The changes in the seasons are minimal in San Francisco. Like in Spring, the weather slips back and forth from the heat of summer to chilly weather with just a taste of autumn in the wind. This year, before the trees turned brilliant fall colors, a strong wind and rainstorm blew most of the leaves down. The brownish leaves skittered across the streets and sidewalks and piled up against the buildings.

We've noticed in our neighborhood that the sun becomes the main indicator of change. The sun has shifted to be more northeast than straight east in the morning. We are getting reflected light from skyscrapers through our windows in the morning that the sun hasn't touched before and we see the long, dark shadows created by the slant of the sun in the afternoon.

One of my aunts kept track of the weather each day. She and my uncle were farmers so that was important information for them. I keep track of other things: what I eat, my weight, books I've read, and movies we've watched. Like my aunt, doing something on a daily basis works for me.  Time and the changes that come with it are threads that run through my art and writing.

This week I decided to take objects from my collection of art supplies and pieces of nature I've picked up and do a drawing or painting each day for 30 days. I want to concentrate on the shadows because the shadows are often the most interesting mix of colors. I am keeping each design simple so that I can complete the painting or drawing in one sitting. Creating a good painting, for me, depends on a good drawing underneath.

Crows live in San Francisco and they also seem to have daily practices. Usually, we see solitary ones perched on light poles or on the railings on the Embarcadero. In the last weeks of October as the sun began to set, masses of crows started circling in a wide aerial path through the city. They landed for a few minutes on the billboard north of us or stood on the edges of roofs. They are more than a murder of crows, more like a dark storm, as they sweep through the spaces between skyscrapers. They are not as disciplined as a murmuration of starlings because they don't follow a leader or a pattern of flight. Our first sighting made both of us anxious as they plunged and cawed near our windows. Was this an invasion?

At 5:30 P.M. they all land for a few moments and then just as mysteriously as they arrived, they are gone. We wonder where they go at night and why they have suddenly started circling the city. As night falls earlier and earlier, we can still see them start to gather and hear their caws, but by 5:30 it is dark and we can't see the crows circle through the city anymore. Time and change are always constant.

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If you care about gun safety and violence, you could work on a project to complete 30 origami boxes in 30 days. You will be participating in the Soul Box Project.

See one column of many of the boxes here:  https://www.instagram.com/p/C6IO996Lllb/?hl=en 

or on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/soulboxproject/

 

30 DAYS ON A CREATIVE WALK

Collaged by M. M. from my cut-up watercolors

A group of friends sat at lunch recently. We were discussing the changes in ordinary things from earlier years to today. We noted the difference from clocks with hands to digital watches and the use of credit cards instead of paper money. Our comments began with how easy these changes have made our lives. Then we remembered our own childhood and our time raising children and how analog clocks and paper money helped teach time, fractions, and the value of money. Without a clock with hands how do you explain what time looks like, or what parts of an hour mean? Without paper money, how do you explain the value of money, setting budgets, and counting? Suddenly we were thinking of creative responses to our questions and we wondered how teachers now explain something that is so simple and so fundamental without using the tools we had.

We all are creative thinkers, every day. Every time we ask ourselves the question, "What if...?", we are using our creative thinking skills. Our culture tends to relegate creativity to a group of people who are artists, musicians, dancers, or writers, but we are all problem solvers. Scientists, inventors, cooks, plumbers, doctors, and all human beings employ creative thinking skills. Otherwise, we would all be still sitting around fires and living in caves. Oh, that took someone with a little creativity to figure those two actions out too.

30 Days of Creativity by D. W.

I recently gave a talk about creative thinking and presented the group with a set of exercises to show that they don't have to be an artist to be creative. We all have that creative drive within us. We just need to practice it. I hope you give these exercises a try.

1. An exercise that came from the Peace Corps. How many ways can you think of to use a tin can?

2. Take a walk and observe what is around you. Do you see a space in your neighborhood for a small park? What would you add to the space to make it an inviting place? If you walk in your downtown, is there a plaza that doesn't draw people in? What woul you do to change that plaza to make it a place where people want to congregate?

These two exercises are fun to do, and even more fun to do with other people. Creative thinking is often more productive in collaboration. Someone will almost always come up with a new idea. One of those AHA moments we all have.

30 Days of Creativity by F. C.

Rules for the next exercise:

There are NO Rules!

Take a blank calendar and in one of the squares once a day for a month, doodle, write, and use your imagination to fill the squares with whatever wanders through your mind that day. I hope you will be surprised at the end of the month with the results. If you don't like what you have made, you are becoming a more creative thinker. Being creative means dealing with failures and mistakes. Creative people learn to move past failures because they often fail. That's one of the pivotal points of creative thinking. What do you do with your failure? Start over? Reimagine what you made?

