i searched for quotes about risk. there are a plethora of them out there. then i realized that maybe the best one for today was already there – no good adventure is without risk. there are no guarantees in life. we all know that. nothing that says if you do this, that will definitely happen. the ifs-thens are not absolute. the ifs-thens aren’t even, well, iffy on occasion. and sometimes there’s no chance in hell that an adventure, an experiment, an endeavor will work out. we jump anyway.
in this anniversary week of THE MELANGE, we’ve done a great deal of looking back at our jumping. those jumps reach much further back than just this past year. as two artists living together, two artists working together, two artists laughing and breathing and arguing together, we have experienced lots of falling-into-the-water as we’ve gone. our individual artistry output pre-dates this year by decades. epic moments of success are conjoined with moments of missing the next rock in the stream (see CHICKEN MARSALA sketch above to see what that looks like.) but, even knowing that – by reverse-threading now – in looking ahead, at all the mystery of that, we jump anyway.
nothing worth doing comes without hard work. no good adventure is without risk. there are no guarantees. all wise words. all daunting. we jump anyway.
i had no idea how much i would love designing. through the first ten years or so of album covers, i watched. i sat with my dear friend 20 as he designed so many of my CD jackets and tray cards. i learned a lot. not about how to use photoshop or illustrator or quark but i learned about balance and clean design and how to “see”. so when we started designing for THE MELANGE, that part came more easily. the photoshop part? well, that had a bigger learning curve (as does website designing.) manipulating images and navigating programs without real directions can be a challenge, but i was up for it. lots of learning.
the thing that really surprised us was when we looked at each of our society6.com stores this week and literally counted our product lines. there are 187! 187 lines created across the five stores.
187 product lines later, i look back in wonder.
mugs and laptop covers, tote bags, prints and cellphone cases, beach towels, shower curtains…not to mention leggings. in the course of the last year, i have designed between 50 and 60 pairs of leggings. leggings with morsels of david’s paintings, leggings with graphics we have designed or photographs we have taken, leggings with words of wisdom, leggings with punchlines, leggings with lyrics. i was a leggings-designing-maniac. i think about even just these leggings designed, available on an on-demand site, and think – we could have all those made and just sell them ourselves. we could sell those designs elsewhere – to a company that already produces leggings. we could open a shop with all these products – interesting, different, artistic, not mass-produced or mass-purchased. we could… there’s no telling what we could do.
i asked david if he knew how many blogposts there had been in this MELANGE year. he had already done the math. we each posted 260 posts, totalling 520. that’s more than a few words, more than a few thoughts, more than a little heart.
immeasurable energy has been devoted to these designs, these blogs, to this MELANGE. here – at the one-year-old mark – we are astounded by the amount of time and effort this has all taken. and we look back in wonder.
what has been the reward?
there is no way to underestimate the power of i/we-can-do-this. the sisu of sticking it out, meeting the challenge, staying in the game, learning.
THE MELANGE is celebrating one year. but we are celebrating so much more than that. we look forward in wonder.
i just re-read the first week of our MELANGE, a calendar-year ago now. words about our little boy CHICKEN MARSALA, words spoken by my sweet momma, words about our community, words about david’s studio and my studio, two artists living together, and our own work-in-the-world. i can feel it. that first week.
we come to this place. one year later. i kind of want to go back and re-read each day. study the images we chose, browse the products we created, watch the arc of changes in design through the year, notice the growth, the things we added, the things we let fall off. somewhere around week 3 i wondered if i would have enough to say, enough words that would be interesting or, at-the-very-least, palatable, inviting for others to read.
i write from my heart, most of it experiential…moments i have netted and captured, written down to hold onto the feeling-of-it. i wondered if that might be too….much…for some. in the middle of living life, i want to remember some of the tiniest morsels of time, layered in the sedimentary layers, bits of shining mica in the middle of ordinary….mica that is celebration, that is eye-opening, that is excruciatingly simple bliss, that is painful, that is full of maturing, that is on-the-edge-of-your-seat-nerve-wracking, that is full of hopes and dreams and regrets…all mica indeed.
