I don’t need to be reminded to count my blessings. It seems miraculous to have raised four children who developed into good people in good health with good lives. To have never experienced real hunger, or war at first hand. My life as the lives of most of those I know has been free of major tragedy. I just knocked on wood. Learned that from my mother whose beliefs must have come from her mother and the "old country". I don’t believe any of it but I knock, just in case.
I’m coming to the end of Wolf Hall, a historical novel that tracks the life of Thomas Cromwell in the time of King Henry the Eighth. The brutality of that reign and age is stupefying. The book is well researched; as I read I go to the web to investigate the characters and events and nothing in documented history has been embroidered on. I have had to skip over pages where another person was being burned at the stake or subjected to an even more horrifying ultimate agony. Too well written, too much information. One wonders how such cruelty could or can be countenanced.
We can choose not to believe what we see in a movie; it’s a movie. But this is our history. So I am grateful to have been born in this time, in this place, grateful for modern medicine (they bled sick people back then), and happy to have a computer and the internet. And let me not forget painting, a major blessing which provides solace and balance in this good life.
The image above is from a series created in 2002 called “Blessings”. Mixed Media/Digital Image Collage on Tyvek, 10.75" x 33”. For information or to purchase any of the images on this site, please email Joan.
Please note that at your right, on this blog, is the door to my new Etsy shop. I have five of my new giclées there and will be adding more as I make them. I invite you to click and visit, and if so inspired, leave me a comment here. I really like hearing from my readers.
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The paintings are blessings. Lovely.
ReplyDeleteI think of what you've written here often. When I watched the John Adams HBO series, and how they were treated in illness, and how surgeries were done, not all that long ago, I am grateful. I mean, whole medical practices just on pain management alone!
I agree that we have much to be blessed about.
ReplyDeleteHowever, as someone who has to deal with modern medical specialists, I think you give them too much credit. So much of what they do is still so much at the level of bloodletting. The aura of all-knowing scientific validity is often an illusion.
Good for you on setting up the fine-looking Etsy shop.
I think I have had better luck than you in the health and M.D. departments and what other than our personal experience makes our picture of the world? I sure hope your next encounter with our medical specialists brings you real deliverance from the troubles that plague you.
ReplyDeletenice blog you have..love it...keep it up..
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thanks,
badloi