I often end up with watercolors that I don't like. My solution is to cut the watercolor into one-inch squares (there's a satisfaction in that act), toss them around together and make a new arrangement with the small squares.  Several of my adaptions from ugly paintings have been selected for gallery shows. They have let me let go of that critical voice we all have.

What would you make from all of these Inches?

Two sites for blank calendars:

https://www.wiki-calendar.com/download/Blank-Calendar.pdf

https://www.saturdaygift.com/wp-content/uploads/Blank-calendar-grid-templates-free-printable-landscape-SaturdayGift.pdf 

A REMINDER OF FREEDOM

A kite from Ai WeiWei's exhibit seen through a broken window

The foghorns echoed throughout our apartment on the morning we decided to go to Alcatraz. I had been to the island in 2014 when the Chinese artist Ai WeiWei's exhibit was installed, but Bill had never been.  The comments by Trump about opening up the prison again motivated us to go. The National Park Service runs Alcatraz, the former notorious prison. We wondered if the government shutdown would affect our visit.

We purchase ticket earlier in the week during our San Francisco sunny, warm "summer" at the end of October. It is now November and the foghorns reminded us how quickly weather can change on the San Francisco Bay. All we could see out of our windows were skyscrapers wrapped in fog. The Bay has disappeared, but we decided to give Alcatraz a try.

We boarded the ferry, looked out towards the Bay, still covered in a wall of fog. As the ferry moved though, the fog receded in front of us so that by the time we got to the island, the sun was shining down on us. Our luck had changed.

Alcatraz crumbles more with each wind-blown rainstorm. The prison cells still stand at the peak of the island, but the decay is evident all around. Toilets and sinks in cells are broken, windows are cracked, some buildings are nothing but rubble. In 2014, Alcatraz became the perfect place for WeiWei's exhibit, which wandered through the crumbling buildings. At the time WeiWei was being persecuted by the Chinese government for his outspoken creative views. The Ai WeiWei installations on Alcatraz expressed ideas about freedom and incarceration, and the constraints on freedom of speech because of censorship. Though the WeiWei exhibit is long gone from the island, the memory of the messages remain in my mind. Alcatraz, a place with all of its history of incarceration, brutality, and censorship, made that exhibit twice as powerful -- similar to walking through the shadows of Auschwitz where that history still lingers in every brick and corner.

The Recreation Yard at Alcatraz

After listening to the National Park employee explain the rules for tourists, we walked towards the steep trail that leads to the top where the prison cells are located. A sign diverted our attention and led us to an exhibit about the Native American occupation of the island in 1969. The stories of the takeover filled several rooms and explained the island's previous history as a military prison for conscientious objectors in WWI, rebellious Chinese immigrants, and Native peoples who were unwilling to move to reservations or allow their children to attend the so-called Indian schools that tried to erase native tribe cultures.

The new exhibit was a truth-teller, a surprise to me after I had read that many, more comprehensive versions of our history are being removed from other nationally supervised places, such as at the Smithsonian. The exhibit shows how the Alcatraz takeover by the All Tribes group helped to develop unity among native tribes, and publicized the history of Native peoples since the migration of Whites from our eastern shores. The stories include the removal and attempts at genocide of Native Tribes and the destruction of their cultures. A summary of what the year and a half occupation by the All Tribes achieved concluded the exhibit. The island occupiers became leaders in their communities, championing the ways of native peoples, showing reslience and the importance of peaceful, non-violent actions. Today, we see some of the results of takeovers in our recognition of who lived on the land before America, the return of land to various tribes, and, recently, the removal of four dams on the Klamath River that helped salmon return to their original spawning grounds while restoring an eco-system that been lost because of the dams. The exhibit, like the WeiWei exhibit, explored themes of freedom, incarceration, and censorship, whose ideas are just as timely and powerful as they were in 2014. We still have much to do.

Article about the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the All-Tribes Occupation:

https://www.parksconservancy.org/park-e-ventures-article/alcatraz-occupation-anniversary-stories-first-person-native-american-rights-indians-of-all-tribes

General history of Alcatraz

https://www.bop.gov/about/history/alcatraz.jsp

Because of the development of the Red Power movement, land has been returned to Native people as well as the removal of dams on the Klamath River, Watch the videos to see how the dams were de-constructed:

https://news.mongabay.com/2024/10/largest-dam-removal-ever-driven-by-tribes-kicks-off-klamath-river-recovery/ 

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I have resided on Tongva, Tamien-Ohlone, and Miwok land in California, and Lenape land in New York City.