This is a card I received from Stewart Charlebois. I like the forward thinking look the young girl has. Full of hope and potential for the new year and years to come.

Hope and potential are feelings that I have been struggling with this month. As some may know, until last May I was in a Ph.D. program. Well, officially I’m still in it; but I am not sure I am going back. While I was doing fine academically, funding was a nightmare with our state’s current budget crisis. I became very deflated and depressed when I couldn’t find funding despite my skills and experience and decided to take time off to think through my path.

This is a card that I received from Helen Amyes. I think it represents my feelings of deflation pretty well.

One of the options that opened up was to get the credentials to teach ESL. I am trilingual and have spent a good deal of my life abroad or working with people from other countries. It is a world that I am comfortable in. I met with a wonderfully warm professor who encouraged me to apply to the program.

And now the application is due in a week and I have been working on the essays for a month, at a snail’s pace. There have been moments where I wonder if I really want to go through with it. I am realizing that much of this may be fear of once again finding myself putting my heart and soul into a dream only to find that my path is blocked. I don’t know if I have the energy to go through this all the time. I would rather collage, journal, and make mail art.

But, I have to at least try, right? Put myself out there, get this application done, and then go back to my visual creating.

Here I go. Next time I post, I will have the whole application done and handed in. Wish me luck!

Kris Naylor did it again. Last year she gave me little tea bag wrappers taped together to form an envelope sized rectangle, each with a little painting inside. You can see it here.

Now I need an explosion of creativity to get me to sit down and write two essays that I need to get done for something that I am applying for. They aren’t hard essays; but for some reason, I am dragging my feet.

Oh those dreaded “shoulds!”

Angie organized a New Year Cat swap on IUOMA and I participated. There were eight of us and I am still waiting for some of my cat mail. I will post what I received when I receive most, if not all of them. Mine are done and have started arriving at their destinations and so I feel comfortable sharing.

The cat is my dear Maya. The images of her are contact paper transfers. It would be fun to make a carved block of this image to print.

This time, I experimented with textured wall paper and paint. After awhile, I found that it was easiest dabbing a light amount of paint on my finger and lightly passing it over the raised areas. Later, I added color with watercolor crayons. I did decide that I like working with inks and watercolor crayons more than with acrylic paint. I may try to make washes out of the acrylic paint that feels more like the consistency of ink. Has anyone tried this?

I hope you are having fun making,

mm

The partner of one of my coworkers is Japanese. Every year before the first of the year, they do a major cleaning of the whole house and every CD is dusted, every window washed. Inspired by this idea, I did the same thing on a much smaller scale. I cleaned my workspace. I dusted, reorganized, consolidated, recycled, and even threw some things away. It is a nice and much more organized space now.

I like to come in at night and light candles at my little altar with mail art hanging to inspire. I have a few projects that I am working on and will post shortly once they are in the mail.

peace,

mm

-Pema Chödrön

2011 was a difficult year for me. I had been focused on a dream and was working hard to fulfill it, but was finding that external forces were making this dream difficult to achieve. I blamed myself. I experienced cycles and mixed feelings of disappointment, embarrassment, anger, depression, shame, low self-esteem as well as a good amount of negative self talk. I took a leave of absence from my PhD program to sift through my feelings and to be in an environment where I had the support that I needed. I felt like I had been intensely focused on a goal and a large gust of wind had come and knocked me off my path. I was left on the side of the road, goalless and with no plan.

All of my collaging and mail art has been so helpful to me. It has given me the opportunity to be creative and make art again as well as find a creative community with whom I can share.

Entering into 2012, I will continue making. I feel that I am just beginning to allow myself to see all that the moments of 2011 were teaching me. I have no plan except to be open to going to those uncomfortable places within myself and sitting with them, perhaps even befriending some of them along the way.

peace,

mm

I hope you are having a wonderful winter season of celebration no matter what holiday you celebrate. The above creation is from Pretty Lily. I love it.

At our house, we have a small cardboard tree that we hang on the wall with lights. You can see a picture of it here. We went to my partner’s parents’ house last night and so today we opened a few presents underneath our tree, made a yummy breakfast and now we will putter around the house in our pajamas for the rest of the day. I will probably make a few things now that my studio/office is clean after a three-day long cleaning!

Here are a few things that I have made recently that are representative of the holiday season in one way or another:

The last two are my first two rolodex creations. The orange one is for a November swap and the second for December. I love them! The fencing is from ephemera that angie sent me and the heart in the second is from a collage ephemera swap that I did with helen amyes last year.

Off to make a bit more now…

]]> http://canimailthis.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/happy-holidays/feed/ 2 madmadge Scan 4 Scan 497 Scan 498 Scan 479 Scan 462 Scan 1 http://canimailthis.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/tra-la-la-occupy-our-future-3/ http://canimailthis.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/tra-la-la-occupy-our-future-3/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 02:57:41 +0000 madmadge http://canimailthis.wordpress.com/?p=1432 ]]> Happy Holidays! Two weeks ago, approximately 50 of us went to our downtown mall and sang political carols. I don’t think the security guards knew what to make of us. We were singing Christmas carols, after all. And, children were present and we are basically a peaceful bunch. So we sang  a few songs and went on our merry way. It was a blast.

I sent Angie a package with two of the songs on the side below. If you can enlarge the photo, you too can sing fun carols. To give credit where it is due, the songs were created by staff at Washington Community Action Network and were originally sung during the Special Session at Washington State’s capitol in Olympia, WA earlier this month.

Things are pretty dire in my state. As a caseworker in Fair Housing, I get calls all the time from people that are desperate for rental assistance, affordable housing, something. And the resources are dwindling if not nonexistent, and there are 4 to 5 month waiting lists for everything that still is available. I no longer take my lack of funding for graduate school personally. I realize that the problem is much greater.

To cope, I sing my carols, go to occasional marches, and make mail art.

These are my last two “Occupy or Future” cards.

My friend and fellow rabblerouser that I mentioned in this post received the above card.

And I sent Tallie, a fellow Washingtonian, the one above.

She had sent me this card and had made reference to “Occupy”:

And, the last of the swap-bot swap have arrived. It was fun giving people a space to vent through the mail:

Not through swap-bot, but through i am superhero’s e-mail lists, I also received a collection of ATC’s from KDJ that I was encouraged to leave “lying around so that people know what is going on.” They are focused on Officer John Pike, who pepper sprayed UC Davis students who were involved in a peaceful Occupy protest and who were already on their knees and handcuffed. You can find the Wikepedia summary here.

Phew. I’ve been stalling on this post. I have been working on so many other cards to send, plus I’ve been getting into journaling and rolodex cards. So much to post…

Be well this holiday season and know that I wish you peace,

mm

Next time, I will try to make the contrast between the background and tree silhouette a little stronger; but I really like it. I may have to make some of these as holiday presents! The “stitching” is my favorite.

Then, I was inspired by this packing tape technique that pretty lily was using. I made a whole bunch because they are fast and fun. They are slowly finding homes. I sent the following one to pretty lily, since she was my inspiration.

And I sent this minimal one to Jon Foster since I hear that he was the IUOMA member who “discovered” the technique.

Ah, so many more many more magazine pages to put packing tape on and then quickly lift to see what randomness stays on the tape!

This last photo is just because I bought a new coat when I was out looking for rolodex containers. I just love the gold and the color combos that it encourages me to make. I’m holding our local clock tower in my hand no less.

And before departing, I want to send positive energy to my fellow Washingtonians that are at our state capitol protesting the budget cut proposals which are nothing less than drastic and inhumane.

Have a good week,

mm