Category Archives: Art

Species Unknown

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Regardless of whether you’re of an evolutionary or Creationist or magical or pragmatic sort when it comes to the origins of life and the vast variety of creatures populating the planet—and, for all I know, the universe, though why anyone would want to live more than a single planet away from the wonderfulness that is Moi, I can’t imagine—it’s fascinating and entertaining to try to suss out how so many divergent and astonishing life forms there are all around us. I suppose one of the aspects I find most curious and amazing is the startling mix of sameness and extraordinary differences that seems to occur within what a first glance might have appeared to be nearly identical beings. How can two butterflies that look, even side by side, very little different contain both marked similarities and also such miraculously distinct characteristics and traits?
Digital illustration: A Breed Apart 1

I imagine that if there are other life forces out there, whether they’re supernatural or simply extraterrestrial, they might find the zoology of earth just as entertaining as I do, even if they already know and understand far more about it all that I ever will.
Digital illustration: A Breed Apart 2

It’s all of no great matter to me, to be honest, as my limited imagination will never remotely encompass the full reality of life on this globe or any other, and yet I think it fair to assume that it all predated me by a longshot and will continue long after I’m composted, no matter what I do or don’t understand. But knowing that I can’t ever know much within the greater scheme of things is neither daunting nor preventive; I will always, I suppose, be intrigued and piqued by the sheer magnitude of exotic, colorful, flagrantly felicitous Life. I can’t explain myself any more than I can explain any other living creature, and that is as far from boring an existence as one could wish.

Though I am just the tiniest bit unsettled by that one lady down the street who glows in the dark and has a flying dog.

Treasured Things

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What’s trash to one is treasure to another, as it’s so often said. Few others are compelled to admire and delight in the same inventory of weird and ridiculous, horrendous and lovely things that speaks to me. My little mental attic is just as specific as anyone’s, and likely to be as unappealing to them as theirs would be to me.
Graphite Drawing: Treasured Things

But one of the pleasures of this individuality is the ability to share our stories about what’s stored in our unique vaults of ideation, whether in truth or fiction, and revel in our moments of visitation to unknown worlds through the tales. In writing, telling, reading, and hearing, we share and exchange ideas and beliefs, feelings and fantasies, insights and excitations with each other, all from the safe remove of communication that need not be wholly shared experience. After, we can choose to join in on the newfound interests and adventures, or we can choose to retreat to our own inner worlds, perhaps changed a little by the passage or, if not, only glad that we don’t have to dwell in each other’s lives and happy to return to the familiar comfort of our own favored inventories of thoughts and things.

Little Green Men

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When I grow up I aspire to communicate with aliens.
Digital illustration: Little Green Man

You know how it is, when you’re a kid: the stories of the unknown are easy for anybody to concoct, since practically everything in the universe is still complete terra incognito to a kid. When I was a little squirt, there were endless options for what could be considered alien, from plain old grownups I couldn’t understand to spies and horror-story monsters, teachers and people who spoke indecipherable languages (you know, like Mathematics), ghosts and clowns. Or any combination thereof. But the best kind of aliens about which to tell tall tales would pretty much have to be extraterrestrials, nearly all of them apparently coming from Mars in the popular lore of my youth, and virtually every one of the Martians being, evidently, a little green man.

We make our gods and monsters in our own image, to a certain extent, even as grownups but most especially as children, so it makes sense that my childhood’s aliens should still have been humanoid, even if from 225 million kilometers away in space, give or take. I suppose that the green skin was mainly to clarify just how different these otherwise similar creatures were from us earthlings, and the littleness perhaps meant to signify their being lesser life forms than the obviously superior terrestrial ones.

But we little life forms known as kids were also savvy enough to make up our tales of Martians and Little Green Men in ways that would generally prove that our own smallness wasn’t so much a marker of inferiority in our race; we could best the invaders (as they always were, in those days) just as much as our elders could, maybe better. And of course we all knew at some point that we could best the human grownups, too. Especially as we grew older and began to realize that, like all of the other sorts of unknown and fearsome creatures that were alien to us, those ghosts and monsters and clowns and teachers, aliens might prove to be different from what we had imagined them to be.

Some might, in fact, turn out to be smarter than us. Be revealed as benign or, to our amazement, even benevolent. Just as we began to understand that not all humans and creatures that resembled humans to the casual observer were intelligent or benevolent or, indeed, quite human at all, we started to realize that each being whose path intersects with our own might prove, on closer observation and interaction, to have unknown depths and nuances, hidden flaws and unimagined strengths and gifts. We all begin as aliens to one another, in a way. It’s in learning to know each other as real and distinct individuals, to see each other with unprejudiced and open-eyed clarity and no preconceived notions of worth, of the good and bad of our hearts, that we can discover connections. Kinship.

I can’t say I think it at all likely that my ancestors were little green men who arrived in a flying saucer from Mars. And I’m not so all-embracing that I’ve given up my sense that there’s something alien and not quite right about most clowns. But I’ve got my own set of strange quirks and characteristics, and since I’d like to think other people will give me the chance to become a good person if I’m not already there, I hope I’m at least smart enough to get to know them as well as I can before assuming that they’re from another planet.

Veiled References

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Secrets. For good or ill, we all have them. Not much remains secret for terribly long; guilt brings out our ‘tells’ and happy secrets will always do their best to bubble to the surface because we long to share them. Secrets.

