back in the day, when i was a small child, we laid shells in sand cavities we had carefully dug out of the beach, filled in plaster of paris and a little water and made sculptures, castings of shapes. mine was a fish. not a very good fish, i might add, but a fish nonetheless. my brother made an anchor and my sister made a seahorse. the castings instantly came to mind when we passed by this leaf impression in the snow.
soon, others would walk on the trail and it is likely that their footprints covered the leaf. or, possibly, the sun came out and the edges of the leaf – so clear on our passing – melted. i don’t know. what counted is that the leaf was there when we passed by.
the last time i sat by my brother’s side, he told me a few stories about being my big brother. i still remember how that felt. his words – a little fuzzier, with a little less clarity – echo in the bank of memories i have, my heart ever-full, his little sister. though the impression has melted a bit with the thirty years of sun since he died, it is no less profound than it ever was.
even if it doesn’t look quite like a fish – or a leaf – each impression is actually indelible and its invisible sculpture takes up a tiny space in our hearts and minds. castings you can look at any time you want.
kind of makes you want to make sure each moment is worthy of plaster of paris, a few shells and a little time to cure.
and, yet, in all its raw nakedness, its vulnerability, it stands proudly, stalwart, determined. it is still alive.
we stand next to our canvases, in front of microphones, in recording studios, on wooden stages, at qwerty keyboards, poised in front of 88 keys, with ballet shoes or tap shoes or jazz shoes, behind the cine-camera, in front of the cine-camera, at the potter’s wheel, baton in hand, holding sculpting tools or playscripts, focusing lens and aperture, holding written words in our fingers.
we are naked trees in the marsh. we stand – vulnerable to the elements – unprotected. we brave lack. we brave abundance. we withstand the inbetween.
we are exfoliated every single time we put it out there. we are artists.
it was easy to lose ourselves on the beach. it was cold, but the sun was out and we were all dressed for it. our hike had brought us through the preserve and then – a little jaunt through the woods – to the shore. deserted, it was sandy, punctuated by driftwood and thick stripes of rocks. the further south we walked, the more rocks. the shoreline curved and must have been the place where the stones were captured as lake michigan rogue waves carried them in. so much to pick up, with smooth edges to run our fingers over, ponder. so easy to lose ourselves.
we walked – heads down – looking, looking. the treasures were abundant, all right there. we found the first hag stone. there is something about hag stones. these rocks – with a hole straight through them – mysterious and beautiful, hag stones are thought to have special powers that represent protection and luck. sandstone, limestone, flint…we found another. and then another. we walked and walked on the beach, looking, looking – because it becomes addictive – finding treasures just waiting to be found. easy to lose ourselves.
it got colder and, with the wind picking up, it was time to leave. we ended up bringing home a few rocks, some magical hag stones, and some sea pottery, gorgeous sherds of earthenware with green glaze, worn down for years perhaps by the powerful great lake. despite no knowledge of the origins of any of these, the connection to the day and to the water made them alluring.
“luck will show itself when it’s there.” (ricko dewilde – life below zero) on challenging days, luck is certainly hard to see. the grass-is-always-greener mindset takes over and it’s easy to succumb, the we’re-never-lucky-like-that defeatist, unmoored. easy to lose ourselves.
but the grass-is-greener-anywhere-else moment yields. and after a pause, a deep breath, mind-quieting, a good lookaround tells us something else.
a walk on the beach with dearest friends. talking and laughing and quiet treasure-hunting. finding sea pottery and sea glass and heart-shaped rocks and smoothed-to-ivory driftwood and hag stones – there all along, just waiting to be seen.
and luck starts to show itself. even in ice cubes.
we have adopted this tree and should we ever drive there and find it is gone we will likely be pretty devastated.
we have a relationship with this tree in this farmfield on this road. we never tire of it. somehow it keeps us centered.
this beautiful tree stands there – as weather systems spin around it and time travels on and on, we see the stalwart and steady tree – withstanding it all. it is not ON the mountain in the raging wind, the swirling snowstorm, the beating rain, the ice and drought and cold and heat and night and day and fog – it IS the mountain.
lessons on highway h.
“be the mountain,” the tree calls to us, “be the mountain.”
and before we drive off, “just like me, like me, like me,” it adds, echoing into the wind.
i take many photographs of us in shadow. it lowers the how-do-i-look bar to practically zero. though it does leave me a tad bit curious about why my head always looks bigger than his. i think it’s my hair poofing out; his is pulled back neatly, while mine is helter-skelter flying in the wind. nevertheless, whether we are smiling or not, whether our eyes are open or closed, whether we have a funny look on our faces – none of this matters.
some of my favorite shots of us are in shadow. we are on the dock at northport harbor. we are on trail in breckenridge. we are at the john denver sanctuary in aspen. we are on a frozen lake up-north. we are walking barefoot in florida, carrying our flipflops. we are in the sun on our back patio.
