Tag: in her own language (Page 3 of 16)

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November 14, 2012 / jeanne / 1 Comment

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Things are lining up here as I work to get some traction in my life. After a good strategizing conversation with Lisa Call on Sunday night, I researched and ordered some silk batting. It feels absolutely exquisite, but I fear it may still provide more loft than I want the finished product to have. I want this cloth to be delicate, to move with the most gentle of gentle breezes. We’re still a ways away from that, though, mostly because I am in the throes of NaNoWriMo, spending most of my time penning 5k words each day (the word count for today is at 7858, ah were that possible every day!) through this-coming Sunday. Usually the goal is to write 1667 words a day (or 2k for an over achiever like me), but I’m dedicating to finishing early this year, so I can enjoy a guilt-free Thanksgiving break.

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~~~~~~~~~

She is my developmentally disabled sister-in-law, Nancy,
and I am Jeanne, the woman who flat-out loves her.
Go here to start at the beginning.

136, Envoy: Little Moon

November 13, 2012 / jeanne / 1 Comment

Today it’s “she draws”:

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And “she stitches” because today we have a guest stitcher:

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none other than Little Moon, the daughter of Illuminary, Envoy in her own right.

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Illuminary and I tuck each other in nightly, so I occasionally hear about Little Moon – about how charming and talented and smart she is – and when Illuminary told me what Little Moon said about Nancy’s cloth making her feel free, I up and asked if she wanted to stitch one. Fortunately she accepted, and today she finished this afternoon, sending these adorable photos.

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(Isn’t that mermaid adorable? There’s a great story behind it. Get Illuminary to tell it to you sometime.) I forgot to ask Little Moon what kind of stitch she used, but it looks great from here, doesn’t it? Thank you, Little Moon. You’re a real treasure.

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~~~~~~~~~

Nancy is my developmentally disabled sister-in-law, Nancy,
and I am Jeanne, the woman who flat-out loves her.
Go here to start at the beginning and read your way current.
And there’s a pinterest board, too.

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November 12, 2012 / jeanne / 2 Comments

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In the early 1800s, Quakers in York, England developed an alternative form of care for people in mental and emotional distress. Before the Quaker’s “moral therapy,” Benjamin Rush and other prominent colonial physicians bled their patients and kept them tightly bound in a “tranquilizer chair” for long, long hours. Their goal? To make even the most difficult patient “gentle and submissive.” The Quakers knew they didn’t know why people suffered in the throes of madness, but they knew these mad and insane people were still “brethren” and deserved to be treated humanely. They built a small retreat in the country, treating their patients with kindness and providing them with shelter, food, and companionship. Historians note that more than 50 percent were discharged within a year and researchers report that 58 percent of those discharged never returned to a hospital again.

Enter Dorothea Dix lobbing for state legislatures to build government asylums to provide care for those who needed it, and once these asylums were opened, cities and towns dumped all sorts of people there. Mental hospitals grew more and more crowded, and staff more and more overworked. The years encompassing 1900 to 1950 were dark, unimaginable times for the field of mental health.

Over the course of its 126 years of operation, the Willard Psychiatric Center in upstate New York housed over 54,00 people, its last patient transferred to another facility in 1995. Years later, 427 suitcases were discovered in the attic of a building there, and Darby Penney and Peter Stastny selected 10 suitcases and set about reconstructing the lives of the 10 people who brought those suitcases with them when they came to live at Willard. Why? Stastny and Penney knew that these 10 individuals never had the chance to tell their stories outside the context and confines of psychiatry. “Regardless of what might have troubled them, we were struck by the sundering of who they were as people from who they became as mental patients.” Penney and Stastny bring these 10 people to life in a book titled The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases From a State Hospital Attic.

I found this book years ago while researching a book I have in the wings, and I was reminded of it this morning when Angela emailed me a link to a recent post about a photographer who has done a documentary in photos of the suitcases left behind at Willard. It seems the mentally ill equivalent to the oft-asked question as to what would you grab should your house catch on fire. What did they bring with them when they crossed this threshold?

Nancy is more of a mental disability, but I still wonder what she might pack. Magazines, probably. She searches for magazines like a flea searches for a furry animal. She really doesn’t own much, and what she does own (clothes, bracelets, necklaces, dolls) she’s not deeply attached to. She does like a good watch and a tape player, though. We take her a new watch every time we visit, and Donn, if you’re reading this, she’s asking for a new tape player again this year, and as usual, I promised you’d send her one. You’re welcome.