Strangely, there are times when we have no secrets, too. Not just when the latest secret, good or not so good, has been revealed, but that’s often the moment of assessment when one might consider that the slate had been wiped clean. There are times when it seems that all in life goes so smoothly and predictably and transparently that no secrets are generated. Or required.

But most of us crave a little surprise, color, mystery, adventure. At least at times, we rather thrive on the frisson of the unknown, don’t we. I love to feel safe and on track, I crave it. But behind the mask of convention or genteel propriety, there somehow lurks the slightest hint of the curious child, the rebellious iconoclast, and maybe even a tiny, tiny, tiny touch of  the mischief-maker that thinks a secret is a good substitute for the more dangerous sort of thrills that lure adrenaline junkies.

Even though I know that’s a charming little delusion. Secrets can be dangerous.

Still, there is a certain amount of the unknown that fuels my imagination and brings out a part of me that’s braver and more interesting, more dedicated to seeking both answers and new questions, than my overt and ordinary, everyday self. That, I’m pretty sure, is neither a dirty secret nor a secret of any sort at all to those who know me even a bit. But I might surprise you all one day, if it should turn out that I had secret superpowers or was secretly fabulously wealthy or was secretly brilliant. I know it’d be a surprise to me, having been so successfully kept secret from my own self all this time as well. She said, looking demurely coy.Graphite drawing: Veiled Secrets

Gotta Lotta Brass, Ain’t He

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Digital illustration from a photo: Feel Free to Horn InThank goodness parents and neighbors have the blessed invention of earplugs to get them through our first attempts at singing and playing instruments. I can honestly say that after at least five years of piano lessons, fifteen of singing in choirs and ensembles, and over eighteen of being married to a professional musician, I am still unable to read music properly, barely being able to follow a score when more able musicians are doing all of the singing, playing, and conducting. After enough years of dealing with Spasmodic Dysphonia, I’m not even very dependable for singing a note very tunefully on cue. But, as it’s said, I’ve still got decent ears. So I, too, own earplugs. Just in case. And I apologize, retroactively, to everyone who didn’t have them handy when my noisemaking might have required such intervention.Digital illustration from a photo + text: Brass

Winter in My Soul

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Winter lends itself, more than any other time of year I think, to the welcome sort of solitude and melancholy that fills me up with meditative calm. It can feel bleak and beautiful at the same time, as long as I’m not in a particularly dark place emotionally. The kind of cold and emptiness that sear the lungs and sting the eyes can sometimes set the soul on fire with inspiration and, concomitantly, a sort of scraped-clean elation.Photo montage + text: Writing & Silence

The Effects of Gravity

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It’s wonderfully simple. Physics. Science. Gravity pulls us down. It’s a force that draws everything to it. Living creatures, all of us on the planet, are pulled toward the dense center of the earth just as we go along through our lives toward the time when we will reach the end, die, and be buried in the earth, drawn at last more fully toward its heart.

But along the way, it’s possible to pull against gravity, too. What happens if we choose to resist for a bit in life? How high can we rise? Any one of us rises to our highest point of all, I’ll be bound, when we choose to raise up someone else. It’s in elevating others that we ourselves are best elevated.Digital illustration: Against Gravity

Going Ahead Blindly

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Digital illustration from a photo: Blurred LinesWhat if my eyesight should fail? Could I ever have enough insight to compensate for eyesight? Others do it all the time, both those blind from birth and those who lose their eyesight. I’m visually oriented, if not obsessed. Does that mean that as a visually impaired or blind person I’d be lost? Ruined? Hopeless? Other people manage to navigate a rich, full world without ever seeing it, and to have a deep, powerful sensory life without relying on eyesight.

One of the real questions here is how I live with change. Do I roll with it, or roll over and capitulate? The other underlying query is, from what do I derive my sense of self? Is it dependent on what I can see, and what I can do with it, or does my inner vision determine much more usefully who I am and what I value, and perhaps even what of value I can still bring to the rest of the world? If others have so beautifully managed to see the great and good whether they had functional eyes or not, I like to think—I hope—that I too will successfully adjust and adapt no matter what my life brings. May it be so. May it always be so.Digital illustration from photos: Vegetal Vision

It’s Your Own Fault You Read It

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Graphite drawing + text: Some Things Words Do

Graphite drawing: Read It & Weep

The Changing of the Guard

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As December draws toward its end and a new calendar year lies just over the horizon and out of sight, there is always a sense of anticipation. It’s a many-layered thing, too, this look forward, carrying my constant consternation at all of the possibly awful unknowns like some sort of a scratchy underlayment to the innocent eagerness to discover great and wonderful things ahead. My own small history has taught me that both will hold true to one degree or another in 2015, just as they have for every day, season, year, and chapter in my life, little speck that it is in the equally fearful and fantastic unseeable future of the whole of existence. Knowing that these things will come to be regardless of any worry or wondering on my part never stops me from either of those things.Graphite drawing + text: Change of Heart

The one very best aspect of all of this is that I find every modification does move me to grow and change. I, along with the days, seasons, years, and chapters of my storyline, can be made better by their passage if I choose to keep my mind and heart engaged. Newness ahead can mean new life ahead. Today is a day when the beautiful potential of the best kinds of change should shine most brightly on the horizon of anyone who longs for it.