two people get credit for this “just shrug”: 20 (aka john) and justine. it was in the “old days” when i was at the graphic design studio what felt like all the time when i learned this mantra.
20 designed the first ten or so of my album jackets (and traycards, if you want to get specific.) i would spend time with him and justine (the person who made things happen at the office) idea-brainstorming or watching layout. i can’t tell you how many times deadlines would rapidly approach or the print shop would goof on a run or the computer would glitch or…. i would inwardly be freaking out (and maybe outwardly), but 20 and just would be even and relaxed (at least on the outside.) one or the other would look at me and say, “just shrug.” after about a zillion times, it stuck.
shrugging off the stuff that stresses us out is not a science. it’s most definitely an art form – approached and accomplished differently by each person who attempts it. everyone chooses different crayons out of the box, everyone paints with different size brushes, everyone chooses a different key on the piano, everyone sings a different song, everyone relaxes a different way, everyone re-centers differently. but people are able -and if they weren’t, we would all be a paralyzed-with-stress community of people- to slough it off, to let it roll off their shoulders, to move on, to shrug.
i once heard an interview with a woman who was about 95. she was happy, happy, happy and spoke of her life. the interviewer asked her, “to what do you attribute your happiness, your ease in the world?” she answered, “i don’t take anything personally.”
my husband is a painter. of course, you know that. his studio is steps away from mine, steps away from our office, steps away from the coffee pot. what that means is that i can just pop in at any time to see what he’s painting, to chat, to have a cuppa or bring down a couple glasses of wine, to throw myself in front of paintings he is about to cover over with a swath of new paint.
what’s really fascinating is the process of his painting. i will walk down and find pieces on the wall or the easel that speak to me and he will tell me that he is “no where neeeeear done.” he takes pictures along the way and i scam them onto my camera roll for future use, not willing to let go of the resonance of one of the along-the-way iterations of a painting.
this week is a perfect example of that. he was in the middle of a painting – a follow-up to earth interrupted I – when i went downstairs to chat (read: procrastinate doing whatever it was i was supposed to be doing at the time.) the image and color screamed out at me. i couldn’t beLIEVE he was going to cover it all up with more paint. the process was so striking. take a moment to just really look at these process shots and the morsel i chose and breathe them in:
process morsel
process morsel
morsel of a process morsel – held in process
and yet, the finished painting earth interrupted II is a stunning, stunning, stunning canvas. it belongs somewhere to get its due. it makes me feel like the universe is weeping for the earth. it makes you pay attention to it. i am humbled by how truly magnificent this painting is.
earth interrupted II, mixed media 48″ x 34.5″
each week i design products from each of the days in our melange. some of these are cartoons, some just words, some lyrics or song titles and some are david’s paintings. i have the creative latitude to choose morsels of his paintings and design from there…a enviable starting point for someone who loves flexibility. this week is a sort of brain stretch. with the exception of designing leggings, where i used both of the morsels on this page, the morsel i have used in design is a morsel of a morsel process shot of earth interrupted II (i said it was a brain stretch.) it is called held in process and is a beautiful (and absolutely timely) image on its own. how odd that it is not actually the painting, but is underneath the painting, a layer of earth interrupted II.
it makes me wonder if we ever think about how layered everything is, everyone is. what is beneath the surface…a richness we may never know, a history we can’t necessarily comprehend. where we have all come from is woven color and texture and light and darkness, swaths of paint and attempted erasures that would cause other people to stand in front and call out to us, “no! don’t erase that! it’s beautiful! it’s important! it speaks to me.” we are all held in process.
interrupting is an art form on long island. i know this. i grew up there. and, apparently, i carried this forward. it took d a while (read: a few years and meeting crunch) to realize i was paying attention, that i wasn’t ignoring what he was saying when i interrupted…i just knew where he was going with it and jumped ahead. now, i do realize that sounds pretty rude. it’s not my intention to ever be rude, so i have tried, in recent times, to w.a.i.t. before i speak…at least a little bit longer. if you are nearby when jen and i talk, you will think we are interrupting each other, talking in a circular path and arriving back at the point; carol and i have, for decades, conversed in short snippets of interrupted tangents. regardless of our intent, no one wants to be asked to “pay attention!”
yet, we have all these ways, nowadays (using this word makes me sound old), to not pay attention. how many videos have you seen where people are walking in a mall (or somewhere) texting or reading on their cellphone and fall into a fountain (or some other obstacle.) we sit with others and try to hold a conversation, but they are busy on their phone or some device checking facebook or texts or twitter or the news…so many ways to not pay attention, so many distractions. we see the tragic effects of split focus while people are driving cars.
we are no longer just giving our attention to the moment. we are interrupting conversation, our work, the activity we are involved in, each other’s safety. we would be well-served to pay just-a-little-more attention.
with the advent of ancestry kits and accessible dna testing, we are a society of people with more desire to learn about our individual heritage. for christmas, The Girl and The Boy each got a dna testing kit from their father. i’m excited to hear the results of these. it’s fascinating to me to find out what our roots are; despite some specificity flaws and rounding up (or down) of genetic heredity in the testing and reporting kits i have read about, it is still interesting to know just a little bit more about where we come from.
