A Year In Sedona: The Art Spirit

Chapter 5
The Art Spirit

Meditations On the Holy Cross, John Warren Oakes                      There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual- become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom.   --Robert Henri                 Moving on from dashed expectations of creative cookery adventures in a brand new kitchen, I made do with the old one which was perfectly serviceable, if not wildly fashionable. I also found some consolation in contemplating the creation of a vegetable and flower garden  but Louis, an excellent gardener who grew up on a farm in South Texas, told me the season wasn't right for putting in a garden, we would have to wait for next spring. "But buck up Mel," he told me, "we'll just nourish ourselves with recipes and menus from all those cooking classes you've been taking." I could see he was trying to be encouraging and that he had a good point. We did need suitable  sustenance for the remaining domestic tasks at hand.             Our current project was finishing up the interior of the house, something that held great intellectual and emotional appeal because in a certain way of looking at the world, once your house was ship shape, so was your life. Was it just us I wondered, or is there something about getting those never-big-enough closets in order that never fails to set hearts aflutter with a sense of  all's-right-with-the world?            Appreciating small blessings where they appear, we gave thanks for now being able to locate  errant items of clothing that had gone missing in the move. With wardrobe choices increased a hundredfold, we could at last step out into society with the confidence that we were dressed in proper attire.  About that time the muse showed up and we accepted an invitation from our friend Rabbi Bernie ("More joy, less oy!") Kling to join a group of modern day pilgrims who met monthly in one another's homes for an interfaith service and potluck. On the appointed morning we donned our newly rediscovered Sunday best, whipped up a splendid Waldorf salad in our perfectly fine old kitchen and off we went.           In a time when the traditional world of religion was experiencing enormous changes in how matters of faith are experienced, we found the idea of a modern interfaith home liturgy inviting. Based on the ancient practice of congregating in personal spaces, it was meant to foster authentic conversation, a sense of shared community and new bonds of friendships. There was an interesting and inviting mix of people from various spiritual traditions, some who'd been here for years, others new to Sedona, each with a remarkable story about finding a personal spirituality. Hosts for that Sunday were painter John Warren Oakes and poet Libby Oakes, both of whom had arrived at their own wisdom's edge some time back after years of travel, study and professional careers in academia.             The topic for discussion was prayer. Not an intellectual exploration of spiritual supplication and reception,but more of a creative literary journey through time, a tour de force of the origins, styles and traditions of divine communication through the ages. The service included a melodic audio accompaniment of an Old English version of The Lord's Prayer played on an iPhone using a clever volume amplifying device John had made and attached to the phone. As it turned out this  little invention was only one of many innovations John had put his hand to over the years.          After the informal service we all headed to the kitchen for a bounteous potluck. Our salad, a festive quartet of apple, celery, raisin and pecans, looked right at home among the other offerings and we felt at home too. I spied John standing near one of his paintings, an abstract with an unusually enticing display of geometric shapes and rollicking colors offering a delightful coherency with John's shirt. Those two gorgeous riots of lavenders and purples laughed and shouted good energy into the room. John told me lavender was his favorite color, very spiritual, he said. This remark opened the door to a fascinating conversation about a rather remarkable painting experience he'd had some years back. Growing animated, he told the story of how he and Libby had created Meditations On The Holy Cross, a boxed set of twenty five meditation cards with John's arresting abstract images of Christ on the cross, accompanied by 'messages' composed by Libby, memorable passages she described as intuitively received during meditative walks.      As John's narrative unfolded I  recognized it as the story of someone who had traveled a very long road that in the end brought him to wisdom's edge. In essence, it was the timeless and universal tale of surrender, transformation and rebirth. He'd been an art professor for some forty years and as he began stepping away from a painting paradigm bounded by rationality and planning, he found himself stumbilng into a completely new way to paint. His Meditations on the Holy Cross paintings were a remarkable example of what could happen when one surrenders to the call of the art spirit.         The Holy Cross series, which ultimately would be available in boxed sets of inspirational cards at the world renowned Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, started taking shape in 2008 and by 2011 there were some two hundred paintings and eight hundred drawings. It was different, John said, from anything he'd ever done before, images seeming to appear out of thin air as if  by magic. The muse had obviously come calling because the resulting paintings weren't at all about self expression, as much of his previous work had been. These new paintings were instead about surrender, he said, because he felt he had become a kind of channel for abstract representations which were breathtakingly powerful in their stark simplicity. Others, more traditionally executed, spoke of sweet moments of acceptance that open the door to true transformation. It was the project of a lifetime, he acknowledged, one that would change him forever as it played out over the next several years.              