Detours seem inconvenient, but sometimes they lead us to beautiful destinations. Such was the case yesterday when the guys and I were on our way to my aunts’ homes to do drive-by Christmas visits. A stopped train and a long line of traffic compelled us to take another route.
We worked our way around through Church Street in the historic part of Madison, Alabama and found it transformed to Christmas Card Lane. Each home had on display a giant “card” [created by local artists] in recognition of the holiday season. Some cards were traditional, some were whimsical, and, of course, some were biblical . Some even featured local themes.
The whole block celebrated the festive spirit of the season and boosted the holiday cheer.
I captured 26 “cards” as we drove slowly down the street. Here are our favorites:
My son’s favorite:
“Merry Christmas in Sweet Home Alabama”
My hubby’s favorite:
Christmas in the style of the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote
My favorite favorite is above, but here’s another favorite.
“No Place Like Gnome for the Holidays”
I’m running low on WordPress space, but you can see all 26 cards in my Flickr album: Christmas Card Lane.
My creative energy has been extremely high the last few days, but since I’m working feverishly to meet a deadline for work, there’s been little time to benefit from that energy. I felt a little like Virginia Woolf this weekend, so late Friday night just before slipping into dream land, I took a moment to make doodle art in her honor.
One of these will become a postcard. The only problem is I don’t know which one I like best, so you get to choose.
Vote below!
Thanks for voting! Be sure to take some time to doodle this week!
When my anxiety or stress levels heighten they are met with an equally strong desire to create. During the “lockdown phase” of the pandemic–March through July–I wrote poetry (almost daily), participated in seminars and workshops, tried new vegan recipes, painted, sang, doodled, and experimented with creative photography.
“Flowers in Bloom” by Rae L.
Since I returned to work in this pandemic season, the drive to create to combat the stress of this moment has been so intense that I had to add micro-creation sessions to my day.
“Flowers in Bloom” by Rae L.
I find a moment to doodle while thinking through a solution or while listening to a podcast or webinar. I fiddle with the lines of a poem I’ve already drafted in the wee morning hours. I transform a photo. I create inspirational Instagram posts.* I cut and tear pages from beautiful magazines and use them in art journal pages. I even do little things to create order out of the chaos of my desks [at home and at work].
“Flowers in Bloom” by Rae L.
Like journaling, there are many, many health benefits of creativity. These small, though intentional, acts of creativity allow me to tune out the chaotic noise of the world and find order within.
About the images: The set of floral art in this post is the work of Rae L, one of my Love Notes friends. She sent the envelope full of cheerful flowers a month or so ago. This is how she’s coping with the madness. Aren’t they lovely?
*A few weeks ago, my desire to create order spilled over to my Instagram page. I wiped my IG clean, changed my name, and created a uniform look for my page. If you have a moment, check it out. Maybe, you’ll be inspired: iamchandralynn.
I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all. –Laura Ingalls Wilder
Happy October, Y’all!
Yes, I realize we’re 5 whole days into the month and I’m that many days late with this do-something-every-day post.
Joan B, one of my “Christian Friends” on Swap-bot, sent me this sweet “Good Day” card for my birthday [October 2nd]. I’m “just a little late” with posting, but the tasks are easy enough and you’ll be caught up in no time.
Good Day Note Cards, published by the Mental Health Association of Oregon, “are designed to brighten your life each day of the month. Don’t you just love this idea of doing little things to make your days great?
While talking to a colleague a few days ago, I happened across a poem I wrote when I was about 16. I shared a few lines with her and she was “impressed” that I was thinking about something other than boys and getting away from my parents’ rules. I told her I’d share the poem on the blog today, but it requires more typing than I can handle at the moment, so I chose a much shorter “teenage” poem–one that is nothing like the other poem.
I Can Be Me!
