A Different View

I've had some paintings hanging at a local Starbucks (on the corner of Exchange and Middle Streets in Portland--Maine, that is) for most of May, and I've been working on more to put there in June. The guest artwork hangs on a wall that's just beyond the counter where special coffees and hot chocolates get picked up, and also where one turns to get to the restrooms, so although they are a long way from the entrance to the shop, they do get seen.

A couple of weeks ago while driving by, Anna and I noticed that, due to the layout of the shop and the placement of windows relative to the street, you can actually see two of my paintings when you are stopped at the stop sign on Middle Street at Exchange if you're headed toward the East End. It was quite fun to look in and see my favorite painting from our car!

Even better, David told me that on his way by one day last week, not only did he look over and see my art, but he also noticed a man standing squarely in front of my favorite, the largest one there and the image included in this blog, gazing intently at it. (Unless of course he was standing facing the wall with his eyes closed.)

Image: "Lilies and Books", c. 2010, Sukie Curtis, 24x24", oil on canvas

That made my day. And there have been odd moments on other days when I've remembered the unidentified gazer. I will probably never know who he was or what he was thinking, but I'm glad that someone felt drawn to stand and gaze.

Road Ahead

Last year about this time I took a solo road trip to Washington, DC to pick up Bekah from her first year at George Washington University (its official name is "The George Washington University," but I steadfastly refuse). At least it was a solo trip down, by way of the Brandywine Museum, and a duet trip back with Bekah and all her stuff.

Even during the solo part of the trip I was supported and assisted by "GPS Lady" borrowed from a friend of ours. She told me how far to go and when to turn. I talked back, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes disagreeing with her and going my own way, sometimes getting lost and begging her for mercy and forgiveness.

"Recalculating," was her usual reply. I suppose I only inferred exasperation in her "voice" when she was recalculating for the twenty-fifth time.

This year David and I made the trip together, bookending two days in DC with a day driving down and another driving back, with Bekah and all her stuff. We took our larger car in order to accommodate three people rather than two, and even still we needed my brother Jon's highly honed packing skills (he is an engineer, after all, and the father of a college graduate whose stuff he has packed and moved many times) in order to fit it all in and still have any rear view.

On Sunday, which was Mother's Day, David, Bekah, and I went to church at the Washington National Cathedral, where James Forbes happened to be the guest preacher, then to brunch in Georgetown, then on to the National Gallery for a lovely, even if slightly hurried amble through the Chester Dale Collection of 19th and 20th century art, ending up in the tower of the East Wing with several black or nearly black paintings by Mark Rothko, accompanied by a recording of music composed for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. It was another world.

At one point as we walked across the Mall, we passed a man carrying a sign and pamphlets asserting the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world on July 21, 2011 (or something like that--it was a specific day in July next year). I said "No thanks" when he offered me a pamphlet.

Bekah said, "I wonder what he'll do next year when that day rolls around and nothing happens."

"He'll do what GPS Lady does," I replied not missing a beat, mimicking her intonation: "Recalculating."

On the way home to Maine, while Bekah mostly slept, David and I discovered that it was possible to put GPS Lady on a different mode, a quieter one, more to our liking. She could be a moving map, displaying the road we were on and others in its vicinity, along with special features like rivers and bridges. In the lower right corner she showed us what compass direction we were heading, and in the other the current time. Often across the top of her small display screen would be the name or route number of the highway we were on and the identity of junctions up ahead.

At one point I looked at the top of her screen and saw simply the words: "Road Ahead." And in the image was simply a car (that would be us) on a road going straight.

And I thought, "Perfect! I like that."

Sometimes all I need to know is that there's a road ahead, and that I am on it.

On Doing Something Scary

Nell Blaine, an American painter (she lived from 1922 to 1996) once said: "I have the firm belief that the only things that are worth doing are those that are a little bit scary." (Quoted from the book by Martica Sawin which you can see by opening the link at Nell Blaine's name.)

It's a sentiment echoed by all sorts of people--like Eleanor Roosevelt ("you must do the thing you think you cannot do") and life coaches. It's part and parcel of getting out of your comfort zone, staying awake and alive, moving toward what expands you rather than what contracts you (and keeps you safe).

Although I am not a psychologist, I believe that when we are young the primary function of the ego, psychologically speaking (in other words, I'm not talking about what we mean by saying someone has a "big ego" of puffed up self-image), is to keep us "safe" according to the needs of our particular life situations--family, school, peers, etc. And by and large our egos do that very very well.

