Maybe it was on the playground. On the small metal chairs of Sunday School.  A television Disney movie. I can’t be sure, but I had the misdirected impression that forgiveness was a wrongdoing taken off the hook of accountability. It never sat well, and rightly so, I suppose. For me, it’s a lesson I keep learning. And it changes in each situation. The common thread is always the same — what am I going to do?

Recently visiting a smaller village, I was excited and surprised to see the L’Occitane store. I needed to reload on my favorite hand lotion. I picked it off the shelf and handed it to the clerk to ensure my decision. Yet, when I opened the bag in the car, the car that took forever to find, in the 100 degree heat, it had been replaced with a different scent. There were several audible sighs and “c’mons”… The oh, how she had wronged me, was larger than necessary. I squeezed a bit on my hands. Of course it’s a great brand. Of course it smelled very nice, just not what I had requested. I don’t know if it was five minutes. I know the air conditioning was calming. I said out loud, “I’ve decided this is my favorite.” 

This is not admirable. I was simply saving myself the heartache. Is that forgiveness? This letting go?

I want to be like the oils in my painting. There is a satisfying speed to acrylics — a quick dry — an ending, a solution of sorts. Oils will not do that, but what they do offer is a melding. A change of mind. Of heart. They will work with you through every decision. They allow you to return to the canvas and say, “maybe it should be like this…” 

I know the furious speed we are all living in, trying to get to all the answers, trying to right every wrong (of others). But maybe it’s all about the working through, the working with, the changing, the deciding, the letting go — maybe that’s when the beauty comes. My malleable heart awakens and says, “Today could be my favorite.” 

Sometimes my life seems so familiar, I could tell you the next word, sentence. And while that is comfortable, I remind myself, that is never my favorite book. But to train my real life heart and brain to have the same reaction — an exuberant “I never saw that coming” — this is the real trick, I suppose. I’m trying to get better. To see the hiccups and waywardness as, “Oh, this is a book I would read!”

I remember the first time I had a crush on the carry-out boy at Olson’s Super Market. His moves so certain and careful as he bagged our embarrassing groceries in the paper sacks. Him holding my boxed breakfast cereal, I felt exposed and vulnerable and wonderful all at once. Being brand new, as they say, I had no explanation as to what was happening.

It was only two days before that I was on the playground at Central Park. Too old for the spinning ducks, still young enough to succumb to the trepidation of the teeter totter. My friend, with later explanation of a bee hovering, jumped off their side when I was in mid air. Funny how everything slows at that point. Reaching to grab on to a cloud, my stomach rose into my throat, which was almost enjoyable for that millisecond, and then I crashed into the dirt.

Standing in the checkout line at Olson’s, my stomach began to rise.

At school the following day, there he was, racing up beside me on the stairs. He turned to smile at me — a glorious millisecond. And then grabbed the new girl’s hand. A puff of dirt smoked around my fall.

And would I have changed things if I knew? Probably not. Is it worth it? I would say yes. YES! Excuse me, a cloud is just within reach.

They probably think they are sharing with us. Maybe they get upset when I pick the harvest to make jam, but I doubt it. They have a better view of things, and I don’t mean simply sight. 

It’s easy to measure the haves and have-nots with money. With things. But there is a larger currency at play. There is an absence of heart. Of soul. Not because someone else got a larger share. No one’s dream fulfilled takes away your dream, nor takes the fruit from your tree. The sky is not filled with, “but she got,” and “he gets to”…no, the blue flutters with hope on wings. 

It was my grandfather who taught me first. Whenever I felt worry closing in, he told me to focus not just on something else, but someone else. At first hearing, I thought he didn’t understand. So I foolishly continued. “But my cousins got bows and arrows from Target, and we don’t have a Target, and I don’t…” “So go play with them,” he said. I watched my feet hit the dirt in the driveway. They had everything, I thought, and now I was supposed to give them my attention as well. At first I simply walked after the wayward arrows. (Because they weren’t aiming at anything, only watching the beautiful flight.) Then I began running them back. It wasn’t long before Shawn gave me a turn. A fling of the winged wood. Hope and love and friendship and joy danced in the air. And I had everything.

I look around our world. We seem to be spending far too much time kicking the dirt. 

It was his signature phrase. I knew quite early on, if my grandfather began to speak, he would end with, “and stuff…” I assumed it was because he wanted an out. An early exit. He wasn’t a big talker, like Grandma Elsie. It could have been the farm report. The forecast. Last night’s card game recap. A sensitive family matter. They all ended with “and stuff…” 

But that’s the thing. I see it now. It wasn’t an ending. It was his lifeline extended. And if you look it up by definition, these ellipses, they are soft pauses to the continuation. He could see that the story would always live on. And he offered a way to carry it. So I grab ahold of each dot. And begin again. The stories live on, holding, gathering and passing along the most precious stuff. 

Yesterday he asked me if I enjoyed it more while painting or when the painting was finished. It was a good question. The first time I had been asked. I explained that at the start, it can be difficult, clunky even. This is the process of just getting some paint down. But if you keep at it, I said, one day, “C’est vivant!” — it’s alive! And with that life, things move very quickly. I suppose it’s like reading a really good book, I continued, so eager to get to the finish, but never wanting it to end. 

