From Wikipedia: “A fumi-e (Japanese: 踏み絵, fumi ‘stepping-on’ + e ‘picture’) was a likeness of Jesus or Mary upon which the religious authorities of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan required suspected Christians to step in order to prove that they were not members of that outlawed religion.” (link)
I graduated college yesterday! I am a free woman. At the end of the month I am making the move from Baltimore, what has been my home for the last four years, to Minneapolis, my fresh frontier.
I have piles of projects that have been on hold, but now that I am going to be flooded by time (o precious time), I will be getting to them! Books will be read, essays will be written, drawings will be drawn, and watercolors will be painted. So much more to come. It is going to be a delicious summer of truthful reckoning.
This last one is a self portrait from when I was traveling (which you can see chronicled in watercolors at my blog, Travel Journals). Since I was traveling alone, I began to feel an extreme kinship with pigeons, or as my brother puts it, “the rats of the sky.”
Songs of Parting
As the Time Draws Nigh
As the time draws nigh glooming a cloud,
A dread beyond of I know not what darkens me.
I shall go forth,
I shall traverse The States awhile, but I cannot tell whither or how long,
Perhaps soon some day or night while I am singing my voice will suddenly cease.
O book, O chants! must all then amount to but this?
Must we barely arrive at this beginning of us?—and yet it is enough, O soul;
O soul, we have positively appear’d—that is enough.
Walt Whitman
watercolor and ink on paper, 2011
