Stories

August 13, 2013 - Keep Flowers In Full Bloom

 

pushing elephants upstairs

pushing elephants type

 

 

Michael Stipe (REM) also makes bronze sculptures…

 

pushing elephants

 

July 18, 2013 - Walk In Your Own Shoes

 

July 4, 2013 - Wisdoms of Rose Away With The Birds

 

Wisdoms of rose bird days

Sometimes Rose couldn’t account for the hours in her day .

Although Rose meets each day with a slight brief, she often drifts off, leaving her with no recollection of time gone astray – and where she was when it went.  She relishes this sweet form of freedom and the fruitful outcomes that arise from times when she does nothing of great significance at all – except maybe concentrating on her breathing.  Long Live Rose.

Footnote:  In a world where the rush to do, to see, to be, is so overwhelming at times, Rose’s footsteps are calm ones to follow – along with her ‘away with the birds’ philosophy that defies the more uptight others view of this being laziness.

(Wisdoms of Rose and Clunk & Jam 2019 books.  Reposted from 2013).

June 20, 2013 - Pleasa Sava Mona

 

please sava mona

 

The changing face of beauty .

In a waiting room I picked up a plastic surgery magazine.  The fact that plastic surgery is being promoted as a fashionable commodity is alarming.    And we should be alarmed by the cultural movement towards the attainment of perfection – and the abundance of sexed up chicks and soft porn images that surround us – and our kids.  And it’s not only women who are suffering from the promotion of an unattainable ideal.  It’s men and kids too.  Talk to young people and most of them don’t like what they look like.  It causes them great agony – and it’s stopping them in their tracks.  So let’s just keep questioning the ‘ideal’ being promoted on telly, internet, social media, in magazines, on catwalks, movies and stages – in doctors surgery waiting rooms.

May 23, 2013 - Write On

 

stormie black board

 

Write On .

I flunked English (and art) and dropped out of school.    But I’ve since found reading, writing and drawing provides an essential power source.  So even if you struggle with reading, writing, spelling, or your writing’s messy, you can’t draw – keep your mind open to these mediums.  And wouldn’t we all have a stronger sense of identity and place if they made studying your ‘Self’ as important a topic as English and Maths at school?   And music, art, poetry and film were on the book-list for this subject.  But it’s never too late to make your ‘self’ a topic to study – to seek a greater knowledge and understanding of who we are and explore the possibilities of who we can become.  And if through this more people felt more comfortable and at peace with themselves (and difference), and more solid in their sense of place in the world – wouldn’t society (the world) stand to gain from this collective of more educated and contented selves?

(Art by Stormie Mills, original in colour).

April 19, 2013 - Comfort in Virginia

 

virginia woolf home

 

From Virginia Woolf’s biography  ….

“Virginia was a sane woman who had an illness.  She was often a patient, but she was not a victim.  She was not weak, or hysterical, or self-deluding, or guilty, or oppressed.  On the contrary, she was a person of exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism, who made the best use she could, and came to the deepest understanding possible to her, of her own condition.  She endured, periodically, great agony of mind and severe physical pain, with remarkably little self-pity.

She frequently uses the word ‘apprehensive’ to describe her states of mind.  The word is a crucial one: the awful fear which accompanied her breakdowns and the possibility of their recurrence can never be underestimated.

What is certain is her closeness, all her life, to a terrifying edge, and her creation of a language which faces it and makes something of it.  This is a life of heroism, not of oppression, a life of writing wrestled from illness, fear and pain.”

Excerpt from biography ‘Virginia Woolf’ by Hermione Lee.