we hike past these cattails. and, because i have a vivid imagination, gazing into their thick darkness, i wonder what would happen if i suddenly had to run and forge my way through these dense reeds in order to be safe. david claims that my imagination is usually on overdrive; i retort, “doesn’t everyone think about this stuff?” he replies, “no, they don’t.” i shrug. for me, these cattails make me think; they make me ponder. they inspire me to make a plan. i am convinced: it would be better to run and find a less dense area of vegetation and then i might be able to find my way through to the other side, to safety. i keep watch for these less dense spots as we hike. just in case.
the magic of the 1970s un-candles was based on density. density parses out liquids which are different. because oil is less dense than water, oil floats on top of water. and so, you would fill the glass container with water and add a bit of oil on top. a simple candle wick in a plastic wick shield would be placed atop this and it would float. voila! the un-candle. a flickering light atop the water.
in the case of other uses of the word “dense”, i would revert back to maybe seventh grade. “you’re dense!” one student would verbally accost another. dense, back then, informally meant ignorant, vacuous, vapid, thickheaded, half-witted, moronic, gullible, daft. most of these synonyms didn’t rapidly come to the forefront of the seventh-grade mind, so “dense” worked. and it seemed kinder than “stupid”. slightly.
as we approach every level of profound challenge in our world today, i am hoping for an un-candle approach. i am hoping that the less-dense rise to the surface, that the less-dense light the way, that the less-dense path opens for us.
8pm curfew and we can hear car horns and sirens blaring, smoke is in the air.
midnight and we hear gunshots, loud booms, sirens.
4:30am and the sirens continue. a storm arrives; the thunder adds to other unidentifiable sounds and is unnerving. we sit, awake.
early morning and the sun has risen to a stormy day. smoke fills our house from buildings, structures, vehicles burning in downtown and uptown kenosha. it is hard to breathe. but we are very much alive.
the town is shoring up the lakefront. the bedrock is crumbling. every time a storm comes, particularly from the north or northeast, the erosion is profound and feet are lost along the shore. enormous boulders are being brought in to nest next to the smaller granite boulders already in place, to protect lives and property. the theory is that these granite boulders will buffet the shoreline against the raging winds, the elements, the squalls, and the resulting rocks flung westward when those aggressive storms come.
the tempest of social injustice is railing. the coastline between white and black is hot and the fire of anger is raging. jacob blake, an african american man, who is right between the ages of My Girl and My Boy, was shot seven times in the back by a police officer on sunday. he is fighting for his life and the community is fighting to be heard.
what will tonight bring?
as the bedrock of this community crumbles we wonder what seawall will be built to protect all, to guard against inequity, to keep everyone safe from violence, to stop the injustice against black members of our community, our state, our country? what intelligent, articulate conversation will take place? what questions will be asked; what wisdom will be proffered? what compassion and generous action will be offered? how will we buffet against the rocks of hatred and bigotry flung by aggressive hostility? what will the boulders of change look like?
“the wise man built his house upon a rock, house upon a rock, house upon a rock. the wise man built his house upon a rock and the rains came tumbling down.
the rains came down and the floods came up. the rains came down and the floods came up. the rains came down and the floods came up and the house on the rock stood firm.
the foolish man built his house upon the sand, house upon the sand, house upon the sand. the foolish man built his house upon the sand and the rains came tumbling down.
the rains came down and the floods came up. the rains came down and the floods came up. the rains came down and the floods came up and the house on the sand went splat!”
we have some decisions to make. as a community, a state, a country. what will we do? will it be sand? again? or will it be rock?
it is our meditation, our respite, our rejuvenation, to hike. so we find trails everywhere we go. our old hiking boots have stories of mountains and deserts, forests and rivers, dunes and sidewalks.
