LIBATIONS by LENY MENDOZA STROBEL

LIBATIONS

By Leny Mendoza Strobel

(October 2020)

Size: 3” x 3”

Meritage Press’ Minitage Editions is pleased to release LIBATIONS by Leny Mendoza Strobel. We present Leny’s thoughts on her miniature book, followed by images of its pages (click on images to enlarge):

 

I call it "Libations" because that's the word that came to me. A libation is usually a liquid (coffee, water, liquor) offered to the Earth to give thanks to the Ancestors and deities on the other side of the veil for they keep this side of the veil alive and well. Then I also started to think: what if I make an offering of myself as a libation? What do I create and offer? The doodles became meditations on these questions.

 

Each doodle is accompanied by a word that floated in my awareness as the lines and ink dots formed shapes evoking something that felt wondrous, curious, mysterious, mystical, whimsical, empty...

 

Leny had created LIBATIONS after receiving a blank journal she was asked to fill and return to the publisher. She would come to observe, "I didn't want to give the book back. But letting go is part of the answer to the whole idea of Libation."

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Leny Mendoza Strobel is Founder of the Center for Babaylan Studies, Author of Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans and Editor of Babaylan: Filipinos and the Call of the Indigenous. More information is available at her website.