My Book. Or, a book. By Me.

Because I hope it won't be the last.

Accurate Observation and Meticulous Grace

Today i had to ask myself, "What do I really need to do right now that would bring me greater well-being?" I answered myself by drawing.

What I've learned in Botanical Drawing class:

--Botanical Drawing is a demanding form of illustration

--I'm not sure I'm up to it

--I loved drawing this artichoke.

--I cannot trust my brain! At all!

The double spiral structure of parts of many plants (like the seeds of a sunflower) results in a complex set of intersections that is extremely difficult to freehand. Every time I used my stick to measure and rough in where the artichoke leaves would be, even the outer shape of the globe of it, I was surprised. It was in fact better to turn off my brain and let the eyes and hands work unimpeded.

What I learned today while waiting to hear the results of my dad's open-heart surgery:

--cultivating well-being while anxious is a demanding way to pass a day

--I was not sure I was up to it

--Drawing is a kind of meditation for me

--I cannot trust my brain! At all!

In meditation class we talked about a variation on the 5 basic precepts of Buddhism as guidelines to rely on when you are at a moment of choice. Intoxicants were a big part of this discussion (ahem, as a topic). Is meditation an intoxicant? Have I been distancing myself from the panic I ought to be feeling about this MAJOR surgery my dad is having? I gave in to the wild feelings I'd been holding at bay for several days and told myself many stories about possible outcomes and consequences. Did I learn anything from this. I think not.

What stays with me from our discussion is that you can't always think your way to a right choice, but you can almost always feel your way there.

Integrity is not just about following guidelines for morality. On a deeper level, it's about being true to yourself. If you are in touch with your heart and your deepest impulses, you will make choices that do not harm yourself or others. --James Baraz, Awakening Joy

I don't really have a conclusion, except thank goodness for botanical drawing.

Sound Living Sense

In a book I read over the summer I learned how to describe what it feels like I 've been missing for so much of my life. The book is "Cutting for Stone." In it a singular character is described: someone, though exceptionally dedicated, exotically beautiful, and especially lucky, who cannot progress in her field of nursing.

"She discovered that memorization ("by-hearting," as Matron called it) was of no help to her at the bedside, where she struggled to distinguish the trivial from the life-threatening. Oh yes, she could and did recite the names of the cranial nerves as a mantra to calm her own nerves. She could rattle off the composition of mistura carminativa...But what she couldn't do, and it annoyed her to see how effortlessly her fellow probationers could, was develop the one skill Matron said she lacked: Sound Nursing Sense."

Anyone might expect to be embarrassed by ways they acted as an adolescent, unsure of their social responses and unclear about who they were. Sporadically surfacing into and through my twenties and thirties I felt a vague and then increasingly sharp disappointment with choices I'd made. Who could be comfortable when a hollowness occupies your personal space, but how do you examine what is not there to see? And if it doesn't change as you get older, then you really feel stuck.

I had the perpetual feeling of coming up with a possible answer three days after the question was asked...so often simply having to cover a blank stare with some bluster or awkward silence, almost always only having a narrow literal interpretation. Why didn't I get it all the way other people did? Aha! Maybe because I lacked Sound Living Sense!

It might not seem like so much, what I was missing--but as Stephen Cope says, "a new freedom for well-considered and appropriate action is a very wonderful thing...we become free to claim actions that express who we really are." Who am I, really? When you don't have freedom to choose, the world really is a bewildering, blurry place.

Sound Nursing Sense is more important that knowledge, though knowledge only enhances it. Sound Nursing Sense is a quality that cannot be defined, yet is invaluable when present and noticeable when absent. To paraphrase Osler, a nurse with book knowledge but without Sound Nursing Sense is like a sailor at sea in a seaworthy vessel but without map, sextant, or compass.