As his relationship with the muse deepened, he expanded his creative boundaries by studying famous artists' paintings of the crucifixion, then taking an icon painting workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He and Libby traveled and lived for a time in numerous spiritual sites including Glastonbury, England and on visits to the soul of nowhere, the Arizona desert, where he settled into a extended period of deep meditation. After  awhile he found his initial rational, carefully planned approach to painting just falling away as he focused not so much on product as process.  He wanted to try to represent the energy of the living Christ and show new life resurrected and reconstituted from the old and seemingly dead.  He felt his experience of artistic transformation through surrender to the unknown was akin to dying to the past so that he might be resurrected to his new life as an intuitive painter.         John's story pointed to possibilities of learning powerful new avenues to pray, of finding an intuitive and deeply personal way to communicate with the divine. It was a good story, one with a message for creative hearts everywhere looking for a way to meet the  muse. When we left, John presented us with a beautiful box set of Holy Cross cards. He probably didn't realize how much his kind and thoughtful gift  had inspired two travelers learning to meet the muse on their way to wisdom's edge.           Meeting Your Muse: The Intuitive Paper Maker          I spoke again with John sometime later and told him I wanted to put his story in my book. I asked him to tell me more about exploring different ways to surrender to one's own personal muse and after a bit of thought he suggested learning to make your own paper as a way to surrender to the muse. Sounds a bit odd, but bear with me.     I asked how would that work, since I'd never thought of making paper as a particularly spiritual experience. He said preparing a substance upon which one can juxtapose the elements of surprise, innovation and originality can offer a creative excursion like none other because the muse is involved every step of the way. the idea isn't so much about planning the outcome as it is letting the muse lead you to creating a unique substance and surface into which you can incorporate anything you want. It's this addition of muse-led inspirations from what surrounds you, that makes the beautiful metaphor for the process of destruction, rejuvenation and resurrection. As an artist, you would then be creating something new through your own willingness to be a channel for creativity.          Making your own paper is easy to do, requiring virtually no tools and materials other than old paper, a blender, a container with a screen and a piece of felt for drying the paper. Let your imagination run wild choosing and experimenting with old papers, colors, and various elements to be added to the paper mix in progress. Anything goes and you can try adding things like old dead organic matter from nature, like soil or sand, kitchen spices, pieces of string, coffee grounds, or tea leaves. Or experiment with using vegetable dyes for smashingly vibrant colors, threads for tiny contrast, slivers of shells or rock for textures, with perhaps some whispers of fur or hair. Metal slivers would work too.        Every person who tries their hand at paper making has their own particular ways of working and types of equipment. There is a wonderfully wide range of fibers, ways of pulping and forming sheets, and techniques for pressing and drying papers. Here are a few methods for you to sink your teeth into.  Take a look at this illustrated summary of the hand paper making process from paperslurry.com. Though not quite a tutorial, you can get a sense of how hand paper makers, paper artists, and yes, how you too can create paper out of cloth rags, plants (not wood or trees), and recycled paper scraps. Here's a guide to paper making to give you a sense of how to create paper out of material you might otherwise discard.   1)  Start by finding some cellulose paper, cloth rags, plants, or scrap paper. Do not use shiny surface card stock.  100% plant based cotton or linen works best. Bast, leaf, grass, or seed fiber is also good. Boil the plants with caustic to remove impurities and leaving cellulose fiber.  If using scrap paper, printing, watercolor, or drawing papers are best.  You will need to break down fibers to make pulp. 2)  For scrap paper, use a heavy duty kitchen blender. Cut the paper into one inch squares, soak and blend with water.A Hollander Beater is necessary to turn rag into pulp, but can also be used for plants and recycled paper.You will want to use a Hand Mallet for Japanese style paper making paper with kozo, gampi, or mitsumata plant fibers.  3)  To turn your pulp into paper you will need a mould, a screen, a vat of water, and the pulp. Lift the mould and screen up through the water filled with your pulp so that you end up with a thin layer of pulp on the screen.  4)  Finally transfer the layer of pulp to an absorbent surface. Now surrender to the muse to inspire what you will incorporate into your paper... organic or inert, colorful or monochromatic, textural or smooth. Let it dry.   5) Congratulations, you can now call yourself an intuitive paper maker!

