In the late summer of 2002, I recorded my last album of songs in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Ankie Keultjes produced, CRS/Rounder Europe paid for the production and manufacture, and I was able to work with two of my fave musicians, Eric van der Lest and Menno Romers. Much of this was thanks to Ankie (who helped produce Ephemera) and Ad van Meurs with whom I stayed and performed while in Holland during each of my European tours.

By the time I finished recording The Glory, I was out of money, energy, tricks, and all of the other things it takes to support and sustain a career as a singer songwriter uninvolved with the “star maker machinery behind the popular song.” It’s a shame because without any promotion or further touring, The Glory was lost and I really love many of the songs we recorded.

Until I unwrapped a CD copy just now, I'd completely forgotten that I included this quote in the liner notes:

I've had this post planned for a while but only this morning did I realize that today is the 52nd anniversary of the first moon walk. I love synchronicity!

This coming Friday, July 23rd, we’ll be under a Full Moon at 10.37 p.m. EDT. It’s not a supermoon or any sort of eclipse this time but it will look full for a few nights and you can watch Jupiter and Saturn chase the moon.

I've kept my eye on the moon since high school, and kept the full and new moons on my calendar for fifteen years, but I started paying attention daily the year I lived on a remote strip of beach in South Carolina. It was so dark and open there that I could walk to the shoreline at night, lay back on the sand and see the Milky Way and more stars than I could comprehend. Because I planned my days around long beach walks, checked the tide app on my phone every night. When the tide was high, there was no beach for walking.

Mostly, when I mention to…pretty much anyone, “Oh, it’s a full moon tonight,” they are not aware or need reminding or don’t see the relevance. But it is relevant. It’s important to pay attention to the moon.

All you have to get is the way that the moon affects the tides and the fact that humans along with almost all life on earth are primarily made of or critically reliant on water. So, if the moon affects the tides, it most certainly affects us and every other living thing on this pretty blue planet, individually, socially, culturally, and commercially.

When I was working for the MIT Office of the President, there was an actual file in a filing cabinet, just inside the inner office door labeled “Full Moon File” into which fell paper documenting any and all unusual campus happenings on or around a full moon.

Which reminds me to mention that the word lunatic is defined as someone who is "affected with periodic insanity dependent on the changes of the moon.” The word can be traced to the 13th century and is rooted in the Latin, lunaticus, literally “moon struck”, and the French, lunatique,  "insane". It helps to be compassionate with yourself and others while keep your own head in check over the day or two surrounding the full moon.

Remember the Ever Given? That ship that ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal a few months ago? (Yes. That was four months ago, not last year.) The full moon freed that ship and, as a result, reopened the passage. 

I couldn’t help but note that the beachfront, Surfisde condo collapsed just 13 hours before the apex of the last full moon on June 24th.

Our bodies swell with the waxing of the moon and contract with the waning. This is probably true for women more so than men. When all synced up, women—individually and often as a group—menstruate in coordination with the full moon.

Following the moon is a way of keeping time. Native Americans looked to the sky to plan their lives. Each tribe created its own conventions for particular locations and needs.

As a way of tracking personal time, the full and new moons gives us opportunities for beginnings and endings, to set intentions and mark completions of projects and other involvements. If you have any experience with creating just about anything then you know that some ideas are realized and some are not. You can launch fresh desires with the new moon and close whatever loses energy or doesn’t eventually manifest with the full moon. That’s twelve or thirteen potential new beginnings in one year! I love this notion and take full advantage of it.

One seemingly paradoxical perk of paying attention to the phases of the moon is that monitoring what is happening in the sky helps to keep us grounded on earth. Looking at the visually changing moon occasionally will remind us that we’re on a spinning planet, rotating around a star while hurtling through space. It’s kind of thrilling and not a bad idea to remember, if not daily, then at least every once in a while.

Finally, the moon is beautiful, even in its seeming absence. At the new moon, we can more easily see the other planets in our system and the stars beyond. Or what once were stars.

