Writing but not Blogging

My, how time passes. It's been nearly two weeks since I last blogged.

Something about that last sentence sounds like confession. Even though I didn't grow up Roman Catholic, there are enough confession scenes in popular culture for me to know the formula: "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been (fill in the blank) weeks since my last confession."

I know what they say about the best ways to blog--being regular, letting your readers know they can really count on you, and all that. And still, sometimes it just doesn't happen. Seems as though I am still working out something about the relationship of blogging to the rest of my writing, or maybe it's to the rest of my life.

I have been writing over these days when I've not been blogging. I've been writing but not blogging. Among other things I've been reacquainting myself with the practice of Proprioceptive Writing, which I first encountered (and practiced for several months) about thirteen years ago. And as with other practices I've been returning to, such as yoga, I find I am coming at this writing practice quite differently. More holistically. With (somewhat) less of an agenda.

I see a parallel between the two "returns"--the one to yoga and the one to proprioceptive writing (or PW for short). When I tried yoga years and years ago, I thought of it rather narrowly as primarily a form of physical exercise for flexibility and I don't know what else. Now I am embracing it in a spirit closer to its heart (and to my heart, too, I suppose), that is, as a means toward greater wholeness and a fuller, healthier interrelationship between my body and my mind and spirit. I like very much that yoga practice often seems to operate on many levels at once--thoroughly grounded and attentive to my body, and yet also with powerful metaphorical force.

Nearly every time I'm at my yoga class I can imagine two or three or sometimes a dozen connections that are worthy of writing about. I am grateful that so often it seems to be exactly where I need (or want?) to be, hearing exactly what I need (or want?) to hear.

With proprioceptive writing, I came to it those thirteen years ago primarily because I thought it would help me to write better--perhaps both because it would provide me with a weekly group to be part of and because it is designed to help you drop down underneath your surface thoughts to stories and memories held perhaps in hiding, held also of course in the very cells of your body.

Now I am discovering its gifts of connecting me more clearly to myself through writing, but not necessarily with an aim toward an end, like writing a book, or writing a better blog post. This time, too, I've read the definitive book on the practice--Writing the Mind Alive--which suggests that the practice is at once an aid to stronger writing as well as to the healing that comes with slowing down and listening to yourself more fully. And the authors offer it also as a "modern day secular spiritual practice". Totally nonsectarian, nondenominational, and non-doctrinal, which was something I was already intuiting about it this time around.

So there's lots going on in my life right now for good, even though I haven't been blogging. I guess I'm still (and always?) negotiating my own terms with blogging--what's my primary purpose in blogging? what's my goal, my aim, my end? (Is it primarily for "business" or for pleasure? and if for business, what business--painting? writing? coaching?) And what are my own "rules" for doing it? How often? and with what range of topics?

When I put it that way, it would seem that blogging is pushing me to figure out my life! Maybe it's time.

Clearing Space: Stuffed Animals

On the large chest of drawers that's in my small study (because the chest is too big to fit through the strangely angled, narrow hallway to our bedroom) I've had two baskets of old stuffed animals that I've decided to put away. By "old" I mean nearly all of them are from my childhood and even some from my older siblings' childhoods. That means many of them have been my companions off and on or at least have been in my possession for an average of fifty years. And the animals that belonged to my brothers might be sixty to sixty-five years old.

As you can imagine some of them do not exactly look too spiffy. There's Jocko, a ten-inch chimpanzee who is now blind in both eyes (missing the glass), with only one hand and no feet intact. There's a lovely tiger, still pretty handsome to look at, who sports an Arthur and DW band aid around his broken tail (and I notice that even that repair needs repair). The "pink" bunny I loved well, now mostly without any fluff save for the secret patches of blush pink hiding in the folds of her limbs and ears where they flop forward.

Many are small Steiff animals, including three from the African plain that inspired my first, still unfulfilled, longings to go on safari--a lioness, a zebra, and my favorite, the gangly yet graceful giraffe. (I did a report on giraffes in elementary school, with photos clipped from a National Geographic. I still remember the shot of a giraffe bent low to drink water, forelegs out wide, and the caption about her resulting vulnerability.)

But of course most of the animals in the collection is are bears. There are eight very small bears--good for putting in dollhouses and houses built of blocks, sometimes even dressing the designated girl bears in skirts made of fabric cut in rounds with a bear-bellied hole in the center--and there are five larger, though still very modest bears. One was my own--she's white with blue felt eyes that still remain stuck on her face, though her pink nose and mouth are gone. One was made for me at an older age by my mother--a lovely piece of craftsmanship.