A Year In Sedona: Only Connect

    Chapter 8  
Only Connect

                Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
                                                  -- E.M Forster
 

            The climate in Sedona was typically mild enough for year round encounters with nature and hiking was one of our favorite ways to meet the muse. The red rocks never failed to live up to their reputation for awe inspiring adventures in the great outdoors.  When winter arrived and the days grew cold enough to curtail daily excursions on nearby trails it was a mild shock. I missed the warmth of our happy golden Arizona sun and fell into a minor sulk about having to stay inside. Louis, my placid sidekick, recommended we just settle in and read classic novels. As usual he'd hit upon a winning idea.

           We drove the mile over to the town's very good library and found some old treasures, among them E.M. Forster's Howard's End. This turned out to be serendipitous. In reading again the sumptuous tale of tangled relationships gone awry only to get set right in the end, I was impressed anew with the heroine's eloquent and persuasive speech about connecting prose and passion, heart and head as a way out of the isolation of living in fragments. Pondering this verity made me feel  a) hopeful about there always being a way to resolve life's thornier dilemmas, and b) motivated because it pushed me to try to spend more time working on my own book about finding new connections in the present by honoring the ancestral spiritual lineage.

         Cozy in our favorite chairs in front of the fire, we read our respective books and afterwards fell naturally into the time honored activity of doing what people used to do in the old days, talking to each other about what we'd just read. Conversation fell on the divine to mundane spectrum, alternating between philosophical musings, metaphysical inquiry, political rants and raves and plain old piddling trivialities. But then that grew tiresome as we got bored with with only each other to discuss ideas about timeless and universal questions such as how to make the world a better place as well as more mundane matters like where we could we get some really good barbecue for dinner.

       The truth was that we needed other people to get a really good discussion going. But where? Fortunately the muse appeared in the mailbox the next day when the latest catalog from OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learn Institute arrived. "Look at this!" I said, tossing Louis the snazzy little publication with scads of innovative educational offerings for the over-sixty set. One workshop sounded particularly intriguing, "Dialogue As a Spiritual Practice" explored how Taoism and other less well known approaches to spirituality might have practical applications in daily life. If we signed up we might learn how to make new connections with heretofore unrelated things and people, plus we would be part of a group of inquiring minds interested in the same things we were.

           At the first meeting we met bright, educated, enthusiastic baby boomers with the time and resources to pursue interesting, affordable opportunities to keep the mind challenged and spry. Since the point of the class was to foster dialogue of a spiritual nature, we were assigned spots in groups small enough to allow for intimate discussion. Our group had five people, all with a different reason for being there. Exploring dialogue, spirituality and the Tao obviously had a certain esoteric overlay so of course the group conversation wandered out of ordinary bounds, with everyone's comments lending a unique but broadening perspective. Louis, fairly taciturn, spent a lot of time listening and pondering. He'd been an undergraduate philosophy major and from time to time pulled up a quote from one of his favorite thinkers. The group responded appreciatively. When it was my turn to speak, I mentioned my book in progress, explaining that one of the things I'd hoped to get from the class was an expanded perspective about the book's subject, connecting with ancestral spiritual  lineage through memoir and personal narrative.


           When they heard 'personal narrative', some in the group politely expressed weariness with the genre, disdainful of something they felt had in recent years become hopelessly trite. Undaunted, I spoke up for it though, I thought an examination of the journey of the soul was a crackerjack tool for lifelong learning as well as a generally useful way to meet one's muse. Put that way, the idea seemed more attractive and Ellen, a feisty sixtyish woman who had taken several OLLI classes over the years, shared her story. She'd reached a time and place in life when learning to connect with her grown children had taken on an urgency, matters of health, she said. She'd hoped this workshop might help her figure out how to move from the superficial and predictable to a deeper and more meaningful conversation with her children and grandchildren.