In a poem I can be anyone I want to be. I can do what I want to do when I want to do it. I can lose painful feelings to memory and rejoice in my misery. I can escape and travel to ageless worlds. I can create a world of my own and destroy reality. In a poem, dreams are reality and yesterdays are forgotten. Tomorrows never come. Today is forever. In a poem I can be a philosophical moron or a simple intellectual. In a poem I can be anyone I want to be; I can even be me!
It has been almost two years since I shared a “younger self” poem! I find a lot of the poems rather “cringey,” to use my son’s word. But there are a hundreds of them, so I’ll try to get over myself and share them a bit more frequently.
About the Image: The cheerful artwork above is the work of my colleague, Kayla W–the person referenced in the conversation about my teenage poetry. She recently learned she’s an artist. 😉 Even if you find my poem cringey [too], please show Kayla some bloggy love. ❤
Forgive me for what is sure to be a rambling, pointless blog post. Despite my weariness, I promised myself I would write a post today because Microblog Mondays are part of my normal. I need as much normal as I can get these days.
For many complex reasons, my university decided to offer in-person instruction, but students have the option to attend virtually. Today was the first day of classes. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I met students in my office via ZOOM instead of in a classroom. Only a couple of my students are back on campus for in-person instruction. The others are learning from their homes because neither they nor their parents are comfortable with the still rising [COVID-19] numbers.
There’s so much more to think about during these COVID times. There are so many ways of navigating academic life that has been remapped. We wear masks and face shields; place protective shields on our desks; check temperatures and sanitize our hands when we enter buildings; we carry gloves, hand sanitizer, extra masks, and disinfectant spray; we are overly conscious of our hands and face; we remind students to “stay back” the magic distance of six feet—no hugs for those beautiful ones we haven’t seen in five months; we teach fewer students in instructional spaces and try to construct our courses so the students build connections through the digital divide.
To make matters even more interesting–here we are in the hottest part of a southern summer, and the air conditioner in our almost 80-year-old building decided to go on strike. So 95 degrees outside. 105 inside while wearing a mask. I had a taste of hell today.
Strange start to the academic year after an odd too-long/too-short summer. In these first moments, getting through [another] COVID semester seems impossible, but I keep reminding myself, the impossible gives birth to miracles.
Today’s guest post for our series on living Black in the United States was written by up-and-coming performance phenom, Liv Grace. Liv Grace graduated from high school a couple of weeks ago, and she is already making her mark in this world. In this post, she shares a little about her music journey and her song and music video, “Hear Me Roar,” which she wrote in protest of police brutality and racial injustice in the USA. Be sure to watch the video.
Yoooooo! My name is Liv Grace, and amongst many other things I am a singer, songwriter, and producer. I’ve always been a lover of music and the arts. I’ve loved making music, writing, and editing films since the day I found out my Nintendo 3DS had a video camera. I started writing poetry and fictional stories around the fifth grade. I’ve been singing in choirs since I was really young. I’ve harmonized on praise teams all throughout middle and high school, and I’ve been “belting it out” in school musicals for the past five years.
What I love most about music is its ability to bring people together and make them feel something. A simple melody has the power to make us feel a plethora of emotions and a lyric can help us see the world through someone else’s eyes. I’ve always loved the feeling I get when I listen to music and I like being able to give that feeling to others.
I’ve always been composing harmonies. I remember watching a video of young Ariana Grande when I was in middle school singing into a microphone connected to a guitar looping pedal, layering harmonies and singing over it. I was mesmerized, and immediately I knew I had to try it. Unfortunately, my middle school allowance was not large enough to purchase a professional guitar looper and trying to convince my parents to purchase a $100 guitar looper for me—a twelve-year-old with no guitar—was surprisingly difficult. I decided to do the next best thing and downloaded a free beatbox looping app on my phone. I picked a random song from my iTunes playlists, listened to it on repeat and recreated the instrumental with only my voice on loop. My obsession with arranging and recreating harmonies ran wild from there. I found myself recreating Broadway cast albums and singing all of the parts. I’d post small clips of me harmonizing with myself and singing covers on Instagram.