And one bear belonged to my brother Dicky, if I remember right, my brother who died before I was born. That one, perhaps as much as sixty-eight years old, has lovely velvet pads on all four paws. His glass eyes are still in place though a bit askew and dangly. The short nap of his fur is patchy and barely there, and his now silent squeaker protrudes from his belly like a very large and misplaced hernia.

Why do I have all these animals (and a few more that I haven't named, thus breaking one of my cardinal stuffed animal rules: to treat all of them the same and never, ever leave any of them out)? Somehow as the youngest in my family at some point I appointed myself the guardian and collector of the abandoned and the cast off, especially when it came to animals. When I was ten and my parents had a new wing added to our house, I moved from a smallish bedroom to my parents' former room, complete with a window seat and bay window. That window seat became the gathering place of my animal kingdom, sometimes even to the point that it was difficult to find room to sit on the window seat.

(Though sometimes on hot summer nights I  would clear off the window seat so that I could sleep on it, or attempt to, imagining that being that close to those three windows would cool me off. I remember once being awake late at night and seeing a skunk cross our lawn to or from our neighbor's garden.)

About my cardinal rule. I believe there was a part of my heart, perhaps even a large part of it, that was moved by the plight of overlooked, forgotten, abandoned, or unwanted things. (And people? Yes, later I also tended to ache for and sometimes even to advocate for the ones picked last for games at recess, or the kids who were the brunt of others' teasing, or later, the boy who was broken-hearted for having been rejected by the girl he loved.)

So in gathering up these left-behind and outgrown stuffed animals, I made a silent pledge to myself never to let any of them "feel left out" by me. It was my work, my solemn and holy responsibility, to treat each one with kindness and loving attention. Which got to be quite a job as their numbers grew. For a time this became a piece of my bedtime ritual--to say goodnight to each and every stuffed animal on my window seat, perhaps touching my hand to each head as a shorthand for saying their names aloud. When I got older or lazier, I think I nodded toward them from my bed--but still, I could not let any of them down by leaving them out.

I am sure that on some level I saw myself in those left behind and seemingly unwanted animals. I identified with them, and not wanting any of them to feel left out or unloved, I was unconsciously expressing my own deepest wish not to feel that way myself. I imagine it's not just sentimentality or nostalgia or the thought that one or two of these animals might be valued antique specimens that has caused me to keep this many stuffed animals well into my sixth decade!

But for the moment, though I do not plan to toss them or give them away (being as old and dusty as they are, I'm not sure who would want them), I am clearing space for something new. And I am trying to decide on just how to pack them up for storage in order to spare them the ravages of rodents in the attic or mildew in the basement.

And you can be sure that wherever I do put them, I will be sure to give some sort of blessing, once again making sure that none is left out or has any cause to feel unwanted, though just what stories of neglect or abandonment are locked inside their own heads is really beyond the scope of my control.

And Then There Were Clouds

Trio of Clouds, c Sukie Curtis, 2010, 5x5 each, oil on wood

What can I say but that I love clouds? Unapologetically. 

After all, I am a certified member of the Cloud Appreciation Society. And I find clouds endlessly fascinating and entertaining in their variations of form, color, density, changeability. 

Sometimes I wish I could hold them from shifting shapes quite so fast, and yet that's part of the nature of clouds to be always changing, fleeting, transitory, impermanent, ephemeral. And thus, fun to watch!

(Did you know that word "ephemeral" is built of two Greek words--the preposition epi meaning "on" or "at," and the word (h)emera meaning "day"? So ephemeral means on a day, or fleeting, etc. That was one of my brightest, most exciting "aha" discoveries taking New Testament Greek in seminary thirty (gulp!) years ago.)

A few weeks ago on a random morning, I happened to look at the sky over our neighbors' house across the street and saw some great cloud formations, and I decided to paint them as quickly as I could. Fortunately I had three small (5x5") wood panels all primed and undercoated with a rosy tone, so I brought my paint, my brushes, solvent, and the three panels out to the small stoop in front of one of our doors. Spread some newspaper on the porch beside me, just in case, donned my apron and went to work. 

Quick work. You have to work very quickly if you're trying at all to paint what's before your eyes when it comes to clouds (or nearly any other weather-related or sunlight-related phenomenon in a place like Maine). 

Of course there comes a time when you are no longer painting the cloud itself, which has morphed through several new stages in the time it has taken you to mix a color of paint. But some concoction of the actual cloud as it was, the way it remains in your memory and imagination, and the actual cloud as it is now and is fast becoming (I will resist saying--well, apparently not!--"as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be..."--what a preposterous idea of changlessness and immutability.)

