Sticking paintbrushes in the hands of 15 kids full of energy and too much desk time was the best idea I have had for a while. I took this large card stock page 70x100cm and filled it with blind contours of garden, flowers, plants,etc. Then I chopped it up in 10x10cm pieces, gave each of the kids paints and told them to paint them as they liked. When it was put back together all the kids stuck out their chests and pat ed each other on the back with pride in their colorful garden. It hangs now in the class room where they do their hours of homework a day. Many of them first generation readers, they are my heroes.

the sunflower has grown
old leaves warped
bloated, head cast down
cloves that held up wide

yellow masses now thorns
towards the ground
crowning the massive head
what pride what arrogance

high, bright, bigger than all
flowers plants wide veins
pumping water to the
shower head spraying yellow

your seeds are bird eaten
your petals ground under
with the grand show over
you bow deep with closed eyes

you turned the sun to seed
who shall find you guilty now
of ego pride and greed
you poured out all you could gather

your power not wasted in you
but carries life through winter
into the next year, the next life
another day for extending us into the sun”

-5 September 2006-

Through the summer and into the fall I have been doing blind contours with pen on handmade paper of the sunflower outside the studio window. This one includes a couple birds that were picking away at leftover seeds. 

Detail from 'The Storyteller'

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a wonderful example of the genius in African Storytelling. As I relished the culturally rich language such as, "... the market was so crowded, that if you threw a grain of sand it would never hit the ground" A few days after finishing the book I listened to a discussion led by a new Word Made Flesh board member, a Ugandan Catholic priest, and presently teaching at Duke. He discribed briefly how we live in and out of stories. Often these stories are unconscous yet they inform our descision, our sense of who we are, and become a basis for building our lives.