Black Dot Diary

Just got back from see­ing Avatar, the lat­est movie from direc­tor James Cameron. Now, Cameron is known for the great effects and plenty of action. Think of Ter­mi­na­tor and The Abyss. I wasn’t expect­ing pro­fun­dity, but that’s what I found tonight.

On one level Avatar is typ­i­cal block­buster, super­sized with amaz­ing ani­ma­tion. But it’s sub­text is pure shamanic jour­ney, from the world tree to the rev­er­ence for the uni­ver­sal mother, to rites of pas­sage and ani­mal guides.

One of the best things about hav­ing a blog is that I get to rave about the peo­ple I think are remark­able. One of these peo­ple is jew­elry artist Anne M. Kelly who will debut two excit­ing new lines at the upcom­ing Out of Hand Craft Fair on Novem­ber 20 — 22 at The Crys­tal Gar­den in Vic­to­ria BC.

Anne, who truly is one of the West Coast’s best kept secrets, cre­ates high-​demand orig­i­nal pieces of jew­elry, each with its own unique story. Because Anne is a pub­lished poet, the sto­ries that come with the jew­elry are works of art in them­selves. Her two newest col­lec­tions include a Native Species line fea­tur­ing Shibuichi Rough­skin Newts, and a Tim­o­r­phic line cre­ated from pure repur­posed aero­space titanium.

Photo by fauxto_​digit

The moon phases appli­ca­tion on iGoogle said the moon was 100% full last night. Google is like God, right, so this must be true?

I swear I could feel the full­ness even if Google hadn’t told me and I couldn’t see with my own eyes that lus­cious golden ball in the sky.

My cats felt some­thing in the air too — those boys were crazy last night, even with­out the cat­nip. The dogs down at the four way hon­oured the moon with wolfish howl­ing. Teenagers pulled up the stop signs at the crossroads.

What’s it like to be on stage with U2? I never dreamed I’d ever find out. But life is full of twists, turns and gifts as I dis­cov­ered at U2’s Van­cou­ver show on Octo­ber 28, 2009.

U2’s music has been with me through a lot of my life — births, cel­e­bra­tions, deaths, dances, epipha­nies. Their music takes me to the same place I go when I’m writ­ing poetry — the almost-​undefinable, mag­i­cal place where the poetry gets lift off and seems to write itself.

Hello every­one, I am so new to Word­press that I acci­den­tally “cut” a blog post that was gen­er­at­ing some inter­est: “Canada & BC Arts Cuts: Deep Insult, Shal­low Think­ing,” first posted on Octo­ber 10^th, 2009. I have to say there’s a strange les­son in cut­ting this blog — when you cut some­thing that is a unique cre­ation of an indi­vid­ual, you often can never get it back. You can’t unring a bell. Les­son learned for me. If only the Harper and Camp­bell gov­ern­ments would learn the same thing about cut­ting the arts. Their cuts have far more dire con­se­quences than the mere dele­tion of a blog. Below is my attempt to recre­ate what I had written:

Land & Sea Murals at Ogden Point Break­wa­ter, Vic­to­ria, British Colum­bia. Photo by Chris Holt Pho­tos, http://​www​.chrisholt​pho​tos​.com

I took a walk with my fam­ily on Thanks­giv­ing Day and, under a dra­mat­i­cally dark Octo­ber sky, saw for the first time the spec­tac­u­lar murals on the break­wa­ter at Ogden Point in Vic­to­ria, BC. With the addi­tion of the murals, the old grey break­wa­ter has become majes­tic. It doesn’t com­pete with its coastal back­drop but appears to emerge from it.