But I don't set out to paint exact likenesses when I paint anyway. If I were after that, I'd take a photograph, and even with photography there's lots of choosing going on to make up a photo--a kind of editing of subject even before the photo gets taken.

As a more experienced painter once said to me, "All paintings, no matter how representational they aim to be, are abstractions." Fictions, we might say.

Especially so if the painter in question is as much interested in her/his own response to what is seen and to the amazement, delight, elation (or, legitimately, sadness, longing, poignance) stirred up in the one seeing. 

Which reminds me of something I've read attributed to Alexander Calder: "My method of working? I begin with elation." To which I say, count me in.

PS. I had intended to sell the three cloud pieces as a trio, but I have since sold one (the one on the right) to someone who admired that one. The others are still available. And I plan to do more.

The Day after: how it turned out

"East End Rocks, Shadows, Seaweed, " c Sukie Curtis, 2010, 10x10, oil on canvas

When I finally got outside that day (which is now many days ago, four whole weeks ago, July 25, to be exact), I loaded up my car and drove around a little, trying some of my former outdoor painting haunts to see how things looked--tide, sky, clouds, etc. 

I didn't want to waste a lot of time driving around (and I could see that it might help to decide where you're going to go the night before, and just deal with whatever conditions are there), so I ended up near the boat ramp at the East End of Portland, looking northeast toward Falmouth and Cumberland and the islands of Casco Bay that lie in that direction--Mackworth, with its causeway, then some smaller ones I don't know the names of, then Clapboard and Sturdivant.

It was around 8 am, if I remember right; the sun was well up in the sky, there weren't many clouds. The sky was a pale milky blue, nearly cloudless, and there was no wind to speak of. In other words, the sky and the water were . . . boring. No variations, no fun clouds to capture, no wind ripples or stretches of rough water.  I honestly didn't want to paint what was in front of me--at least not until I noticed what was really right in front of me.

The shadows among the tumble of rocks and boulders along the shore, and near the water's edge, splotches of exposed seaweed. 

Remember, this was the first time I had painted outside in over a year, so I was feeling a little bit timid. I wanted to enjoy myself, and I really didn't want to end up frustrated and disappointed with my painting experience. I didn't even get out my easel for starters, but instead found a flat expanse of rock on which to sit, with my paint box beside me on the rock, my bag of paint, brushes, and assorted equipment on the ground by my feet. I put on my well-used apron and held a prepared canvas in my lap. 

"Keep it simple," I might have coached myself. "Just start somewhere." I had a feeling that once I got started mixing colors, or something, anything, I'd be OK. I just had to get started.

It was the deep, velvety shadows in the rocks that held my attention the most, so I started mixing colors for those, not really trying to be visually accurate, but to enjoy the process and see where it would lead. The painting up above is where it led. I worked for over an hour, I think, though I really don't remember the details any more. I worked until I felt I was finished, was satisfied with what I had done, was hungry and ready to get out of the sun. 

When I got home, happy to have broken through the mixture of fear, self-doubt, and inertia that had kept me from painting outside for a year, I put my painting up on my wall to dry and rather quickly decided I'd like to paint a variation based on it, to change the composition a little bit and just play around. 

Which I did a day or two later. Which produced the following:

Rocks, Shadows, Seaweed Variation, c Sukie Curtis, 2010, 10x10, oil on canvas

The Day after Stopping by Fields to Draw, part 1

It is now a little over a week since the day I wrote "Stopping by Fields on a Sunny Morning," and I've been meaning to write what happened next. That is, what happened the next morning.

Inspired and energized by sitting in the sunny field drawing two very quick sketches (that really don't even look like much), I was determined to go out the next morning to paint. Honestly, I'd been thinking of doing this for several days if not weeks, but just hadn't really pulled myself together to do it. Partly, I am guessing and confessing, because of a subtle undertow that had kept me from painting outdoors since the fall of 2008--something that might sound silly and insignificant, except for the fact that it really did keep me (or became an excuse I used to keep me) from doing something that I had really loved doing from April to October of that year.

I am almost embarrassed to admit this--and only do so because perhaps my being honest will help someone else not to get so stuck or caught in a similar way--but I put the brakes on painting outdoors largely because I had had the brilliant idea of showing my outdoor paintings to a noted landscape painter whose work I admired, and he wasn't exactly highly complimentary. He did say some positive things about my sense of color, eventually, after having spent quite a bit of time critiquing (or was it criticizing?) my totally favorite painting, the one dearest to my heart that I dared to put out there first, and then showing me images on his laptop of famous artists' work to illustrate what he was trying to say. I really couldn't hear anything positive after the not so good stuff he had said up front.

