Images:
June Leaf at the Grey Art Museum
Shooting from the Heart
1. Wire Sculpture
2. Painting
3. Portrait of June Leaf
From Memory
The mind, highly alert and intelligent, can get caught in moments.
At any given time.
Memory filled with familiarity when entering into a space
and seeing something, or hearing a song,
takes us quickly to a time before that happened.
Deeply embedded in our senses,
impulses of memory get triggered.
Some can be devastating and paralyze us
and some can be held on a moment.
Letting the memory bubble up and recognizing it for what it is/was.
A PTSD moment, PCC moment, a dreamy familiar deja vu moment.
A memory fond and filled with wonder.
It’s this embodied chemistry that gets uprooted
in our daily meditation practice in the form
of thoughts, images,
that gives us the opportunity
to remember and to hold on to or to let them go!
They are not us. They are in us.
They can come in the form of feelings, images,
sounds that can tap into our deep senses, that
allow us to uncover the meanings and let us evolve.
Familiarity filled my body when I traipsed into the
Grey Museum this week in Cooper Square
to see the June Leaf show.
I went see this show, as my parents talked about June Leaf throughout
my life. We had a small studio with its own bathroom connected to the
garage at our house in IL.
Random people stayed from time to time when I was wee little.
We had students, artists, Rabbis going through school
that needed a spot.
These memories come flooding in,
deeply embedded in our physiology.
Some more intense than others.
June’s metal sculptures were all so whimsical and light.
I recognized the image shown here of the people.
Bingo… a copy of this rested in our living room.
I sent a snap to my brother to verify and we chatted about
the people that stayed in our house and the studio.
It was the memory of my parents having small moments of time
with this lady that struck me.
And getting a glimpse of her work on the easel
through the screen door.
She was kind and quiet and would say I could come in…
This mysterious woman with the beautiful name, June Leaf.
11.02.2025 Deck Talk available upon request info@fifthfloormeditation.com