It seems unlikely, but then what isn’t really? A bamboo tree fell in our backyard. Not broken. Not uprooted. But lying on the ground. I guess nobody thought to tell it that it was no longer viable, because with the same speed of the standing bamboo trees, it appears to be still growing.
And it makes me smile, because how many times have I, we, been that tree? Knocked off of our feet, but certainly not done. Maybe it’s when we grow the most, in mid-challenge.
I suppose inspiration is everywhere, if we choose to see it. And I do.
Sometimes you need to hear it from someone who’s been there — from the mouth of the bamboo — everything is still possible, life, growth, learning, even love.
I find it interesting that some of the most expensive clothing brands, The Row for example, are now selling ensembles that highly resemble the things I chose to wear for Halloween from the basement laundry room. Not closeted, but simply hung from a horizontal pole. It was a selection of work clothing, not unlike what hung in my grandparents’ basement. All basically the same size – big — and almost exclusively damp. I never questioned who wore all these clothes. Who worked them into a state of supple? I just assumed every house had them. And my theory was substantiated by the amount of bums and hobos that walked up and down VanDyke road in the dusk of October 31st each year.
It makes me smile, because we thought ourselves too poor to purchase the pre-packaged costumes that hung from the end caps at Peterson Drug, but as it turns out, we weren’t poor, just simply ahead of our time.
I love how everything changes. Fashion comes and goes. Lines get blurred, nearly obliterating perspective. And we just choose what feels right. From the length of our pants to the hearts on our sleeves, we pick, we find our comfort — not because someone told us, influenced us, or pressured us, but because we became.
I can tell you the different paintings that I was working on, by the color palette left on my pants. My shorts. My shirt. Through the years, I have been asked which designer manufactured my paint-splattered jeans. That would be me, I reply.
Don’t get me wrong, I love fashion. All of it. I want to be a part of it, but not so much to impress you, but to joyfully comfort me.
In the summer’s of my youth, usually at least once, the skies would cover in an almost greenish gray, and the breezes that lilted anything on wind would quiet. Alone in the yard, I would hear the land line ring and run. Wrapping myself in the cord and winding myself into the garage, so happy to hear my mother’s voice. “Grab the transistor radio,” she would say, “and go down into the basement.” She didn’t warn me about the possible tornado. Maybe I knew. Her work voice was calm and directive. The plug of the radio hit each step on my way down. I climbed up on the washer to reach the outlet. Between updates and alerts, I danced to the music, weaving in and out of the work clothes. And I was saved.
I feel beautiful wearing my mother’s blouses today, with my tattered, well worn jeans. Is it the fashion, the sound of her voice, the security of her leading me? Yes.
I hear the phone ring again. I race from the basement to a clearing sky. And I become.
If you need reminding of how differently we are taking in the information of this world, just google a few books and read the reviews. I always sample the books online before buying. Searching for a new read yesterday, I had to laugh because three times in a row the “It was so bad I want a refund” review was right next to the “I can’t stop thinking about this book, it changed my life” comment. Each were given the same words. The same pages. But clearly they didn’t receive the same story.
So it really shouldn’t be a surprise that we have such vastly polarizing views of the world. The information is processed so differently within each of us. Affected, I suppose, by our own experience. This was proven again as I picked out my book last night. As I began sampling, I wasn’t certain about this book, not sure if it would appeal to me. Did I have anything in common with the main character, a young Japanese girl writing in her notebook? It was when they cut to a woman on a remote Canadian island, who finds this journal that washed up on shore in a bag that I knew. It was one of those moments when you look around to see if you are actually being filmed. Am I part of the simulation? Because surely some magical force directed you here. It was when they cut to the Canadian woman describing the front of the sketchbook that I knew — “À la recherche du temps perdu” (French — in search of lost time). This is the sketchbook I started recently. The sketchbook I show you almost every day with the birds. The sketchbook that I hold daily. The one that is currently resting beneath the tablet that I’m typing on.
This is the reason why I buy this book. The reason that I am connected to this Japanese girl and this Canadian woman. The reason I still believe we can come together. We can find a way. The very reason I have continued hope.
There are so many things that can divide up. But I am not that different from you. We can always find a reason to connect. If we keep searching, time is never lost.