And did I mention that I paid, and paid good money, for this privilege? Oh well. (I had recognized, and David had asked me about, the potential for investing too much authority in this guy, not trusting my own felt sense of delight and vitality and passion for painting as guide enough for my work at that time. What did I expect of myself, anyway? I had squeezed oil paint from a tube for the first time in my life only eight months before! )

Because it was November, when the weather in Maine is rather cold for painting outdoors, I probably would have taken a winter break anyway. At least that was my "cover" for the month going on two, even three months, in which I refrained not only from painting outside but even from painting at all, other than showing up for the last few sessions of a class I was taking at the time. After which I cleaned up my brushes and shut down, not with any sort of conscious decision to stop (how could I possibly have explained that?). I just stopped painting and told myself, if I told myself anything at all, that I was taking a break.

Perhaps this didn't sound so strange, especially given that there were Thanksgiving and Christmas to attend to, and one thing and another, and soon January became February. But given that the undeniable high water mark of the previous seven months had been my falling in love with oil paint and my subsequent steady yet passionate devotion to painting outdoors, simply to stop really was rather odd and highly questionable behavior. An outsider looking in might easily have smelled a rat; I was a little too close to the matter to observe or think about it with clear eyes.

All of which is to say that it was no small matter that stopping by fields on a sunny morning finally provided sufficient fuel to get me outside to paint the next morning. And in the process of getting ready to head out, I remembered just how much work it really takes to do just that: all the steps and pieces that are essential to being able to paint somewhere (paints, solvent, brushes, a surface to paint on, rags, a palette knife), plus others that might not be essential but assist greatly, like an easel, a hat, sunscreen, bug stuff, water, a snack, and a car. And then there's deciding where to go to paint and hoping that the conditions are interesting enough to get your creative juices flowing.

So before I even left the house, I was marveling that I had done this very thing so many times two summers ago (many times I simply painted what I could see in my own back yard, or in our neighborhood). And I was appreciating all the devoted outdoor ("plein air") painters I know who do this on a regular basis. It is no small commitment.

Stopping by Fields on a Sunny Morning

This morning while driving home from Freeport, after leaving Bekah for her summer job at J Crew, which was after leaving David in Pownal to embark on another trip to Labrador, I made an impulsive decision to pull over beside a meadow full of Queen Anne's lace, goldenrod, clover, and other assorted wildflowers and grasses.

For weeks I've walked by the blooms in various neighbors' gardens-- daisies and daylilies, bee balm and coneflowers, Siberian and Japanese iris (way back in June and early July!), and I've thought about coming back without the dog and equipped with pen, pencils and a sketchbook to draw.

And have I actually gone back to draw? Not once.

So today when I noticed myself yearning toward the meadow and thinking, "Hmmm, I'd love to come back here and draw--or find some other similar place near home," I caught myself. Why not just stop and draw, right now?

At least this time I was a little bit ready. I had hastily stuffed a bottle of water, a sketchbook and some water soluble colored pencils in an old backpack, just in case I decided to go somewhere to draw and doodle. So I pulled over, parked, and got out to draw.

Never mind that I hadn't thought to put in any sunscreen. Never mind that I couldn't remember where I'd left my favorite sun hat and had grabbed one of David's many hats that didn't really fit me. Never mind that the pencil I had tossed into the backpack came out with its lead broken and I had no sharpener with me.

Sitting on a log on the edge of the meadow just off the side of the road, with my paper on my lap and broken-leaded pencil in my hand, I remembered what I've always loved about drawing outside. I remembered a big part of why I had found so much delight in painting outdoors two years ago, my first summer painting with oils. (And yet I haven't actually painted outside since the fall of 2008--for reasons that both embarrass and sadden me.)

To state what may seem obvious, when drawing or painting outside, there's so much more going on than what I see with my eyes. So it's not just about "capturing what I see." There's the sun's heat on my skin, the movement of breezes on the back of my neck and the hairs on my arms and legs. There are all those little noises of insects and the chattering and callings of birds, mingled with the sighings and stirrings of leaves and branches. The shifting of light and shadow, the swaying of blossoms on their wiry stems. The whole dynamic symphony of life that's way bigger than me and yet that encompasses me and sets my heart singing, delighted to be alive, "a bride married to amazement" (Mary Oliver). So there's ecstasy, too. Every day garden variety nature-inspired ecstasy.

