Category Archives: Human Nature

Calling All Knights: To Each His Own Grail

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digital photo art

If you don't have a dragon handy to defend your treasury, you may have to put on your own armor . . .


Never Give Up Your Holy Grail!

Just because some genius expert says the object you treasure is kitsch, the popular song you adore is cheesy and off-key, or the person you date is too dorky for you doesn’t mean you have to live by the so-called expert’s standards. If the object is radioactive, the song causes neighborhood riots and shatters windows all down the block, or the significant other is a part-time serial killer, then you should definitely be revisiting your values. Otherwise, winnow down your oddities to the ones that serve and please you well, and keep a relatively low profile with them where it keeps the peace. And then enjoy your little eccentricities. You are, after all, unique.

digital photo art

No matter what you treasure, you may be called upon one day to make a choice . . .

Never be Unwilling to Throw Out Your Holy Grail!

If the time comes when honest reassessment of your most treasured effects, whether they’re objects or ideas, leads you to the realization that they’re not what you once thought they were, can you do the brave, smart thing and amend the situation? Can you not only let go of your sacred cow but give it a firm boot in the behind and get it out of your barn altogether? Things, beliefs, even people—those ingredients of your life that once had a revered place in you—can change. You can change.

The past never snuffs out of existence, but you can put it in its appropriate place and give yourself permission to turn to better, more present things. Only if you’re willing to haul off and pitch away what you once held dear, vigorously and decisively, can you start afresh. The loss stings madly for a bit, and discarding anything you once adored generally tends to feel like misbehavior, but if you’ve really embraced the transformation, when the pain recedes that missing part can be replaced with better and richer possibilities, and your new life and new self are infinitely worth the trouble.

mixed media collage

One man's treasure is another man's trash . . . one woman's trash is another's treasure . . .

Daring to Live the Adventure of Life is Its Own Reward

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The wonderful Eve Redwater (http://everedwater.wordpress.com/) gave me a generous gift on my birthday. I’m not sure it was intended specifically as a birthday present, but it was aptly timed so I’m certain there was at least some synchronicity at work in the event. See, I operate under a very contentedly delusional science system in which I, the sun, am always finding ways that the universe and all of the wild diversity in it revolve around me and conspire to do good to me and for my benefit. On the heels of Lady Eve’s kind gift, I was contemplating how to respond appropriately to receiving the Versatile Blogger Award from her and, virtually simultaneously, both got into a discussion via several posts and comments on my blog and those of several friends (thank you, CF, Smidge and Co.) about the roots and responsibilities of our creative lives and was reminded by my own birthday that my late godmother’s birthday was imminent. And yes, they are all interconnected–what a coincidence, eh?–in and through me.

It all meets at that point of origins + inspirations once again.

Getting involved in blogging was quite a milestone in my progress as an artist: the culmination of a large push I’ve been making toward steady, committed practice and broader sharing of my work, and also a starting point for working with a marvelous new community of inspiring and educated peers and mentors in the online community to expand my horizons to places I can’t yet imagine. No surprise, then, that it also begs the questions of where I started, where I am now, and where I might possibly be heading. That’s what’s on my mind a lot lately.

A significant part of the whole equation is that I have parents who raised all four of their kids to be unabashedly themselves and do their own thing. Of course, being semi-normal mortals, we all had our periods of self-doubt, frustration with finding out just what our own ‘thing’ might be, and any number of other growing-up issues. Having loved to draw and write and do any number of similar, incredibly unworldly things from very early, I was haunted fairly often–not least of all in my undergraduate days–by worry about how ridiculously impractical and selfish it seemed to study, then major in, and commit to a life’s work involved with the arts. I mean, really. Mom and Dad patiently assured me at all points that I should do what I felt called to do and be who I thought I was made to be, and I thwarted all of their efforts with equal stubborn force of hemming, hawing and hunkering fearfully behind innumerable university requirement courses before I would willingly and publicly admit to my addiction to art. [Ed: I like that when I typed ‘art’ just now, my computer offered to “correct” the word by writing “artichokes“, so it apparently recognized that I was in such denial it wanted to help me by disguising my intentions even from you, faithful readers!]photo

The upshot of all of this muddling around and foot-dragging is that I approached my junior year of college without having dared to declare a major, and I skulked around like a sneak-thief in the hallways of the art building and spent significant amounts of time maundering and mewling about the whole ordeal when I really ought to have been simply plunging in and getting soaked in all of the art I could lay my grubby little hands upon there and then.

