My friend Cynthia came for a visit with her adorable son, and while the boys played in the pond (frogs! newts!) Cynthia decided to give me a long-desired painting lesson. She’s an amazing artist (this is one of my favorite of her paintings; the colors of the forsythia are so incredible in real life) and has been telling me for months she’d help me learn to put paint on paper, something that absolutely TERRIFIES me. (This is not a rational fear. This is not even an articulated fear, meaning, I don’t have words I can put it into. But paint scares the shit out of me.) When she arrived, as it happened, I had paint out for the Babe, who was busily painting a rock she found by the pond, and, oh, her entire body. Cynthia, bless her, jumped in. She painted the Babe’s picture, the Babe painted hers, and then she directed me to get a piece of paper and a brush for myself. She set up a still life, and started teaching. I was so irritable, and tense, and not particularly gracious about the enormous gift I was being given. By the end of what felt like hours but was probably only 45 minutes, I had a semi-lucid portrait of a papaya, and a headache. I felt like I’d been run through a mangle.

I was so visibly on edge that I felt terrible for my friend; I couldn’t even fake ease, so stressed was I by the paint everywhere (The Babe had taken to pouring it out on the paper, applying to her legs, and so on), the sudden appearance of my mom, who is incredibly supportive of my artistic efforts but through no fault of her own makes me feel like I’m a big fraud, and my own anxiety at how hard it was to process and replicate patterns of light and shadow and color. In the end, I produced something that, from a good distance away, looked plausibly like its subject. I will try again. But meanwhile, I love working in the ultra-forgiving, cut and paste world of mixed media collage.

The piece above arrived at my friend Hilary’s today. She is all heart, all woman, all breathless living-with-a-capital-L, and I love her. She and Cynthia, I realized tonight, remind me of one another;  though they are so different,too, they share a quality of creative passion that I treasure.

Mailed week of May 10, 2010

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.” –August Wilson

I don’t usually have much interaction with the anthroposophist (Rudolf Steiner devotées) communities which abound in this area. I like the people, usually, very much, but the dogma is too heavy for me. Camphill is a Steiner project that cares for developmentally disabled adults in a village setting, where they live and work side by side with normally-abled adults and their families. Its presence here (about 10 miles from my house) means that we often see the residents out and about, which I think is a great thing for my kids, and for me. (In California, I now realize, I almost never saw disabled adults, and rarely children. Where were they?)

Anyway, the people at Camphill tend an herb garden and make wonderful teas (really, tisanes) with lyrical names like Douceur de Fete (one of my favorites.) They also make the prosaically named Tea for Colds, which seems to actually help. So, with my head stuffed and snotty with a cold, I made myself a cuppa just now, using my newest (non-local) fave acqusition, my Tea Stick. (Pricey, but genius. If you drink loose leaf tea, get one.) And I poured the nearly-boiling water into my favorite new mug (one thing you may not know about me is that for years now, I’ve been searching for the perfect mug. It’s more challenging than you might think, but I think the search is over.) My mug was made by a potter/friend down the road who gave it to me in exchange for using my home as a location for a photo shoot for her new website. So my soothing tea was in my perfect mug, which soothes the palm of my hand in addition to holding my medicinal tea, and I thought: this is all from right.here. If I had a younger horse (and, let it be said, was a better rider) I could get to both of them in an afternoon. And that thought just made me so happy that I live in this random, odd, lovely place.

Meanwhile, last night I made a discovery that also has everything to do with where I live and what I do here, and it also made me shiver with quiet joy.

Mary Oliver is one of my favorite contemporary poets, but I only recently discovered this work of hers. To make it even better, I found it on a work of art made by my teachers and friends Karen Arp-Sandel and Suzy Banks Baum. If you live near me, check out their collaborate mail art show, Femail, at the Berkshire Art Kitchen.

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patcha few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorwayinto thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak

~ Mary Oliver

Patience from Glowing Heads on Vimeo.

I have little to none these days, not patience, not time to create, but this is a beautiful reminder of the immense pleasures in both. Hoping you are all having happy holidays.

That’s more than I can say about most of the last 30 days preceding. The last month has, in a word, sucked. Between the H’s terrifying accident, and its aftermath, both physical and emotional, I am completely spent. I used nanowrimo as intensive therapy, escaping into my fictional world every.single.day, even if I didn’t commit any new words to my draft. It was an amazing outlet, and exhilarating to prove to myself that I could actually write a piece of fiction–something I literally haven’t done, save fragments, since high school.

This month, I’ve got a new immersion project, which I’ll reveal at some point, and I am, as a wise friend counseled, just trying to get through the month.

Today, I drove all four of us to the kids’ school. The H and I had breakfast, then went to the market and I dropped him in Great Barrington while I went to see my shrink (how badly did I need that appointment today? Oh, badly.) I picked him up, and drove him an hour to catch the train to NYC where he has a meeting tomorrow morning. I drove back to the kids’ school (an hour and five minutes) to pick them up to take them to get their flu shots. I drove them to the pediatrician (20 minutes.) We drove back to school, so Dido could finish his day. The Babe and I went for lunch (for me) at 3 p.m., and then to her ballet class. We drove back to school, and then home. Let’s not even discuss my carbon footprint, shall we?

I am quite relaxed, actually about all this; my biggest dilemma is how to manage the animals: the dog can’t stay home alone all day, so she’s going to need to ride along with us most mornings; I will hike her (good for us both) and then leave her with the H at his office while I go about my day. The horses have to be fed and turned out in the morning, every morning, so I now have to do that before taking everyone to school, rather than my prior routine of doing it after they leave. But there’s no way for me to get up early enough (5:30? not happening) to do stalls before school, too. As a result, over the last few days, the kids and I have gotten into an evening routine. Dido does his homework, then we all go down to the barn together. They, who have steadfastly resisted much barn work for the last eight months, have suddenly gotten with the program (fear of maternal meltdown perhaps? though that’s never had an impact before, really) and have started helping, a lot, with cleaning stalls, feeding, watering and stocking the paddock with hay and water for morning. By the end of the half hour “shift”, they’re done working and are just running and playing by the barn while I finish the last details, but that’s lovely, too; then we go back up to the house for dinner. Between that and the time change, they’ve been falling into bed at 7:30, and mostly are asleep by 8, which is, no exaggeration, bliss.

The H was in L.A. for work last week, and without getting into too much gorey detail, had a seizure, something that has never happened before. He was driving at the time, and so wrecked his rental car and shook himself up quite badly. Thankfully, he wasn’t hurt much and mercifully, neither was anyone else, for which we are both beyond grateful. Even so, it was a terrifying experience for both of us, and I was happy beyond happy to have him home, safe if not completely sound, on Friday night.

Until we know why this happened (and we suspect a reaction to some medication he’s been taking) he can’t drive. This means that I am back in the twice a day commuting gig, one which made me nearly insane when we first moved here. There’s nothing to be done about it, so I am trying to figure out how best to integrate the extra hour of commuting into my already packed days. My first sane step was to decline the opportunity to take on yet another volunteer responsibility at the kids’ school.

We’ll muddle through this, but it was a shock. Ah, the chaos of life.