Lucky Valley Press author/friend, Sharon Mehdi

 When I first met Sharon Mehdi, I thought she was a stand-up comic. She made me laugh until  my jeans burst at the seams.

Then I discovered all kinds of interesting things about Sharon: labyrinth walker, healer, teacher, writer, public speaker.

She told me she wrote a book, so I ordered it and, after I read A Curious Quest for Absolute Truth, my respect for this woman grew. Not only was she funny, but she could write, and express deeply felt things.

As the Board Member in charge of books and authors at Art Presence Art Center & Gallery in Jacksonville, I asked Sharon to read from Curious Quest several years ago. It was such a hit, we ask her back every year.

Not only that, Lucky Valley Press (David & Ginna) helped Sharon re-publish A Curious Quest for Absolute Truth, as well as the Great Silent Grandmother Gathering and, my favorite, Eleanor Bobbin.

One morning, over coffee at the Good Bean in Jacksonville, Sharon asked if she could read this little manuscript to me. "It'll only take a few minutes," she said

I love to be read to. And she's so funny. And, Eleanor Bobbin really does have the potential to save the world.

Here's what Sharon wrote for the back cover of Eleanor Bobbin and the Magical, Merciful, Mighty Art of Kindness:


"As this book goes to print, the world is once again in chaos. Rancor and retribution rule the day. Greed, fear and demagoguery have been crowned Kings of All That Is.

"And yet... and yet... hidden beneath the helplessness there is a glimmer of light. So faint it can be seen only in the darkest of dark night.

"If this tiny flicker had a name, it might be called forgiveness, compassion, kindness or love. Such little words. But the one thing I know for sure is that they can create miracles. They can make the impossible possible. They can heal lives. And sometimes, whole communities. Just ask Eleanor Bobbin."

If you're looking for a book to send to all your friends
around the world to remind them, Eleanor Bobbin is it.

Buy all three books. The ride inside the mind of Sharon Mehdi
 is worth it. She should be President.

Love, Ginna

P.S. Eleanor Bobbin kindly includes an uplifting Apple Dumpling recipe.

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Charles Osborne’s "Boss" is just in time for the Pebble Beach Centennial

 “Without Sam Morse, Pebble Beach would be a West Coast Coney Island.”   – Bing Crosby

“A newspaper dubbed my grandfather “The Duke of Del Monte” and although he pretended to be embarrassed by the title, I believe he liked it. Del Monte was more than a chunk of some of the most beautiful land on the planet. It was a style of life that included golf, tennis, polo, beautiful mansions and beautiful people having a good time. He enjoyed being in charge of that. In fact he wanted people to damn well know he was in charge. Damn was one of his favorite words.

“He died when I was 22 years old while I was studying art at the University of California at Los Angeles, living above a merry-go-round on the Santa Monica Pier and working as a cue-card boy at NBC, none of which really met with my grandfather’s approval. Still, the man was a big influence in my life and in the lives of many others, a benevolent despot who ruled the Monterey Peninsula.

“His friends called him Sam and his employees called him Mr. Morse. People referred to him as S.F.B., and that is how he stylishly signed his paintings and documents.

“The family called him Boss.”
– Charles Osborne, from the dust jacket of Boss

www.luckyvalleypress.com/boss

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Tibetan Temple #2

From The Once and Future King by TH White:

“It is God who keeps the price secret, Uther. Not I.”

“God? God? What god? I have heard you speak of so many gods. If you mean Mithras...”

Says Merlin, “Mithras. Apollo. Arthur. Christ. Call him what you will. What does it matter what men call the light? It is the same light, and men must live by it or die. I only know that God is the source of all the light which has lit the world and that his purpose runs through the world and passes each one of us like a great river and we cannot check or turn it but can only drink from it while living and commit our bodies to it when we die.”

God is in the details. Of everything. And the Light.

The Shrines to the Divine project began in early 2018. I have cataloged here in the blog the process of the first little tea house and the final Japanese Shrine, the Zendo, both built in 2018.

