Possession

This is the dog I love and the son I love.  I do not feel that I own or possess either one, but there is something about men and ownership and possession that baffles me...

Examples: this morning I was running up the road, and a man with a big dog on a thick leash had crossed in front of me, and as he stood on the grass of a neighbor's house, his dog on that thick leash was standing in the road, the leash blocking my path.  I slowed down and gently moved the dog closer to the curb because the man did NOTHING to pull him in, forcing me into the middle of the road if I'd gone around the dog.  I continued with my run, clearly leaving behind me a problem.  The problem was speechless but then began to scream at the top of his lungs, "Don't touch my fucking dog, BITCH."

I was reminded of running with my husband years ago when I tripped when a dog ran in front of me; I was down on the ground, gravel ground into my knees, elbows and legs.  I looked up to see my husband, running after the man with the dog instead of tending to his wife who was bleeding and down on the ground!  HE might as well have yelled, "Don't touch my bitch, DOG!"

Men...

Christmas Sunshine

Morning glistens through my windows in the corner of my house where my book tree sits dormant, waiting for the dark to descend when I turn on its lights.  The promise of sunshine today makes me gleeful.  It is the day I will take presents for the children at the Jane Addams women's shelter, and I will give the little girl her baby doll that I promised her two weeks ago.  It is also a day when I will have dinner with both of my children, a time when I can hold them close and remind them to love each other always and always.  Also, it is a time for bubbly champagne and a time for laughter because the two of them are unrestrainedly hilarious.

Mostly it is a day for rushing around but feeling calm in my soul and serenity in my heart because I do not feel that I am hurting or unkind to anyone, probably because I do not feel threatened or hurt or victimized by other people.  Maybe it's being unmarried. Whatever it is, I accept my solitude, wrap myself in it when I can but share myself whenever I have the opportunity.

Serendipity: hats and random friends

How often do we walk along a road or a street and notice an article of clothing hanging up, begging to find its owner?  I seem to see it with some frequently - the lost sweatshirt, hat, sock, or shoe, hanging on a fence, a bush or merely lounging on the sidewalk, anticipating a living soul to stick an appendage or a head into its living space and fill it with a soul, a being to move, bend, run or walk and give this piece of cloth or rubber or wool a life.  It saddens me when I see a hat squashed into the leaves or jammed into the corner of a curb, as I saw this one the other rainy day, but lo!  This morning I find to my delight that some gentle soul had lifted it from his soggy existence on the ground up onto theses lively red leaves of a bush, dangling jauntily as if the hat belonged.  Somewhere.  Something about pavement, street, floors that suggests death.  Raise up that cap, tuck it onto a burning bush, and suddenly possibilities abound.  The dew just dusts the top edge, but otherwise, I can just imagine a man on his daily walk, coming upon the cap, looking furtively about him before he gently takes it in his hand, turns it slowly around, estimating the size of his head, flicking off the lingering dew and securing it neatly onto his head.  He would then turn and walk with a little skip in his step, feeling sartorial from the very top of his head, and walking all along the Wissahickon, whistling as he went.

I set these little fellows up to dry and rest together and realized that they were probably already communicating with each other.  Look at the orange side on the tall right piece of wood as it speaks to the orange front of the little middle guy who has a deliciously pink head of thread.  Tracy wants to group her wooden paintings together, but I hope she will bring along the stray little guy.  He's not yet finished, but I think he has promise... Isn't that really was all life is about?  Promise?

Whistling at my post...

I have learned that a colleague and a sister do not like my whistling while I am at work; my colleague says it hurts her ears, and my sister says she "would kill" me.  It troubles me to think that something as innocuous and joyful as whistling can generate such vitriol and such violence, and I begin to wonder at the value of glee in the face of gloom and the embrace of sorrow.  I surmise one could eliminate from one's life all negative people, but when that includes one of the colleagues of whom I am fond and a sister I love, that becomes an impossible option.  Stop whistling?  Cease cheer?  Wallow in drear?  Bruise my soul to let out the wail I worked for years to eliminate?  No, thank you very much.  I shall wrap myself in music, dance and joy when I am alone or with Tracy and Nancy who understand the drive and the energy that keeps us churning out whistles and color and song.