I recall Sunday afternoons of youth’s winter in Minnesota. In the darkness of 4pm, time crawled. We perched beside the stereo console and listened to the same record again and again, amid her promise that one day things would be so good, time would seem like it was flying. I smiled under the wing of promise. 

I’d like to think I thanked her for those clunky times. For the process. But I’m not sure that I did. I do now, covered in paint and beginning another canvas. Not waiting for the joy of completion, but relishing the paint on my hands and joy’s wind speeding through my hair. It IS alive! And so am I!

It’s a myth that time is a healer. More of a revealer, I’d say. Like a sculptor. It works daily. Sometimes minute by minute. To show what’s inside — what we’re really made of. And when I can think of it that way, it’s all manageable, even exciting, but sometimes though, that heavy tick of the chisel… 

My mother often worried that she wasn’t brave. I suppose it’s easier to see it in someone else. (An artist always has to stand back to get the full picture.) When I’d worry, or be afraid of something, she didn’t negate it. Didn’t even say don’t. I’d relay the situation and tell her that I was scared. “That’s just good common sense,” she’d say. We’d laugh out loud, dulling the swing of the chisel. 

It was Georgia O’Keeffe who said, “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life — and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.”

There was a push for a while for everyone to be fearless. I never bought in. Of course we’re going to be afraid. We’re going to be scared and we’re going to be happy. We’re going to feel it all. And it will shape us into something beautiful. And then with the words that my grandma passed on to my mother, who passed them on to me, I will say to myself and the world, “Isn’t that something!!!!”

It was Halloween. I had just entered my  trick-or-treating age. I could hear some of the Van Dyke Road kids already stomping a path. Explaining who they were in front of porch lights in exchange for candy. Standing in our entryway, no costume, I could feel all of the good candy slipping away. Tired from a day’s work, maybe my mother simply forgot. But then she saw me. Desperate in the entry. She grabbed the nearest solution. Down by the shoes. Under the coats. A stack of paper sacks from Red Owl. She poked two holes for eyes and one for mouth. I stood motionless. Unimpressed. How would I look in a sea of store-bought costumes? Seeing my hesitation, she pulled another sack. Poked the same holes. Her always red rouged lips mouthed the words, “Look, we’re owls.” Maybe it was how her lips matched the logo of the sack, or seeing them move independently, as if floating in space, I couldn’t help but giggle. Both of our sacks began to wrinkle with the uncontrolled laughter. That was one of the countless times I saw my mother become directly before my eyes. She transformed from mom to someone extraordinary, my super hero, as she pulled the sack from her face. 

Yesterday, in the throws of a new painting, I was nearing the end of the day. Paint was still being placed, but the energy was dwindling. And then, a shadow under the eye. A change of hairline. Just a few strokes, and I could feel it, her becoming. There she is! I exclaimed to no one, as if I were standing in the entryway of our green house on Van Dyke Road. 

Of course our neighbors knew who we were that Halloween evening. Still they asked politely as I reached out my sack. “We’re owls,” I said, not with the pride of costume, but the joy of my mother. 

When you find your purpose, you won’t need to search for motivation. 

I suppose I saw it first hand. The walking out to field in summer’s dark. I thought the sun followed him, my grandfather. And didn’t he let it rest at the end of the day, with a wave to say goodnight and a promise of leading tomorrow’s way. 

No one used words like inspiration at the time. And if they had, it would have been the day itself to read the book with a picture of Grandpa Reuben on the cover. He was a farmer. His purpose called from both sides of the screen door. 

I am not motivated to write this blog every morning. Nor to race to the studio and begin a new canvas. I want to. I really want to. These are my fields. They aren’t calling me. I’m asking each day if I can join them. What a privilege to wake up before the light. To feel joy’s weary by end of day. 

My grandfather’s portrait is one of the first things I see in the morning. The screen door swings, and I am on my way. 

Maybe it’s because of the gerbil that races in my heart, constantly trying to catch the one spinning in my head, that I gravitate toward a clean surface. White space. A place for your eyes to rest. Herein lies the slow certainty created from all that clamber. A place for love. For gratitude. For hope. Their zones, I think, should remain clutter free. 

I suppose I’ve always been trying to create that space. For myself. For others. A place that calls to you, in studio or on page, “Come in, you and your heart sit down.”

I mention it because yesterday my gerbil was really working overtime. That wheel was spinning between, why wasn’t the package being delivered and why was the elliptical machine so noisy, and and and…then I opened the door. Exhaled the whys and let in the white space. And I was saved. 

We all honored it, this holding of place. In the line for the drinking fountain. The next to jump rope. It was a real friend who kept your spot in line when something urgent came up. Upon return to set place, all you had to say was, “Oh, she was holding it for me,” and the others could only agree, knowing, I suppose, that at some point, they too would require the assistance of the held place. 

Perhaps it’s the main reason I did anything. That I dared the oncoming dark in the neighbor’s empty lot, knowing that I had a home just through the bush. That I risked going off to college, knowing that at any given time, any given weekend, my mother was holding my place. That I followed the unconventional path of being an artist, as she held my confidence right beside me. Even moving to another country, I was safe in her heart. As she will be ever in mine. 

Maybe it’s all that I’m doing. Returning the favor. When I write of my grandparents. My sweet mother. I will ever hold their place.