Thursday, July 28, 2011

What is Love Contest?



Love wanders down so many paths, takes many forms.  Let's explore the universe of Love.  In an earlier blog you read an excerpt of an inter generational example of love titled The Quilter.  Now click on The End of the Affair below and read about another case of Love, love gone wrong-- 





The theme for The Artist's Path for  2012 is Love.  Below are the opening paragraphs in Wickipedia on the subject of Love.
In the comment section of this blog send your meanings, definitions, thoughts, stories of love.  Send photos too.  I'll post them on this Blog or at www.TheArtistsPath.org. If you wish to submit photos, email as jpeg attachment to  gailm@theartistspath.org. The Best Entry will win Dinner for Two at a Prescott, AZ restaurant subject to needed editing  and agreement to have their entry used in Path 2012.  Deadline:  November 15, 2011.


In English, the word love can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure ("I loved that meal") to intense interpersonal attraction ("I love my partner"). "Love" can also refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love, to the sexual love of eros (cf. Greek words for love), to the emotional closeness of familial love, or to the platonic love that defines friendship,  to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love. This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.



Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.

Helen Fisher defines what could be understood as love as an evolved state of the survival instinct, primarily used to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species through reproduction


Let's Explore What...  

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

The Artist's Path Announces 'Path, 2012'--The Artist's Response to Love

Where do you go for inspiration to write a 5 to 15 minute monologue that somehow is connected with love?  I look lots of places, but I begin with my own life.  Here's a passage from a monologue I'm working on titled The Quilter.  This the final bit of the piece in which a grandmother is quilting with her granddaughter telling about her last conversation with the little girl's great grandmother.

Two days before she died I was on the phone with her, long distance.  She sounded good.  Not as if she'd be gone in 48 hours.   I asked her how she was doin?  And she said,  "I feel like I'm just losing myself, kinda floating.  You know I'm off of my last, great adventure." I asked her, “Margaret what’s your earliest memory?” She paused, I don’t know if she was still smoking at that point, but often when we talked on the phone, I’d hear her take a drag on her cigarette while she accessed her memory banks.  “Well”,--she always seemed to start her thoughts with a long, drawn out 'well' as if she was giving herself time to collect her thoughts. So she said, “Well, I can see myself in this drainage ditch along the road.  It’s summer; and it’s hot as hell. (she grew up  deep in the heart of Cajun country.)  Oh OK you're right.  That’s another quarter, but she said it not me. 
Then she said,  “I’m dripping with sweat.  I never did perspire. And I sure as heck didn’t glow.  There's not a cloud in the sky.  But the sky's not that crisp blue you get on a cold, dry winter’s day.  No it’s kinda milky blue. And the ditch is still damp with dew, so it must be morning.  And I’m surrounded by dandelions, a carpet of yellow all around me. My arms are out and I’m twirling in circles. Even now I can feel a smile on my face.  Don’t know where I am, but the flowers sure are pretty in the morning light.”  Those were her exact words.  For some reason they just stuck with me. She died two days later, in the morning.  I still miss her.

Now why don't you 'access your memory banks' and write a monologue for Path 2012 and send it to gailm@theartistspath.org.  Start writing.  Don't over think it.  Just go for it! 
NO FEAR!                                                            

Details at www.TheArtistsPath.org