Along the way of my life, I have had the privilege to study with, cook for and generally be around some lovely teachers, in the name of art, or food, or spiritual advice. I have sat at the feet of gurus, pranced around the fire as a deer with a Huichol shaman on Mt. Shasta, meditated on Paramahansa Yogananda's houseboat with Steven Seagal, studied with and fed Deepak Chopra and myriad other pop culture stars, looked at Tibetan Buddhism through the eyes of the Thangka painting monk, and cooked for large groups at a retreat center while spending my nights in a 400 square foot tipi. Alison Stillwell Cameron lived next door to my mother and sparked my interest in Chinese Sumi painting, my bookbinding instructors shared Japanese print making, Shibori fabric design, marbled papers and so much more.

I feel closest to the source of all the light when I am being creative.

The top image above floated across my Facebook timeline, posted by a friend. It is an art deco painting by Vittorio Zecchin who died in 1947. Look him up. He blows my mind. The Dominican nuns never showed us his paintings in Art Appreciation class.

When I saw this painting, not just the goddesses themselves but the intensity of the colors hit me like a whack in the chest. The moment pushed me into the long talked about Tibetan temple, because I had to get involved with those colors.

As a dedicated DIY nut job, I set out to make some fabric for the backdrop to the buddha's throne. Although I used red and gold on black in my first draft of the fabric pattern, the colors of the shrine with mimic those above in Zecchin's: orange and purple and violet ...with some red.

I took a photo of the finished 12 x 12 canvas and shrunk the design to the size of a postage stamp, repeated the pattern to fill an 8.5x11 sheet of paper-backed silk for printing, and voila!












A tiny silk curtain of my own design.

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Lucky Valley Press author, Judy Tatelbaum

Recently a  friend came to visit. After she left. I sent her a copy of Inspiration for Living.

Here is a quote from her thank you note:

"Dear friend of 5o+ years!

"What a lovely surprise to receive your thoughtful (and beautifully printed) gift of Judy Tatelbaum's latest book. Her first book, The Courage to Grieve, was a huge help to me after my mother's death back in the early 80s. She also helped me "let go" of my mother in a profound Gestalt therapy session - I had to tell my mother goodbye - I felt like I was jumping off a thousand foot cliff when I actually said the words... I am looking forward to reading the book. I think Judy is a very wise person. Thank you with all my heart."

From the Introduction to Inspiration for Living:

"For me the joy in writing is the opportunity to
inspire others. In 2009 I began writing a free
monthly inspirational email newsletter. I sent it to
people I knew, and they sent it on to people I didn’t
know.

"Although I am known as an “expert” on grief, I
wanted to write about all kinds of aspects of living. I
thought I’d have about a year or two worth of ideas,
but as of today I have written over 100 articles, and
I am not done. My readers kept requesting that I
combine all the newsletters into a book to which
they could refer. At last I have done just that.

"This is not a book to necessarily be read in order
or cover to cover. It is a book full of ideas to encourage
the reader to live life ably and fully. Just open
up to any of the articles that strike you or close
your eyes and pick one. Hopefully you will find a
spark of inspiration, some moment of insight that
fits just for you.

"Know that it is a pleasure for me to have written
these articles. Thank you reading them. Thank you
for using these ideas to enhance your life."
– Judy Tatelbaum

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How to be Obnoxious in 25 Easy Lessons

I laugh every time I tell someone I wrote a book when I was 9 years old entitled How to be Obnoxious in 25 Easy Lessons.

I had no writer’s aspirations at 9. Not really. I was more interested in my little shoe box full of paper dolls and the Littlest Angel Doll that came with a trunk full of tiny clothes.

On this day, in my brother Mark’s words, I was “pestering” him and my mother while they stripped paint off furniture meant for my French Provincial bedroom. I am not sure what “pestering” actually meant. I do not remember myself as the pestering type. Perhaps I asked too many questions. Or wanted to help. But, this is what I looked like. Would you trust me with paint stripper? (although I have just carved out a pumpkin here and am still holding a sharp knife.)

The one of a kind book is long gone, but my recollection goes something like this:

1. Stand close enough to your brother to breathe down his neck while he slathers paint stripper on a piece of furniture.

2. Put a frog in his bed.

3. Blame him for everything.

And so on…

But this story is not so much about being obnoxious as it is about books in general.