my sweet momma and poppo traveled to salt lake city to work on the genealogy of our family. they spent hours in the library there, researching. they would have loved the idea of simply submitting dna to find out a broad spectrum of heredity, of lineage, but i suspect they still would have traveled to work on this the old-fashioned way, looking for names of family and how the branches of the tree spread out.
without doubt you have seen the commercials for these tests. my favorites are the ones where people find that they were either mistaken about their ethnic heritage or they found that there were some surprises. the best part is that – and i know it’s a commercial, but hey, i’m gullible – they embrace learning about this new part of their identity they had no idea existed. they embrace something different. they want to celebrate ethnicities they knew nothing about. why not celebrate these whether or not it is a part of our heritage? maybe we can make the legacy we pass down one of inclusion and acceptance and a curiosity to learn and welcome others, whether or not their dna matches ours.
more than once i have been in a moment when i thought, “this is a slice of heaven.” everyone has them. like this scene, it may be on the beach. it may be in the woods. it may be in the rocking chair with your tiny baby. it may be on the mountain in fresh powder. it may be listening to music while running (or sitting quietly) or reading poetry in an adirondack chair. it’s different for everyone. regardless of where it is, of when it is, of what it is, everything feels in balance and all feels well with the world, at least in your little piece of the world. we feel grateful and alive. and we wish for more of those moments.
what if we treated every breathing moment like that? like a slice of heaven.
sisu sue swore by them. turtlenecks. she has them in every color, every kind of weave and fabric. she looks fabulous in them and wears adorable chic jackets over them. she is one cool and trendy lady and i adore her.
having already started the hot-flasharama-period of my life when we were working together, i would ask her how she could stand having a turtleneck on; it was (and mostly still is) out of my realm of imagination being able to wear a turtleneck and not ripping it off in the middle of -say- the choir room or the train to chicago or in the car while driving. this oh-so-wise treasured woman told me that someday i would understand.
THAT DAY HAS COME.
i look in the mirror, a few steps of days away from 59, and stare at (you might want to stop reading now) my NECK. what has HAPPENED? suddenly, my neck (and chin, for that matter) have become O-L-D. where has the time gone? where did my old neck go? and where did that new chin-under-my-chin come from?
my sweet momma, at 93, looked at me one day and said, “i looked in the mirror and (in a horrified voice) i saw an OLD woman.” “momma,” i reassured her, “at 93, you are an old woman, but you are a BEAUTIFUL old woman.” personally, i thought my momma was striking. every last wrinkle told a story. every last thing she saw as a flaw. but my words fell on deaf ears. she just stared back at me. probably feeling much the same as me. delusionally thinking that time would stand still in our necks and chins and -yup- everywhere else. time and menopause take their toll.
the next time you see me try not to stare at my neck (although i have likely set you up for that.) i may or may not be wearing a turtleneck. the ironic part is that a real turtle’s neck really does look a lot like mine. sheesh.
anyone walking in our home knows this is true: i’m a vintage type. our home is not populated with new things fresh from the pottery barn catalog. instead, it is filled with things that are re-purposed, things that are old, things that have some history, things we haven’t replaced with new things. even our manner of work is kinda vintage, although this blog and our online product lines aren’t evidence of that. but as an acoustic-analog-type musician and a brush-to-the-canvas painter, we pretty much scream
“vintage”.
one of my most treasured physical memories of my poppo are a few old small wooden boxes we found next to his workbench. they would likely have been thrown away, but i knew he had “saved them” for some future purpose – perhaps holding random fasteners or nuts and bolts. we carefully wrapped them and brought them home and they now sit in our sunroom (next to our not-so-vintage-and-really-awesome nespresso machine) and they hold nespresso capsules (which are recycled) and a collection of old clothespins my sweet momma used to use on the old clothesline in our backyard growing up. it’s not the fancy stuff. it’s the vintage stuff.
i lusted over this typewriter in the antique store. i’m still thinking about it. if it’s still there one day when we are visiting that shop and i have a little bit of extra spending money, i will buy it. i’m not sure what i will do with it, but it speeeeeaks to me. my sweet momma loved typewriters too. what is it about those?? i think correctotype and purple carbon paper, the workout your fingers got, how it feels when you take the return handle to move to the next line down of type, and that really great sound -think of it…hear it- when you pull the paper out of the roll. it’s visceral.
