I Am A Miracle

Hope, a photo by DebraAnn813 on Flickr.

This piece is called Hope, it is folded up in one of the bins in my studio at the moment.  This is the first art piece that I ever made.  It is called Hope because sometimes you live in a black hole so deep and so vast that the only thing you have left is a hand coming out of it and a faith in something bigger than yourself.  Before I found myself in this beautiful part of the world I call home, I lived in this black hole all my life.  Everyone I have ever loved was lost except my son, my husband, my brother , my aunts and my dog.  I was literally a living lost soul.  Everyone else died but yet somehow I still remained with a smile on my face. I had to have that smile at a very early age probably before I even knew what a life was.  I was 2 years old when one of my brothers was born with a hole in his heart(I mentioned him in a blog post 2 days ago as that would have been the day he was 51 years old).  He was always sick and when he was 4 he had a life saving operation and he died on the table.  That is literally all I know, I was 6 years old  and didn't know much about death and living or happiness.  Nothing.  A few months later my father was in a terrible accident which we passed on the way home from the store and I saw his car and yes it was his car.  He lived through the accident, was told he would never walk again, but yet he did.  He was in the hospital for a year I think, I was 6 years old and really don't remember it.  My mother I think must have had a nervous break down because all I remember is that she took lithium till I was a teenager and she suffered from insomnia and slept late every morning. No breakfast, no lunch, no clean clothes.  Nothing but the greatest love a mother could have for her children.  I think my mother is the reason my brother and I are still alive today because although we lived in an environment not conducive to anything living, she gave all the love she had in her heart to her two remaining children.  She did everything with us. Any interest in anything she indulged us.  I love to read, to dance to sing because my mother would spend her days dancing in my living room with her daughter who she so adored.  My brother was a real card and always getting into little boy trouble but she just loved us to death.  We were her world and she was going to keep us safe from everything.  Most kids fall off a bike, they get right back on she put our bicycles away.  She would make the most extraordinary breakfasts when we were sick and of course we were always sick.  Once in high school she got mad at me because I liked a boy in school and went to school in the snow.  She was the most nurturing mother ever on the planet ever.  However my whole childhood was spent dancicng around a hoarders episode complete with dead mice, dead birds, dead pets, decaying food.  Kids never came to our house or if they did they never came back.  She filled our time though with great listening and you could literally tell her anything and she would understand.  She also taught me acceptance and the value of  making people laugh.  I could always spin a good yarn and make even the most stuffiest of people laugh.  Even cruel children who didn't have any freakin idea the trauma my brother and I went through.  School was hell and those breakfasts were extraordinary.  I never went to school, ever.  Missed weeks at a time sometimes.  Who knows where I would have ended up had I gone to school.  I could be writing a book and making million dollar paychecks doing it.  I loved to write too.  Was exceptionally good at it too when I was a kid.  My grandmothers and aunts and uncles also helped to pick up the slack, my exceptionally strong maternal grandmother was the most generous soul on the planet,  she also had an extremely hard life and managed to rear absoluting amazing children.  My paternal grandmother who gave me my greatest gift, my love of the needles and the ability to stitch just about anything back together and she lived above a church .  So here I was a little girl with a flair for the dramatic,  who could make people laugh,  who was completely sheltered from the bad world(somewhat) who would say anything to anybody and never had a filter, which let me tell you is a great way to make people laugh.  My mother used to paint clowns, lots of them, with tears running down their cheeks and she would say that I was that clown.  I still am. My grandmother used to take me to church and  lady in the church would say I can see the whole world in your eyes little girl.  And I guess she could, there was a lot of the world for a little girl.  My brother and I continued on that way with a babysitter till I was 14, a lovely neighbor used to bring us hardened marshmallows and pretzels(still have a great mind for details).  Lovely woman.  