      "I came not really knowing what to expect," she told us, "but I didn't want more classes in how to talk to your grown kids. What I'm looking for is a way to share with my children on more of a soul level. I've got a garage full of boxes, letters, pictures, mementos and several years worth of journals. I've wondered if I could find a way to use all that, maybe open a new dialogue with them by sharing the story of my own spiritual journey, showing them all the stuff I've saved over the years, not just mine but from the whole family tree." I offered my perspective and experience, said I'd found conversation with my adult children much easier and gotten a new perspective when I communicated in a way they more easily understood. Images, photos and pictures, symbols, objects and mementos told a better memory story than mere words. Imagery could bypass rigid verbal cues, allowing instead a more creative approach to generating internal and external dialogue. A perfect way to broach the subject of connecting to ancestral lineage. Ellen's eyes lit up at this, maybe she'd found a piece to the puzzle of how to engage in dialogue as a spiritual practice.

         There were others in the group with very different reasons about why they'd signed up. Greg, a retired hydrologist, was a scientist on the way to discovering himself as a mystic. Looking for alternatives to traditional explanations of spirituality, he was delving further into the mystique of what has drawn seekers of all kinds to Sedona. Unlike Ellen, he had no pressing family dialogue issues to grapple with and simply wanted to explore new ways to connect and converse with others about the things he loved most. Befuddled in the beginning by the instructor's very Zen/No Mind approach to dealing with the unfolding and flow of the class, Greg slowly found ground, his alive and curious spirit well served by embracing the intent of the class to let go of logic as answers arose intuitively. Learning to be more fully present, practicing non-judgment, opening to minute-by-minute experience, and coming to recognize unconscious skills and instincts began to make more sense to him as the class unfolded. Maybe he was learning that to find the holy grail, aka wisdom's edge, called for a different way of thinking. Or non-thinking.

        Robert, a computer programmer, hailed from back east and had been a winter resident in Sedona for several years. He told us he liked to keep his mind sharp during the off season by looking into topics that at first glance seemed completely unrelated to his primary work which was teaching a college computer course. Robert was someone not afraid to go full on for something totally out of his comfort range. Like others in the group, he wanted an experience that promised to fling open the doors to a wider perception and appreciation of life and give him information and maybe skills to forge better relationships. He thought this might happen by learning to connect with his own as well as others' spiritual traditions. At the end of the class he had retained his initial openness and his 'all things are possible' approach as he promised to stay in touch.

       As Ellen, Greg and Robert talked, the unspoken subtext was that at some point they'd each made a decision to set out on the road to wisdom's edge. Though all had a different tale in the end they told the same story of a readiness to meet the muse and live in fragments no longer. In a profound way their presence validated Forster's perspective that connecting to others by sharing one's soul story invites the prose and passion inside emerge from its waning isolation. Our group dialogue ended up being a kind of spiritual practice in itself, a useful and elegant way to meet the muse. At the end of the workshop Louis and I knew we'd come to a turning point on the road to wisdom's edge. It had been a very long time since we'd been this happy about going back to school. 


                                       Meeting Your Muse:  A Spoken Image  

                 Let the muse lead the way to reveal a story of love and compassion, a warmer and more nurturing ancestral lineage brought to life using image, artifacts, photos, mementos as well as words to portray personal heritage and history. Experiment with your narrative, what you end up may surprise you. A tribute to ancestors can highlight inherited spiritual qualities such as strength, peace, honor and courage, qualities that can be passed on to future generations. Once composed, the story is initially honored and validated through sharing with a silent witness. Later, sharing with a wider audience and family can be immensely rewarding. Here's your guide to composing A Spoken Image:

  Greet...lineage members through their photos, assembling your tribe together in a rough collage. Sit with this awhile until the photo montage calls out for context. For instance, I added the Buddhist Lovingkindness peace prayer after meditating for a bit. I love the beautiful expressions of cultivating tenderness, offering forgiveness and finding strength. If you choose this approach, sit for a few minutes as you allow the ancestors to find voice through these images. Offer up the strong, sweet words of Lovingkindess to your ancestors, then listen for a response.

Boundary...the sacred space you are creating by experimenting with shadow, light and color, barely there strokes of pencil or colored pen to delineate borders, fashion icons, add designs, your own illustrations, anything that helps delineate sacred space. After the images are respectfully boundaried in this space, create a written schematic with family tree connections, remembered relationships and carefully constructed memories.

    Write...a descriptive sentence about each ancestor. Tracing lineage back as far as you can within the collage. Clearly, the further back you go, the less you know so fabricated description is acceptable. This isn't as cavalier as it may seem. There's something very powerfully creative and revealing about encountering a photo image and sitting with it as you open your thoughts and feelings about the photo image. Oddly enough, you begin to realize you know more than you thought. 

