Blogging Archives - Page 7 of 13

by Marja-Leena

FOUR

Researching how long blogs have been around, I was surprised to not find a definite answer. Let’s just say, this one here still seems to be a youngster on its fourth birthday! The writer behind it is slowing down a bit, writing less but posting more photos, still avidly reading blogs, and loving the many connections and friendships found through this medium. To all of you, thank you warmly!
This is the perfect occasion to put up a new banner – hope you like it! Thanks to my lovely designer daughter Erika for placing it up here!

February 1, 2008 in Blogging by Marja-Leena 21 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

January tree fest

The holidays are not quite over yet, today is the 8th day of Christmas after all, AND there’s also a new Festival of the Trees to cheer us.

The Festival of the Trees is a monthly blog carnival devoted to all things arboreal. Like other blog carnivals, it’s a collection of links to blog posts and other sources, hosted each month on a different blog.

Festival of the Trees #19 is a real holiday treat. Mull some cider, pop some corn and cuddle up with a warm laptop. Lorianne has gathered a forest’s worth of links for your browsing pleasure.

Indeed, there are a lot of trees in that forest! I’m pleased to be part of this January’s festival and will savour the links slowly during my breaks. I hope you enjoy this tree fest too!

January 2, 2008 in Blogging by Marja-Leena 5 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

trees of my year

Many of us are looking back on the past year as it’s nearing its end. Photography having become more and more a passion for me, I like to look through the year’s photos. They may be observations of the little things that capture my eye and images that I plan to use in my artwork. Often they are a visual diary of family and friends at varied gatherings, of trips taken, of many walks in the parks, and a record of the seasonal changes in our garden.

While going through them, I was also thinking about the current call for entries for the Festival of Trees being hosted this time by Lorianne. (There’s still time to submit with the deadline tomorrow, Sunday, December 30th!) So I took a tree-centric review of the year and found a LOT of images of trees! Here are a few highlights from our garden and from some of the walks. How fortunate we are to live in such a beautiful and tree-filled part of the world.

Cedars covered in January’s snow, then February’s catkins on the hazelnut tree

March’s mossy and leafy new greens followed by April’s fat magnolia buds

September’s light and shadows in the forest and the red maple leaves of October

Bare arms reaching up to the November sky, then magical trees with December lights

December 29, 2007 in Blogging, Canada and BC, Photography by Marja-Leena 18 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

Looking back: Lucia’s Day

I am finding that one of the downsides of being a blogger for more than two or three years is that I feel that more and more I begin to repeat myself. Yet, readers come and go though there are many long time loyal readers that I treasure. Am I chatting with the new readers, or with the longtime ones? Both, of course. Well, it is my blog and a kind of diary, and it is a special time of year for me when I enjoy rereading my past December posts, dug up out of the ever larger archives.

With today’s slightly tired and jaded eyes, I look back on that first year of blogging and feel again that excitement of discovering new information on the net and the joy of connections with new blog friends. I’m going to link to some of my old favourites on their anniversary dates with the hope that new readers will enjoy them for the first time, and longtime readers will not be too bored. After all, this is the season of holiday traditions and this has become a tradition for me, as is sharing the joys. (However, the nature of this medium being what it is, some older links may be dead.)

Lucia by Swedish painter Carl Larsson, 1908 – from wikipedia

Today is Lucia’s Day, or the Festival of Lights. Two years ago, I wrote in part:

Lucia is “the only saint celebrated by the Lutheran Swedes, Finns, Danes, and Norwegians, in celebrations that retain many pre-Christian elements of a midwinter light festival.” “Her feast day in the West is December 13, by the unreformed Julian calendar the longest night of the year”. Lucia also means light, so this is a festival of lights in the dark northern countries. I find it fascinating how the many religious and pagan traditions meld and transform over time into our modern day celebrations.

Last year’s post includes some interesting links to other bloggers, especially Dave’s unique view of the saint of light.

Happy Santa Lucia Day! Now, back to writing a few more Christmas letters. The overseas ones are finally on their way. I’m enjoying reading the ones arriving daily now.

ADDENDUM 3:50 pm: Lucy of Box Elder has written a wonderful and personally significant Nocturne upon St Lucy’s Day – a highly recommended read!

December 13, 2007 in Being an Artist, Blogging, Culture, Finland, Estonia & Finno-Ugric by Marja-Leena 11 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

a stimulating weekend

On Friday, November 16th, our youngest grand-daugther had her second birthday. November 16th is a significant date for me and as this blog is kind of a diary as well, I enjoyed looking up past posts on this date. Two years ago I wrote about Niamh’s birth in the very early hours, then later hanging my exhibition and then having my opening that evening. As a friend commented: ‘What an Opening Act for your Show!’