And then the fun started, I turned 16, sweet 16 and never been kissed.  Met a wonderful boy who is a facebook friend with his wife.  Lovely.  Met lots of boys had a knack for doing that too I might add.  When I turned 18 I went out 4 nights a week and danced and kissed my way through northern NJ and had a hell of a good time doing it.  Until I was 22.  My mother came down with unoperable lymphoma, but didn't know it was terminal until after she died a year later on January 3, 1983.  During those years and the rest of my life I made some very bad choices which haunt me till this day.  I was a train wreck waiting to happen and literally my car got stuck on a railroad track of the real kind not the metaphorical kind, obviously it was towed.  Dark, dark, days and stupid, stupid ways.  My father well I think  he kinda died a little when my brother died and a lot more when my mother died.  He decided he wanted to be happy and he left with his new wife and never looked back on his old life.  Did call once a week and send christmas cards from Arthur and Maria.  Wonderful really.  Also let my 14 year old house cat out in the middle of the winter where I found her when Peter and I went back to visit them.  My brother had to end up taking care of her.  The dog was lucky only her name was changed.  And my brother was lucky too, they let him live in his room without paying rent.  My father was very charming though and that is something I did inherit from him.  No matter what happened, it didn't really matter because when my son was 5 he had a heart attack, which gave him a stroke, which put him in a coma for 8 months because his new life wasn't over.  He was a kind of wonderful father when he was a father.  He died a few hours into January 1, 1997.  It was really a gift because watching someone on machines and knowing they wouldn't have wanted it that way was very painful, dark night of the soul painful.I often visualize my brother, my mother and my father holding hands in a circle in a field.  It gives me joy.  Andrea Bocelli got me through those horrible 8 months I discovered him and he touched my soul,  I also made many embroidered christening outfits without a pattern and worked in a preschool where I could be around beautiful little souls.  Those children kept me alive with their wonderful little happy faces every day.  Later on in January my paternal grandmother died. My maternal grandmother died in August 1987, 2 months after my wedding and my maternal grandfather a truly wonderful, wonderful, wonderful man died May 1991, the same month my son was born.  No matter what, no matter when whenever I was happy the ground gave out under my feet.  And I laughed, and loved, and lived through it all.  I was given so many wonderful gifts from so many different angels on my path and I talk about them every day on my blog.  They are the reason I am alive today.  I have a penchant for meeting new people and a penchant for talking really good combination and every single one of them knows a little something about my life, but this is the first time it is all put together.  9/11 was exceptionally hard for me because I knew exactly how all those families felt and how those poor children's lives were changed forever.  Luckily that happened when mental health doesn't hold such a stigma, hopefully they will heal before it takes them 50 years to do it.  I decided to do this because I no longer just have hope to keep me going, I have a place I love, a nice peaceful place.  I have friends who love me for the crazy I bring into everyone's life, I have a son who the sun rises and sets on and always will even when he lives to the ripe old age of 100, I have a husband who moved me to this beautiful place.  I have a wonderful bunch of artist friends giving and warm and beautiful souled.  I have my beloved embroidery and a penchant for bright colors to brighten the darkness.  I have the Black Keys and their songs that seem to have healed everything from 2 to 52, they have been living in my head through my earphones while I've embroidered for the last 4 months as all of the other music I listened to is too loud, too depressing or too painful to listen to anymore.  I have been set free and I am a miracle.  People like me usually succumb to drugs, to drink, to food, to recklessness but  thanks to my mother and my son as long as one of them has been in my life I've been able to survive.  Unconditional love.  I know this was a long tale to read, I kind of wish it was a novel being paid for and kind of all over the place and raw but it is 3:30 in the morning and I am finally free.  I am a freakin miracle.  Blessings to all who stayed to the end and all of the angels I have in my life  now who worry about me so and the angels I loved in the past .  I love you all.  Don't worry about that roast that is burned or that car that is dented it could be so much worse.