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November 11, 2012 / jeanne / 3 Comments

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We watched a 6-part documentary on Auschwitz recently, and I felt chilled to the bone as I heard – not from anything read by the narrator but from an actual television recording – this Nazi propaganda, delivered in the sing-song cadence that marked public speaking in that day and time:

“The German people are unaware of the true extent of all this misery. They are unaware of the depressing atmosphere in these places in which thousands of gibbering idiots must be fed and nursed. They are inferior to any animal. Can we burden future generations with such an inheritance?”

As we listened to the words, we watched films of mentally handicapped, mentally challenged, developmentally delayed people of all ages wandering the grounds at what I can only assume was a mental institution.

The Nazi’s euthanasia program included severely disabled children and adults. Two doctors read reports on selected individuals and made a big red cross on the report to indicate extermination. The doctors never discussed their findings and determinations with each other, and they never so much as laid eyes on the individuals they were condemning to death. The Nazis actually used the disabled population as guinea pigs as they honed their gas chambers routine, luring them to the showers then delivering carbon monoxide through pipes that weren’t even connected to any water source. (Later the Nazis moved from carbon monoxide to something that was more economical and efficient.) By the summer of 1941, some 70,000 disabled people had been killed by the Nazis.

We can NOT rewrite history, turning away from what we find distasteful and appalling and upsetting and even unbelievable. It is NOT okay for us to sweep this under the rug and utter such stupid things as how this would never happen today. We CAN shudder at how closely the German propaganda resembles things we hear broadcast today by all political parties as they point fingers at one another and instill fear in us, and we CAN stop ignoring and dismissing and maligning people who happen to be different from us, people we don’t understand. We CAN make damn sure that we do not fall in line with any regime or party or system that sees human beings as financial expenses and liabilities, cutting costs by cutting care. We CAN and we HAVE TO start thinking for ourselves instead of accepting whatever we are told. We CAN and we HAVE TO start asking good questions and demanding satisfactory answers. We CAN and we HAVE TO use our voices to protect and defend and shelter each other and people like Nancy who can’t do it for themselves. We have to.

We just have to.

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Delighted and honored to be mentioned here and here by my friend Teresa who is one of the most creative, encouraging, supportive people I am fortunate enough to know.

~~~~~~~~~

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November 10, 2012 / jeanne / 2 Comments

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I found I could say things with color and shapes
that I couldn’t say any other way –
things I had no words for.
~ Georgia O’Keeffe ~

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Envoy Noel Rozny has more to say about being an Envoy.

~~~~~~~~~

She is my developmentally disabled sister-in-law, Nancy,
and I am Jeanne, the woman who flat-out loves her.
Go here to start at the beginning.

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November 9, 2012 / jeanne / 0 Comments

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20 more cloths before we complete Nancy’s Set 1. I have begun to think about how to pull the cloths together, and as will come as no surprise to those who know me, I have about 30269 ideas. So I’ve booked a call with Lisa Call this weekend to brain dance and strategize. I’m leaning to one idea in particular, and I’ve already started gathering what I’ll need: lots and lots and lots of vintage ladies handkerchiefs. If you know where I can get any, I’m all ears.

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Oh, and we are here today, Nancy and I, tickled to be a part of this project with other people from around the world.

~~~~~~~~~

She is my developmentally disabled sister-in-law, Nancy,
and I am Jeanne, the woman who flat-out loves her.
Go here to start at the beginning

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November 8, 2012 / jeanne / 0 Comments

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I don’t mean what other people mean when they speak of a home because I don’t regard a home as a . . . well, as a place, a building . . . a house . . . of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can . . . well, nest. ~ Tennessee Williams

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Today’s drawing speaks to me of mother/daughter. And I didn’t realize it until right now, but it’s photographed in a basket titled “Mother and Daughter” by the artist who created it.

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And speaking of mother/daughter . . . here’s a photo of cloth #113 taken by Envoy Merry at her daughter’s wedding. And the crows? Those beauties were made by Envoy Illuminary (#120).

~~~~~~~~~

She is my developmentally disabled sister-in-law, Nancy,
and I am Jeanne, the woman who flat-out loves her.
Go here to start at the beginning

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November 7, 2012 / jeanne / 0 Comments

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She writes of silence, Radka Donnell in Quilts as Women’s Art: A Quilt Poetics, of how in Bulgaris women kept a small stone in their mouth to keep them from talking back or screaming. The stone kept them quiet. Quiet kept them safe. They called it their wisdom stone.

Silence, a verb.

Silence, a noun.

