I’ve learned I have some technical difficulties with comments here. I tried to fix the settings, but not all posts seem to allow comments without registering and logging in. No wonder I never seem to get comments any more! If you are participating in the Bloggy Bloggy swap, and the comments don’t work, please send your comments by private message on Swap-bot.
The last painting had a water theme. This one ended up feeling like what an experience in a desert would be if one were on very hallucinatory drugs.
Playing with dot painting lately.
Two of the last three paintings have been done on 10″ x 10″ canvas. Very different energies. One painting started one way and took an entirely different direction. The other unveiled itself entirely at the beginning. The third painting is tiny, and it too was conceived whole. All are available for purchase.
My last post in May focused on a medical issue. That abated, and I was again aware that it is possible to make much ado about nothing.
School ended, camping began, summer camps and swim lessons happened. And now we are two weeks away from the new school year.
In an effort to extricate myself from the tentacles of Facebook, before our recent camping trip I decided to limit my use of it to one hour daily after Bean is in bed. Then we went off the grid for almost three weeks. I plan to come here and plunk out thoughts. Maybe share some photos from camping and of my artwork (if I make any).
I feel like the last post was heavy, and so I’m lightening it up a bit here. My darling girl drew this. I enjoy the illustration, and I especially love the simplicity and quirkiness of the story.
Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs — anybody can have that — I mean in truth. That’s what I write. What it really is like. I’m just telling a very simple story.
—Maya Angelou
I have reached an ambivalent state in my weight loss process. I am so accustomed to 16 years of heaviness. It’s interesting to note that I didn’t gain all this weight until I met Hub and life improved in many ways — materially and psychologically. Until this morning I haven’t understood what happens, why I give up and regain.
It’s this: if I follow this discipline, lose weight, become strong, healthy, active, I connect with Life so big and powerful coming through me that scares me. I have historically protected myself from the heartbreak of loss by making my life harder and smaller. And maybe this is what’s going on. Being overweight reduces my life, so that when I someday get ill and die, I won’t be as heartbroken to go. AND… all this weight is protection to “balance out” how my life has improved. Since meeting Hub, life became so much richer, so I’ve protected myself from fear of loss (what if it all goes away?) by gaining weight. Yes, it’s illogical, and it’s what is true for me.
Early in life, my father had the power to take away what I wanted. As an adult on my own, struggling with underemployment, circumstances had the power to take away what I wanted. I learned to protect myself. And, in spite of the impulse to protect myself, I also forged ahead with goals. I experienced hardships, I persevered, and life has generally improved for me in the past 20 years. But that pattern remains. I notice it regarding intimacy in my marriage (avoid), in how I manage friendships (retreat and end them when I feel vulnerable or dynamics change), career (avoid positions of risk and responsibility), and this morning, realizing how it affects my health.
Earlier this year, my husband and daughter joined a program sponsored by the YMCA, called Adventure Guides. It’s a father-child activity. In this case, it’s fathers and daughters. They have meetings, do crafts, play games, and go camping.
Right now, for the first time in eight years, I am at home — alone. For two nights! I’ve been away for a couple nights before, and that’s great and all… but being able to stay home uninterrupted for 48 hours is a luxury. So, what am I doing with this time? Creating. More specifically, I’m playing with acrylic paint and various techniques. It’s bliss.
Once there was a smiling winking pumpkin in a pumpkin patch. She was eager to go home with a child. All summer she’d heard stories about her ancestors and the festival called Halloween. She was so curious! As she sat in the patch, she noticed kids passed right by her, always choosing another orange globe. She began to wonder what was wrong with her, and she asked the question aloud, “Why don’t I get chosen?”
A nearby pumpkin replied in a haughty tone, “You aren’t perfectly ROUND enough to be chosen. People only like round pumpkins.” The little pumpkin thought, “Well, that’s not true. All shapes of pumpkins get chosen. Besides, I feel my shape is just right for me.” She asked another neighbor, who replied, “Well, you aren’t chosen because you’re too small. Nobody wants a puny pumpkin. They want enormous globes.” And the little pumpkin thought, “That doesn’t feel right. I feel I’m just the right size for me.” Just then another pumpkin piped up, “You aren’t chosen because you already have a face. Kids want pumpkins they can carve their own faces onto.”