Oh, woe is me! Boo Hoo, and all that. I thought I was supremely talented at evasion, but of course my parents had a secret weapon trained on me from the very beginning, and it was activated during these very tenuous years of my faltering development. It was a pair of super-agents they called my Godparents. My parents, it happens, besides being nifty talents in the parenting department, had the smarts and/or temerity to choose as godparents for their children some people that took the whole parental-surrogacy aspect of the job quite seriously. Mine were a couple of Mom and Dad’s closest friends from the quartet’s days together attending (you may be beginning to feel the frisson of familiarity, the sting of synchronicity, here already) the very same uni where I was now paddling around in a diminishing spiral of destiny-denial. Furthermore, my Godma, as I called her, and The Godfather, as he was known to me (for being, thankfully, the polar opposite of that fictional character), had long since taken up employment at said institution as a Business Office administrator and head of the department of Radio and Television, respectively. So I could go and see my Godma when I was paying my tuition or trying to find out where my last scholarship had wandered, or just when I needed some bucking up, because she was seriously skilled in dealing with all of those aspects of my college life. Her estimable spouse was housed in another building, across Red Square from her digs, and I had a little journey through the catacombs of the old dustbin to drop in on him, which trek I gladly undertook on certain occasions when I wanted a different flavor of encouragement from hers, or–gasp!–artistic advice.

See, with The Godfather, I could go all clandestine and it seemed right in character, so I didn’t try to pretend with him that I wasn’t heading in an art-ish direction, though which one of many directions was still quite cloudy in my crystal ball. After all, there was that James-Bondish crawl through dusty and dimly lit corridors in a faintly creaky building just to find him in his office. And of course there was the visiting, during which he would puff away on his pipe and I would pretend not to see or smell it, because Officially he had “quit smoking” and his wife “didn’t know” he still did it. Apparently he thought that her willingness to admit to relation of any sort with me proved she was non compos mentis, and I was certainly in no position to argue that, so he pretended not to smoke and I pretended not to be coming in every time to whine that I couldn’t sign up as an Art Major because that was just plain irresponsible and stupid. I would go ahead, maybe, with an English degree and get ready to teach, because at least that might lead to, oh, I don’t know, a paycheck or something like one. My godparents, bless their dear departed craziness, never once chastised me overtly for being, oh, I don’t know, irresponsible and stupid by not doing what I really felt called to do and exercising what little native wit or talent I might dig up in my education to do what I was perhaps meant to do. But somewhere along the line the gentleman with the invisible pipe neatly skirted the issue of what-to-do by saying, in effect, Never mind what you think you’re supposed to do, or even what you want, this is about who you ARE. He proceeded to clarify by telling me that it was perfectly obvious to him and to anyone else that might have spent thirty seconds or so in my company that there were certain compulsions and eccentricities that I couldn’t exactly gloss over that earmarked me plainly as an Artist.

I won’t say that I never questioned the whole thing again, but somehow Mr Wise Guy pressed the right button at the right moment so that what my parents and sisters and friends had all been eternally encouraging me to do and be suddenly was revealed as so much more dazzlingly clear and excellent than when I had been studiously ignoring them and covering my ears and singing LA-LA-LA-LA! at the top of my voice to drown them out the whole time.

This is all a mighty stretched-out way of telling you that I still believe life and all of the fine creatures surrounding me in it work pretty hard to steer me in happy directions and plunk dandy gifts in my path all the time. That many supportive people and useful events in confluence led me down the primrose path of Art; that a life lived in the midst of said art connected me to a whole lot of additional supportive folk and dropped me amid numerous other grand gifts; not least of all, that opening up the stubbornly barred gate to my own artistic playground was one of the really great gifts life has given me and I can’t imagine not living life surrounded by all sorts of ARTICHOKES! ARTICHOKES! ARTICHOKES!

Oh, you know what I mean: Art.photo + text

The Googly-eyed Romantic Point of View

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Admit it, you start to slip into a coma the instant someone else starts spewing the horrifically saccharine details of their great love story. I do too; it just doesn’t stop me from being the mushy bore myself the moment I see a hairline of an opening. Honestly, don’t we all do it? There’s nothing much any of us are more inclined to brag about than our happiness, and nothing much that gives us greater happiness than fancying ours the Greatest Love Story in History.