I Wanna Get Funky

This little chicken is called Funky Berta.  She was inspired by the song I Wanna Get Funky by Albert King.  A beautiful bluesy (or just plain blues)tune which is excellent beyond  belief.  It was recommended by a kindred spirit of the humankind.

Sometimes the universe works in special ways, and you notice something perhaps that you were not looking for. Everyone can look at a painting or listen to a  beautiful song and find something that speaks to them.  Every painting and every song carries significance for some one.  It's a different painting and a different song that speaks to us but somehow it just does. 

Sometimes as mere mortals we miss the significance of our souls in the general scheme of life.  We get up every morning.  We work our butts off,  we live, we laugh, we lose,  we make love or we make hate.  It's a different story every single day.  Sometimes on the human plane our lives can look like a complete train wreck, but somehow we are able to transcend that on our soul level.  Humans are fallible, souls move from one lifetime to another.  That is why I can listen to a Black Keys song and embroider and I can find happiness and peace, my friend Emily can find happiness and peace in country music and quilting,  and  my friend Cheryl can find happiness and peace in classical music and glassmaking.  Each person has a particular linkage to something in their soul that bonds them with an artist , with a song, with a small embroidered heart (that's the sales pitch but I digress).  But you have to listen very carefully to what your soul wants or you just completely miss the linkage and the message that God is trying to send you.

Artists on a whole, live in their soul more than they live in their mere mortal status.  They are more sensitive, they are solitary beings, they spend a lot of time in their heads which sometimes leaves them up in the clouds.  They get the messages that the universe wants to send them and they disseminate it out into the universe where it is supposed to land on the person who most needs that message. But sometimes that message is filled with pain, for it is the losses and the heartbreaks that artists feel more then mere mortals, and then they are used as the conduit to heal everyone else.  Mere mortals like to keep the darkness of their life hid so it is up to the artist to heal them.

I've had a lot of losses and heartbreaks in my lifetime and I spent an awful lot of my life in a very dark place( smiling and making other people laugh) but god never takes anything away from you without leaving something in it's place.  For me it was the needlearts and music and laughter.   The clown with the one tear always dripping down my face.  The dancing with my beloved artist mother who made me and my brother her whole world until her soul just could not take it and left to live in the strictly soul life with my other brother.  But then for all that pain I was rewarded with my beautiful soul of a son.  He reminds me every single day of my mother.  He is the one I adore, as my brother and I were the ones my mother adored.  Children are our souls personified until they get old enough to become mere mortals.  They are the reason we are here on earth .

Without mere mortals, we would have never had Mozart, or Picasso,  The Black Keys(grrrrrrrrrrrrr)or embroiderers who use their talents to stitch people back together.   So I guess in the end to find real beauty sometimes you have to look behind the madness and find the soul living beneath the grrrrrr and then you will be able to give your children the most important message of all, that they are loved and adored and the one.  Because for all the messages and pain the artist has to endure, we appreciate the young souls are children are because we recognize our souls in them.

Buy some music, buy some art and most especially tell your kids and their souls that you love them.  If you would like to discuss this post as it is a most personal subject you can email me at debraann813@yahoo.com.  I am always here to listen to ailing souls, I understand their pain all too well and I try very hard to stitch them back together again or at least make them understand that they are not the only mere mortals with such heavy problems.

Rest

This piece is called Serenity. It is currently available at Valley Artisans Market in Cambridge, NY.

Rest.  We all need to.  We all need to sleep and rest and restore.  Somehow the universe doesn't seem to have gotten this message. So many people in my universe are having problems going to sleep and staying asleep. My  friends, my facebook friends and almost everyone I run into lately is having problems sleeping.

But why?  Is it because our days are so hectic we can't wind down, or is it just the general state of unrest around the world?  Wars, school shootings, politics, unemployment, every single day something horrible happens, not just horrible but catastrophic.  So many people are in just a general state of  despair. Is it hormones or the planet turning the wrong way on it's axis.  I'm not a scientist so I don't really know the answer to that, but I do believe in the bigger picture.

Most of my friends are artists nowadays.  Overly sensitive to the universe.  We laugh louder and longer than "normal" people and we cry and get sad more easily then "normal" people.  We need the universe to be working and turning so that we can keep working and turning.   An artist can never stay in just one place, we always have to be turning and changing.  And when the world is kind of crazy like this we just bounce around like a pinball machine.  Going on an hourly basis from peace to frenetic activity.  Tears to smiles in a split second and then we are back to the tears again(that could just be the hormones).  Or perhaps all those weird variations are because the planet isn't very happy with us and all these sleepless nights result in a massive universal state of unrest.

