I Am Worthy, Yes I Am. Repeat.

"Yes, we are totally exposed when we are vulnerable. Yes, we are in the torture chamber that we call uncertainty. And, yes, we're taking a huge emotional risk when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. But there's no equation where taking risks, braving uncertainty, and opening ourselves up to emotional exposure equals weakness."
Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

I'm just starting Brene's book, thank you Flora, and I'm only in chapter two. It's already dogeared. Just this very weekend, just a few days ago, I felt off balance, cranky, sad, and I didn't know why. Then I read a few chapters in, and yes, I was feeling vulnerable. But why? And more so, what was the cause of that feeling and how quickly could I escape. I told my sorry story to a friend. I knew I had to reach out quickly before I could tell myself too big a story about it. Well, guess what? You know what. Because she is a very good listener and because she could identify a similar experience, the story she told me was put in a way that I understood a part of the seed I had planted in myself. As I read, I'm learning more about how vulnerability works.

I'm hoping some of you might start reading Daring Greatly, or if you have, start talking with me about it in the comments section. I's a book worth buying. One of the things I'm working on with myself as I write and add my art on my blogs, as I show my paintings, is to disconnect my feeling of self worth from the comments I do or don't receive. It's easy to attach my self worth to the number of comments that come in. It's easy to attach my self worth to the way people offer feedback on my art. What if you love it? That's great, just as long as I don't bump up my feeling of self worth because of it or feel shame because you don't. We are so complicated!

Baruch ata adonai...I take a lot of chances in life. May I continue to do so. May I move ahead bravely. May I not believe all my inner voices: not the misguided ones that whisper venom or the cheerleaders who rah rah me into believing anything can happen as long as I jump up and down cheer loud enough. What's important to me now is to love the doing of what I'm doing. And I do. Amen

Another Darn Patience Lesson

When we moved in, my garden looked nothing like this. Years and years ago it contained one of every imaginable plant and tree. Five years later we removed the trees that ran down the middle of the lawn, a play set was erected for the boys, a boat full of sand was put in, forts were built, dogs dug, vegetables grew. Just before we got rid of the play set, the swings were taken down and it was covered with flowing white paper and flowers, and it became the stage for a wedding. After the kids moved out, I created my idea of an English garden with masses of day lilies, perennials, annuals, color every season. Whoosh. Years in a paragraph.

My beautiful garden became my refuge from the world, and I loved keeping it looking like something out of House Beautiful magazine. Years passed. A knee replacement. A cranky body. Annuals were replaced with bushes with interesting colors and structure. No more kneeling to cultivate and deadhead. And so it goes.

This isn't the blog I intended to write about my garden. Some of the pictures would't print or didn't allow me to continue to write after printing. I'm learning how to do this and trying really really really hard to be patient with myself. Gardens teach us about patience, don't they. And about life and death. And about the need to pay attention. One year I missed the wisteria growing down through the slatted roof of this garden room, a room with windows and walls you can walk through, because I didn't look at the right time.

Baruch ata adonai...this isn't the blog I intended to write. Today I need to be satisfied with who I am rather than who I want to be or who I very well might be tomorrow. There was a time a didn't know how to put in even one picture. Today I put in two.  If I wait to become perfect before I show my beautiful blooms, chances are I won't bloom at all. Thank you for helping me to be brave. Amen

Dealing with Our Stuff

The American People's Encyclopedia occupied a prominent position in my parent's home for fifty years. Purchased volume by volume from Sears, they represented more than my parent's prayer for our future. They meant my parents had enough money to provide for us what they never had. The books gave them a certain gravitas, proclaimed them adult members of the middle class. They meant my sister and I were to have a college education, that we would never have to face years of unemployment as my father had, and though we were only six and eleven when they arrived, we knew these serious looking books meant business.

Sixty-three years later, those volumes bought with savings and great hopes, those volumes which had a place of honor in my own living room, were dumped on the floor in my home. Have I ever looked at them in all the time they lived with me? In this day of Wikipedia and instant online sources for all you want to know, these volumes speak of another time. Saying good-bye isn't so easy. Even though my parents were very practical people, I feel I need to apologize to them, thank them, honor their hopes so fully realized.

No matter how important our stuff is to us, how freighted with history and personal weight, our kids don't want much of it. By the time my parents died, my sister and I had overstuffed homes. Now our kids do too. My son has told me he doesn't want any of it: not my grandmother's wedding plates and glasses we used and they used on special occasions when we were all growing up, not the sterling silver in the same box I played with as a child, and knew one day would be mine.

So what do we do with the stuff we carry, the stuff we box and store, the stuff we think is so important or simply can't figure out what to do with? These encyclopedias will be upcycled to art pieces. What would my father think? Better than going to the dump I say. No one wants mid century encyclopedias any more. I'll save one remnant: "Anatomy of the Human Body, 12 transparent plates showing the internal organs in natural color." They always fascinated me, and though you can see through page to page from boney structures of the chest to intestines to the scrotum, though you can see front sides and back sides, I still can't see and couldn't then see the very thing I looked for: what little girls are made of and why aren't my reproductive organs even mentioned?

Baruch ata adonai...I am so thankful to my parents for wanting so much for me and doing so much to make that happen. Thank you for placing me in their arms. I will create an art piece in their honor so that this book and their intentions for me live on. I like thinking about that. Amen

Willing to be Vulnerable

Aha! I've been wanting to add pictures to my blog, and today I had just the right combination of courage and willingness to turn my face toward vulnerability and my back to perfectionism. I am quivering with excitement. Not a big deal to many of you, but I know my oldest truest friends are impressed if not amazed. Right? I've been having great fun painting colorful papers to use for cards I'm creating. Cut down to card and bookmark size these are art pieces I'm quite proud of.