Luckily, my childrens’ book collection survived several moves and throwing out of things: Little Golden Books like Mary Poppins and The Poky Little Puppy and my first ever chapter book, Elmer and the Dragon, who flies Elmer everywhere and eats skunk cabbages when he can find them.

My parents read to us every night, and soon I knew The Little Red Hen by heart. When my father was in Korea, he sent home a 45 recording of himself reading The Little Red Hen, so we wouldn’t forget him or the sound of his voice. He paused after saying, “Who will help me plant the wheat?” etc., to give us time to chime in with, “Not I,” said the pig, the duck, the cow…

Our house was filled with books: art, music, novels, biographies. Our father was our Google, our Wiki, our arbiter of grammar and the Chicago Manual of Style. If he didn’t know the answer, he could usually find it in his impressive library full of now out of print reference books and encyclopedias. The big dictionary on the oak swivel stand was one of the few items we three siblings seriously discussed at the time of his death.   

“Who gets the dictionary?”

GB

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Valentine Greetings

Little is known of the early Saints Valentine (I hear there were at least eleven), but some 18th century historians believed Valentines Day was invented by the holy Christian fathers to supersede yet another pagan holiday, Lupercalia, which, on the Ides of February, purified the city and its people of evil by sacrificing a goat or dog, among other unsavory rituals. One article reports a certain Valentine to have burned at the stake on February 14th. Nice. Others say Geoffrey Chaucer thought up Valentines Day in the 1300s for his book, Parlement of Foules, making the feast day of February 14 special for lovers.

Whatever. I have been hand-making Valentine cards since the third grade, when I could fit all materials, including small blunt plastic scissors, into a shoe box with my paper dolls.

Wow. Studio in a Shoebox! In the third grade! Maybe that was the real beginning.
Since a small child, hearts and echinacea flowers have been my symbols. I have doodled the echinacea during arithmetic class, Geometry, in meetings, while on the phone. I test new pads of drawing paper by drawing this echinacea on the first page.

But hearts… hearts symbolize everything important to me: that relationships are everything, that God is Love and versa visa,* that communicating love enhances all relationships thereby making the world a better place.

My creative communications heroine is Alyson Kuhn of Carmel, San Francisco and the globe, who travels about her world sharing with others the art of communication. By mail. Snail Mail. You know, with paper and everything. Paper, pens, related stamps, little surprises inside, and sentiments straight from the heart.

Which takes us back to Valentines and greeting cards in general. Valentines, Thank you notes, condolences, love notes, get well cards.

Create Your Love Note Kit

In my 2018 GB’s Love Note kit, situated on the counter for easy access. This kit does not fit into a shoebox.

Envelope template and many 4x6 envelopes cut from colorful magazines, gift papers and sheet music (Use label for address.)

Scissors (sharper)
Double Stick and Magic Tape
construction paper
heart-shaped patterns
magazine cut outs
Hot Glue Sticks and Glue Gun
Gold leaf
40 Rubber Stamps & stamp pads

Card stock in colors and high quality papers for the cards, cut to 4x6 and fold-able 8x6
Handy paper cutter for above
Bone folders
Pens
Tiny photos, cards and items to slip into envelopes
Postage
Extra stamps of relevant sameness (old postage, etc.)
labels

The Love Note kit provides opportunity for a quick response to someone grieving, a love note to a far away beau, an acknowledgment of a sibling’s birthday. The kit is about giving a moment to create something tangible that someone else will receive in the mail and hold in their hand. Anyone can send a thank you email. By taking the time to make a little perfect thing for whatever occasion, I feel like I am sending that person a hug, that it means something, that for a moment, when the envelope is opened, love pours into the hands of the receiver.




*Richard Farnsworth’s character Evo in the Movie Resurrection

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Studio #12 - The Laundry Room +

We moved into our love nest about three weeks before our first marriage ceremony, dubbed the IRS wedding, on December 31, 2003.  You’ll hear about Wedding Number 2, Valentine’s Day, 2004 elsewhere in the blog.



