we started our day with mimosas. the up-north-gang was in cedarburg and we descended upon the stagecoach inn’s pub, a place built in 1853, dedicated to their bed & breakfast. we sat at wood and iron tables surrounded by vintage stone and brick walls and chatted away a very fast almost-two-hours. we hadn’t ever been at this little pub before to start our winterfest fun. but it was perfect and it was an easy choice when the day was over and we stopped back there to sip wine or old-fashioneds (a wisconsin staple), review the parade and bed races on the river and talk about any old thing. i grabbed a brochure (because i, well, love brochures) and looked at it later at home. “where you can actually hear your conversation” the little pub (named the five20 social stop) advertised. it was true. it was refreshing to be able to actually have a conversation and hear each other.
we do our best work in the woods. d and i will take a walk and solve things that have stymied us. the quiet, the beauty – it’s centering and it removes all the interruptions of home-office-work. it offers us a chance to actually have a conversation and hear each other.
at this point, i don’t know what it would take for this world, this country, our state, our community to actually have conversations and hear each other. so many seem to be yelling, reacting. certainly not conversing. it’s tempting to turn off the news app on my phone, but i don’t want to bury my head in the sand. and yet, lately, this earth seems oddly tilted on its axis, bent on anger and strife, inflated egos, name-calling, exponential self-serving, and pointed blame. it’s all so toxic. where is the listening going on?
i would think about suggesting mimosas and a walk in the woods but, with all the noise out there, i don’t know who would hear me.
i searched for quotes about risk. there are a plethora of them out there. then i realized that maybe the best one for today was already there – no good adventure is without risk. there are no guarantees in life. we all know that. nothing that says if you do this, that will definitely happen. the ifs-thens are not absolute. the ifs-thens aren’t even, well, iffy on occasion. and sometimes there’s no chance in hell that an adventure, an experiment, an endeavor will work out. we jump anyway.
in this anniversary week of THE MELANGE, we’ve done a great deal of looking back at our jumping. those jumps reach much further back than just this past year. as two artists living together, two artists working together, two artists laughing and breathing and arguing together, we have experienced lots of falling-into-the-water as we’ve gone. our individual artistry output pre-dates this year by decades. epic moments of success are conjoined with moments of missing the next rock in the stream (see CHICKEN MARSALA sketch above to see what that looks like.) but, even knowing that – by reverse-threading now – in looking ahead, at all the mystery of that, we jump anyway.
nothing worth doing comes without hard work. no good adventure is without risk. there are no guarantees. all wise words. all daunting. we jump anyway.
i had no idea how much i would love designing. through the first ten years or so of album covers, i watched. i sat with my dear friend 20 as he designed so many of my CD jackets and tray cards. i learned a lot. not about how to use photoshop or illustrator or quark but i learned about balance and clean design and how to “see”. so when we started designing for THE MELANGE, that part came more easily. the photoshop part? well, that had a bigger learning curve (as does website designing.) manipulating images and navigating programs without real directions can be a challenge, but i was up for it. lots of learning.
the thing that really surprised us was when we looked at each of our society6.com stores this week and literally counted our product lines. there are 187! 187 lines created across the five stores.
187 product lines later, i look back in wonder.
mugs and laptop covers, tote bags, prints and cellphone cases, beach towels, shower curtains…not to mention leggings. in the course of the last year, i have designed between 50 and 60 pairs of leggings. leggings with morsels of david’s paintings, leggings with graphics we have designed or photographs we have taken, leggings with words of wisdom, leggings with punchlines, leggings with lyrics. i was a leggings-designing-maniac. i think about even just these leggings designed, available on an on-demand site, and think – we could have all those made and just sell them ourselves. we could sell those designs elsewhere – to a company that already produces leggings. we could open a shop with all these products – interesting, different, artistic, not mass-produced or mass-purchased. we could… there’s no telling what we could do.
i asked david if he knew how many blogposts there had been in this MELANGE year. he had already done the math. we each posted 260 posts, totalling 520. that’s more than a few words, more than a few thoughts, more than a little heart.
immeasurable energy has been devoted to these designs, these blogs, to this MELANGE. here – at the one-year-old mark – we are astounded by the amount of time and effort this has all taken. and we look back in wonder.
what has been the reward?
there is no way to underestimate the power of i/we-can-do-this. the sisu of sticking it out, meeting the challenge, staying in the game, learning.
