So where have I been?
Battling devilkins, my friends. Long curled cozy in my psyche, they are wakened by these two years’ loss and misadventure, and by this house which proves itself a psychiatric ground zero. As some of you know, I moved across the country last fall in the wake of my mother’s flight from this world, and now dwell in the little house where she lived.
The house, tiny and crouched amongst trees like a proper Baba Yaga hut, contains spectres: my maternal Granny with her red-handled fireman’s ax and tendency to devour, the beginning of a most dreadful marriage when I was 19, and most recently the melanoma that ate my mother. Combined with the sort of remorse soaked self-examination that can follow the death of someone close, it has seemed a delving in an Underworld. Far the most difficult demons to lay are the revenants of my own blunders.
But such shadowed periods may be fruitful. One hopes the reward for clambering out again may some kind of renaissance, and the Arts do hand one a form and venue for such, along with an obligation to seek it.
Even bright art is stronger for wading through sorrow. Sweetness in art with no deep root through darkness can lack sustenance and resonance and remain a thing of the top soil. So perhaps we bring more revealing, higher growing fruits to the Goblin Market for time spent underground. Or, joy with more ballast.
But alas, I have neglected much meanwhile; not least the many and many kind words from Visitors here.
State of the Blog
This blog was launched just a few months before my mother’s diagnosis was revealed and this strange two years plus began, with me in ‘curl up & hide’ mode much of the time.
Thank you, most patient Visitors, for your support and words, despite my being so often MIA. It has meant and means a great deal, do not doubt! The launch of the blog was perhaps ill timed for my audience, given my frightfully sluggish responses, but it has been a great asset to me, the knowledge that you, Friends, are out there and care that I keep producing.
Now, I aim to do better. We shall see, but I venture to bet on myself. There is much work in the pipeline: more of Faeryland, more of Baba Yaga (who will eventually have her very own page when I’ve fully set up the blog over on SquareSpace, http://ForestBeings.com, a new Mr. Faun, more folk tale and mythic subjects. Speaking of which, I’d best return to the Table and work on them, so I can show you!
Ever my (somewhat variable) best,
Forest
(The images are, of course, from Hieronymous Bosch,whom I adore.)
Lou Rogers, working at the Rudolph N. Rohn liturgical arts company in Pittsburgh, PA, in the early 1980's.
And on the Mountain, over Boulder, CO, at 20 years old. She saw the Mountains both as entities in themselves and as populated with numinous beings, which manifested in her paintings and writings.
(One of a ring of twelve Angels I painted for the Holy Resurrection Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Wilkes-Barre, PA. Wingspan: 14 feet, hight: 9 feet)
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