because one can only lament so much about the current divisive atmosphere. and then it need cease. at least for a moment. for a breath.
we look around for randomness – arbitrary, non-thinking imagery, things that will effect little to no rise in blood pressure, little to no anxiety, no hot flash.
today, this image is ‘pear on wine bottle’, a still life depicting the ingredients of a 5pm cocktail hour. the time of day when maybe the pressures of the day are easing up a bit or the weariness of the day is catching up. a time of a deep breath, a long walk, an old-fashioned or sliced pear and a glass of red wine.
we are fortunate to have these moments at the end of the day when we can take a step back, sit in broken adirondack chairs on our patio and watch dogdog run circles around his roundabout sign in the garden.
we wonder, like you, when we can gather together again. we sigh, not knowing.
when the waning sun warms our faces out back this day, we will tip our glasses to each of you, sending you love, good health and a breath of peace.
wearing flipflops, our feet weren’t prepared for schoolhouse beach. one of only five sandless limestone beaches in the world, we were picking our way across glacier-polished rocks on washington island, vowing to wear our hiking sandals the next time. it was stunning, these smooth white rocks representing thousands of years of geology. it is illegal to take even the tiniest of stones from this beach, but it is obvious that people need to hold these silken rocks in their hands, cairns built along the water’s edge. it’s a place you will forever recognize once having visited there, a place that touches a sense of peace within you.
the cairns up on the high ridges of red rock were equally as moving. stunning in the sunsetting high desert sky, the uneven sandstone edges of stones were piled in formations and i relished every second sharing this with my cherished daughter. it is a sacred place, these canyonlands full of red rock millions of years old.
as we walked in the drizzle in our neighborhood, the sky over the lake began to take on a pinkish hue. we approached the lakefront down by the old beachhouse and saw them, something in thirty years of walking this lakefront i have never seen: dozens of cairns stacked on the rocky beach, mazes, tiny labyrinths.
inspiring and inviting, the cairns beckoned us and we spent time in raindrops wandering and photographing. we were quiet; you could hear the lake gently lapping at the shoreline. mostly, it took us out of our thoughts and worries of the time. someone had made lemonade and we had the good fortune to sip of it.
i distinctly remember designing this. for over a year i spent tons of time designing products: pillows, tote bags, cellphone covers, prints, beach towels, cutting boards, mugs, travel cups, coasters, cards, shower curtains, side tables, leggings. i would study david’s paintings and extract morsels and execute the process – with great joy – of the choosing of the product lines i wished to represent and the designing of those. it was our intention to sell these pieces. i would have absolutely loved to fill a brick and mortar store with these pillows and mugs and journals and tote bags, but the sheer outlay for merchandise and stock and the overhead for a physical store made that impossible. but online – at an online storefront called society6.com, which would manufacture the pieces as they were ordered – it was possible. it was a good premise. so we opened five storefronts online (listed below in case you want to stop by with a cup of coffee) to represent each day of our studio melange postings.
only it didn’t really work.
hundreds, literally hundreds, of designs and thousands of products later, we decided it was time to stop putting the hours of effort into these designs. we had some sales and it is truly a delight to see someone carrying a tote bag i designed or a laptop cover or to hear from someone who is enjoying their purchase. the sales trickle in still, $4 here, $2.10 there. the mark-up, as you would expect, lists mightily to the side of the host company, but we dreamed of great volume – so many pillows that earning a few dollars for each-one-of-many would be a big help to our working budget.
only it didn’t really work.
every now and then i visit these sites and am astounded at how actually cool the products are. the designs aren’t so bad either, if i do say so myself. (tee-hee) there are some really beautiful pieces out there, like this PEACE. EARTH. PEACE ON EARTH. morsel. simple and profound. timely. if you click here, you can see it as a pillow. if you scroll way down on that linked page, you can see all the other products that we designed and made available with this image. it was within the painting INSTRUMENT OF PEACE that i found this morsel.
even though it didn’t really work, i suppose it worked. because i can’t begin to tell you how much i learned. maybe that’s the point. maybe that’s always the point.
