Katrina and beyond

I just returned from a conference in New Orleans. This is my first trip to New Orleans and it is hard to be there without remembering the cataclysmic images of hurricane Katrina. Not that the location of my hotel, the French Quarters, was  much affected being several feet above sea level. In the Big Easy, the divide between the one percent and the 99% is a lot starker and it was this 99% that was most ravaged by Katrina. Little of that is visible in the French Quarters, a tourist hotspot. Except, for the permanent exhibition called Living with Hurricanes: Katrina and beyond at the Louisiana State Museum. From the continuous looping video of 24-hours before Katrina made landfall- the gigantic waves, the blinding rain, the toppling roofs, to the chilling breath stopping digital simulation of the breaching of the levees as neighborhood after neighborhood submerged in flood waters and to the stories of those witnessed it, it is haunting.

So, I decided to dedicate this week's I am the Diva Zentangle Challenge #73 Bridgen to the spirit of New Orleans. In Bridgen, string is the basis of the tangle. I used a grid map of New Orleans as my string and connected the various parts of the map (or string) with WAVES, HURAKAN, River Rocks and FLEURI (fleur de lis) is New Orleans' logo) and Fescu.

Thanks for visiting.