“live life, my sweet potato,” my sweet momma said to me. yes, momma. this sweet potato is feeling it.
a couple years ago our CHICKEN MARSALA went with us everywhere. i mean literally everywhere. FLAT CHICKEN traveled across the country and we have pictures of him in the scion, in front of the ‘welcome to colorful colorado’ sign, with rest area volunteers, sitting with family at an outdoor bbq.
we had submitted CHICKEN to all the major cartoon syndicates with some interest on their part and so we were bringing him with us, to document his travels and keep our hopes up. ultimately, CHICKEN MARSALA, the strip, was not syndicated and we ended up concentrating our efforts more on short bursts of wisdom and thought in one-panels of CHICKEN in life.
CHICKEN MARSALA and another one-panel cartoon named FLAWED CARTOON, graphic designs we were making or photographs we were taking, david’s paintings, my music – all were fodder for what became a melange, a mixture of it all, the crux of what we would write about each day. and so THE MELANGE, offered monday through friday, was born.
it has – this week – been a year since the first MELANGE was published. and monday through friday since, we have had an image that we each have used as a jumping-off ground for our blogposts, the chute through which we have funneled our thoughts.
i was a crazy person designing products for each of these days…mugs with our sweet CHICKEN MARSALA on them, BE KIND tote bags, FLAWED CARTOON prints, painting morsel throw pillows, what-seems-like a zillion leggings with song lyrics. we posted links for our product lines and re-assessed things daily – placement of images in the blog, placement of hyperlinks, whether or not to include FB ‘like’ buttons….it is an endless list.
somewhere along the way we realized that it was possible that other people might not be as invested in our CHICKEN MARSALA as we were. he wasn’t their imagined little boy; he was ours…
i have this great tear-off calendar i enjoyed every day last year. it sat on my dresser and had a unicorn on every page. it also had a saying of some sort…some words of wisdom, some tongue-in-cheek, some downright sassy. although i love unicorns, for obvious reasons, i found that i could not tell you what the unicorn was doing each day; i barely looked at the unicorn. for me, the important part was the saying. when i realized that, i also realized that was possibly the same reason people were not investing in CHICKEN. it was whatever the panel said, the words, that held the interest. when someone would randomly come upon the image of CHICKEN MARSALA, no matter how adorable the drawing, they wouldn’t ‘see the unicorn’ so to speak, but instead would read the words, the starting gate for our posts. ahhh. we are ever-learning.
and so, we changed our MELANGE monday from CHICKEN MARSALA MONDAY to MERELY-A-THOUGHT MONDAY. and i stopped, for now, designing more CHICKEN products for a society6.com store that was already full of products. CHICKEN MARSALA will have his time in the light; it just isn’t right now.
the same thing happened for our FLAWED WEDNESDAY. as funny as those single panel cartoons were, we found they weren’t necessarily connecting in-a-big-way to our audience, so it was time to re-evaluate our posts for wednesday. FLAWED WEDNESDAY became NOT-SO-FLAWED WEDNESDAY with interesting tidbits we encounter in life.
today (ok, technically calendar-tomorrow but alas let’s not be too detailed) we celebrate this monday in february a year ago. a year of our MELANGE. a year of selecting images we would feature. a year in which we have we have blogged every monday-friday. a year of designing websites, blogsites, products. a year of questions and thoughts. a year of assessing and re-assessing. a roller-coaster of learnings.
“when one door closes another door opens.” how many times have you heard that? people fail to address the hallway in-between. ahh….that hallway in between. full of mystery. full of questions. full of wondering. full of not-knowing. it can be freeing; it can be torturous. bridging from now to next.
two to three months after my big brother died, my sweet momma continued to have nights when she could not sleep. she would rise from bed and go down the short hall to the bedroom that served as her office. in that short walk, she would pass the entrance to the living room. one night, as she passed the living room, glancing in she saw a depression in the very top of the recliner, the way it looks when someone is sitting with their head against the back of the chair. this chair…the very one that my brother sat in so many times in the last months of his life, close to the front door so that he didn’t have to go too far and become too tired.
