“know then that the body is merely a garment. go seek the wearer, not the cloak.” (rumi)
and the babycat chair – cloaked in snow – shielded all from the view of its real soul. its new trapping hides its decrepit wickered weave. one would not know not to sit – certainly not to sit back – with snow covering this seat, this chairback. the babycat chair’s garment of white belies what is truly there.
and yet, this chair – the other day – seated a squirrel or two. as i watched out the window, they took turns sitting, munching on something i could not identify, comfortable squatting on this handy seat.
i – like you – have known plenty of people who have cloaked themselves in all the trends, who have kept up in fashion, who dress for the time and continually refresh their wardrobe. indeed, they look fabulous and, like just wearing the right couture, their vehicles and homes and sundries are all cloaked in that same shiny wrap. with some, it might be hard to gauge what is truly inside, what soul is silent, what soul is loud. we may not know but we are entranced by the packaging, the masking, the shell – that which is superficial, evanescent, transient.
the spirit of the babycat chair carries on, with or without snow. its aging – like the aging of barney-the-old-piano in our backyard – lifts up the unchanging truth that aging is not negotiable.
we – inside our cloaks – whatever they might be – transcend the broken wicker of what we put on to cover who we are. like the babycat chair – but exponentially – the spirit of what we mean, what we have meant, remains.
what do we each choose that to be, individually, in community, in this world?
it took me by surprise – the iris in the middle of the cattails. we’ve hiked along these trails and through these wetlands so many times. yet we have never seen an iris here – bravely growing in the margin of the marsh.
we stopped and had a moment with the grace of the iris.
decades ago i was on a rare weekend trip with three girlfriends that ultimately changed the arc of things. our trip re-opened a door that had been slammed shut long ago. suddenly, recording my music rose from deep inside; it had seemed buried forever.
it wasn’t that I wasn’t a musician. i was. i was actively a minister of music at a church. i was teaching private piano lessons. i had been a public school choral director. i was a professional. but I wasn’t the one thing i wanted to be, the thing that felt like me, like my skin, doing what i was supposed to be doing – a recording and performing artist. that had been dashed early on – stolen by the insatiable appetite of a serial predator.
we four wandered around a small town in the corner near where wisconsin meets illinois meets iowa. they picked out an Italian restaurant for lunch – because as we wandered we talked about meatball bombers and good sauce.
but i was a margin girl – because the arts are not held – financial-reward-wise – as other professions and we had a tighter budget than most. so i didn’t feel comfortable with what i anticipated would be the cost of such a lunch at a restaurant high on a bluff in town. being a margin girl my budget was meager. i, instead, insisted on grabbing a meatball bomber at the local subway sandwich shop, encouraging them to stay with their plan to dine out. it has always been my stance that it’s not really about the food; it’s about the company.
i was the only one to buy a sub sandwich and quickly eat it out of its paper wrap at a formica-laminate table in the fast food place. but they kept me company. and then we all went to the restaurant where we were seated outside at a table with cloth napkins on a tree-lined patio. they dined on scrumptious-looking meatballs on crusty italian bread overflowing with sauce and melted fresh mozzarella with lovely stemmed glasses of wine. and i kept them company. i felt silly and out of sync with my friends, who teased me about the quality of their lunch versus mine. there was a $6 difference in the cost of the sandwich and i can’t remember the expense of a glass of wine plus tip for the meal.
i never forgot that day. it was a profound experience for me – a defining margin-moment.
years later, on our way out west, d and i stopped in this town. we did a little walking and shopping and then – very deliberately – we went to the restaurant on the hill and ordered giant meatball subs and a glass of wine. still marginpeople – particularly as artists in our mid-50s – but embracing it, proud of it, working with it instead of against it.
so the small beautiful iris tucked within the cattails in the marsh really captured my attention. a margin-dweller.
we admired her for several minutes and then we hiked on. and i quietly cheered for her. just like i cheer every time we get into our 282,000 mile littlebabyscion.
it is just a little corner of our yard – about 4′ x 6′ or so off the east side of our deck, tucked next to the fence.
years ago – decades, really – we used it as a tiny vegetable garden. we planted a few tomatoes and other whatnot plants and attempted to have a bit of farm-to-table (so to speak) additions to our kitchen. being a tiny, difficult-to-access place, it was hard to keep up with weeding in that garden and it eventually went by the wayside.
wildflowers seemed like a good idea then – less maintenance – a freeness – a mayhem of a garden. that was lovely until it wasn’t. weeds were prolific and my neighbor’s snow-on-the-mountain was an ever-present menace.
