i have literally sat across the restaurant table (or the kitchen table or the living room or or or) from him, on date night or any other night or morning or day, staring at his face, thinking, “geeeeeeez. you are DEFINITELY an acquired taste!” but then, a few moments (ok, or longer) go by and love swirls around me and i like him again.
i KNOW you have been there…whether on a date or with your significant other…the times you think “whattheheck??!!??” thank goodness that is balanced out with “you are totally my type!!!” or there would be NO relationships in the world.
i’m guessing he thinks that about me too (but only RARELY. lol.)
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!!!”
the quiet and not-so-quiet moments of comforting. your child. your friend. your partner. when they see the storm coming and you are there. when the storm is raging around them and you are there. when the eye of the storm gives false pause and you are there. when the tides pull back and regain momentum and you are there. when the storm has finally passed, the debris is fierce and you are there. when the rebuilding starts and you are there. the storm – physical or emotional – does not have to be endured alone.
lumi is our granddog. she is our only grand-anything so far, so she, like all first grand-anythings, holds an esteemed place in our hearts. kirsten and becky adopted her the end of last summer and, in many ways, they are learning what it is like to have a toddler. well, kind of. happily, The Girl sends me photos and videos of lumi-girl, the “powderhound” (as she says). she is an amazing little dog, literally chasing their snowboards down gigantic mountains, zigging and zagging behind them. she hikes long distances uphill with them as well, as they splitboard up seeking height and good snow. many of the videos are of lumi at night, mushing into the blankets, curled up next to them, sleeping, snoring, in funny positions. she goes everywhere with them. they worry about her, accommodate her needs, love her desperately. lumi roots their little family.
and what better way to root a family, but in love. in steady, holding-fast, unconditional adoration.
The Girl and The Boy were little when i wrote and recorded this piece of music GIVE ME ROOTS, GIVE THEM WINGS. the title wording was deliberate; it was stunning to me how rooted having children made me feel and yet i knew that, even from the very start, just as i was giving them roots, i was also giving them wings. the toughest part. that letting go thing. The Girl told me today that i was high maintenance. me??? “what???” i said. she said, “have you ever MET you?” wow. straight to the gut. lol. she made me laugh. i guess as a momma i may want a littlemorelittlemorelittlemore time….
when The Girl was a baby, jenny gave me a cross-stitched picture with the words “give them roots, give them wings.” bittersweet words. how little i knew back then.
no matter any other job i have had or will have or any other work i have done or will do, i will always consider motherhood the most important. i cherish every moment of all of it, even the very hardest moments. The Girl and The Boy are out in the world, doing what makes them happy, close or far away.
they root me. yes. even as i continue to watch their wings lift higher and higher.
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.
David asked me what I would do with a tax refund, were we to be getting one. I answered that I would want to do something special. Go somewhere or purchase something I have wanted for our home for a long time. It’s always a piece of art or something that evokes emotion in me that pulls at my heart and my purse strings. So often I have said, “I wish…”
Individually and together we have heard those same words “I wish…” from people who have connected to one of these paintings, a piece they would cherish in their home or a space important to them. We are grateful when David’s paintings find such homes.
We are celebrating five years together soon and think this is a perfect time to pass along heart opportunities: connecting paintings to the hearts who love them. So we are offering an opportunity to you at a time that is so important to us.
We want these paintings to be with the people who wish to have them AND we need more studio space to welcome new work. In a society of sales-minded shoppers, we asked ourselves, “Why should a gallery be any different than any other business?”
So we are having a sale. A big sale. 50% off any painting on the gallery site. (through april 22. naturally, plus tax and shipping, if we are shipping the painting to you.)
Go browse. If you are already connected to a painting or your heart connects anew, email us through the contact page on his site (or call us or text us.) We will get in touch as soon as possible and work out the details with you.
Know that we appreciate you, your enthusiam, your sharing and support of the work we do. We know that we don’t do this work alone. Thank you. From our hearts.
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.
reverse threading 