The down side of this is that in keeping us safe, the survival tactics put in place by the ego tend to bury, silence, banish to the basement, or at least put on a back burner the desires, hopes, and dreams of our deepest selves, what I think of as our souls. And I hope it's clear that by "soul" I don't mean some wafty, ethereal thing that "goes to heaven" when we die. To be honest, I don't know a thing about the after-death part. I'm talking about life here and now. And our souls are intrinsically part of our bodies; they live and work together.

Maybe the braver individuals among us figure out how to honor their souls earlier on in life--maybe someone like Nell Blaine, for instance, who against her mother's fierce wishes left her Virginia home at the age of nineteen and moved to New York City to pursue her dream of being a painter.

Some of us, and I would number myself among these, have a harder time in adolescence and early adulthood learning to hear and honor our souls. Maybe we hear in part and do our best to follow our souls, but with a fair amount of playing it safe holding us back, until something wakes us up (especially at mid-life) to realize there's still a huge chunk of us wanting to expand, develop, see the light of day, express itself.

"How is it that you never went to art school when you were younger?" David asked me about a year ago, when I was in the thick of a painting streak and people were expressing interest in purchasing my paintings.

"I was too scared to make mistakes," I said rather quickly. "In order to make art, you have to be willing to take risks, make mistakes, make messes, look bad, etc. And I really didn't like doing that." I might add that I also barely knew that I wanted to make art.

I believe I had a very deep down yearning to make art, and I did "try" from time to time, especially when my artist aunt would give my sister and me exciting new art supplies for Christmas. But "trying to make art" usually meant trying to paint like a famous painter--Andrew Wyeth, for instance, or Monet.

Talk about setting myself up for frustration and failure! I can remember setting up paints and paper and actually thinking I could, in an hour or two, as a complete novice, paint the curtains blowing in from my window the way Andrew Wyeth did! I'm sure you can guess the results. Let's say these attempts at art didn't exactly embolden me to push myself further. I wasn't a bad art student in high school, but I wasn't exactly a bold one either. I played it very safe.

Still, there was enough of an interest in me to take a Design 101 (I don't exactly remember the name--Design I, perhaps) during my first year of college. I think I was more interested in drawing than in "design," and I still remember a drawing I did as part of our first assignment. It was a pretty accurate, detailed drawing of a dried up stalk of tall grass.

I don't think I had a clue what "design" meant, , and I didn't know what to do with my drawing (other than admire it!), and I ended up getting a C in the class. Which, despite my saying aloud that this just proved that grades don't really matter, was really not acceptable to me. So I never took another studio art class in college. I took art history classes instead, in which I did very well--my excellent memory and my great enjoyment of looking at art and seeing the component pieces of composition worked well there. And it wasn't very risky. At least I wasn't risking much self-exposure.

I think it's really sad that I let that C (and my protective ego and my need to be following rules and doing things "right") turn me away from other studio art classes until I was well into my forties, about twenty-five years later. It never occurred to me, until I took another college Design class two years ago, that perhaps it wasn't "all my fault" that I got that C in college. The second time around I am happy to report I got an A (although I did get a bit perfectionist about my homework projects, I must confess).

When, toward the end of the semester, I told the teacher about my first college Design class experience, I said something like, "I just didn't have a clue what I was supposed to be doing." And she said, "Maybe that wasn't your fault. Maybe you didn't have a very effective teacher." Which of course had never occurred to me.

Anyway, I set out to blog about doing something scary. And this was not the direction I intended to write! But I'm going to stop here and trust that this is what I want to say today, and make this a series (of at least two posts) on doing something scary.

Which means, there's more to come.

Let me simply end by saying that for Nell Blaine, facing an empty canvas and starting a new painting (she tended to work from beginning to end all in one session, with only minor tweaking later), was doing something scary. There were no guarantees of a "successful" outcome, always the possibility of making a mess, or a fool of oneself, etc.

And the same is true of a blog post. I wouldn't call it a "big scary" but a "little scary". There are no guarantees. I could be making a fool of myself. And it's worth the risk.

Speaking of art, I haven't posted any art images here or on my website recently (I won't bother to make excuses), but if you want to see some earlier images, you can look at the gallery of my website. I am happy to say that all but three of the paintings in the gallery have been purchased, and two of the three are not even for sale!

Stop Interrupting and Let Me Speak!

"Damn it, you guys," I more or less shouted into the phone at my three siblings during a recent conference call. "Stop interrupting me, and let me speak!"

