Pecking at the Glass

Yesterday afternoon, I was sitting on my couch doing some work when a bird outside caught my attention. It was a young sparrow who had alighted on the obelisk just outside the living room window. At least, I think it was a young sparrow. It was fully grown, but it kept its mouth open in that baby bird, begging-to-be-fed way, and I've noticed before that young birds do that.

For some reason, this particular bird decided he wanted to come through our window. I don't know how much he could see of the interior through the glass; it was very bright outside, and we had no lights on in here. But something captured his attention. He didn't exactly fly into the window, but he kept sitting on his perch and pecking at it and then hopping over to the sill or grabbing onto the screen with his tiny claws and pecking away.

For half an hour, he kept at this, trying first one way and then another. I couldn't help it. I sat there watching him, and I laughed and laughed.

You see, all of yesterday morning I was in an absolutely foul mood. Some days I want nothing so much as to pull a Paul Gaugin and chuck all my responsibilities for the sake of my writing and my art. Yesterday was one of those days, and even though I knew I was making myself unhappy by brooding over the idea, I just couldn't seem to break the rut in my thinking even though I tried to journal through it.

When I saw the bird stubbornly trying to get into my shadowy living room and ignoring the glorious yard that was filled with bugs and worms and seeds and flowers behind him, I felt a jolt of recognition. That was me, pecking desperately at a vague vision that only I could discern and ignoring the wealth of the life around me.

Not the least of which was a tiny bird who made me laugh at myself.

Blessing of St. Clare

Lately, one of our priests has been closing our service with a blessing based on the final words of St. Clare, and I have found great strength and peace in it. I couldn't find the blessing form online, but here is a translation of Clare's dying words:

"Go forth in peace, for you have followed the good road. Go forth without fear, for He that created you has sanctified you, has always protected you, and loves you as a mother. Blessed be thou, O God, for having created me."

May you feel his protection and love today.

P.S. Thanks to Roberta, who posted the version I couldn't find in the first comment.

Summer Art Experiment, #3

This is the drawing / painting I worked on the last two weeks. (I don't know what to call it because I did it with watercolor pencils and I did wash a lot of the colors.) What I wanted to accomplish with this experiment was to really push the color to convey emotional intensity. I also want to capture a sense of movement. I don't like that static nature of technical botanical illustration; this is intentionally as far from that as I could get.

As an interesting contrast, I thought it would be fun to look back at the flower drawing I did in my class a year ago:

Quite a change, eh?

P.S. The drawing wouldn't fit on our scanner so I had to photograph it. That caused a little distortion, but I adjusted it a bit an decided it was close enough.

Mary Versus Martha

I've been thinking about Mary and Martha on and off since Sunday's gospel reading.

The first thing that occurred to me is that sermons and lessons often portray these two as different kinds of Christians . . . with the ensuing discussion centering on which kind we should be. Earlier this week, I suddenly saw the story in a different light. Mary and Martha are both within me, and I can read this story as my own inner conflict: the responsible, practical side beating up on the more intuitive side for not getting more done. Such a reading gives me pause and makes me wonder about the internal violence I inflict on myself.

Next, I thought about Martha's behavior a little more deeply. One thing that bothers me about her actions in the story is that she "tells tales" about her sister to Jesus. Did she even try talking to Mary first? Did she try to resolve the issue privately? We don't know. Whether she did or not, she is clearly not content to let Mary's conscience guide her own behavior. No, Martha has to go running to the nearest authority to try to coerce her sister into meeting her own expectations. In psychological terms, she is externally driven while Mary is internally driven. Perhaps, just perhaps, one of the points that Jesus was making was that Mary chose the better part, not because quiet contemplation is better than action, but because being guided by the Spirit and your own inner authority is better than legalistically following external expectations and rules.

