Saturday, December 9, 2023

Making Christmas/Holiday Cards

                                                             

           

I was planning to make cards with the little red-hatted gnome I've used the past few years. But somehow this is what I find myself doing.

Making the cards is repetitive, for sure. Batches of six at a time; I need around forty. 

 It's also a kind of meditation, a mantra. I don't pray, believing as I do that if there were a good god in charge of things, they wouldn't be letting bad things happen.  But making these cards is as near to prayer as I get.

                                                                                              

I was making dove linocuts for holiday cards, back during the Vietnam war. And fifty-some years later, here I am, painting doves with Ukraine/Russia and Palestine/ Israel on my mind. 

Peace. 

Is it even possible?

                                                                                     



3 comments:

Sandra Parshall said...

I've run out of the slightest dribble of hope, but your cards are. reminder of what we should aspire to. In our own country too, where the worst seems yet to come.

Barbara Rogers said...

THese are beautiful...and oh the work you're putting into them gives the world energies another thrust towards peace. I think that world wide wish seems to have trouble when it hits metallic guns and war machines...so I am thinking how there might be some gunk like honey to wish into all war machines. It's a bit more intentional kind of wish for peace. Maybe some tar instead, as I love honey!

Anvilcloud said...

All of this on a pale, blue dot in this vast universe in which we might be the only ones.