An Elixir of Youth

 

 

 

 

 

So here I am still loving kids’ artwork twenty years after the Camden BOE made a ten minute documentary on my Art Aware program.  https://youtu.be/RYqPG1W3lRQ

Dang! I am so old. It is fifty (!) years since the mid 60s, when I discovered my passion to teach elementary students to recognize their own innate creativity.  I was an ESL teacher in Japan after college. Whether it was painting pictures with words or with crayons in Tokyo, Honolulu or Camden, N.J.,  I felt I could get results.

When I stopped traveling the world, I had the luxury of staying in one place and of saving the proof of the results – the artwork –  in my Camden row house.

Thanks to the extensive renovations on the 4th and 5th floors of Collingswood Manor Continuing Care Retirement Community, I can share the artwork with residents.

The spirit of the work from K to 5th graders is invigorating.

I will never throw it away and will keep finding places to display this elixir of youth.

Corner Row House in Camden

It’s rare for me to just sit outside and do nothing.

I wonder if you can relate?

Today I’m sitting on an overturned five gallon plastic paint bucket. The sun is just right, the wind gentle, my dogs, cats and wild birds surround me as do 50′ evergreens and deciduous trees – some of which I planted, some of which were already here in this place I chose to live some 30 years ago.

A garden of Eden.

I feel an overwhelming gratitude for my life, past and present, and “for a dream not caught in self-centerness”* but rather in a dream taking each moment as it is with compassion and ecstasy.

I wonder if you can relate?

• from a meditation by Pat George, Founder of Zen Center of Philadelphia