And so I churn.  And paint.  These please me, albeit in a rather processional kind of way; I know they aren't finished, but it's funny; I didn't know that when I "finished" them years ago!  I revisit this old pastel painting that I loved for years and years, especially a little squiggle down the middle.  Gone now, the squiggle has been replaced with swirls of color: lime green, aqua blue, lavender and a touch of red.  The orange makes me happy, but I did leave the grey block and the blue door, both of which I used to love.  I will see if they stay next session.

This is an oldie that needed depth, and I still don't think it's finished, but it is beginning to speak more clearly to me.  The purple "happened" when Tracy dropped a hug blob of dark purple on her board, which she has taken home to mull over, and I couldn't bear to waste any of it.  I nipped into it and slapped some onto the middle of this piece, blending it in with my fingers and some water; Still it looks rather blobby, but maybe more shadowy and mysterious.  I am liking the windows on the door.  Again, I can only wait and watch what "happens."

This was a painting of a white door in my bathroom, a door that had shadows and brilliant reflections on; I could never get it quite right, so today it became the blue door with a green shadow.  I remember really being haunted by that old 45 we used to have, surely my older sister's, "Green Door," and this is beginning to evoke the spirit of the green door, but the highlights have turned out nicely.  The little pink splotch behind the door is actually a painting that I tried to put into the original.  I think maybe the hint of pink suggests something also a little mysterious.  I shall see.  I wonder if the white tile is really discernible and if not, it shall go the way of the white door.  I still quite like the knob.

Over and out for today, a day of a crisp run in the cold, an encounter with Debby and her new dog, Suzy, and a GFS parent from Jack's class.  Tracy and I danced and sang to Sweet Honey and the Rock, both parting, I hope, feeling refreshed, affirmed and vital.  I did.

Back at it with gusto!

When I can't paint with Tracy, I'm on my own, and this little flower arrangement begged for attention one night when I was alone and color beckoned.  It's acrylic on a board - all these boards are left over from Leo's wonderful project of building my potting space and shelves in my entry porch.  I feel so very lucky!

 Tracy and I finally got together after two weeks of not painting on our regular schedule and she brought a whole box of NEW Sennelier oil pastels; we charged into them as though we had all the money in the world with no cares of excess of waste, and the process was full of glee and giggles and what I thought was exquisite work.  This is Tracy's earlier piece that I thought was whalish and watery, but now has depth and design.  The board on the left she has just placed on top of the larger board, and I really like the dimension it adds.  I couldn't resist when she had finished the small piece of lumber and had to add the reds on it - I like those moments of bounce!

This is a print from 1999 that has hung in my front hall for years - yup, I suppose lots of years!  It fell down as it had been stuck onto another board that I'd painted green.  Once it fell, I was invited to "work" it, and that I did!  Those oil pastels are magical and ever so enticing.  I pulled out that light blue, orange, green and yellow and tried to add zip to a print that I'd turned upside down.  I used to like the drip of ink that had looked like an orange monkey in the upper right hand corner, but I just left him hanging there when I flipped the piece upside down, and he is no longer very important.  I will see if next week he may even disappear even though Tracy is SURE that this piece is DONE.  I'm not yet so sure...

I also love that the photo of my brothers and sisters happens to be sitting on the window sill next to the painting, an unintended gesture that suggests to me that all is right with the world.

Chance encounters...

I am thinking about my trip to New York to meet Lisa at the Met and see Nozze di Figaro.  The Megabus was late, the young girl next to me had ear phones with rap blasting loud enough to make me cringe and squirm.  I was grading papers but could feel myself getting grumpy and unkind, so I stopped, closed my eyes and said my mantra as loud as I could in my head; I tried to meditate for 25 minutes or so.  When I opened my eyes again, the noise had not stopped, but the girl reached over and turned my light back on for me.  For a moment, we looked into each other's eyes, and we both smiled broadly as I said thank you.  She was just a kid, knew no better, and she had shown kindness to me.  And I was grateful.