Last year I revisited that time and also wrote about a big storm here that resulted in what turned out to be a very long boil water advisory.

This year there were no new births, art openings or storms. As we do on special days, we enjoyed a lovely family celebration. My husband’s sister from Vancouver Island joined in the fun and afterwards came to spend the weekend with us. It was a full weekend of endless stimulating conversation. I’m usually fairly quiet, and so is my husband to a lesser degree, but when she’s around we do talk a lot. Saturday, a very gloomy rainy day, saw us around the kitchen table ALL day with and without meals and tea. Sunday was dry and cool and we talked and walked for a couple of hours, then talked even more around that table!

A teacher and school counselor for many years, currently teaching ESL, Brigitte Rathje is a life-long student and traveller, attends numerous conferences and workshops even internationally and has an enviable network of friends and colleagues. Articulate, passionate and compassionate about connecting with and helping other people, she has recently trained in clinical hypnotherapy and facilitation with the goal of a new career in retirement. She told us she wants to facilitate a state of emotional well-being and create clarity in people’s lives so they can expand into the fullness of their being, teaching skills and strategies to overcome self-limiting beliefs, thinking and negative self-talk. She sees a huge demand for this amongst the wave of boomers looking for ways to have full and happy retirement years. What an inspiration my husband’s ‘kid’ sister is!

Well, I got pretty excited and did a lot of talking too, as I shared my passion for blogging, for the wonderful community or ‘coterie’ that it creates as Joe Hyam wrote. Brigitte, already part of many communities, was the perfect candidate for using a blog to more easily keep in touch with these connections, and she had so many resources all ready to share. And it could become part of her eventual practice. I strongly encouraged her, and knowing that she was not yet comfortable with computers, described my own slow learning curve at first. I think she’s convinced and will talk to someone she knows who may be able to help her start. I’m looking forward to seeing her blog one day and to showing her off to my readers!

By Sunday night after our goodbyes, I was pretty exhausted by all this stimulating conversation. Today was a quiet day.

November 19, 2007 in Being an Artist, Blogging, Home by Marja-Leena 8 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

witchy trees

Come, my dearies, for a tour of my woods

See, here is the witches’ castle

Meet Witch Hazel

and Witch Rowana

Here’s Raven

There’s our resident treehugger witch.

If you’d like to join in the Samhain edition of the Festival of Trees being hosted at Windy Willow, please email your links by midnight October 26th to silviasalix (at) yahoo (dot) co (dot) uk, with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line.

(PS – Apologies for the artistic liberty with the witches’ names. They are not the names of the trees illustrated.)

October 25, 2007 in Being an Artist, Blogging, Culture by Marja-Leena 25 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

moved by beauty

We had a warm sunny day today, almost blindingly bright after a long spell of gloomy rain. The beauty of the fall colours in the trees lining many of Vancouver’s older streets gave me great pleasure as I headed for an appointment. Back to rain tomorrow, but then it looks like we’ll have several sunny days so maybe I’ll get some of my fall gardening jobs done after all.

Along with today’s sunshine, I’ve been deeply moved by some exceptionally beautiful writing and images:
– Dave Bonta thinks profound thoughts while out walking
– Another glorious cycle of sonnets in the Handbook for Explorers written by Joe Hyam with photographs by Lucy Kempton
– Beth’s rich descriptions of a day in Montreal when she realizes “I was home”.
– The rich jewel-like colours in Tracy Helgeson’s paintings.
– Sadness that the Giornale Nuovo is quitting after five years of blogging. Thank you for giving us so much beauty and knowledge, misteraitch.

October 23, 2007 in Blogging, Home by Marja-Leena 8 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

the artist and the environment

I’ve been thinking about what I could contribute to the world wide discussion raised today with Blog Action Day. I decided to talk about my behaviour as an artist as well as a homemaker.

As an artist concerned for my own health and for the health of the environment, I stopped etching several years ago. I used to do a lot of deep etching, which meant using very strong acid baths because I wanted to imitate the weathering effects of nature in the process and the resulting images (in the Meta-morphosis series and many of the Nexus pieces). The etching facilities in the studio are very good, with powerful ventilation and special tanks to collect the wastes. That’s why I don’t do this at home! In spite of that I’ve been long concerned about residual absorption into my body as well as into the environment over my many years of printmaking.