EXACTLY SO. Parenting, of course, opened a whole new chapter of misguided responses, a whole new understanding of the words "hot button," a whole new ocean in which to be lost without navigation tools of any kind. Amazingly, now I'm finding a whole set of possible solutions. They knock me over! With their simplicity, purity, curiosity. Like the proverbial feather, they are weightless and quiet. Hear the bickering in the back seat and remember how lucky I am to have two healthy children. See three day's worth of dirty clothing on the floor and choose to feel grateful for the creativity in the incredible drawings they've made of a float plane, a vase of flowers, a bowl of fruit, a portrait of our family.

Why was that so hard before? Why couldn't I distinguish the trivial from the life-threatening? Not to mention life-affirming? Don't think I don't still pick a fight over a sock. Maybe the day I don't even care about that I'll know I'm truly enlightened.

Please, make me look good

This is Theo's artwork from a school assignment. Isn't it cool? This is some British actor I don't know. I love the closeness with which he observed the details, as with the circle of the iris cut off at the top, and the lines in the forehead (and some hairs, which he repeated as in a mirror image--a little funny in this "complete the face" project.) As my husband said, that is what an 11-year old boy will do if someone asks him to do it . . .

this, however, is what he will do if left to his 'druthers. A little levity in an otherwise rocky morning--I needed that!

I had given him the recent New Yorker issue with all the portraits of world leaders taken when they were gathered in New York for a UN meeting in September. I found these pictures fascinating. Have a look if you missed them (Dec. 7 issue). I thought Theo was going to do the half-face completion thing again; I was humorously mistaken! But Netanyahu looks much improved here, no? (no offense intended . . .) Apparently before his picture was taken, and then stopping by several times later on, he asked the photographer "Please, make me look good." Was it just coincidence that his face was one of two that Theo chose to doodle upon? Hmmm.

I felt the panic that filled me upon waking and all during meditation recede with contemplating the chuckles he must have gotten out of this. I added one too many things to my plate yesterday afternoon. Luckily, my friend Sarah understood, relieving me of the task, and even flipped what I saw as disappointing inability to help as an important communication from my heart that I must respect. Took a Deep Breath. Went to Yoga. Found my way into that crink again, felt it give just a little bit more.

Engine swamp

I think I was holding my breath most of today. Not so as to turn blue, but definitely enough to feel that tight, irritated, impatience return and, as the day wore on, that feeling of losing certainty of bearing--whether I was tired, hungry, dangerous, whether in the next moment I would be able to imagine something I would actually want to do--I couldn't tell. In the relative peace after dinner I sat and breathed. I needed to be upstairs with the door shut so the cats wouldn't find me, no stereo up there, so I sat with myself for the first time since meditation class started. No cd, no teacher present.

After 15 minutes I realized I had been starved for oxygen and breathing felt so good. Every inhalation an exponential increase in possibility, I am ready for anything, every exhalation a smoothing, a preparation, I am not in control. So funny to think the first few times I sat I had the feeling of not being able to breathe. I started to lose my despair in the kid's bickering and the reasons that Steve had been in the wrong and the feeling that perhaps I didn't so detest having to find new ways to eat the most expensively procured many vacuum sealed packs of fish Steve and Theo brought back from their little jaunt to Alaska last summer . . .

Yesterday at the end of yoga while we were still in savasana Jen opened the door to the studio and we heard the rain. It was so beautiful. I would be oversimplifying my emotional reaction to write briefly about it here. But I collected that appreciation together (as Steve says, I instinctively group like objects) with the visual memory from a few days before of light streaky marks of rain falling in a wash of low-angled sunlight as I drove home, also completely, well, convincing, if you know what I mean. I haven't felt this positive about rain since I was in elementary school and living in the tropics, ready to strip to my underwear and run or ride my bike through deep inches of standing, flowing, and pooling water.

