Welcome to samples of my writing showcasing “Eye-locks and Other Fearsome Things.”“Eye-locks” is a Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir in narrative form that describes the triumph of love over mental illness. While not a lesson plan it documents my therapeutic journey to finding love against all odds. Useful for therapists, and for patients with Bipolar Disorder and/or Asperger’s Syndrome. A scholarly, autobiographical case history of my story was the showcase article in vopl. 13 no. 1 of Psychoanalytic Inquiry in 1993.
Learning to love is an ongoing process and I am writing posts on new lessons learned.
All the original abstract painting is posted to advocate for Bipolar Disorder and Asperger’s Syndrome– for it is those very handicaps that feed my art. The more realistic nature art is dedicated to raising consciousness for animals and the environment. All other art work is purely for your enjoyment.
Finally I have also posted selections from my nature writing and poetry. My nature essays were published in a small paper in upstate New York for a year and a half. The poems have appeared throughout my life, coming and going as they please.
Welcome to samples of my work in various art forms showcasing “Eye-locks and Other Fearsome Things.” “Eye-locks” is a Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir in narrative form that describes the triumph of love over mental illness.
Welcome to samples of my work in various art forms showcasing “Eye-locks and Other Fearsome Things.” “Eye-locks” is a Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir in narrative form that describes the triumph of love over mental illness.
Last year I wrote about our special visitor, Shelley, who has appeared in our driveway around Memorial Day for the past three years to lay her eggs in the exact same spot. Shelley, to introduce her once again, is a large snapping turtle with a muddy, mossy shell and a long jagged tail. In my ignorance the first year she came I tried to save her from getting run over, while all the time unbeknownst to me, she was trying to find the right spot on the side of the road to lay her eggs. Good-natured, she took my meddling in stride and only gently snapped once after the third time I had returned her to the marsh out in back of our house in a snow shovel. Only then did I realize what she was up to. Shelley communicated simply and without malice. Shelley was a class act.
(Click on all photos to enlarge)
Every year, according to some inner time mechanism, Shelley would come early in the morning to lay her eggs in the swale in the corner of our driveway. A big snapper, she, majestic in her reptilian grandeur. Her shell measured (yes, we measured it) 13 inches, but like all snappers her head juts out of the shell about 4 inches and her spiked, dinosaur-looking tail adds on another 5 inches or so.
This year we checked our driveway early each morning worrying as trucks barreled by dangerously close to where she has laid her eggs in the past. Days went by. No Shelley. Judging by the size of her shell and the speed of her gait, Shelley was not young. Each year we saw her Shelley was walking slower and slower. We wondered if she made it through the winter.
In addition, in the early spring her pond was dug up and drained by the new owner to make it deeper and with each dig of the steam shovel we imagined our snapper being snapped up.
Memorial Day came and went and each day was sunny. Shelley liked overcast days to lay her eggs. The very last day of May was a perfect day for laying eggs, overcast and humid. We checked our driveway. No Shelley. We checked up and down the road. No Shelley. My husband didn’t say anything but disappointment and worry were written on his face. I was feeling worried, too.
We held our breath and waited. And then…
We first noticed her at 6:30 in the morning and watched her as she spent the next 3 hours or so looking for a suitable spot to lay her eggs, digging a hole for them, and then depositing them in the hole. She picked the same spot she picks every year after much mulling around and searching.
It was a delight to see those mighty claws dig a deep hole and then the back feet dig deeper. She rested for awhile and we took pictures which she did not seem to mind. Then we left to give her privacy and the back of her rocked from side to side as she deposited the eggs.
Normally she takes a hair-raising walk crisscrossing a somewhat busy road and I accompany her to make sure no car hits her. But this year she surprised us yet again and took the safer route across our back yard, after a few false starts (stopping at our front door).
Though she could have taken an easier route in our yard, she followed a stream in back of our house following a logic that has worked for 200 million years. Maneuvering over large rocks and crawling between crevices that looked impossibly narrow, we were not sure she could make it home and were wondering how we would rescue her.
We were the fools. She arrived triumphantly and magnificently in her exhausted state in the marsh on our side of the pond and quickly submerged herself under the mud until she was no longer visible, a living submarine.