You can be forgiven if you didn’t know yet that that title was already mine.

photoParticularly since I’m quite certain my love story doesn’t conform quite perfectly to your–or anybody else’s–idea of the ideal romance. We’re not much, around this household, on many constant and overt expressions of commercially endorsed couplehood: bouquets of roses, spontaneous gifts of expensive jewelry and sports cars, and going out to chateaux with extravagant four-star restaurants to toast each other over mortgage-worthy vintages are just not high on the list of things we often do. On the other hand, I am in the company of someone still teenager-enough to really like holding hands, hugging like there’s no tomorrow, and blurting out “I love you” pretty much every few minutes or so, even if we happen to be sitting right next to each other. He also reads to me, cuts my hair, laughs at my pitiful jests, cooks for me when there’s time, takes me on meandering road trips or spectacular world travels when the opportunity arises, covers my eyes when the really gruesome surprise is coming up in a scary movie he’s seen before so I won’t have to be tranquilized later, and sings me ridiculous made-up songs in the car.

Thing is, being soggy Romantics isn’t just about the stuff or the standards. It’s about finding pleasure not only in those storybook moments of ecstatic bliss but especially in the ongoing and real kindnesses and shared tasks that fill up the everyday, because the everyday is such an insurmountable percentage of our lives, singly and together.

So there’s no question that one of the things I find most romantic in my partner is that he does have an appreciation for all kinds of beauty and learning and amusement and work, from nature’s resources to friends and family, from rambling around a run-down part of town to finding starlight in the arts that we share as both as passion and as vocation. It’s reassuring, after all, that there’s not some impossible measure of queenly perfection I myself am expected to meet but that he sees good in the ordinary me and values it as though it were something romantic.

All the same, it doesn’t hurt that he’s fed me filets, tirelessly supported my “Expensive Hobby” career of being an artist/writer, and he’s taken me to castles and cottages, forests and mountains, cities of great sophistication and incredible vividness and hidden hamlets with more shaggy livestock than human population, and to seas both of the stormy north and those surrounding tropical islands. It is, truthfully, pretty romantic to stand at the shore of the ocean with the best person in you whole life right by your side.

photo + textThe most striking fact of our coming together as such a love-sodden twosome is that we were both quite content in our single lives and expected to live that way perpetually. I’m convinced that because we both liked who we were and how we lived our lives, had surrounded ourselves with a constellation of astonishing friends and loved ones, and had endless interesting things to do with our time and attentions, it was easier in reality to fall in love than if we’d been avidly hunting for something either of us felt too keenly that we lacked. And that is for me the romance in any part of life: that we don’t necessarily require it to make us whole or contented or excited or whatever-it-is; it’s a genuine, unexpected, unearned treasure. A gift, a bonus. The prize.photo

“Mama, Where Do Baby Ideas Come From?”

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graphite and colored pencil on paper

Ingvar Lidholm

Well, Honey, when a mommy artist and a daddy medium love each other very much . . . .

I can’t imagine that there is an artist or creative person alive who hasn’t been asked many and many a time where he gets his ideas or what inspired her to make this piece of artwork, write that song, take whatever photograph or choreograph any given ballet. In many cases, the answers are hard to condense into sound-bite-sized, manageable pieces for the occasion, because much creative endeavor is the tangible end result of a whole lifetime’s experience and train of thought, and we all know how often and how easily that particular train gets rerouted, redirected, diverted and derailed along the way.

But in general, most of us can point to pivotal moments that shaped our thinking, whether on an individual project or about our artistry as a whole. We can cite particular persons and their artistry that inspired and enlightened us and informed our own work as we grew. And for many of us, even we who are relatively late bloomers, a lot of the fodder for this inspiration begins early in life and creeps up on us subliminally to a certain extent.

I’ve already mentioned my long-ago irritation at being ‘bundled’ with Edvard Munch because of my Norwegian roots–and, of course, how ridiculous I realized that irritation was once I discovered that contrary to my belief, the more I got to know his work the more I actually admired it. Now, naturally, I take it as high praise (if perhaps hyperbolically so, though I’m happy to take it anyway) when my stuff is seen as meriting any such comparison.

My personal Style, if there is one, is defined more by a tendency toward slightly aggressive lines and bold coloration and faintly eccentric leanings when it comes to subject treatment than by any distinctive media, techniques or actual subjects. My affections in art are too fickle and my attentions too fleeting for me to be easily contented with any defined set of materials and topics and applications. But I find ideas and encouragement and guidance in the work of many painters, poets, draftsmen, printmakers, essayists, storytellers, architects, boat-builders, jewelers, botanists, lycanthropes . . . dear me, have I wandered again?

