FinnThunder play: Old Woman & the Barefoot Maiden

My sisters and I have been busy. Here's part three of our contribution to FinnThunder 2012, starting tomorrow. Our performance piece is a one act play. The characters are an Old Woman (Vanha Akka), Crow, a corpse, Spring Maiden, Suvi, Black Swan, Tuonen Tytti (Queen of Death/Tuonela), Spirit dancers, and a Narrator! Sat. July 28, 2 pm, Finlandia Club, Bay St. Thunder Bay. $10 or free with FinnThunder day pass or weekend pass.  

The inspiration for the Suvi summer woman who ends our play was this old book that I once found at a Finlandia Club rummage sale. It's a book of poetry from the 1940s in Finnish. The poems are wonderful old poems, all dedicated to nature, to the lakes, rivers, sky, clouds, flowers, fields, and cliffs. The book cost me either 10c or 25c. Suvi means summer, the heart of summer. I laid the book in my bed of thyme and doesn't she look pretty there!

Finn Thunder: song performance

My sister, Della, will be performing/singing her story Echo of the Ancestors, this coming Sunday at the FinnThunder Festival. Hope to see you there!

FinnThunder Art Exhibit & Sale

This is the piece by Johanna Virtanen that I'm bringing home....actually, I think I'll put it in my office for inspiration. Institutional spaces are so in need of grounding energy....

This coming weekend in Thunder Bay

FinnThunder 2012 Art Exhibit & Sale

Friday, July 27 10 - 5 pm
Saturday, July 28 10 am -5 pm
Sunday, July 29 10 am-3pm
@ Hammarskjold High School

Come and browse Finnish and local artists artworks ranging from oil, acrylic, and watercolour paintings, woodworking, photography, surreal faeries, pointillism and so much more! 

Featured artist Johanna Virtanen from Helsinki, Finland has created a new series of artworks specifically for FinnThunder! Her series entitled Mother Earth presents the many beautiful faces of our Mother Earth.
Make friends with art and even take one home to adorn your walls!
Read more about the art exhibit and the Virtanen, the featured artist, here. 

Israel's tent cities for workers

I wonder how many tourists to Israel will see places like that depicted above? I guess none. These places will be build away. The abject, those thrown out, will be put out in the margins, away from curious eyes.

I like reading Haaretz, an Israeli English language newspaper, because it writes up stuff that Canadian and American newspapers and magazines don't dare to as it will disrupt the public's perception of Israel as a beacon of democracy.You learn more about Israel than meets the Western fiction of Israel.

Closing borders, beefing up security, and building more prisons are increasingly the pastimes of states like Canada, the US, and Israel. Defining who doesn't belong is part of this nation building through exclusion. As if Israel hasn't created enough tent "cities" of refugees in the past through the creation of the state of Israel, through the war of 1967, the removal of Palestinians from Palestine, the bombing of Gaza and other injustices, now I read that Israel is going to erect 20,000 - 25000 tents for African migrants who have entered its borders.

Where will the they be built? Five tent cities will be built at five different detention centers.Three of them will be built near a prison. Like the coils of barbed wire and crowded men in the image above foreshadow: "The centers will be run by the Israel Prison Service." Say, what?

Haaretz reports that

The objective of the plan, according to the ministry, is to ensure that all African migrants who enter Israel will be directly transferred to a detention center where they will stay for long periods of time, in order to prevent their entry to Israeli cities.

The plan was presented to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier on Thursday after his bureau ordered a quick and efficient response to the migrant issue.

I have bolded the lines that ring alarm bells of incarceration, exclusions. Does anyone still believe that Israel is a democracy? Criminalizing migrants and refugees has a long history in Israel and this seems to be ramping up again, but this time addressed to another group of people, also with brown faces and, for many, non-Jewish origins, who are "the issue". Why does that term seem to ring with the term Canada once invented for its own issue: "the Indian problem"? (Indian was the word created for the First Nations people who lived on the land that Canada claimed as its dominion). I wonder if Israel's earlier plans to replace the exploited Palestinian work force with other exploited day / migrant labourers has backfired for Israel? It seems they have another demographic problem at hand that will expose the lie of their democracy.

rattle in Finnish is helistin

Today on my morning walk, I saw a lot of things. I saw the most run-down garage I have seen in awhile. They used to be common when I was a girl, but seems everyone is slapping vinyl up on every standing wood frame building left.

This one doesn't seem worth saving, however. Under the Algoma St. bridge, I saw white supremacist graffiti and swastikas painted on the concrete walls.

Mostly likely, city workers will come out in the morning and paint over it. I saw a black squirrel that had no fur at all on its chest and upper back area, so it looked like it was wearing a vest. With its skin exposed like that, it looked even more like the rodent it is. I saw a pair of ladies thong underwear tossed over the overpass and a used baby diaper, and a whole lot of other unsightly garbage. Down at the water front I had to walk all the way around the paddling pond to pull out of the rocks a huge piece of unsightly plastic that was ruining the symmetry of the photo I wanted to take of the red dogwood.

I saw a pair of blue-winged teal, a male and female. I saw many beautiful reflections down by the waterfront, before the wind suddenly flew in.

I saw two of my friends out jogging and we stopped and chatted. I saw a man I had never met before but we also stopped and chatted about the so-called development of the waterfront. I saw an old white man with big brown liver spots on his face, walking preoccupied. I said, look! See those three goldeneyes? There are two males and one female. Both males are dancing their mating dance and calling out to the female duck, who is swimming non-plussed between them. He looked up and continued on his way.  

Behind the Spirit Garden, I saw some coloured tinsel streamers thrown out on the ground. First, I walked by them, saying to myself, stupid people. But then I decided to tie a few to a dried goldenrod. Before long, I had picked up most of them and tied them on. This was right when the wind picked up, so the streamers were dancing in the wind. It reminded me of the rattle I am making--or maybe the rattle was calling me.

I am almost finished my rattle. The women at ONWA had invited me to join them for their rattle-making workshop. I have to go back this week and pick it up because it was drying.

After I tied the shiny streamers of somebody's garbage onto the dead goldenrod, I headed back home. Before I crossed the train tracks, on the ground, I found two long soft beautiful feathers, one copper, one black. They were attached together with a small piece of metal that had a hole in it. I picked it up off the ground. Perfect! Just what I need for my rattle.