After her departure we felt sad. We can only assume this brave lady made it home to her now-deeper pond having survived despite the hand of man and the worry of her next door neighbors. The brilliant naturalist and “turtle man”, David M. Carroll, explains the tinge of sadness we felt after seeing Shelley lay her eggs when he writes in his Self-Portrait with Turtles: a Memoir: “The furtive turtles were utterly silent in their nesting, but the sandy fields and road edges somehow seemed to go quiet with their departure.” Shelley’s departure meant a break in our one-sided bond with her and David Carroll sheds light so poetically on our experience of loss when he writes of his relentless study of turtles: “Through these children of the sun’s dialogue with the earth I could continue to pass out of human time and place and enter the soul of the seasons.” That was Shelley’s gift to us.
Welcome to samples of my work in various art forms showcasing “Eye-locks and Other Fearsome Things.” “Eye-locks” is a Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir in narrative form that describes the triumph of love over mental illness.
Welcome to samples of my work in various art forms showcasing “Eye-locks and Other Fearsome Things.” “Eye-locks” is a Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir in narrative form that describes the triumph of love over mental illness.
Welcome to samples of my work in various art forms showcasing “Eye-locks and Other Fearsome Things.” “Eye-locks” is a Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir in narrative form that describes the triumph of love over mental illness.
Welcome to samples of my work in various art forms showcasing “Eye-locks and Other Fearsome Things.” “Eye-locks” is a Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir in narrative form that describes the triumph of love over mental illness.
When nature awakens in late March or early April, sap starts flowing in the trees and ice changes to water marking the end of hibernation. This is the grand opening of the wetlands and the pilgrimage to the vernal pools as David M. Carroll writes in his “Swampwalker’s Journal: a Wetlands Year.” A vernal pool is a body of water which fills up in autumn and winter and is swollen in the spring but often dries up completely by the end of the summer. Carroll describes vernal pools so beautifully: “It is at snowmelt and ice-out, the last sleets, first rains, and the earliest warming breaths of spring that they beckon wood frogs, salamanders, and spring peepers from surrounding upland woods, where they have passed the winter in rotted-out trees roots [a reason not to ‘clean up’ the woods], under layers of bark and litter, in small mammal tunnels and other hibernacula in the earth.” The melting snow heralds the march of the amphibians. “Vernal pool habitats hold a galaxy of small things that come to life the instant ice and snow turn back into water.”
Carroll walks the swamps, as the title of his book suggests, in search of mating salamanders and spotted turtles, bogs, fens and all wetland flora and fauna. He tells us that there must be a certain collusion of events– several warm days in a row followed by a darkest of nights with temperatures ideally in the mid-50s with rain preferably two nights in a row. And then the magical migration begins. The salamanders begin their “annual pilgrimage” to the vernal pond to mate.
My husband and I are lucky enough to have a vernal pond on the property next door to us and when Spring comes the sound at night from that pond makes us feel as if we are camping out next to a vast wetland. The music of the spring peepers plays through the night throughout the house, often starting overeagerly in the late afternoon. This manic symphony thrills us every year. It is the first sign of Spring for us. The quality of joyousness and the affirmation of life gladdens our souls. Going to sleep with that sound makes us remember what we so often forget, to give thanks to our Creator for his magnificent creatures.
Inspired by Carroll, one year we awaited the first dark, rainy warm night after a succession of warm days. In our rain gear, armed with flashlights we set out around 11PM to look for the march of the salamanders. We walked to the nearby pond. Nothing. We walked quite aways down a nearby dirt road that has run off but is not quite a vernal pond. We shone the flashlight this way and that. Nothing. We finally headed home disappointed and dejected and my husband started towards the front door when I yet out a yelp. There in the doorway was a 6 inch spotted salamander in all its glory! We never found the march of the salamanders but we were greeted by one of these fantastic amphibians right at our front door!
This story, however, does not have a happy ending. In his epilogue to the “Swampwalker’s Journal,” David Carroll explains why it took him more than 7 years to complete this book. He writes that he became involved in saving some of the wetlands in his book and says sadly nearly all of his interventions have or will become “losing battles.” He describes the plight of the wetlands, bogs and fens as a “landscape of loss.” And he scorns our human selfishness as he writes how it “reveals explicitly the extent to which we think of ourselves as owning all living things, along with the very earth, air, and water in which they live, as if we possessed some divinely mandated dominion over all creation.” He warns: “As we will learn in time none of this belongs to us.” I read these words, knowing them to be true and I think of the soon-to-be-extinct bog turtle and other creatures with the same possible fate. I think of the spotted salamander who came to our door, as did Shelley, the snapping turtle who returns to our drive way every year to lay her eggs and I think of the spring peepers whose joyous song heralds spring and I fear for their future.
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