Part of the trick in pinning down who has been an influence on my work and where I’ve gotten my inspirations and ideas is that I’m very much a holistic, integrative and analogous operator, so in true Liberal Arts fashion I pull my many threads together from many divergent and possibly unrelated sources. The only consistent thing is that I try very hard to steal from the best.

My gifts are not musical, but I love music. So although my piano skills are fit only for personal amusement and my singing limited by spasmodic dysphonia and lack of practice to in-car singalongs and serenading my spouse with occasional outbursts of bent versions of formerly-familiar songs, I often work with music as my inspiring accompaniment. My paintings could be said to derive more from Aretha Franklin or Felix Mendelssohn, The Real Group or Tomás Luis de Victoria, than from Munch or Vincent van Gogh, though both of the latter have lent me many of my ideas about brushwork and coloration. My writing is more directly writing-derived, perhaps, but all of the favorite writers that spring to mind (Ogden Nash, Vladimir Nabokov, Dr Seuss, JRR Tolkien, S.J. Perelman, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tomie dePaola, Geoffrey Chaucer) are on my hit list because of the lyrical, even musical, qualities with which they treat poetry and prose. I love children’s books as much now as I did when an actual child, because the best of them of course comprise a perfect and literal confluence of verbal and visual imagery, something that becomes more deeply ingrained in me by virtue of drawing the senses together. And in that way, my writing is often led to incorporate certain textures and moods and colors or to carry a particular ambience by either pictures (real or imagined) or simply the weight of a visual experience I’m hoping to evoke with words. I’m no synesthete, but all the same I do depend on the interaction of all my senses to shape each of the creative works I’m developing.

I did once make an entire exhibition devoted to portraits of people (mostly historical figures) who had had influence of some significant sort on my art and my creative life, and perhaps the most telling thing about the gallery besides that I had deliberately filled it with nothing but portraits (a form I’d studiously avoided all along in my artistic journey until then) was that very few of them were of visual artists. Most were of composers, singers, and writers. A few were agents of social change, a couple were people I actually know, and a handful were influential in the philosophical or spiritual realms. The writers and musicians ruled the room. I doubt that would change hugely if I were to do such a survey of inspirational influences again. I do know that there would be a new character added, but I’m not certain how exactly I could represent in a portrait my network of online muses in blogdom.

acrylic and graphite on canvasboard

Igor Stravinsky

Foodie Tuesday: Some Assembly Required

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photo

The way to maintain my vegetative state of bliss is to keep dissimilar food parts from dangerous intermingling . . .

My dinner table usually resembles an early automobile factory, or at least the aftermath of an IKEA shopping spree. I’ve gotten in the habit, over years of feeding guests with allergies and dietary needs that are unpredictable and widely varied across the board, as well as supertasters like my husband, of presenting the various parts of a meal as separately as possible. In many cases, the segregation extends to dividing the ingredients of a single dish into many serving containers so that salad becomes a salad bar and entrees become DIY designer projects to be customized on every plate. I don’t mind helping people put their food together or serving it to them to order, but I have long since learned that one dish does not suit all eaters and it’s silly and wasteful to force the issue. It may seem like a foolish extreme, but it’s become comfortable for me. Two year olds should, in fact, also like dining chez moi. And since I’m often prone to thinking rather like a two year old, I suspect any such event could be quite the adventure all ’round.

Thus, whether we all work our way through a buffet line and create our culinary variations on our own plates as we go, or we sit at table with an assemblage of small containers sprinkled around like so many car or furniture parts in every available spot, everybody had better be hungry enough to fend for themselves, or get a helping hand from someone else who’s able to build them their ideal dishes from the bits provided there. It makes for a whole lot more dishing-and-passing of a whole lot more little bowls, plates, platters and jars, but then–well, being at table with me is bound to be something of a project, anyway.

Last night’s dinner was somewhat typical in that way. Small parts of the meal like side dishes and condiments are so easily omitted when one is serving oneself that I never fear to go ahead and serve them as-is. So we have haricots vert already slathered in beurre noisette, a relish of ground cranberries and mandarins in maple syrup, bakery croissants and butter all ready for the taking. Or yes, for the ignoring. I made up last evening’s main dish as a whole before putting it out to serve, because it has so few ingredients the removal of any of them would amount quite nearly to asking the diners to make the whole meal themselves. Which I am not in the least averse to doing, in principle, but didn’t feel was necessary in this case.