for more morsels of david’s paintings, click here:
because i have this thing about everest, high-mountain-climbing tales and the arctic, we have a propensity to seek out movies we can view that tell these stories. we stumbled upon an explorer series that followed the adventures of an arctic explorer at the north pole. the photography was stunning. so much white. and then the blues. a turquoise aqua that you just can’t accurately describe. the explorer described the north pole as elusive, as theoretical, since it continually moves and the longitude/latitude is never constant, always fluid. he is there at the exact north pole and he is not. both.
this painting BLUE PRAYER feels like there. sitting at the very top of our mother earth, the deep night sky behind her, she prays. for our planet, all people, tenets of goodness, generosity, peace. she is quietly still and bowed in fervently verbose prayer. she is praying for the elusive, the theoretical. she knows it is all out there and she knows it is not. both.
“do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” (credit for quote is unclear)
this sounds like a good mantra for one’s life. it would seem that it would bring satisfaction and accomplishment to someone invested in its mission. it would seem that it would create joy for others. it would seem that, were everyone to simply live by this precept, the world could actually be a place of peace.
but people are not infallible and personal agendas reign over the collective. competition is fierce and the caste system hasn’t vaporized. people keep score and vindication is a driving force. people are self-serving and power-controlling and will knock those down in the way.
children are not born with the desire to exploit others or minimalize or marginize them. they are not born with hatred in their hearts. children are born with the ability to embrace all, include all. they are not born with a scorecard in their hands. they are born with the generosity of innocence. they are not born with fear of places and peoples different than them. they learn that.
we can teach our children to play nice. but we need model it first. we need do all we can.
download ALL YOU CAN from AS IT IS on iTUNES or CDBaby
i don’t purport to understand every painting of my visionary husband. if i ask him what a painting is about, he posits a question back to me, “what does it mean to you?” in normal conversation, this kind of question-question response is not troubling, but in husband-wife conversation it is slightly irksome, one of those times where you gently roll your eyes at your partner and sort of hope that coffee grounds find their way into the bottom of their first cup of coffee the next morning. ok, so maybe not, but it is from a little bit of laziness that i sometimes want him to just TELL me. instead, groaning, i take a tiny step back away from the painting and let emotion take over.
the title of this painting THREE GRACES suggests (from research) the goddesses of things such as “charm, beauty and creativity”. a wealth of goodnesses, a wealth of possibility. an appreciation of every little gesture, every honey bee, the creation by others of a world of wonder and challenge.
in our world today, we first cover our disbelieving eyes with hands of despair. we look to the heavens for guidance. we ground ourselves, one hand firmly planted for balance, the other on our foreheads, thinking, thinking. we seek to find answers, ways for charm and beauty and creativity to thrive. and the elusiveness of peace.
i distinctly remember my sweet momma talking about FERDINAND THE BULL. she would refer to him from time to time, a twang on the third syllable slipping into her new york accent. i am wracking my memory for her other wise words about him. my guess is that, despite not remembering her exact words, her message isn’t lost on me.
FERDINAND is a book published in 1936, the story of a gentle bull who loved to smell flowers (aka “flowuhs”). he spent his time sitting under a tree, daydreaming, sniffing flowers. upon finding himself in the madrid bullfighting ring, he sits calmly in the middle, refusing to take the bait. the grace of a mashup of “i want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.” (oriah mountain dreamer) and “when push comes to shove, don’t.” (unknown) we have much to learn.
FERDINAND was performed by the Washington Island Music Fest this past week and was among my favorite moments of this two week music festival at TPAC. it was sweet on many levels, read aloud, depicted on violin, slides of the original illustrations on screen.
and my momma, in my mind’s eye, reminding me to be like FERDINAND. a bull, by definition fully expected to want to fight, presumed to fight, just like all the other bulls – and yet, brave enough to be different, to sniff the flowers, to turn away from participating in dissension or violence, to be at peace being true to oneself.
on march 19 of this year i wrote about our prayer flags. the ones at our home, i cherish their presence as they flutter in our backyard breezes. the prayer flags in this post are at our littlehouse on island. they stretch between a tree and a covered wooden rocking loveseat that plants itself firmly gazing at the lake. my sweet girl got me these as a gift, from the same little shop in ridgway, colorado that our home-prayer-flags come from.
the lake breeze is stronger than the breezes in our backyard; sometimes the flags are horizontal in its fury. the threads are loosening, loosening; the prayers are flying, flying. these little prayer flags are already more quickly tattered than the ones we have at our home. prayers for peace, compassion, strength and wisdom are perhaps more zealous these days, perhaps more often, perhaps more imploring.
at the end of this season we will gently take our prayer flags down and wrap them in soft cloth or tissue. we will thank them and put them in our special box to bring home with us. perhaps they will then hang with the flags-in-the-backyard. or perhaps, after a time of flying and more reassurance than i can explain, they will rest. we will see.