half a dozen years ago or so we decided to build the potting stand with some delicious barnwood and industrial pipe. we added basil, a dwarf indeterminate tomato plant, some lettuce. we had a (yes, singular) salad with our lettuce, loved our tiny tomatoes and were ecstatic with the basil out our back door.
it has morphed – this little garden. and now, through a study of the survival of the fittest, herbs and jalapeños and tomato plants fill the space – this tiny space – wrought-iron-fenced off to really define it – this space that brings me peace.
in the last days we have had some big harvesting extravaganzas. our basil plants – despite an unsure beginning when i thought they might be goners – have responded to the sunshine and the warmth of this particular wisconsin summer.
with new clippers (it’s really the little things!) i clipped off the basil and some parsley as the youtube instructed. rinsed all the leaves in a colander and prepped everything we needed to make two batches of red pesto and a giant batch of green pesto, all of which went into the freezer for the middle of winter when fresh from our garden will taste ever-so-good. we have at least nine meals stored away and that was merely the first harvest.
i simply cannot imagine what it might be like to farm most of what one eats. the sheer joy of tending and growing and harvesting – all lots of work – tedium, really – (for even this little potting corner is time-consuming and i find myself worrying about the health of the plants, our investment in them, their yield) – but yet entirely zen as i lose myself in it.
yesterday i purchased a new cilantro plant – ours bolted along with the dill. so we will give cilantro another round – it is the perfect addition to our sweet-potato-black-bean burritos and stepping out back to snip it off is ridiculously glee-inspiring. (yes, yes…you are right…it doesn’t take much to amuse us.)
early every day i step out the back door asking dogga if he “wants to water the plants with momma”. every day we use this wildly cool watering wand and top off each of the big clay pots or wood planters out there. every day i – once again – think to myself how happy this tiny garden makes me. every day – in these moments – peace descends on me like the soft morning air.
*****
* (sing to the tune of don ho’s “tiny bubbles”: tiny garden/in the yard/makes me happy/is my zen-life-guard)
it is a ritual. the dandy dandelions show up and i instantly become the mother of toddlers. oh, those very, very precious times.
it is wondrous to me that i still receive notes about this song – fistful of dandelions.
my children are both in their thirties now. life as a mom has changed dramatically…but only from a practical day-to-day point of view. the heart stuff is the same. it never changes.
a friend wrote to me, wondering if she could turn her mother-emotions down a bit now that her child was an adult.
i wrote back it doesn’t get any easier. motherhood is both the joy and grief. it is the fierce loving, protecting, worrying, cheering on…forever and ever. it is the backing up. it is the letting go. it is trusting that – in both the bliss and the pain – the connection exists, there is love.
in the juxtaposition of october’s start and summer’s last grasp – up north – we were the recipients of the gift of a subtle duality, the gift of liminal space as the seasons shift and morph into the next: summer falling away and autumn rising.
i am a fall-girl and october is my favorite month. way back when – when color and season analysis was a thing – i was told i was autumn. but i already knew it. and now – in what is defined as the autumn of my life – i find myself looking back so as to look forward, to go forward. sometimes this is with great intention, sometimes it is not at all deliberate.
i stumbled across a video the other day. i was googling a youtube of one of my recordings. second up on the googlelist was a video i had never seen. from 1996, shot and edited by a videographer, this was posted recently as a memorial to him and is a 25 minute snippet of a full-length concert i had played at uw-parkside’s auditorium. i released two CDs that night, my second and third…a dozen albums and so, so many concerts and stages ago.
i pushed the play button.
there are days you wonder where the time has gone, how summer has turned to fall and fall to winter. time has rushed by and, in its fleetingness, you have left behind profound moments, defining moments.
watching this video became one of them. watching this video reminded me.
my straight-bangs-wrinkleless-eye-shadowed face was in her element. i could feeel it.
maybe – in the autumn of my life – in the liminal space of relevant-not-relevant, of summer-fall, of falling away-rising – i’m not quite done yet.
