I make a collage and set it up on the bookstand in my “serenity room,” (named for my aim within it). The collage waits there for me to see and ponder every time I glance up.
“Climb,” it has come to say to me. “Upward.” “Movement.” “Rise.” And soon, “Journey.”
All those meanings emerged in its making…
So I ponder its creation:
I started with the stairway, cut from a magazine for the beauty of its lines, and for the “painted” quality the stairwell’s wall gives the photo (something like poetry within prose)—but maybe for more reasons besides.
I used torn strips from pictures of shirts in a Duluth Trading catalog—because lights and darks undulate in the folds of cloth. (Sorry I didn’t take photos of this step.) I overlaid these strips with tissue paper shreds to subdue them, placing all in vertical to contrast with the repeated horizontal of all those lovely red-carpeted steps.
Now I had a background. But what to put on it?
Time to sort through papers on my scrapbooking shelves…
I found a book of old old-fashioned portraits, with lots of roses sprinkling pages. I love red roses, and these seemed to capture my heart, so I cut some out. The ones inside the book’s covers loomed too large for scale; so I hacked up the front!
Here and there, while leafing through the book, I passed a few watch faces, which I mostly ignored at first. Timepieces seemed redundant because I’d pictured clock faces before on my blog.
But I kept thinking about them. So I searched through again, found three, cut them out, and placed them “at random.”
I needed one more, I decided, but did the illustration book have another? Searching, I found just one, hiding under double-folded pages—and heart shaped!
“Perfect!” said my intuition, and I extracted it, too. It would be the focal point watch.
After all that went into place, a blank space remained in the curve made by the stair. Robbing roses from other places didn’t work, left areas too blank elsewhere. What to use?
I’d brought to the work table a couple snips of deep red wired ribbon. I started playing with them. Eventually one of them became a sort-of rose shape, opening out toward the watches and roses. The other snips made wind-blown banners.
Done. But what did it “mean”?
Husband entered at one point and surveyed it.
“Why all the clocks?” he asked, “And all different times?”
How could I answer when I didn’t know? I only knew I’d chosen them and that it was somehow important that they all showed different times.
Did the idea of journey come from Friday’s five-minute prompt? Probably. But it caused me to think more about life truly as a journey, from here to there, and hopefully upward, even though that involves a long-term climb.
Did the watch faces “call out” because the “time to turn the clocks back” loomed just ahead? Probably, at least partly, but they also caused me to think about life within the constraints of swiftly passing time as the journey moves forward.
Why the roses, and why red, when my book source contained many other hues? Just because I like them best, I supposed! But beyond that, I know that red roses symbolize love, and I think in the depth of my mind or heart was the concept of True Love, which would be Christ’s, showered over our hours and travels.
Beyond all that, it’s your guess as much as mine.
What does this collage seem to signify to you?
I assemble the pies: the pumpkin whirred in the blender, the apples with the crumb top, or sometimes with the dough “lid” (as husband calls the top crust. (He once made a pumpkin pie himself–mistakenly “with a lid”!)