When I took the Metro back into the city from Park Slope the next morning, I was a little unsure which side of the platform the train would show up, so I came up behind a woman who was standing near a bench.  I didn't realize until I came in front of her that she had JUST taken a big out of a raisin bagel or bun or some such thing that sticks to one's teeth in globs of soft dough.  She grinned apologetically, and I laughed and apologized profusely before she could speak; we both laughed, she answered my question, and as I looked back over my shoulder, I could see that she was still chuckling.  As was I.

When I got to the Megabus line, I noticed my friend Will about 8 people ahead of me.  He was taking the 9:15 and I was taking the 9:45 but decided I'd try to make the earlier bus.  I hung around while the bus became more and more jammed, but there were 3 extra spaces, and after some hesitation, looking around and checking, the woman finally took my $5 for changing my reservation, and I hopped onto the bus.  I skipped up the steps to the second floor and saw that Will in his eternal optimism had sad on an aisle seat with a free one next to him; he looked back and waved me in.  He chattered the whole time back to Philadelphia, and I gleaned more information about tugboats and the waters and hills around New York, so it was an adventure in data that I will probably never be able to call back to mind; however, he did tell me about his wife's dying mother who had become a dominatrix.  Now THAT was a tale about which I can retrieve every, single detail, but I shall have to keep them close to me because his wife is working on a book.

I was only able to have these encounter because dear, sweet Tracy kept Shadow for the night; we painted both Tuesday and Thursday, and she is working on some other little pieces to go with the grand whale.  It still thrills me to see her colors and her light.

Mine is clunky by comparison, but I do like the way the cloth leaves make their presence known even though I've painted over them with purple.  Nicky tells me that it's a tree with water and mud; right on, Nick!

Now we wait for the chance encounter that is Hurricane Sandy.  No public transportation, no school, no orchestra and a case of beer on hand; is this heaven or what?

Turn your computer over on its side...

These images come after a longish run when Tracy and I were singing and dancing as we painted.  BOTH paintings should be standing upright, so you will need to turn your computer over, tilting it on its right side to properly see the paintings.  Tracy, as always, has the simple elegance of line, color and shape that smack of real artistry while mine has the complex frenzy of too much of everything.   I wanted to sing of autumn and the brilliance of leaves and sky and trees and wind and clouds; instead I have sticks and fabric and matte medium and finger painting.  We will work more on Thursday, and I do like the bottom swirls of energy on mine but know it needs focus instead of flurry.

The elegance of Tracy's shape here and the way the light drifts down from the darkness on the top (now the left side) is so watery and lovely that it makes me swim and reminds me of sitting underwater in my parents' pool.  I remember looking at the way the light shimmied through the top of the water, moving through the molecules and making everything sparkle and dance.  I love Tracy's whale-like shape on its side, but I do think it needs perpendicularity for its full effect.

Who knows where these will go by Thursday when we meet at 7:30 A.M. for more.  When we came back from running today, we shared stories of when mentors or teachers had given us negative critiques on our dancing, and I wonder if we felt freed in some ways to "speak" more fluidly with our paints.  I wish I knew how I could make these images move one rotation to the right....

Hmmm.

Hues on Blues

I am moved by brilliance - of mind, of color, of heart.  When I encounter the majesty of leaves, tarrying on their branches until they succumb to the trod of crunch and crush of little feet coming and going, my own heart swells and I pause.  No, I gasp.  The colors, the fragility, the fleetingness of the natural world humming beside us as we plod through walled lives, directed, channeled, focused.  How does one not become distracted by the free show that weaves itself in and out of our routinized existence?  

I have begun to stop for birds, for leaves, for slivers of a world that is just as focused, channeled and directed as our own; the theater of living, struggling, soaring, and dying is all just within our reach.  And yet, who can afford to slow the stride and slip inside the natural world of glitter and gray?  It takes such time to tarry and invite into our lives the splendor and the horror of nature that it is a wonder and luxury that I do i at all.  I am an addict, poking my nose, squinting my eyes, slowing my pace, dallying down just to feel its presence, just to be in IT for a moment of splendor and joy.  My world is bigger and richer for that moment.  

Sometimes I can even fly.

Whenever I get the urge to live in the city...