Dead silence followed. For a long time. At least a good, solid ten seconds passed before I recovered enough from the force of my own small explosion even to think about speaking again.

The four of us were in the midst of one of our semi-regular conference calls as we work together on the challenging matter of how best to help our nearly ninety-one year old mother. Our calls have worked best when we have followed an agreed-upon process for speaking in turn (rounds of either oldest to youngest, or youngest to oldest). This time we were working oldest to youngest, and I was in the middle of one of my turns to speak, when not one, but two of my siblings interrupted me. (Or maybe the second one interrupted the first one, but . . . you get the picture.)

During that silence, which was actually so potent that I wondered what would happen if I let it go on and on, I felt different. A different sense of my own strength and power and authority, at least in the few seconds before traces of embarrassment and thoughts that I needed to apologize began to arise.

As the youngest in my family, I'm not sure I've ever commanded the attention of all three of my siblings at the same time in quite that way! I'm sure I told them to "Shut up!" or "Leave me alone" or "Stop tickling me or I'll bite you!" (actually, I believe I shrieked the "stop tickling me" part and acted out the "I'll bite you" part without verbal warning. Hey, what else could I do? I was the littlest! I was outnumbered!

But as an adult among adults? No, I don't believe I've ever hushed them up before. At least not so overtly.

Like many families--is it New England families? New England WASP families? New England WASP families of the 50s and 60s? or most human families on the face of the planet?--ours was not exactly a school for learning direct communication. We are all still learning, or at least I hope I am.

David has sometimes observed that at gatherings of my family, we tend to interrupt each other a lot, so he wonders aloud if that's how it always, or usually, was with us growing up. I certainly don't easily recall times growing up when we were together as a family when we actually listened carefully to each other. I remember some playful banter, and verbal free-for-alls.  And the end result of more interrupting than listening? A sense that what you have to say isn't really all that important, or at least not as important as the person who has just interrupted. Perhaps even a lingering doubt that what you want to say, if you can even put it into words, is worthy of being listened to.

I remember as a child or adolescent wanting to say things that were on my mind and heart, and mostly I remember not daring to. I remember hanging around near my mother, wishing with all my heart that she (usually--oh, what expectations we lay on our mothers!) would read my mind and ask me if I wanted to say something. Wishing yet also perhaps fearing that she'd ask me, because then I would have to take the risk of speaking, of believing that what I had to say was important enough.

And when she didn't read my mind (perhaps she, too, was wishing for someone to read hers! or for a chance to speak her heart to a listening friend), I would leave again, choosing to stay silent instead of risking trying to say what I needed to say. And I went back to my room feeling all the more lonely, isolated, or sad (and maybe way, way down in there, the banished black sheep of all possible feelings, angry?).  Over time, each time I did this, performed my part in this odd, repeated dance, I'm sure on some level I became all the more convinced that speaking up would never be the right thing to do.

Maybe we are all a little afraid to speak, and a little afraid to listen, too. Let me practice being an adult here and rephrase that! Maybe I am a little (and sometimes a lot) afraid to speak, and maybe I am also a little afraid to listen, to allow myself to be stretched by being fully present to someone else's reality, feelings, and opinions that might not feel comfortable or match my own opinions or my own sense of what I need for myself and my well-being.

Listening is hard work, that much I know. When my siblings and I practice it in our phone calls, not only is it perhaps "against the grain our training" but it is also a powerful new way of being with each other as adults, a gift each of us can offer not only to the others but also to ourselves. To stake our behavior on the belief, or let our behavior form the belief, that each of us deserves to be honored and listened to, and each is able to give respect and honor by listening to one another.

But what struck me after we had hung up (and we did go on to talk for twenty minutes or more after that silence) was that it would be too easy to let this be only about my family and let it go at that. There was something about that phrase I had used, "and let me speak", that rang some bells in me. I've used that phrase or something quite similar when I've spoken to people about my writing, about telling the stories of my journey. More than once I have said, "It is time for me to speak."

So I've thought more about the whole of what I said to my siblings--"Damn it, you guys! Stop interrupting me and let me speak!"--and I have let myself wonder how these words might relate to my inner reality. Might they be a clue to the fact that I interrupt myself a lot? Interrupt the flow of my creative thoughts and ideas as they get flowing? Interrupt and talk over myself when I start writing and feel excited about expressing myself and what's dearest to me?

