Saturday, September 26, 2009

It's a great morning to take a walk downtown!

Because there are two art events happening in Los Alamos. There is the SEC Sandoval Chalk Walk on the sidewalk behind Fuller Lodge from 8 am - and it will be judged at 12:30. David Delano will be in the park drawing caricatures and the Life Drawing Group will meet in the park and you can see them in action.

Also, Christy Hengst will have an installation of her porcelain birds in front of Fuller Lodge, today, and around Ashley Pond on Sunday.

I am going to check it out tomorrow, because I'm in Taos right now. I just want you all to get a chance to see it.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

The seven days of creation - quilted

There are a lot of really amazing quilters in Los Alamos! Here is a series of quilts that are on display in Graves Hall at the United Church of Los Alamos. It's a depiction of the seven days of creation.







Friday, September 18, 2009

St. Dimitri's Ethnic Dinner is Sunday

Taste the zip of a Feta crumble tucked into a fresh tomato. Smell the golden spanikotpita, stuffed with spinach. Take a bite of baklava from the recipe of YiaYia Maria Marros and savor the flaky layers of honey and nuts.

On Sunday September 20th at 5:00 pm the members of the Saint Dimitri of Rostov Orthodox Church will host a dinner for the community where they will serve a sampling of ethnic and Mediterranean dishes.

After every liturgy, the families at Saint Dimitri’s they have a meal together. Because of their mix of ethnic backgrounds, they usually serve traditional foods from Greece, Russia, Bulgaria, Sweden and Romania.

“We fast before we come to church, and so we’re always really hungry,” said Elizabeth Bezzerides, “and we like to visit with each other.”

The United Church of Los Alamos has volunteered to let them use their dining space in Graves Hall at 2525 Canyon Road.

Bezzerides converted to the Orthodox religion after marrying her Greek husband and learned to cook Greek food by watching her mother-in-law (and later getting a great cookbook). She will be cooking Greek macaroni meat and pasta classic dish. “Food is basic to people’s relationships,” she said.

Even the kids help. A seven year old boy will help his mom make Spanokopira, phyllo stuffed with spinach and feta cheese.

For dessert there will be baklava, Russian tea cookies, and galactoboureko, a Greek custard pie, coffee and Russian Tea .

Seating will be limited. Make your reservations today by calling 661-7466.

Suggested donations are $15.00 for adults, and $5.00 per child of 10 years or under.

Friday, September 11, 2009

Dream method helps you overcome writers block and gain deeper insights

Eugene Kovalenko, Ph.D., from Los Alamos, NM, has created a simple method of using images from your dreams to infuse your writing with deeper meaning. It’s called the CREEI Method.

Remembering what you dreamed about can be a challenge for some people. “If you have to get up to turn on the light and start getting ready for the day, usually the dream will fade -- unless it was a nightmare!” said Kovalenko, who recommends keeping a notebook by your bed, or in the bathroom, so that you can write down your dreams with the least amount of effort. “If you make a minimum effort to wake up to record a dream, even a few key words can be like a little thread. You pull that thread and it becomes a string; the string becomes a cord; then a line, and before you know it you've landed a dream fish!”

“Dreams are your language, your personal metaphor. Every dream has something original in it, something new,” said Kovalenko. For writers, simply writing your dreams down can help you overcome writer’s block. The raw dream images can help you find your writing voice. Discussing dreams is a way to put aside ways of thinking that can hamper creative growth.

But CREEI can do more than help you collect images. It can actually change your life by helping you work through problems that lead to writer’s block.

Using CREEI people can record their dreams by answering 12 yes or no questions and plotting the answers on a spreadsheet. The questions are:
The questions are:
1. Is the scene Clear? (Can you describe it?)
2. Is your Role proactive Rather than absent, passive or reactive?
3. Is your Emotion (passion) high?
4. Are you Expressing your emotion?
5. Are you Interacting with others? (Rather than withdrawing or being alone.)
6. Is the scene complete or resolved?
7. Is it pleasant? Does it include satisfaction, joy, beauty, aesthetics and/or abundance?
8. Are you secure? (Do you feel safe?)
9. Do you have a sense of healthy self-worth?
10. Are you being your authentic present self? (Rather than pretending.)
11. Are you becoming all that you can be? Are you on the path towards self-actualizing?
12. Are you beloving of all beings? (Do they experience their own beauty in your presence?)
Answering them quickly makes it possible to avoid judging, analyzing and interpreting the dream prematurely. The questions lead to “AHA! moments” that foster creative and spiritual growth and also help you identify problems and issues.

Each dream is categorized based on how many yesses and no’s you have. Dreams can be “transformative,” “motivational,” “anticipatory,” or “traumatic”.

When a dream is puzzling, disturbing, or thought provoking, CREEI offers a technique to help you gain further insight.

In the three stanza poem, the first stanza is a word sketch that captures the dream as you remembered it. In the second stanza you can mess with the dream: ask questions, make changes, or reject certain parts. In the third stanza you rewrite the dream, bringing in heroes or outside support, so that it scores transformative. Kovalenko said, “The very act of writing these words actually makes changes in you, and they are permanent.”

Dreams are close to the boundary between the physical world and the spiritual world. Looking at that boundary will help you answer questions like Who am I? Where am I going? Why am I here? and will give you a new style of writing that is more creative, direct and honest.

Kovalenko offers a free online video course at www.creei.org.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Michele Tisdale



Fall is Michele Tisdale’s favorite time of year because it’s a great time of change. During this time of year she feels tremendous pressure to finish. She said, “There are so many things to paint and they’re going to be gone.”

Her studio is surrounded by her gardens, and she loves to bring flowers and plants inside to paint. She’s inspired by life and movement. She is working on a painting of a morning glory, climbing up a wall. She can only paint it during the short time of the day when the flower blooms. But it’s worth it to go back to the flower, instead of using the photograph that the layout of her drawing, because the photo doesn’t capture the light or the color the way she sees it.

Besides, she enjoys returning to the same places many times. It helps her capture the mood of a place. When she painted the gardens at Los Luceros, all the master gardeners were there and they were all talking. “There was this buzz in the air. It was wonderful.” She loves to paint areas where there is a farm, with pastures, like the place she grew up in Michigan and she love’s painting her friend’s home, which has tremendous warmth and beautiful spaces. Her painting at Chimayo includes a pilgrim, which was the most important thing to her, because she has done the pilgrimage to Chimayo a few times. “You keep seeing more and more. You can never get it all.”

About six years ago Michele had a head injury that turned her world upside down. She said, “I had perceptual problems, pain, difficulty reading and I was drawing everything backwards. My speech therapist said this might be an opportunity to change my life. To take a new direction. After years of dedication to watercolor I switched to oils.”

“The injury actually affected the way I see the world. Shapes are more apparent, colors are brighter and somehow different. Changing to oils was like taking a deep breath and feeling at home. I loved the texture of the paint, the vividness of the colors and the brush stokes. I felt I could render texture in my paintings and that finally I was achieving what I envisioned in color.”

“There are so many times when people are hurrying and there’s so much beauty around and they miss it. I want my paintings to help people pause. “

Like many people, Michele struggled to find time to be creative. But when she was thirty-nine she resolved to make it her top priority. “One day I just decided I could not wait another moment to devote more time to my art work,” she said. “I've never really slowed down since then. Painting is the driving force in my life. My brushes have mileage on them. There's a restlessness, a peacefulness and joy in the work. I'm always finding new things to learn and I know it is a never ending process I hope to continue as long as I live.”