30 October 2017
Make art about recovery.
31 October 2017
Make art about what’s haunting you.
1 November 2017
At twelve, I took my confirmation name from St. Margaret of Scotland, wife of King Malcolm, who was particularly known for feeding the poor, for, though she was a queen, going out among them daily, and for inviting hundreds of the poor into the castle to eat.
It’s All Saints Day.
Make art about a saint.
Happy Halloween! Death for Beginners is now released on Amazon!
What a perfect date to turn it loose 
❤ Thanks and Love to Karen Kelsay Davies of Kelsay Books for making this book a home, and special spooky gratitude today to Susan Deer Cloud, Clare L. Martin, and Jerry D. Mathes II, for their willingness to read and offer their thoughts on the book
This book helped me tremendously. Thanks and Love to Carmel Mawle for suggesting it to me.
“Essential reading for anyone interested in understanding and treating traumatic stress and the scope of its impact on society.” —Alexander McFarlane, Director of the Centre for Traumatic Stress Studies
A pioneering researcher transforms our understanding of trauma and offers a bold new paradigm for healing in this New York Times Science bestseller
Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.
Sampling of Reviews
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/06/20/the-body-keeps-the-score-van-der-kolk/
Dr. van der Kolk Speaking
How to Detoxify the Body from Trauma: Interview
Healing Trauma/Creative Activities
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53RX2ESIqsM
Take care of yourself ❤
xo
Mary
26 July 2017
The world is in so much pain right now, so much anger, so much fear. If I am not mindful, that collective despair will weigh down on my back, settle ’round my shoulders like a yoke, until it chokes me, and I am become part of the problem, rather than doing what I think I should–choosing light, choosing peace, choosing Love–doing all that I can to be a force for compassion and Love in this world. So I have to make sure that I care for myself, body and spirit. I personally seek solace in the natural world, in my garden.
It reminds me, daily, that we are made not from our successes, but from the narrative of learning embodied in failure, every lush, red tomato now the product of years on my knees, learning, lessons gifted by seeds that did not germinate, rain that did not fall, soil that wasn’t ready, woodlings that wandered in and ate the fruit, reminders of my rent being due, for sharing this space.
Reward, and humility, in equal share, mistakes and losses, the cost of carelessness, the reminder that I own no space alone in my time on this planet, reside always in the garden. But even more, for me, in that small space, dwells possibility. Even in the darkest winter months, I imagine what will come, with spring. I find solace in the garden’s persistent gift, the imagining of an unimaginable future.
Make art about where you find solace.
Prompt Love Catch-Up!
6 July 2017
Make art about packing for a trip, what to leave in, what to leave out.
7 July 2017
Make art about arrivals, about arriving.
8 July 2017
Make art about reunion of souls.
9 July 2017
Liminal: occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.
Make art about liminal space.
10 July 2017
Make art about light and dark, about the juxtaposition of light to dark, about how we need one to know the other. (with love to Mesha Maren ❤ )
11 July 2017
Make art about moving past obstacles (with love to Rahul Mehta ❤ )
12 July 2017
Make art about a whisper, or a howl (with love to Kim Dana Kupperman ❤ )
13 July 2017
Make art about relocating in our own bodies (with love to Jon Corcoran ❤ )
14 July 2017
Make art about the amalgamous nature of memory, of how sometimes the amalgam is more true. (With love to Eric Waggoner ❤ )
15 July 2017
Make art about point of view, about deliberately shifting point of view (with love to Rodney Jones ❤ )
16 July 2017
Make art about departures.
17 July 2017
Make art about driving alone, about that silence in the cocoon of the car.
21 June 2017
Make art about finding your way through the dark.
22 June 2017
Make art about illness.
23 June 2017
Make art about what the body remembers.
23 May 2017
Make art about seeing the world through eyes of Love, especially when it seems most impossible.
19 May 2017
Seven years ago today, my oldest son J was in a terrible car accident, his little plastic Saturn sedan t-boned by a brand new Dodge Charger with its all-steel construction.
J, my laughing, charismatic, kind, smart son, only 22 then, was critically injured, with a compression skull fracture, subdural hematoma, subarachnoid hemorrhaging, and four feather bleeds into his beautiful brain. They airlifted him by helicopter from our small town to the major medical facility, MCV, in Richmond, admitting him directly into the neurological ICU. He was conscious the whole time, talking, joking, charming the nurses, complaining that he couldn’t look out the window on his first-ever helicopter ride, even saying things meant to reassure me, his sister, his brother, the friends who stood by us at the hospital. We bedded down in the ICU waiting room, while behind those heavy doors, monitors clicked and hummed, documenting my son’s traumatic brain injury. That was Wednesday.
Early Thursday afternoon, as I stood as J’s bedside, a doctor we hadn’t seen before strode in, his crisp white lab coat flowing behind him. He introduced himself as the head of neurological research, and after a moment, he asked us if we had seen J’s latest CT scan. We hadn’t, so he hurried from the room, telling us he’d be right back. J and I looked at each other, confused, and my son must have seen worry in my eyes, as he patted my hand.
The doctor returned, wheeling in a large piece of equipment, a medical imaging viewer, and positioned it at the end of J’s ICU bed. He turned it on and the image of my son’s skull appeared, stark in the black and whiteness of it all. For a second, we were completely silent. Then the doctor, smiling, began to explain what we were seeing.
What we were seeing was nothing: no bleeding, no bruising, no swelling. The only sign that remained of my son’s injury just 24 hours before was the spiderweb of fractures in the bone, as if a pencil eraser had been pushed into the fragile shell of an egg, a network of bone break just beneath the C-shaped wound on the side of his head. J’s brain looked completely normal, showing not a single other sign of the blow he’d taken the day before in the wreck that had left his little car mangled, left nothing but the driver’s seat intact.
The doctor grinned, saying, “We want to study you, study why and how you healed so quickly.”
That was Thursday. We brought J home midday on Friday. Six weeks later, he was back at work, then back to his last year of college that fall. We talked time and again about his miraculous healing, about why it might have happened.
J, my wise son, said, “Mom, I don’t know why it happened. I just know I got another chance.”
He now calls May 19 his birthday. His Facebook status this morning read, “Today, I am alive.”
Make art about being given another chance.
28 April 2017
“Every particle in the physical universe takes its characteristics from the pitch and pattern and overtones of its particular frequencies, its singing.
Before we make music, music makes us.”~Joachim-Ernst Berendt
Make art about the song you recognize as yours, the song of the body.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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