art grieves . the people call out . yet still . our gardens wait

If the government continues to lock up the food stores and eat cake in their imaginary ballrooms while the people slide further into chaos and poverty - what do they think will happen?

I planted a tree yesterday and as I patted and firmed the soil in around its roots a great wave of love welled up in me. I loved the promise of this tree which will grow lovely golden delicious apples and will shade a corner of the little yard and will provide food and branches for birds and blossoms in the spring. It will clean the air and return carbon to the earth.

And live for years and years.

So I named the tree Lucy.

Does this make me a bat-shit crazy old woman? Maybe. And a little less of the old thank you.

This tree - this weeks tiny offer to help recover the climate - you and I have planted a lot of trees around the world over the years. Hundreds actually. Because after all the madness the garden and the trees will be waiting.

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The Tiny Garden in a Melbourne Suburb

Honestly - really tiny. Below is one of the flower beds. In disarray after another squall.

Even in the cold with morning after morning dipping close to freezing - the hollyhocks are budding up in my little ramshackle flower garden. That chair is there to hold up the mammoth poppy that just keeps on pumping out massive frilly green leaf. It has fallen in over all the other plants - but instead of pulling it out I keep inspecting it for any sign of flowers. None so far.

We are at the stage where most of the winter greens and the green onions and the garlic and the spinach are done so they are all out and in the compost. The Silverbeet will go to seed soon - for collecting. The parsley and coriander are going to seed. For collecting. The peas are flopping all over everything. Also going to seed but for eating!

And there are lots of bare patches just waiting for me to pop something in there!

The potatoes are growing well. There is a potato shortage here in Melbourne. Due to a combination of a tough year weather wise and a natural seasonal transition affecting supply these last few weeks. I suspect that if people were happy to buy ugly potatoes we would all be fine. But when we depend on a few supermarkets with their few contracted suppliers this will happen. We get our potatoes from the little local Iranian vegetable shop - they go to the vegetable auctions every morning so their stuff is fresh, seasonal and plentiful.

I need to keep growing potatoes. We love potatoes in this house.

I will plant another little crop just as soon as my next box of seed potatoes arrives. This time I will get them into even bigger coffee bags.

The rhubarb continues to feed us nicely. With muesli for breakfast. Just four plants goes a long way and they are only young so I am careful not to pick too much.

Baby is just starting to taste food and there is an ancient satisfaction when you feed a child from your own garden.

The carrots have not germinated yet. The parsnips are close to being ready to eat. The tomatoes are flowering even with these cold nights, the aubergine and basil are not enjoying this cold snap and I think I see a few wee zuchinni beginning to form.

We have lots of bees - native and otherwise so I have high hopes. For the zucchini/courgette to pollinate we need male and female flowers to be present at the same time and a pollinator (or paintbrush) to blend their pollens.

Apples will self germinate but prefer to have another apple close by and there are two just over the fence, both early flowering so I hope my new tree does well.

I am still wearing my big wooly Norsewear jersey in the mornings. John says he has started the fire in Illinois. It is only slightly colder there. Once the fire is started it seldom goes out as it is the primary heating for the house - plus the cooker! I am missing the farm but I must get over it again, it comes in waves.

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I am worried for the many families in our rural town in Illinois that have only one income in the household.

To date they have been receiving government assistance. This stops this month. And Trump has been quoted saying that the shut down has allowed him to get rid of many government programs he does not approve of. And they won’t be coming back. Please God this is not one he has eliminated but it is closed. I can still do a lot for the little families who are losing their food assistance - even from here. (Melbourne) Especially with the Walmart bread. So much bread is just dumped as it approaches it’s used by date. The trick is to intercept the bread delivery guy after he has taken the old stuff off the shelves and replaced it with new stuff - before he gets to the dumpster and tell him to dump it in your car. This is a car park transaction. Then drive the bread over to the food pantry.

Once this arrangement is established we can usher a lot of wasted food into people’s homes instead of to the dump.

You can do this too. There are thousands of Walmarts!

We are all working on transferring meat from our freezers to the pantries and organizing pantry drivers too. But once we have all emptied our freezers and the food pantries run dry - what then.

If the government continues to lock up the food stores and eat cake in their imaginary ballrooms while the people slide further into chaos and poverty - what do they think will happen?

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So many revolutions began with empty stomachs.

(I wrote about this years ago when I was studying revolutionary art. I was quite the anarchist in those days. I wrote all my notes on paper in those days before typing it into my collection - now I can just take a photo and show old handwritten notes and letters to AI and it gets typed up for me. The joy.

I cleaned it up again last night because writing is never finished and I have a very loose relationship with punctuation. We did not have the tools then that we have now.

I was also a single mum with a mob of kids in those days and food was in fact scarce and we had a big vege garden. They had cut the child support payment for people like me. Us single mothers without family support got very thin. I was heavily involved in the local art scene. And libraries were great free spaces to take kids on rainy days and their skinny mums could study their books. And exercise our minds.

And so I studied.

“When people cannot feed their children, patience collapses quickly. The masses coalesce into a frightening wave of anger. And artists were able to portray the grief and anger and hysteria that enabled ordinary people to rise up and risk everything to change a world.