When I sit down to write or stand up with a paintbrush in my hand, a whole host of editors, censors, the religious orthodoxy police, and others start interrupting. If I'm not careful (and aware and brave and quick to act), they will inhibit me, raise doubts about the value of what I have to say. They aren't my siblings; they are in me.

And maybe sometimes I just have to put them in their places and hush them up by saying, "Damn it, you guys! Stop interrupting me and let me speak!"

I have to say I'm actually grateful that I got interrupted by my siblings in that phone call. Look at all that I might have missed if they hadn't done that, and I hadn't popped my cork!

They just better not do it again; the next time I might have to bite someone.

One of those Dreams, addendum

I ended the post before this rather quickly, as I was going to be late for my yoga class. I felt somehow that the "drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling" connected to the dream, without knowing quite how (and not worrying about it much).

I am still adjusting to having yoga in my schedule. I find myself resisting it a little when Monday morning rolls around, thinking, "I can't possibly spend that kind of time in a yoga class when a new week is getting going and I should be doing . . . (something or other). "

But I have a feeling that yoga on Mondays is a very good thing. Starts the week off differently, more slowly and more connected to my body-and-soul via those postures, breathing, listening, etc.

This week Rebecca asked us to consider truthfulness (satya, in Sanskrit) or truth-telling as a pillar of our yoga practice/life, both telling the truth about ourselves and what we are feeling on the mat and telling our own truths in the rest of our lives. She suggested that when we have been out of touch with the truth of ourselves, the first step toward the practice of satya might be silence, by which one listens to what's really going on.

I sensed an intuitive essential connection with my lived experience, having to refrain from speaking (at least from preaching and speaking as a priest) in order to get clearer about what wanted to be spoken and expressed.

And then she read Mary Oliver's poem "The Journey"--and read it exceptionally well--and I felt as if it connected to my dream even more than Eliot's lines. David and I were given at least three copies of "The Journey" when we left our congregation four years ago, heading out into an unknown landscape with the barest hint of a path (or two paths) to get us started. It is a poem I take out and read often.

As Rebecca read it, and I could anticipate the end of the poem, I realized the illumination it was offering to me and to the dream, given the role in it of voices, both those "shouting bad advice" and making claims on the speaker, and the other voice that emerges at the end of the poem.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

One of those Dreams

About ten days ago I had one of those dreams that feels like a landmark, a significant gift from my psyche and the great beyond/within. It hasn't magically protected me from bouts of self-doubt, waning confidence, and getting stuck in my head, nor from having to wrestle with "America's most convenient bank" and more or less conceding defeat.

But perhaps it has helped. At least when I have remembered it, called on it, allowed myself to dwell in it as if it were an actual dwelling place or a way of being here. More than anything, I trust it has already offered me encouragement and will do so again and again if I let it.

It was really a two-part dream. I don't remember how the two parts were connected--you know how dreams are!--whether the first flowed effortlessly into the other (with your psyche saying to your rational mind, "Of course these two dreams are connected; why don't you see that?") or whether there was some sort of time gap or connective tissue that went missing when I woke up. It really doesn't matter.

I was in a school gymnasium somewhere, one with a full-sized basketball court. I was near one end of the court, and I was watching a student athlete shooting baskets from pretty far out. I'm not a big basketball expert or anything, but I know enough to know that he/she (sex unknown) was practicing three-pointers from well beyond the markings on the floor. The only odd thing about the scene was that the balls, that were scattered all over the floor, were smaller than basketballs and light in color. More like softballs. But in the dream I didn't find that strange.

I watched the athlete shooting again and again and again. Some of her shots went in; some did not. Some  rebounded in my general direction; some did not. Mostly, I noticed how many shots she was taking and how many balls were lying around--how many more shots she had already practiced.

And I felt something shift in my body, like a deadbolt sliding free, or some formerly stuck thing now freely moving, dropping into place.

"Ahhhh," I said (or thought loudly, I'm not sure which). "That's what it means to really aim for something."

Next I was in my own house, in David's and my bedroom, I believe. And the air was ringing with voices.

Not a chorus of blended voices, neither unison singing nor multi-part harmony. But several individual voices, children's voices, or women and children together, each of them calling out individually the same words: "I love you." "I love you." "I love you."

Could it have been just one clear treble voice repeating herself? Possibly, although I think that the chanted phrases overlapped a little. What I know for sure is that the air was resonant; and the sound seemed to come from all sides of me.

"I love you." "I love you." And one time, "I love you, Sukie."

