Art as Metaphore

"What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion for yourself and those around you. I had begun to enjoy the seduction of inadequacy, but flowers keep blooming inside me." Lupita Nyong'o

The activity in last week's Life Book 2014 online art course was to celebrate connections in life while at the same time continuing to learn how to draw a face, create transparent layers using collage, gesso, stamps, writing, and applying paint over and over again. The first task was to find a face in a magazine to use as a base and then make it our own by completely changing it. Wow. Isn't this just like real life. If you peeled off your layers, wouldn't find you find something completely different underneath, an entire back story? This week's project is a metaphor for life: create a face, change it, try on clothes, change a hair color, collage over the rough spots, get a new wardrobe until you've got your very best look. Then with compassion, change your thoughts as well.

Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong'o, winner of the supporting actress award for 12 Years a Slave, is an amazing inspirational speaker and writer. "I had begun enjoying the seduction of inadequacy but flowers keep blooming inside me." I love that. I know about that. Peel back my layers and you can see all the times I've lived that seduction, but not now. Now I'm getting better and I'm gentle with myself. Lovely combo.

Baruch ata adonai...I am so blessed to live a long enough life to look back and appreciate my many layers with compassion and love. Amen

How to Be a Friend to a Friend Who's Sick by Lettie Cottin Pogrebin was written just in time for me and my friends. It's an important read for the friend who is ill and for those of us who want to be the best kind of friend we can be when all the rules change. I bought a copy for myself and gave it to my friend with breast cancer. Then I ordered another for myself. Now I'm ordering a third.

My friends and I are getting to that age, not that there is any right age for this sort of thing. It can happen at any age, but more and more a bad diagnosis for you or your friends is likely to happen the older and older you get. My friends and I have been dancing with each other for a long time, dancing like we know the steps when we do and when we don't, dancing when we feel more like crying and hiding, and being wonderfully brave and adventurous when we haven't a clue what dance we're doing. And then the bad diagnosis taps us one of us on the shoulder, cuts in, and partners us off to an unknown ballroom where the rules have nothing to do with us, except they do. And so it is for three of my go to friends.

Lettie Cottin Pogrebin is an old friend too. She doesn't know we're old friends. She's someone like me only on a national scale. She is one of the founders of MS magazine, and because we're the same age and because we're both Jewish we've always had a lot in common. Twenty-five years ago she wrote a book for me when I was beginning to figure out if I had a place in Judaism. She introduced me to her friends and I read their books as well, and I found my way. Some of them cycle back through her current book. I'm grateful I met them all.

If you are in the dark corridor of illness, your own or a friend's, if you're looking for a light to lead you forward, the title of this book is the beginning of everything you need to know. 

Baruch ata adonai....I am grateful for health and the wealth of friends who guide me to unknown parts of myself. Thank you for waking me up this day. May I be a friend to others and especially to myself. Amen

Something from Nothing

Start with a blank canvas, a piece of white paper, a cardboard toilet roll. Start the new year wtih ideas from two internet classes, Creative Jump Start and Life Book 2014. Where have three weeks gone? Here's my show and tell.

 

Scrapwrap. Start with a household item, stuff in your stash, low technology and creative time.

Life Book 2014 is a year long class. Each week a new teacher, new techniques. Carla Sondheim, this week's teacher, is known for her blobamils. Start with a blob of paint and see what appears. This is some octopus!

Start with a day set aside to do art. Start with good intentions. Then clean out your studio, get involved with HeArt Space on Face Book, spend time with some newly salvaged stuff for cardboard box art, eat, make some appointments, check for email, go for a walk, lose something you've put in the scanner, spend time trying to find it cleaning up as you go, need to go to the Dollar Store, Michaels, feel tired from so much avoiding doing art. That was yesterday. I'm sure today will be completely different.

 Make a flower with two pieces of paper and see where it goes next.

Lay down three different kinds of tape. Make sure they overlap. Fill in with pen. Who is waiting to appear?

I'm not even going to tell you what this animal was suppose to be. The task was to draw an animal in one continuous line with your eyes closed. Another was to cut a typed paragraph into words or phrases and compose a story. That was a bit of a bust for me. Instead I wrote part of the story around this guy.

Baruch ata adonai...I am having fun and growing and my mind is in creative places. I am grateful. Amen

Feeling Content

"All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple of years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer...It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as  your ambitions."Ira Glass

This morning it only took me an hour to make that watermark. That's a lot of time first thing in the morning. I started at 7:15 and voila! There it is, covering up an important world. I'm settling for good enough. One of my words for this year is ease, and so I relax. This morning Ira Glass whispers in my ear, "It's going to take awhile. You've just gotta fight your way through."