we choose to trek instead of anything else. for we have found that “in every walk with nature, one receives far more than one seeks.” (john muir, naturalist)
in these times of pandemic, our travel has been of limited scope. we have taken seriously the words of fervent scientists and medical experts to stay close to home, to wear masks, to social distance, to be always aware of putting self and others at risk. and so our spectrum of hiking trails has been reduced in range, the radius from our home none too large.
the river we hike along is well-known to us now. we know the curves in the trail; we know the bend in the river and where the water laps at the bank. we anticipate the small turtles on the rock in the tributary; we expect the butterflies to be numerous as we pass the field of wildflowers. we know where the mile markers are before we see them. we know where the mosquitoes will swarm. it doesn’t change anything for us. we still go. we still hike. for “into the forest i go to lose my mind and find my soul.” (john muir)
each time we start we are aware of how very familiar this place is. each time we finish we are aware of seeing it with fresh eyes. marcel proust’s words, “the real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes” comes to life with every booted step.
the place we go, the haven we seek, are trails that let us be quiet, trails that let us talk, trails that make us tired, trails that invigorate us. they need not be new.
each time we take any of our beloved trails or walks in the general radius of our sweet home we breathe air into anxious hearts, solace into worried minds, we stretch stress-tensed bodies, we are mindful of glimpses of eased souls, we draw inspiration from this good earth, we find the new in old.
in a tenuous time of fraying loyalties and the aggressive recruiting of followers, people are being indoctrinated into what they believe are the-cool-groups, welcomed with open arms, social-media “love-bombed” and, it would seem, encouraged to believe that which has not been proven to be true.
indoctrination (noun): the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.
uncritically. terrifying. without critical thought. without mining for facts. acolytes of persons who gaslight, persons who claim absolute knowledge and power, persons who, like the scum on a glass of sour milk, rise from the acidification of true idealism, true tenets, the true basis of a society as a community.
i am worried.
the bridge between us as a country seems as crumbling as the infrastructure of old roads and bridges across this nation. the fragile bridge sways now in the gentlest of breezes. the bricks, mortar, concrete, steel are wearing thin, their veneers weathering storms of severed ties, storms of conspiracy over fact, storms of cronyism over love. the bridge-slayers taunt, tempt with poison fruit, the oldest story of stories. the ideologue-apostles forego conversation for testaments of belonging, baseless creeds. the indoctrination devours relationships, forming unions useful only to itself, without heed to emotional ties or history. crazed, yet measured, words of untruth and hatred blur clear vision to the other side.
the bridge ceases to exist. it becomes but a shadow.
where has this country come? we need so much more. for survival. understanding, compassion, commitment to unity, justice, truth, equality, equity, love of one another, peace among peoples.
the last days we have watched the democratic national convention. we have connected with the real-ness of regular folks, politicians, celebrities across the country who have had something to say. we have listened. we expected words of encouragement, words of hope, words of comfort, words of healing, words of promise to unify and not divide, words we could trust, words of truth. and we have heard them. our hearts swelled with a bit of optimism; our pulse slowed and calmed.
we heard the poignant words of michelle obama, speaking about the promise of this country. we heard the tenderness in jill biden as she spoke about the empathy of her husband, about the import of love and understanding and kindness in this nation. we watched people from each state and territory, on their own stomping ground, cast their delegates for the democratic presidential candidate. we listened and teared up and, mostly, we hoped for these instruments of peace to rise above the noise and the furor of division in this country, slobbering all over itself with rabid foam, inviting ultimate disaster.
we will watch next week as well. the republican national convention will be different than the democratic national convention, for sure. in a climate where i’m not sure everyday republicans even have a grasp of what the party means anymore, it will be important for us to glean that for ourselves. in an effort to attempt to understand the position of others we know and love, it will only be fair to watch both conventions. we will expect words of encouragement, words of hope, words of comfort, words of healing, words of promise to unify and not divide, words we can trust, words of truth.
we live in community. this country’s backbone is the melding of many peoples working to form a “more perfect union” together, to build together, to grow together, to share a common purpose. we shall never arrive as instruments of hatred. we shall arrive, however, as instruments of peace.
