Lotus is Coming!

Each year the mid-sized midwestern city where I live is enriched for a few magical days, thanks to the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival. Musicians come from all over the world to perform in tents, churches, and the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, a renovated movie house. Our local food co-op, Bloomingfoods, sells food and drink, and the streets pulse with energy and rhythms from around the globe.

The Lotus Festival is only possible because of hundreds of volunteers. A small dedicated staff coordinates everything, working tirelessly to acquire passports for artists, raise funds, secure venues, publicize the event, and make it all remarkable. When the festival is over, they even remember to send out thank you cards.

Here's a little something I made to sit on my desk, to help me recall how lucky I am to have this event in my life. It's part of my effort to transform objects (and therefore the world) via images and Mod-Podge. (A modest aspiration, but someone has to do it.)

First I found a wonderful glass heart at Goodwill for $1.99. (I'm collecting those now, for future projects: the heart is a special genre of glassware, it appears.)

I glued to the bottom (face up) the note of thanks I once received from Lotus Fest assistant director LuAnne Holladay, a writer who also makes beautiful notecards and folding books.

I finished the bottom with a piece of wool felt, in the same blue as the lotus on the card. Voila. If I could say that in sixty languages, I would!

On Thursday night, while much of the world watches Sarah Palin and Joe Biden fight it out in the VP debate, I'll be at a Lotus concert, hearing music by Finnish and Norwegian fiddlers in Frigg.

Named for the Norse goddess who is the patron of marriage, motherhood, love and fertility, Frigg will thrill us with the message that the cosmos – in spite of everything – is big and generous, feisty, fertile and good.

They have a new CD called Economy Class: perfect for today's climate. Buy it!