Neighborhood Bullies

The word “bullies” is so often associated with school yard toughs – the kind of kids who like to torment their younger, smaller, sometimes more defenseless counterparts, but for a lover of the Old West such as myself, bullies conjures up an entirely different image.

I had fun with this early painting, “Neighborhood Bullies”. And, who knows, maybe the next time you hear or read that word an entirely different image will come to mind.

Neighborhood Bullies
Gale F. Trapp, 2012

Remember to be kind

It’s a season for hustle and bustle, shopping and travel. The news is filled with stories of black Friday shopping horror, weather related travel delays and various atrocities around the globe, with only the occasional mention of acts of kindness from one stranger to another… I’m thinking of the individuals leaving large tips for wait staff, volunteers manning and collecting for food banks and toy drives, those that take the time to hold a door, or simply smile at someone.

Simple acts of kindness make all the difference. So, remember to be kind.

The Good Samaritan
Gale F. Trapp

The Good Samaritan

Game On

“The great spirit is our father, but the earth is our mother.

She nourishes us; that which we put into the ground she returns to us, and healing plants she gives us likewise.

If we are wounded, we go to our mother and seek to lay the wounded part against her, to be healed.

Animals too, do thus, they lay their wounds to the earth.

Game On
Gale F. Trapp, 2012

When we go hunting, it is not our arrow that kills the moose however powerful be the bow; it is nature that kills him. The arrow sticks in his hide; and, like all living things the moose goes to our mother to be healed. He seeks to lay his wound against the earth, and thus he drives the arrow farther in. Meanwhile I follow. He is out of sight, but I put my ear to a tree in the forest, and that brings me the sound, and I hear when the moose makes his next leap, and I follow.

The moose stops again for the paint of the arrow, and he rubs his side upon the earth and drives the arrow farther in. I follow always, listening now and then with my ear against a tree. Every time he stops to rub his side he drives the arrow father in, till at last when he is nearly exhausted and I come up with him, the arrow may be driven clean through his body… ”

– Bedagi, “Big Thunder” of the Wabanakis Nation