Jodi Hills

So this is who I am – a writer that paints, a painter that writes…

Category Archives: dare


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Grounded.

In Greek mythology, Antaeus had super strength whenever he was grounded. Touching the Earth (his mother), his strength was always renewed. In combat, even if thrown to the ground, he was invincible. It was Heracles who discovered the source of his strength and, lifting him up from Earth, crushed him to death.

I always wanted to do the sleepover. But when the sun began to set, when it was time to go to bed, the battle began. It didn’t matter if it was a best friend’s house, or even in the beginning at my grandma’s house, I just wanted to go home. And home was with my mother, the source of my power. 763-5809 was the life line that grounded me. Making the call, without question, she dropped what she was doing and came to pick me up.

I suppose some would call that spoiled. I call it loved. You might think, oh she’ll never learn if she isn’t forced to do it. On the contrary. I would come to learn because of it. Secure in this love, I was able to go beyond my wild imagination. And not just physically. But emotionally. Artistically. I had the strength to dare in it all. To brave my heart and soul. To live. To love.

There are a million things, people, that try to pull us away from what we know. What we believe in. Sometimes it can even be our own silly worries that try to rip us away from the very thing that gives us strength. And I can see it. Feel it. When my feet begin to lift off the ground. When defeat feels imminent… I return to the story. I write it again and again. The love is always there. Will always be there. Invincible. And I am forever strong. 


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Laid upon the counter.

My first instinct was to save it all. Candy from Easter or Halloween. I would spread it out. Sort it by taste and then color. Count it. Figure out how many days it would last. Not wanting to run out. Supplementing with Christmas, or Valentine’s, possibly birthday…how could I keep the candy supply chain alive?

It became quite clear on our trip to Jerry’s Jack and Jill grocery store, that this was the furthest thing from my Grandma Elsie’s mind. The first thing she picked up was a bag of coconut toasted marshmallows. She ripped open a corner and placed them in the child seat at the front of the cart. “Grandma!” I shouted a warning. “It’s fine,” she said. “We’re going to pay for it.” “But we’ll get in trouble.” “No, I know the people here.” And indeed she did. Never hiding her joy of these sugary treats, she ate them right in front of the butcher, and the stock boy. She said hello to everyone, popping them into her mouth, one after the other. By the third aisle, it became quite clear that we weren’t getting into trouble, so when she looked at me offering, I agreed. They were delicious. “Don’t you want to save any?” I asked. She looked bewildered. “But you love them…” I said. “What am I going to do with all that love?” she smiled.

We placed the empty bag on the counter at the cash register. It was my favorite trip ever to the grocery store.

It became so clear. Nothing was worth anything, if it wasn’t spent. Candy on the bedroom floor had no taste. And it became even more true with emotion. Courage had to be exercised. Love had to be given away. Or it meant nothing. I suppose we think we’re safe or something, if we hoard it all, but I’m afraid it’s just not true.

I want to live this way. So sure at the end of the day that I’ve laid it empty upon the counter. My sacks of courage, and victories, my joy, my woes, even, and especially, all my love. So sure that there will be more tomorrow. Again, and again, I will taste this life.

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By name.

Left to my own devices each weekday of summer, I became quite adept at navigating this solo world of play. On the alternate days when I didn’t have a softball game, I figured out a way to play catch with myself. My mother bought a net that was strung between a metal square. If you threw the softball directly into the sweet spot it bounced directly back to you. I thought I was making a good decision when I placed the net in front of the garage. Because our driveway faced Van Dyke road, I didn’t want to throw the ball directly into what I loosely will call “traffic” (the random neighbor’s car).  Perhaps I overestimated my throwing accuracy. Hitting the target several times in a row, I gained the confidence to throw harder. I “wound up” and let the ball fly. Missing the target completely, the ball shattered the glass window of the garage door. 

I panicked. I looked around to see if anyone saw. There was no one there. Only my banana seat bike. It seemed to be the only answer. I dropped my glove and straddled the banana seat. Kicking the air. Trying desperately to keep up with the pedals as I raced down the hill toward the North End. The North End was the undeveloped land at the end of our neighborhood. Undeveloped by housing, but certainly overdeveloped in every school age kid’s mind that lived on this road. It was where every bad thing imagined or otherwise was sent to live. It was the threat of the unknown. The Bermuda Triangle of this small Minnesota town. Exactly the place where thieves or window breakers would go to hide.  I threw my bike into the side of the gravel pit and waited. 