So the pasta–wide egg noodles–emerged from the kitchen fully dressed in their cream, lemon juice and zest, pepper and smoked salmon. Mom and Dad S having shipped us a succulent Washington Christmas present early, we thought it prudent to dive right into those tender, moist pieces of Sockeye and pink salmon before they tortured and tantalized us for too long. Since our guests brought us a bottle of superb champagne, this was clearly the destined dish to accompany it! Also, as it goes almost without saying, it’s one of the world’s simplest entrees to make, and therefore a favorite in the arsenal of the Kath of Least Resistance at any time when such great smoked salmon is available. I did go so far as to serve the garnish of fried sage leaves separately, knowing my spouse’s disdain for “Green Stuff”; he’d be quite happy if all herbs just disappeared from the face of the earth, or would be at least until he realized that some of his favorite foods actually do rely on them for their distinctive flavors.

photo

. . . no offense to you Green vegetables and ((shudder!)) Herbs!

It was the salad’s turn, as is often the case, to be divided and conquered by the individual diners last night. In keeping with my fetish for combinations sweet and savory, I chose to accompany a bowl of freshly torn romaine lettuce with the following, from which everyone could pick and choose their proprietary blends: a bowl of cubed red Bartlett pear and super-sweet mandarin oranges–the seediest, by the way, that I’ve chopped up in years, but as fresh and bright and juicy and candy-like as any I’ve ever had, to make up for the inconvenience; toasted pine nuts; diced and candied orange peel; crumbled feta cheese. The dressing, also to be added or bypassed at will, was an easy blend of two parts of blood orange infused olive oil (fabulous stuff from Stonehouse) with one part each of mixed mandarin/lemon juice (leftovers from the salad fruit and pasta sauce), soy sauce and maple syrup, plus a healthy shot of fresh ginger juice. Easy peasy.

Now, lest you imagine that I am some sort of cruel beast that would make all of my guests take care of themselves completely . . . oh, wait, I am. My idea of being in a hospitable environment is someone else’s idea of being left alone.

I am quite happy to spend time with friends and family, as long as they are tolerant of my not being an attentive hostess in the any sort of normal waiting-on-you-hand-and-foot mode and know that I crave large quantities of time to spend not honing my admittedly limited set of social skills. I keep strict private ‘office hours’ between bedtime and late morning so that most people needn’t be exposed to my internal dragon lady, she who rules whenever I should be recharging my emotional batteries in silence. At bedtime, I’ll gladly show y’all where to find any breakfast groceries, pots and pans, clean linens and spare toiletries in the house, have my husband train you how to use the TV remote, hand you the house key and the garage door opener, load up your bookshelf, keep the newspaper out for you on the kitchen table and the coffeemaker stocked on the counter, hunt you up a crossword puzzle collection or a pack of playing cards for solitaire, and give you my spare coat, hat and gloves to borrow for a cool-weather walk, but please wait until I emerge from my cave before attempting any interaction.

And know that I’m just not very good at reading minds when it comes to culinary preferences. Even if I know you’re a vegan or keep Kosher or are deathly allergic to whole grain toast, I don’t necessarily know what you really love or hate to eat or how you like it served. If you can choose your own food and manage assembling your own meal out of the provided parts, we’ll get along swimmingly. Even the Generalissimo, the Duchess and the Dalai Lama would have to fend for themselves at my table. I bet you’ll do well enough too.

Get Out Your Super-Spy Gear: the Future is Inscrutable Yet Inviting

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graphite drawingWhen my sisters and I were kids, the Cold War was still chilling the spines of two cranky paranoid continents to pretty much the polar-offset temperature of today’s heated heights regarding relations between, say, anywhere in the middle east and the US. So we regularly crouched under our little school desks in Cold War air-raid drill positions that would’ve made us a whole new and much more crouch-y Herculaneum if Da Bomb had ever actually been dropped on our noggins. The fact that my early heartthrob Morgan M [name redacted to protect his dignity, if any] had vomited all over our shared desk when the Hong Kong flu swept through our school might’ve made my particular spot-de-crouch that much more stalactite-covered and sculptural, had I dared to look upward, but really, there was no greater sense of danger in those classrooms than the one that some teacher might decide my huddling wasn’t taken seriously enough, so crouch I did.

