Filling In Skeleton

vampire skeleton cake

As I polished off a slice of cherry cake tonight, I couldn't help but think about this weeks spread "external" and the postings which Ceci has been sending out. My son, Jack, has been daily intoning me with the repeated question, "Mommy, when can we make a skeleton cake?" Actually, the description changed through the past two weeks, from Halloween cake to skeleton to pirate to vampire and back to skeleton cake. As it turned out, I was not the direct aider to his cake making fulfillment, Daddy engaged the mixing and frosting brigade with Jack today, as Hallie and I took some girl time together. I had to include my pics from their success with this weeks spread, as it is incredibly reminiscent (to me at least), of the Dia De los Muertos skulls Ceci posted earlier in the week, and echoed in the face of "external".

As the title to this post suggests, my intent here, is to simply fill in a few lines. I personally get a chuckle from this cartoonish left side of the page, in the toes I filled into the candy wrapper spaces, as part of my Dino body expression. Cec and I actually lifted the yellow crinkly paper recently to check in on the drawing, to see if it went beyond what's visible, and in fact, it doesn't, it is truly a filled in space - awesome!

In her last post, Cec posed a question to me about the book from which the attached sentence on external comes from and its original reference to me. The book is, Meetings with Remarkable Men, the 3rd book in the All and Everything series of G.I. Gurdjieff, who I was turned onto via Osho when I was visiting Puna, India in October 2007, an incredible and mind boggling set of stories, which I apparently read out of order, having made attempts at the first book in the series several times and failed to penetrate it beyond pg.200. - even this past summer, I made another hopeful pass, and was successful reading aloud into the three hundreds, but not yet beyond; this round was completely different I must say, perhaps I'm beyond some levels of delusion - or perhaps, I'm swimming in them! Whatever the case, I am here, and my story is here, where I am. Where are you? -J.

existential silliness

"external" click to view

Deady Eddy click to view

Z page this week "external" was birthed in Guadalajara during the restoration time I shared about in my 6/9/10 post. And as I shared before, it was when I began to paint these faces made of shapes and the lines of negative space in between. Some landed in ZBOOK including this one, created not with paint but instead with white sticker pieces. These pieces made up the borders and framing off an old sheet of stamps which was by this time stampless with only the sticker peripheries remaining. Let no sticker be unrecognized nor unused! As I've proclaimed before, there are stickers all around us in our lives, far beyond the packaged sheets sold at the craft store. The skeleton body came later...
O my goodness it just hit me that this body was drawn in Guadalajara also, but 2 years later when I was living their for 6 months and teaching art an an elementary school. My partner at the time Vinh was going to medical school there (which is why Guadalajara was a frequent spot for me during and after college) and it was a skeleton doll we got during our travels around mexico, in either Guanojuato or San Miguel De Allende, which inspired the drawing that gave the sticker face a body in ZBOOK. O man, what was that skeleton's name?! O yeah! Deady Eddy! ((sigh)) Dead Ed. We loved that that little dead dude. And I didn't even connect that early this week when connecting this page to Dia de los Muertos!

click these to view

ALSO from Guadalajara are these wrappers on the left, that I picked up from the playground at the elementary school I worked at. The top one is for some kind of candy kids eat by scooping out with a little plastic flat spoon. The one below is the top of a sticker package, folded open, you can see the hole in both sides for hanging the package in in the store display. It was Jennifer who later came in and added the middle section that gave a body to the face in the candy wrapper. And after that the dino's body line was extended into the stickers wrapper to excentuate the mirror opposite image in the wrapper, to which I apparently wrote on the side in orange pen " a kind of ying yang" Okay Cec, I suppose :) I'm now teasing myself. And now I'd like to tease myself for teasing myself. O man I did it again. Wait, the date says March 1999 also in orange which would be when I collaged the sticker wrapper in... so Jennifer's dino body came after... so how beautifully did she match up the body line with the "ying yang" line... simple things like this make my day. That is so much of what ZBOOK is about... the magic in simple gestures that meet in perfect timing in the presence of trust and play and availability and receptivity for it all to be revealed and discovered.


So we have bones which are internal yet external in terms of being the matter of the physical... and wrappers that are external and made for for disposal but kept to live on in the internal realm of ZBOOK (look for many other candy wrappers through out ZBOOK too) and on both sides of Z page are the glows of external light of which appear to be auras around these skeleton and dino bodies, also indicating an expression of something internal... or eternal. It tickles me how this page, which is so silly fun to me, also speaks to me of existential awareness. The element that probably set the latter tone, and certainly appeared on the page before the auras did is the cut out quote collaged over Dead Ed:

Cut out from a book that Jennifer sent me color copies of... of the cover and some inside pages, a beautiful book, O man I forgot the name of it again... Hemphill please refresh my memory... and if you feel like, I'd love to hear about how this book came into your hands and how it came to be copied and sent to me... that was late 2000 or early 2001 when Vinh and I were living in New York. And other images and words from those copies of that book appear in other places of ZBOOK. ZBOOK is indeed the search of understanding the mysteries of life... which can never be fully understood of course... thank goodness.


∞ ceci
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week twenty nine >> "external"

Feliz Dia del Los Muertos... we expereinced Hallos-eve, and now we enjoy the celebration of LIFE through recognizing the dead... for that is life, the hologramic cycle of the birthing and the dying of everything which in itself has no begin or end because it's fundamentally energy.... ever present and alive... energy that mutates, transforms, changes form... each change appears as an end of that particular form... and then the new form emerges and "begins." From the chapters in our lives to our relationships to our sense of self to our very lives, we experience many deaths and rebirths along the way until we finally do die... yet we go on... our bodies change form and decay back into dust of the earth and our spirit, our energy, transmutes and lives on beyond this particular life. We often look on death and endings and change as frightening; we often resist change and fear death. But change and endings are the stuff of LIFE. And end is not about an ending at all it is about RENEWAL, marks a beginning, births new LIFE. It is hanging on to the same unchanged state of stasis that is a true death or end because with out change and circulation and transformation there is no living, movement, breathing, rhythm, LIFE.

In this season of harvest, autumn, scorpio, and day of the dead, the time is ripe to recognize what is outmoded in ourselves, in our lives, in our world...what needs to die out is is rotting away already done for... so we can consciously let it go.... so that we can discover all that is seeking to emerge through us. Not just the "bad" stuff, there is "good" stuff too in us and our lives -ways of being and thinking, identities, habits- that truly isn't us any more and holding onto it stagnates us, blocks us from unearthed possibilities, hinders our potential. In the spirit of the Day of the Dead, we recognize the dead in order to celebrate what is alive and wants to live. This day is also known All Souls Day. Once we slough away our excesses we attune to how our internal (soul, energy, light, awareness) gives life to the external (body/world/ideas/forms). Important to begin this weeding and harvesting in own selves and then together collectively. Interesting that our country's major election is set around this time every year. It's a prime time to recognize and choose changes.

"external" click to view

get down to the bones

in touch with your guts

in tune with your tones

releasing the muck

weeds from the internal

steam out now external

new breath fills new senses

new eyes see past fences

step into fortune & out of luck

revere what's done for it begun

the life that now thrives without it

& rejoice!

now that you've allowed it

∞ ceci

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