 People do crazy things when they haven't been sleeping but then again if you time everything perfectly you sometimes find ways to rest without sleeping.  You embroider, you read, you chat with friends on the computer so you know you aren't alone at 5 AM or you listen to music. Sometimes if you are very lucky you laugh, that hysterical crazy laugh you laugh when you haven't had a good night's sleep in weeks, or months or years.  I guess it's the universe's way of throwing us a bone.  Perhaps it's because artists through the ages have been known to be vey poor sleepers who are always dreaming of their next masterpiece.    Their masterpieces make it easier for us to rest and to process the unrest so we know we belong to something bigger than ourselves.

The song of the day is Rest.  It is sung by Michael Kiwanuka(cut and paste it's easier that way, perhaps with a good night's sleep I could spell it).  I listen to his music every morning now just to ease my worried mind and inspire me.  Blessings.  Go listen to music (his song Tell Me a Tale is inspirational too)your music and do something that will ease your weary mind and perhaps make it easier for you to rest if you can't sleep.

Brothers

Happy Birthday to my brothers!  Anthony is the little dark haired cute one and Laurence is the blond cherubic looking one.  Anthony is 51 today and Laurence died on the operating table when he was 4  from an operation to fix a hole in his heart.  I guess you could say we carry that hole part around with us to this day.  The part that's missing but still kind of there.  My brother has a cat for his facebook picture and I have an embroidered Bluebird so you can kind of separate the three of us but there are things that keep us together even though we are all planted in different places.

The lower picture is a picture of Anthony and I  with our cousins(who we saw so often as children they were kind of siblings).  We were all incredibly close and this was my communion day.   If you look closely at the picture you will see the Anthony I remember. He is wearing my communion cape and has a huge space in the middle of his bangs because he cut his own hair.  He was always doing silly things like that.  Anthony is  one of those boys who actually put a bobby pin in a light socket and I dropped a lit match on the couch once.  Birds of a feather and all.  And Anthony is the kind of guy who has all these humorous cats and gizmos that he makes people laugh with on his Facebook page and well myself if you know me well enough you know I will say just about anything to make someone laugh.  I think that is where I will leave my brothers  for today.

Which brings me to my obsession with the Black Keys.  Sometimes even a somewhat spiritually evolved person can be listening but not really hearing.  I thought my obsession was of the god's gift to menopausal women kind(Listen to When The Lights Go Out, it is gods gift to menopausal women, growling and pleading and word lingering swoon).  But actually my first CD by them was Brothers.  I listen to all of their CD's for different reasons and I just kind of missed the linkage.  I was 6 after all.  It is the most beautiful soulful cd I have ever owned.  It just goes right into my ears, swims around a bit and then goes right into my soul.  There is even a song called Unknown Brother which was written because
Dan Auerbach's wife lost her brother also and the song is about her brother.  Even then I was kind of too dense or maybe the pain was just so deep I couldn't find the meaning.  It was easier to laugh about my craziness, then to think about my craziness.  I've been in therapy for a long time and even then I was so bottled up and the pain was so deep nothing penetrated it.  My therapist has become sort of a friend therapist and finally the walls started coming down.  One day while leaving her office I saw a magazine that discussed childhood trauma, I brought it home and realized that I was normal, for a child who lost her brother when she was 6.  We become creative searchers who can never find the missing piece.  Also on that day my beloved son downloaded the first of my secondary Black Keys cds which clearly muddled up the spiritual awakening and healing that was going on.  But you know what it made me happy, it made me laugh, it made me sing to my  dog and laugh, it made me question the way I was living.  Did I want to be happy or did I want to just live the same dreary muddied existence?  I chose the happy route and I will continue to say anything that comes to my head to make people laugh.  Certainly not enough laughter in the world, not enough music in the world and not enough joy in the world.  So I guess you could say all of the therapy and all of the art and all of the wonderful people I've met on my life journey have healed me and that oh so sexy voice is just the icing on the cake or that Wicked Messenger(in case he ever happens to read this)!!

And yes my unknown brother(for the most part) gave me a gift on his birthday.  An epiphany(a real one for my friends who know what that means to make them laugh)!