At 7990 I packed most of my studio paraphernalia into the dark and rather gloomy laundry room and shared my creative space with the washer, dryer, a cat box and the water heater.
In this space, and spilling into the kitchen and onto the decks by necessity, I painted one little Jack Russell terrier sculpture for the Carmel Art Festival and the next year four plaster-cast dogs for CAF and five resin cat sculptures for a spin-off fundraiser.

Although I enjoyed painting the little terrier, the clean lines of the elegant Egyptian style dogs in 2005 allowed for exquisite details - layers of paint, tiny lines, many dots, applications of beads and other adornments. The CATZ, sponsored by the Monterey Symphony, the Mozart Society, Chamber Music Monterey Bay and the Carmel Music Society,  were PizziCato, MagnifiCat, Meowzart and Kitty Bouquet.

Tout Uncommon, Pied a Terrier, Haut Diggity Dog and Cinnabar represented four of the local retail shops. All dogs and cats were sold at auction to raise money for charities.

This event inspired me to organize twelve local artists to paint “Musical Chairs” for the Carmel Music Society 12th Night Auction/Dinner Dance. Once again, my studio spilled out of the laundry room, this time, onto the deck, where I spread a drop cloth and decorated two matching straight back chairs.

At 7990 my garden expanded from a few herbs in a pot to an acre of Sugar Pie pumpkins, artichokes, beans, tomatoes, and flowering herbs and this, too, became part of my outdoor studio, with a potting shed that held all the usual tools plus a mannequin names Kate Hepburn and a little corner with old wood, brushes and a few acrylic paints for sign making.

 When the tenant in the guest house moved on to greener pastures, I moved myself in lickety-split and spent the next few years amid myriad projects before the next folly took control of my desires.

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Studio #9 - The Tipi at Rainbow Ranch

Ah, the tipi: the most romantic of my living spaces, the  simplest of studios. A life-long attraction to Native American lore, life style and spirituality inspired my 400 “square foot” tipi at Rainbow Ranch in Calistoga. That and the 5 x 8 room (next to the kitchen and across from the pantry) they called the “Chef’s Quarters.” Nothing inspires creativity more than necessity.





Nomadic Tipi Makers of Bend, Oregon, those same folks who created the leather tipis for Dances with Wolves, made a canvas one to my specs and sent it by UPS in a cardboard box with instructions on how to raise a tipi. The 23-foot poles came by freight in another, longer truck.



I had a pad built on the slope of a gentle hill near the kitchen door and filled the pad with gravel from the nearby quarry, laying conduit and electrical wiring underneath, which, ultimately, came up beside my bed and by my “bead table.”




With a friend I constructed a giant, egg (tipi floor-space) shaped template out of newspapers and with a utility knife cut a piece of beige remnant carpet to exactly fit inside the tipi on top of a canvas pad on top of the even gravel. The lining attached to the poles was supposed to protect me from rain dripping in and the opening at the top rarely drizzled wetness or smoke into the space.



I faced the opening east to greet the morning sun. I placed my hundred and fifty year old wood stove in the center and learned how to vent the tipi by directing the smoke poles away from the direction of the wind.

True to my Native American period, I made mostly dangly things out of seed beads: earrings, medicine bags and loom-work bracelets and belt buckles. I sat on the floor on my zafu pillow and created beadwork on a table made from a 4 x 8 plywood plank perched on four milk crates.

As always during my cooking career, there was a
studio on the side for after hours, no matter when those hours were, or how few hours were available to me. At Rainbow, my day began at 5 with building a fire and setting bread dough to rise and ended about 8:30 pm with warm milk and cookies for the guests, so productivity was not the operative goal for this studio. Even so, just sitting down cross-legged in front of the tiny fire and doing a few weavings or sorting beads or graphing a project helped settle my mind and body for the night.



Several years later while living in San Diego and cheffing at the Chopra Center for Well Being in La Jolla, my Aunt Bonne came for a visit. I showed her photos of my tipi. She said, “Well, that makes sense.”

“Oh? Why?” I asked.

