My car knew the way. Before all of my creative work began, my morning routine was coffee, bank, post office, UPS. I barely remember turning the wheel before arriving at each place. And it wasn’t from not paying attention. It was the softness of simply knowing.
I know the value. The importance of reaching this state of being. But sometimes I forget. In the traffic of chaos. I forget that my heart is the car. My hands are the wheel. And I know how to get there. I’ve always known. The key is just not to fight it.
She arrived so gently yesterday on the page. As if she knew. No hard lines or edges. And I could feel my shoulders drop. A loose grip on the brush. And that calm that was called for, settled, pillowed, and I was home.
“Women in pain become birds.” I just read that. I often find myself looking around for the cameras that are surely filming me in this episode. And as I flutter through the inexplicable planned randomness of the page, I think, yes, but not in the way the author meant — small. No, I think women do become birds, but there is beautiful strength in that. A grandness of sky. Adapting in mid flight. Hovering. Not avoiding the breeze, but feeling it. Using it. All while dressed and feathered.
I say this, not in praise of my own wings, but marveling at those before me. I have been nested and pushed by the best. Elsied and Ivyed into the blue. Words like small were replaced with capable, and I learned to fly.
It’s not to say that days won’t be fragile. That we won’t be fragile. But we have been given everything we need. Mostly love.
I wrote it long ago. The truth of it still lifts me. “She believed in the pure randomness of it all. It could happen to anyone at any time, pain, happiness, confusion, even love.”
It was my mother who listened to me with the patience of paper. I could tell her anything. No dream was too big. No concern too frivolous. No wonder dismissed. I could cursive my feelings throughout the house, and she would gather them in softly, gently, filling heart reams daily.
I didn’t read Anne Frank until junior high. I had already been writing for years. On scraps of paper. Wood-burning notes into panels. Poems on birthday cards. Hopes onto sticky pads. But I didn’t have a diary. And it wasn’t until reading Anne Frank’s that I knew why. It was because I had my mother. Anne wrote in her diary, thinking she had “no such real friend” to confide in. My mother was that “friend.”
Through the years, as I made my living selling the words and images, I was constantly approached by my sales reps and store owners with “What’s new?” A feverish flurry to get to the next thing. An urgency to keep the writing short – “no one will take the time to read all that.” I would smile and think that Anne Frank was right, “Paper is more patient than people.”
I’ve tried to stay true to my slow and looping cursive heart. Giving it the space and time it needs. Giving it the care my mother showed me it was worth.
I hope you have that friend. That confidante. If not, let it be me. Take your time. I’m in no hurry.
The Christmas carcass became yesterday’s soup. Aproned and worry-free, I Grandma Elsied my way through the process. Adding everything. Measuring nothing. And it was delicious. Steeped with holiday and attention, it tasted rich and full, but for me, the added pleasure, satisfaction, joy, came with nothing being wasted.
I try to practice it — this making use. A scrap of metal turned into a frame. Discarded wood into panels. Yesterday’s still fresh oil paint into tomorrow’s tableau. And to me it’s all important, but I hope I pay the same attention to living. Using everything I have. Every speck of courage, because we’ll get more tomorrow. Loving with every piece of my heart, knowing it means nothing left inside. And perhaps it’s not as easy as pot to stove, but I was taught to attempt in Elsie’s kitchen. To abandon worry and just create.
She’s smiling over my soup bowls, but more over, my heart. Telling me daily to give it all, and just become.
I couldn’t figure it out. “But how do they know where they are?” I couldn’t navigate the whole farm, and my little legs were a thousand times the size of the bees. How did they know to find the flowers on either side of the front steps of my grandparents’ house? And because summer days lent themselves to pondering, I sat in the sun on those cement steps, watermelon seeds by my feet, contemplating the size of the universe.
The soundtrack in my head played, “There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea…” The lyrics crescendoing to – “There’s a flea on the speck on the frog on the bump on the branch on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea…” And wasn’t it the same with the hummingbirds and bees? Here. Right now. From the planet, to the state, to the city, to the country, to the driveway, and the grass, right here beside me on the steps.
I asked my grandfather, how they found the flowers. “They want to find them,” he said. I shook my head yes. “I do too,” I said, flicked a seed from my bare toe, and ran off to capture sight of my own.
“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.” Henri Matisse
I had a favorite spoon when I was young. Rounded, I never felt the edge of elongation. It just simply delivered. And I loved it. My mother made sure it was clean for every meal. From Captain Crunch to Campbell’s soup, I had my security, my joy, my spoon.
