The Sneaky Guise of Selflessness: Part 2

At the risk of beating this particular tired, nearly worn-out horse past the point of usefulness, I have a couple more thoughts to add. One was a moment of self-understanding (that may border on self-justification) about my desire to blog what I feel like blogging without having to worry much about whether I'm being helpful to others.

"Ahhh, yes," I thought in a flash of recollection. "Writing sermons all those years (22, to be more precise), I was altogether focused on what would be helpful, elucidating, enlightening, encouraging, or challenging in a positive way. No wonder I not only find it hard to allow myself to do otherwise but also have a burning desire to follow a different (i.e., self-determined) path of inspiration!"

I suppose this bit of awareness should have been obvious to me--I'm sure it has been clear at various times. It's just one of those slippery fish that easily wriggles free of my grasp. I have put in my dues in an other-focused profession. Even if the stuff I wrote was drawn from within myself and the quirkiness of my own creative process, the writing and speaking of all those sermons took place within externally determined boundaries and a fairly set liturgical framework, for a clear purpose that had little to do with free personal expression.

Preaching is an an art form, for sure, but one in which the goal of the particular religious inclination can clash mightily with the hungers and longings of an individual creative person. My soul has borne the brunt of that clashing of agendas, goals, longings.

"But you can exercise your creativity in your sermons," people used to say.

"Yes, but..." I used to try to respond. Often as not, I would give up trying to articulate the struggle, the intensely felt clash of forces, because no matter how I tried to frame it, my desires for true creative freedom to express myself however I chose (meaning, in whatever medium or language I chose and on whatever topic I felt moved to speak) always sounded just...so...damn...selfish.

How can the fires of individual self-expression ever come off sounding as morally or religiously legitimate as the ideals of serving others? Especially from within an institution whose stated goals and norms are the service of others in the name of and in the spirit of Jesus?

I remember a poet leading a poetry workshop I attended while still in seminary, who took a rare (among the rather bohemian poetry world of that workshop) positive view of my religious affiliation. He suggested I read one or two poets who wrote what he thought of as "religious poetry," even if not overtly religious poetry.

I'm not sure I could have said so very clearly at the time, but I think I knew even then that I didn't want to write "religious poetry!" Over the years my poems, when I wrote them at all, were a means (or at least kept alive a hope for such a means) of keeping alive some other voice within me, a wilder, truer, sometimes even a deliberately irreverent or skeptical voice, a voice outside the boundaries of the church.

And my pursuit of other art forms over the years sprang from a similar motivation. My forays into drawing, painting, knitting, dyeing yarns, weaving...

"Oh, wonderful!" at least one parishioner said after I had learned weaving during one of our sabbatical breaks, "you can weave new altar hangings for the altar!"

I remember how suddenly and totally my heart sank when I heard those words (and the moment was at least seven years ago). And I remember how a fiery, feisty energy had risen up almost as suddenly, ready to defend my creative pursuits as my own, to mark off a place where my own quirky, peculiar, authentic to myself as possible self-expression would be guarded from that seemingly insatiable hunger of the church to own it all, to own all of me, and for parishioners to want to claim my creativity for themselves.

As you can imagine, there's still more to tell of this story. But right now I'm off to deliver some paintings to the church where that very same exchange happened seven years ago. For the second year in a row, I will step into that building (that I still love very much), not as a priest but as a painter. Somehow I think I would do well to repeat that last sentence to myself many times over, and to savor it.

And then to keep telling about the "sneaky guise of selflessness", and especially about the time when I finally saw it for what it was and dared to choose a different path.

The Sneaky Guise of Selflessness: Part 1

This post is really a sequel to yesterday's about "Waiting for Permission". It's where the permission issue hooks up with the selfish vs. selfless (or at least altruistic) issue. What do I mean by the selfish vs. selfless/altruistic issue? You know the one, I'm sure.

Usually the things we wait for permission to do are viewed by some super-ego part of ourselves as "selfish," self-centered, for ourselves and our pleasure alone.

"What good can this possibly do for others?" we might ask. Artistic, creative, and self-expressive endeavors seem particularly vulnerable to such accusations.

Of course there are numerous leaps of false assumptions and false thinking that take place in our minds along this path, and sadly, our particular culture's bias toward the pragmatic and away from the aesthetic and creative is of no help at all.

And since most of us, and especially most of us who are women and girls, are encoded--perhaps hormonally, and certainly culturally--toward serving others, being praised and feeling rewarded for doing for others rather than for ourselves, to choose to do something that appears to be primarily for one's own pleasure or simply because it's who you are is difficult. More than difficult. Terrifying even. I have been stopped in my tracks more times than I care to count.

Enter then what I call "the sneaky guise of selflessness." Under the cover of darkness (in this case, the darkness of your own lack of self-awareness, your disconnection from your self) your own personal dream or desire finds a guise of selflessness. You find a way, in other words, to offer up your personal "calling" toward particular creative endeavor as something for a whole bunch of people! You get to do it because you find a way to do it for others; thus, it's no longer selfish of you!

