i have a lot of conversations with God. they aren’t really formal; instead we just chat. well, i chat. or implore. or express gratitude. or cry. or ask questions. sometimes my head is bowed and my hands are folded, but other times i am driving or playing the piano or walking or eyes-wide-open. for me, prayer is not just that thing i do at church or before a meal or at night before i go to sleep. it’s just an anytime, everyday way of being, with this magnificent higher power watching over the universe.
anne lamott’s book Help, Thanks, Wow is a gorgeous primer for anyone wondering how to pray, a beautiful reinforcement of the internal power of prayer, an outline of simple spiritual praying. i have read it many times, nodding my head and struggling to always remember, remember, remember the important stuff.
this painting PRAYER reminds me of the quiet, the steady rock, the essentiality of praying.
mama dear (my grandmother) used to sew with her lips pursed, straight pins held between them for quick access. as a little kid, i thought that you had to spit on pins in order to sew; as i grew up i realized that this was a falsehood (i’m sure you are thinking, “wow. what an enlightenment!”)
mama dear was the person who taught me how to sew. with an old-fashioned singer, a red pincushion, a blue sewing box and good sewing scissors, she set me on a course of many projects through my life…outfits in the 70s, curtains and shutter screens for the nursery, jumpers that matched The Girl’s when she was little in the 90s, pillows and stuffed animals, mending jobs, craft projects. my sewing machine is set up again, adjacent to d’s studio where he says he likes to hear me talk to myself or hum as i sew, and i love spending time at my machine, dreaming up things to make.
one thing i am proud of these days – that hanging around me (sewing or doing whatever i am doing) david has picked up some of the vernacular that comes out of my mouth….like “oopsies!!!”
wendy (aka saul aka ben) and i have this thing about unicorns. well, unicorns and bubbles and rainbows. i can’t look at any of those without thinking about her. individually we look especially for unicorn “stuff” for each other; those tend to be small gifts we send from time to time. i have a unicorn calendar that offers pretty straight-ahead advice each day, without mincing words. i have unicorn socks. i have a stuffed unicorn on my piano in my studio. my new favorite unicorn thing is a white plastic stretch unicorn pen she sent me for my birthday…hard to explain…a unicorn with a rainbow mane that looks a lot like a dachshund and is a pen. yep, too much information. you are probably thinking i am too ‘old’ for unicorns, but i beg to differ. one is never too old for unicorns. they are happy and free and magical. plus, as a person who has been horse-crazy since girlhood, anything that even vaguely resembles a horse gets my vote.
d often tells me that i have a wild imagination. that works against me as well as for me. i will imagine all sorts of things – both good and bad. sometimes this is an opportunity; i often find myself imagining things, ideas or plotting while i am blowing my hair dry (this seems to be a time of increased-imagination-activity for me.) or i will be off and running in my imagination on long drives or walking in the woods. sometimes this imagining thing can make you nervous, making up stuff before it even happens. but the word imagine conjures up many things for me. john lennon’s song ‘imagine’ or mercy me’s song ‘i can only imagine’. both have beautiful lyrics; both imagine places and experiences of great beauty and and grace and goodness.
one day when d was drawing our chicken marsala i asked him to include a unicorn. “for wendy,” i said. we decided on the words “give full rein to your imagination” to go along with this drawing of chicken and his unicorn. but when i was designing the cartoon nugget, i added the word “reign”….it felt right. after all, what could be the worst thing if we all let our imaginations be sovereign? if we imagined a world of peace and harmony and rainbows and bubbles. and yes, maybe even people on unicorns wearing creativity-tiaras. full reign.
our dog has separation anxiety. he doesn’t cry and whine while we are gone (that we know of) but he gets this incredibly sad why-do-you-want-to-leave-me?? look on his face (see: the dad on my big fat greek wedding) when we get ready to leave to go. anywhere. we feel compelled to tell him, “church. we are going to church.” or “errands. we are going on errands.” (and then we feel we have to explain to our dog-who-loves-to-go-on-errands that it’s too cold in the car for him to wait during this particular set of errands.) we have this running dialogue while we are out, joking about how he is asking babycat if we are “everrrrr coming back” to which babycat sneers at him and calls him names, reminding him that we come back every single time. well, at least we are amusing ourselves.
i have separation anxiety. (ask my children.) but i’m not writing about that kind of separation anxiety. it is about the paintings i have fallen in love with leaving our studio. it’s crazy. that’s the whole point of paintings – to be placed where someone will commune with it and draw from it and love it (like me.) as we continue our virtual gallery sale, i find myself thinking about each of these paintings to which i feel so attached.
and i know that i have to let go. and hope for as many paintings to have-to-leave-us as possible for, as artists, this is how we make a living, this is how we pay our bills, this is how we make a tiny impact in our little corner of the world.
i truly wish for each of you who have pondered an original painting or have purchased one – no matter where you have done so – to be just as in love with it as i feel about david’s.
life below zero has captured our attention. sheesh. we are not ‘those people’ who have to follow shows, but we find ourselves searching the channel-changer for the national geographic show or… wait-for-it-this-is-no-surprise … this is us. (so i guess, in essence, we are ‘those people’.) anyway, that’s not my point.
when david drew this, i laughed aloud. it is truly funny to think about what animals dream (like our dogdog who runs in his sleep and babycat who snores up a storm) and if their dreams distort reality, just as ours do. in the morning, over steaming mugs of coffee, we often tell each other what we remember from our dreams. talk about distorted reality! i crack up thinking about what jessie holmes (the most avid -and very-sweet-to-his-dogs sled dog guy on the show) would do if he saw this cartoon.