it is what it is. what will we choose to do? who will we choose to be?
in a country deeply divided by narrative, the decision between silence and speech presents a challenge. subjected to judgement and the possibility of being harangued, speaking words, speaking truth, is a choice-point.
this is a time of massive misinformation, a time of gullibility, a time of digging in heels, a time of excuse-making, a time of circling bandwagons. to pass by one who opines misinformation is to be complicit. to be silent around falsehoods is to be complicit. to not speak to inequity, to not address moral or ethical failures, to not stand up against prejudice and bigotry is to be complicit. to fail to engage against injustice, to not protect the truth, to rabidly push narratives of lies, is perfidy. to stand silently by is perilous. yes. there does come a time when silence is betrayal.
it would seem that two people or two groups of people, no matter how disparate, should be able to have a conversation. it would seem that they should be able to maturely debate, using factual information, issues that are at hand. it would seem that they should be able to respect each other, use discretion, and, without the betrayal of silence or anger, come to a place where ideas shared might move them closer together in understanding and mutual goals. it would seem that there is a bigger picture.
it would seem that unity might be the utmost goal, the endzone, the heavily-weighted bottom half of the pyramid of needs. it would seem in a country that its people would want to be unified in its most basic desires, its most basic values, its most basic tenets. it would seem that for a society to survive it must gather its people and its resources together to achieve any sort of illumination or actualization.
but relationship and conversation and unity cannot be achieved in silence. for silence-personified invites assumptions. silence-personified instills distrust. silence-personified creates chasms out of dividing lines. silence-personified shatters relationships. silence-personified builds walls of resentment, houses impervious to healing or conversation, learning or compromise. silence-personified is dangerous and paralyzing.
for those who speak the truth despite the pain of vulnerability, despite the vast line in the sand, regardless of any tribal politics and with much courage, we glean there is a way to survival, there is a way out of the polarization.
but time is of the essence. it is none too soon to start. to speak. and not to be silent.
“when you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. you have to say something. you have to do something.” (john lewis)
between us we have two master’s degrees, two bachelor’s degrees, four businesses, a coaching and consulting practice, various certifications, multiple states of teaching credentials, fifteen albums, four singles, hundreds of paintings, multiple play-scripts, countless productions and concerts and performances and gallery showings, a radio show, four cartoons, books, blogs that contain a few thousand posts, numerous and diverse leadership positions in theatres and churches and educational institutions, too many non-profits to count, long resumes and a combined total of over eighty years of work experience.
we are artists. and, as you know, that is not the easy path. it’s gig economy in a corporate environment. it means piecing things together, working a plethora of jobs at once, purchasing your own healthcare, investing in your own so-called retirement, advocating for your own value, balancing, balancing, balancing. the tightrope is thin, but anyone doing the tightrope dance (funambulism) is well-acquainted with the balancing pole and standing tall in the center of mass on the rope, necessities in an artist’s life.
in a workplace conversation once, i was asked how i would even speculate about having a second job. an incredulous moment, as a person who has always had simultaneous multiple jobs, it was ludicrous to me that the person asking this, who apparently has always lived in absolute bullet-pointed stability, could not fathom having more than one job at a time. were artists to be so lucky. were any gig workers, in their area of professionalism, to be so lucky. that is another world entirely.
so we are always on the lookout for additional gigs, so to speak. education, experience and skills from the wide spectrum of the first paragraph speak well to helping with growth and change processes and insight and honoring students and employees, not to mention the separate and interwoven threads of music, painting, theatre. these experiences that span decades speak to the arts, that which the world turns to in times of chaos, unrest, dis-ease, periods marked by adjectives like distraught, devastated, frenzied, unprecedented, uncertain, arduous, splintered, divided, distrustful, untrue, exhausted. the arts – that which feeds society. yet, “creativity takes courage,” understated henri matisse (painter, 1869-1954).
