She was the first person I knew to wear a beret. She sang songs about Paris. When I say I knew her, well, we never actually met, but she, Joni Mitchell, was my babysitter. Alone (I suppose you could say “unfettered”) with a turntable my brother left behind, I played the Court and Spark album again and again. I had memorized the words to each song, long before I knew what a free man in Paris would look like, or where Paris even was on a map.
She was always there, the two hours between my hop off the yellow school bus and my mom’s return from work. Music never lets you be alone. Nor poetry, or any of the arts. Maybe that’s why I love them all so. For me, all a form of grace — it sits with you, until you can walk in it again.
Maybe you’ll think it strange, but one of the first things I purchased at the Galleria in Edina was a green beret, made in France. But I think it’s perfect. This spinning of my worlds together, round and round, like the very music of my soul.
We outgrow our babysitters, but not our need for care. I try to give it to myself, still. I hope you can do the same. Find your grace. In the right tempo. Walk in it. And then one day, “unfettered and alive” you find yourself in the dance.
After five years of restoration, the Notre Dame cathedral reopened in Paris! I don’t know that one exclamation point can signify the extraordinary feat. While most agreed that five years would be nearly impossible, the greater consensus was — “not on my watch…” It wasn’t whether it could be done, but that it had to be done. And it wasn’t just Catholics, or Parisians, the world seemed to be invested. For it isn’t just architecture, it is a story of our humanity. Some will call that faith. Fortitude. Survival. Pride. Celebration. Maybe it’s all of those things. But this building, this evidence of our living, this story that has stood for nearly a thousand years, all agreed that it couldn’t be lost to something so banal as a dropped cigarette or a loose wire. Not a war, not a natural disaster, nothing in all this time had taken it down. No one wanted to be the ones that let it go.
Every detail was replicated. Details that most will never see, but all will feel. The voice of Notre Dame has been restored. Each rafter is aligned to the note. There is a sound that exits because of the building. It rings again. Still.
In my most humble of ways, I work each day on keeping my own “Notre Dame” alive. There is a voice to my Hvezdas. My Alexandria. My Van Dyke Road. My friends. My new French family. My Provence. My Paris. All rafters in the voice that is mine. Is ours. And I will do everything to keep that alive. It is my watch. It is my responsibility.
And don’t we all have that? Aren’t we all keepers of the story? Isn’t it our joyful duty to do the work? To pass on the love? To keep it alive? To be the exclamation point of this time? This place? “Yes! Yes!!!” I shout, we shout, over the sound of ringing bells.
I always rationed out my Halloween Candy. Counting each day. Indulging in a piece or two. Doing the math. The goal was to make it last until Thanksgiving. I imagined that each piece was a link in the joy chain. Even on the days when I limped along with my least favorite candy, like a circus peanut or a Jolly Rancher, I was keeping the sweetness alive.
Most of you celebrated your Thanksgiving yesterday. Here in France, of course, it is not a holiday. No days off. So the tradition that I dragged along with me won’t be celebrated until Saturday. As I read the posts of you already walking off your gratitude, I could let it get me down, but I choose to think of it as the luxury of keeping my chain alive. I give thanks again, and check the turkey parts thawing in the refrigerator.
I suppose it’s what I’m doing with everything, trying to keep the chain alive, with a painting of a niece, a grandma, a brother-in-law, a cousin. What if somehow we could all connect? In this most unlikely of scenarios, (and aren’t they all) we could come together and find the joy.
Of course I have my days, my moments, limping through the “circus peanuts” of life. But even the worst days connect me to a chance of something better. So I give thanks. And wait. Today is going to be delicious.
When our house was built, long before I arrived, it was still legal to burn things in the backyard — hence the firepit that rests next to my studio. I use it for display. It has a glorious texture that no doubt came from use. Cracked. Wired. But still strong. Still beautiful. Maybe I’m only able to see it because of my own exposed wires, those holding together all of the cracks that make me, well, me.
I was listening to a psychiatrist explain this so elegantly on a podcast yesterday. Human need is what really holds us all together. We so often confuse these needs as weakness. But in reality, these needs bring us closer. Crossing our experiences like a trellis, thus connecting, strengthening all of us.
The first painting I hung on our pit and then photographed for my website sold almost immediately. The fire never died.
I hang each new creation on the challenged wire that holds together the pit, that holds together my heart. In fact, nothing rests cold. And we are connected. We are stronger. Together.
Yesterday I saw a photographer on Youtube manipulating a photo to make it seem old — like it was a memory lived, I suppose. The technique took some skill, certainly. And while the end result was interesting, I thought it lacked what the photographer wanted — the depth of an actual experience. That feeling is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to manufacture. And I began to think, would our time be better spent trying to capture real experiences, by, well, living?
Once the thought was in my head, spinning around like a kid on a ferris wheel — my brain urging “go ’round again, go ’round again — I began to see it everywhere, this attempt at manufacturing a life. I saw it in the catalogs. Buy our ripped jeans! What if we did the work in the jeans we owned? Wore them in the yard, the garden? Hung tools from belts? Bent? Stretched? Bounced children on bent knees? Wore them thread bare by living?
I saw the paint splattered jeans on the next page. Couldn’t we just actually paint? Splatter our own clothes with life experience? These are the colors that I want to live in — the colors flung from my own hand and heart.
It was everywhere. This manufacturing. Even with so-called friends. This trying to fill the life-size holes within us, with “likes” and “followers.” Certainly it has its place. I use it here, every day. To connect. Keep the strings attached through time and distance. But nothing will ever replace human contact. Sitting outside on a sunny day, laughing so hard with friends that waists become rendered useless, bent over by the weight of joy and memory. Nothing can replace the feeling of hugging someone, just a little longer. A kiss of a hand. An empathetic, no words needed, smile. A wave that can’t be contained in the hand, but must be lifted in the air with feet jumping!
I sit here typing, with paint on my shirt. It is valuable, not because it will sell in a catalog, but because I lived in it. Life’s couture. And I will again today! My heart, threadbare as my jeans, telling my brain, “let’s go ’round again, ’round again!!!”