Well, here she is. My artistic guardian. I love her. She's the first face I've ever drawn I truly love. She looks me steadily in the eye and reminds me to keep being creative and pay no attention to those snotty voices that could be muttering away if I were to listen. She wants me to have fun. And I am. I do need to give her a name. Hmmmm. I'm going to give this some thought today.

My guardian, loving and steely, appeared during the first assignment in a year long online class, Life Book 2014. One week into it and I'm smitten. I think it's going to be a wonderful course for me. There are students from all over the world. It's a huge class in terms of the number of people participating and the content. In the first week there were six videos. There will be many guest teachers over the course of the year, and Tamara, the founder, producer and guide-in-chief has done an amazing job of building in support for artists like me whose courage might flounder, whose stuff is just not that good, yet, but trying to be good and getting better with practice.

The word you can't quite see is Abundance. My guardian wants me to explore Abundance. Isn't she wonderful? With ease!

Usually the first few months of the year I like to go away to someplace warmer and sunnier. Last year I painted in Mexico. Another year we spent a month in Kauai. This year I am very happy and content to be at home and to grow myself right here in my own sweet place. Sometime feeling content has a short shelf life. Today I'm creating a gratitude jar and dropping a little piece of paper inside, a reminder that today at nine in the morning, I am feeling an abundance of contentment.

Baruch ata adonai...I rejoice in moments like this when everything seems right with my world. I rejoice that I recognize in this very moment I am optimistic and happy. No qualifiers. Thank you. Amen

Friendship and Gratitude

"When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled and pleased to give back. Most humbling of all is to comprehend the lifesaving gift that your pit crew of people has been for you." Anne Lamott

Yesterday and the day before captured everything good about 2013.

One day was totally and unexpectedly dominated by the celebration of friendship, and I began to rejoice in the way serendipity brings us together and then glues us through all the calamities and joys of life. Two friends who arrived by pure chance have stayed for decades. Another opened the door just a few months ago. The amazing thing is that we each recognize something undefinable and alluring in each other which is worth sticking around for. Many friends come through shared interests, and I wonder when so many others are involved in the same way, what it is about certain people that keeps us checking into each others lives. My friends have rallied over and over this year. Thank you all. You are better than magic, and I know I am so lucky.

Yesterday we drove to the mountains to have lunch with our grandchildren and watch them confidently and eagerly start their skiing lessons. It was the Monday before Christmas and not many people or other creatures were were stirring on the road or at the resort. We drove over to the mountain and hiked into our cabin. A couple was ice skating way out on the lake. It seemed like a daring and joyful thing to chance so early in the season. We crunched our way over the snow filled road, checked out our cabin which looked snug and brave, and then continued down to the lake.  Could a day be more life affirming, more soul drenched, more beautiful and pristine? It was truly a winter wonderland.

As the year ends, I am filled with gratitude, optimism, and good health. At least for a few days, maybe if only for today, may I remember to stop and enjoy each moment. May I look into the eyes of others and see them. May I go forward and into the future minutes and hours with soft sweetness. May we all.

Baruch ata adonai...More and more for more and more time I feel I am the person I want to be. It is good to feel comfortable within myself. May I be the friend others are for me. May I continue to be willing to learn and change and challenge and accept what comes to me day by day. Thank you for the blessings of this year. Amen

 

Be a Warrior: Ask for What You Want and Follow Through

"There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man."
Winston Churchill

The moment I saw the light between the woman and the horse, I knew I wanted that light in my body forever. There is so much energy on this page in my vision book, and it was such a surprise to find the answer to my soul's learning on these pages.

The answer to my soul's yearning from my vision page in the August Joy Up.

My fingers began Googling, and within an hour I signed up for a course of Equine Therapy two hours from my home. One month later I was just as close to a horse as the picture above, and inside I was just like that little leaping girl. It is the best birthday present I've ever given myself. When I sent in my deposit, I had no idea what Equine Therapy was until much later when I watched a video about it and thought, "Holy Shit! That's more than I bargained for." I trust my intuition and I trusted that this would be right for me. I thought it was probably about working through fear, and it certainly was. And so much more and so right on.

The Morning of the Second Day

I just returned a day ago. I don't want to write about the course and all I learned, just know that I was a warrior! Doesn't mean I fought anything or even myself. I knew nothing about horses, had next to no experience with them, didn't want to ride them, but I knew without a doubt to be with them is my secret yearning. The first two times in the ring I had no idea what I wanted the horse to do or how to do it. The next afternoon I was in a big arena with another participant and together as a team and using only non verbal communication we moved a big white horse through a variety of barriers. As we stood together at the end of the exercise, the horse came up to us and nuzzled our joined hands. I was brave. I asked for what I wanted, and I got it. I know I will be integrating the awareness learned from being with a variety of big horses forever.

