrown by trees, some more than one hundred years old by the size of their girth and impassable by car, but easy enough for our bicycles. There through the woods on a lonely stretch of land stood a house near water. On the upper floor a tree busted through the roof. A few dishes were left in the antique cupboards. A pipe still packed with tobacco and a box of stick matches there beside it on the window sill and reflecting it all, an old mirror with the silver flecking off. Just such a find might guide our stories to the adventures of pirates; in fact many of the navigable waterways around Virginia were reputed hideaways for the dreaded buccaneers.

Our story telling did not restrict itself to just the past as Newport News was and is a very dynamic place culturally and historically but it is also a hub of technology and has several military installations nearby as well. These elements were all fodder to our nocturnal stories. I smile when I think of us in our sleeping bags huddled together with one of us illuminated by our lone flash light recounting the story of The Witch’s Tomb or Aliens like us and eating rice crispy treats and sipping orange soda through paper straws.

Seasons come and seasons go and this will be September’s only full moon. If the skies are clear, let us take the moment to put away our smart phones and take delight in the bounty of a beautiful moon, but most important to savor the company of our loved ones. Rice crispy treats and orange soda are of course optional.

Here it is, the last weekend of summer, unofficially and I am pleased to announce in the past fifteen months I have completed my manuscript. I have carefully combed through it removing anything that doesn’t carry the story forward. I have sketched the characters and drawn floor plans of the important settings and now comes the really hard part, finding the right home for it.

It is my belief that creating a novel or an oil painting is a lot like hatching an egg. While mammals carry their young inside the womb; birds, reptiles, amphibians and even octopi are the guardians of their young in their particular precarious environment. While I am sure that no thieving crow will swoop down from the sky and carry my baby off, I am still cautious before I reveal it.

Growing up in the Tidewater area of Virginia I have a much different idea of what the last weekend of summer feels like as opposed to my contemporaries in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. For us on the peninsula of Virginia summer did not magically stop at the Labor Day weekend, no it went on for weeks and in some years, months. One of my many fond memories of the Christmas season in Newport News is shopping on Christmas Eve and having the weather warm enough to wear cut off Levis and sandals. No it doesn’t have to be freezing to enjoy a candy cane; they’re good all the time.

While many people are preparing their children for back to school, and the holidays to follow when I think of those rainy days of autumn that is the best time to enjoy a new book. Right now as the rain falls on my roof muffling all the sounds outside I can easily focus on the page before me as I write. A slow drizzly rain I find is the best background for reading and writing as long as it isn’t the kind that can squash a community. When the power fails and batteries need to be conserved all that is left is playing cards, reading or perhaps journaling by candlelight. For people with small children sometimes that is the time to have them tell you their own fairy or ghost stories as my husband and I have with our daughter while weathering a hurricane without electricity.

It is no secret that in the publishing industry like the film industry they look to Christmas and the summer as a time to promote their hopeful top sellers, but I think maybe the New Yorkers’ missed a potential market; hurricane season. If not in imminent danger and I really mean not in danger of having your home and community swallowed by the aftermath of a gigantic storm and when there is no electricity to charge the smart phones and tablets, why not enjoy a good read by candlelight? There is simply nothing like reading to take us out of ourselves, out of our own world to see something we have never seen before and sometimes that something new is in the pages of a great book.

If we are to believe we cannot excel beyond that which we are made of, it would be a very limiting prediction. We would have never troubled to visit the moon or in earlier centuries to see beyond our own shores. We must acknowledge that example, may be the definitive teacher for better or worse. If your parents are litterbugs you may well be one too. That being said, we all have an investment in what we leave for our younger generations. Who doesn’t like the best? Who says, “I really love mediocrity!” And there it is, that risk of our invested time being undervalued and appreciated.

What we learn at our own mother’s knee may be something we take with us all through our lives. My mother is a landscape artist and while other children were getting the basics in the alphabet and the names of colors I was also learning the fundamentals of sketching. At the time I did not think it unusual that my mother painted with oil paints and that there were things like turpentine and linseed oil around the house. No, I thought it odd that my friend’s mothers did not paint.

She is an excellent baker and made prize winning cakes for our birthday parties and in some ways, I felt a little sorry for those children that had store bought cakes. I could not seem to grasp that their mothers could not bake, I mean my mother baked fresh bread every week; every week. We had a large family, so there was a birthday cake being baked nearly every month and in some months, twice.

My maternal grandmother would expect nothing less from her own daughter; in as much what our mothers teach us in our youngest years may benefit many others as well. With the arrival of Mother’s Day I may celebrate by saying thank you: for the art lessons, the baking lessons and that I always had a beautiful, imaginative Halloween costume courtesy of the Singer sewing machine and not those synthetic costumes that came from the five and dime.