    Draw...a visual representation including a timeline, a family tree, geographical map, showing connections between the photo images and you as well as with one another. The unfolding image will put you physically among the ancestors, seeing, feeling and hearing them as they were.

  Write...about these characters in the lineage and connect yourself to them by describing the complex of connections, facts, feelings and events that had to occur to bring you to a life in this place at this time. Write about the person you think you are now because of the influences of your ancestors.  Again, it's OK, maybe necessary sometimes,  to imagine, make up, surmise or guess when the unknown looms. Imaginative excursion is after all, the key to writing great stories. 

Tell the Story... to somebody.  I told my husband. And my cats, one dead and one alive, cats that is. Yes, speaking to the dead is a valid and even encouraged avenue to finding your way among the departed ancestors. Feel free to speak to a lineage member or a life heroine/hero that has passed on. The listening partner is silent, there only to honor and bear witness to your arrival at wisdom’s edge.

          

         

                                       

         



           
       .

A Year In Sedona: From Truth to Art

Chapter 6
From Truth To Art

Sedona Arts Center, display of  student paintings

          What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervading both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements. -- Marc Chagall

            Late spring had arrived in Sedona all its glory, the whole town now completely awash in beauty. We were so ready to explore new artistic frontiers after our encounter with the abstract art of our new friend/muse, John Warren Oakes.  Sedona, at an altitude of 4,500 feet was ringed by sheltering red rock spires creating a kind of a hermetic container now buzzing with a hundred kinds of colorful high desert wildflowers blooming their little heads off.  What better time could there be than now to take that two-day workshop with the intriguing title, A Beautiful Mess taught by artist Julie Bernstein Engelmann at the Sedona Arts Center.

          The class promised to cover the basics of abstract painting with latex and acrylic paints. There were ten students, some experienced artists and novices like Louis and me. We were all there to learn how to wrestle a chaotic cacophony of shape, line, space, texture and color -- aka 'a beautiful mess'-- into some kind of transcendant new order reflecting the subtext buried in our souls. Whether this was the same thing as moving from truth to art and ending up at wisdom's edge, we would soon find out.

        On Day One Julie asked the assembled artists to find an intention, a word, a phrase, something to lend inspiration and focus for our proposed painting. I cast about, anxious to choose the right word. This was to be an abstract, and yet....one had to retain some sense of boundary, didn't one?  Finally I chose  'nourishment', a concept that had always served me well in the inspiration department. The painting itself would be wrought from a free form exercise involving mixing and pouring latex house paint on a primed canvas. I liked the initial results, my brave attempts at mixing colors, light pinks, various hues of green, warm yellow, soft blue produced the sense of a midnight garden in spring under the light of a golden full moon.

          After we poured, we left our piece to dry and set overnight, returning the next day to give it a good structuring workout with a variety of brushes, soppy wet paper towels and acrylics applied sparingly for contour, shaping and form. The finished pieces took on line and definition, surprising many who'd thought they might not be able to locate anything remotely resembling their original concept. True, one woman became annoyed with the process outcome and refashioned her whole painting into a whimsically rendered but  realistic depiction of a prancing pony.  I thought it had great charm and applauded her courage to keep working it until she got to what felt right for her.


             My own painting took on the semblance of a field of vegetation, which I loved and yes, felt nourished by. Louis' painting looked almost exactly like one of those wildly colorful weather channel hurricane graphics, very powerful. Which sounds less than inspiring but the contrary was true. the main spiral threw off an enormous pink happy energy as it twirled across the canvas. At the end of the workshop we'd learned valuable hands on techniques and become acquainted with  how to embrace an intention prior to beginning a new abstract. Most people were pleased, some amazed at what could happen when you let yourself meet the muse in this way.

          It  reminded me of  the writing workshops  I taught back in my years in Santa Fe. Free form, abstract, spontaneous, on the fly...whatever you want to call it, there's something liberating about getting all your stuff down on the page and then going through it line by line to find a jewel, gem or treasure inviting you to step into wisdom's edge. Writers had often been shocked to realize that a few well chosen editing techniques led to a discovery of new order, focus and purpose  arising from the original mess and chaos. Same idea, different medium, identical result.


