Search Results for: mother mary

As soon as I drew the face I knew it was the right one for my Blessed Mother.

This morning, lying in bed before getting up, I was picturing my Mother Mary and realized she was too big.  So when I finally got into my studio this afternoon, the first thing I did was shrink her body to the right size.  And when I began working on her face again, it came to me.

There are so many different stories and images of Mother Mary, I feel like she’s expansive enough to be what each of us needs her to be.

My view of her is definitely influenced by Sue Silverstein.  It was in Sue’s art room that I first saw a Mother Mary I could relate to.  And even though the statue that sits on the counter right next to the sewing machines where I was teaching sewing, looks like so many others I’ve seen throughout my life, there was something different about her.

Maybe not in the way she looks, but in the way she feels.

Sue has a long and close relationship with the Blessed Mother. The way Sue talks about her makes me understand Mother Mary in a way I never did before.  “I relate to her being a terrified young girl with a huge task”, Sue told me. “She keeps me sane when life feels out of control.”

So when Sue saw a picture of the face I drew today and said that her expression was “perfect”. I felt even better about it.

By creating my own Mother Mary, I’m finding out who she is and what she means to me.

I hadn’t told Margaret that I was making a Blessed Mother fabric painting, but there she was in our conversation as we walked up the dirt road together.

Margaret and I have been walking together almost every week since the summer. Today she was telling me about the indoor Grotto she used to visit when she was young.   It was the rocks and running water in the small room that made it special for her.

That reminded me of the Madonna in our front yard when I was growing up.  She belonged to my Grandmother, who lived upstairs from us. A narrow cement path through the garden led to the wooden arch draped in climbing roses.  The three-foot-tall concrete Madonna, under the arch, was painted white. Big conch shells and candles in glass jars were at her feet.

Although we all posed with small white bibles in our hands when we had our first communion, we kids were not allowed to go in Grandma’s garden.  So I kept my distance from the Madonna.

In retrospect that made it all the more mysterious and alluring.

Even though she lived in the same house, and I saw her almost every day, I wasn’t close to my Grandmother. But one summer day, I was helping her weed the garden.  I was both horrified and impressed as she picked up one of the big conch shells at the Madonna’s feet, reached inside of it, and pulled out a huge slug. She tossed it aside as if it were just another weed.

All I could think of was the slime that stuck to the bottom of my barefoot the first time I accidentally stepped on a slug.  I never imagined someone would voluntarily pick one up in their bare hand.

When I got home from our walk,  the two books about the Mystics and the Virgin Mary had arrived.  Jon ordered them for me when I told him I was working on a fabric painting of the Blessed Mother.

One book, The Miracles of Mary, by Michael S Dunham, had a lot of pictures. So I skipped the words and went right to the images. It has paintings and sculptures from different countires from the 13th century to the 20th.

I’m not interested in a sullen or suffering Mary with downcast eyes.  I want her to have the wide, wise eyes of the ancient goddesses and a subtle but knowing smile.

I found inspiration for my Mary’s face in the book and started doing some drawings to get it right.

I also think I may be putting conch shells at her feet, like the mysterious Virgin Mary I grew up with. The shells can also represent water.  So many of the images of ancient goddesses use water as a symbol for the life force, so it’s fitting.  But I may also want to put more mundane objects, maybe some paintbrushes and pencils at her feet too.

Like the Blessed Mother in Sue’s classroom, I want my Mary to be accessible.

Jon and I went to the funeral service for Mary Kellogg today.  Jon gave a talk about Mary and I read two of her poems.

The first poem was Song At Milking.  I chose it because it showed the loving relationship between Mary and her father, who she loved dearly.  And also because it shows Mary’s spirit even at a young age.

Song At Milking   By Mary Kellogg

Dad was a quiet man
especially around the cows

evening chores begin
he pats first cow gently
and settles on the three legged stool
resting his soft farmers hat against her thigh
begins to pull the milk down
silver milk bucket resonates zing zing on metal

I am watching from the doorstep, feet flat on cement
warm moist scent of hay and cows wrap around me
cows wait stoically
grinding hay and grain in sliding  motion

I like it here   I start to whistle

Dad says Whistling women and crowing hen
are no good for mice and men

smiling he says, My mother used to sing.
   She had a beautiful voice
The neighbors loved to hear her singing in the garden

Did you ever sing? I ask

Used to, sometimes. 

Will you sing a song for me?

He begins, Yankee Doodle went to town riding on a pony
put a feather in his cap and called it macaroni
Yankee Doodle keep it up, Yankee Doodle dandy
mind the music and the dance and with the girls be handy

in bubble of mirth I whistle Dad’s tune up the step
and out the door

The second poem of Mary’s that I read shows that same self-determination only seventy years later.