i know i might be accused of over-documenting. so many photos. “1.81 trillion photosare taken worldwide every year, which equals 57,246 per second, or 5.0 billion per day,” according to photutorial.com. at least they are not all mine.
yet i know that it takes many, many shots to get the right one. my dear friend scott is a world-class photographer with a compositional eye to die for. he shoots thousands of shots at a-list events. which makes me feel justified in my overshooting. i have loved being behind a camera since my parents gifted me my first 35mm when i graduated high school. crunch and i would go out and about for hours on end, on escapades, taking pictures and dreaming of what they would look like developed. the advent of cellphone cameras – as they are today – makes it infinitely easier to snap, snap and over-snap. and, though i can confess to that, i will not stop.
because every now and then, when i go through all the photographs i’ve taken on a hike or at home or traveling or with one of my children, i find a jewel. like the lyrics that are tucked into notebooks-upon-notebooks, scraps of paper of melodies, pa pads with ideas for smackdab cartoons and blogposts, sometimes something special turns up. “practice makes perfect,” my sweet poppo would always quip.
so, the other day, while we were hanging out with richard diebenkorn, i thought i would document our time together. not a gem of a shot, but – truly – they aren’t always gems. sometimes they are just reminders of time spent, thready mementos of moments, scraps of lyrics or color samples or heart rocks. they are a diary of time, back and forward, threaded clockwise and reverse.
despite the vast ponderings of art critics and pedantic curators, it would seem that richard might just be trying to create mood, evoke emotion. this ocean park painting – like the whole series – depicting shimmering light and air, his extended time in santa monica sun. he painted and re-painted 145 canvases in this series. a diary of time.
selfies and shadows, smiles and light. all stuff that counts on the way to 1.81 trillion.
it’s 925 miles from the corner of sixth avenue and west 55th street, but it displaced me in an instant. there i was – back sometime in the 70’s, in new york city, seeing robert indiana’s love sculpture for the first time. i loved love then. i love love now. (could that be any more redundant?!)
a part of sculpture milwaukee in 2018, this sculpture has returned and was permanently installed at the milwaukee art museum in 2019. we saw it for the first time last week. life and covid interrupted our visits to mam. we were really happy to be back. seeing love out the window facing lake michigan’s lakefront was the icing on the cake.
there are nearly fifty of these sculptures around the world. people travel far and wide to have their photographs taken next to the iconic stacked word. it became a u.s. postal stamp in 1973. it has big history. its artist has big history.
the success of this giant – yet simple – sculpture begs questions for me: what musical gesture might be equivalent to this sculpture? what rhythmic or melodic motif has this kind of powerful impact? googling these questions produces a plethora of suggested lists – everything from classical to motown to the beatles and beyond. i suppose it’s a truly personal thing.
any listener of albinoni’s adagio in g minor or j.s. bach’s air on the g string or arvo pärt’s spiegel im spiegel or ennio morricone’s gabriel’s oboe or john denver’s annie song or leonard cohen’s hallelujah or carole king’s you’ve got a friend or aretha’s r-e-s-p-e-c-t or the beatles’ here comes the sun or, for that matter, eldar kedem’s you and i or any piece composed and played or sung by giant artists or tiny independent artists …. any listener of anything arrives at the place of listening – the dropped-down-out-of-the-universe of their own world – individually. we tote along with us our lives-at-the-moment, our busy schedules, our worries, our longings, color and breath and heart, a distinctively different set of ears. we hear and we listen and we are transported by music to worlds away, places and times stored up, a chorus of commentators in us telling silent stories in viewmaster snippets, our hearts grasping the filmy tails of memories. impact. giant impact.
the love sculpture means something different to everyone who poses in front of it; every person’s story has different details, a different emotional spectrum. how we connect to this emotive piece depends largely on where we are when we visit with it, what we bring to it, how open we are to its energy.
the love sculpture stands outside the museum and i know that each time we now visit, it will demand our time as well. we will stand and gaze and visit with it. and we’ll keep loving it. it’s simple. it’s that kind of piece.
the first time i walked by i was a misunderstander, a glancer, a critic.
i thought – and spoke aloud – that it seemed elementary to display canvasses with the primary colors…large canvasses at that, lots of wall space, valuable real estate for an art museum.
it only seems right that ellsworth kelly, in a conversation with john cage (i mean, who gets to talk to john cage!!) said, “i am not interested in painting as it has been accepted for so long – to hang on the walls of houses as pictures. To hell with pictures – they should be the wall.” and so, ellsworth created big multiple panel paintings – murals – to cover walls. they are stunning and i have been enlightened – by sheer experience of his work. you need just stand there a few extra moments and it hits you. his “austin” temple of light is on our list of places to visit. minimalism. color. breath.
we visited the milwaukee art museum and the two of us, ellsworth, richard diebenkorn and mark rothko all hung out together. their notoriety far surpasses anything we could dream of – yes, yes – by miles and miles. but they love hanging out with people who get it and we were happy for their company.