It could have been hours, or a lifetime, I’m not sure how long. I imagined my story. It was robbers who did it. Certainly bad people who just wandered by while I was innocently playing. Or maybe it was one the Norton girls. Surely I could throw the blame at one of them. I kicked the dust with my bumper tennis shoes and thought and thought and thought. 

When I first heard my name called, I was sure it was the police. I held my breath. I heard it again. It became louder, but not angry. Almost sweet. Almost welcoming. I knew that voice. I got on my bike and rode towards it. My mother stood at the top of the hill. Every excuse fell from my heart and hands as I dropped my bike beside her on the gravel road. “I did it,” I said, hugging her nyloned work legs. “I know,” she said. We walked my bike back home.

Love will always call your name. Heart open, I walk the road. And listen.

Heart open, love called her name.
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Four and Twenty.

We were doing so well, until we got into the higher numbers. Not only did we have to learn the language, the French words for the numbers, we had to do the math as well. To say the teacher explained to us — (A “we” that could be only described as a collection of people from the land of misfit toys. Myself – the American, the two women from South Korea, the Cambodian, the Russian, the Mexican, and the 5 Arabs.) — this would be an overstatement. But in her defense, what good reason could there be to stop giving the additional numbers their own names and start combining them in different math problems? For example — the number for eighty is not given its own name, no, it is quatre-vingts (4×20).

Deep in my wandering brain, I thought of the first time I had heard this four and twenty. Yes, yes, baked in a pie…

“Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing.
Wasn’t that a dainty dish
To set before the king?”

It was my first music box. It was red and yellow, shaped like a tiny radio. You spun the knob and it sang the nursery rhyme. This one was my favorite. I dialed it in. The birds survived every time. Imagine that I thought – baked in a pie – and they survived! Glorious! I sang it again and again.

As the nursery rhyme repeated in my head, the teacher had already gotten to the nineties. It was even worse. In the nineties, you have to multiply and add. You can imagine the nightmare that 99 brings for a non-French speaking person — quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (4×20+10+9).

I suppose it will come as no surprise. To test out of this first unit, we had to hold imaginary conversations with the French officials. The first scenario, she explained, was in a store. I was to be the clerk selling dresses (so far so good.) She would be the customer. I looked at the pictures she gave to me. It showed a dress hanging on the rack. As big as life the tag read, $99.99. My heart sank. She asked how much it was. I started doing the math. The numbers raced in my head…all clunked together with the Song of Sixpence. I began my quatre-vignt-dix-ing… then stopped and said, in my best French — this dress was on sale. (Wasn’t that a dainty dish, I thought?) She laughed. I passed the exam.

I have been given the tools I need to find my way in and out of life’s pie. And so I keep singing!

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Seeing blackbirds.

I was shocked when she said it. I couldn’t believe my ears. I looked at my mother, who couldn’t hide her surprise either. What did she say? We were riding in the car together with my sister-in-law’s mother. Headed to some sort of family event that had spread to include a good portion of this small town. We were discussing the family tree. She asked about one of my mom’s brothers. Surely she couldn’t be thinking of Uncle Tom, I thought. “Oh, yes!” she continued, “he’s so handsome!”

No disrespect to my Uncle Tom. But this is not how he had been branded to me. He was the rough one. Tough one. Bold. Straight talking. Intimidating? Sure. Colorful? Indeed. And I guess, once we’re presented with something, we often stop looking, as if this were the only answer. 

After the event I went home and looked at the family portrait. I guess he was handsome. Huh! I wonder if he knew. I hope so.

I love to paint birds. You might think the colorful ones offer the biggest in painting lessons, but for me, that’s not really true. The black bird is a beauty that really forces you to see. Because to create the deep richness of the black, you have to see all the other subtle colors. The blues. The grays. The taupes. And browns. There is no depth without these other colors. And with no depth, there really is no beauty. 

But where does the responsibility lie? Within whom? Is it up to the person to show you their true colors? Or the viewer to see it? I suppose it’s both. And this is not a hardship – no, this is something! Because when you look, and you see it, it makes you feel special — you are allowed into all the beauty. You get to see beyond the shadowed wings of the blackbird and watch the glorious flight. You get to see beyond the expletives of your uncle’s mouth. Beyond the overalls and slight smell of cow, and think, wow, he really was handsome.  

