Dedicated

Haiku My Heart
June 29, 2012

Haiku My Heart is the creation of one of my friends here in Blogland. Rebecca pulls us all together to share each others company every Friday with this special feature. Check out more Haiku My Heart and consider participating yourself. You can find more and read the simple guidelines on her blog, recuerda mi corazon.

Bound up memories

Legacy of destiny

Catalogue of dreams

Here’s a story about friendships. The blog world is an interesting place. You meet many people and discuss and comment back and forth to each other about the subject matter we write and show photographs about.

So be it with many new found friends when I started participation in the original Shadow Shot Sunday which was head mastered by one named Tracy who resides in Australia, Brisbane, if I remember correctly.

From there, I found others and worked my way into Rebecca’s recuerda mi corazon blog, where this meme, Haiku My Heart started. I’ve been doing Haiku for over a year now. I like it and look forward to seeing the other weekly poets. It’s like waking up in the morning and knowing that today is the day that I’ll be meeting up with my pals over coffee.

It was on Shadow Shot Sunday that I met Paula. Paula has other blogsites. Molokai Girl and Molokai Girl Studio are just two of them. Feel free to go to the links to her sites that I have provided and look around.  She is known as Molokai Girl as her ancestry hails from Molokai, Hawaii, and from what I have seen, she is a wonderful photographer and artist. Paula is a very beautiful woman inside and out. She is an inspiration with her energy, artistic ability and creativeness. The effort she pours into her own life and community is incomparable.

In fact, I had the good fortune of meeting her, her husband and her son, face to face last year when I was in the Albuquerque, New Mexico area. We talked on and on over lunch about the blog scene, the others we know, either from the blogs or from first hand meetings and encounters.

Paula had made a beautiful cigar box shrine that she donated to an on line auction to raise money for Oaxaca Street children Grassroots, an organization that helps children in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Her newest project, as I understood it at the time, was to have a life size model of the same cigar box shrine and have an invitational photography session. Her original model was a doll holding a Dream Catcher. Here is a story about this particular project right from Paula's Molokai Girl Studio Blog.

A photograph of the photography art subject holding a Dream Catcher

Paula asked me if I could make a larger sized Dream Catcher for the life size model to hold. I was honored to do so and created one for the project. Money was mentioned and discussed a little, but I decided that I would give this Dream Catcher to Paula. I was so honored to be asked to submit a piece and be a part of an art project that she was going to be involved in. My payment already came in the form of being asked to provide a piece of the Native American influenced folk art that I make.

Inside the back cover

I sent her the Dream Catcher. The photography session took place. I was invited to the opening of the exhibit and planned on attending, ( I even bought new shoes), but that was last December when I fell to the heart episode that almost did me in and provided me with my handy dandy  Medtronic Pacemaker.

I never attended the art show opening, but Paula sent me a few photos of the subject holding the Dream Catcher that I made. I felt so proud. She even mentioned it on her blog in one of her posts of that time period.

The empty pages in the book. Beautiful hand made paper, embossed with prints of  buffalo, arrows and drawings of natural examples of gifts from the Sacred Earth Mother

Capturing honor

Saving wordsmith packages

Only friends do this 

We talked about her making me something in return and I was satisfied and left it at that. I know how these things go because I am the same way. They get completed when they get completed. I would wait and once in a while Paula would mention “the book” she was going to make for me. I had seen some of the books she made. I was going to get one, some day. I never worried about it and in fact, it wasn’t even on my mind when this package came in the mail.

I couldn’t imagine what it was as I opened it. Mrs. Spadoman stood by, wondering what I had received in the mail. I assured her I hadn’t bought anything on line for my motorcycle and wasn’t expecting anything.

When the package was opened and the contents revealed, it dawned on me that Paula had finished the book and sent it to me. I was amazed at the beauty of the book itself. The tight binding on the leather cover. The pages were paper, hand made from pulp. The spirit of the buffalo was evident with fur and symbols of the great animal, my spiritual namesake, as my Indian name is Mashkoday Biizhikiins, in Ojibway, or Tatanka Ptecila in Dakota. In English, the language of my own ancestors, I am Little Buffalo.

Click to enlarge to see and read how the passages were arranged

As I passed the book around the kitchen table to show it to my Grand children, my daughters and my wife, they opened the pages and started to read the small passages which seemed to be on every other page.

As they read them, out loud, I realized that the words were the words and excerpts from Haiku poetry or songs that I have written. Some were just sentences from the posts of my Round Circle blog. I started to cry.

I knew this was a very special gift. I received it, but it will be around for the future generations of the Spado family to have, a record of the patriarch’s words. My words, my thoughts. Someone was thoughtful enough to think that some of them were worth repeating on hand made paper pages of a beautiful hand bound volume.

I can’t say a big enough Thank You to Paula for this work of art of hers. I appreciate it greatly and will cherish it throughout the rest of my life.

This is a family heirloom that will be cherished in my home forever

Over the past month or so, I have received two other pieces from blogger friends. One that I won by random selection and another sent to me because I mentioned I liked the patterns of a series of paintings.

I will feature these in the coming weeks, complete with photographs. For now, as you have seen, I have scattered photos of the  buffalo book made by Paula Scott, the Molokai Girl. Photos are grand, but holding it in my hand, I can feel the positive energy that was used to put this together and the help it generates with healing of my soul.

Peace to Paula and all she holds dear, and to all