And believe me, life hands you countless opportunities for doing so. (Being in a helping profession ensures that you will have an endless supply of opportunities to bite the bait. My years as an Episcopal priest in parish ministry are riddled with examples. I could get very specific about some of them, and how I came to recognize what I was doing--another day, another post.)

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that there's something dishonest or distorted about all altruistic activities, nor about all creative endeavors offered to others. Not all of them are really your own private yearnings in distorted disguise. Sometimes you really do want to teach others how to paint or draw or write or sing. Sometimes it really is a part of your calling to lead groups or to share your own knowledge and love of a particular field or craft with other people. And thankfully some people really are called to the visibly altruistic professions--to be healers, nurses, doctors, teachers, librarians, you-name-its! It's what makes their hearts sing (at least some of the time). Thank God!

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something much more insidious, precisely because it happens beneath your own radar. And after it happens enough, it becomes a rock solid habit that is both hard to notice and hard to break.

It has even been a part of my struggle around blogging! Is it really and truly OK for me to blog what I feel like blogging, to spend a little time at the keyboard putting my thoughts out there for others to read, simply because I enjoy the process of doing so? To choose whatever topic seems to want to be written on a given day, or whatever words or ideas I seem to want to play around with, without regard for whether it might do anyone out there in cyberspace any good at all? (Ah, there's the rub!)

Could it be enough simply to tell a story because it's a story that I feel called to tell, driven at times to tell, partly because when I scratch deep enough down I discover that part of who I am, part of my DNA, is a writer and teller of stories?

More times than I wish to relate or you probably wish to read, I've steered away from an expression of simple joy or a quirky observation in my blog in favor of something that might actually, if I'm lucky and say it honestly and well, help someone else. Who's to say that the expression of simple joy or the quirky observation wouldn't have been just as "helpful" as my attempt at wisdom?

I even had a small tussle with a reader of one of my blogs early on (one since abandoned), a reader who really didn't like even the slightest hint that I was going to write what I felt like writing and wasn't all that concerned about what she and other readers might want me to write about. I held my ground, but it really got under my skin. I fretted and worried for days that I was a hopelessly self-centered and self-serving blogger. (Maybe I am! And if so, well, so be it. Might as well stop pretending.)

Suddenly I'm aware of what a huge topic this is. And how much I could say about it, how many stories I could tell. Let's just say, there's more to come, and call it a day.

Waiting for Permission

Remember how in grade school (maybe even in high school?) if you needed to go to the bathroom you had to raise your hand and ask permission from the teacher? And of course you had to ask your parents for permission to do things you wanted to do if they required money or a ride or you just plain knew they were a little too big to do without asking.

Such as when I took a semester off from college after the fall of my sophomore year (that was the first really big permission thing--I remember what my dad said: that if I was as unhappy in school as I said I was, then perhaps I'd be wasting my time and his money to stay, so his answer was "yes").

And then I tried to find a job somewhere away from home for that semester, and I was interested either in doing some kind of service-oriented work (like a short-term Peace Corps kind of thing) or working on a boat in the Virgin Islands (like a short-term totally NOT Peace Corps kind of thing).

And when I received by mail--it was all done by mail in those days! How slow!--a rather vague job offer from the male captain/owner of a yacht who took paying passengers for week-long vacations, my dad said, "No way are you going to the docks on St. Thomas to meet some strange man who may or may not actually offer you an honorable job." I think I was secretly relieved to have that permission denied.

In any case, I've been aware these days of how often I still act as if I am waiting for someone other than me to give me permission--to try out an idea, to paint a certain way, to spend a whole day painting rather than doing something else, or to ignore all the rules and suggestions for successful blogging and just blog what I feel like blogging.

And do you know what happens when I wait for someone else, some mysteriously unidentified other, or else some poor innocent who happens to cross my path, to give me permission? (And not only do I wait but I don't even ask, because of course to ask for permission for such things at age 56 is nigh to ridiculous!)

What happens is that I notice other people who appear to have their acts together enough simply to do what they want or think best without waiting for permission from someone else, probably because they give themselves permission without even having to think about it!

And when one of those self-permitted people happens to do something I'm still waiting for the aforementioned vague permission to do, boy, does that trigger me! I might feel betrayed (how could you steal my idea?), or like a victim (you didn't tell me you were going to do that!). And on an even deeper level there's a part of me screaming, "NO! Wait! That's what I want to do!"

I get to see things more clearly--about myself and how I operate; and even more important, about what there really is within me that wants to be expressed, created, honored and acted. And of course to be given my fully self-authorized permission to do just that.

P.S. Thanks, Beth, for nudging me yesterday by saying you'd noticed I hadn't been blogging much of late.

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