In my junior year of high school, I decided it was time to start creating my own music. This was daunting, yet exciting. Ironically, around that same time my dad, brother, and I stumbled across a space connected to the Hirshhorn Museum called ARTLAB+. That space literally changed my life. In fact, the only reason I actually completed my very first song was because I needed it to apply and audition for one of their arts programs. I was accepted, but didn’t go in with high hopes. I showed up, I sang it, and they loved it! It was at that moment that I realized this thing I’d been doing as a therapeutic hobby was something I was actually good at! I’ve been writing melodies, producing instrumentals, and composing harmonies ever since.
Liv Grace. Photo provided by the artist.
At the beginning of the shelter-in-place [to flatten the curve of COVID-19], there was a moment when nobody in the US knew what was going on or how to deal with it. My school extended our spring break while administrators and teachers worked on an action plan, so there was this huge chunk of time in which I was able to focus on things that made me happy. I’d started a music account on Instagram earlier in the year, but rarely posted on it due to lack of time. Now, I had what felt like all the time in the world!
Like many others, I began to use this surplus of time to focus on things that I genuinely enjoy and to learn new things. I finally had enough time to pour into one of my passions—music. I started actively posting on Instagram and from this the opportunity arose through ARTLAB+ to share my creative process as a teen artist in collaboration with the Nicholson Project, an artist residency program.
Liv Grace. Photo provided by the artist.
A couple days into the process [and after I’d written a song on mental health for the project], the video of George Floyd’s murder took over all forms of media. It wasn’t the first time I’d watched my people carelessly shoved to the ground by law enforcement. Every time a video comes across my feed, my heart aches, but watching George groan in pain as he yelled for his mother was the last straw. I knew I needed to use my gift to speak out. I decided my mental health song could wait and began writing “Hear Me Roar.”
When it comes to creating, I overthink everything. I spend hours writing and rewriting, trying to find the right drum pad or the perfect harmonies to accent, but with “Hear Me Roar” everything just flowed so organically. The song just came to me. The chorus popped into my head as I was soaking in a bubble bath. The next day I sat and wrote two verses, a pre-chorus, a chorus, and arranged backing vocals in one sitting. The next day I produced the instrumental and just continued tweaking throughout the week until the song was finished. I let it breathe for a little bit, listened to it about a week later and called it a wrap.
The song was done, and I loved it.
A little after the song was finalized, I decided I wanted it to be released with a music video, so I grabbed my video camera and my dad’s mini projector and pushed my bed to the other side of my room. Over a couple days I filmed, directed, and produced the video.
“Hear Me Roar” is the song I needed to hear as we mourned the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and all the other Black people who lost their lives to police brutality. I needed a song that would remind me no matter how hard anybody tries, they cannot silence my voice.
We often see the tragedies and the news and feel hopeless, like our voices don’t matter. But they do! Not only do they matter, our voices have the power to move mountains and make change in the world. My hope is that “Hear Me Roar” can remind people how powerful their roars are and that they should use them to speak out on issues that matter to them. Right now, we are in great need of change and if we use our individual and collective voices, we can make that happen!
“Hear Me Roar” is available to stream on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Tidal, Amazon Music, Google Play Music, Youtube Music, Deezer, and Napster! It is also available to purchase on Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play Store. You can find links to all of these stores here:
A percentage of the proceeds from “Hear Me Roar” will be donated to the ARTLAB+ program. Individuals involved in the program devote their lives to uplifting and amplifying the voices of young artists of color and provide us with equipment, professional guidance, and a loving environment to express ourselves in our own creative and unique ways. I want to help the program give the opportunities they’ve given to me to other young Black artists.
John Lewis, after arrest in Mississippi, 1961. He served 37 days in Parchman Penitentiary for ‘disorderly conduct”–using a restroom reserved for whites.
