There it is, getting all packed up.

And here it is at the opening at Allied Arts in Bellingham.

It was the middle of the night so I thought it was a dream, but when I went to print out a letter I'd written to Mom, it turned out not to have been a dream. The cats, it seems, had a violent disagreement (or perhaps it was fun?) on top of the printer. Result: ten sheets of paper, toast. One printer, also toast. There are a few little plastic pieces that don't seem to go anywhere, and the paper feeder is detached and no longer snicks into place. 

Well, people used to write letters by hand, didn't they? The trouble is, Mom has dementia and doesn't do well with my handwriting. I like to send her photos because as an artist, she is always interested, while text sometimes bypasses her consciousness altogether. There was only an hour until I had to go to the Post Office, though. I'm not a very sudden artist. 

Calligraphy! I'd calligraph something for her. Okay. I have some calligraphy projects that she did back in her heyday, and they are all rather dark German poems. Best not to revive them. Rumi, though. He's got the flavor of what Mom used to like, but he's upbeat as well.

I've been paging through More Than Fine Writing about Irene Wellington, a British calligrapher. She did a series of "panels for the staff-room at Edinburgh College of Art for firewatchers during the war" in 1943. I was struck by a fragment labeled "MS of Benedictbeuern," and looked it up. 

The Benedicktbeueren is an ancient Bavarian monastary, famous for  a collection of Medieval drinking songs, the Carmina Burana, which were discovered in it in 1803. Carl Orff set some to music. I looked up the poem O Fortuna, and found it pretty much as Carl Orff says. Then I suddenly woke up! Rabbit hole alert! Back to copying Irene Wellington! I did a rough draft and a second draft, which is probably the final draft.

Job is an amazing chapter in the Bible. I heartily recommend it. It's about power, and about despair, and about poetry. Plus, God gets pretty sarcastic in it. 

To do this calligraphy project, I bought a Latin Bible. Imagine my surprise when I found that, even with my very primitive Latin, it seems that the several English Bibles I have translate several of the passages differently than what I'm sure is right there in the Latin. It's not theologically important, but still.