Then came an audible, gentle but strong and steady wind or breath from behind me, and without hesitation I knew to lean back onto it and did lean back onto it to let it carry me. Which it began to do. Even though I was in our bedroom which doesn't have a whole lot of space in it. I leaned backwards onto the strong-gentle wind-breath and knew I was on my way.

I almost hesitate to tell this dream, because if I heard someone else tell me a dream like this, it might make me gag, or want to throttle them for being so holy, or so Miss Spirituality 2010.

But I guess I'm willing to take that risk. Because it seems to me that I'm in danger of forgetting the dream and not letting it work its work in me, and putting it out there is one way of doing my best to remember it and let it speak. And besides, maybe it has some encouragement for you in it, too.

What's interesting to me is that the day before, and for a few days before, I had been reading the last section of T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" (no, I don't make a habit of reading Eliot; I had gone looking for something half-remembered). These were the words I had been turning over and over:

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling


  We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time....

The Problem with Thinking About Things

This is hard for me to admit, being a thinker from way way back, but I really have a problem with thinking about things. The problem develops when thinking becomes an end in itself, when "I think therefore I am" becomes my personal job description, when thinking becomes a substitute for doing, for taking action of any kind.

Now that phrase "taking action" can conjure up really active kinds of action in my imagination, like, say, applying for a job, or cleaning my whole house in one afternoon, going bunjee jumping, or at least going out for a 5 mile run (even if I haven't been a runner for ten years). This only adds to the problem of thinking about things, because I now have all sorts of reasons and excuses for not taking any actions at all, because I am imagining doing things that are next to impossible to accomplish (cleaning my whole house in one afternoon, so why bother to start?) or aren't necessarily appropriate for my current circumstances or that don't fit who I am--and thus are as ludicrous to consider. As if I were to decide that this morning I will stop wearing my own clothes and instead wear David's, which are built for someone about eleven inches taller and seventy-five pounds heavier than I am, and someone without (although David might want to argue this point) noteworthy breasts.

I could go into the whole topic of perfectionism here, and the need to take imperfect actions in order to take any actions at all. But let me sum up that topic in the catchy expression that an Episcopal priest I once worked with used to say: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly."

I wasn't sure I liked or agreed with that statement when I first heard it, twenty-something years ago, which is probably a pretty good indication that I have a decent case of perfectionism in my blood. I find it a handy saying to have in my back pocket these days, to pull out when I am hemming and hawing because maybe I won't be able to do something very well. (Fear of failure might be the grand way of naming this; fear of looking stupid or fear of just plain doing a shitty job and being horribly disappointed in myself are closer to the bone.)

So, back to the problem of thinking about things. Actually, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with thinking about things, as long as you have an inner alarm that sounds when you cross from wise thinking, pragmatic thinking, or especially from creative, idea-sparking kinds of thinking into obsessive worrying, fretting, and inability to decide just-what-to-do or how-to-start kinds of thinking.

It helps to have a thinking first aid kit around to help you out--I suppose each of us has to try own and gather our own best tools and techniques and potions and ointments to have on hand. (A whole collection of sayings like "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." might be part of your first aid kit; a practice that grounds you in the present moment--noticing what's going on in your body or in the air around you--might be part of it; visualizations, yoga stretches, cold showers, hot showers, flowers, chocolate. You get the idea. Somewhere in your first aid/tool kit you might want to put a note reminding you that seeking a lobotomy is not on your list. In fact, thinking about getting a lobotomy is one of my warning signs.)

Sometimes I just make myself drink a glass of water and go outdoors and walk around a little. Anything to change what's going on in my head!

The kind of problematic thinking about things that I had in mind when I started this post is the thinking  about doing things you want to do (like, for me, writing or painting or taking a walk) and letting the thinking about doing them be a substitute for the doing of them.

Considering options ad nauseam. Which do I want to do first? And how do I want to do it? Which direction do I want to walk and for how long? Do I want to write with pen on paper or with keyboard on computer or directly into my blog? Do I want to draw with pen, pencil, charcoal, watercolor crayon or . . .  or paint instead of draw? and indoors or out, from memory or direct observation? Too many options!

Such a beautiful, active mind resides in my head! And, wow--such a messed up, convoluted, stuck in familiar ruts of thinking sort of mind resides in there, too!

At times like this, there's just no substitute for doing something. Like just plain sitting down and writing this post. And now I think I'll go paint for a while. Indoors. Because it's too cold outside. Thank God that decision was made simpler.