Lasan

This is a beautiful soulful song taking on one of the most important messages of life. “Live your every day like you're running out of time” and “Try to find you something that won't fade away in time”   Please listen.  It's kind of a beautiful soulful way of saying find your black keys and your embroidery .Have a great day .  Be back tomorrow with pictures.
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Home Again

The name of this piece is Unconventional. It can be found at The Katbird Shop in Schenectady, N.Y. Originally Unconventional was going to be embroidered on Orange water-colored fabric, but then I opted for blue because I wanted to show that although every thing else is "normal" the house is different. Every house is different and every person living in that house is different. My home is in upstate New York, it is the most beautiful, peaceful healing place I have ever lived. I grew up in New Jersey a block away from the second biggest superfund sight in the country, although when I was growing up it was just a paint factory spewing the chemicals from the paint into the air and not into the ground water supply. I was sick all the time growing up. Then I lived in Bayside, Queens. An experience so horrible I just choose to forget it. It was never peaceful and you couldn't distinguish the Fourth of July from a war zone. I was sick all the time. And then I lived on Long Island, it would have been a beautiful place were there not so many damn people on that island and I didn't live close enough to spit on a brother and sister act who made my and my family's life miserable. I was always sick. And then I moved up here. The place where I fit and where I found myself. My home. I never get sick. I have just enough space to breath and I have wonderful neighbors, wonderful friends, wonderful art and well I can just sound pollyanna about where I live all day. If you are ever looking for a vacation destination you can find it up here just seconds, minutes, hours away. And it seems to be a place where everyone can explore who they really are and have enough freedom to chase some wonderful dreams. My song of the day is Home Again. It is sung by Michael Kiwanuka. Yes he was yesterday's artist too. He has such a beautiful voice and such an inspiring way with words and music I find myself taking a break from my embroidery and watching him on Youtube. I especially like to listen to him live. Just beautiful. I found you can get the same feelings from music when it is(was) performed live that you can when you put on your headphones, because live as with headphones gives you the opportunity to see the nuance and texture of the music you listen to. And I found that the experience is even better when you close your eyes and only experience sound. So listen to Michael and let it bring you to the beautiful place that you call home.

I'm Getting Ready

I live to be inspired. No other way around it. In the past year I have been so blessed. This is Garden Tree. This is the piece that started the wonderful journey I have undertaken. The piece that started the realization that I am an artist. Sometimes you can make art and not feel like an artist. Artist is such a loaded word really. It means you see the world through a different lens. You have to be thick-skinned, inspired, tenacious, and positive and sometimes in real life those attributes are hard to find in yourself.

When you really start to express yourself, your world totally changes. When you finally decide this is who I am and this is who I want to be, the world accepts your uniqueness and you move forward into the life you've imagined. Simply all those wonderful inspirational sayings are inspiring for a reason. Because until you believe them somewhere in your soul they will just never happen. No matter how hard you try.

Every unique individual has a unique path that they have to follow. Doing the work is the hardest and most rewarding part. There are a million reasons every day why we don't reach our potential but most of it is because we just don't realize that it can be done. That it's about the work more than the reward. It's hard to try to find your own path in a world where talent is not always rewarded and a pretty face can make you much more important then you deserve to be. But then we have to become artists again and just block out all the suggestions about who we should be, what we should make, and most of all how selfish we are to spend so much time doing something we love. Yes selfish is the real word, the word that stops us dead in our tracks. I guess for those who love us they want us to be happy but they really don't want us to change or slip back into the cocoon we have to live in to create. But since they loved us when we were broken, I guess we have to give them a break sometime. Hopefully they adjust.

Being a hand embroidery artist means I need a lot of focus. Most of the time I live between my headphones because that blocks out the outside noise and the other voices who want to play when I want to work. As you know most of the time that music is provided by the Black Keys, who frankly I wonder where they have been all my life as I enjoy every single song they play, a different one for every day and every mood. But I digress.

The song of the day is I'm Getting Ready. It is sung by Michael Kiwanuka. A beautiful, soulful, inspiring artist who sings as beautifully out in a field as he does on a stage or on a recording(go look for him on Youtube). He's also young, I so appreciate young people who realize they are artists and don't have to go through the years of searching to find themselves. So give him a listen and hopefully we will be hearing his beautiful music for decades and decades to come.

Have a great day and find something that inspires you, if you look closely enough you will find it. Blessings.