I also, along with my sisters, considered playing cowboys-and-Indians pretty generally passe, so 1950s, don’t you know, and eschewed that popular pastime for the much better use of our coolness in playing Secret Agents. That we never actually spied on anything more exotic than our own basement Rec Room or went on any mission more hair-raising than to demand a pitcher of green Kool-Aid from Mom to take out to the backyard where we would guzzle it until we were bursting and then run around in sugar-high mania having our Spy-vs-Spy battles (only slightly less ludicrous than those in Mad Magazine) was irrelevant; being Secret Agents was cool, was jazzy, was scintillating and ever so grown up. Naturally, we didn’t have the remotest idea what a spy was or what secret agents of any sort did for a living/dying.

What we did have was a whole lot of green-sugar-water-fueled shrimpy persons’ fun. And then, on a really good day, we’d come inside and have nuclear-orange macaroni and cheese for dinner and some outstanding stories from Dr Seuss or perhaps the infinite child-rearing wisdom of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle to top it all off. We were surrounded by the unspeakable dangers not only of the Cold War but of playground equipment made of heavy steel pipes and undergirded by solid concrete; by houses full of asbestos insulation and lead paint, foods crammed with deadly cyclamates and Red Dye No. 2; and of freely roaming streets full of unlocked houses with total strangers living in them and packs of mainly-unsupervised neighborhood kids playing Kick the Can on the same roads where cars full of seatbelt-repellant maniacs tore around smoking unfiltered cigarettes and spewing plumes of black exhaust every which way.

In my current glorious old age, I am quite delighted that I never had to be rescued from the depredations of cigarettes on either lungs or bank account, that I have a car with seatbelts and airbags and GPS (not a chance in the universe that I’d find my way around the old neighborhood without that), and that I have apparently lived to this advanced vintage with my teeth and internal organs basically intact and not even artificially dyed red. I’m pretty darn delighted to be, let alone to be healthy, well off, surrounded by wonderful people, and even able to remember some of those youthful dangers. But I’m still amazed by the will of modern, educated people to believe in all sorts of dangerous fictions. (I will leave my political commentary at that for today!)

Can’t say whether my love of more benign–designed for entertainment– forms of fiction, fantasy and mystery stemmed from that wilderness of seen and unseen ‘hazards’ menacing my youth, but all of that inherent excitement surely must have had some influence, on the whole. So I thank my parents for not over-protecting me from woodland fort-building and steel-wheel roller skating and river inner-tubing and from meeting the neighbors and all of that reckless craziness. And I thank my lucky stars and guardian angels and many random strangers that I have come through all of it so remarkably well that I look forward quite enthusiastically to the second of my half-centuries from here. No matter how completely that entire range of years is wrapped in mystery at this point.

So for my self-gifting and self-congratulating (I’m very good at both, as you know) on this my 51st birthday, I’m posting a couple of self-indulgent (also a talent of mine) fond and foolish reminiscences and a couple of my mystery story drawings. And wishing all of YOU a very happy day and a marvelous, surprisingly excellent year to follow: I’ll share my day with you if you promise to make it a grand year too, as best you can!

graphite drawing

No doubt the clues are all there, but there's something to be said for just continuing to go along on the adventure and seeing what happens . . .

Choosing an Upward Trajectory

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Mixed mediaUncertainty of Heart

Amid most fond expressions of affection, endless love,

Devotion and determination to be stewards of

These sentiments and feelings, is that little nagging voice

That tells us it would not be so if we had any choice,

Because we are perfidious by nature, roaming, weak,

And fearful of commitment to degrees we cannot speak,

And paranoid, on top of it, that others are the same,

And so we speak our pretty vows and play our little game,

Attempting to convince ourselves as much as other folk

That our desires and adoration aren’t some flimsy joke—

The shocking Surprise Ending to this tale is that at death,

Some of us finally realize upon our final breath

That all of it was true, and that our hearts were so inclined;

Too bad we take so long, we fools, to see that we have lived as blind.

acrylic on canvasboardLaudate

In a room with bright light and bright sound

It’s as though all the birds in the wide world have set

Their hearts on singing out the highest praise

Of sun and stars and moon, of life and light and love,

And of being wingèd things up in the broad green roof

Of the springtime world–and yet this song,

Sung in truth by mortals mere, by trebles in

The spring of their own lives, can only hint

At the brilliant sweetness of having been born to sing.

Our Hard-Earned Inurnments

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photo + textInurnment

Don’t let the dignified patina

Lent by old age fool you—

Dead is dead, decay, decay:

One day it too will rule you;

Just because it may look pretty

On an object in decline

Doesn’t mean I’ll like the gritty

Feel of dust when it is mine!

photo + textSurprise, I’m Dead

I never thought to see so soon

My death, when I am scarce past noon,

Yet though it seems a little odd,

I find me snoozing in the sod.

photo + textGone But Not Forgotten

Lily Rivington has gone

And found eternal respite;

We don’t begrudge it, for we too

Gain peace and lose a despot.

