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.