One thing I must take away from my mother and grandmothers is always to be an original and do not let anyone else define my standards and expectations. Some people believe their occupations distinguish their lives and for others, life adds value to their vocations.

I wonder if Homer was apprehensive about offending the society he was part of with his heroic adventure. I am sure that Frank Zappa would not have been the amazing individual he was if he let social standards rule his output. I think both were driven by their own vision and would not let society dictate their value. Did Gustav Klimt struggle with his vision of art among his contemporaries? Amedeo Modigliani surely suffered and died young, his paintings a lasting tribute to his journey as an artist. For some art is something that hangs on the wall, be it a doctor’s office or a museum, but I have always seen it as a window into another human being’s private journey.

While William Blake wrote and created his art the attitude of his immediate contemporaries was not one of accolades but rather of ridicule. If there is a great hereafter than Mr. Blake may have the last laugh for while he lived he struggled through poverty, but today nearly two centuries after his death he is awarded a private gallery at the very prestigious Tate Britain in London.

Vincent van Gough, if he has achieved the perfection of being that was not afforded him in life may have found it in the great beyond now that his paintings are valued at upwards of twenty-two million dollars. Marketability is the bane of artistic creativity; for art is supposed to be something above the gross conception of wealth and to elevate human beings upwards to the divine. Alas, the gatekeepers ever strive to put it in a safe box; when that is the exact antithesis of creativity. I feel that every blank canvas and every blank page is an opportunity to travel to where we haven’t before, a chance to see a world other than what is conveyed with our waking eyes, a chance to dream. Mr.van Gough saw that even when those around him were blind to it.

The first step in any campaign to control human beings is to remove their gods and their art so that they will forget their origins; their tribe. Those brave revolutionaries who cling to their beliefs even in the oppression of persecution are to be celebrated, not shunned. I believe to make real art, lasting pieces that test our reality one must dive into our subconscious and delve deep, otherwise what is the point? Are we to paint yet another still life of a bowl of fruit? Is that what we want to say as a species about our existence here on this planet when there is so much more to leave to future generations to ponder?

Federico Fellini’s Satyricon is an epic film based on the writing of Petronius during the rule of Nero. The parting imagery of the Coptic style portraits in the final stages of the film is something to remember for one day we will all be a memory; if we are that fortunate. Do we want to be remembered by a bowl of fruit?

I believe if we want to hang in a museum with the serious artists than we must delve past the membrane of reality, into the foreign and strange to find that black pearl that others were a feared to bring to light; the one that has goblins and dragons to protect it.

I believe art is something that can only be revealed by peeling back the sticky skin that separates our consciousness from our subconscious. An artist must plunge deep like a pearl diver to come up breathless with an exquisite gem those less stout of heart would be unable to dive for.

If we dare to be an artist than we better dust off our diving bell, armor and anything else needed to travel to the very edge of reality. We must go beyond to the blue-black regions that hide uncountable monsters and fiends that will lash onto our ankles and bring us even further down. Those monsters are always hungry and waiting…The black pearl is their lure, their welcome mat for those that dabble in the Arts just enough to call themselves artists to their immediate society. A true artist never thinks of themselves as an artist, they leave that label outside the studio door. Nothing will scare off the artistic muse quicker than arrogance.

Truly, artists are brave explorers seeking the undiscovered and returning more lined and wizened at what their subconscious reveals. Artists must be fearless for there are indeed monsters in those deep and dark places where night rests eternal and dawn not even a distant memory.

If we want to be artists beware: the blood we spill will be our own to distract the goblins from their treasure of black pearls. We must also realize that those who haven’t risked their sanity for the treasure will be blind to the wonder of our find. They will look on with veiled eyes and nod knowingly as if our particular strain of crazy might be catching. It might have gone epidemic in Parisian salons a hundred years ago but we won’t be having any of that malaise here. Jack Donaghy may have said it best on the 30 Rock series for those with limited imagination, “We know what art is! Paintings of horses!”

To be an artist is to brave the unknown, the unfamiliar, to follow an unmarked trail without breadcrumbs and the knowledge that when we return we will have left some bit of our ideology to return with a prize invisible to people painting safe pictures and writing safe stories. I do not believe Albrecht Durer, Pablo Picasso, Jules Verne, Alfred Hitchcock, and Federico Fellini created their art in safety for the masses but rather as an invitation for others like minded to join their tribe.

Are you an explorer, an astronaut, are you willing to go where there may be danger and are you willing to do so in front of a blank canvas, an empty sheet of paper; just you and your imagination? If so, than you may be part of the lost tribe of artists. Welcome!