Greetings!
And welcome to my newsletter for February, 2010! Please feel free to forward this to anyone you think would be interested in keeping up with me! To receive these newsletters regularly, please drop me an email or subscribe online from my website (http://www.JefMurra
Pitchers ============
A number of folks have been asking about prints of my Tolkien-themed sketches and paintings. These have been unavailable from my website since early 2008, but that is now being remedied. Although all of my original Tolkien-themed paintings and sketches continue to be handled exclusively by ADC Art & Books (see www.adcbooks.
All will be limited edition pigment-based archival quality prints (Giclée), and all come signed and numbered. Just look up an image you like at www.JefMurray.
Ponderings ============
I’m mulling over masks. This happens each year about this time, as Shrove Tuesday approaches. Mardi Gras materializes just as winter waxes full. Spring storms will stalk the weeks to come, but for now we are still Jack Frost bitten.
Mardi Gras masks hang ‘round our house in preparation for a feast this Friday. Mountains of okra, bushels of crabs and Andouille sausages heap the kitchen. Shrimps of all sizes and shapes swell ice box shelves. Peppers peek and onions peel. I am become the maelstrom and my name is Gumbo: behold me, ye of puny proportions, and quake!
Gumbo means “okra†in Creole French, and the word derives from the Bantu language of the Congolese people. Here in the Deep South the word means many things: it is the big soup of the bayous that wraps great-muscled arms around all that is tasty, wild or cultivated. It is made of all things; is eaten by all things; is all things. The culmination of French and African and Native American and Italian largesse, Gumbo is a soup like that of Tolkien’s Fairy Tales…made up of bits and pieces of all nations, all peoples, all mythologies.
Gumbo is like Mardi Gras. It is something magical molded from the mundane. As Tolkien says, “All that is gold does not glitterâ€: in this case, Mardi Gras glitters, but Gumbo is true gold.
But, appearances deceive on these February days. The grape vines look dead, and rosemary bush and bamboo seem to have taken Jack Frost a bit too seriously. I’m checking to see if the honeybees are still humming their wintry lullaby, and am snipping old growth from scuppernong and fig. Next week begins Lent, and I probably need more pruning than anything else growing on this petite plot of land.
Shrove Tuesday means “confession†Tuesday…the day when we need to ‘fess up about our failings. And with Lent we get opportunities to make amends.
But this brings me back to masks. As I’m snipping off straggly tendrils that have grown into the gardenia bush, I’m wondering, if masks are so much a part of Mardi Gras, is it because on Ash Wednesday we’re supposed to strip them off again? And here I mean _all_ of them, not just the paper ones we don as we guzzle our Gumbo…?
Who is the wearer of the mask and who _is_ the mask? Do we ever stop to find out? If I were a grapevine, who would it be that would ask to be pruned?
Surely not this strand of grapevine-come-
Snip. There goes a little bit of temper.
Snip. That’s some arrogance right there.
Snip. There goes just the smallest strand of self-centeredness.
Hmm. Looks like this is going to take a while. Truth to tell, it may take the rest of my life to find all the bits that need chucking. Worse still, the part of me that’s doing the judging is, very likely, the one that’ll get it all wrong. I’ll end up keeping the arrogance and snipping off a branch of humility. I’ll hang on to hamfistedness and cull compassion.
Maybe, then, this isn’t something I’m capable of doing. Just like Gumbo needs someone to season it, maybe I’m the soup that wants salting. Maybe, when all is said and done, I’m not capable of removing my masks and finding out what’s beneath them.
And if this is true, then perhaps my job this Lent is something a bit bigger than I expected. Maybe my job is to sit still and let larger hands than mine figure out what parts of me need sifting and what needs savoring. If I’m the soup, then there’s got to be someone else tending the stove.
What I have to do this Lent is to trust the One doing the cooking. And perhaps that’s the point. My own certainty that I know what’s best for me is the biggest mask of all. And if so, then only by laying down that mask can I finally learn who it is that God intends for me to be….
May God bless you and yours this Lenten season….
Jef
Prospects ============
- The next full exhibition at Moreton in Marsh, “The Edge of the Wildâ€, has been postponed. There are multiple reasons for the change, not least of which is the desire to include a number of new pieces of artwork from Ted Nasmith, Ruth Lacon, Peter Pracownik and myself that would otherwise not be ready to show at the event. In addition, the extra time will help insure that the new Hilary Tolkien book, “Wheelbarrows at Dawnâ€, will be available at the show, as will copies of my own new work, an illustrated edition of “The Magic Ring†by Fouque. Look for details on the new dates and times shortly; they’ll be announced on the ADC Art & Books website (http://www.adcbooks
- The folks at the Festival in the Shire just launched the second issue of the online Festival in the Shire Journal (http://www.festival
- The current issue of the “St. Austin Review (StAR)†(January/February)
- Volume 3 of “Silver Leavesâ€, the journal of the White Tree Fund (http://www.whitetre
- For folks interested in original paintings and sketches or prints of my work, please take a look at the ADC Art and Books online catalog at www.adcbooks.
No comments:
Post a Comment