Author: Katharine Asals

Some local drama

Katharine Asals8 Comments

Over the holidays some dear friends who have moved out to BC were here at mine for a couple of days, and we did a thing which is becoming tradition for us – an “unravel your year” exercise, where you look at the past year and do your best to remember deeply what each month was about, to better envision what you would like to achieve or experience in the year ahead.

For all three of us, one of the big highlights was the visit I made out to their new home on Vancouver Island. For me, the one doing the traveling, it started with a gorgeous flight out over the Rockies –

The flight began in the dark of early morning, but as we flew west the sun rose in the east faster than we flew, giving the sensation of being chased across the earth by the sun.

Perhaps I was feeling especially aware of the turning of the earth as I’d done an exercise for my shamanic “course” some weeks earlier. The course itself is really a yearly engagement with the directions – east, west, south, north. This summer I moved from doing a year in the east – the place of fire, sunrise, and new beginnings – to the west. The west is about sunset, earth, stones, dreaming and death. And as part of engaging with the west, one exercise is to try and spend an entire night out sitting on the earth, seeing the sun go down and then come up again in the morning, sensing the turning of the planet.

Where I live is very urban, so I figured I could sit in our local park, amongst the trees by the beach. But then as the evening played out, groups of guys with cases of beers and boomboxes blaring reggaeton started to show up – it was after all a beautiful Friday evening in summertime – and by the time the sun went down I was too distracted and went home and sat instead on my balcony, heading back to the beach before sunrise to see how much I could feel into the experience. 

As the sun rose, I sat by this tree who seems to reach down into the earth apparently getting just enough nutrients to make a life.

So all of this leaning into feeling close to the earth was still with me while flying west – thinking of the west and the earth while flying west over the earth…

And then being in BC for a week, well… BC is just one of the most gorgeous places on the planet.

So very gorgeous that my friends attempts to try to convince me to move out there stayed with me quite powerfully upon my return to my neighbourhood of condo towers and the never-ending construction of more and more condo towers.

But there are things here that keep me here. 

There is the ongoing graffiti art project I’ve got happening here which is still a lot of fun, even in the ways that it engages with the worst of this area in all of its hideous highway underpasses and traffic jams –

And then, in the most bizarre juxtaposition, just meters away from the ugliness of the traffic, are all the pleasures of life by the lake –

And part of life by the lake for the last few years has been the delightful convenience of the New Year’s fireworks being set off from a barge on the water, meaning all we need to do is stumble down our stairwell a few minutes before midnight to revel in not only the spectacular flashes and bangs, but also the throngs of the young people of this city.

Happy New Year !!!

Lens Artists Challenge – Dramatic

On the edge of loss

Katharine Asals5 Comments

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal ~

love leaves a memory no one can steal

~ from a headstone in Ireland

I went out onto the balcony at about 6:30 in the morning with my coffee as I often do.

Settling into the chair, a huge murmuration of hundreds of birds suddenly burst forth from the park next door and spread out across the city. Without thinking, I looked for the kitty cat, to point out to her this happy deluge of birds…

But alas. She left us in late July.

It’s a thing you try to keep to yourself – being heartbroken after the death of a pet, even when they’ve been with you for 20 years – because there isn’t much to say really, and well, heck, they aren’t technically “a person”…

But I gotta tell you, throughout the evolving empty nest home situation of a boy spreading his wings and making his way in the world, and then covid lockdowns, and other health challenges of the last few years, she has been, effectively, my person.

Now I have a little cylinder of ashes out sitting in her spot on the balcony.

Sometimes the balcony door suddenly opens by itself and I wonder if it is her, telling me that these fall nights are too cold for her to stay outside, and she really just wants to be in her heated bed.

Big picture, it really was all fantastically good.

She lived a long and glorious cat life.

She ruled the wilds of a phenomenal back yard for her first 10 years –

And in her older years, there was a smaller life in the quiet of a wee condo with Cat TV –

Still, managing the loss, the Never-Again-ness of death is so difficult to fathom – it arrives in bits and pieces over an extended period of time, perhaps never quite ending. You think the worst is over and then you wake from a dream in the wee hours and look for that little face, and remember again – gone.

*

In a more shocking development, we lost Tom, of Tom & Bea, very suddenly.

Only 55, it was / is still impossible to really comprehend. At the funeral service and wake it was striking to see the people – but maybe especially the men – wandering around stricken, with tears streaking their faces. How Tom with all his big-hearted generosity, his acceptance and love of so much humanity, allowed us to be ourselves – who else is there in this world to do this?

What an exceptional and beloved human to leave us so abruptly. Bea, I think of you every single day.

Tom, I want to share a tune, you know I do, and of course there are too many. So here is one of many –

*

On yet another note – one of temporary absence – my winged boy is off with a one-way ticket and no specific plans to return. His girlfriend has let slip a few more specifics than he has, mentioning perhaps a period of 2 years…

I’m trying to see it as a challenge – a challenge to build and strengthen every other aspect of life until he comes home again.

Lens Artists Challenge – On the Edge

On the bus

Katharine Asals2 Comments

Some weeks ago I went to New York City with my son.

We landed early on the Wednesday, dropped our things at the hotel, and then made straight for the museum around the corner that was having a show of Wangechi Mutu’s work – a woman whose collages I’d long admired online.

But OMG, the show was so much more than what I knew, and so much more than I expected… the early collages, but later paint-collages, sculptures and short films and installations – several floors of a lush, dynamite, gorgeous and frequently creepy body of work – a highly coherent and full retrospective of an artist in mid-career.

On the Thursday we had a lunch date with V, who I had never met in person, but knew from some online art classes and group critiques, from 2 years of regular zoom meetings hosted by our mutual teacher, Lisa Call.

And at some point there over lunch with V, talking about art and bodies of work, both she and I tried to explain the Helsinki bus theory to my son – a theory Lisa introduced to us early on in her classes, as a way to focus on one’s own path for long enough to get to a point of deep creative exploration and originality. We stumbled through our explanations, looking for how to say that if you stay on your one single bus long enough instead of trying each and every new thing, it will start to evolve into something that is original.

And once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire—that’s why you chose that platform after all—it’s time to look for your breakthrough. Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it. Your vision takes off.”

Arno Rafael Minkkinen

Lisa had us consider this way of thinking early on in our work with her, along with a process of what she called “closing doors” – closing the doors to all the things you are NOT going to do, so that you can focus on what you ARE going to do. And in a way, the narrower, the better – challenging, but also a clearing of the dross.

So looking at the work of Wangechi Mutu, it was so clear she had stayed on her bus – but the interesting thing was, that her materials were able to change quite radically through the years, and it was her thematics that stayed true and focused like a north star throughout.