*****
snippets from 1996 CONCERT at UW-PARKSIDE – releasing BLUEPRINT FOR MY SOUL & THE LIGHTS CDs(a memorial post on YouTube to videographer Harry Stoetzel)
the seagull looked at me furtively, side-eyed. he acted like i just wasn’t there, stepping along the harbor channel wall at his own pace, seemingly not too nervous about my presence.
writing, i’m holding my weathered copy of jonathan livingston seagull in my hand. jonathan thrived. he left the traditional flock of gulls so that he could fly, soaring higher than he had ever soared. he was an outlier but was kind and loving, generous with the skills he learned.
i’m thinking he was as much an artist as those of us who are artists.
ever since, well, forever, i have had a thing about seagulls. i have a seagull collection in a box in the basement. in the 70s, it was a popular tchotchke – a plaster or wood base that looked like a piling or rocks or shoreline with a thin metal piece atop which was a seagull. sold in every beachfront town, i was – back then – a willing buyer. i had seagulls everywhere in my room. they represented the beach for me – my winter/spring/summer/fall sanctuary. and then i read richard bach’s book. and i was hooked. it resonated with me back then, this story of breaking away, hopefulness, dreaming, accomplishing. i was 18 and i was a jonathan-livingston-seagull.
my soaring seagull days ended abruptly at 19.
but in these days now – as i walk the lake michigan beach or hear the gulls as they fly overhead our house – i am reminded. the caw of the gull is reassuring and, as i gaze up watching them swoop and soar, i feel vestiges of the surf – the sound and the ocean from long ago. tide out. tide in.
i walked along the channel and, in parallel lines, the gull started to step along the wall. and then he stopped, put both feet firmly on the cement.
and, still looking at me sideways, whispered, “don’t forget you know how to fly.”
it’s been a minute since i’ve sung into a microphone. for that matter, i haven’t spoken into a microphone in a while either. i haven’t run cables or tested monitors, used earpieces or balanced sound in a space. i haven’t hung condenser mics over my piano or booms in front of the keyboard. no neumanns or shures, no audix.
it’s not like you forget, though.
we walked past the meadow off-trail and nature had clearly sent in her sound engineer. the meadow hawkweed microphones stood ready and able to amplify all the ambient sounds of the woods. it made me giggle a little thinking about these tiny microphone-like clusters soaking up all the noises around them, running them through some sort of nature-equalizer and tossing them back out through an invisible speaker system.
in every good venue sound system, decisions are made for each and every performance. tiny – sometimes barely perceptible – turns of the dials, slides of the sliders, mutes and unmutes all define what the listener will hear. in the best scenario, the listener hears sound as it really is, nothing distorted. in the best scenario, sound is pure, unadulterated, unfiltered, offered as true, crisp, present, full-frequency-range. the piano sounds luxurious; the voice rides above it. exquisite.
how would nature balance it all – the call of birds, the busy peeper-frogs, the wind in the high leaves of the forest, the wings of butterflies, the tease of chipmunks and squirrels in the underbrush, the crunch of human footfall, conversation, hushed tones of worry, laughter, breath. would nature pare down all tones of negativity, choosing instead to pan to the positive? or would nature allow for all of it – a cacophony of life as it exists in the moment?
the draw of the microphone is powerful. i wonder if the butterflies nearby felt it too.
sisu is alive and well at the milwaukee art museum. i was thrilled to see the scandinavian design installation. i was pretty sure it would all feel familiar. all my life, i have been surrounded by pieces from scandinavia, finland in particular.
in what is likely a sin-of-casualness, quite some time ago i placed the vintage marimekko dish towel into the kitchen drawer, wanting to use it, to see it more often than the rare times i open up the cedar chest. i took out other finnish linens as well, placing them in regular rotation. they are simpler, organic linens, raw in color. but the marimekko…it’s happiness in a towel.
so when we walked into the room with the brilliant marimekko maija isola’s unikko (poppy) design hanging as a giant banner of fabric, i was inordinately happy. gorgeous and bold, you could stand there for a long time and just soak it in, like sunshine on a bluebird day.
i have many finnish relatives. all delightful and spread about in finland and various other european countries, i haven’t had the pleasure of being in their company since i was eight and my grandmother took me to finland for ten weeks to experience the land of the midnight sun, the sauna and the lake of the northern cabin, the town named after her family – klamila. but, at eight, i wasn’t fascinated by bolts of fabric or designer glass. instead, i pretended there was a horse on the back porch and spent long hours on the porchrail, reins in hand, exploring the wilds of finland. it would do my heart good to meet this branch of family once again.
i knew my sweet momma and my grandmother were cheering as we slowly made our way through the installation. reading all the placards and admiring the simplicity of pieces of silver, of china, of exquisitely designed coffeepots, we had to, of course, veer off the scandinavian path and visit the diebenkorn and the rothko before we left.
the marimekko towel was the next one up in the drawer. i took it out and pondered the feasibility of using such a treasured item. and then i could hear my momma echo my grandmother’s words: of course you should. it’s your roots.
