I made this particular scrapbook, featured in recent posts, as a prop to be used with children with my picture book, The Secret Remedy Book. But when I had completed the pages showing the seven remedies from the picture book story, I did not want to leave the impression that there are only seven remedies in this vast and bountiful world of ours. So I made a page to indicate that there is always more. More remedies. More dreams. More ideas. More this, that, and the other thing, everywhere.
A pegboard format seemed like a good way to go about doing this.
And I added a quote by Mary Oliver in one corner because it hits me full force every time I see it, for is there any other question more important for each of us to answer?
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
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I love this shy little girl holding out an apple to the world, with her little boots, the weathered wooden sled, the weathered wooden basket of apples, the old rope in her mittened hand, all those lovely driftwood-grays contrasted with the cheerful holiday-red of her smock-like dress and the fuzzy red wool of her hat with its fluffy elfin pom-pom.
"The little applegirl" is a card by artist Lisi Martin. The card company is Pictura Graphica in Karlstad, Sweden. It says on the back of the card that Lisi Martin was born in Barcelona, Catalonia. Years ago, a dear cousin of mine in Michigan sent this card to my mother in Texas. After my mother died, I found it inside a large brown envelope that she kept right beside her chair. My mother had written on the outside of the brown envelope: "Important Things."
It isn't just a gimmick of movie magic that takes us on a time-space-travel sequence from a brown envelope in Texas to Michigan to Sweden to Catalonia. It is the reality of our lives: we really are all connected . . .
Here is the full two-page spread inside the scrapbook on the brown-bag paper made from old grocery sacks.
I used pushpins to hold some of these bits and pieces in place, but then, in order to actually close the book, I had to remove them. They were a problem in sticking through to adjoining pages as well. The colored paper clips and miniature clothespins have worked better as placeholders, although I should admit here that I have not yet used enough glue or tape to keep things from routinely falling off this particular page.
I wanted this "pegboard" page to be attractive to a child, but to also come with the kinds of things that adults put on their own inspiration pegboards in their studios or over their desks. So I added a few quotes that seemed to me to fall into that realm of words that are so simple and yet so mysterious that they are both reachable for a child and yet unreachable at the same time.
I find these quotes to have the same effect upon myself, but then I love ideas that are almost within my reach ~ because they make me reach for them.
Here is one from Emily Dickinson: "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else." Oh my! How Emily startles us with her thoughts sometimes!
I didn't think about it at the time, but now that I look at it, this quote seems a perfect contemplation to go with that "Happy Birthday" stamp, and for all the birthdays that we each of us celebrate to honor the years in which our being alive is so breathtakingly astonishing.
And I have always loved this Latin proverb: "Solvitur ambulando" or, in translation, "The problem is solved by walking around."
I have actually solved some problems in just this way. At any rate, it's a very good beginning for problem-solving, and, by the way, it is also another mere coincidence that I attached this quote right next to a Chinese "Happy New Year" stamp. But what a great way to start a new year, by walking around and solving problems!
There was a title for this page, "More Remedies & More Dreams," but it got lost among all the bits and pieces, or perhaps it simply became one of the bits and pieces.
The title is hand-printed on a piece of box cardboard. It is very 3-dimensional on the actual page, but that extra dimension gets lost in my photograph.
This whole page is a kind of addendum to what came before, a postscript to let us know there are more remedies and there are more dreams. The page started out with images of old-timey remedies like cups of hot tea and Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup, and then progressed to pencils, stamps, and bottles of ink, and from there to Dr. Seuss, greeting cards, and unforgettable quotations.
Last thing, I added a flurry of stars and flowers, those bright, petal-rayed pinwheels of heaven and earth.
And just now I searched WikiCommons to see if anyone had given their pegboards or pinboards or bulletin boards to the world, and I found two that I loved.
Here is a pinboard produced as a wonderful work of art by Cornelia Durka & Birgit Vogel. It is dated 14 February 2006. Valentine's Day!
I love the playing cards, the scissors, the butterflies and roses, the upsidedown words, the maps, the whole fantastic hodgepodge of colorful things.
It makes you look and look again, and think and think again. Dream and dream again.
And here is one that everyone who has ever been in a school has seen stretching down some endless hallway, enticing us to join up, to attend, to participate in, to show up for, to grace an occasion with our presence, to report for duty, to witness, to stand in the presence of, to partake of, to be a part of the world at large.
The description of this display is: "Builletin board on the Infinite Corridor at MIT."
Infinite corridor! Honestly, it's dangerous to use words like that around me. I just go spinning into infinity when people toss out words like that.
The photographer is Joseph Barillari. Okay, Joseph, I'm willing to be very open to the idea that there is a word spelled "builletin" that has a super-esoteric, guru-geek, top-secret technological meaning that is way above my head, but I could not find this word ~ yet. It might be a code word for "bulletin," but I'm still looking . . .
Well, I think I will leave you with a quote I put on my little scrapbook pegboard from our very own Austin, Texas, Gilbert Shelton's Oat Willie, or so the legend says:
And there are days when there is really no other way to go forth into this world.
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