I have been flawed. I haven’t always seen what is right in front of me. But I’m learning. I’m trying to do better. Be better. And like the Blackbird song says, “Take these broken wings and learn to fly…”

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…and then the beauty comes.

My grandfather was perhaps the first to teach me about color. Each year he planted in the black dirt. He worked under blue skies. Prayed under gray. And with the daily stroke of his hands turned the field from green to gold. It was the most beautiful canvas I had ever seen. Were it not for him, would I have seen it? I can’t be sure.

I often speak of the Sainte Victoire mountain. It rests in our daily view. Cezanne was perhaps the first to point it out to the world. Painting it again and again. Showing its beauty in every light. Dominique was the first to point it out to me as he drove me from the airport. Would I have seen it? Would I have felt it? Would I have painted it without either of them? Probably not.

Georgia O’Keeffe had her own mountain. Her own “Sainte Victoire.” She painted the big mountain (as she called it) again and again. Braving the heat and the cold. The solitude. The doubters of women. All to show us the beauty of what was around her. The beauty of what she saw.

I suppose all of it was unlikely. Seemingly almost impossible at times. But this is what gives me hope. This is what enables me to put my grandfather, Rueben Hvezda, alongside Paul Cezanne. Alongside Georgia O’keeffe. To write about him. To write about my grandmother making kolaches and quilts. My mother dressing in the crispiest of whites, even on her most crumbling days. OH, my beautiful mother! Were they artists? (…a rose by any other name…) They took what was in front of them, inside of them and made it beautiful. Not only showing me, but showing me how.

So I make the pictures with paint and words. Each daily stroke, with brushes of Rueben and Elsie and Ivy — my open fields, my sturdy mountains. What are we here for, if not to show each other the beauty? The beauty of living.

You have something. Right here. Right now. Live it. Something beautiful will come. The world is waiting to see.

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Hearts wild.

I wrote the combination on my hand. On my notebook. And on a small scrap of paper that I put inside my mom’s desk in her office at Central Junior High. I had never had a locker before. I had never locked anything. Not our front door. Nor my bike. Not the car doors. Not my journal. (The only one who was there to read it was my mom, and I already told her everything — feelings as open as the streets roamed.)

This was all new – these lockers at school. I wasn’t sure how I would navigate. How would I remember the numbers? And to date, on bike, on foot, on feeling, I roamed randomly. How would I become so exact? Turn left to the number. Right. Stop. Back again. Numbers. Turning. It all seemed so calculated. I read the number from my left hand and turned with my right. Carefully. Slowly. Then pulled at the handle. Nothing. I did it again. Slower. Counting. Breathing. Sweating. Pulling — nothing. My heart beat faster. Why???? Left. Right. Left. Circle round. Nothing. I spun the dial on the lock round and round as if to break the spell. Just before tears, it opened. I hung up my coat. A coat I would have given up easily to never have to go through this locking again.

But I did it. Day after day. And it became routine. To lock things. Books. Homework. And most regrettably, feelings. I can’t blame all of it on Central Junior High, but somewhere, in this time, in this space, this heart, my heart, that I once dangled from sleeves at high speeds on a banana seat bike, now rested quietly, locked on handwritten poems unseen in a junior high locker. It would be years before I dared show anyone.

But bit by bit, I was given the combination. My mother was always the first number, then a few professors in college, a few friends, turned my number to the right, and I suppose it was that little girl that said enough already — begging to get back on that banana seat bike, and ride freely, feelings whipping through hair and breeze — it was she, me, who turned the final number and released everything. No more locks. Heart, mind, soul — open.

The birds are singing through my open window as I tell you my story. This day and every day. Hoping each letter, each word, gives you a part of the combination to set you free, so you can do the same for another. And one day, maybe we’ll reach that final number — hearts open, wild in the breeze — and we’ll all be free.

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Simply the best.

It’s funny, but I didn’t remember the names of the two women who took me to the concert. We had only just met. I started this job right out of college. I was in gathering mode. There was so much information to take in. I stepped into the business — this wild adult playground. This playground of a school that everyone had attended for years, and I was the new kid. I was employed now – whatever that meant. I navigated through this unfamiliar jungle gym. It was in that first week of chaos that I heard them, these two women, yelling above the crowd, urging me to join them at Double-dutch. “You have to come with us to the Tina Turner concert,” they yelled. I timed the ropes with my hands and I jumped.