as many of you, we receive solicited and unsolicited lists of jobs in our email. we peruse through the obvious ill-fitting options like neurosurgeon or stem cell biological researcher; we look for opportunities to plug our work as artists into the world. we are also emailed positions that line up with our professional abilities and tenure in the arts.
and this is what we’ve been sent: sandwich ARTIST and GALLERY advisor. it’s hard to know whether to laugh or be insulted. sandwich artist? if this is really what subway calls their employees, i would say most of us have related experience since the first time, at like age 3, we spread peanut butter and jelly on our wonder bread. and gallery advisor? tesla, really? car dealer concierge maybe?
it’s a dim future if you cannot see relevance for the arts in a society, if they are secondary to anything and everything else, if they present in sandwiches and on dealership floors. where are the organizations, the institutions, the employers who recognize the multi-faceted diamonds in an artist’s perspective, an artist’s drive, an artist’s commitment, an artist’s vision, an artist’s project-driven dedication and multi-layered stamina, an artist’s sensitivity, an artist’s heart?
as two artist-funambulists, we’d like something better for the gifted artists giving breath to joy and hope and tomorrow. from the tightrope of this gig economy, it makes our toes curl to think any differently.
i still have it. the index card is taped to the inside bottom of my old piano bench down in the basement. these words, “perfection is an eight letter word. practice ” written in eight-year-old pencil-printing. it’s been there – in that old spinet piano bench – since 1967, when i started taking lessons and needed a reminder how to keep the ups and downs in perspective.
i spent long hours on that bench and on the organ bench also in my growing-up living room. what i could hear in my imagination wasn’t necessarily what was showing up on the keys. my sweet poppo would encourage me, “remember, practice makes perfect,” he’d say. i’d add, well, at least practice moves you in that direction.
there’s no guarantee for perfect. there’s no route to it and any expectation that you will achieve it really is for naught. the best you can do is the best you can do – moment by moment. with practice, each best-you-can-do is better than the last. and so on and so on.
it’s the caring that matters.
i have two amazing children who have shown me examples of the pursuit of how to do something, to a point of excellence, that you’ve never done before. the keeping-at-it, toughlove-letting-go-of-judgment, the training, the practice, the trying-failing-rinse-repeat-ness of learning. they approach new things like stoic explorers, adventurers prepared and open to experience.
it’s the very thing that inspired our snowboarding lesson earlier this year – the one where i broke both of my wrists. every time i hear someone say, “eh, i’m too old; i can’t learn that,” i store my emotional response to that statement away in my memory bank, waiting for the day i’m about to say just that so i might pummel the words before they escape my lips.
even though my wrists broke and even though i cannot point to any great accomplishment or success on the slope, i would not take back the experience or the exhilaration and anticipation of learning something new, particularly, in this case, that very thing that would give me the slightest first-hand touch, not merely a window, into my daughter’s professional world.
in post-cast moments many people, aghast, said to me, “what were you thinking? don’t you think there’s a point you are too old for that? remember your age!” i am more aghast at these words than all the months dealing with uncooperative wrists in a livelihood where they really matter.
knowing first-hand how difficult and humbling pure novice-ness is, i hope i can always release the suffocating self-evaluating that goes hand-in-hand with being new at something; i hope that i always care about learning.
at eight i had no idea what piano lessons would mean to my life. i simply wanted – really, really wanted – to learn. i, at 8, didn’t beat myself up over getting it wrong or failing nor did i get self-conscious about my journey of mastery. i just stepped into it. and i cared with all of my eight-year-old heart.
we walk and talk about the day The Girl or The Boy suggest to getting-older-every-day-us that we purchase new technology or download a new app or try a new recipe or consider a new lifestyle or or or …. the day we will want to say, “eh, we’re too old; we can’t learn that.” i look down at my wrists and i remember to care.