              That abstract workshop was exhilarating because we'd met the muse in a whole new way, inviting us to keep on creating even after workshop's end. We decided to use an available third of the garage to accommodate a primitive art studio where we resurrected a long stored trove of art supplies, including over 20 old tubes of paint that had dried out, a few still salvageable. Ditto for the brushes, pencils, pastels, pens, sponges, scrapers, pokers and pliers. Toiling among the morass of papers and paints, it  just felt good to pour the dust out of the resurrected collection of plastic cups we'd saved, in their former lives receptacles for mixing watercolors and acrylics.

        Though older now and a little weathered, like us, our art supplies and folding tables were nevertheless  ready and able to go another round with us as we sailed on into our new life as creative spirits. After Louis finished installing a whole wall of display and storage shelves, we felt we'd accomplished something big. Surveying our novice efforts with pride and satisfaction, we saw our dream of joining a wider creative community had become a solid reality. In the end, our truth had become our art.

 

 Meeting Your Muse: Nourishing The Creative Spirit

          One of the best ways I know to nourish a creative spirit is to go back to sources of your first inspiration. Like food. While we'd worked along on our new art studio I cooked up a few tapas including some fabulous Mediterranean dishes to keep us going. Shaping and working the menu choices, I began looking at the food with my new abstract-appreciative eyes. I was taken aback because if you've ever looked, and I mean really looked, at your meal preparations, you will be continually astonished and thrilled at the artistry you can encounter in the simple act of observing, preparing and cooking food. the elements of art -- line, color, texture, shape, space -- are abundantly evident in even the smallest morsel. Behold: A sunburst in the middle of a carrot slice! The curly, crispy edges of a textured fried egg! One perfect, smooth, round green pea!  Happy crinkled edges fluting a fresh bunch of kale! why it's enough to make you want to remodel your whole kitchen to honor the food muse (but we've already talked about that in another chapter so....).

        Food -- its selection, preparation, cooking, consumption--  is an artistic experience and the Mediterranean diet is touted worldwide and has a distinct esthetic appeal. Here's a menu that is worthy enough to be called a form of abstract art with the requisite contrasts of color, juxtapositions of new and familiar textures, a wide variety of shapes and just enough order to satisfy the sensibilities of those among us who live for boundaries (yes, me).


            To begin, set out a wildly colorful and textured dish of perfectly prepared grains. Couscous is so compelling with its tiny pearls and honeyed hue. Zap it with ghee or olive oil, but not too much more. Let it hover lightly, set off to perfection in an indigo ceramic dish. Offer pita bread on the side.

         Next find some small, crisp white plates with nice shapes (I love a little ellipse, don't you?)...maybe use four or five just large enough to have a healthy and attractive sampling of 1) Greek olives and pickle slices (zesty dill is best), 2) a good size helping of plain yogurt, sliced cucumbers and feta cheese slices sporting fresh shredded mint as a suitable topping, along with fat red grapes as a clump for color and contrast of taste 3) tiny, halved sweet cherry tomatoes with gobs of cilantro and parsley,  4) an alluring, perfectly smooth dish of chickpea hummus sporting a well of olive oil, dashed with paprika, and then maybe 5) another slightly more hearty dip of baba ganoush, wherein you make the tahini by grinding the sesame seeds yourself and strip the soft and juicy eggplant so that it's tender but firm, proudly showing off its handsome seeds and other textured innards.

          While vegetarian fare is always appreciated, for some, so is a little side of salmon, lamb or perhaps a roasted garlic-lemon chicken. Just a side though since the main event is always fresh vegetables, grains, condiment sides, nuts and dairy choices.

             You will come at last to dessert and there's really nothing better, more appropriate or more artistic than homemade Baklava served in tiny colorful bowls. It's easy to put it together, just grab some filo dough from the frozen food section at the grocery, those small individual cups with fluted edges are cute. Then get some really, really pure fine honey and pick up some of the freshest walnuts you can find to grind and add to the honey, which you'll then stuff into the lightly cooked filo cups. If you want to ladle on a dab of yogurt or vanilla bean gelato, knock yourself out! Just keep it simple and keep it healthy.

            And there you have it, you won't believe how beautiful your abstractly artful Mediterranean meal will look. And how much your muse will thank you for taking the time to look beyond the ordinary to the extraordinary....from truth to art.