Our heat arrived before the calendar said it was summer. I suppose that’s always the way. It’s funny to think we can prepare for life’s arrivals. Maybe there is no ready before, but only a willing when.
I have often wasted my time with questions of why. Or the blaming of who. I hope I’m spending less time on that. And more time on the now what? Some of my best creations have come from this. When why turns to wonder, words pour out on the page. Paint flows freely. And love breaks through all the cracks of mistiming.
I don’t shake my fist at the sky’s clock. I simply go into the pool. It’s time.
I was able to varnish her yesterday, this woman reading. It’s always the most joyful magic, watching the colors of the painted and glorious self come to added life with this layer.
I guess it’s the same in real life. Under the varnishing of love’s protection, this is when we really shine. Unburdened by the fear of losing what we have. Being able to take the chance of the day’s exposure.
When I listened to her sing in front of her 15 year old peers, standing alone on the stage, the notes braving the audience, my second and third thoughts were, oh, she’s really good, and she looks really beautiful. My first thought was, she feels loved. She feels loved enough to risk it all. And I was happy to be a small part of that varnishing.
There is the rush to protect, but oils cannot be hurried. There-in also lies the advantage. Paint can still be moved. Decisions tweaked. And the painting improves. It turns out this permanence that I think I so desire, can be avoided, leading me to something better.
The ancient stoics had a saying — The obstacle is the way.
It has always been elusive. This patience. My heart struggles to capture, so it tells my hand, you give it a try. And joyfully, my hand, never burdened by lessons already learned, picks up the brush, trying to capture a moment of still, of within. And maybe it’s not patience after all, maybe it’s just being. Because patience itself implies perhaps still a waiting. And in all that naivety of hand, my heart admits, that WAS a good try. And it simply rests in the moment. In the light. In the being. A moment not captured, nor improved, just a moment. And I am saved.
I had this idea. That all was forgiven. I don’t mean just with me, although that was a good start. I mean with everyone, the world. And I suppose it seems silly. It seems as unlikely as the bird atop my head that brought the thought of this peace. And yet, there it rested, tucked in tangles of hair and misbelief. And I closed my eyes to slow the doubt — nothing chases away the hope faster. Maybe it was the Peter Pan collar, bringing these youthful ideas, I thought. But my heart said, “Don’t laugh away the magic.” And I coudn’t see, well, only deep inside where the thoughts were taking root, where the thoughts thought, hoped, that maybe you felt it too, forgiven. Maybe it was messengered in. As easy and light as that. And my heart smiled, sending the confirmation of what had been given. Sending it through lengthened neck and blushing cheeks and all those hopeful tangles, and behind lid, I knew, I somehow knew, that even if it left, flew away with all that hope, all that forgiveness, it still was all possible.
“America is my country, and Paris is my home town.” ― Gertrude Stein
I started discovering myself long before I moved to France. My mother saw to that.It wasn’t so much that we went on vacation when I was young. But we did travel. With neither plan nor map, we drove. When we stopped for gas, my mother placed one foot out the door. By the time the second foot landed she would say yes or no. This was not a judgement so much as a choice. And not whether she would actually fit in this place, but whether she wanted to. Visiting nearly all of the states, I won’t give you the list of “no”s. There were hard yesses throughout the country, but the easiest of these came in New England. One small, elegant, cultured town after another. Streets lined with freshly painted houses. Groomed lawns. High fashion behind screen door porches. Lobster on paper plates. Accessible luxury that not only agreed with her, but was her. I don’t know why we love what we love. I’m not even sure it really matters. I guess the most important thing is knowing when your are in the middle of love’s embrace. When your feet stop and say, “we’re here!” When your heart beats louder than any reservation your brain can come up with. When you don’t just feel alive, but you feel the fresh warmth of being born, again and again. When the only word is yes.
I have a recipe for bread. I can make it in a cocotte (a cast iron French oven), or I can make baguettes. Same ingredients, but different taste. I can’t tell you why it’s true, but only that we love it. When the scent rises with the morning sun, I am my mother’s daughter, driving on paved streets of the familiar unknown. I am still my country, but I am home. I slice the steaming baguette, add the butter and honey, raise it to my mouth, and say, “yes!”
When I think about the countless times I have sung exuberantly into my own fist, (reaching those certainly standing in the back row), it’s not really a stretch that I would put a bird into a French outfit and give him a microphone.
Who is to say what is your Grammy, what is your Louvre? The other day a young woman recognized my painting of her grandpa out of a sea of Tik Tok photos, and I was hung beside the greatest in Paris. These lives we’re creating are limitless.
When I first met our neighbor she asked if I was a singer. Without hesitation I said yes. Don’t I sing all the time? It never occurred to me that she meant professionally. (Whatever that means.) After getting to know each other, it became clear to her that I wasn’t a “singer,” but someone who sang. I shrugged and held up my fisted microphone for her to join in. Now she is a singer too.