the last little vestige of winter is in the air here (well, maybe.) as i write, there is snow in the forecast. even though we had this amazing hike-gift the other day in sunny 65 degree temperatures, truthfully, i don’t really mind that winter hasn’t ended; it is a time of fallow and that brings great anticipation for spring and newness.
leonard pitts jr. wrote an opinion column, a gorgeous essay on the moon that we read the other morning. only it wasn’t really about the moon. he references a short film (which we watched) by filmmakers wylie overstreet and alex gorosh called “a new view of the moon” where the two men “wandered around los angeles with a telescope…asking a cross section of passersby in a cross section of places…to put their eyes to the viewfinder and gaze upon what they’ve looked at a million times yet never seen.” the two men found that people responded in the same way, awestruck, profoundly moved by the vision. the short doesn’t feature the moon; it features the reactions of people as they gaze into the telescope. leonard calls it “a hymn to our common humanity.” a reminder that in all our differences we are the same…”we spend too much time looking down and across.” we are, yes, tiny in the vastness – something i felt myself in writing about david’s painting FROM A DISTANCE that we chose for thursday’s melange. “so each other is all we have. but then, it should be all we need,” leonard writes.
when i drew this simple graphic, i wanted to portray a uncomplicated thought. an image unadorned with fancy-ness, but, hopefully, clear…or, at the very least, thought-provoking. “your” earth with arrows upward, “your” earth with arrows that circle around, “our” earth with arrows that circle around, “earth” with arrows that circle around.
it is all a circle. what we do counts. how we help counts. how we help our earth. how we help each other.
what’s that saying?…’one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’? a walk through our house shows we drew this chicken nugget from our own lives. i’ve written before, ok many times before, about the stones in our home, the sticks and feathers, the old doors and windows, re-purposed old aluminum coffee pots as canisters, old stoves still working, my dad’s workbench wooden boxes, pieces of old desks or old wooden crates as end tables. everyone has their own definition of “treasure”; for us it’s just not always the shiny new stuff.
this weekend marks another earth day, a celebration of support for our beloved home planet. more than 193 countries now mark this day as a day of awareness and honoring. as we move about our days, we make seemingly miniscule decisions about how to handle our little piece of the globe. but each one of these has an impact and the ever-widening ripples will either be adding to the protection of mother earth or contributing to the harm that will adversely effect our earth in the long-term. yes, those blue recycling bags cost a bundle, but it helps. yes, those kitchen cabinets might look old for you, but they’d look better in someone else’s home (who maybe doesn’t have cabinets) than in the dump.
maybe a few sticks or rocks placed here or there in our home reminds us of all that. they are treasures for me. they always have been. we can’t fit all our treasures into our literal ‘special box’ of memories so they sit out. i can’t tell you specifically where each of them came from anymore, but i can tell that each one is meaningful and each one comes from our good planet earth.
on our work table in our sunroom we have three wedding invitations. each one is beautiful, sent to us by the children of friends or relatives. it is that time, when the next generation is marrying. we are excited for each couple and celebrate with them, whether or not we can be at the event with them.
when we were choosing a piece of music for this ks friday, we decided to honor these celebrations of love-found with the song AS SURE AS THE SUN. (scroll down to listen) it is our hope that in each of these couples they are, “in for the long run, forever…safe to be who (they) are” and that, in that universe mystery of ultimately finding each other, they are loved “as sure as the sun.”
david’s painting SHARED FATHERHOOD makes me weep. it is a powerful painting of two fathers tenderly and humbly holding their baby. it is love in a pure form. it makes me think of my son, The Boy. i can see him in this painting and the possibility of him choosing one day to share fatherhood.
SHARED FATHERHOOD, mixed media 39.5″ x 51″
in the very corner of this painting is the morsel i chose for today. a doorway. or is it a window? either way, it struck me as a morsel image, especially in the context of this painting.
so many figurative doorways/windows, so little time…. is it a doorway into acceptance? into inclusion? into openness? into home?
we sat this morning, over early coffee, and talked about our perception of ourselves. how we can’t see that we exhibit the very things we tout we aren’t. or, conversely, how we aren’t (in whole) the things that we tout we are. how scary is that? it’s human. we ponder and perseverate over the things we believe. and we realize in moments of self-judgement that, yet again, we have a view of ourselves that is perhaps somewhat inconsistent with who we are. that goes both ways, however. the times we believe we are not enough, we are incomplete, we don’t measure up – those times are also inconsistent with who we are.
the doorway in – to acceptance of where we are, what we have been through, where we are going – to learning more – to growing – to knowing we are held in grace – to forgiveness of others and ourselves – to trying again tomorrow – to home, a place of as much gratitude and peace we can muster and then even more – this is a doorway/window in to shared fatherhood (read: parenthood) of the world, where each of us is responsible to do our best, bring our best, try our best.
when he was a kitten, i wanted to name our cat ‘jack’ but The Girl and The Boy objected. to me, he looked like a ‘jack’ in the way animals look like names, plus every ‘jack’ i could remember meeting had been a really nice guy.
and, in line with my nice-guy-jacks, this jack – the one with the ‘save the beanstalk’ picket sign – is a nice guy.
another case of little-guy-vs-big-guy, jack just wants to face his giant, save what is good, fight for that which he worked hard, keep what is his safe, preserve what is organic and part of the earth. i immediately think of the many marches across our country.
beach towels
speaking their minds, good people are making an effort to face their giants, save what is good, fight for that which they work hard, keep what is theirs safe, preserve what is organic and part of the earth.
i believe that good prevails over giants, in the long run. sometimes, the long run is waaaay long. but good prevails. and beanstalks grow and flourish.