“Because of that Cherokee in your father’s lineage.”

“What? What Cherokee?” News to me.






The conversation went a long way to explain my interest, not to mention Dark Sage, the imaginary Indian Medicine Man friend of my childhood.

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Studio #7 - On Main Street

After a year on Spring Mountain, I moved to town and got a job in a bookstore. I had decided to stay.

If this post were about my various homes, I could spend the next five paragraphs on the guest house: cozy, in the trees, private and charming and within walking distance from my new studio on Main Street in downtown St. Helena: now that was a shack, torn down years ago to make way for new potential, but in 1989, I rented it with glee: two rooms and a bathroom in a little converted shed at Highway 29 and Pope Street, between Tra Vigne restaurant and an architectural firm, with the Wine Train rattling by in front and acres of empty space behind.

You don’t see outside wall treatments like this any more - like someone slathered a pale green frosting of cheap stucco all over the building and then had a pack of hooligan boys throw glass and pebbles all over it, from the top of its flat roof to the bottom, nested on a sea of gravel. The walls glittered in the sun like costume jewelry.

The inside was the reverse - grey indoor/outdoor carpet, grey walls, grey curtains. I would never get away with this now, but they let me install my little wood stove. Who travels with their own wood stove? I stacked my wood, built a fire and got to work.

I produced the Cosmic Cloth series there - hand painted silk altar pieces with personalized symbols and designs, but the most relevant memory of that St. Helena studio was the line of earrings made from my collection of decorative papers. I had dies cut in triangles and circles and squares and created hundred of little paperboard shapes in black and hired a local bookbinder with the right skills to help me cover and glue all those shapes together. A rep picked them up right away and went off to the San Francisco Gift Show to display my paper earrings prominently in her booth. Nice start.

The trouble was, she got one order, for 400! All of the same danged earring! I filled the order, resentfully, and declared, “I am not a manufacturer! I am an artiste!”

I have several boxes of these earrings in my closet. What shall I do with them? I admit to a certain emotional attachment. They are each a little canvas, some hand painted abstracts, or French marbled papers, Geishas, Asian newspapers. I wouldn’t wear any of them these days, but they are tiny and unique bits of memorabilia from the ‘80s.

They still give me joy, so perhaps they won’t be thrown out today.

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Studio #6 - Spring Mountain

“Where will you go?” My friend Sampson asked during the phone call when I told him my restless self would be on the move again.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have my little bed-sit in LA.”

“You hate LA,” he said.

“I know, I know.”

“Come see my Paradise on the mountain,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. He didn’t see me roll my eyes, of course, but he knew.

“Stop rolling your eyes,” he said, “and come check it out. I have room.”

So I hopped a plane, which he met in San Francisco with flowers from his garden and a bottle of wine from his favorite vineyard, Folie a Deux. I wondered if he was trying to tell me something. It was too late, if he was. He was 80, I was approaching 50, we’d been the best of friends for years. Sampson invariably introduced me as his “little sister.”

Late afternoon sun glittered over the dormant Napa Valley grape vines, turning the bushy little plants of tiny mustard flowers into shmears of buttery yellow. We drove up, up the hill to the property, seven hundred acres of grapes and seven different kinds of trees. The owner, a cheese and washing machine heir, gave Sam carte blanche to design and build him a house on his little man-made lake tucked away in the forest of oaks, pine, madrone, manzanita, fur, cedar and maple.

Sam lived in a three bedroom/two bath caretaker’s cottage. After three days of friendship, conversation, good food and rest, he said, in distillation, “You need healing. Do it here.”

And so I did.

There’s not much to say about the tiny bedroom/studio on Spring Mountain: a drawing board and a folding table. One of Sam’s architect friends taught me how to make miniature houses to scale.

I made a tea house. I made earrings out of old book papers and created a bunch of largely unsell-able stuff for a couple of local gift shows.

I did heal on that mountain. How can you not? Quality air, with only the sounds of the hoot owls and coyotes at night. No more honk, honk, beep beep, hurry hurry. Just me, my own bed, my yoga mat, music, some good food, someone to talk to and a little room for my ebbing and flowing stash of art paraphernalia. It was good.