the stove/oven in our kitchen is, ummm, old, and, although i prefer to think of it as ‘vintage’, it doesn’t necessarily count as romantic ‘vintage’. it was here when we bought the house in 1989 and had likely been here at least ten years at that point; the people who owned the house before us were not the buy-new or even fix-it-up type. matter of fact, they took it to a new level, putting contact paper on the countertops and backsplash and offering to teach us how to replace it. (eww. the sheer bacteria-breeding-ground-ness of that makes me shiver. one of the first things i did was remove that stuff.) but, back to the stove/oven. it continues to work and i can’t tell you how many meals i have cooked on it and how many people have eaten those meals. (if you merely consider almost 29 years and maybe just one meal a day, that is 10,585 times that this appliance has served me and my family and it is likely about 40 years old.) my sister has had multiple stoves/ovens in the time i have had this one. granted, she has enjoyed lots of updated features i haven’t had, but i haven’t (knock wood) spent anything to date on a stove/oven since 1989. amazing. it’s a testament to kenmore’s older appliances. someday i know we will have a new one, but in the meanwhile this workhorse is not taking up room in a dump somewhere, with a half-life of a billion years (ok, slight exaggeration) and i feel good about that. it’s not pretty, it’s not high-tech; i feel it has earned the label ‘vintage’ and no one seems to run – aghast- out of our kitchen because it graces the spot for ‘stove/oven’. there is something to be said for that.
we just had breakfast; d made it as he does each morning these days. he cooked it on that stove and it was deeeeelicous. and me? i’m going to get out our coin jar and count what’s in there. maybe there will be enough to go back to that antique shop so i can bring home this typewriter.
try to see what they see. i glanced back over what i’ve written the last week: about trying to see eye to eye, about assuming awe, about being relentless in a life that isn’t simply black and white, about being brave. is it possible to write too many words about the importance of empathy? the importance of trying to walk in another’s shoes to really understand their circumstance, their joy, their plight, their challenge? because it’s easy to forget, i never feel like i can be reminded enough; it’s always hard to remember my perspective is different than any-other-person’s-on-earth. sometimes it’s laden with stuff. it’s all so complicated.
when dogdog was little we were astounded by his exuberant joy. he was always bounding, seemingly ever hopeful. he still is. i’ve written about what his take on the world looks like to us; i’ve written about what babycat’s take on the world looks like to us. they look forward and see possibility, without the capacity to mull all the looking-backwards-stuff over in their brains.
we surround ourselves with wonderful pets who unconditionally love us. all of us who have dogs or cats -or any pet- we adore know this; people who dedicate time or their lives to keeping animals safe – like aly, a veterinarian, or jen, who has spent lots of time volunteering at humane societies and sanctuaries, or my sister, who just adopted a puppy-she-wasn’t-expecting…we all know this. they see us like no one else. and they are part of us in ways not easy to express in words. they aren’t looking at us with prejudice or judgement, emotional baggage or elitist measurements of value. they simply expect the best and somehow they find it in the very next moment. they find it in each moment. they clearly know something we don’t know. they don’t need to walk in another’s shoes. they just look forward and trust. it’s simple for them.
for us? we can stand to be in those other shoes AND to look forward. we can try to see what they see.
i love design. and i love finding the small morsels of design hidden in each of david’s really exquisite paintings and, with my mind’s-eye-magnifying-glass creating products with them…my favorite new design challenges are – amazingly – leggings! but, regardless of the product i am designing, it makes me crazy how many stunning individual images are within the whole…i’m bowled over with my camera roll after i shoot a painting.
earth interrupted I, mixed media 48″x53″
it occurs to me that this is not far from something i should notice in all of life. quarter earth – a part of earth interrupted I – is no less a beautiful image because it is a smaller piece of a whole painting. ahhh. it’s not a stretch to see – that the individual daisy is no less a beautiful image because it is a small part of a field of daisies…this moment is no less a beautiful image because it is a small part of a life of moments…we are no less a beautiful image because we are are a small part of a whole world of people.
i hardly know where to start. eye to eye. i to i. dang.
it’s easy to look at this and think of my own daily-life-eye-to-eye challenges. but – i can’t look at this cartoon and stay away from the political climate in our country. whether you prefer blue or red – or even purple – you have to admit, we are not in a state of blissful co-existing. we have moved in together and have drawn lines down the middle of the virtual apartment, down the middle of the ever-increasingly important issues, down the middle of integrity, down the middle of people’s hearts. and, with such strong big-thick-font-lines drawn, there seems to be no meeting ground, no where to go. the “eyes” of wisdom and for-the-good-of-all-people have disappeared and the “i’s” have shown up, stronger and bigger and more powerful than before; superman without clark kent’s goodness.
where DO we start? pstacey said the other day that we have to start in our own little corner of the world. i agree. how hard is it sometimes to see eye to eye/i to i in our own relationships, our own families? ptom’s words “acts of radical kindness = building community”. i agree. in the middle of our own concentric circles, we make a teeny movement of goodness and the ripple spreads out. there is no where else to start. without our grounding in the breath-space we each take up in the world, we can’t make any progress, we can’t ripple out.
perhaps we all could work on seeing eye to eye (er, i to i) if we made conscious and generous life-giving decisions with every choice-we-are-faced-with that take into account a weighing-in of how it might impact others. we don’t have to agree. but we have to respect each other in the process, try to walk in another’s shoes, see another perspective, see what someone else’s eyes see. see i to i.
yes! there are two different product lines – each easily accessible by clicking on the “eye to eye merchandise” link OR the “i to i merchandise” link above.
two people get credit for this “just shrug”: 20 (aka john) and justine. it was in the “old days” when i was at the graphic design studio what felt like all the time when i learned this mantra.
reverse threading 