Finally, my thoughts came to center on Mary. How rarely the story is looked at from her consciousness. Can you imagine what it was like to sit there at the feet of Jesus, knowing that you were defying your culture's expectations, knowing that the men in the room probably were seething that you "had stepped out of your place," knowing that you were wounding a beloved sister, . . . and yet sitting there all the same. How brave she was and how obedient to the prompting of the Spirit within her.

As I try to balance my responsible, practical, "do things" side with the more contemplative side of my personality, I hope I can remember Mary's single-minded focus and determination—and in the process, learn from it.

My Current Favorite Lunch

Walk out to the garden. Pick a young zucchini (about five inches long). Pick a tomato.

Back in the kitchen, pop two slices of whole grain bread in the toaster. Wash the zucchini and cut it into 1/4 inch slices. Lightly saute in olive oil. If desired, saute some green onion with it.

As you saute the zucchini, wash and slice the tomato. When the toast pops up, spread each slice with hummus. Plain is fine, but flavors such as garlic or sundried tomato and basil are also good. On one slice, layer zucchinis and tomatoes. If desired, add kalamata olive halves.

Place second piece of bread hummus side down on the layers of vegies. Slice in half and enjoy a fabulous meal.

Snippets

Isn't that a great word . . . snippets?

The mold situation turned out to be more complicated than the initial inspection revealed. We have a patio door that, unbeknownst to us, has been leaking for years. As a result, the mold was also in another area, and it had actually eaten through one of the wooden joists. (It's not a supporting beam, so thank God for that.) The mold remediation took almost two weeks, and was very noisy because of the sanding and the giant air scrubbers they had to run both upstairs and down. For two days, we had two of those running on the main floor. It was like living on an airport runway next to warming up jet engines. However, the cleanup is nearly done--just the duct cleaning to go--but we need to have the patio door and our kitchen floor replaced. Fortunately, we were planning to do both those jobs this summer anyway, so it's not a shock. But we also have to have that bad joist braced, and have caulk put around the outside of our house wherever the deck meets it, and we have a skylight that is seeping, so it needs to be repaired, possibly replaced. Sigh.

Michael's film project continues to inch along. About a year ago, I posted that the producer John Yaworsky signed on the project. A couple of weeks ago, he and Michael parted ways because of differences about how to proceed. Michael has lined up another producer, someone he has worked with before. In other matters, Michael and his casting agent continue to contact name actors. Whenever we do that, the script has to be read and approved by an agent first, but it keeps passing that step and getting to the actor—which is huge. None of the actors has said yes yet, and I don't know how much longer we can keep hiring the casting agent, so I feel a bit anxious about that.

We have had our first person invest in the project. She bought one share, which means she invested about 2.5 % of what we need. We're very excited about that. It doesn't help with the costs, though, because she was not willing for that money to be seed money. So it will sit in escrow until we've raised our entire amount. Michael and his lawyer have brainstormed a few ideas for getting more investors, so maybe something will come through. Overall, Michael's lawyer is sounding more positive that the project may eventually happen, although it may still take several years. I'm trying to stay on an even keel.

The last couple of weeks, it has been wonderful to have only one job (instead of one and a half) and no art classes. I'm not planning to stop my classes, but I'm debating what to do in the fall. The plan was to take two classes for the months of September and October, and I'm not sure I have the stamina to do that. I will definitely go back to studying with Richard. I'm debating what to do about the botanical drawing class though. Plus, the half-job may start again in August. (It hasn't been decided yet.) I know I can't keep doing this much, but deciding what to eliminate is difficult. I'm praying about it.

In the meantime, I'm trying to catch up on all the things I let fall behind over the course of the last few months. And revise my novel. And continue to do some art so I don't get rusty.

So what's going on in your life?

Title Decision

Thanks to everyone who commented on my last thread. Your comments assisted me to clarify my feelings about my novel. I've decided on a title, and it's none of the possibilities I listed.

Of all the responses, perhaps of most interest to me was the fact that no one picked Lily in the Valley, which was my working title for three years but which never satisfied me.