An ebullient, enthusiastic talker as recent as two years ago, Nancy is now quiet. She speaks very little, and when she does say something, it’s barely more than whisper, causing you to focus, tune out, lean in. Do these drawings surface from the recent pharmaceutically-induced silence or do they emerge from a life of physiologically-induced silence?

She draws in silence.

I stitch in silence.

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~~~~~~~~~

She is my developmentally disabled sister-in-law, Nancy,
and I am Jeanne, the woman who flat-out loves her.
Go here to start at the beginning

119, Envoy: Lisa Call

November 6, 2012 / jeanne / 12 Comments

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Today’s Envoy is Lisa Call, a woman I’ve known for a long while but just met at the World Domination Summit in Portland last July. I’ll tell you about that later. First, let’s hear what Lisa has to say:

Nancy’s drawings and your stitching the drawings inspired me to return to needle and thread when sketching for my postcards from New York series and so I’ve placed her among my sketches and imagine her dancing in the streets of New York.

Nancy Dances in New York

In the second I’ve placed her drawing in the middle of my latest piece – Portals #5 – which is all about opportunity and possibilities and it breaks my heart to think of how Nancy’s opportunities were limited. Which is why I am so moved by your project – you are giving Nancy a chance to make her mark in this world without constraint.

Nancy Meets Opportunity

Thank you for giving her a voice!

[ ::: ]

So there I am, waiting for the session on How To Deal With Feeling Overwhelmed to begin, sitting at the end of the row in the chair nearest the door, stitching one of Nancy’s drawings. The chair next to me remains empty, maybe because I am not making eye contact, what with my head down stitching and all, or maybe it is the sight of a woman working with cloth. Some people see that as something only an ancient grandmother would do, you know. Just as we are about to begin, in walks this woman who heads straight for that empty chair beside me. “Mind if I sit here?” she asks as she’s already settling herself into the chair.

The session starts, and before you know it, we’re doing the dreaded audience involvement activity that requires pairing up with somebody near you to talk about it afterwards. There is only one person near me, and as I turned to face her, I silently vow that she will do all the talking. “So, tell me,” I say to her, “what have you to say about this?” She says something that that’s both clear and succinct, leaving space on the clock needing to be filled. “What about you?” she asks me. “What overwhelms you?” It’s a wonder I don’t have a heart attack right then and there, hearing the words that fell out of my mouth, talking about something I do not talk about. Ever. And you know what she says in response? “Me, too.” SHE HAS THE SAME OVERWHELM CARRIERS. (Or Gremlins, depending on how and when you look at it.)

We chat a bit – a very little bit cause in the time it takes to snap your fingers, the presenter starts talking again. How rude.

The session ends, and we sit there, the two of us, talking more about our respective chronic overwhelmed states of being and the similarities (especially the causes). She asks what I am working on. I tell her, of course, and she says she works in textiles, too, as we both fumbled inside our bags for a business card. “Mine is big,” she says as she pulls out a postcard-size business card to give me – a card bearing the beautiful artwork of Lisa Call. For the second time in the space of an hour, I fell a heart attack is called for. Lisa Call is a woman I’ve followed online (some might say stalked) for EONS, never leaving a message because she’s big and I’m not – that whole what-on-earth-would-we-have-in-common inferiority thing to which I now say “Pfffft” while swatting the air with my hand.

Not only do I love Lisa’s work, I love her approach to it. Lisa treats her textile art as a business. She makes plans, sets goals, does spreadsheets and marketing, AND she sketches, conjures, notices, stitches, and spends time on introspection and reflection. She produces, or as Steve Jobs said, she ships. She is very deliberate and disciplined (knowing that discipline means remembering what you want) in the context of her creativity, and that’s why she is able to be a mother, a friend, have a full-time job, AND create prolifically.

Her medium is textiles, but her methods transfer quite nicely, so go have a look at the workshops she offers. Sign up for her newsletter. Peek inside her studio. Read more about the Portals #5 piece, about her New York postcard series and the kindling behind it. And for heaven’s sake, take your time looking at (and perhaps do a bit of shopping, too) her artwork. Textile paintings, she calls them, and I think you can see why.

~~~~~~~~~

She is my developmentally disabled sister-in-law, Nancy,
and I am Jeanne, the woman who flat-out loves her.
Go here to start at the beginning

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November 5, 2012 / jeanne / 17 Comments

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Today was a day of writing in the morning and hatching and sketching ideas in the afternoon. Sometimes I need a day like that. Tomorrow promises more of the same, though with a bit more creative productivity.

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