we were at costco. in the fruit and vegetable section. pondering just how many blueberries and strawberries we could eat in the next few days; costco’s quantities are not meant, necessarily, for two people. but we are berry-lovers, so it works for us. we were in the middle of deciding to get both the 57 pint container of blueberries and the 28 quart container of strawberries when i felt a presence. right next to me. close. like next to my face, only my face was turned away. i thought – is this a mystical visitation? is this a sign? i turned slowly. she was standing rightnexttome, her face inchesfrommine. i have never seen this person before. she spoke directly -and loudly- to me, “are the blueberries any good?” she asked. “it’s only me. will they stay good?” i tried to back up, but our cart was behind me and she moved forward as i moved back. i was trapped. i answered (you owe me, costco!) that they were the best berries and would last and last and that she should buy them. and then she was gone. good grief. what i wanted to say was, “get out of my space!!!”
i know you know what i mean. (insert eye-rolling emoji here.)
we have bought our share of throw pillows. different fabrics and patterns from target, from department stores, they have been at various price points. and they are great accent pieces on the couch or the wicker chair where we are hiding the wicker that babycat has torn off with the combination of a throw blanket and throw pillow (of course, if you see the chair from the back, it’s pretty clear what has happened there.)
recently, the newest design within reach catalog arrived. now, that is a great catalog. clean lines, a store (brick and mortar as well as catalog and online presence) that is dedicated to their designers and design services. so the “design” part of their name i agree with. it’s the “within reach” part that gets me. i flipped through the catalog, admiring the white space and the simple fonts, the brief snippet stories about their designers, and came to pages 50 and 51. six columns of throw pillows greeted me across the spread and a “save 15% during the living room sale.”
catalog page
the pillows ranged (retail price, without the sale) from $95 up to $295. at this point in our life, it’s not in our budget to spend even $95-15%=$80.75 on a throw pillow. yes, i grant you that there are people who absolutely can afford that. but i must say, that on the day i wouldn’t have to think twice about a $295 throw pillow, it would have to be hand-painted by our (potential) grandchild for me to buy it.
when i have been working on the designs for products that are inspired by david’s paintings, i have been aware of and have worried about the pricing. (that is something we think about a lot for those people who are interested in purchasing these designs and other products that are printed on demand – one at a time.) on the society6.com site, throw pillows range from $29.99-$44.99 for indoor pillows or outdoor pillows for your deck or patio. with their often 30% off sale, it brings that down to about $21-32. i mention all these specifics because those prices seem more “within reach” to me, and not mass-produced or mass-marketed through a large company. it is entirely possible to have the only pillow in the world with the design you have chosen. but, that is also the peril of many artists – the inability to reach the masses.
even with however cool it is to say that you own a design within reach throw pillow, i just want to say that each time i see one of the rendered pillows with the chosen david-painting-morsel on it, i have wanted to purchase it, put the pillow-painting on our couch and show others that beautiful art doesn’t just have to be on the wall.
and so, with the arrival of new catalogs as fall shopping approaches, i thought a pillow collage was in order – just in case you missed the pillows along the way. besides, if design within reach can do a throw-pillow-collage, so can i. 😉
for us, it’s easy to like chicken…our chicken marsala, that is. we made him up; he is the (mutual) son we didn’t have together. and so, he’s a jeans-wearing-black-shirts-mostly-flip-flop little boy. he takes after david with his esoteric wisdom and me with his high forehead and sentimentality. he has much more brevity than either of us, but he’s little, so give him time.
it’s easy for us to be invested in chicken’s antics, to laugh aloud at his shenanigans, to get a little misty at his emotional ties. but we have driven across the country with david making up his little voice in the backseat; we have taken a three foot tall flat-chicken into welcome centers and family gatherings; we have taken pictures of our chicken at the colorado border and hanging out in the back of the xb.
and so, it’s easy for us to believe that chicken marsala would have an instant following – an ever-growing group of people who believe in him kind of like how they believed in charlie brown or calvin (well, maybe a teeny little bit like charlie brown or calvin.) because we do. we believe in him. his snippets of wisdom, his goodness, his take on life. i realize that, like any story, it’s possible that maybe it is hard to start in the middle. (i am the worst at starting in the middle of any movie – i ask a million questions trying to catch up…)
so i just want to say this: if you had a chance to have a little boy in your life, one whose wise words entered your heart and whose voice countered the narrative so prevalent in our world now, and, even if he was, ok, make-believe, wouldn’t you just love it to be a little boy like our Chicken? this nugget is for you. play. with abandon. like a little make-believe boy. like there’s no tomorrow.
i drove back and forth and back and forth to nashville when i recorded this album, each time returning with a cd of the work we had done on the album. i’d play it numerous times, taking notes to share with my producer, re-writing, practicing, sometimes sharing the songs-where-they-were-at-the-time with others.
joan was the one who told me i needed a “strong woman” song included on this album. so i walked across the street home, directly into my studio and wrote one.
now, this isn’t my favorite song – it’s a little kitschy if you ask me – but i have had many tell me how much they like it and one of my favorite performances of it was when beth’s students sang it. (i was long-term-subbing for her. she’s a dear friend and an amazing choir teacher in a middle school in our district.) those kids really rose to the occasion and kitschy fell by the wayside in favor of strength and power and belief in themselves.
recently d and i listened to some of my first recordings. they were from 1979-80 and recorded in a studio in a town called port washington on the north shore of long island. i had found a cassette (now isn’t that retro word dating me!) and we have a boombox (another retro word) that plays cassettes so we settled in to listen to the three songs on what would now be called an EP.
one of the songs is called leaving and is a song i wrote for my parents as they retired and moved from our long island home to florida. i remembered that song well.