Last spring I went to a monoprinting workshop that gave me so much hope. The workshop instructor, a printmaker named Kevin Fletcher, talked about staying in the abstract, working with the grid, leaving ideas of images you wanted to appear to be hypothetical conceits, locked in a safe. In a way, he was saying that coming to creativity the back way can hold you, can find you while you are humming a few rhymes and dibbling your toes in the water . . . every line, every mark you make is still true, isn't it, it's just that you are letting it tell it's own story, instead of making something up for it to be. Make yourself available.

Anyway what I'm trying to convey is my great relief and astonishment when I heard someone (successful and interesting) saying "don't have a goal. Just make the motions." Now to be sure, it was clear he had an immense catalog of images in his head, just stacks and stacks of memories and references to architectural, natural, and every other kind of shape or structure. That must be very helpful. When he saw the print above, which I had in spite of his directives to resist naming or identifying any part of our work before it was done started thinking of as a reedy swamp, he said "fabulous! (that's a good teacher, eh? first thing he says is encouraging) that makes me think of the engine block of a Chevy Impala." My college literature professor said memory was a useful critical tool . . . what an understatement. Its a creative tool as well.

I hope that I can start returning to art in this way, around the back, not with an irrational goal or self-conscious expectations but with a few hummable riffs and some water on the way.

What if I can learn what the lion has to teach us?

At a yoga class I missed recently my teacher read this poem, and two different people told me about it, saying they thought of me.

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:

the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

--David Whyte

They know me well, the two who thought of me. These are the kind of words that are hard to read if your heart feels empty and your mind is dark. I was getting pretty sure I was beyond love, and if you haven't been there, living and breathing and everything in between is painful.

I haven't written much about yoga here yet but be sure it is a big part of my life. I try to do it three to five times a week, and on the days I get to go I just can't wait to get there. This morning I realized that my experience of it has changed recently. Up to now the experience has been physical, and often (in the last three years) emotional. These are my natural first reactions to anything, I think, physical and emotional--that's what you get from 5 water signs and a moon in cancer, apparently. I'm attached to how my body feels while I practice, if I can get to a place of mastery of any part of it, and how I feel after I am done. If emotions came, grief or bewilderment, contentment or joy would sweep through me without leaving a clue as to why. I could sense no end, or even release in these emotions, but at lease the yoga mat was a contained, safe place in which to have them. If I didn't have to pack up at the end of class and be back in the day's routine who knows what would happen.

The yoga teacher I found two years ago is gifted in her ability to bring your mind into the practice. Last summer she finished up a day long yoga retreat with a sitting meditation on the Open Sky of Mind from Jack Kornfield, and it was the first time I glimpsed with all my senses that a world in which I belonged was inside and outside of me (Thank you, thank you, and thank you Jen.) I'm sure I will be talking about her and what I'm learning from her more in this space.

With starting a meditation practice in addition to a mental aspect to the yoga it is like phosphorescence on top of moonlight--slowly I've begun to feel my mind expanding to hold my whole self and the darkness and the aloneness. It's not perfect all the time, certainly. But it means my days are more full of those moments when I see that in a given situation there is a way to become all outcomes, to move within it to a positive choice. So different from feeling pushed, driven, corralled into acting or reacting in defense.

It means turning towards things that I would have dreaded: the darkness. It means welcoming things I would have avoided: responsibility. It means loving things I would have felt alienated from: singing or dancing or communicating with others. So many levels are affected by these changes!

As if I needed another example, my daughter gave me another reason why she is easy to love. She naturally, effortlessly moves through her days setting herself up for positive outcomes. She lost a tooth yesterday at school. This morning she came downstairs smiling and she said "mommy, do you want to come and watch me look under my pillow?" The answer, of course, is yes, complicated by the fact that I forgot to be the fairy last night and I am pretty near 99% certain Steve did too. So I say: "Yes! Go ask pop if he wants to come too." Exit Dora. Run upstairs with two quarters, grope under pillow, where is that tooth ag! she's got three pillows and a pile of covers . . . ah, get tooth, leave money, come downstairs . . . Dora coming out of back room saying Pop's not quite ready because he's shaving, "Theo's not awake yet," I say as a reason for having been upstairs. The three of us go up, and . . . smiling gap toothed sweet girl has two new quarters for her flower bank.