When asked what they would like their super power to be, most people will say they would love to fly. The closest I’ve found is to let myself become —become a baker, a poet, a singer, a lover, a painter. While I sit in front of the canvas, fueled by homemade bread and the song that is playing, the bird appears and I am all of these, and I begin to fly.
It was almost a relief after the first scratch. Oh, the pressure of white tennies from Iverson’s shoes. I tiptoed from bus to class to preserve. And then maybe one day, guard down, laughing over a passed note from the back seat, leaning over a nothing that could be funnier, blocking the aisle of the bus, someone less interested in the joke and more concerned about getting off, stepped through the glee onto my new shoe and marked it with a rub of black urgency. Once the shock wore off, so did the pressure, and the outside rain no longer seemed a challenge.
When I hopped from the final step onto Van Dyke Road, I could see them — all the puddles that gravel will allow. Grownups complained, why wasn’t it paved already. But in this land of 10,000 lakes, our sweet dirt road added more than a few extra. And didn’t the name itself sound like an invitation — puddle…. And so I did, I puddled my way up the drive.
Not to be outdone, my socks were as wet as my shoes as I stripped my feet in the garage entry. There was a small line strung from the ceiling to hang the well traveled. I walked from the outlines of my damp bubble toes on the cement, and went victorious into the house.
I’m reading Gertrude Stein. She writes, “ You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle. ” I know I was brave on Van Dyke Road. I must be braver still. We all must be. This current murk that we find ourselves in, more than a puddle for sure, we must brave our way through. Daily. The moral compass is strong. It calls to the heart well traveled, “Come.”
It wasn’t until university that I studied the Renaissance. And to be more accurate, we studied the Renaissance Man. I cringe at that now. Not only because we only studied men, but because we didn’t question it. I didn’t question it. And this being my first year at a liberal arts college, in the midst of fulfilling the requirements, taking science and math and English and art history, wasn’t I actually living it? And not having come from a generation of “you can be anything you want,” it might be surprising to think that somehow I still saw the possibilities. I still believed in them.
I didn’t have the words for it then, but I hear them now. Neil deGrasse Tyson tells us, “Most humans who could ever exist, never will. And so the fact you exist at all, is against stupefying odds of who gets born and who does not. Realizing this, you are you. I am me. We are alive. We get to die. And to get to die means you get to live. Any moment you spend squandering those moments you are alive, does disrespect to all those who will never even be born.”
I suppose it’s within this respect that I eat the bread that I made for breakfast. I play fashion show in the garden. I put together the weed wacker in the garage. I paint a bird in my studio while listening to music. I write a story. I read a book. This won’t get me studied in Ivy League universities. (But if you know me, you know the “Ivy League I admire most anyway.) I’m not even sure that it makes me interesting, but it does keep me interested, and that’s the most important thing. I am interested in still learning. In becoming. In not disrespecting all of those that got me here. In not “squandering” my moments. I am here. We are here! We get to be alive. I still see all the possibilities.
I brought her outside to varnish her. The light was spectacular. She took on the warmth of all her surroundings. (Is that what love can do?) Even having given her those colors by my own hand, I felt like I was seeing them for the first time. This morning, when I opened my computer, it was the first photo that came up. As all of technology does now, it gave the location, but not by city or address, it simply said “Home.”
Because that is the truth. It’s never really about the street or city, it is the feeling. This place where my heart can rest and my mind can wander — both in this glorious light, this truth of being who I am. This place that is no longer about getting there, but becoming in… daily. That is a warmth that only home can bring. (And maybe that’s just love by another name.) I don’t need my computer to tell me that, I’ve already taken on the light.
Words are nothing until they leave the page. I suppose the same is true for love.
Someone was always jumping from something. The overpass. A bridge. The roof of a barn. While I can’t say that I ever would have followed — (we were often asked that question, “if the neighbor girl jumps off a bridge…” and for the most part we didn’t take it literally) — but still I understood the need. The need to fly from something. This need to take all the ordinary of Alexandria, Minnesota, the similar look of classroom and bus. This need to take all that was certain and sure and fling it into the wind and just see…see if in the letting go, we could simply fly.
People laughed when they read it in the news, or sat next to them in the orthopedic clinic, but there was just a tiny part of me that said, yep, I get it… as I turned to the blank page and poem-ed and painted my way up the side of the barn, dropping words and images like added weight, fluttering with excitement as I handed it over to my mother, vulnerable, and weightless, in that moment, in that glorious moment of trusting love, it was then I could fly.
It’s funny how it calms me. Being inside the risk of canvas. Of showing you. Who I am. It’s not my first barn. Not my first book. Nor canvas. But oh, how I keep climbing, because in this life, this love, I know, one way or another, I am going to fly.