The other three titles were my attempts to replace it, but I didn't wholly like any of them either.

The new title, which I decided on this morning, feels absolutely right to me. It's one of those "know it in my bones" feelings.

This morning as I was walking Smokey, I was thinking about the most recent comments on the other post and, because of that, I was reviewing the themes of the book. Because of the tragic event that happened when she was 18, Lily lost her trust in God and she also shut down, giving up her professional hopes and her hopes of a loving marriage. One of the tensions of the first third of the novel is whether Lily will even allow herself to remember what happened--not in the sense of having amnesia but in the sense of forbidding herself to think about it or to even say the name of the boy she loved.

Two of the big themes of the novel are her journey back to God and her struggle to shake off the oppression of this past event. Two other significant details are that she was raised Catholic and she works as a translator.

So I was thinking of those two main themes and asking myself if anything in the novel could act as a symbol of one or both of them. And the answer came to me. There is a Catholic prayer that was significant in Lily's childhood and which helps her make her first tentative steps back to God.

The prayer is called the Memorare. It is a Latin word meaning "Remember." Faith and memory all in one word, which is a foreign word but that's appropriate for her character. And even for people who have no association with the prayer, the word looks enough like the English word memory to trigger that association. (Plus, the book is written in the first person and starts with Lily's decision to write down her memoir.)

So Memorare is my title. If I'm ever lucky enough to get this thing published, the publisher will quite possibly change it. But for now I have a title I really like and that is all that matters.

P.S. For those of you who have never heard of the prayer, here it is:

Remember, O Most Gracious Virgin Mary,

that never was it known that anyone who fled to Thy protection,

implored Thy help or sought Thy intercession,

was left unaided.

Inspired by this confidence,

I fly unto Thee, O Virgin of Virgins, my Mother;

to Thee do I come, before thee I kneel, sinful and sorrowful.

O Mother of the Word Incarnate,

despise not my petitions,

but in Thy clemency, hear and answer me.

Amen.

Research for my Novel

I've been working on a novel for several years now, and I'm in the final cutting stage. I hope to start marketing it by the end of the year. But I've never been able to settle on a title I like.

The basic premise of the book is this: A woman named Lily is in a loveless marriage to a moderately wealthy man. When she was a teenager, she fell deeply in love with a boy in high school, but the relationship ended tragically and she swore off love. She married Max because he could help her pay for the care her mother needed after developing Alzheimers. When Lily reaches her mid-forties, a sequence of events makes her dissatisfied with her life. She begins to want more than the stale relationship she has, and she meets a charismatic young man who seems drawn to her, but who has his own mysterious and painful past. However, her husband Max becomes critically ill, and her conscience balks at the idea of divorcing him in those circumstances. The resolution of the book involves her struggle to figure out the right thing to do for all involved and then to do it.

So here are my possible titles:

Lily in the Valley (an allusion to Ps. 23 and the valley of the shadow of death)

Lily Pierre (her maiden name)

Lily and Thistle (thistle is a symbol for another character in the book)

The Ashes of Desire (This is taken from a passage in which Lily thinks: "Love. For so many people, the purpose of life came down to that. And what happened when love ended in tragedy, leaving only ashes where once there was desire?")

If you were shopping for a novel and you saw books with these titles laid out on the New Releases table at Borders (or wherever), would you pick them up? What would you expect? Which title intrigues you the most or seems best to fit with the synopsis above? (Note: This is intended to be serious fiction, not a romance novel.)

Thanks.

Tom and Zuke

Anyone remember my tomato experiment--starting them indoors in an effort to have tomatoes by Michael's birthday (which is tomorrow)?

Well, we've been eating tomatoes for two weeks. They've been very small and we get ripe ones every three days or so. But finally, it looks like we're going to have a steady crop. Look at this monster I picked this morning. It looks like conjoined twin tomatoes. It's a Brandywine. Sometimes they form these odd shapes that make them difficult to slice into perfect rounds, but the taste more than makes up for it.