to write on-the-fly requires a certain letting-go. one cannot be too exacting. there is always another note, another rest, another phrase, another measure. always a chance to iron out the details, clean up the rough, rake the sandy grit. composing improvisationally is stepping into not-knowing and following threads that show up. because, instrumentally, i am typically an it’s-a-song-without-words writer, i listen and hang on to where the thread brought me, seizing it to wrap back to themes stated, to gestures implied. the starting gate is full of imagery or word-phrases, emotions to elicit. a shred of hope rose up in front of me today and this time, in an effort to not push back against hope, i answered. the call and response to a scintilla of hope spoke in glimmers of 1 minute 42 seconds.
yesterday was an historic day. after days, months, years, decades of not really speaking up, i found myself speaking. processing the balance of liability-seesaws, i wondered why i hadn’t spoken aloud about things that were not ok, things that were clearly unfair, inequitable, people who were aggressive, people who were passive-aggressive, those who were destructive, those who undermined, those who did not help. i felt the confines of the wrapping-which-kept-me-quiet and pulled tightly across my heart drop ever so slightly away, fibers draping and drifting. voice, a deep breath, a little lighter. a beginning. a shred of hope.
wednesday was an historic day. we gathered together online again, ukuleles and singers. and yesterday i read a post from one of the young women there, “when you play music in a group where the ages range from 31 to 94 you always feel blessed.” community. shared. a place of i-love-you-love-me. a shred of hope.
tuesday was an historic day. a brilliant woman of afro-indian descent was chosen as the vice-presidential running mate of the democratic party’s candidate. oh, where we have finally come, where we will finally go. a shred of hope.
monday was an historic day. the derecho roared by. our tall old trees were spared. this time the rain did not pour in by the air conditioner. the dog and the cat shared the basement with us until the tornado warning expired. we sipped wine and rocked in rocking chairs, listening to the sound of the wind and rain above us. our little space in the world was safe. a shred of hope.
the prayer flags shred in the wind, sending prayers off into the universe. bits and pieces fall to the ground or fly off in the breeze. a perfect heart landed on our deck. a shred of hope.
it all doesn’t change the lost-ness of last friday’s on-the-fly. we have much to weave back together and so much to let go in this broken narrative, a tapestry of individuals, families, cities, states, a country, a world in pain.
a few years ago i went through all the thousands of photographs taken for the previous three to four decades. they were not neatly in photo albums, which would have made it much simpler. instead, with a mere few albums capturing the earliest of years, they were in envelopes in boxes, envelopes in drawers, envelopes in bins, envelopes, envelopes, envelopes. it was a gigantic task with the dining room dedicated to boxes marked with years and headings like “christmas”, “birthdays”, “summer fun”, “trips”, “visitors”, “losing teeth”… an opportunity to re-live all of it, the heart of life lived.
one thing i noticed in my goingthroughgoingthroughgoingthrough and sortingsortingsorting was that it was really obvious that i had most often been the one taking the pictures. through my lens, my focus, my read of the moment, the wisp, the instant the aperture closed, my blink.
there is always the picture-taker, a designated recorder, the secretary of the emotions, the faces, the light and shadow, the view, the action, the moment-in-time. i grab my camera all the time. it’s second nature for me. and now that it’s the same device as my phone, it is incredibly easy to always have it at-the-ready. i just told a friend that i am difficult on a hike – always stopping to take pictures on the trail. it’s not because i’m so much a collector of things-to-have. it’s because i am a collector of things not-to-forget. each photograph, each image reminds me not-to-forget a certain time, a certain place, a certain interaction, a certain story, a certain feeling.
so when i walked into the basement in july and i saw the wisp of me on the easel, it moved me. that wisp is now gone and in its place, paint-over-paint, is this whispered iteration, on its way as d says. a moment snapped of my time, a moment of his. but this one, this wisp, this color-put-to-canvas photograph, is one i didn’t take and, my heart gently points out, one he clearly didn’t want to forget.
please consider following this blog as FACEBOOK continues, with no explanation or communication, to block my posting of it on that platform. thank you! xo
reverse threading 