Whenever I get the urge to move back into the city, I just go down to the meadow with Shadow and realize that I could never leave the grass, the creek and creases of sunlight streaming through the trees and splashing across the grass, the mists rising above the water and the dewy early morning quiet.  If I am sitting on my sofa and grading endless essays, I have only to glance out into the trees to see the birds, the sky and the natural world that has begun to embrace my whole being; I will get out there with my clippers soon, but while I am within this womb of tree leaves, branches, vines, bird call and squirrels, I will wallow in it and feel cradled in its sanctity.  What is this next to concrete buildings, gum-stained sidewalks and the hubbub of the city life?  This is my respite and my haven.  I know God is close at hand when I am here.

Acrylics by finger - new method

Tracy  and I began to really ROCK today as we plied our boards with thick paints and began moving the paints around with our fingers, blending, adding water, white and swirling, moving across the picture plane with gestures of energy and dance.  We were thrilled with the nuances, the shapes and the shades of color as we worked on the surfaces of our paintings.  Tracy's changed over and over, moving from texture to texture, line to line and color to color.  She, in typically self-effacing fashion, prefers the "old" paintings, the ones she has covered up and moved beyond, but I see a richer surface each time she works it.  I love the way this yellow-green dances in the right edge of the painting, and I love the sturdiness of her ball and egg.  She will, of course, completely change it next week, but we will have to wait and SEE!

My painting hasn't changed all that much, but I did begin to mess with the sky.  When I did, the whole texture and colors changed.  I added blue in the bowl, much to my glee, and tried to make the coffee cup hold some coffee.  Once we began with fingers, I added pink to the cup, blended the yellow around it and added pink around the sun, which I know I will change next week or this week; it looks too much like a lollipop in the water, which is meant to be sky, reminding me of "clouds in my coffee," which I've NEVER understood because it always seemed to me to be more like sour milk blobbing in clumps inside one's coffee.  And who the hell would want THAT?

Stylin'

As I walked to the train station from school, a man wearing about 5 crosses in various materials dangling from his neck, a nice wool jacket and a brilliant green scarf around his neck said, "Hiya, Mama," as he passed me on the sidewalk.  I thought I recognized him as the homeless man who used to "live" on the corner of  17th Street and Callowhill, so I slowed down and responded cheerily, "Hey, how are you doing?"  He began to bounce along with me, making a total u-turn and heading in my direction.  I looked at his coat and his jaunty green scarf and noticed that one of his crosses was a large glass cross.  I told him he was looking quite spiffy today, and he looked down at my pink stockings and then at my red shirt (I dress in the dark of the morning and sometimes don't get it quite right...).  He grinned that decidedly high but compelling grin and said, "You are looking pretty nice yourself!"  We bounced a few more steps and then he looked straight at me and said, "Oh, yea, we be stylin' today!"

I laughed and kept on my way, knowing what was coming next.  When he asked if I had a little money for him, I said lightly, "Nope, but I'll bring you a sandwich tomorrow."

He smiled, turned around and began to walk away; He turned around, looked at me and said earnestly, "You be around here then?"

"You betcha!" I said, already planning what kind of bread I would use for his sandwich tomorrow.  I almost skipped to the train, the little encounter with my new friend filling me with joy, not that he was probably homeless and hungry, but that he was so spectacular.  His glee, his costume and his forthrightness made me spin.  I knew he probably wanted money for all sorts of nefarious activities, or at least I was supposed to know that.  But I didn't care.  I could bring him a sandwich tomorrow, and we'd be stylin' again.  I looked forward to that.

Not afraid of WHITE...

We decided this morning that we were not going to fear the color white, and as Tracy whitewashed her balloon and then added an egg and "a road," she scrubbed at the surface of the board, making the wonderfully misty, foggy, ethereal texture in her delicate painting of blues and greens.  I love the way the green balloon still hovers over the left side of the piece, and her "road" pulls the whole thing together.  Before she left, we stood in front of the piece and I saw a large hand behind the ball and egg, a kind of spirit holding the clearly material things in the picture, both here and not here; the hand suggested to me something bigger than the picture plane and bigger than the material world, and I wondered if my Education for Ministry is making me think about the spiritual world a little too often!