And look what's next to it. We're going to have sauted zucchini tonight. Yes, I know, in a couple of weeks I will be thoroughly sick of zucchini. But for now it's exciting and so pretty.

window to the past

This is the last photograph taken of my oldest brother before he died (he's the one in blue to the right of me). It was taken in February 2000, on the occasion of our father's 85th birthday.

Yesterday, I had this strange urge to Google my father's name. It made little sense. Dad died 9 years ago, and he was never on the Internet, so it was unlikely that I'd find anything. But I typed in his name and the city where he lived. Instead of finding any mention of him, I came across a query in which an old navy buddy was looking for my brother Carl. The query was posted in 2000, but the man left his complete name and I was able to find his personal web site by Googling.

So we corresponded last night, and he shared his memories of my brother in Iceland in 1961. Carl would have been 19 at the time. I was only 3, so it's a glimpse of a brother I cannot remember . . . and can no longer ask.

The Internet has many flaws and issues. But yesterday it gave me a gift.

domestic wasteland

The mold remediation crew is supposed to come today and start work on restoring our basement. The first thing they are going to have to do is to move everything out of the affected area and HEPA vacuum every single object in the basement. Then they'll make a containment area and start pulling out the contaminated insulation and treating the damaged wood, etc. etc.

Yesterday, Michael and I spent about an hour in the basement throwing some things away to make the task a little less daunting. But really, the amount we accomplished was equivalent to draining a bathtub's worth of water from the hold of the Titanic. We couldn't do much for some very legitimate reasons. First, I've been experiencing growing allergy symptoms for the last week, and I think it's from prolonged exposure to the mold. So the last thing I need is to spend half a day stirring up mold spores. Second, we can't bring anything from the basement into the upper level because of contamination. So we carried some stuff out to our trash bin, but when that got full, we stopped. And there are some things we can't just throw away. Two old computers and all their peripherals. Old paint and gardening chemicals. Things you can't just put in the regular trash . . . and we can't take them to the special recycling center now because putting them in the car will contaminate it.

The sad truth is that our basement is a giant dumping ground. There are cartons we haven't opened in the fifteen years we've lived here. Ok, it makes sense to keep the storage box for my wedding gown, but really, how many of those other boxes have that kind of justification? Maybe the Dick Francis collection I inherited from my late brother and cannot bear to part with. Maybe the boxes and boxes of family dishes that we promised to give our niece when she and her husband bought their first home, but they've been living in her mother's basement for something like seven years and there are no plans to move.

But those things account for maybe only 20 percent of the clutter. There are some fifteen years of writing files down there. Old furniture. Empty boxes that technology products came in (in case we ever move). Ratty stuffed toys from my childhood. A box with probably 2,000 buttons that my mother-in-law gave me because her mother diligently cut them off every worn piece of clothing she ever had. An old quilt frame that a dear friend inherited from the grandmother who raised her, which she gave to me because I briefly took up quilting and she loved me like a daughter. But I no longer quilt and the thing just sits there because I can't throw away something that meant so much to Clara.

Isn't that the way it is with non-tangible things too? We let things take over our lives from a combination of indecision, weariness, and guilt.

I wish I knew the answer. I could try to be more ruthless about culling junk from my life and more disciplined about not buying just for the sake of buying. But still I end up with old pictures that once meant something to me but which I can't stand to look at anymore and a box full of every card Michael and I have given each other over the course of twenty years of marriage and a barrel full of leftover yarn from knitting projects and the rocker in which my mother rocked all of her babies but which I didn't get to use because we couldn't have children and a carton with my high school and college yearbooks. How does a person ruthlessly dispose of such things?

So we have a basement filled with things we never look at and never use, but which we cannot bear to throw away. And because of the weight of our past, our basement will remain unusable even after all the mold is gone.

How do you deal with the detritus of your lives?

Hair as Sacrament

This is a very silly post, but here goes.

