Musings+: escape

Stampin' Up Thick Whisper White card stock was used for the card base, the flowered layer is Stampin' Up Sheer Perfection Vellum, coloured on the reverse side with SU Summer Sun (retired) and Garden Green Markers. The Cornish Heritage Farms sentiment was stamped on the front with StazOn Tuxedo Black ink. The cage and bird stamps are from the retired SU set, Nature Walk.

This stamp set makes me think of Maya Angelou's 1969 autobiography, "I know Why the Caged Bird Sings." The title drew me then and still does. What does the author know, what is her answer? On first reading that title, I suspected that the reason wouldn't be that the bird sings for joy. Her poem, Caged Bird, gives the dark answer. The bird is a metaphor for the slave and for the freed slave struggling for basic rights. Freedom and rights are seldom gained without struggle and suffering.

The poem Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) also uses a caged bird as metaphor for the slaves of antebellum United States, and for their descendants who struggle for full recognition of their dignity as human beings. The poem contains the line, "I know why the caged bird sings, ah me". Dunbar was close to the experience of slavery; his parents had both been slaves in Kentucky, and he was born in the years when freed slaves and their children began the struggle to claim their place as full citizens.

These poems, different in style and voice, both express forcefully what those suffer who are treated as less than human. The images of cruelty and of longing for freedom strike to my heart and lead me to reflect on the dangers of treating any human life as inferior or without value. Human life, from the instant of conception to the moment of natural death, is priceless.

Have you ever felt like walking through the door of home or work and closing it on the responsibilities and people depending on you? I think we all feel like that at least once in our lives. We usually don’t give into those feelings. It’s not the feelings that count; it’s what we do about them.

I’ve learned to take a break, to talk to someone, to pray, when I feel overwhelmed. None of these actions are magic solutions, but they help me keep things in perspective. Despair comes when we keep our worries wrapped up inside of us. There, they grow out of proportion. Despair induces a kind of perverse pride, making one think that one’s problems are beyond solution. There’s no problem without a solution, however difficult the solution.

The young girl possibly thinking of running into the deep, dark , beckoning woods, is Paperbag Studios Windsong. The “Escape” stamp is from Heidi Swapp. The background stamp is Cornish Farms. The cardstock is SU Rich Razzleberry and Shimmer White, the ink is SU Rich Razzleberry. I stamped Windsong twice, cut out the girl from one image and pop dotted her on the first image with SU Dimensionals.

I used a stamp from one of my favourite SU sets, Haute Couture, for the ATCs, I’m not sure what the English title of the set is. The sentiment translates as “Just my style.” The cs is all scraps, so I'm not sure of their identity. The background on the second ATC was stamped with an SU small background stamp.