I did try to put some ethereal qualities in my rather sturdy, straightforward coffee cup and bowl with egg, but instead I messed with the "sun" and sky and created a beautiful blue hue but wrecked the sun enough so that Tracy "read" it as a peach half, which it very well could be.  That makes me rethink the whole piece, which I had anticipated being a celebration of morning sunshine, morning coffee and sustenance, but I can certainly embrace a peach half in the sky just as easily as a sun.  It just doesn't quite resonate as much for me - at least with my newly released spiritual side that sees the spirit in everything, God lover that I am...

Tracy took a hot shower when we finished our run, and her hair was such a funny nest of curls and fuff (I made up that word, but it really did have fuff! that I had to take her picture; however, she was a little embarrassed and began to pose, which was much more interesting that the fuzzy hair photos.  At least here we get the spirit of venture - a very silly, singy, sort of play that sometimes results in sparkling art.  Today we were singing about not being afraid of using white, and the harmony was actually quite lovely there for awhile as I sang a made up rendition of some white-girl, Jewish-girl spiritual and she chimed in at just the right harmonic pitch.  I wonder if perhaps we have missed our TRUE CALLING!  La, la, la tra, la, la...

My camping buddies...

Saturday night these two fellas are coming over for a sleepover, and we are planning to sleep outside in a tent.  I look into these faces, and I sometimes wonder what's on their minds; this was at their dad's birthday party last night, before or during ice cream cake servings.  What wasn't to smile for?  And these are genuine smiles - Nicky's on the verge of a big giggle.  Their emotional ranges are so vast at these ages that I wonder what will happen when they hit their teens, but I am trying to stay grounded and focused on the glorious moment of the now and enjoy the little steps of the day: walking barefoot in my pajamas down the steps and out the stone walkway to get the paper in the mornings that I don't leave at the crack of dawn, grinding the coffee beans and dumping them into the filter after I smack the grinder onto the counter top.  Dipping into the Fage yogurt container to fill my shallow blue bowl and then digging out some frozen orange-pineapple juice concentrate and plopping it on top of the plan yogurt.  Ready for breakfast, I drink black coffee from a bright orange mug, wait for the concentrated juice to melt just a tad and then eat the sweet syrup covered, cold yogurt as I drink my bitter, hot coffee.  And life is good.

Art is funny like that...

This morning as we painted with acrylics, I watched Tracy lather the colors onto her board, blending rich blue with a green, moving the brush around as though she were really a part of the colors themselves; meanwhile, I stood over my board and tried in my most meticulous method to recreate an image of the delicate little egg that her chicken lay, an egg she presented to me as a present.  It ended up looking more like a fig than an egg, and the other end of my board has beautiful knots that I wanted to use as part of my schema, but how?

As we worked side by side, Tracy muttering about not giving up and both of us intensely invested in our painting and not our weightless conversation that floated in and out of the space, I watched her piece become artistic while mine because Kindergarten.  She cooed and urged me on, saying, "You really DO have a style."  I thought to myself, "Yea, some style to have like a 6 year old's!"  The magic of working together, though, is that her movements and her process inspire me to move beyond the familiarly domestic, but then I realize that if I cannot do something as fundamental as an egg and a cup, I have no business exploring the abstract and the ephemeral.

I like these two pieces together because we began with different colors, moved in completely different directions and then ended our session in strangely disparate states of completion.  Mine feels incomplete, and I think she overworked hers with white so that she lost some of the very richness with which she began. I like that about both pieces because when we come back to them, I will have to pick up presumably where I left off, moving where I think I am going, and Tracy will have to go somewhere new because she cannot go back; in other words, she is building something magical, and I am plodding towards the familiar.

Maybe I shall throw coffee grounds on it next week and see just where that takes me~ !

Moving into the picture plane...

Again we painted on Tuesday morning, and Tracy is developing her abstract style and balance from week to week.  Above is her revised painting from last week, which she has opened up onto a full plane instead of broken into smaller boxes of the space.  The orange glow is all the more magical because it is behind something else, a suggestion of sky with the blue, and there is real depth because of her variations of darks on the bottom and the white interjected into the top.  I love this piece. Mine is more literal and from this photo seems flat and sluggish despite the water I try to suggest with the white, perhaps too much of it, in the foreground.  I still like the trees dug into the layers of pastels, but there IS something missing.  I shall find it next week or maybe before then, but I won't touch the piece until next week.