“we pass under them every time we leave the house and every time we return. our prayer flags fly between the house and the garage…a welcome sight either way. although better given to you as a gift, we purchased our flags in a little shop in ridgway, colorado and i consider it a gift that we were able to spend time in that tiny mountain town in the san juan mountains. these flags represent that place to us, that time, and so much more.
each color is symbolic of an element…white is air and wind, blue is sky and space, green symbolizes water, red is fire and yellow is earth. flying these in a specific order produces a balance of health and harmony. flying these promotes peace, compassion, strength and wisdom; the wind blows the prayers into the universe. i cannot think of more visual evidence of constant prayer. it matters not to me what religious practice is associated with them. the prayers are so much bigger than that. everything is bigger than that.
every time we watch any depiction of an everest story, there are multitudes of these buddhist prayer flags. they grace base camp and the summit and each camp between, the prayers issued by those people seeking to reach the highest place on earth.
we can’t claim trying to reach the highest physical place on earth. but we can claim seeking peace, compassion, strength and wisdom, a balance of health and harmony. for me, for us, those things are the highest place on earth.” (march 19, 2019)
click here to browse or purchase ISLAND PRAYER FLAGS as wall art
click here to browse or purchase ISLAND PRAYER FLAGS – THE FIVE ELEMENTS as wall art
this will become a familiar sight. sunset coloring the lake, an island populated by waterbirds in the distance, jelly jars in hand. we have arrived.
fog dawned this day, which somehow seems apropos, considering. dogdog and babycat are struggling to adjust – a different house – the “littlehouse” as opposed to “home”. we are surrounded by bins and artwork and happy lights and a bulletin board full of photos. we have our picnic basket and our nespresso, office supplies and our peace signs. we’ve hung an old window frame and the chalkboard from our wedding. we have a vintage road-worn black suitcase just waiting to be filled with the stuff of this adventure. we have beach buckets with sunglasses and paintbrushes, kitchen utensils and a bottle of wine. we brought our cloth napkins, jelly jars and a set of our favorite bowls, our hydroflask coffee mugs and water thermoses, our lidded yeti wine tumblers. we have dogdog’s penguin, his lion, his candy cane and babycat’s chase-the-ball-in-the-circle plastic game. we have candles and clipboards, ukuleles, lawn games, and various devices that play music. we have threadied us up.
and it all boils down to this one thing – in my pocket now every day since jen gave it to me – a silver token that says PEACE.
right now, these thready things embrace me. they help with that peace I’m reminded of by this little token.
but this will all become a familiar sight. i know that.
my sweet momma always said that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. although she stood her ground, she rarely pushed back. well, maybe at my dad…i certainly heard her push back in that relationship. she was a woman before her time, struggling to be seen and heard…in relationship, in work, in the world. nevertheless, she led with kindness and generosity.
recently i surprisingly found myself in a situation where i felt the kind of civility that is needed to accomplish anything was lacking. instead it was aggressive, pointed, antagonistic. “when push comes to shove” implies escalation and this, indeed, was the case. instead of actual conversation, it was a push-shove back-and-forth. instead of communication, it was a shining example of what-not-to-do.
we drove past a passiton billboard on the way up north that read these words: when push comes to shove, don’t. civility is in you. what does a boorish push or a retorted shove accomplish other than an establishment of immaturity, a driving desire and play for power and an uncooperative non-collaboration?
civility is not that hard. it should be what we lead with. respecting others and their place in their world. we each get the same air to breathe and we each breathe in and out the same way. instead of escalating to shove or pushing yet harder, how might we fill our lungs with responses of peacefulness, thoughtfulness, fairness, appreciation, intelligent consideration, magnanimity, grace, even reconciliation. why must push come to shove? it needn’t.
reverse threading 