Baruch ata adonai...Thank you for always telling me to trust myself and ask for what I want. I am much bigger inside, inside my silent and centered self, than I ever experienced before. I set an intention and showed up with all I had. We were blessed with a very rainy day. Cleansing rain and new strength. Thank you. Amen

Reaping What I Sowed

"How often I experience growth and work toward growth as a result of pain and suffering. May I commit myself to growth through joy and happiness. May I believe this is an even more valid means of growth." From a prayer I wrote in 2010.

My art journals from the fall of 2010 through the end of 2011 now look to me as though I planted seeds and knowingly marched on to how I'm feeling about myself now and what I'm doing today. In that year and a quarter, day after day, I wrote poems and prayers and dreams and experimented with ideas for projects and drawings. If you've followed my blog, you know it wasn't a straight line, but rather one moving through angst to joy.

The odd shaped pieces of colored paper came from SCRAP, a San Francisco treasure trove of recycled art supplies. They still have hundreds of these pages with a flag cut out. I can't imagine where they came from. I love the two hole binder ring approach. I was willing to put down anything. I know if I'd started with a bound book I wouldn't have been as uninhibited.

Today after a great meeting with another artist, I decided to go through these journals to see where they might take me today. I farmed them and put together this little book of resources.

The note cards I've been selling this month came from ideas I developed in these journals, but then I had no idea where they would lead me. I was too into the idea of art being hard work rather than fun play.

Somehow through writing this blog, through prayers, through loving my little ladies and seeing where they would take me, I did let go and then I took off. I have ideas for moving my drawings from cards to walls. Or maybe I'll go back to painting fabric. That was something else I found in the journals. Or maybe I'll figure out how to combine the two.

Baruch ata adonai... I'm so glad I documented where I was a few years ago. I can see how far I've come. I am so pleased I've lightened up on myself. What a lovely journey life can be. Amen

Staking Claim to Our Dreams

"You say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us. And the world will live as one."
John Lennon

Once upon a time and even up to this very day, high up in the Sierra Nevada mountains and down a road that winds around a lake, is the place of my dreams. When I have trouble sleeping at night, I dream of our summer cabin and of hiking a well known trail, perhaps to a waterfall or another lake, and I'm soothed as if I were there. We bought this cabin when my children were young teenagers and now, during the winter months when it is closed, our grandchildren dream of it too.

How do we pass on dreams? I want my grandchildren to know there is a place they can return to where multitasking hasn't been invented yet, where people go to borrow a hammer and spend an hour talking about not much at all, where they can climb rocks and one day sit on the deck and look back and see themselves again. I want them to know when life is too much, they too can drive to the cabin and replenish their souls.

I think it might be happening. Tomorrow we drive just two hours and decades away from our daily life, to open up. It's a long couple of days of turning on the water and praying there are no leaks, turning on the propane, sweeping out mouse droppings, raking the area and burning the debris, and then it's paradise. Now our sons come up and do the tough stuff and our grandchildren come to help open too. I want to pass on my dream by creating theirs. I want them to remember when they were little and helped open. I want them to stake their claim.

We create dreams by working hard, not by spinning if onlies, and by sweating the sweat right up to wondering why we ever thought it was a good idea in the first place. I've always known the cabin was a good idea, but I've wondered about the cards I'm creating. I'm just finishing a series of Be Bold girls who have been fishing and kayaking. I love them, but I know if they sell, I can't keep making them by hand. I've got to dream the next stage and march up the mountains of another learning curve. Meanwhile I'm going hiking...

and I'm going to live the dream.

Baruch ata adonai...I am so grateful for all the blessings this wonderful cabin has brought into my life. Thank you for helping me know my dreams can come true. Amen

Leaving Heaven's Hard To Do

I can't seem to get started writing this morning. I've done two loads of wash, straightened everything in sight and am sitting down for the second time to see if my mind will center itself. Maybe the problem comes from yesterday, at least it seems that way because I had a very restless night. If I could unscrew the top of my head and dump the gremlins running around and behaving badly, maybe that would help. I know you've been here, but that doesn't necessarily mean you want to read about it, unless you think I'm going to find my way out of this which isn't at all clear to me just now. If I stopped now, my morning prayer would be, "H....E....L....P....!"

