“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 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.
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.
As Jane Goodall sat for her portrait, she told the artist that everyone made fun of her as a little girl. After finding the Tarzan book, and reading from cover to cover, she knew that he had married the wrong Jane, and that she would go to Africa, study the animals and write books about them. “How are you going to do that?” — really more doubting than asking. “You don’t have the money,” or “You’re just a girl.” “Everyone scoffed at my dream,” she said, “but not my mother.”
And didn’t I make it the same way? Without examples or funding. Seeing the wrinkled looks. The doubters of my chosen unchartered path. But never with my mother. I can’t even tell you if she was reflecting my dream, or I was reflecting her belief, but within her presence, I didn’t just imagine who I could be, I believed in who I was.
…but who was doing that for her?
Maybe this is one of life’s greatest treasures. Finding your champion. The person who eventually teaches you how to become your own. Maybe it’s a parent, or educator, or friend. When you find it, hold on tight, then let go loosely. Because this is the gift that must be shared.
When I painted the first portrait of my mother, she looked at herself and said, “That woman doesn’t look like she needs to be afraid of anything…maybe I don’t either.” We were each other’s champions.
I like that the word story in French is histoire. Because it is my story, my history. I am a part of it all. And it’s not about going back, but building on it, daily.
You wouldn’t know it to see my home today, but I came to France with almost nothing. The walls are now filled with paintings of my family, both American and French. I am surrounded by new books that I’ve read. New books that I’ve written. The small suitcase of clothes with which I arrived now fills three closets. My story, mon histoire, continues.
When I feel sad, it’s often because I think I’m in an ending. That’s when I have to tell myself that I’m simply in my story. I look at the painting of my grandfather and know those fields get replanted every year. I still feel the breeze of my mother’s twirling dress. The bursting of youth from the children at sea’s shore. And from my story, my history, I keep beginning. We all do. Planting. Twirling. Dreaming. Loving, still and again, the story continues.
Maybe nature knows, how the gifts are only borrowed. From nest to song, how it’s all impermanent. We’re given everything we need between sky and tree, but it has always been for the sharing. We were meant to live in the birdsong.
I think all creative ideas (and I’m including love here, perhaps topping the list) are like dandelion seeds floating on a summer breeze, with the bravest of barefoot children chasing them, stretching to pluck them from the blue, knowing if they don’t, there are countless chubby legs running behind and beside, willing to make the journey. And just as the summer child borrows the fleeting day, I gather the words and the paint, into the shape of love, and hope and try and pray it makes it to the next season.
Painting in a new room yesterday, brush in hand, I sang along with each stroke, the Christmas songs so generously lent to me, to us, each year. Within the music, somewhere on the canvas, I am suspended in time, in the gift of the moment. No doors of advent are opening. No rushing toward the next. I’m catch myself in the song of the bird, in a moment of happiness, and I find myself in the most wonderous gift of all. I know I won’t keep the painting. It must be shared. Chubby summer legs will be waiting.