Do not speak ill of those who’ve died,

We’re told, whate’er is said,

So let us kindly leave it that

We thank her that she’s dead.

Yes, Rest in Peace, Miss Rivington,

Enjoy eternal slumber;

At last you did do one good deed:

You left our earthly number.

photo + textWish You were Here

I am having so much fun

It doesn’t seem quite fair

That I’m relaxing underground

And you are stuck

Up there.

Something Rare

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Mies van der Rohe‘s dictum that ‘less is more‘ certainly holds true in many places and times. It’s clearly wise to apply it judiciously to the design and construction of many a lean and studied piece of art, architecture or cabinetry, for example. That chef is wise who learns restraint in concocting foods not meant to overwhelm but to grace the palate with subtle or purist readings of ingredients’ beauty. My own betters have long written poetry and prose whose clarity and brilliance stems from a pared-down aesthetic, from refusal to let excess verbiage gnaw away at the edges of refined excellence.BW photo

But when it comes to kindness and generosity of the heart, I think perhaps there should be no limit in sight. One ought to find ways to multiply and continuously add on to the volumes of hospitality and compassion and gentleness and humor. One of our dear friends was apt to find any dessert, no matter how excellent on its own, yet better ‘mit schlag‘–that is, with a generous application of whipped cream–and I feel the same about kind-heartedness. I have been privileged to know a number of people who embody that principle wonderfully.

One of them died this week, and among other things I must say that I saw her as a veritable avatar of the more-is-more way of sharing. My brother-in-law’s mother is no longer in our company in the physical plane, but thanks to this inner light she cultivated, she will be present and continue her influence well past her time in our midst.digitally doctored photo The first time I met her, when my sister married into her family, I was encouraged to call her Mor (Mother) along with the rest of the bunch. Somehow calling her by her first name would have seemed far too formal and distancing, of all things. And if you gave her the slightest indication you were willing, she would adopt you. I felt such ease and happiness at the table with Mor and the whole family that I never doubted my assimilation, even when I couldn’t follow the [Norwegian] conversation particularly well. All that was required of me in return was that I be contented in the company, eat heartily when presented with all of the good food in front of me (as if I could resist), and laugh often–as if that weren’t the most irresistible of all in Mor’s company.

What I’m thinking of most of all now after hearing of Mor’s passing is that high, musically un-selfconscious laugh of hers, something heard often in the times I was privileged to spend in her sweet company. She was hardly a ‘lightweight’, cheery because she had no understanding of darker things; Mor had reserves of strength and will built on hardships and trials that were her harsh tutors from early in her life and shaped a woman mainly undaunted by everyday tribulations that would make others crumble. Part of her will was the determination to see and enjoy the simple beauties and funny foibles of the world around her with full appreciation. That, to me, is one great talent to cultivate.

She made delectable things in the kitchen. The creamiest cauliflower soup imaginable. The most succulent and perfectly seasoned venison chops–I salivate involuntarily every time I even think of those incomparable chops. In perfect keeping with the whole over-the-top generosity with which she viewed and lived life, Mor’s bløtkake [cream cake] was spectacular, as was the cream she served more simply topped with fresh multer [cloudberries] when they came into their seconds-long peak season.

She knitted me an exquisite genser [Norwegian cardigan]. I knew that she had a couple of friends known for knitting the beautiful sweaters for hire, and since I had been hunting unsuccessfully for one myself I asked if she’d connect me with one of those friends. Next thing I knew, she was picking out yarn and patterns with me and made my one-of-a-kind genser herself, altering a pattern to customize it for her American-Norwegian extra kid. “I couldn’t let someone else make yours, you know.” So mine was unique not only in appearance but in being suffused with Mor’s inimitable warmth.

She made perfectly ridiculous puns and told silly stories, primarily with herself as the hapless heroine bumbling innocently through the wide world. Or through her own house: there was the time when, mid sewing project, she lost the shoulder pads destined for a jacket and only found them much later: they were tucked away neatly in the refrigerator freezer where she had apparently exchanged them for a food item she’d also been hunting to thaw for supper whilst en route to the sewing machine.