on friday i projected being proud to be there – at chicago pridefest. i underestimated it.
even in its boisterous volume – loop high-fidelity-noise-reduction-earplugs and all, even in its crowded-can-hardly-move streets – take a breath, take a breath, take a breath, even in its vast array of body-expression – everyone seeming so comfortable on this day in their own skin, i felt at home. there was not one time we experienced any rudeness. there was not one time anyone excluded us. there was not one time anyone looked us up and down, measuring, discerning, approving or disapproving. there was not one time anyone seemed in-your-face superior. there was freedom. there was the peace of acceptance. there was – love of one another – as far as the eye could see.
our son’s friends ran to greet us and a tiny little girl passed out rainbow happy face buttons. we browsed the merch booths and returned to the corner in time for our son’s performance. an EDM artist, his show was seamless and powerfully energetic.
i might have worn different shoes. the health app on my phone said 9.7 miles. i’m thinking it was more. it was impossible not to dance, so i’m pretty sure that added to the steps i took, but keen sandals are not really dancing shoes. i don’t know if the tevas would have been better. what i do know is i had really happy feet and that doesn’t even start to compare to my heart.
though most of the time i watched my-son-on-stage-in-his-element…his imperative, as david said, “making music that sets people free.” i turned around a few times, to look at the crowd behind us.
people blissfully dancing, moving, touching, hugging, smiling. there didn’t seem to be one iota of self-consciousness or doubt. it wasn’t about wondering if they belonged, if their actions – or their very beings – would be measured against some heteropatriarchal b-s.
and i was so proud.
proud of our son and his music. proud of his really kind friends. proud of the people dancing around us. proud of the fishnet statements and the rainbows and the exposed skin.
this is what the world should model itself after. this is what our country should model itself after. this is what our communities should model themselves after. period.
and then – in the forwarding of love as the only north star – all could be proud.
mama dear made rag rugs. i still have a few of them. for a long time, a rag rug served as a faux tablecloth on the kitchen table. eventually, after years of washings, the stitches loosened up and i tucked it carefully into the drawer of a cupboard in the dining room.
my grandmother also made yoyo quilts. she took outgrown clothing and bits of leftover fabric bolts and cut circles from them. sewing a running stitch along the perimeter she pulled and it gathered into a rosette-round. hundreds of rosettes later, even thousands, she stitched them together into quilts full of visceral memories of moments spent in party dresses or aprons or simple a-lines. yoyo quilts sell on etsy for a few hundred dollars, but i would never sell mine.
some day i’d like to make a yoyo quilt. i had envisioned my children cherishing one made from clothing they wore as little ones, but i realize that their level of thready is nowhere near mine, so i will have to make the quilt for myself. i have saved their clothing to do just that – tiny overalls, sweet sundresses, toddler leggings, mini blue jeans, printed onesies and receiving blankets – for a yoyo or even for a traditional quilt, both projects which seem like mindfulness exercises even with the tedious work needed to create them. someday.
we walked into the door of the farmhouse. it was our second time there. i remembered it as homey and just perfect for what we needed – as a gathering space for the family, the rest of whom were staying in a hotel. i remembered the blue walls, the chalkboard cabinet doors with messages, the photographs. i remembered the cheer.
but i had forgotten about the rag rugs. instant bonding.
in early morning, the sun rose past the horizon, peeked under the porchroof, around the adirondack chairs and the swinging platform, past the sleeping gracie-cat and up and over the fern perched on the rusty-red outside cellar doors.
but at just the right time, in later afternoon, it curled around the silo and the barn out on the west side, streamed in through the screen door and bathed the old wood floor and the rag rug in light. like a spotlight on something simply beautiful, it called out to be noticed.
i wonder how hard it is to make a rag rug. mama dear never showed me how she made them. i suppose i could take them out of the upstairs closet where they linger, waiting for the right chance to use them again. maybe i could figure it out. it can’t be too very difficult to discern the process. but my grandmother was a talented seamstress and i remember mama dear sewing and sewing, her hands moving quickly – at her singer or with needle and thread – and talking, talking, talking as she sewed. the only time she didn’t speak was when she would (don’t try this at home) store pins pursed between her lips. i thought that straight pins needed ‘spittin’ on’ in order to use them. it wasn’t for a few years until i learned that my grandmother was not spitting on the pins before she used them. perception – as a child – is a funny thing. what i did understand was how much she made things for all of us. no spit needed, just lots of love.
rag rugs and quilts and wood floors. they go straight to my heart.
reverse threading 