Living by the moon enriches our human experience and reminds us that we are both mere and magnificent beings on earth. Just for a little while.




©2021 Suzanne McDermott

When I was 26 years old and living in Santa Monica, a friend invited me to a barbecue in Bel Air. I dressed for a barbecue, in Kelly green painters pants, a shell pink cotton crew neck, and Jack Purcell sneakers. I remember my outfit so vividly because the party I actually walked into was jammed with a well-heeled international crowd dressed in Valentino, Albert Nippon, Hermes ties and custom tailored suits. Marty Ransohoff was hosting the opening night party in his home for the first American Film Market. It was a party I’d remember all my life.

I settled into one of the sofas so as to not feel quite so conspicuous and struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to me, an older, entertainment lawyer. It turned out that he had known my father slightly as an upperclassman at University of Pennsylvania Law School. My father had died several years earlier at the age of 73. It was the only time I ever met anyone outside of the family who had known my father as a young man. He told me, "Your father had a huge mind."

Later in the evening, our host, Marty noticed me looking at one of the paintings on his walls, learned that I was a painter and set things in motion for my first ever painting commission of his two step-children.

On the heels of that encounter, a Dutch producer chatted me up. When he learned that I was an artist and musician, he took out one of his business cards, knelt down beside me, wrote a date, time and place on the back, told me that my name would be at the door and that, no matter what, I must attend the screening of a film called "Charlotte". I did.

The screening was at the Directors Guild and there were only a handful of people in the audience. After the screening, the producer invited me to dinner with the director and a few others. I gave one of the group a lift to the restaurant in my messy VW Bug. As we approached my car, he said, "I used to have one of these!" I later learned that he was one of the top Dutch bankers at the time and the rest of the group had a good laugh when they saw him climbing out of the passenger seat in front of the restaurant.

The producer sat me next to the director, Frans Weisz, with whom I began a long friendship. Before he left Los Angeles, Frans gave me a copy of the newly published, very heavy Viking book, Charlotte: Life or Theater?

It is an understatement to say that, at 26, I identified with the subject of the film and the book. Over and over again, through the years, I showed friends and acquaintances the book and told them the story of Charlotte and how, in 1975, Frans and Judith Herzberg set out to gather background information in order to make a film about her.

In the process, they interviewed Charlotte's father at the very end of his life, her step-mother, an associate who possessed papers in which he described Charlotte, the wife of the doctor to whom Charlotte entrusted her work, and others who had known her. They also discovered additional paintings that had been treasured privately over the years. They walked around the grounds of the Villa where Charlotte spent her final years.

To a large degree, it is because of the dedication of Frans Weisz and Judith Herzberg that attention was brought to Charlotte Salomon and her work at all.

It was another dozen years before Charlotte’s story and work started entering the mainstream. Then, only in the framework of Holocaust studies. Now, after decades of the development of academic art history programs, and a few generations of art history scholars, you can easily read about her story here.

In 1996, on my first tour of Europe as a singer songwriter, I visited the Joods Historische Museum in Amsterdam, where I saw some of Charlotte’s original gouaches. Later that fall, I spent about two weeks making small watercolors along the Côte d'Azur, including a couple of days in Villefranche-sur-mer, where Charlotte spent the last years of her life. Standing on these steps to the sea, I was not very far at all from where she created Life? or Theater?

When I eventually started teaching long courses in drawing and watercolor with excursions into art history, I always tried to include Charlotte Salomon and her work.  One day, almost forty years after that screening at the Directors Guild, a student said that she’d just read an article on Charlotte Salomon in The New Yorker. I went home and read it, too. After all those years, I understood Charlotte in a new light which, in retrospect, made perfect sense.

I completely missed the documentary Frans made in 2012, Life? or Theater? and would still very much like to see that with English subtitles but it's more or less impossible to watch in the US. Having published that statement, my dear friend, Mineke sent me a link to the original Dutch version of the doc which you may watch here. Still, that is not yet the end of Charlotte's story!