She took me to see some of the family property and showed me a little hidden spot where some sort of very delicate primrose-like pale flowers bloomed, though they were nearly impossible to find anywhere else. It was as though nature itself had planted a secret garden just for the elfin Mor to find and love, and so touching in its prettiness and Mor’s affection for it that I wrote her an illustrated poem about it. I called it Something Rare, and she liked it enough to hang it on her wall at the time, but I think she probably thought it was named for the uncommon flowers she’d shared with me when of course the poem was really named for her.

So whenever I get bogged down in petty everyday grimness or humorless attitudes, I shall endeavor to remember that I owe much better to the memory of a person who was gifted at piling the whipped cream on top of life. Mor is more.BW photo

A Broad in the Great Wide World

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photoIt’s so easy to forget my place. Oh, yes, you know full well that I am uppity and contrary by nature and will drag my heels at the slightest hint of insistence that I should do a particular thing or be a particular way, even if by the pseudo-polite stealth of passive-aggression. I’m just not that naturally Appropriate. A broad, rather than a lady.

I am well enough educated and naturally prissy enough to know the difference. On top of that, I’m smart and cultured and experienced enough to know a whole slew of ways in which I could and possibly should be a better person. I’m also self-aware and honest enough to recognize that the vast majority of those things are just never gonna happen. What you see is mostly what you get, now and forevermore.

But I’m an optimist, presumably quite the cockeyed one indeed.

So while I have openly confessed to you my many excessive loves–gastronomic outrageousness, all things intense and overblown in color and form and bejeweled wildness, baroque language, hardware store binges–I still believe in my own willfully naive way that I might moderate my urges when absolutely necessary. It’s in this hope, however vain or misguided, that I think I might at least periodically overcome my natural state of inertia, of fixity so granite-like on this planet earth that the mere thought of exercise tends to cause me hyperventilation and require smelling salts.

Yesterday, the sun smiled brilliance on me at such an opportune juncture that I broke stasis. The perfect confluence of a gloriously blue-sky cool day with a lunch date with friends a manageable distance away conspired to lure me upright from my characteristic hunched position at the desk and right out into the world.

How quickly one forgets that said world is rather alluring and full of wonders! How quickly I forget that, along with whatever position(s) I occupy in the world of my narrow influence and contact, I also live in the beautiful, messy, unpredictable, constantly shifting world that is my neighborhood, this town, this part of an entire planet.photo

The whole walk wasn’t necessarily impressive in and of itself. Recent longed-for and welcome rains have left the Texas clay in many areas (lacking sidewalks) converted to rust-colored mucilage, so I spent more of my focus on not being sucked ankle-deep or doing a banana-peel slide in those spots than on looking around me with interest. Fortunately, most of those zones are alongside the duller and dirtier of the main roads, where there mightn’t be much more than an onrush of traffic to engage the senses anyway. But in about seven miles round trip there’s a whole lot to awaken those dormant senses, too, and to remind me that while the sedentary state may have become my default position it isn’t necessarily the best or even the most desirable one.

Yesterday I saw the sun again, really saw it; felt it brush my cheek like a tender hand. Felt the breeze tug the hem of my coat and run its fingers sloppily through my hair. I heard birds whistling and chattering in their treetop congregations. Saw the wintry silver seed-heads of prairie grasses blink their brightness on-off, on-off as they swayed in and out of shade, and trees whose leaves have finally burnished to the exact same shade of red as the bricks on the facade behind them.

And I stopped partway home to have a walk through the cemetery, where I chanced on the headstone of a soldier killed at Pearl Harbor to remind me that it was the very anniversary of the attack that left him and many others dead and launched the US fully into World War II and the loss of millions more. The cemetery is old enough to serve as resting place too for a generation whose family plots often contain two, three, four children’s graves, as many in those days died in infancy or barely beyond youth. There are graves for those who lived long and fully, too. The thing is, I was the only person in this particular cemetery at the moment that wasn’t dead.photo

Which pleases me a great deal, I’ll tell you.

And it was an incredibly fitting reminder to me that while I was busy patting myself on the back over having been such an outstanding and exemplary being as to take a measly fair-weather walk, I too will join the hordes of the dead soon enough. So I’d jolly well better get out and about in this wide wonder of a world a whole lot more if I want to see the ravens tumble and leap among the tombstones, smell chimney smoke as it drifts between the sweet gums and cedars, and see that twenty-four-karat sun glittering in the enamel-blue sky like there’s no tomorrow. There can’t be an endless number of tomorrows, to be sure.

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Death comes to us all, sooner or later. In case I needed a reminder, I came across this grave of a young lady who died on her own twenty-eighth birthday. A birthday I happen to share. The End!