Calling All Virgens

Good Morning -

If you had to guess, based on the image that you see of the Virgen on the bed floating through the cosmos, anchored only by the moon, would you say that yesterday I

A) Participated in a local triathlon

B) Cleaned my house top to bottom while completing my 400-page memoir

C) Found myself fairly useless and napped for 4 hours in the middle of the day

Yes. C it is. I don't know what's gotten into me lately, but I have next to no energy a good bit of the time. I got up at a good time yesterday (6ish), worked on some things, read the NYTimes online, ate breakfast, blogged, and then was tired by 11:30. I thought a quick nap would do me good before I headed out to swim, so I laid down. An hour later, I was up briefly because I had to pee, but then fell back into a wicked hard sleep that lasted another 3 hours.

Useless is how I describe myself yesterday. I didn't get to the pool, I barely got a load of laundry washed and hung on the line - I spent most of the day in the land behind my eyelids. I know sometimes these days are important (one of the reasons I'm still not totally invested in parenthood at this point), but it still flicks and pokes my strong working class work ethic to nap a day away.

Once I let my working class work ethic rail for a bit, I settled it down with the understanding that, clearly, I needed the sleep, so it's better to take it than to deny my body what it is asking for (why it is asking for this is the question I would like answered). Sleep deprivation is no fun and the need ignored would just continue to build until my body took matters into its own hands.

Aside from laundry and dreaming, one other thing I was able to do yesterday was soak the Virgens off a batch of burned candles I've had sitting around. I got five more Virgens, which made me wonder how many I have altogether. A quick inventory resulted in the answer of 15 - including the three that are currently burning on my mantel.

This is no good at all. These Virgens won't even get me through July. I suddenly had a sense of the scope of the project I've undertaken. I felt more specifically what it means to burn 365 Virgen candles to get 365 Virgen images.

When I started this project a little over a month ago, I was partly motivated by the big bag of Virgens I had lying about, which seemed like an endless supply. Turns out, 40-some is nowhere near 365 and I'm in need of some Virgens.

This conundrum caused me to consider my motivations and get clear about which pieces of this project were negotiable and which were not. In its theory form, I burn the candles and then use the Virgen to make the tile, which is imbued with all the thoughts and intentions I directed at the candle as it was burning. It's a very small, tight, specifically personal experience.

Were any of those pieces negotiable? Could I soak the Virgens off the candles before I burned them? This would certainly help with time because those suckers can burn for a long, long time (I just spent 20 minutes in Google Land trying to find a page that said exactly how long they burned, but couldn't - it's a long time - a couple of weeks to be sure).

I'm not totally invested in this as a choice because I love to have the Virgen image on the candle while it burns and don't know if a naked candle would bring me the peace that a Virgen candle does - especially if I knew I created the nakedness in the name of finishing a project.

The only other choice, then, would be to solicit other Virgen burners - send out a call to all who may be burning these candles to put them aside for me, and see if there are those who don't currently burn who would like to join this project and start burning these candles.

I had to sit with this one for a bit because I was torn between liking the community aspect of it and wondering if the tiles would be impacted by a Virgen burned by hands not mine. Would I be stripping away an important self-reflective piece to this project if I didn't burn all the candles myself? Would I notice a difference in the feel of the Virgens burned elsewhere and those burned here? Would the solicited Virgens come with expectations of the burner to be represented in the tile or to keep the tile or...(yes, here we get a glimpse into my work to understand relationships)?

The only other option would be to have a meditative burn-off and take a few days to sit with a bunch of candles while they burned down - like a retreat of sorts. I'm reminded of a MFA project I saw as an undergrad in which the woman sat on the floor of the gallery surrounded by thousands of empty eggs (she poked a needle and drained all of the eggs) - the exact number of which was some giant symbolic representation of the number of ova she has. The whole meaning behind the project involved women and fertility and such.

For the piece, she sat on the floor and, one by one, rubbed paprika all over an egg until it was red. She was mumbling something - perhaps counting as she did this. As the project went on (a couple of days), the pile shifted to red eggs. I remember my sculpture teacher at the time (also an MFA student) was a friend of this woman and she told us how the woman was a zombied wreck for a few days after completing her project - I have to assume sitting and rubbing paprika on thousands of eggs would do that to a person.

So - similarly, I could buy a bunch of candles and sit meditatively with them until they burned. This would definitely keep them imbued with my intentions, but those intentions might result in my lunacy.

No - I feel like the best way to move forward with this is to solicit other Virgen burners. This is an image of the type of Virgen candles that produce the best Virgen images (some candles have an oval-shaped label and the glue used on those does not dissolve well). This type is found in most grocery stores and can be un or rose scented (pink wax for rose scented).

If you currently burn these candles or are interested in burning some and sending them to me to keep my supply of Virgens up, let me know. Certainly I could use the help and it will be a different aspect to add community to this project.

We'll see how it goes.