I’ve been pleased to be able to use more and more digital processes in my printmaking though I haven’t been able to give up hand printed plates entirely. Collagraphs have been satisfying that need and I’m thinking of drypoints again, or possibly even linocuts and woodblocks. There’s still the issue of the solvents used to clean up the printing inks and I wish our shop would use some of the safer alternatives in the market even if they are costlier and a bit less efficient.

Some testing that was done on me a couple of years ago revealed a lot of toxins in my body. Learning this increased my resolve to eliminate as much exposure as possible, even to what I use in my home – the cleaning products, soaps, shampoo and the cosmetics I put on my skin. I’ve been switching to more organic produce and to antibiotic and chemical free naturally raised and fed chicken, beef and bison meat. Eschewing farmed fish, we’re lucky to find good wild salmon and other fish here but I’m concerned by the dwindling supplies in the world. I don’t use any pharmaceuticals, only naturopathic/homeopathic products when needed. I must give a lot of credit to my daughter Elisa for inspiring and teaching me by her example.

These are just a few of the ways I try to reduce my impact on the environment as well as to improve and guard my own health. I know that I could be making a lot more changes, like getting rid of my car, though I don’t drive it more than necessary.

Further reading:
on artists’ health
toxic-free artists

ADDENDUM: Wednesday, Oct.17th. Several people have expressed interest and some frustration in finding safe cosmetics, so I thought I’d add some of the links that I use that may help you in your search.
Skin Deep is a great resource where you can search products by brand name or ingredients. I use this one a lot.
The Dirty Dozen Chemicals in Cosmetics offers a handy check list of what to avoid.
My daughter Erika bought this book and recommends it highly: Ecoholic by Adria Vasil. I have to get my own copy!

October 15, 2007 in Being an Artist, Blogging, Environment by Marja-Leena 17 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

Seven years and Thanksgiving

The amazing wood s lot is 7 years old, and that’s a lot in blog years! In addition to his ever rich cornucopia, for the past few months Mark has been posting his own beautiful photos of his home region in Ontario which I’ve admired. With my obsession with rocks and petroglyphs, I was most intrigued by his post of Sept.25th, 2007 with his photos of Mazinaw Rock in Bon Echo Provincial Park. He wrote:

This 1.5-kilometre sheer rock face rises 100 metres above Mazinaw Lake, one of the deepest lakes in Ontario, and features over 260 native pictographs – the largest visible collection in Canada. It also is home to some Eastern White Cedars upwards of 1000 years old.

Congratulations and thank you, Mark! That’s a great photo of you.

And, it’s the Thanksgiving long weekend here in Canada. We’ll have our family dinner on Sunday (tomorrow) with eight of us around the table – two daughters, two partners and two granddaughters. One out-of-town daughter and her partner will be missed but not forgotten, especially on her birthday on Monday! We are thankful for the blessings of a lovely family and a good life in this beautiful part of the world. Happy Thanksgiving to all!

October 6, 2007 in Blogging, Canada and BC, Rock Art & Archaeology by Marja-Leena 8 Comments »

by Marja-Leena

forest in our backyard

About two weeks ago, I made a long overdue first visit with some of my family (who’d been there before) to the very popular, though awkwardly named Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve located in the North Shore mountains behind us, right in Vancouver’s backyard. I don’t know why I’d waited so long. There are numerous trails to explore through these beautiful forests so I look forward to visiting many more times. The only problem was that I spent more time taking photos than walking so I may have to leave the camera home if I want to get a workout.

Anyway, I promised more photos from that first walk, and being on things arboreal, it’s just in time for this month’s Festival of the Trees, being hosted at the beautiful trees, if you please.The deadline for submissions is September 28th, so there’s still time to participate.

One of the things I love about the Pacific Northwest is our forests and the way the tall trees create a magestic canopy overhead. Here and there were orange and rust coloured sculptural forms standing out from the darker green background of cedar and hemlock, often highlit by a perfectly placed beam of sunlight, like a spotlight on the star of the stage. These still brilliant skeletons look like they may be the remains of giants felled by last winter’s huge windstorms. Here was beauty even in the early stages of decay. At the same time we were appreciative that they were still full of life giving nutrients for future trees, birds, bug-eating creatures and the ecology of the forest floor – a circle of life.

September 25, 2007 in Being an Artist, Blogging, Canada and BC, Photography by Marja-Leena 14 Comments »

Marja-Leena Rathje

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FOUR

January tree fest

trees of my year

Looking back: Lucia’s Day

a stimulating weekend

witchy trees

moved by beauty

the artist and the environment

Seven years and Thanksgiving

forest in our backyard

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