When I started taking art classes a year ago, I set myself a personal goal of being a "real artist" in four years. By that I mean, producing paintings that express what I see and feel. Probably oil paintings but I haven't ruled out watercolor. I don't expect to have learned everything by then or even to be consistently producing work I like, but I want to be out of the "I'm just a student" stage. I'm making a list of paintings I want to do, images I see in my head but that I know I don't have the expertise to do now.

So one year of my four is down and I have three to go. (This is an arbitrary number, of course, but it gives me a time frame.) If you knew me in real life, you would know that I hate being a beginner. I always feel like I should be able to learn quickly. So I tend to push myself to make progress faster than I really can. (My art teacher, Richard, once told me not to view my art as though I were a child taking violin lessons, who had to progress through a certain routine of scales and finger exercises. And he's right. I do run the risk of turning my learning into drudgery by assigning myself X number of anatomy drawings and X number of perspective exercises in order to rush ahead more quickly.)

Anyway, I recently hit on a quirky, very personal way to help me accept that I'm in an awkward transition. I've decided to grow out my hair. I have strange hair--it's very porous so it takes forever to dry and is damaged very easily by dryers and curling irons and chemicals. So I've been wearing it short for years and years because that way I don't have to do much to it. The other strange thing about my hair is that it's completely straight on top and very, very wavy in back. Wearing it in short layers works with the difference in textures. But since I've been through menopause, it's grown dry and difficult to control. Half the time, I have to put a lot of stuff on it to keep from having Bozo wings at the side of my head.

So I've decided to grow it out. I first got the idea because both of the women art teachers I've had wear their hair long, . . . and it just seems so artsy. But the practical advantage is that once it reaches shoulder length, the weight of it will keep the side hair from winging out. Right now, I'm pulling it back (except for my bangs) with a plastic headband. When it's long enough, I'll probably clip the top section back with a barrette. Or maybe I'll keep wearing headbands but buy a bunch of colorful, artistic ones.

I estimate it will take a year to be all one length, and then a second year to reach my shoulders. So for the next couple of years, the hair will be a symbol of my life. When I get impatient with my art studies, I can tell myself, "By the time my hair grows out, I should be well along in learning how to paint." And when I get impatient with how awkward my hair looks, I can tell myself, "Well, I may have a long way to go, but it represents that I'm in transition."

I know this probably sounds odd, but it really comforts me to have something external and tangible as a way to represent the internal journey I'm on. I'm really into having external markers for internal things. That's probably why I ended up in sacramental churches (Catholic first and now Episcopal), since sacraments are defined as "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." Hence the title Hair as Sacrament. And I bet you thought it had something to do with Samson and Delilah.

Summer Art Experiments, 1 and 2

I don't know if these will look like experiments to anyone but me, but they are. There are three things I'm intentionally working on with these drawings.

First, I'm trying to learn what I can and cannot do with watercolor pencils. In the top image, I washed the background and didn't like how it came out so I worked over it heavily in dry pencil. In the bottom image, I washed the pencil in a lot of areas but also left significant patches dry, so that different objects have very different textures.

Second, I'm trying to get over my nervousness about doing backgrounds and creating border-to-border pictures.

Finally, I'm testing how I feel about this somewhat stylized, simplified style. This has been an aspect of my work as far back as I can remember, and until recently, I hated it. I thought it made my work look childish and cartoonish, and it was one of the reasons I doubted that I had any real talent. Now I'm wondering if this ability to hone in on essentials might not be one of my strengths, if I learn how to use it intentionally. Only time will tell.

Oh, and in the bottom image, I was creating shadow with color complements. The shadow areas of the pot are perhaps a little more muddy than I wanted (it would pop from the background better if I'd kept it from getting so dull), but I do think I managed to give both the pot and the treetops in the background dimensionality, so that part was a success.

If you click on the images, they do get bigger (and in fact, you can click on that to zoom into a certain area if you're so inclined).