Yesterday we walked into our mountain cabin. You can google it: Silver Lake off Highway 88 in Northern California. It's south of Lake Tahoe in the gorgeous El Dorado National Forest. Our cabin is right on the lake at 7200 feet elevation. We had a report that we had a huge dump of snow on our deck and that the lake was still frozen. When we drove to the top of the hill for our first glimpse, we were overjoyed to see the lake had thawed. As we walked the 3/4 mile to our cabin, alternately through snow fields and bare road, we speculated about its state and found much much less snow than we anticipated and no snow damage. We so eagerly anticipate our first trip each spring. If we were younger, we would run around in circles just like Gracie, our labradoodle, eating snow, barking, running ahead, sniffing, sniffing. We looked at each other and said, "This is heaven."

We bought our cabin 25 years ago. I'd had an unexpected surgery and careened into the wall that has written on it, "Life will change when you least expect it." I didn't know what I wanted to do then, but I knew it was important to pay attention to clues. When a friend and I went on a camping trip and stopped off at Silver Lake, I felt as though I had come home. And so it has always been ever after. Our children were teenagers when we bought the cabin, and now my grandchildren are loving it. It's my dream come true. It's the place my husband and I get along the very best. It's a place of healing and restoration for everyone who visits.

It's hard to leave heaven and come home to your everyday self with your everyday needs and the everyday house to clean and food to buy and errands to run and a blog you really do want to write, but you're feeling dry. It's hard to come down from a high point. I can remember conferences I'd come home from too jazzed to calm down. And so it is with art and writing now. There are so many things I want to do and I think I'm afraid I won't get to do it all. Now that's another blog.

Baruch ata adonai...thank you so much for helping me know what is great and wonderful in my great and wonderful life. I do have this fear that I won't have time to do all I want to do, not just this day, but in my life. I'm not sure what is bringing this to the fore. Perhaps you'll help me figure it out. My life is wonderful right now. Thank you for pointing that out to me. Thank you for telling me that this moment is all I have anyhow. Thank you for telling me to get real and stop worrying about not having enough time. And now, yes, thank you for telling me I've written quite enough! Amen

Capture Rest. It Can Be Elusive.

"Work when there is work to do. Rest when you are tired. One thing done in peace will most likely be better than ten things done in panic....I am not a hero if I deny rest; I am only tired."  Susan McHenry

The days I begin with writing this blog, the days I start off meditating or thinking about something like our cabin in the mountains, now covered with snow but ready for us to make it our own again in a few months, the mornings I start off in peace are days with an omen for good built in. I just thought about the days I wake up juggling to do lists even before I get out of bed, and I could feel my breathing change. When I start my day in peace, my heart is ready for more peace. To do lists for all their self-importance just don't do that!

I first experienced taking a day of rest, which many religions have built into their very fabric, maybe fifteen years ago. I attended a week long adult religious studies camp on a college campus built into the woods, and on the seventh day we rested. Groups of friends took slow walks in the forest, studied texts together, had prayer services, ate together. We didn't get in cars. We didn't go shopping or to the nearby beach. We didn't rush or call home or hurry in any way. The whole day was at the pace of a stroll. It seemed like the longest day, in a very good way, and the next day I did not want to gear up to drive home.

When I'm living consciously, I don't use Saturday, or it could be Sunday, as a catch up day. Of course this is easier done now that I don't have children at home and I'm not working, but you can do this too even if you don't seem to have the time. How can you not make time for renewal? How can you keep going if you don't? How about a day without listening to the news or television or, gasp, without your cell phone and its opportunities for hours of distraction. How about turning off the internet. Start small and see what happens. You will love it, and then, if you're like me, the next weekend will come around and you'll forget  your good intention even if you loved that day and swore to do it every weekend. So start today by looking at  your calendar. Look at next weekend. Write down one commitment to yourself: turn off my smart phone for the day, pack a picnic and go to the beach or the woods or a local park, Hug a tree.Yes do hug a tree. Don't open the newspaper. Do the wash tomorrow. Write it on your calendar now while it seems like a good idea. Start small until you are greedy for more, then build it into the fabric of your life.

Baruch ata adonai...may I make tomorrow a day of renewal. As I drive my grandchildren to their activities and respond to their needs, may I remember this opportunity for joy doesn't happen very often. May I awake with peace in my heart and breathe myself into calmness I can recapture when I need it. Help me to not to take anything personally and to rejoice in their lives. Thank you for placing them in my life. Amen

(Baruch ata adonai is the beginning of every Jewish prayer. You can replace that with Dear God or whatever you are comfortable with.)