I didn’t recognize them at first when they picked me up. No longer in office attire, they seemed younger. More wild. They honked the horn and turned up the radio. I got in the back seat. Is this how adults made friends? Is this how you survived the work? I had no idea. The wheels sped down the freeway to the stadium. In the parking lot, the taller one said she “had to pee.” I turned my head to find a restroom. In the few second it took to turn my head back, she had already squatted with pants around her ankles. I couldn’t breathe. What had I done? I didn’t know these women. Why had I just joined them? So easily I got in their car. It had only been a week. Sure, I liked Tina Turner, but I didn’t own the cds. My feet, without my knowledge or permission, raced with them to the stadium door.

Our seats were actually good. Just left of the stage. Cigarette lighters flickered in the darkness. People squirmed and danced in their seats, eagerly awaiting Ms. Turner. I looked at the two women next to me, trying to remember their names.

I don’t know the song. It all happened so quickly. Suddenly she was there on stage. So close. A force of nature. She was not young, Tina Turner. And she was so petite. Just a tiny woman. But I had never heard, felt, witnessed anyone so powerful. Hair, dress, torso, thighs, heels — all moved in time to this thunderous voice. And it may surprise you to hear, but it was the most elegant thing I had ever seen. She moved like a gazelle to our corner of the stage. We were beyond the zoo now. Animals, all moving on instinct. There was no time. No space. No cages. Primal. Beautiful. Dance. 

It wasn’t my only glimpse of freedom. But it may have been one of my first. And upon it, I would build. Adding enough courage, wisdom, to walk out of this building, to my own humble corner of stage. To dream my own dream. Stand strong on my own two feet. Even dance. 

Our journeys are full of choice. And chance. We wander the strangest paths, to simply find our own best lives. Along the way, we remember the ones who lift us. Hoping one day to do the same for someone else. Today, I remember Tina. Let’s dance.

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Tools.


It isn’t often. It’s only happened a couple of times in 10 years, but it’s been enough to keep me humble. To keep me aware. I respect my electric saw. It cuts the angles to make the frames to enclose the paintings.

The first time it occurred, it terrified me. I can’t say why it happened. Maybe a flaw in the wood, or an extra strength… I don’t know. I always check for nails or screws in my reclaimed wood. I wear goggles. Take the usual precautions. But something snapped. And I mean cracked with the most vengeful noise and a piece of wood shot across the studio. Like a gun or canon went off! It took me several days to go back to it. To be calm enough to try again. But I did. And the fear slipped into knowledge. It became an additional tool. It happened again the other day. Less terrifying, but I knew enough to step away. To think it through, and return with a clear head.

I hope I’m smart enough to do the same in my relationships. I hope we all are. Gathering in the fear, the surprise, the anger even, and turning it into knowledge. To know when it’s time to engage, and when it’s time to step away. We are given all the tools. Right from the start — I guess we just have to keep learning how to use them.

Trust is a big one. I will admit that it has been a hard one for me to re-learn. Taken away with a bang at a young age, it took me a long time to go back to it. But I have been lucky. The door has been opened and opened again with the kindness of others. And I can’t turn away. There is beauty to be made. Joy to be felt. Love to be loved. Life to be lived. The day begins – my heart is a tool – I’m not afraid to use it.

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Passing through.

It’s no surprise really, that when I first started to paint, a lot of the women looked like my mother. Even the greeting cards that were a bit cartoonish, carried her smile, and that unexpected wit. Proof positive, I guess, that what’s inside of you will always find a way out. 

It’s still happening, without my knowledge, or permission, people get in and come out on the canvas. I finished a small painting in my sketchbook the other day. Dominique said, “Oh, that looks like my cousin.” His son agreed. And now when I look at pictures of her, I see it. I see her. People get in.

This, I suppose, is why it’s so important to surround yourself with good people. Positive people. Positive information. Books and music that teach us. News that is actually news, and not propaganda. Because it all gets in. And if it gets in, the negativity, it will have to find its way out. And then it just grows and grows. I don’t want that passing through the stream of my heart and mind. So I make choices. Some are easy. Some are not. But all necessary. Leaving space for the joyful surprises of the goodness that travels all around me. All around us. 

The canvas continues to remind me, to “Let someone in. Let someone go. After you’ve seen it all, you won’t remember the windows and doors, but who passed through.”

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