The little pumpkin didn’t know this. She sighed and wished aloud that she didn’t have a face so she could be chosen. Just then a little fairy appeared. He announced he was the Pumpkin Fairy, and she explained what she wanted. “But if you don’t have your face, you won’t be you anymore!” But the little pumpkin wanted so badly to be chosen that the fairy came up with an idea. He cast a spell on the pumpkin to hide her face, but when she was chosen, her natural face would return when she was carved.
The next day, the little pumpkin felt herself lift and a sensation of flying. She could hear a girl’s voice: “This is the one!” The little pumpkin rode home in the back of the car with others. She felt herself move through the air again and sit on a countertop. Mother picked up the little pumpkin and said, “”I’ll use this one to make pie.” She jammed a knife into the little pumpkin, who thought, “Oh no! I’ll never get to have a face again or see Halloween!” Just then the girl came in saying, “Not that one, Mom! Here is the pumpkin for pie,” handing her another small one. “What difference does it make?” asked Mom. The girl said, “I picked the one I want and I want the one I picked.”
So Mom handed the little pumpkin to her, and the girl sat down to carve. She wondered what type of face to make. The pumpkin sat, hopeful, and thought about how she had a smiling winking face before. The little girl saw a vision in her imagination and began to carve. Then the little pumpkin’s smiling winking face was back! That night, the girl put some candles in the pumpkin and put her on the porch. The little smiling winking pumpkin glowed happily all night as kids came trick-or-treating. She had the time of her life!
I’ve been playing with paint the last few days. Here are the results. I do love the way I feel when painting, how place and time disappear.
Has it been a month since I last posted?
I’m getting ready for Halloween these days. Bean wants to go as a wolf. I’ve decided to be a national park ranger. Did you know that you cannot purchase the badge (or the hat) unless you can prove you are an employee? So I’ve made my own. Not an exact replica, but pretty respectable!
Sometimes when you’re eight, and you’re worried about people you love dying, and you feel small and vulnerable, and you’re congested and tired and not quite SICK sick but not feeling great, you start Monday saying, “I’m not ready for school! I can’t face it.” And sometimes Mommy listens to her intuition, and instead of worrying that she’ll set a bad example by saying yes to a day off, she decides instead to give her daughter a day of her full presence. To fill her bucket with cuddles on demand, silly hand games, book reading, exploring a tree in the front yard, and whatever she wants for dinner. And at the end of the day, when the girl turns out to have a low-grade fever, the mom feels vindicated for having followed her wisdom.
I’ve been doing the bare minimum for the household recently. And I feel like I’ve checked-out in the mothering department a bit too. Escaping into good novels and such. It’s the doldrums of summer. I spent today going through my cookbook, sorting herbs and spices, and taking inventory of the pantry. This way I can get my mojo back when school starts next week.
“Planning complex, beautiful meals and investing one’s heart and time in their preparation is the opposite of self-indulgence. Kitchen-based family gatherings are process-oriented, cooperative, and in the best of worlds, nourishing and soulful. A lot of calories get used up before anyone sits down to consume. But more importantly, a lot of talk happens first, news exchanged, secrets revealed across generations, paths cleared with a touch on the arm. I have given and received some of my life’s most important hugs with those big oven-mitt potholders on both hands.”
— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
I sit on the chair with the cat, Smokey, a soft gray comma curved against my leg. I notice cool air skimming my bare toes. I feel sleepy, hypnotized by the steady march of the wall clock’s second hand. What should I write? What does the world want to hear?
I could be, should be, doing chores: vacuuming, laundry, culling unnecessary plastic objects from the closets.
To an observer, I’m doing nothing. Yet I feel so full, like the Mississippi river, fluctuating underneath with powerful currents of possibility.
In the past few months I’ve been following the still, small voice within. It’s as though I am knitting a complex lace shawl with many colors. I knit the pattern for a few repeats, and then I pause until the next part of the pattern becomes clear and knit that. When I look back, I see the design more clearly. The question is which color thread to pick up next, and how to weave it into my life.
“Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you’d think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.”
–Lewis Thomas
I haven’t participated since 2006, but I decided to get re-acquainted with the site Swap-bot. One of the swaps I joined is to make nine Artist Trading Cards, each focused on one color. Here it is before I pop it into the mail. It felt so good to make. If I just carve out a little time to create, I’m a much more content person.
The ‘pure’ red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist. Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters’ caps and a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we would have no feeling toward red and its relations…
–Robert Motherwell
Red protects itself. No colour is as territorial. It stakes a claim, is on the alert against the spectrum.
–Derek Jarman
A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.
–Henri Matisse
Long ago in my twenties, I lived a struggling, claustrophobic life. I lived paycheck to paycheck; depressed, angry, lonely, and unconvinced of my right to exist. Through my hard work and perseverance, I changed myself and my life. (This was pre-Austin, pre-Hub.) But I have a secret. This accomplishment arose from decade-long, intimate journaling relationship with a Navajo man serving seven consecutive life sentences for rape in the Arizona penitentiary.
I’ll let that sink in.
Yes, I credit a man — a very broken man — who provided me with a safe heart-place to express all my thoughts, fears, and dreams. He loved me and gave companionship and encouragement. I met myself — and him — through our words. I wrapped my head around his story, his despicable crimes, and found something good in him regardless. Something that helped me. And for awhile, I helped him.
For ten years we wrote; at one point I wrote him letters daily — by hand, single-spaced and double-sided, sometimes 30 pages. We no longer have contact. I broke off the relationship twice, the second time permanently and in a rather brutal way, in 1999. By severing the relationship, I made room for the path to open, and I met my husband not long after. (And that relationship also changed everything.) But this part of my journey wants to be told.
So I’ve begun.
These are excerpts from a powerful essay about domestic abuse.
How many times did I find myself on his bathroom floor cowering beneath him, feeling the hot spit land on me as he screamed? Stop crying like a baby. You’re crazy. No one else would put up with you. …
How many times did I crawl into that bed, rather than into a cab, and wake up with his arms around me, telling me that I brought it out in him? He wasn’t like this. I made him like this. I needed to change the way I approached him about these things. Be less accusatory. If I just softened my approach, it would allow him to react differently. How many times did I adjust my approach before I realized the only way to avoid the abuse was not to bring it up at all? But he never hit me. …
How could I explain to someone that I believed it was partly my fault, even though I was embarrassed to hear those beaten woman’s words spoken from my lips. No one really understood. No one knew him like I did. It was my job to protect him from the truth of what he did to me. I couldn’t let them think he was a monster. I wouldn’t tell anyone. I was entirely alone. But he never hit me. …
When it was over, I wasn’t permitted to mourn him. No one could understand how love, hate, fear and comfort could coexist simultaneously. They could not understand that in addition to my abuser, I also lost my confidant, the person to make dinner with, the person to watch movies with on a rainy Sunday, the person to laugh with, the person who knew me. I lost my companion. How can you explain to someone that the abuse was only a part of who he was? How do you explain that to yourself?
–Reut Amit, “He Never Hit Me“
Verbal and emotional abuse is so insidious. It takes strength to decide such treatment is unacceptable and leave the relationship. It takes love for one’s self, a belief in one’s own dignity and worth, to leave and learn to tolerate living alone. It takes courage to quit what is known and safe, especially if one doesn’t have skills for a job that earns a living wage. Being single is often lonely. Still, I preferred the loneliness to what I witnessed growing up.
There is another reason for the priority of pastry: pastry chefs are the only ones in the kitchen who are alchemists by necessity. Where the rotisseur or the man with the sauté pan does his best work when he does least, it is in the nature of pastry-making that you begin with ingredients that don’t at all resemble what you end up with. It is de rigeur for the fish chef to say that he wants his fish to shine through, but the cake maker does not want his cake to taste anything like the flour that constitutes it. Baking is always making new.
–Adam Gopnik