The Broad Yoko Ono and MOCA

• Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at The Broad Museum ends on Sunday 11 September, so it was time to experience it for this week's Tuesday outing.

• 1960-2016 were the dates for Add Colour Refugee Boat that was part of the Yoko exhibit, but people had kept adding blue to the walls, the floor, and the boat, so somewhere I need to learn more of its history.

• Because The Broad is expanding they'd closed some of the usual galleries. I'll end this Broad section with a pair of industrial photographs by Thomas Struth.

• Semi Submersible Drilling Rig, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME) shipyard on Geoje Island, South Korea, 2007

• Neutral Buoyancy Lab, Johnson Space Center, NASA, Houston, Texas, USA, 2017

• After leaving The Broad, I crossed the street for:

• In These Times: Recent Acquisitions at MOCA

• Silverlake Hillside, 2025 • Hilary Pecis

• Dick Tracy Variation (empty speech), #1, 2015 • John Sparagana

• Abolish ICE • Andrea Bowers, 2018

• The Ogre's Wife, 2022 • Christina Forrer

• Secret Circle, 1990-1991 • Viola Frey

• Z.E.E.P. series, 1969-1970 • Sir Eduardo Paolozzi

• Only details from Numbers and Trees, Tanzania Series 1, Baobab Ogiek, 2024 by Charles Gaines because I couldn't capture the whole thing and it's too hard to describe, but it was elegant and unusual.

• Subway Tuna Tuesday

• Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf exterior and a Hazelnut Frappe

Five Minute Friday :: Brief

Dreams from Summer 2000
The days and the summer nights
Berries from the brambles and the vines
Yearning for a future still not yet
Recalling how to dream…

• Five Minute Friday :: Brief Linkup

Let's go with brief in the sense of short. A brief meeting. A brief scripture commentary. A quick conversation. Kate wrote about the passage of time—that's something all of us know related to both loss and anticipation.

What more can I say? I fully trusted it was a brief intermission between the life I'd known and a similar life that soon would come by way. If you'd asked me then as in my grandma's expression "way back when," how would I have defined brief? That's easy! I'll quote what I said to a friend who since has gone on to glory. After she expressed concern about my future and wondered how it might happen in the wake of a string of unanticipated events I replied, "I'm not worried at all. Before I turn around – no, before I blink – my life will be full again."

Wrong!

My header collage is Dreams from Summer 2000. Twenty-six years ago. Not a brief stretch of time in any human's life. Sometimes I ask myself what I'd tell someone else in a similar situation.

As I've told people in person and online, I go through most days with a combination of optimism, hope, and denial. A facebook friend observed there's a fine line between hope and denial. Ya think so? And though I keep observing no one can change what they don't acknowledge, I don't admit to much of any loss or pain for even a brief moment.

I'd tell someone else to get mad. Feel the pain. Let the anger hurt the way it's supposed to. Those were serious betrayals. Add up the months and the years and the decades. List all of the lost expectations. Yearn again for a future still not yet. Put yourself back then and start over again. Amen? Amen!

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Getty Center Gardens

Despite many recent visits to the Getty Center, I hadn't spent time in the gardens since Before Covid (BC). This past Tuesday that changed; here's some of the beauty.

Five Minute Friday :: Responsible

• Five Minute Friday :: Responsible Linkup

Somewhere I read, over-responsibility is neurosis; irresponsibility is character disorder. Most people can't avoid being some of both at one time or another.

I'll start by asking "Is neurosis still a concept?" Whether or not most contemporary clinicians use the word neurosis, most of us have an excellent idea of what it means. I'll admit I tend toward the over-responsible side, and I have a sneaking suspicion most women probably do. Only last week in our Approve FMF I admitted to being a people-pleaser—again, more women than not, I suspect. So why not make this yet another in my Life Stuff category? No, I don't think so. Not this time.

Let's look at responsible from the perspective of being responsive. Responding to the needs of others, especially those in our immediate circle. Responding to the needs of creation. On occasion being an (over)responsible steward of planet earth. I try to live as green and as minimally as my current living arrangement allows; I know several people who get very high marks for their level of creation care. I have one friend in particular whose stewardship of this planet is so extraordinary it's a case of "I have no words." I'm always in awe of the example she sets. And related to my opening statement, I'd say she occasionally gets excessive (over-responsible?) in some aspects of earth care.

Riffing on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's gospel, I designed the Salt, Leaven, LIght header illustration. As a creation lover and especially given my passion for cities and The City, I try to look around for situations than need a bit of seasoning in order to be appealing. A hint of yeast to grow into what they could be. A blaze of light to reveal goodness and possibility.

In what areas of life do you excel in being responsible? Is there one where you're overly so? How about a wonderfully balanced just right without going over or under? Do you have one? I wonder if I do!

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Five Minute Friday :: Approve

• Five Minute Friday :: Approve Linkup

This prompt fits a classic Pauline trope that directs us to the source of grace and the proper place to seek approval:

"Am I now seeking human approval or God's approval? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still pleasing people, I wouldn't be a servant of Christ." Galatians 1:10

Like many others, I can be quite a people pleaser. (And quite the iconoclast.) The reasons are complicated. Part of it is I've worked hard to achieve high levels of skill, and I don't want anyone to question my expertise, especially if they have no knowledge of that field of endeavor.

But doing something in public for the public like a piano performance, a design project, a Sunday sermon, are more distant and almost abstract than some other areas where a person seeks approval.

Consider when someone gives you a job or a task, whether or not it's part of your paid employment, whether or not it's for public consumption—and public approval. When someone tasks you, either you already have a relationship with them, or you may aspire to relate to them or their company. It could be a boss, a client (also a kind of boss because they'll be paying you if all turns out well), a job interviewer asking you to demonstrate your abilities in software X or solve sample problem Y. It could be a spouse or a sibling or another relative. In sum, any time you're doing anything that propels you into approval-seeking mode, it's not simply about you. It's about them, too. And my wanting approval is about a possible fracture in a current relationship, or maybe it's about a new relationship that won't happen if my performance isn't the best ever.

My scripture from Galatians directs us outside of and beyond all those humans whose approval we think we need. It sends us to the source of the gifts, to the Spirit that inspires our actions and our expertise. The Spirit that gathers the community and relates us to the people we believe are worth pleasing. The apostle Paul asks if we want "God's approval." And what does he tell us about pleasing people?

Think about that.

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