Tracy and I talked about doing a show of paintings in groups where we've used the same media as we work side-by-side, clearly in different voices and in different visions.

Still haunted by these photographs of the "blue moon," I post this just to remind myself that there can be clarity even in the deepest dark of night when the air is still and the silence is soft.  It is pouring rain this morning, and my plans for a run before I head into a day of the mundane and the managerial are shot.  I love putting myself in the hands of the weather gods, not insisting that I push against them, knowing that when there is an "opening," I shall be invited into a run, just the way that I will be invited back into my painting to move it where it needs to go.  Giving over myself to something bigger and higher without relinquishing my own voice and energy gives me freedom and force in their highest forms.

Pondering Penang

Last night I got an email from my friend who edits the Penang Journal, and she asked me for photos because they will be publishing my last essay in October.  I began to think about Penang and the role it plays in my discombobulated life.

When I am there, it is always a time of liberation from the life of an American; I can look with fresh eyes at people and things that seem more complex, subtle and colorful, and I wonder why.  Is it merely that I hear the sounds of Haakan, Tamil, Bahasa and English, the accents of Australia, England, and the Middle East?  It is a linguistic composite as well as a gastronomic composite, all flavored by the smoke of "the other," but there are so many "others" that the incense of one culture wafts into and blends with another so that the air is never clear, the flavors never simple, the exchange always layered.  I love being there, perhaps because I am a whole day away from here...

I find myself now that I am back at my teaching, living at home with my dog, engaged in the routine of rehearsals, church, and meetings, often looking up into the sky to look at an airplane.  The plane looks small and slow from where I stand sturdily on my spot of soil that is mine, that is home, and yet I always project myself onto that plane, that moving entity that is taking me somewhere else, taking me away or to or "there."  I wonder if we are every anything or anywhere BUT "other" or "there."  So often as I walk from the train to school and I watch the people in their cars on their way somewhere, anywhere, I wonder where I fit, where I live.

Sometimes my sister asks me what I DO when I go to Costa Rica or travel alone, and I try to explain to her that I walk, I read, I hop or I putter.  She asks if I am lonely.  I am alone, I say, but I am never lonely because I have my imagination and think that sometimes this imagination is bigger than I am, pushier even.  In fact, this imagination, this mind, is often to controlling, so willful that I prefer to be alone because IT insists upon it.  Introverts need space, time and stillness just to make room for the mind.  Sometimes I wonder if we are all anything BUT the mind.

When I am off in my ruminations, I am too often called into the space of now by a texture, a sound or a color; these things ground me, and so I have put these photos at the top - a textured door, spattered with graffiti, but a graffiti that compliments and enhances its original color, and the swoop and swirl of the Penang bridge, the sturdy railing of which leads the eye across the water and into the clouds, not over to a concrete, visible spot of land - both images that have been mysteriously marked or that move away into the undefined, intangible space of the imagination.

But I really must come back into the world and go to church to help set up for the service tomorrow morning.  I wonder why.

Making Art with My Friend

This morning after running 5 miles with Tracy, we drank coffee and talked about painting together, but we couldn't quite feel the energy or the spirit.  She admitted to wanting to use pastels, and I couldn't hide the grin on my face as I led her upstairs to my "studio" where I opened Janet's old pastel box with three layers of gloriously soft, workable pastel sticks.  We had both chosen boards from the basement, and we grabbed colors (as it turned out many of the SAME colors) and began smudging the colors onto the surfaces.  We sang, we wiggled, we moved our heads hear and there, checking out the effects of our maneuvers, and finally  we decided to stop and evaluate.  It was the moment of critique.  Interestingly, I loved HER work instead of mine, but I DO think we bring wonderful things to the endeavor.  After oohing and aching about each other's and our own work, we decided to leave them until next week when we will look at them again and take it from there.  What makes me deeply sad is that these two pieces will probably change and move into something entirely different, never to be seen again, so I thought I would at the very least put them here where I know I can come to see them whenever I am feeling nostalgic.  Who knows?  Maybe they will take an organic course to a level or artistry that neither of us anticipated, but I always mush it up and mash my paintings into mud and have to try to resuscitate them but can't.