my momma, not given to fanciful imaginings, decided to walk into the living room to find out why the headrest of this chair gave the appearance of someone in it. she came around to the front of the chair and found my brother. he was sleeping in the chair and did not stir while she stood there. she never said a word, just silently watched for a couple of minutes. her heart full, she quietly walked to her office. an hour or so later, when she was ready for bed, she walked back down the short hall, this time glancing in to the living room to see if the headrest was still shaped as it had been, if my brother was still there. the recliner had returned to its normal state. my brother was no longer there. she went to bed and slept, her time in the hall of grief a little lighter, a little less encumbered, a little less painful. mysterious, full of questions, full of wondering and not-knowing. freeing and a little torturous. but moving into next.
as you know, we are two artists living together. so everything around our house has meaning of some sort. each rock, each piece of wood, each feather, each vintage suitcase, each peace sign, each wooden box, each old window frame, each peeling screen door, each painting. before david’s paintings also found their way onto the walls, there were several paintings i had painted. well, “painted”. i spattered and brushed black and white paint to the beating of my heart onto large canvases until i knew the paintings were done and then hung them up. they each have a story – a heart narrative that might not be obvious to you, but is something i can feel each time i look at each of these paintings.
david’s work is stunning. although some of them are for sale, we have pieces of his displayed on our walls – stories on canvas, we have chosen to hang paintings that tell part of our story together. you never get tired of looking at something that is a piece of your life, a canvas of an intimate moment here or there. K.DOT & D.DOT SEE AN OWL is one of those. it’s an exquisite collection of color and movement and reaching. in our story, it is about seeing an owl in the big old pine tree in our backyard. on your wall, it could be about any moment in your life that you and your beloved looked forward, pointing into the future, embracing it, excitedly sharing together something inordinately full of meaning and just yours. paintings are like that.
“the weakest link,” i said, referring to myself as we spoke about the possibility of going snowshoeing. i had never snowshoed before, but i was excited to try it. we were planning on renting some snowshoes at a nature center and then snowshoeing through the woods. but, in the typical manner of someone who has never tried something before, i was a little nervous about keeping up. i’ve skied before – both downhill and cross-country – and i know it takes some concentrated ability to do it even partially well. hence, the nerves about snowshoeing. (do i need to take lessons? is there a trick to this? are there things i need to know about balance and leaning in and switching leads and and and?)
our best friends and david told me it was “like walking”. i seriously doubted that. i just knew that i would somehow be trailing behind, poles and snowshoes stuck in drifts, head over heels in the snow (literally).
but it didn’t turn out that way. i worked at having a you-don’t-have-to-be-instantly-good-at-this-relax-kerri attitude all the way there. i worried all the way there. did i have the right boots on? should i have worn a different jacket? what kind of gloves would be best? i complicated something that is actually not complicated. but, even in the middle of my snowshoe-agonizing, i kept walking toward it.
and, ohmygosh, it was fabulous. when i wrote to The Girl afterward, she referred to it as “your new fave winter activity”. it is totally ranking up there, high on the list. what better way to hike a few miles through snowy woods? the trails were quiet, save for the punctuation of our laughter and the stops where we had lengthy conversations and brad built a snowman. it was a brilliant day.
so many times we hesitate…we worry…we think we should already know how to do something or be instantly good at it…we resist trying something new….
i just want to say this: walk toward it. it could be an experience filled with quiet and laughter, stretching of muscles intellectual or physical, simple beauty and fresh air in your lungs literal or figurative, and an i-can-do-this illumination.
in the middle of the night when i wake up – which happens every night thanks to the keeps-on-giving gift of menopause – i can hear them.
dogdog is gently breathing, sometimes punctuated by his paws running in a dream where he is doing laps around our pond, excitedly barking. his even breaths, a dog in mostly-quiet slumber, reassure me, and my heart and i listen as he peacefully sleeps.