That whole experience is literally money in the flower bank of life. Same thing that Jill Taylor is doing with her fascination and openness to the experience of recovering from her stroke. Same thing Edward Abbey is describing when he writes about meeting a mountain lion, standing still and staring at him, on an Arizona wilderness trail, and realizes even if the mountain lion is ready to meet him, he is not yet ready to meet the lion. Same thing everywhere you look. You can fear or you can love. Incredibly complicated, and incredibly simple.

Yesterday in yoga my teacher said "every exhalation is an opportunity to let something go." With three deep breaths at the end of yoga practice I lift my arms and lower them, and a beautiful, blue bowl opens above my head, without moving I am floating in the center of light without an ominous vibration in sight. Here the emotion is connected to an identifiable center, now I cry and know why.

What if I were a deck of cards?

Yesterday I took part in a SoulCollage workshop. The term "SoulCollage" is trademarked and there is a whole book about it and the skeptic in me feels a bit, um, skeptical. It's all a bit woo-woo, referenced to the tradition of tarot and its unnameable, intangible life energies and spiritual mythologies. However. I had complete beginner's mind, as I do anytime I'm starting something new, and enjoyed the process of sorting through images, cutting, and gluing to make a collage mounted to matt board, in a short amount of time, that feels very solid and finished. I felt a lot of freedom in being asked simply to choose from a big messy pile of cut and ripped out magazine pages. So much easier than creating my own images on a blank surface. It's not a work of art! Nothing to lose! It's just a collage. Much easier to pick up momentum and get into the zone, and hard to stop!

Meditation on the finished cards was the extra component that I found unexpectedly interesting. Holding and looking at a finished card we imagined it being the size of a doorway. Step in and engage all our senses. What is it like there? Know we can return any time. Ask for a message or a gift. Say thank you. Come back through. Then write.

Here's what I wrote about this card:

I feel sleepy but there is a lot of movement. The spiral is changing shape and color above me. It is my life, myself within life, and I'll never be able to predict or contain it. I'll see if I can make a comfortable place for myself, and there will be places I'm not comfortable, but all around me are the textures and the food of life. The chair, an anchor, a haven, a place that's clean and well-lit-- is big enough for others to join me. An egg, the beginnings of pattern or design printed on nubby linen and sketched on old stone . . . grain? flower? insect? prehistoric elements of life that I can watch and that even cast light and perspective on my own small corner of life. I didn't get a gift or message but realize afterward that I couldn't tell the passage of time. I was a bit cold.

Hmmm. Kinda interesting considering I pretty carelessly selected a bunch of magazine images and slapped them down together with glue. Considering I have spent much of the past three years feeling stuck (as an artist, wondering if I am indeed even an artist). Feeling like I am trapped in my role of safe haven and food provider for my family, feeling called by but far away from hints of big ideas about pattern and design. Considering I have felt the drag of days, passing so excruciatingly slowly, filled with menial chores while others pursue lives of meaning and creativity.

Well. Maybe it's all so obvious. But when I looked at what I had made, and what I had written, both without much forethought or planning, it looked so much more like a life over which I have some control. About which I may decide to change some things. Through which I may allow myself to find the connection and meaning I feel I've been missing.

When I meditated this morning I used a new cd track that asked me to imagine my mind reaching in succession to the limits of the room, beyond the room, to the clouds, to the sun, and finally to the stars. I tried this, mmm, perhaps with a bit of feeling like I was in a movie instead of really imagining the molecules of my body connected somehow to the molecules of the stars. When I was done I felt expanded, though, which was cool. Even better was the moment when the cd player changed over to the next cd and what came on was . . . Star Wars. No kidding.