So, here's waiting until next week, but here, too, is the palpable joy of prodding, poking and pushing around paint for awhile with a friend.   That alone is so delicious that I could leap for glee.

Home.

I have had stashed in my closet a rug I got on sale at the beginning of the summer, rolled up and tied.  It was too heavy for me to look at or determine whether I'd guessed the wrong size.  Today Oonie and Leo came over to help me put it down, and here it is, fitting perfectly just where I'd hoped it would go, and it is a warm, rich golden orange color from one side, and a light, almost straw color from another side.  I am hoping that the cold winds won't blow and make it necessary for me to curl up in this room with the fire in the fireplace in the next room so that I can be toasty.  Shadow is already testing the turf to see if it is soft and luscious, but I fear that what he is really checking is where he is going to pee first.  Sigh.

This morning on my way to church I found a fuzzy-wuzzy caterpillar on my steps.  He was small and not really very burly or furry; I'm thinking that is a predictor for a mild winter.  A few big snows for cross-country skiing would be delicious, but none of that lingering slush and dirty snow piled up in the city for weeks at a time.  I feel blessed and lucky to have an escape in Costa Rica where I gather the rain has been gentle thus far and the whales are breaching down off Uvita.  Part of me wishes I were there and could see them, but maybe they will move up the coast for Christmas.  I can hope.

When children aren't children anymore...

 Last night we celebrated Jack's 25th birthday even though the real day is today, September 15. but what boy wouldn't prefer going out with his friends instead of celebrating at his mom's house on his birthday?  The candles were the kind that relight, the kind my children used to get so mad at me for putting on birthday cakes, but last night nobody seemed to mind at all.  Is this tolerance a sign of maturation?  Compassion for the mother who continues to make festivals and celebrations over the slightest things? 

I watched Jack giggle over the frustration of trying to blow out these candles, and I saw in him his father, at which I felt delight, realizing my son was free to be the man who is both son of his father and son of his mother, as his sister sings along.  It is a moment of happiness for me, the two of them together, she supporting him as she has always done, always loving him as her younger, more vulnerable brother even though he presents himself as confident and competent.  I remember when she told me how she used to watch over him in his infancy and then rolling around with him in his babyhood, her heart overflowing with protective love, and she, the young girl at age 13 who curled up into the fetal position on the cold linoleum hospital floor when Jack was just born, she, the vulnerable baby of my heart, who I thought had grown into a young girl, having a far greater need to be held and rocked by her mother than did this innocent, jaundiced, new-born Jack.  How could I not have seen it?  What could I have done with the 140 pound adolescent, sound asleep on the floor?  I wish I could have turned back the clock and given her what every child deserves and requires - consistent, unqualified love.  But I, the baby that I was, hurt, abandoned by her father, and utterly at sea, a nursing babe in my arms, facing a world that I could not fathom, was not trained or educated for, and hadn't the thick skin for, could not manufacture enough love for myself, let alone for this bulging, hulking, quivering mass of needs.  I never felt I gave her enough, and isn't it funny that I write this as I celebrate not her birthday, but her brother Jack's birthday, Jack, the boy who could do no wrong but who also feels in many, many ways wronged and judged and unloved.

As parents we can only give our all and then wait for the blame, knowing that for children, including own little inner child, we never, ever feel loved enough until we can finally, finally GIVE it!.

Mortality - Christopher Hitchens, Florence Howe and me

Finishing Christopher Hitchen's book Mortality and receiving from Florence Howe her memoir A Life in Motion, I can only wonder what the hell I have been spending my life doing.  For sure, I am no Florence Howe, and with what my mother used to call "a memory like a sieve," I am no Christopher Hitchens whose memory Graydon Carter called a "staggeringly, almost punishing memory."  Am I hobnobbing with people who are WAY out of my league?  Of course, I am, but somebody has to read these books, and it might as well be me as few people I know seem to mess around with books anymore; oh, they talk about them with a ferociousness that borders on madness, but if posting on Facebook amounts to anything at all, it seems to me, it amounts to a heap of wasted pages and precious moments that could have been spent reading.