THE MELANGE is celebrating one year. but we are celebrating so much more than that. we look forward in wonder.
i just re-read the first week of our MELANGE, a calendar-year ago now. words about our little boy CHICKEN MARSALA, words spoken by my sweet momma, words about our community, words about david’s studio and my studio, two artists living together, and our own work-in-the-world. i can feel it. that first week.
we come to this place. one year later. i kind of want to go back and re-read each day. study the images we chose, browse the products we created, watch the arc of changes in design through the year, notice the growth, the things we added, the things we let fall off. somewhere around week 3 i wondered if i would have enough to say, enough words that would be interesting or, at-the-very-least, palatable, inviting for others to read.
i write from my heart, most of it experiential…moments i have netted and captured, written down to hold onto the feeling-of-it. i wondered if that might be too….much…for some. in the middle of living life, i want to remember some of the tiniest morsels of time, layered in the sedimentary layers, bits of shining mica in the middle of ordinary….mica that is celebration, that is eye-opening, that is excruciatingly simple bliss, that is painful, that is full of maturing, that is on-the-edge-of-your-seat-nerve-wracking, that is full of hopes and dreams and regrets…all mica indeed.
“live life, my sweet potato,” my sweet momma said to me. yes, momma. this sweet potato is feeling it.
a couple years ago our CHICKEN MARSALA went with us everywhere. i mean literally everywhere. FLAT CHICKEN traveled across the country and we have pictures of him in the scion, in front of the ‘welcome to colorful colorado’ sign, with rest area volunteers, sitting with family at an outdoor bbq.
we had submitted CHICKEN to all the major cartoon syndicates with some interest on their part and so we were bringing him with us, to document his travels and keep our hopes up. ultimately, CHICKEN MARSALA, the strip, was not syndicated and we ended up concentrating our efforts more on short bursts of wisdom and thought in one-panels of CHICKEN in life.
CHICKEN MARSALA and another one-panel cartoon named FLAWED CARTOON, graphic designs we were making or photographs we were taking, david’s paintings, my music – all were fodder for what became a melange, a mixture of it all, the crux of what we would write about each day. and so THE MELANGE, offered monday through friday, was born.
it has – this week – been a year since the first MELANGE was published. and monday through friday since, we have had an image that we each have used as a jumping-off ground for our blogposts, the chute through which we have funneled our thoughts.
i was a crazy person designing products for each of these days…mugs with our sweet CHICKEN MARSALA on them, BE KIND tote bags, FLAWED CARTOON prints, painting morsel throw pillows, what-seems-like a zillion leggings with song lyrics. we posted links for our product lines and re-assessed things daily – placement of images in the blog, placement of hyperlinks, whether or not to include FB ‘like’ buttons….it is an endless list.
somewhere along the way we realized that it was possible that other people might not be as invested in our CHICKEN MARSALA as we were. he wasn’t their imagined little boy; he was ours…
i have this great tear-off calendar i enjoyed every day last year. it sat on my dresser and had a unicorn on every page. it also had a saying of some sort…some words of wisdom, some tongue-in-cheek, some downright sassy. although i love unicorns, for obvious reasons, i found that i could not tell you what the unicorn was doing each day; i barely looked at the unicorn. for me, the important part was the saying. when i realized that, i also realized that was possibly the same reason people were not investing in CHICKEN. it was whatever the panel said, the words, that held the interest. when someone would randomly come upon the image of CHICKEN MARSALA, no matter how adorable the drawing, they wouldn’t ‘see the unicorn’ so to speak, but instead would read the words, the starting gate for our posts. ahhh. we are ever-learning.
and so, we changed our MELANGE monday from CHICKEN MARSALA MONDAY to MERELY-A-THOUGHT MONDAY. and i stopped, for now, designing more CHICKEN products for a society6.com store that was already full of products. CHICKEN MARSALA will have his time in the light; it just isn’t right now.
the same thing happened for our FLAWED WEDNESDAY. as funny as those single panel cartoons were, we found they weren’t necessarily connecting in-a-big-way to our audience, so it was time to re-evaluate our posts for wednesday. FLAWED WEDNESDAY became NOT-SO-FLAWED WEDNESDAY with interesting tidbits we encounter in life.
today (ok, technically calendar-tomorrow but alas let’s not be too detailed) we celebrate this monday in february a year ago. a year of our MELANGE. a year of selecting images we would feature. a year in which we have we have blogged every monday-friday. a year of designing websites, blogsites, products. a year of questions and thoughts. a year of assessing and re-assessing. a roller-coaster of learnings.