Octogenarian    By Mary Kellogg

I am mighty close to this age
Never thought I’d reach such a milestone

Now what?
I can be like a frog
sit on a bog and wait
to be gobbled up 

or

I can jump, make a ripple
affect change 
in little ways

I can sit motionless 
as one I knew did
and say, “oh dear, oh dear.”

I prefer to make a ripple
to sweep another shore
touch another life
within another day

Our friend the poet, Mary Kellogg died last night.  She was 91 years old.  Mary had entered hospice about a week ago and she died peacefully in the company of her daughters.

Mary was in her late 70’s when she wrote Jon a letter and asked if she and her friends could visit his farm.  It was after everyone else was gone that Mary told Jon she’d been writing poetry her whole life and had never shown it to anyone.  After reading a few of Mary’s poems, Jon got the idea to publish a book of her poetry.

He and I were just friends at the time, I wasn’t even doing my art, but he asked me to help edit the book.  It was the first creative thing I had done in a very long time and it opened up an important part of me that I had shut down.

For a while, it was the three of us, Mary, me, and Jon making a book. We were reading years of Mary’s poems and picking the best ones, then pairing them with Jon’s photos. We published My Place On Earth and sold over 2000 copies.

We published three more books of Mary’s poems, Whistling Woman, How To Dance and This Time Of Life. All of Mary’s books sold out.

In some ways, I saw myself in Mary.  We both put our art aside and found it later in life.

It’s one of the reasons, working on that first book was so important to me.  I was helping to give Mary her voice even when I had lost my own.  And in seeing her work so hard at that point in her life to bring her poems into the world, it helped inspire me to find my own voice.

Here was Mary, a woman my mother’s age, saying with her actions if not outright that what she had to say was worth hearing. That it mattered.  And she trusted that people would want to hear it.

But Mary also believed in me at a time when I didn’t believe in myself.

She listened to me and took me seriously. She appreciated and trusted me in a way no older woman had in my life. Mary was a no-nonsense church-going woman.  She believed in family, community, and tradition.   But she never made me feel guilty or bad about myself and my choices, which in many ways, were very different from hers.

Mary was a creative mother to me.

We understood each other’s story without having to talk about it.  When I saw how Mary grabbed the opportunity to get her poems out into the world, I paid attention.  And a few years later, when I had the opportunity to turn my life around and be the artist I always was but hid, even from myself, I had Mary’s example to follow.

What I learned just today from Mary’s daughter was that publishing Mary’s first book helped lift her from a low point in her life after her husband died.  She took care of him for ten years when he had dementia and her poetry gave new meaning to her life when she needed it most.

Mary was a part of Jon and mine’s life, even before we had any idea we would end up together.  She was there through our divorces and supported us when we got married.  She wrote a poem which she read at our wedding and read her poetry at every Open House we had.

One spring she invited Jon and me to walk through the woods by her home to see the wildflowers that grew there.  Up to that point, I had no idea that wildflowers grew in the woods.  I thought they only grew in sunny fields.  I don’t remember what kind of flowers they were, but I do remember that she led us to a shady place where the ground was thick with purple flowers.  It felt like magic to me.

I don’t think those flowers ever made it into one of Mary’s poems. And we never walked in nature together again.  But I did get to see her gardens while she was still able to tend to them.  And a few times we watched the birds out her dining room window together. The same window you could see the mountains, that she called her “neighbors.”

By the time we published Mary’s last book, This Time of Life in 2018, she could no longer write poems. As the Alzheimer’s got slowly worse, She told me she just couldn’t concentrate.   But she was able to give me a folder of poems we hadn’t yet published, some from the past few years others older.

Between Mary’s illness and the pandemic, I hadn’t seen her in a long time. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about her often and won’t continue to.

All summer as I watched the Hollyhocks bloom in my garden, I thought of Mary’s poem Hollyhock Lady. (After reading the poem Mary showed me how to make a woman in a dress out of a Hollyhock flower like she did when she was a kid. )And every time I drink a cup of Chai from one of Mary’s china cups that she gave me I think of her.

And of course, there are and Mary’s poems. Always at my fingertips.

But even more than that, what Mary taught me lives inside of me now. I live the lesson that it’s never too late to come out of hiding and show the world who we really are. And I intend to keep passing that on, as Mary did, in action and words.

Rain beaded on my windows distorting the world outside them.  Zip only came out at the end of the day to see Jon.  The sheep and donkeys stayed in the barn all day.  Only the the hens seemed to love the warm rain.  They wandered the farm, pecking at the saturated ground as if it were spring.

The gray day made my studio cozy,  the rain an excuse to stay in and get a good days work in.

And I did get far on My Truth Has Wings.