When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation, a mission, and a mandate to stand up, to speak up and speak out, and get in the way, get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble [and help redeem the soul of America]. –Congressman John Lewis (February 21, 1940-July 17, 2020).
It is not unusual for artists to use their work as a platform against social injustice, so it is not surprising that we have seen a resurgence of social justice art since the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement. Many artists have used Instagram to share their messages.
My former student, Chanté Enu [formerly known as Chanté Marie]–singer, songwriter, and artist–contributes to the dialogue. Her social justice artwork, which she has begun to post on Instagram, reminds us to “say the names” of those who have succumbed to police violence.
For today’s post on living Black in the United States, she shares a piece from her series, Voices Mourning in Protest and a little about the motivation behind its creation.
This piece is a tribute to the many Black individuals whose lives were taken by the police. I added names to the canvas in hopes that while viewing this composition people will say their names and remember:
George Floyd. Jamar Clark. Timothy Thomas. Danroy Henry Jr. Trayvon Martin. Eric Garner. Artago Damon Howard. Jeremy Lett. Lavall Hall. Thomas Allen. Charly Leundeu Keunang. Naeschylus Vinzant. Tony Robinson. Anthony Hill. Bobby Gross. Brandon Jones. Eric Harris. Walter Scott. Frank Shephard. William Chapman. David Felix. Brendon Glenn. Kris Jackson. Spencer McCain. Victor Emmanuel Larosa. Salvado Ellswood. Darrius Stewart . Albert Joseph Davis. Samuel DuBose. Christian Taylor. Asshams Pharoah Manley. India Kager. Keith Harrison McLeod. Junior Prosper. Anthony Ashford. Bennie Lee Tignor. Jamar Clark. Nathaniel Harris Pickett.
The list goes on.
The focal point of this piece is a black woman in mourning. She represents the heaviness of the grief and loss many of us feel.
My prayer is that we expel the monsters of apathy and disconnect that plague our nation and invoke genuine feelings of connectedness through our collective grief over the loss of these lives.
Through this piece, I hope people understand that it is our responsibility to speak up, to advocate, to say their names, to protest injustice, to deeply care about the injustices against Black lives.
All mothers were summoned, when George Floyd called out for his mother. —Rachel Costa
Every mother heard him. We heard George Floyd. We hear him. —Kadiatou Diallo, mother of Amadou Diallo who was murdered by New York City police officers in 1999.
For today’s post on living Black in the United States, I invite you to view a three-part series presented by the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art. The project features Dr. Tameka Cage Conley, an artist I initially met many years ago when she was a student–an English major, of course. 😉 I am so very proud of her and her work.
The museum describes the “Summoned Mother” series as:
a memoir of a particular American motherhood: Black and uniquely precarious. This three-volume video series features Dr. Tameka Cage Conley, a literary artist and mother to a six-year-old Black boy, as she responds to George Floyd’s breathless call on motherhood. Conley juxtaposes the works of Elizabeth Catlett with those of contemporary Black poets, bridging the visual and literary arts in a meditation of Black artistry’s longstanding eye on injustice.
Dr. Tameka’s masterful weave of poetry, art, story, and song achingly reaches that primordial place in all mothers that compels us to protect, to rescue, to do something.
The project was spearheaded by Kwadwo Nnuro; the entire series is approximately 42 minutes in length.
About the image: The image that leads today’s post features a favorite photo of my son and me–modified for the post.
Other posts in the “Black Lives Matter” Monday series:
Yoooooo! My name is Liv Grace, and amongst many other things I am a singer, songwriter, and producer. I’ve always been a lover of music and the arts. I’ve loved making music, writing, and editing films since the day I found out my Nintendo 3DS had a video camera. I started writing poetry and fictional stories around the fifth grade. I’ve been singing in choirs since I was really young. I’ve harmonized on praise teams all throughout middle and high school, and I’ve been “belting it out” in school musicals for the past five years.
