Hana Sasaki Makes Her Debut

I'd like to announce an exciting animated collaboration with my friend and writer, Kelly Luce. Kelly and I met at the MacDowell Colony during the Great Ice Storm of '08. A week without power in rural New Hampshire lays a good foundation for friendship.

Kelly is releasing her debut collection of short stories this October and I have had the privilege of an open creative license to animate a few scenes from her book. This may result in future collaborations... a supernatural toaster is a tempting plot point. But for now, enjoy this glimpse into Ms. Luce's strange and wonderful mind.

Three Scenarios in which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail 
https://vimeo.com/cfparks/hanasasaki 

And please do your social media duty for us both with a like, comment, tweet, tumble, blog, embed or otherwise share.

Three Things

This morning, I read these three poems by Czeslaw Milosz. Pondering on an age old theme.
Faith
Faith is in you whenever you look
At a dewdrop or a floating leaf
And know that they are because they have to be.
Even if you close your eyes and dream up things
The world will remain as it has always been
And the leaf will be carried by the waters of the river.

You have faith also when you hurt your foot
Against a sharp rock and you know
That rocks are here to hurt our feet.
See the long shadow that is cast by the tree?
We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.
What has no shadow has no strength to live.


Hope
Hope is with you when you believe
The earth is not a dream but living flesh,
That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
That all things you have ever seen here
Are like a garden looked at from a gate.

You cannot enter. But you're sure it's there.
Could we but look more clearly and wisely
We might discover somewhere in the garden
A strange new flower and an unnamed star.

Some people say we should not trust our eyes,
That there is nothing, just a seeming,
These are the ones who have no hope.
They think that the moment we turn away,
The world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,
As if snatched up by the hands of thieves.


Love
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills-
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.

Witness

a poem I read this morning by DENISE LEVERTOV. This is from the anthology A Book of Luminous Things by Czeslaw Milosz

WITNESS
Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

Yonder, Yonder, Yonder

There seems to have been a lot going on for me this summer. I have been moving in multiple directions, if that is possible for a 3 dimensional being. Opportunities have come pounding at my door leaving me in 'analysis paralysis', to borrow a friend's well-coined term, wondering where this grand vision will lead me and if I have the strength of mind and heart to follow it.

The other morning, I came across a poem that pin-pointed exactly how I felt - poetry does that so well! Indeed, I had been asking myself Hopkin's own question: how, with all these blessings, can I feel "so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered" by my grander vision. What beauty do I hold in my hands that must be freely forfeit to a fonder care?

The entire poem, for the poetically minded, is here.

Poetics

A month of bloggimating actually served its purpose of getting me started on the new film. I'm storyboarding at the moment, so no new animation to post for a while. In between times, however, I am moving down a new tangent, a poetical one. So many of the images in my head are birthed from poetry and now I am occasionally scribbling them down as they come. Here is one worth sharing.


Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternatively stone in you and star.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~