I began the day by removing the hand stitched appliqué from an old quilt.  The green stems and leaves of its flowers were perfect for the flowers that would be growing beneath my wings.

I’d used a part of this quilt as the backing for my Mother Mary fabric painting.  Much of the appliqué was worn but there were more squares in good enough condition for me to repurpose.

Once I had the stems and leaves removed, I went on to removing more appliqué from the quilt I’m using as a ground for “My Truth”.

Whenever I’m removing stitches from an old quilt, I think of the person who sewed them. So often the stitches, the threads, hold when the fabric gives out.  I am undoing their work.  Releasing whatever they put into the quilt.

It is destructive, but also transformative.

I reshaped the flower to create two more.  Buds at different stages, growing into the flower in bloom.

I hand sewed the flowers, stems and leaves.  I think it gives them a more organic, less formal feeling.

It was dark when I left my studio, but the hens were still out pecking around.  I bet I get an egg or two tomorrow.

I think a strip of red on the bottom  will complete My Truth.

We went to a contemporary Catholic church.  It had traditional stained glass windows, with scenes from the bible, but was bright with natural sunlight and pale green walls.  The Folk Mass was my mother’s favorite, she liked the music.  They played acoustic guitars and sang If I Had A Hammer and Blowin’ In The Wind.

My father never went to church, and my only mother went reluctantly.  Once we were old enough to go by ourselves she stopped taking us.

When she did take us to church, my mother would give us each a quarter to put in the basket.  Men in suits would walk up the aisle on either side of the pews with a basket on a long handle.  They’d pass the basket in front of us and we’d toss the money in before they pulled the basket back and moved on to the next pew.

When I learned that the money went to the church and not poor people I was shocked.

Then, one day I saw a very old woman, whose face was folded with wrinkles.  She was stooped and held onto the arm of a younger woman when she walked. I saw her put money into a metal box on the wall, with the words For The Poor on it.

After that, I put my change in that box instead of the basket.

I was searching back then. Looking for something to believe in, for a way to do good, and I wasn’t finding it in the church.

So when my grandmother gave me a chain with the Virgin Mary and a pendant with the number 13 on it, I wore them religiously, never taking them off.  She told me the “13” was good luck and I didn’t think more about it.

I know now that was more superstition than religion.

I hadn’t thought of that medal in years until someone sent me a message on Facebook about how the number 13 was a holy number in the ancient goddess culture.  I don’t remember the specifics, but it got my attention.

In many ancient cultures, a full year had thirteen moons.  These moons correlated with women’s 28-day menstrual cycles and their fertility.

I’ve read that in Italy, where my grandmother was from,  the number 13 is still seen as a lucky number.  And even though there are more recent connections to the Virgin Mary and the Last Supper, I have no doubt that the meaning found in the number 13 goes back to the days when women (not male gods) were still seen as creators of life.

I have a feeling, from what I remember about my grandmother, that she was more superstitious than religious.  I never talked to her about it but looking back it seems to me that what she did was mostly about Goddess worship ( the Virgin Mary being the Goddess), and about bringing good fortune.

I stopped going to church soon after my mother stopped bringing us.  It just didn’t give me what I was looking for.  And when I was a teenager, I took off the gold medals my grandmother had given me and put them in a box in my dresser drawer.

I don’t know what happened to them but now I like that I had that connection to the number 13 early in my life.  I still gravitate toward the number, it’s always felt witchy, in a good way, to me.

My grandmother was a difficult person and I did not like spending time with her, but she’s been dead for many years.  The distance makes it easier for me to find a gift in the relationship.  The first was when I made my Mother Mary fabric painting.   The conch shells in the image I created came from the Madonna my grandmother had in her garden.  She was surrounded by conch shells.

Now I have another in the number 13.

But this connection is with women in general and spans thousands of years instead of just two people’s lifetimes.   It also speaks to all the work I’ve created around Goddesses in the past years. To my “Flying Vulva” and the power that women continue to fight to reclaim.

Over the summer someone donated a bunch of raw canvas to Sue’s art class at Bishop Gibbons.

When Sue showed it to me, she wasn’t sure how she would use it.

This is how it works.  When a creative person receives something they weren’t expecting, they figure out how to use it.

Sue came up with the idea of making floor cloths from the canvas.

Using a soft pad that is similar to using a linoleum block, but easier to carve, the students cut out designs and printed them on the canvas to make floor cloths. Both sides of the soft pad can be carved so the designs can be alternated to make a repeated checkerboard pattern.

I was moved to tears when the saw the floorcloths hanging in the hallway at the school around the statue of Mother Mary.

It felt as if Sue had brought the art room up from the basement and into the light where everyone could see it.

Here’s a few of the printed floor cloths close up.

This one makes me think quilt.