The Boats Ritual II

Some photos from the Ritual of Ending / Boats Ritual ...

as it happened, the tide was coming in, and most of the plain coloured small boats ended up on the shore. I took this as a sign and brought four of them home again.

The Boats Ritual

Tomorrow, the 31st of January, I am planning another ritual to say goodbye to a relationship I've been finding it hard to let go of. I have written a poem and am making a lot of paper boats which I will float away on the tide. Here is the poem:

The Poem for the Ending

lost the lines of your tattoo on my brain

lost the water of your eyes in flight

everything is one foot
on the green
of that path beneath the trees
beside the sea,
when the last of the tiny shells on your back
has rubbed off on your lonely white sheets

the moon tells us false tales to hide
the nude histories
making us shameful
or boastful
or just silent

silent floating in salt water that isn't made out of your tears

but my knees and hips, spine
dance
my whole body into sexy oblivion
feet contacting a dirt floor
space outer limits of no brain activity -
getting high

and swings make kisses arise from deep down
down and determined to fail
for no reason but your
belief in the inevitability of failure

groping in darkness wanting to be fucked

some sometime, some somewhere
will it all become clear
like riding a bike in
a dream of tree-lined Leipzig roads
where your house is a red tent
amongst a block of concrete rubble?

it's departure time for the in too hot
and cold for me so I step out and
leave it all for a red-gold cliff

I fall and I will catch myself

The Rings Ritual

I am getting very excited about performing rituals. It is something that is very helpful for me at the moment, to process things in my life, but I'm also really keen to bring it into my teaching work. It is a fantastic cross-over between life and art, using art and creativity to encourage internal changes...

The first one, which I performed last Friday, was inspired by Sera Beak's "The Red Book". She describes a short ceremony in which she married herself, making vows to honour and protect herself and so on. I realised that perhaps wearing rings from my old relationships (for 12 years!) was not giving a good message to the universe/god/myself and constructed a ritual to bury the rings and bought myself a new ring which has come to symbolise my ONENESS (I much prefer thinking of myself as ONE than as "single").

Here is the place I did it, with the ring box and also a box of ashes of "links" between other people and things I associated with them or wanted from them (eg: "Joel - Love") which I had burnt a week earlier in another small ritual.

Here are the ashes and the three rings - two old and one new.

And here is the 'grave' ...

Miracle

My first Danielle Steel poem...

“Miracle” page 109

sailing the exotic night
imagine
things coming easily
like a pilot in a night sky

“What was that for?”
she said.
the hotel in the late afternoon,
the purposes he intended her for,
bed linens, flatware, crystal and china

she kissed him just
in time to catch a plane to Paris,
a night flight to San Francisco

an hour at Charles de Gaulle
and all her most pressing questions
were answered by
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

---

I've uploaded "The Forgotten Tuesday" to youtube now, too.

Danielle

I am starting to get a bit more serious about planning a new photography/film project using Danielle Steel as my inspiration.

I just started reading her book "Miracle" and it is impossible! I can't believe such terrible story-telling can be so horrendously popular!

But I am fascinated by the cult of personality/the brand that she has created of herself, especially with these over the top glamorous author photos that appear on the backs of her books. They are fabulous.

The project will give me a chance to do some sewing/costuming, and, of course, to be fabulous too!

As well as dressing up like her, I'm also hoping to pull some poems together using her words

Other news ... I will be appearing at the Christchurch Art Gallery during the William Morris exhibition (beginning late March) as Morris' wife, Jane (Janey), sitting in the gallery hand-sewing the famous blue silk dress in which she was painted and photographed by Rosetti.

the clinic's new project, "Love You Approximately" is slowly coming into shape. Auditions will be held soon in Spain and then we may be able to start devising!!