the peaceful-sleep bar is different for babycat. he is not a stealth-sleeper. well, actually nothing that babycat does is stealthy. he’s not that kind of cat. instead, his sleep on the end of the bed (he picks the side and you definitely know early-in-the-night if you have drawn the short straw) is noisy, fraught with snoring. i’ve never heard a cat snore as loudly as he does; it is absolutely necessary to nudge him a little so that he steps it down a tad bit. even with the snoring and the give-him-an-inch-he’ll-take-a-mile-bed-hogging, babycat’s presence sleeping on the bed is reassuring and i lay awake in wonder at how peaceful he seems, how content.
these two are buddies. i was concerned at the beginning, having never had both a dog and cat simultaneously. i needn’t have worried though. they will lay napping on the raft back to back, with their people nearby. perhaps at those times it is the two of them tuning in and listening – to our voices, our laughter, the rhythm of our day. and perhaps it is those times that they are reassured.
my poppo would likely have agreed with sue aikens. he was a solution-finder. i will, right-here-and-now, brag about his ability to fix absolutely anything; he would find a way, even if he had to make it up. well, mostly because he made it up.
i’m not sure how he learned everything he learned; his knowledge base was incredibly practical. give him any problem and it became a challenge for him – an undertaking he never-ever thought of as insurmountable…it was simply a solution he hadn’t yet found. and so, i hear sue aikens (of national geographic’s life below zero fame – living a solitary life out on the arctic, solving problems i will likely never encounter) and i think of my dad, whose list of favorite places on earth included his workbench out in the garage (or in the basement in earlier years when they lived up north.) he saved every screw and nut and bolt and tool that crossed his path “just in case”. he was a re-purposer before it was vogue. and he was an expert at turning cardboard boxes inside out or fashioning a new box from old in order to ship or store any thing. his rube goldberg fixes were always pretty amusing, but they all worked and i can hear him in my head pondering and strategizing when i look at something-that-needs-fixing. sue aikens would be proud. her glass-half-full attitude is pretty amazing, considering the elements she deals with. she’s pretty black and white about things; a lack of grey is something i can’t really relate to, but maybe that’s why she solves things more easily – she doesn’t get lost in any part of the emotional response to the problem.
i have to say, though, that i wish i could look at problems in the same positive way as sue. yes, yes, yes, i know how much we all grow from problems and solving problems and blahblahblah. it’s the stress of problems i’m talking about…the worry. there was a prayer yesterday in the bulletin that said, “help us resist the reflex to worry constantly about every single detail of our lives…” wow. i double that. mmm. make that triple. it is a reflex. we know that the moments beyond problems will come. more than likely we will be on the other side sometime soon, sitting in the middle of the solution and looking back, shaking our heads at how befuddled and stressed we felt. but in the meantime….
in the meantime, i would like a collection of some straight-up solutions for the problems that lurk…a (metaphoric) closet full of how-to-do-its or at least how-to-make-it-ups. oh, and a better attitude about problems. they are just solutions we haven’t found yet.
ken calls this my MUSH album. he is an amazing producer and i feel fortunate to call him my dear friend as well. he produced 14 of my albums and, although one of my albums and a few vocal singles were done in nashville, now i can’t really imagine any other recording projects without him.
MUSH stands for made-up-shi* and is aptly named. this album came at a really inspired time for me. artists have their highs and lows, inspiration-wise, and this was one of the highs. i’ve mentioned the story before, but i’ll short-story it here again: i had a list of titles – titles i wanted to use eventually for compositions; i carried a notebook and scraps of paper everywhere i went. i had this list with me as i recorded two other full-length albums in nyc at yamaha artist services. in-between recording the two other albums, i would choose a title and play it. simply play it. my heart is laid out in the tracks of this cd; every title was meaningful to me, every piece tells what it means.
AS IT IS is the title track so it’s interesting that i gave over the melody line to a flute, the only piece on all of my albums that has a flutist playing. it’s also rare for me to step away from the piano and, in the production-post-initial-recording phase, play a keyboard. but life is like that. you have to give over sometimes. the texture changes. the melody isn’t yours to own; sometimes you are support staff. make peace with it. it is as it is.
AS IT IS: life. we are right here…where we are supposed to be in this part of the journey…the best time is now. simply because life is as it is. (liner notes)
purchase and download the album AS IT IS on iTUNES or CDBaby
reverse threading 