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Studio on the Move

About the time I stepped into the Orchard studio in Ojai, my attentions got diverted to LA, where I signed up for the UCLA Design Program. Classes in the arts of Trompe l’oeil, Shiburi dying and surface design (and a little dip back into commercial acting) took me all over downtown LA to various teacher’s studios (and several theaters).

I divided my time between Ojai and LA for the next three years, transformed the kitchens of my two borrowed apartments into temporary art spaces (one in Santa Monica and one in the fancy shmancy apartments in Marina Del Rey) until I rented a friend’s guesthouse in Culver City, where I could prepare my artsy homework and rehearse for acting classes unseen and unheard.

Three years! What was I thinking? Compared to my life now (where I walk to the grocery store and post office and take the car out twice a week), I was in Hell - on and off the freeway all day, stuck in traffic on Highway 10 at 11pm, looking for places to park ad nauseum. Schlepping art materials and paraphernalia up stairs and into elevators and down escalators. Driving back and forth to Ojai for long weekends, busy busy, and then back to LA for three days of classes.

On those long weekends, I reveled in my Orchard, sucked in the rarified orangey air. I drew ideas in the dirt with a stick. John Denver crooned in my ear, reminding me… just reminding me.

On an eleven day “Burro Trip” in the high Sierra with the Headmaster of Thacher School and 10 other intrepid hikers, I took my drawing pad, a few pencils and a journal and kept a few notes.


I made a Bisquick Apple Cake, buried in two pie tins in the coals of a hot fire, drank out of a tin mug, led burros, hiked trails, ate Toblarone Bars that taste like Heaven on top of a mountain after an all day hike.

Better, to be out on the trail than stuck in LA traffic. GB

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Studio #5 - The Orange Orchard

Fortunately, the 1985 Ojai Fire burned around the perimeter of the Thacher School campus. When the ashes settled Patsy, our illustrious neighbor, took me for a walk in an orange orchard. Allowing Bob, the blond Labrador, to lead the way, we discussed the fire evacuation.

I said, “We spent two nights on the ground in our sleeping bags in Souel Park. We watched the fire storms leap up and down the hills and by morning we were covered in half an inch of ashes.”

She said, “We dumped the silver in the pool and the furs in the fruit locker and packed small bags, tempted to just dive in the pool and wait the fire out, but Constance waived her stick at me and said, ‘Foolish girl!’ We spent three nights at a friend’s in Santa Barbara and two days cleaning up the silver. The ranch, thank God, is fine. Here we are.”

Pasty proclaimed, “Here we are!” as if showing me a castle, and to me, it was. If her Octogenarian mother, Constance, had been with us, she would have waved one of her sticks, which, by the way, were clear plastic canes filled with plastic flowers matching her colorful outfits. Her close pal, potter Beatrice Woods, had no canes but feather boas and bright red lipstick and, at 85, when I knew her, was an accomplished and incorrigible flirt. A pottery box she had made inspired this be-ribboned chocolate cake.

What became known simply as the Orchard was a little clearing about 20 feet in diameter in the Navel orange trees. In the middle of this clearing stood a dear little shack. I am attracted to shacks. If shacks could talk!

This little beauty leaned ever so slightly to the south, undoubtedly held together with toothpicks and kindling. Slivers of light peaked through the thin and ill-fitting bat and board walls. The screen door didn’t latch, there was rust in the tiny sink.


BUT, there was a sink! And water! And power! And two little rooms, one with a stone perch in the corner, where I put my old wood stove. My workbenches fit perfectly, nestled into each corner. The views: orange trees. The smells: oranges. The world: my little Orchard.

In this clearing in an orange orchard I created a line of sleep and casual wear, inspired by Japanese paper designs. I folded up squares of fabric, dipped it in dye, let it dry, unfolded it, ironed it out and made it into things.


By then, I was redefining my studio, less bookbinding, more arts inspired by the tools, colors and skills learned from bookbinders, so precise.

And, that same summer, I learned how to use an Apple Macintosh computer.

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