I don’t remember learning it, but there was a definite opinion in the kindergarten class of Washington Elementary that separated those that “colored” and those that “scribbled.” How easily we were placed into those categories, the rule followers and the rebels. I can see now how those confinements didn’t really do either group any favors.
When my mother used some of her hard earned money to purchase a coloring book at Olson’s Super Market, I knew how special it was, and I treated it as such. Respectfully I colored within the lines. And she would smile, but only with an “I see…” not with a “wow!” So I would go back into my bedroom, lean against my twin bed, sheeted in Raggedy Ann and Andy, and seek permission from the line of dolls that sat beside me. Big Suzy, with her hair so golden it almost seemed plugged in, was the first to say, “go on…go ahead…” I reopened the off brand crayolas and began to draw outside of the lines. Embellishing. Offering. Filling the entire page. Outside the lines, with no lines at all, this was not a scribble, I told myself, (unsure of why that was even deemed derogatory), this was without rules or regulations, this was simply the joy of creation. And the wow I received in the afternoon kitchen from my mom, and all the future wows, I realized were not about perfection, nor shock, but for the creation itself, the art of being.
Yesterday I allowed myself to just paint. With no plan. No idea really at all. No lines or constructs. No intention of sale or even keeping. Just the joy of doing. Of being myself. It still sets me free, the external and internal power of a wow!
We learned early on at Washington Elementary that so many of our problems could be solved by sitting quietly. If we were too hot, “Sit quietly,” the teacher would say. Trying to memorize our times tables, it was important to “tune everything else out.” Even in our excitement of knowing the solution to the problem on the chalkboard, she never called on the ones that “Ooooh, Oooooh, Ooohed,” — no, she smiled and pointed to the steady hand raised silently in the air.
It followed me through high school and even college. I could never do my homework in front of the television, nor with the music blaring. The answers, for me, always came in a whisper. The same has held true for everything, I suppose. Recovery, hope, dreams, even love, has never arrived as the Tabernacle Choir, but more of a hum, a bird song in my heart, that to be heard requires the silencing of all the doubt, fear, and chaos that surrounds us.
There will always be the chatter of those who are so eager to shout, “you can’t,” “you shouldn’t,” “you won’t.” To them (and mostly to myself) I say in a gentle hush, “Oh, but I am.”
I never did step on that rusty nail that we were always warned about, as we barefooted our way up and down Van Dyke Road. And certainly they were there, scattered and abandoned, between every unlocked garage and shed. Maybe it was because we lived in a time when people could actually fix things, or wanted to try. In at least one driveway there was a hood up on the car. A lawnmower turned over. Saw horses supporting more than they should. The hum of power tools. And the smell of cut wood. I suppose that’s why I, we, dared the ground without our shoes. Not believing that nothing would ever go wrong, but understanding that it could be fixed, if and when it did.
And I smile because so far that has held. My mother had it on the yellow sticky note beside her phone, the barefoot equivalent that read, “What haven’t you survived?” Knowing this, it keeps me better than safe, it keeps me vulnerable. Open. For that is when we learn the most. Receive the most.
We can try to protect, seal off the heart with steel toed shoes, but we would give up so much — all the joys of summer — freedom, hope, love. I choose to let my heart barefoot through the day. Rusty nails and all, I will race the morning dew, and I will joyfully survive.
Of course I was going to get in. Everything I had done up until this moment was about taking the chance, saying yes. So when she pulled her car up next to me and stopped, I walked up to the open window. She said the French equivalent of “get in” twice. And it’s surprising how quickly the brain can weigh all the options in a splintering of a second. I opened the door and sat down, and said “OK…” We both let out a nervous laugh, neither quite sure of what we were agreeing to.
It was her husband and son-in-law I had painted. The two men on my daily path. She had stopped me once before and applauded me in my paint splattered shorts from behind the car wheel. We were connected by nothing but sharing the same path. (And isn’t that everything?)
My mind tried to leave the proverbial bread crumbs as she wound us down the gated path. Through the sea of olive trees. Past the pool. She apologized that it was becoming green. She opened the shutters and we walked into her home. She unlocked the armoire and pulled out the most beautiful bottle of olive oil. This was their art — their exchange for the painted portrait. I held the weight of it close to my heart and thanked her in both languages.