This is a time of challenging my willingness to show myself or stay in my shadows forever. Yesterday my husband helped me hang five of my paintings on the walls of my living room, studio and office. Out of the stack of humble canvases leaning against the wall, the stack of mistakes and imperfections and learnings, five hang honorably and proudly for all to see. I'm definitely embracing my vulnerability with love and delight! They look great.

Friday I had a facial treatment and the dermatologist left me beet red and required I stay inside, shades drawn, for 48 hours. Today I move on with my life. My cover story: jetting to sunny Hawaii for the weekend. Staying inside for two days no matter how well I entertained myself, no matter how much fun I had painting and drawing then cleaning out cabinets, is debilitating. When I took a walk after dark, I noticed I felt unsafe on my own block. How much more so if I had been feeling sorry for myself and stayed in a bathrobe for those two days. Our world can diminish us if we let it, and that can become the story of our lives.

Baruch ata adonai...baby steps and then a breakthrough, a willingness to be vulnerable and show parts of myself kept in dark safe vaults. I'm taking a big deep breath. I'm feeling energized. What's next? I'm moving slowly but surely to something that will require everything I'm learning and practicing now, and I have no idea what it is. I know I'm willing. I know I'm moving forward, and I know my eyes are open. Amen

So Hard to Trust when You Haven't a Clue

"Trust that still, small voice that says, 'This might work and I'll try it.'"Diane Marechild

The past few days have been the lulling, quiet, not much happening type, just the kind that used to  make me antsy and impulsive and then for no good reason morph into angst and ennui. But no more. Life is good. The weather is lovely. I woke to rain this morning, so in a day or two my garden will do the happy dance.

I'm painting without having the least idea where I'm going, and yet just the doing is good. The flip side of trusting the process, the nasty nagging side is feeling as though I have no idea what I'm doing either.  Well, it's true, I don't, and I can choose how I feel about that. Shall I put on my duck and cover gear or step into my tutu and boa and dance anyway? When I was writing more and felt dry, I  strung words together that meant nothing at all until some twitch of an idea began to move to a sentence, to a thought, to some idea I had no notion waited inside me. Kind of like now. Now I trust my writing process. I don't know this way of working with paint, but I suspect it is the same. Be patient my heart.

"To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive appear to work backwards." Frances Wickes

Baruch ata adonai...please protect me from my rational mind and it's need to build fences to keep it safe. May I create with paint like my flowers bloom in my garden: sometime showy, sometime waiting for  my words, or fertilizer, or protection from the garden bullies, those slow moving, voracious, relentless, snails to eat them up. Help me paint in an organic way that has nothing to do with my marvelous mind. Amen

Spring is all anticipation

"When all is said and done, spring is the main reason for Wow." Anne Lamott

As I look out my window, trees silhouetted against blue and pink strata now changing to the faintest of yellow pink and greying blue fill my view. In a very short time, just the time I take to write this, the sun has come up enough to reveal shades of green, green trees so recently bare then decked out with buds, then blooms, then the release of petals dropped to a blizzard of white on the ground all around it. The recent rain has made the trees so happy, the air so clean. My garden looks like a teenager getting ready to go to her first prom. In days the wisteria will trail through the arbor, long purple plumes anticipated for so long and gone in days. And now the sky is beginning to show its color for the day, a glare of bright grey.

Why has the thought of pencil boxes, an archaic reference to the past, come to mind? Maybe it's the distinctive smell of anticipation like opening a new book or getting a box of brand new crayons, tips pristine, paper in tact, or new shoes when we're kids and we know we can run faster and jump farther and higher now. Or the smell of my first car, the smell of freedom and possibility. Spring is all satisfying anticipation. Each spring day I thank the tulip tree I pass on my morning walk for coming out again, for giving me so much hope and encouragement to bloom myself.

Baruch ata adonai...thank you. Amen

The Freedom of Silence

"When you become aware of silence, immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning. " Eckhart Tolle, Silence Speaks

This weekend I spent two days in virtual silence. The silence I'm talking about is the silence of internal dialogue, dialogue that saps my joy of creation as it nitpicks and natters mindlessly for its own purposes. This weekend I painted and constructed a book and bookmarks and participated in Skype conferences with my seven year old granddaughter about a book she's writing that I'm illustrating, in total freedom from myself. Only now do I realize why I slept so peacefully last night. I had escaped my boundaries.

As I write about that silence now, and only in retrospect do I recognize it for what it was, I observe it has abandoned me or rather I have abandoned it. Just now comments about getting it right, not getting it right, rewriting, retyping and a loss of confidence in my ability to find out what I think are in charge. I'm no longer involved in the joy of writing and thinking. I'm concerned about exposing myself.

How great to understand all this before breakfast. My inner critic reports to me that all this is quite banal, and I respond, "to you it might be, but to me it is simply amazing." I refuse to get into a conversation with myself about who is who or whom is whom.

Baruch ata adonai...I am so grateful to have spent the past two days in monklike silence. Now I know I can create peacefully and joyfully without continual critical references drawn from the past and no longer true in the present. Thank you. Amen















creating painted paper, using it to make a book, and illustrating a book my grandchildren are writing.