When my parents divorced and we had to leave our home, everything felt sharp and long. Who were we if not on Van Dyke Road? The last cardboard box packed, I stood at the door and she slipped the spoon in the pocket of my navy windbreaker. Everything would be ok.
Since then, I have never left a situation without a dream in my pocket. Every school, vacation, team, life event, I have taken flight with my pockets filled. Nothing is lighter than joy.
Each time I paint a wing, I smile, because I know what’s beneath. I know what they carry. My mother showed me long ago.
When I first moved to France, the letter arrived in the mail. A little too bulky for just words. Inside was the spoon. The dream. I knew everything would be ok.
For years, I thought that the Horton family from Days of our Lives lived exclusively in the large television cabinet in my grandparent’s living room. It was the only place I saw them. Grandma Elsie seemed to know them intimately, calling each by name. Wrapped in the coil cord, talking about them on the party telephone line for hours while cooking in the kitchen. And why wouldn’t it be possible? There were countless people who dropped by that farm house. Sat at the table. I thought we were all related. I didn’t differentiate between blood connections, neighbors and soap opera characters. Often stories of real happenings were more extravagant than those taking place in Horton’s Salem.
When we gathered for Christmas, there were the usual suspects — all the cousins I summered with in golden fields — but I found the additions the most interesting. Ruby, married to Mac who secretly worked in the CIA, (but then how did we know?). Several Loies. Aunt Kay’s newest husband. Did they all live in the television too? And how did they get here? Certainly there was magic in the air. All under the glow of large multi-color bulbs on the Christmas tree. Sure there were packages, ribbons, bows, but so much more was being opened. Arms and stories and magic.
I guess they are still my favorite gifts — love’s surprises that show up and are ever welcomed home. Finding me still, a lifetime and country away. The magic, if we truly believe, never ends.
I don’t know how many times I sang the song, “I wish I had a river…” Joni Mitchell was a staple in our house, so when it was “coming on Christmas,” she was on repeat. How many wishes did I make for that river, a river so long that I could skate away on, before I even knew what it would mean?
It wasn’t a river where I learned to skate. In fact it was a pond. Noonan’s Pond. And by “learned” I mean, fell and broke my arm. (Maybe that’s where all lessons are learned, in the falling.) All of my summers were spent attempting to fly. From diving boards to bicycle wheels, I was certain that my feet could leave the ground. It was no different with the change in weather. When the lakes ponds and froze over, I was certain, it was simply another way to take flight.
I wore my full plastered arm, like a badge of courage. Every fifth grader celebrated the attempt. All knowing, valuing, what that breeze felt like underfoot.
The needles are already falling from our tree on this sacred eve. But it’s ok. I learned it long ago on the ice. I learn it daily, simply loving. All the rivers to cross. There will be so many stumbles and falls, and letting ins and letting gos…all breezes under our hearts, under our feet, this love teaches us daily, how to fly.
I’m currently reading Theo of Golden. It wasn’t long in when I realized I had seen the main character before — the elderly man with the gray hair, kind eyes, and green flat cap. I opened my sketchbook. There he was. Now with every word of the book, I can see his face. That’s the magic of not just reading, but living in the word.
I suppose we’d call that empathy. Maybe that’s what books are for. To give us the practice for real life. Oh, it comes so easily with the turning of the pages. How we can immerse ourselves into their lives. Really see them. Experience the journey. And if it’s a pleasure to do by the book, shouldn’t it be so face to face. Certainly everyone in literature is an other, ones that we can fascinate. Why do we fear them in real life? I wonder if we imagined their stories, gave them faces, what our world would, could become.
I think it’s worth the practice. So I dive in deeply. Gently. Amid the stories. Amid my own. And maybe we see each other a little more clearly. And we become…
It’s not lost on me that the words are so similar. So often when painting the birds, I feel the smiling, winged “wink” from above.
He didn’t really know me, when he commissioned the painting for his wife. (Didn’t know that I have a “bird by bird” daily regime.) When I finished, he asked if I could add a little something special on the back. “Could you paint a bird in flight?” I looked around the open sky to see who was watching, “Yes,” I smiled, “I could paint a bird…”
I painted for her a yellow bird to match the yellow house on the front. And I wasn’t sure if they were led to me, or I was chosen, or if we all simply met mid flight. And I suppose it’s that idea that I like the most, thinking we’re all just trying to make this journey a little lighter, a little more joyful… and wouldn’t it be something if we did our best to lift each other, even with just a wink and a smile.
Anyway, it’s always a good reason to keep looking up.