A slow reader and an earnest but rigorous teacher, I have to look back on what I have accomplished in my work; is it having students over to my house to bake pies for the homeless at Thanksgiving, as indicated in the above photo?  It hardly seems like anything worth poking a finger at, but I cannot bring myself to write books because I have so little to say.  Well, not exactly little to say, but it is the preciousness of the small about which I have a great deal to say: the birds, a worm, leaf ants, a shade of coral, the clip clop of the horses walking on the paved road outside my window in the mornings, and the bulge of an overly jammed peanut butter and banana sandwich my friend made for me.  These are the minuscule, the minutiae that draws me in and holds my attention.  But I'm no Mary Oliver, the poet who can make the feather of a small bird take on the significance of the resurrection.

Sometimes I write to tell my sister about some insignificant sparrows fighting over an over-sized piece of pretzel on the sidewalk or the feeling of a heron flying close to my shoulder.  She tells me I should keep a blog for my concerns, and I think she is telling me not to bother her at her busy day's work.  Here I am, writing on a stupid blog because I have no audience for small secrets or quiet mysteries.  Sometimes I think I would like to become a preacher so that I could share my spirit with a "congregation," but then, I realize that they, too, would be judges of sorts.

I suppose I'm better off just writing into cyber-space, savoring my own wee journey through the day, relishing writing with a pink marker on a white board at school, or listening to the jangle of my bangle bracelets as I scratch away with the white chalk on a blackboard.  These are the sounds and sensations of my days, diminutive but dynamic even if only to me.

The Mekong River - Don Khong, 2006 - Art as Voice

If, as Christopher Hitchens claims, the main issue for a writer (and a speaker) is finding your own voice, what does that suggest for budding painters or just plain old people who try to "articulate" with lines and colors instead of words.  I won't say instead of language, because lines and colors are a language and the voice they express is equally significant as that of words, but people who paint and draw often perfect their craft by practicing drawn renderings that mimic the visual world around them; I don't believe this helps locate an artist's voice.  My paintings are too often wiggly, wobbly and overly colorful, but with the kind of vision I have and the lopsided seeing I do, perhaps this IS my aesthetic voice.  I have enough crappy paintings that take me back to the precise place I sat and mused and mulled to know that the voice of visual art is just as powerful and just as expressive as the verbal.  Here I was sitting in a small bed and breakfast on a little island in the Mekong River in 2006 on Don Khong after spending time ogling the Khone Falls, that expanse of rapids and rough water that interfered with the French explorers' trip up the river in 1866 or thereabouts.  When I crossed the "ferry" to this little island, the ferry being a little souped-up canoe with a motor, I found the most serene, tranquil spot on the river, a place where I could rent a motorcycle and ride around the rice paddies, wave to women bearing bundles and wearing those wonderfully pointed straw hats that looked like straw coffee filters on their heads.  I felt as though I could touch the clouds and clearly that was what I as trying to portray in this little watercolor...

This was my view at a little spot where I ate dinner; who could possibly "articulate" those gentle pink clouds reflected in the wrinkles of the water?  Not I certainly, but how I love to try.

 

My sister says...

I should create a blog because I think I clutter her email with notes about my encounters with birds or bugs or flowers, the details of which profoundly move me, but don't seem to be too significant in the high-stress world of making it in the U..S.  When writing a blog, though, I hate relying on photographs to convey the world that seeps into my head and swirls around in my imagination, but one must.  And so on this old computer I stumbled upon a photo of this little walkway that I took from a boat on the Mekong River to a little village that I visited in Viet Nam.  I love the picture not just for the tentative state of the bridge and its uneven, jagged planks, but also because of the neat shadow line at a diagonal across the planks.  I remember going into this little town and watching the children play in the dirt.  I remember, too, children at work in a classroom that I peered into through a window.

Isn't it powerful how one shaky image as this one can conjure up such memories and musings?  Who would bother with a photo like this?  The lovely part is that it now will sit somewhere in cyber-space and someone else just might find it and read about it or maybe be inspired to paint something as a result of having seen it. Maybe, just maybe, my sister will discover it and wonder what mundane event I am documenting now, and maybe she will be moved to look, to mull or to imagine for herself.