CLAY ART - Susan Musi
(Susan Musialowski) claywork paintings
Poems, writings, quotes
was when I painted.
I was completely and utterly myself.
It was more than a profession.
It was even a therapy,
for there I just told it as it was.
It takes a lot of courage in life
to tell it how it is."
Alice Neel
"Being in Nature and feeling her to be so fully herself, helps me ease into being myself again.
Watch a bird try to pick up more than she can carry.
Remember that the Moon never gives herself a hard time for waning.
When we give voice and color and shape to how we connect to Nature, we gather into the Circle of Life."
Margo McCreary, artist and naturalist
"To experience the land aesthetically one must give up the struggle to dominate it, and instead become receptive to its beauty and its drama. It is then that we merge, that we lose ourselves in the deep truth of our oneness with the whole."
Joe Paddock, naturalist and poet
Me, on Lake Superior shore
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or the silence after lightning before it says
its names—and then the clouds' wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles—you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head—
that's what the silence meant: you're not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.
A disk of ice slides downstream,
an impact crater announcing deep winter,
ice crusts thrown up all around.
The rippling river reflects a cold sky blue.
Within the crater, water is gelid, still.
As the river freezes over,
beneath the locked surface, it will flow.
(This poem reminds me of the Upper Penninsula of Michigan and Lake Superior, winter, and 'more'. Photo and poetry by John Caddy.)
Rough birds fit this field, starlings and crows, their blue-black wings against the sheen of the week-old snow and the metallic stubble of corn. The sun behind a squirrel's nest, an eclipse unnoticed in the rest of the world, sends no one into panic, an omen of nothing to come. Observe one gray displace another. This day in history a mouse was caught in a drainage ditch, you hurt your arm, at night the stars came out.
Flowers......put up no resistance to attack, suffer evil rather than inflicting it, imitate carnal love, multiple without fighting, and die without complaining...They have realized the dream of Buddha: to desire nothing, to tolerate everything .....
A wasp rises to its papery nest under the eaves where it daubs at the gray shape, but seems unable to enter its own house.