the other two? well, it’s funny. i could sing every word, but i didn’t remember the intense emotion behind them. THESE were my #metoo songs, i discovered (rediscovered?) as i listened. one of these days i might share these songs, not because they are great songs but because they are truth and every artist has songs that are life-defining. not the ones necessarily that chart (although those are lovely, indeed!) but the ones that speak from deep inside, with lyrics or music that must be spoken. these two songs were written by a vulnerable (and pretty angry) young woman who wanted to unleash the power of her crayon and live out loud, who definitely wanted to live without fear, who tried hard to break away from an experience i still would rather forget and who prayed – alone at the time – beseeching words. all this is what i wrote about in this week’s melange.
my heart goes out to all those women who are also card-carrying #metoo survivors. the out-loud ones and the silent ones. my wish for each of you: unleash your crayon, live without fear, break away, pray with another, count on you.
from this song of today’s melange post COUNT ON YOU, which may be more #metoo and less kitschy than i thought, “just move forward and then believe – you gotta trust…in you.”
the first time i joined hands with david and prayed, i cried. truth be told, we both cried. it was a powerful moment…one i will never forget. there is something deeply grounding about prayer with another person. it is forging, like iron in a hot smelter, clay in a kiln…seeking the solid base, making something stronger.
this painting, prayer of opposites, reminds me of that gift – the exchange, the sharing of peace and words of comfort, words of gratitude, beseeching words – with another. the passing of that spiritual energy one to another.
were we to pray with opposites, would we not ultimately be drawn closer?
we used to drive in the car, ok, minivan at the time, and blastttt this kelly clarkson song called breakaway. The Girl and i would sing it loud, really really loud. i still know all the lyrics (despite the fact that i can’t remember what we did each day last week without consulting my calendar. but you know what i mean…if you are, um, my age, then you likely remember all the lyrics to all the 70s songs you listened to. ok…..what was i talking about here?)
monday’s studio melange post was about unleashing the power of your crayon, yesterday’s was living without fear. today’s is called break away. hmm. a theme is quietly emerging.
one of my favorite quotes of michelle obama, “when they go low, we go high” reminds me of this – the power of breaking away from the masses, the power of unleashing YOUR crayon with an eye to the center, the power of living without fear. break away indeed.
probably one of my favorite photos of graffiti i’ve taken, i found this sprayed on the wall of a building in tuscany years ago. i thought it was kind of lofty then and i think it is lofty now. living without fear seems next to impossible. how can one be that brave?
there’s this song we sing in the band called only the brave (t.hughes, m.smith, n.herbert). we just sang it a couple days ago along with our ukulele band. the first line, “this is the moment, this is why i’m living to face the giants with you…” who is the You in your life? the vastly abundant magnificent Love you may call God? your partner? your best friend? your mom? someone of this earth? a spirit-filled presence? the song continues, “it’s now or never, and though my heart is racing, i’ll leave my armor with you. your love makes us stronger, and your love sees us through. only the brave will go where you go, into the fire but never alone. we know you’ll always carry us home; only the brave….”
as i get older, i find myself in this sliver of a space between fear and no fear. a quandary of emotion. i look back at all the things that made me quiver, the things that ate away at time itself and i realize that maybe, just maybe i had been just a teensy bit braver than i thought. i look at right now and worry; i look ahead and worry. am i brave enough? will i be brave enough? life has a way of presenting challenges right alongside bliss.
i find that words i had written in a post three years ago – a post about being brave – speak to me now and so i’m just going to copy and paste them here:
we face down our fears, we risk our dreams, we forgive without being forgiven, we acknowledge our disappointments, we are given grace in our mistakes, we plod on, we face the sun, we scurry through the rain, we feel our way through the fog, we celebrate the moment without investing in the whole day, we love without ceasing.
on my piano in my studio is a teeny sign with a big message. it reads, “if you asked me what i came into this world to do, i will tell you i came to live out loud.” (emile zola) it’s a reminder – a reason for being. true for each of us, it’s unleashing the metaphoric crayon of our creativity, our thoughts, our knowledge, our gifts, our voices.
there is an extraordinary amount of power in those crayons..the place in the middle that we open…the heart from where our concentric circles start rippling out…where the crayon meets the page, the song is composed, the painter paints, the activist writes. “loud” (for the sheer sake of being loud) and “out loud” (simply having a voice) are two vastly different things. and, if you are paying even the least bit of attention at all to world events, we are privy to both in our lives these days.
after living all this life so far, i hope now that the crayons i pick will help to ripple out things that are good, things that consider others, things that are not hurtful, things that are fair, things that are kind. the power of a crayon unleashed that is “out loud” not “loud.”
you can’t help but listen to country music when you are in nashville. there’s something about the storytelling in country songs that i can really identify with. i love telling a good story. ok, i even love bad stories. i’m sure there are a slew of people rolling their eyes around me most times i am talking. when i was writing for this album and traveling back and forth to the studio in nashville, i decided i wanted one of the songs to be a little bit of a nod to that genre, of which i am a big fan. i wrote this song on a single page of notebook paper on an airplane. some songs just show up. my favorite part is the happy ending. 🙂
i love david’s newest painting, earth interrupted VII. it’s vibrant and alive and textural and full of questions. i have found a free whisper of a tall black-ink crane in the middle of this morsel, a non-intentional coming together of brush strokes, a simple treasure in a small piece of a large painting. it is unlikely you could see it if you stood back to look at this stunning painting, but as a symbol of longevity, balance, wisdom and good fortune, i can’t imagine a better totem for our earth, a better embedded wish, this fortuitous crane.
reverse threading 