I still haven’t done #14-16, but Acey’s collage challenge prompt #17 was too good to wait for:

What could be more literal and mundane than the alphabet? And what could be more central to my life than reading and writing?

And then, how best to exalt it? Would hymns of praise do?

So first a story of my young mother self, home with a newborn who was averse to the 1980s-conventional-wisdom that babies should sleep on their tummies (right?) … daughter Meg was having none of it. So I walked her, for literal miles, singing.

What evolved was my own version of the ABC song, sung backward … over and over and over.

And so it has been, with each successive grandchild, my go-to mama-rock (now nana-rock) anthem.

Coming back to now, I thought of prayer flags … of synesthetes …

wondering how I might meld words and music and color and imagery into a collage that would lead to the sense of stillness I experience when a child finally embraces sleep while in my arms …

In so doing I embraced another aspect of self … intense focus bordering on obsession … further highlighted by photographing the resulting collage with four levels of lightbox intensity, ranging from lowest to highest …

And finally, looking at the images right now and realizing, “I actually perched the letters on the limbs like birds, rather than hanging them off the limbs like flags. Oh well … ha!”