Polly Answers Your Questions (#3)

Polly Answers Your Questions (#3)
Polly Answers Your Questions Persistence Alone Wins the Prize (gouache) by Polly Castor

Can you recommend five essays from your blog (the first five that come to mind)?

Sure here are the links…

Pro Life and Pro Choice

Art Education and Mental Health

How to Foster Civility

For Improved Relationships, Shine

Thoughts About Cross Pollination of Ideas and Butterfly Chasing

What is your definition of God?

I think Mary Baker Eddy’s definition of God is brilliant and has made a huge, positive difference in my life:  “God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love.”  (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures p. 465)

What were some pivotal experiences you had early on that influenced you a lot?

  • Winning a national poetry award in 10th grade solidified poetry as a life long outlet. I still wear the ring on my right hand that I bought with some of that prize money.
  • My mother was underutilized as a stay-at-home parent, which had the effect of me always working, and striving to have equality in my marriage.
  • I spent a lot of time looking at Kandinsky’s art in my very early, formative years, and my mother (a fine artist) used to admonish me repeatedly that “copying is not art.” Both were instrumental in making me into an abstract artist.
  • Travel: I visited all the national parks in the contiguous 48 states (and went to Scandinavia) before I was 18. I spent a lot of time in nature, hiking, camping, swimming, bike riding, and painting outside. I love all that still.
  • I needed to overcome some seriously overt sexism early on in order pursue math (I was shut out of the higher track in 7th grade because it was only for boys: we fought it and won) and in engineering school (I was one of three girls in a program of 5,000, and they clearly did not want us there).
  • Being the youngest in a family of mostly women: my dad and six females: my mom, my two older sisters, my dad’s mom, my mom’s sister, and me. They wished I was a boy. I was not understood much; I was literally underfoot in a lot of preoccupied bustle. This galvanized me as independent, rebellious, and not caring much what other people thought.
  • I’ve collected wisdom quotes for as long as I can remember; it is deeply authentic for me. As a very young child, I talked to the sun in the sky like it was God, and I used to like to “perch” in the forest on rocks, sitting still and quietly for lengthy periods of time (basically I was meditating). I was brought up in an atheistic home, while my natural tendency was always to reach for something beyond the human.
  • I couldn’t read until very late, but was light years ahead in math. Being an asynchronous learner helped me carve my own path, as well as be compassionate to others with differences. It also makes me really appreciate reading and not take it for granted.

Please send me your questions for me to answer next month!

Facing Down the Wind (acrylic) by Polly Castor
I work to amplify good wherever I find it. I love color, texture, beauty, great ideas, nature, metaphor, deliciousness, genuine spirituality, and exploring new territory. I encourage authenticity, nurture creativity, champion sustainability, promote peace, and hope to foster a new renaissance where we all are free to be our most fulfilled, multifaceted, and terrific selves. Read more here.

3 Comments

  1. Shelley Sechrist 10 months ago

    Wow! I really love the story of your upbringing. As a young girl with two brothers growing up in a fairly liberal CS home, I still felt a lot of anger about the unfair treatment of girls/women. It’s clear you have done a lot more to overcome it than I have because I still feel this anger greatly, especially with what is going on with the Republican party right now.
    Thank you for your writings and art.

  2. Joseph D Herring 10 months ago

    Years ago , I was particularly interested in Paul Tillich. Tillich liked to think of God as ” ground of being.” InTillich’s tradition, the Anglican theologian John Macquarrie loved to say that God is not the Supreme Being, but Letting Be.
    Letting Be is primordial, expressive, and unitive. Scripture hints at these three: ” My thoughts are not your thoughts “,
    ” The heavens are telling the glory of God ” and ” How is it that we hear- each in his own native language… ?

  3. Sue+Krevitt 10 months ago

    I appreciate … Castor-candor.

    It will be a while yet until I Get, though,
    how you seem to have more hours in your day than most of us!

    Beyond impressed,
    A Fan

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