we talked about art and music and simplicity and air and light. we talked about the ocean park series and rectangular color fields and bigness. we talked about communicating basic human emotions in our work. we talked about journeys and life and times of passage, evolution. we rued the difficulty of transitions and obstacles. and then, though sans museum ticket but clearly listening in, john cage stopped by and reminded us, once again, to “begin anywhere.”
and then it was time for us to leave, to go sip wine at the public market and to talk about the magic of getting it.
out the window was a snowstorm. it was february and it is wisconsin. it’s an IFTTT. we had plans for the next few days, not something we oft have…fun things booked with others. we pulled up accuweather and, between that and the ice forming on the window, had anticipatory grief, figuring all would be cancelled. we worried. if this-then that. if a snowstorm, then everything halts.
IFTTT – if this then that – i didn’t know this acronym was a thing, but i see no reason for conditional statements not to have their own acronym. “if you build it [then] they will come” made hugely popular with the movie “field of dreams”.
out the window was a snowstorm. it was february and it is wisconsin, so this is not a surprise. it is an IFTTT. but in these strange climate-changing times, the snow didn’t really stick around much. a couple days later we were out and about at the winter festival in cedarburg, traipsing around with the up-north gang. and the next day we hiked our favorite river trail. i might add – sans miracle mittens.
IFTTT should come with a caveat, some sort of warning. because there are times we may make the worst of assumptions about what is to come. we if-this-then-that ourselves into angst. we can – for sure – envision the difficult, the darkness. but, she reminded me, do we envision the blessings?
it didn’t all halt. on the contrary. instead, the snow fell and it was a magical day. by the time another day passed, most of it was gone. the temperatures were in the 40s and our day’s end on the deck around a couple firepits was dreamy.
out the window was a snowstorm. from inside, we watched it fall. we were warm and toasty. we were immersed in the work we must do right now – the IFTTT of job loss. and we were excited – with some trepidation about cancellations – for the next few days to follow.
kevin costner called and reminded us to stay focused on the hope, to stay the course, to dream of the field of possibilities, to go play after the snow falls.
if the price tag had not read $9.99, i would have purchased this tiny stake sign. but, at that very moment, despite the it-made-me-pick-it-up marketing, $9.99 seemed a tad bit high for a five inch tall sign. still, ridiculously cute.
our sunroom is filled with plants – everything from an exploding ponytail palm to stalwart tiny cactus twins “the dots”, to charlie, the heart-shaped leaf philodendron to snakeinthegrass sansevieria to kc, my difficult bonsai gardenia. kc is my problem plant-child. i mist kc, i use distilled water, i have fed it and keep the bottom tray filled with moisture, i turn it to face the sun. despite my attempts to have conversation, to really share life – for i talk to it every single day – kc is stubborn. next i will seek specific bonsai gardenia plant food – there are several options online. i’ll probably do some research to really determine the proper way to nurse this treasured plant back to good health. i’m not sure where i went wrong and it means so much to me that kc will be healthy and will grow – unfettered and with wild abandon. my relationship with this tiny plant has become a challenge.
you would think, had i purchased the tiny sign, that i would have placed it in one of the burgeoning clay planters. there’s a posse of plants responding to being nurtured. you would think that the e.s.p. of choice might be one that is flourishing.
but it’s not so. i, for sure, would have placed the stake into kc’s pot. for this plant – despite its complexity – is dear to me and is most definitely my emotional support plant. kc is a tiny slice of real life, a little unrooted, a little nutritionally off. when i got it, there were two buds on it. they never opened and, instead, fell to the dirt. my nurturing is not quite right yet. something is not quite right. feeling a little defeated, i keep trying to figure it out.
one of these days, i hope, i will walk into the sunroom and a tiny bud will have formed. and then – the day it begins to slowly blossom – i will know that i have done something right, something that touched it, something that let this little plant know its cherished place in my heart. its bloom will open and i will know that kc is ready and present – with me.
in the meanwhile, i will just keep on keeping on, trying to be steady and, just off to the sidelines, giving it unconditional love. i’m trying to be patient and let it do its own thing, while i quietly do everything in my heart to support it. i am rooting for this bonsai every day and i know that the bloom that will someday come will be inordinately beautiful, exquisite in every way.
that babycat would be 14 today. it’s an unofficial birthday because he just showed up and no one was there to tell us all about his birth, about the litter of kittens he was from, about his momma or his papa. february 28 was the day chosen for him and we celebrated it – and him – each year.
it’s been almost two years since he became an angel-cat. and, in the way that our sweet pets profoundly impact us, we miss him every day. our babycat had a big presence in our home and lives. he still does.
i just read an article about love written by neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo in which she reminded the reader that it indeed is “better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all”. all love. including our amazing animals, i’d insist.
though his own life was not nearly as long as i wished it to be, babycat saved mine. his tiny heart in the universe changed me.
reverse threading 