In a nutshell, this is my personal history with Charlotte Salomon as she and her work were revealed to me and the world.

Before closing, I recommend an excellent book of biographical fiction based on Charlotte's life by David Foenkinos called, what else?, Charlotte. I could not understand how anyone might pull such a thing off without pictures but when I started reading the book, I could not put it down. With all that I have learned, I think it's a pretty great book.

Life? or Theater? Good question. What will the next act bring?

One thing that fascinates me about studying the history, the lives and work of artists (of all forms of art), is not only how individual creative expression evolves over a lifetime, but also how attention to and perception of artists and their work changes, sometimes dramatically, over the years.

I am interested in how artists will evolve now. Now, that the state of the earth and culture and society are shifting so dramatically. It’s a nice to imagine that we can “go back to normal”, but I think that ship has sailed. Normal, at least in the last forty years or so has been sort of insane anyway, in my opinion. Longer, but definitely since the start of 1981.

How creatives will evolve now is what I am after in the Creative Wayfinding course I am about to open. I’m really not interested in people making more stuff (though we'll probably make some stuff). I’m wondering if we can transform creative experience and expression into a different sort of paradigm. If this piques your interest, get in touch. I’ll be opening the course to a small group soon.



©2021 Suzanne McDermott

A couple of weeks ago, I was re-watching Ira Glass's oft quoted talk on storytelling. I used to ask my drawing and watercolor students to watch the third segment of the talk because it's so relevant for beginners at any new creative practice.

Essentially, you have to bite the bullet about what the thing you're practicing looks like and how you want it to look (or sound or read). You must keep practicing until your skill and understanding meet up with your aesthetic sensibilities. The active instruction is that "You have to fight your way through that."

But as I was listening recently, I was struck by the subsequent instructions. "You will be fierce. You will be a warrior."

That, I thought, is what we carry with us after years of practice. After conquering an acceptable level of ability, agility, in any expressive form. This practicing and conquering actually makes us warriors in many other areas of our lives. We carry our learned and earned warriorship with us.

Each creative artist has a unique narrative of their own individual process and procedure. But regardless of the story and the product, it's the process of creative warriorship that propels us along our soul's journey.

My personal life has trained me as a warrior but that is a story worthy of a large advance.

I worked through Shambhala Training in Boston and in Vermont, at Karme Chöling, in the early 1990's, with small workshop groups led by Pema Chödrön. That was a particular and broadly applicable form of overt Warrior Training.

With that warrior training in mind, as I considered all of my creative projects over the years, images from the Suit of Swords in the Pamela Coleman Smith deck kept coming to the forefront of my mind like they were plastered on my forehead.

So, I reviewed that entire suit of swords in terms of the creative process. As a result, I am developing a course with that framework on the Tarot. This will be preceded by my upcoming course on Creative Wayfinding.

Just look at this Ace of Swords.

Here is the Hand of God tranformed into the Tarot from a long history of appearances in sculpture and painting. This is Divine Intervention, offering a gift. Any of the Aces represents a Divine Gift. But here, the hand of god is offering the gift of the sword. The Swords represent thought or reason, the intellect. But in light of the frame of the creative process, this hand presents the Divinely Inspired Idea which sparks most any creative project.

Any artist who is not a complete megalomaniac, will confess that their original idea or inspiration for any project, product, process or performance was not of their personal, mundane design. Somewhere, at the beginning of the process, shone through, If only for one brief second, this Hand of God, offering that stroke of a bright idea.

As I develop my course on Tarot as a guide through the Creative Process, I am offering a 12-week course on Creative Wayfinding.  We'll have total accountability and companionship through the process with weekly meetings of like minded souls. If you would like to learn more, click here.

Thanks, as always, for reading.


©2021 Suzanne McDermott (All Rights Reserved)