“the weakest link,” i said, referring to myself as we spoke about the possibility of going snowshoeing. i had never snowshoed before, but i was excited to try it. we were planning on renting some snowshoes at a nature center and then snowshoeing through the woods. but, in the typical manner of someone who has never tried something before, i was a little nervous about keeping up. i’ve skied before – both downhill and cross-country – and i know it takes some concentrated ability to do it even partially well. hence, the nerves about snowshoeing. (do i need to take lessons? is there a trick to this? are there things i need to know about balance and leaning in and switching leads and and and?)
our best friends and david told me it was “like walking”. i seriously doubted that. i just knew that i would somehow be trailing behind, poles and snowshoes stuck in drifts, head over heels in the snow (literally).
but it didn’t turn out that way. i worked at having a you-don’t-have-to-be-instantly-good-at-this-relax-kerri attitude all the way there. i worried all the way there. did i have the right boots on? should i have worn a different jacket? what kind of gloves would be best? i complicated something that is actually not complicated. but, even in the middle of my snowshoe-agonizing, i kept walking toward it.
and, ohmygosh, it was fabulous. when i wrote to The Girl afterward, she referred to it as “your new fave winter activity”. it is totally ranking up there, high on the list. what better way to hike a few miles through snowy woods? the trails were quiet, save for the punctuation of our laughter and the stops where we had lengthy conversations and brad built a snowman. it was a brilliant day.
so many times we hesitate…we worry…we think we should already know how to do something or be instantly good at it…we resist trying something new….
i just want to say this: walk toward it. it could be an experience filled with quiet and laughter, stretching of muscles intellectual or physical, simple beauty and fresh air in your lungs literal or figurative, and an i-can-do-this illumination.
my poppo would likely have agreed with sue aikens. he was a solution-finder. i will, right-here-and-now, brag about his ability to fix absolutely anything; he would find a way, even if he had to make it up. well, mostly because he made it up.
i’m not sure how he learned everything he learned; his knowledge base was incredibly practical. give him any problem and it became a challenge for him – an undertaking he never-ever thought of as insurmountable…it was simply a solution he hadn’t yet found. and so, i hear sue aikens (of national geographic’s life below zero fame – living a solitary life out on the arctic, solving problems i will likely never encounter) and i think of my dad, whose list of favorite places on earth included his workbench out in the garage (or in the basement in earlier years when they lived up north.) he saved every screw and nut and bolt and tool that crossed his path “just in case”. he was a re-purposer before it was vogue. and he was an expert at turning cardboard boxes inside out or fashioning a new box from old in order to ship or store any thing. his rube goldberg fixes were always pretty amusing, but they all worked and i can hear him in my head pondering and strategizing when i look at something-that-needs-fixing. sue aikens would be proud. her glass-half-full attitude is pretty amazing, considering the elements she deals with. she’s pretty black and white about things; a lack of grey is something i can’t really relate to, but maybe that’s why she solves things more easily – she doesn’t get lost in any part of the emotional response to the problem.
i have to say, though, that i wish i could look at problems in the same positive way as sue. yes, yes, yes, i know how much we all grow from problems and solving problems and blahblahblah. it’s the stress of problems i’m talking about…the worry. there was a prayer yesterday in the bulletin that said, “help us resist the reflex to worry constantly about every single detail of our lives…” wow. i double that. mmm. make that triple. it is a reflex. we know that the moments beyond problems will come. more than likely we will be on the other side sometime soon, sitting in the middle of the solution and looking back, shaking our heads at how befuddled and stressed we felt. but in the meantime….
in the meantime, i would like a collection of some straight-up solutions for the problems that lurk…a (metaphoric) closet full of how-to-do-its or at least how-to-make-it-ups. oh, and a better attitude about problems. they are just solutions we haven’t found yet.
i love the unicorn on the daily calendar wendy aka ben aka saul gave me, but the thing i really pay attention to are the words of wisdom it offers me day after day. sometimes it makes me laugh aloud; sometimes it makes me really think. later in the day i recall a bit of the message, but i can’t recall how the unicorn was standing or if it was flying or rearing up or ….