Giving Light to the Blur of Life

"It seems we run our lives like trains, speeding along a track laid down by others, going so fast that what we pass blurs on by....The truth is that blurring something is not the same as experiencing it." Mark Nepo

I've done a lot of wonderful things so far this year and we're off again for a few days. Yosemite National Park, three hours from our home, is a world apart. Though it's often packed with travelers, its beauty surpasses most of my desire that everyone else would stay just home. I've been going there since I was a kid and memories of being there as a child, then as a mother, and now again being there as a couple, we went there for a few days during our honeymoon, layer in my heart. Click on this site and imagine I'm living in this miracle for the next few days. http://www.terragalleria.com/photos/?keyword=yosemite-winter

Nevertheless...all those wonderful things come to be and pass quickly. I just closed my eyes and slowed down through the Palm Springs Film Festival, my aunt's ninetieth birthday party in Oregon, my trip to Mexico. I realize that when each event has passed, I move on to the next new thing and don't go back and savor each one again and again. Living in the present moment is an imperative in my life, yet looking back, living in the present moment can feel like being on a speeding train. I'm present with each experience each day, or that's my goal, and then the train moves on. And the years move on. Big fast blurrrrrrrrrrr!

I don't know how to resolve this conundrum. I love my life at home, the dailiness of it, the length of the days. I'm a curious person, and there is so much in this world to taste and smell and see, so much to experience. It isn't that I don't want to miss anything, and there's not much in my past I wish I hadn't done, and I know I'm not alone in this experience, and yet day by day and year by year the train speeds on. That's life: savor and move on. Hold out my tongue and taste the snow. Know I've been so very lucky.

Baruch ata adonai...thank you for health and stamina and the joy of experiencing so much of life. Thank you for the luck of my birth in a country and at a time when so much is possible. Thank you for giving me the gift of observing as I move along. Sometimes I think it must be quite okay not to be so much of a processor, and you've given me this gift along with so much else. I honor it. Thank you for friends and family and of course for Gracie. Amen

Gifts of Healing

When I'm ill, I learn patience. Once I dance around the thought that one day I might not get better, then I remember it takes time to heal. In Mexico, I experienced a trifecta of bodily woe, and day by day I'm getting better, and I'm enjoying doing things I haven't taken time to do in awhile: read a book for hours at a time, slow down, sit in my garden and enjoy the sunshine. I'm also observing, not for the first time, how much will power it takes to resume habits that sustain me. After a week of squeezing prayer writing into snatched moments of time, I'm finally up and writing first thing in the morning. It takes practice to restart even good habits. Same thing with exercise. After a break, it always takes me days and days to get back to a pace that sustains me.

Baruch ata adonai...thank you for bringing me to health again. I will enjoy the next few days of not being quite well enough to give up reading books and sitting in the sunshine! And why give those up at all. I must incorporate these in my daily life and give up something else, like checking email quite so often! You are with me like a beating heart and I am grateful. Amen

Be the Figment of Your Imagination

"I am a mix of practical realist and romantic daydreamer. But of these two entities, the latter needs the most encouragement." Ann E. O'Shaughnessy

Twelve days from today my romantic daydreamer and I will fly off to paint in Mexico. Sometimes it's hard for me to dream big and beautifully beyond my lack of art training. When people ask me if I'm an artist, I practice saying YES, though a voice inside says, it's common knowledge real artists sell their work and find themselves the star at gallery openings. It's easier to say yes to strangers, than it is to believe it on the inside. And yet, there was a time I had to believe I was a teacher and later a therapist and even harder, a mother. Lots of us raised on "The Little Engine That Could"came to believe we can do what we think we can do. I need to think I am, think I am, think I am an artist. Besides it's fun to say I am an artist whether or not I'm chuckling inside.

Baruch ata adonai...I love the idea of reinventing myself. Parts of me are still voting for the conservative party, the party of tradition and it's always been that way and it's safe. They know they're outnumbered though. It's so much fun to be someone else entirely, to fly away on the wings of romantic daydreams that do come true. Thank you for your encouragement and letting me know you're on the side of figments of imagination. Amen

Taking Home Away with Me

"...the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace." Gaston Bachelard

Each Fall I dream up ways to get away from the dreary melancholy winter weather in my hometown.  I've just returned from one of those dreams, and while away, I found myself dreaming about being home, being in my familiar world, eating plain food, spending the morning in my bathrobe, being unaccountable to time. I can only be overstimulated for so long before I need to tuck my head under my wing and be alone. For next weekend, I'll pack a book to disappear into, a journal, a few art materials to take me into myself. And I need to write a morning prayer. I don't need to be in my home away from home for long, but I do need to remember to honor that part of myself.

Baruch ata adonai...I am grateful to the part of me that knows what I need to do to keep myself happy, and I'm grateful to the part of me that knows I need to protect myself from what I think I need. Amen