today is The Girl’s birthday. kirsten turns 28 today and i can hardly believe it. where does the time go? i am wishing i could spend time with her today (well, like every day)… make her dinner or a decadent gluten-free cake, have a glass of wine with her. what i would really love to do is take a walk with her. in her world. like most moms, sharing space and time with my children is precious; taking a walk outside, breathing in air and talking together is something yearn-worthy.
the best part about visiting The Girl and The Boy is that then – and really only then – i can picture their lives…the place they live, their home, where they buy their groceries, the roads they travel, what they see when they look out their windows, the way the air feels, the angle of the sun, their favorite places to hang out or places that have been in stories they have told me or pictures they have sent. it’s all vital for me.
The Girl lives in stunning surroundings. her mountains are massive and grand and the terrain is white with snow or green green with leaves of aspens and needles of pines. she walks in beauty. she sees it. she recognizes it.
today my wish for her is to find that every day of her life. no matter where she is or what her surroundings. she doesn’t just walk in beauty. she is beauty.
several people lately have asked us what we meant by “products”…the “products” we were designing to go along with our blog post images. many of you may have noticed these product bars on our blogs each day. we understand that not everyone has seen these or understood our intent. we have been seeking the easiest way to present these products as options and so we listen to each suggestion we get.
there is sure a lot of fodder in our studios: paintings, music, cartoons, graphic images, photographs, writings…a melange of our work. it’s fun (and necessary) for us to turn all of this into a line of things that are purchase-able: wall art, tote bags, mugs, leggings, throw pillows, home accessories. i love the design work and have learned so much in the process!
we thank each of you who have taken a look at the sites where these are available (we have five storefronts on society6.com.) we have been told and have seen firsthand that our designed products that society6.com ship are of good quality and they stand behind them if you are not pleased. if you have any questions, please let us know. we appreciate you so much.
this week’s product line links are right below. the link brings you to one of the products in that line on society6.com. if you scroll down the page a little, it will say “also available as” so you can see the image in its varying iterations.
we walked The Girl to kindergarten. it was spring and sunny and warm. dandelions were everywhere. on the way home, The Boy dropped my hand to toddler-zigzag around a yard where dandelions > grass by far (kind of like ours.) he bent down and picked yellow flower upon yellow flower. until he came running back to me. he held up his sweaty-dirty-little-boy fist, full of bright yellow and green dandelions and said, “woses for momma.”
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.
when i wrote and recorded THAT MORNING SOMEDAY (you can hear it below) it was wistfully about any beginning…any beautiful or cloud-striated sunrise…any hopefulness…any new day. my big brother had died and i was yearning for the peace of understanding, a feeling of being ok in the world, a wish to wake up to something that had given order to chaos.
many many years later, i can’t honestly say that i always have the peace of understanding or a feeling of being ok in the world and i often wish to wake up to something that has given order to chaos. someday is still out there.
only now, a little older and the tiniest smidge wiser, i realize someday is waiting too long. someday is right now and i am sitting right in it, with lots of time behind me and, hopefully, lots of time in front of me. the only thing that really counts right now is right now.
i yearn to make it more peaceful than my last moment. i step in the world, ok or not. i try to help create order out of chaos. maybe someday it will all come together. but in the meanwhile, i will do the best i can in right now.
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.
heidi and i performed together for years at innumerable oncology and cancer survivor events. heidi is a breast cancer survivor and speaker and we wove her spoken words and my songs or instrumental music into performances of celebration, of gratitude, of honoring…performances we cherished together.
heidi would speak of a lazy river she had been in. how, without doing anything, you just become part of the river…tubing on a slow river is like that. no real thought, just meandering in the flow. like life, it’s easier when you don’t fight the currents.
there is something, for me, about gathering riverstones. we gave them to everyone at our wedding – to mark that each person is part of the river of our life. these beautiful riverstones – the way water created a smoothness on rock…years of the flow has worn down the rough edges, made a beautiful patina. i’m hoping, maybe, i’ll be just like that.
i was distracted when d brought the camera back to me. working on something, i glanced up and thanked him. a few moments later, i asked him how the painting he was working on was going. “i scrubbed it,” he said. “what?!” i replied. “i started something else,” he said. when he left the room, i looked at the camera. this is what i found. an extraordinary look at earth, removed from earth, from a distance away. fragmented mother planet through the haze, i found it to be a striking – and yet abstract – image, with rich, almost-metallic hues. how does he do that?
this is EARTH INTERRUPTED V: FROM A DISTANCE. we need this perspective every now and then. we lose sight. we fall prey to overwhelm in our own stuff. we are but a speck of a fragment on this earth. we are both tiny and vast. and we are capable of doing both tiny and vast things to help our earth and each other.
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.
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.
reverse threading 