I asked about her husband. I don’t see him anymore on my daily walk. The Alzheimer’s no longer allows his trip. A small tear, hers or mine, said he still makes the journey each day on the canvas.
I walked home knowing we always have the tools to connect, if we share the best of us. If we dare the best of us, ourselves.
It’s only a painting. It’s only olive oil. But it’s everything.
I didn’t have words for it when I began. It all seemed too much. Too long. And it wasn’t like I was simply out on a limb, I was gone, so far off into the distant future, a future that I could awfulize into every worst scenario. So I brought myself back. Gave myself only the space of this sketchbook. Allowing myself any emotion, but confining the worry, the fear, to about 12” of my day. Feel anything, everything, I told myself. And once I gave it a voice, without my knowledge or permission, that voice began to turn into a song. And that song calls me each day to the page, not the fear.
And the most joyous thing happened yesterday. Looking at the bird woman, with her wicker bag at the market, birds resting on her head, I imagined her saying, “Seriously, I really need to shop faster.” And I laughed. Out loud.
And it isn’t time making the difference. It’s the work. Giving myself a place to grow, to feel. A place where perfection isn’t required. And it’s ironic, I suppose, so beautifully ironic, that in this tiny space, I feel so gloriously free.
It just occurred to me, maybe that’s what the heart is after all, a sketchbook. Not the place with all the answers, but beat by beat, page by page, a tiny space where we are free to feel, to learn, to grow, to become. Ever the artists of our own choosing. I suppose it’s never the brain, nor the hand, that says, I can make something beautiful out of this, but the heart…ever the heart… turning the page, crossing over to the beauty that lies ahead.
Although she only sat down for one, Days of Our Lives, the soap operas played all afternoon on my grandma’s television set in the living room of their farm house. Of course we could hear them as we ran in and out of the screen door, up to the corner kitchen cupboard with the Lazy Susan that held all of the candy. We’d spin ourselves almost dizzy trying to decide between the blur of Black Cows, Sugar Daddies, Sugar Babies, and all things sweet.
Deep into our sugared highs, we acted out the parts we heard from the other room. Using words we didn’t know, but kept repeating them, whispering them into our sweaty hands covered in sticky giggles, after our Aunt Lillian warned us that to say them aloud was to risk living them.
In no way do I believe that my summer antics, nor my cousins’, brought to life all of those whispered words we seem to be living within. We say them out loud now. Words like divorce and affair and death and cancer. The only real difference, what they consolidated in less than an hour on the television, has taken a lifetime for most of us, but certainly we have all been touched.
And I think it’s ok to say them out loud. To not hide from them. Not give them the power. To voice our struggles and our fears, whatever they may be. Maybe we knew something as children. We weren’t afraid of any of it. Not the words, nor the warnings. Nothing could stop us. Not screen, nor cupboard, or door of any kind. We raced through it all together.
I suppose I write the words each day in order to release them from the living room set. To fling open the doors and tell you it’s ok. To show you. To run with you. Play with you, amidst it all. We’ve never had the power to rid the world of all the difficulties. The pain and the struggles. But we’ve always had the power to find, still, the dizzying joy, the sweaty laughter.
It sounds odd, but there is a real truth to finding comfort in the uncomfortable.
The process of painting starts with an unknown. You are going to bring to life something that didn’t exist before. There are no real risks in the beginning. Stretching the canvas. Gessoing. Fundamentals basically. No big chances taken. And even starting with the first strokes, you know you can always paint over. But then there is effort and time. And a decision to continue. You’re really in this now. And you feel a twinge of magic amid the fear. Will it show up again? Will you show up again? Will you do the work? And it seems long when you’re in it, but everything is really just a moment, isn’t it? For me, I like that moment. Some may call it discomfort, and I don’t know another word for it. But I don’t want it to sound negative. Because I seek it out, again and again. It’s what I miss after each completion, I suppose. But It’s why I return to the canvas again. I love that feeling of getting through. Shrugging off doubt. Not knowing, but just believing in the process. The mix of magic and work — a heart’s potion that makes no promises, and would it be magic if it did? No.
As the newest portrait hangs on the wall, there is joy in the praise. The compliments. But I can feel it. The warning of stability. Faith’s tap on the shoulder that says it’s time. Time to chance it all again. So I start with the panel. The canvas. And my heart wriggles. Let’s get uncomfortable.