As I write this, I am reminded of something I copied down from an article about the Maine painter Lois Dodd: "Nature is a wonder," she said. "There is nothing more wonderful than going outside and being outside all day, and just watching stuff. It's just a good way to spend time. It's probably the way fishing is to people who go fishing. Just go out there. You are working, observing and thinking, and you feel like you haven't wasted the day because you have been in it."

An active, grateful participant.

Suze Orman and Me

OK, so I lied. But I didn't mean to. At the end of my last post I said that in my next one I would share something I wrote recently about drawing. But now there's something else I want to write about. I am sure I will get around to the drawing post some day.

Meanwhile, I never thought I would say and say truthfully what I am about to say: yesterday I actually picked up and voluntarily started to read a book by Suze Orman. I don't even like Suze Orman! Not that I know her personally, of course. But I don't like her perky blonde perfectly put-together appearance beaming successfully on TV or from the covers of books. And I suppose I don't like her sort of know-it-all ways about money, either, even if she has learned it the hard way.

I've read one or two of her articles in O magazine, and without fail I feel worse after reading her advice than I do before. (Ignorance is bliss?) Without fail, she leaves me feeling inadequate. Like a failure with money. Ashamed.

Let me correct my language here: she doesn't leave me feeling that way. I feel that way in response to reading what she has to say. Sometimes because I don't even have or don't think I have even ten spare bucks, let alone the quantities she talks about saving or investing. I feel inadequate, like a failure, ashamed when I read what she writes.

No wonder I'd rather avoid seeing her perky, blonde, perfectly put-together face and body. I suppose I could close my eyes and listen to her, but I've never even tried to listen to her. I have no idea what her voice sounds like. I'm happy with this arrangement.

But this morning I actually felt a small tingle of excitement when I picked up her book Women and Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny. A teacher of "The Basics of Starting a Business" in the Women, Work and Community program recommended the book highly, saying: "It will change your life."

So even though I don't like Suze Orman (I mean, really. Is her name pronounced like Suzie or is it Suze, to rhyme with snooze?), and even though just seeing her face on the cover gives me the creeps, I did get a copy of her book through my favorite local library at the University of Southern Maine. I felt virtuous for doing even that much--looking up and requesting the book on line, then driving to Portland a few days later to pick it up.

I think I may have opened the book slightly in the first week I had it--not a full-bodied opening, but a casual kind of lift the cover at an angle and glance at a page or two sort of thing. And then I rested on my laurels, con gratulating myself for being willing to obtain a book by Suze Orman and to hold it in my hands. And that's all I did with the book for more than a week.

So what made me decide to pick it up yesterday and start to read it?

Two words: Cash Flow.

Cash Flow? Yup. Cash Flow.

Wednesday in the Business Basics class, for the first time in my life someone actually explained to me how to create a cash flow projection and how to track actual figures in a ledger. You read that correctly.

I am fifty-six years old; I have reconciled my bank accounts for most of the years I've had them; I have stared at (and sometimes asked questions about) countless church budget reports at countless church vestry meetings, and this is the first time that anyone has ever explained to me what I was looking at and how one might arrive at such numbers. And I suppose it's only fair to add that I have never asked anyone to explain it to me, either through embarrassment at not knowing or simply from not wanting to know.

So when the teacher of the class said, "It's just like when you set up your family budget, same idea," I laughed a little to myself at the strange humor of it, which was better than simply hanging my head in shame.  "What family budget?" I might have quipped but didn't.

The teacher, full of enthusiasm for her subject, even waxed poetic! "The numbers in your cash flow record are singing the song of your business! They are telling you a story."

"How nice," I thought, "if you know the language."

Best of all, when it came time in class for us to do the numbers ourselves with the fictitious example of Sue and her Threaded Needle sewing business, Eureka! I got it! I had a chance to flex my underused math muscles and give it a whirl, and in the process I discovered two things:

First, it wasn't half as distasteful as I thought it would be.

And second, instead of feeling ashamed or like a failure, I actually felt empowered. I felt competent, or at least sniffed the potential for competence in an area I had never imagined I would. I had learned something new (often a pleasure in itself), and I had experienced the exhilaration of hope.

Hope that I might actually be able to do this, to make this happen for myself as I get clearer and clearer about what kind of business I am offering, and perhaps some day to help make this kind of empowering shift happen for other women.

I felt as if I had been to the gym (I don't often go to any gym) and had had a good workout. As if I had used muscles in a good way and had released a flood of endorphins and was now basking in the afterglow. And I was ready for more.

So with the exhilaration of hope I opened a book by Suze Orman and started to read it. I will keep you posted on how it goes.