In 1789, the French stormed the Bastille over the price of bread, an uprising immortalised by Jacques-Louis David. In 1917, the Russians rose for lack of bread, their struggle voiced by Mayakovsky. These moments in history were fierce, unforgiving and bloody. Across Europe in 1848, hunger filled the streets, captured in Käthe Kollwitz’s stark images of workers and mothers. Picasso’s Guernica condemned tyranny, while Diego Rivera’s murals showed the dignity of labour. In China, famine fuelled revolution in 1911 and again in 1949, and in the Arab Spring of 2010. The cry was once more for bread, freedom, and dignity. An appeal that continues to echo through Ai Weiwei’s art of resistance.

Art as resistance.

All those cartoons, signs, slogans, posts, graffiti, murals, drawings, photographs and comments are art. And art is a passionate avenue to help heal the earth and her dwellers.

In every one of these protests it began with the people taking to the streets and walking. Walking along the streets of the earth. Walking miles and miles - chanting and singing and waving their art and shouting out slogans.

But we need to be careful now - hunger has often been the match that lights the fuse and the art of these periods is a flame that illuminates it. But tread carefully. Be intentional. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

They walked - in the millions they walked. And still do.

There is no point at all in writing about art as a vehicle of protest without seeing some of the art that the people inspired.

Here ⬇️ is a particularly pertinent image I found again for you today. One of the most famous works by Jacques-Louis David is The Death of Marat (1793). Oil on canvas. Painted during the French Revolution after the assassination of revolutionary journalist Jean-Paul Marat.

Pertinent today with the danger to any person trying to record the increasingly violent armed ICE units in the USA.

Here is one of Käthe Kollwitz’s most striking works Woman with Dead Child (1903) Etching.

The image shows a mother cradling her dead child. Look at this carefully. The figure of the mother is bent, cradling her child, creating a universal portrait of grief. I cannot look at this image without feeling every particle of her pain. Her body in a coil. She does not think she will use her body again. She does not believe she will ever stand upright again.

It was this portrait I thought of when I read

Hans Jorgensen

’s essay on grief. How we learn to live beside grief. And when I found this picture again it brought me back to those long ago notes. Watching old mothers fighting ICE militants in an effort to protect their adult children and the sheer grief people are dealing with now all over the world.

The thing with this etching is that the viewer must study it hard to catch each lightly applied line - her work is soft with grief, ruined by it and the more I study it the more it breaks my heart.

At the time, I was writing the original essay, Ai Weiwei’s photography, particularly the finger in Tiananmen Square, was particularly striking. Do you remember it?

(This is another screen shot from the public domain. I am trying very hard not to breach copyright here).

As I was searching for the image above which filled me with power at the time, I found another more recent one. ⬇️ An installation at The Tate Modern by Ai Weiwei in 2010. It was a floor covered in millions of individually hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds, produced by artisans in the Chinese town of Jingdezhen.

The seeds covered the floor of the main exhibition hall at the Tate Modern, inviting visitors to walk across them. (Though after a short while they could only look). The Tate Modern owns the sunflowers now. And I heard that sometimes they sell the seeds as a limited edition. I am not sure how I feel about selling off an installation piece-meal but I would buy one! Bad me.

Here is a screen shot of WeiWei and a few of the seeds. Behind him people walk amongst the stone seeds. Each one of us is a seed.

( Credit to the Tate Modern)

I am sowing sunflower seeds today, and as an homage to WeiWei’s work, I am going to write the initials of people I respect and love on each seed. Then, I will plant them in the ground. My own little piece of art for today. My secret installation.

For we are all artists. In our own worlds. And not all art is seen by all. Our art can be a comment. A cry. A word. A poem. A silent gesture.

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Good morning. I hope your day goes well.

Once again I ask that if you can - please help walk our latch key kids walk to and from school or to their buses in Chicago. We are hoping that as it gets colder some of these thugs will retreat. Just go home. We hope it is a really cold winter. There is no way to tell the good guys from the bad guys at the moment with masks and no ID and no court ordered warrants necessary so we want them all to go away.

All of them.

They talk to me of the fear - every day. My Chicago friends. And they express their wish that they could have got their kids out before this started.

Let’s hope they are recalled soon.

Good morning.

It is morning here in Melbourne Australia as I hit send. And now to my sunflowers! And our ongoing work of keeping plastic out of the world’s oceans. Because alongside all the protest we still get to plant our gardens. Life’s dichotomy.

Love Celi

PS - one of my favorite sections! The PS.

Go here to watch a bumble bee bumble about because even as we struggle to recover the earth and keep plastic out of the sea and feed our friends and relations and shelter our fragile - while all that goes on - our trees still need planting and the garden needs tending.

A new (to me) writer I am now reading - he also believes - like we do that every small act we make to help heal the earth is worth doing and makes a difference. I hav3 only just begun to red his work but like what I see so far. We have the power.

And Amanda - who we have been following for a while now. Certainly worth the read. Amanda helps us ordinary souls feel hope for the earth. (and the whales).

Keep doing what you are doing!

Islands transformed: Thousands of seabirds nest on newly rat-free atolls