i think that’s the way with other similar images…like our CHICKEN MARSALA. CHICKEN is our little made-up boy, a cartoon, who showed up for the first many months of mondays as a part of this melange. CHICKEN always had a message morsel – a CHICKEN NUGGET – and it was that message that seemed to resonate with his audience.
taking some of those words of wisdom or expressions, i designed ‘words-only’ products (as well as products with CHICKEN MARSALA on them.) with the shopping season upon us and everyone seeking something unique as gifts, the next few weeks we’ll revisit some of those products so that you can see what you might have missed.
this is throw pillow week. you can find these by clicking on the box above or by clicking HERE. when you get to the society6 site, you will find these same simple images and lots of others – including images with CHICKEN MARSALA – on coffee mugs, travel mugs, laptop sleeves, phone cases, hoodies, t-shirts, tote bags, blankets, towels, coasters, even shower curtains. it was a blast designing all of these product lines. i hope that we can help you in finding just the right thing for someone special…or maybe even yourself.
happy holidays with love from me, david & chicken marsala.
right at 2:08 in this recording is an ambient sound. it is a sound that my producer and i deliberately decided to leave in the recording, an audible sound of divine, a tiny punctuation in our project from across the barriers of physical being-ness.
we were recording remotely on one of the northwestern university stages, ken (my amazing “it’s fine” producer) having built a small studio off in the green room, separate from the stage space where the piano was. everything was moved or padded so as to avoid interruptions or rattling or vibrations or overtones, anything we didn’t want included in this solo piano album. it was a tedious process and we recorded straight through a twenty-three hour stretch. with me were items – totems of a sort – to keep me company as i recorded this first album. one was a stuffed animal i had given my beloved big brother during his chemo treatments, three short missing-him-years prior.
divine intervention was the last piece up. the last piece of the very first album i was recording, released 23 years ago november 11 on my sisu music productions label. teetering on that balance point, no idea of where i was to go next or what would become of this album, i was emotional and exhausted, determined and vulnerable. i spoke words of prayer and began the next take of this piece.
at 2:08 i heard a sound. it sounded like an old wooden screen door closing, but i didn’t really know what it was. i was sure, however, it would be on the recording since i could hear it on-stage. i kept going anyway, thinking we’d go back and re-record the piece. when i finished playing, tired tears in my eyes, i walked into the green room to find ken standing in astonishment. there was an empty can of pepsi in that little studio, one i had put in there and secured by towels deep onto a shelf. at 2:08, the can somehow moved out of the spot it was nestled in and clattered onto the floor. the sound. even without listening to the cd i can hear this sound in my head every time i play this piece.
we listened back to the raw recording. sure enough, it was there. and so was something else. a feeling that somehow, some way, the divine interrupted. intervened with a small nod. perhaps it was my big brother, in jest, stopping by in the middle of the last take of the very last piece of my very first album, to make a little noise. perhaps it was something else. either way, we knew. and we left it in.
i still have the can.
15. divine intervention (3:16): the feeling i have about this whole project. there really isn’t any such thing as chance. those who are just on the other side sometimes help us to sort and place the clues of our life’s story. (words from released from the heart jacket)
whoa….we saw one on the des plaines river trail and stopped short. it looked like candy on the path, but on closer examination, we discovered it was a spider! an orange spider. it’s called a marbled orb-weaver. and it’s pretty intense. and, i suppose if you are not spider-phobic like me, it’s beautiful.
later that month, we were hiking at bristol woods, one of our favorite go-to places to hold staff meetings as we walk together. out of the corner of my eye i caught the glimpse of bright movement in the air…sure enough, it was one of those marbled orb-weavers (doesn’t that just slip off your tongue? lol!) it was dangling on a web-strand that was at least 5 stories high! whattheheck! this roly-poly little spider was bravely trying to reach a white mass that was a bit flattened (an egg cocoon with several hundred eggs, we read later) while being tossed about in the wind, up and down, sideways.
i could practically hear this spider whisper to itself, “gotta have sisu, gotta have sisu” as it climbed, bobbing, bobbing, up its long, high-above-the-ground web, finally reaching its cocoon and wrapping it close into its body.
wow. what we do for our babies, eh? amazing stuff. the stuff of sisu.
reverse threading 