“Use a good pattern to cut on the lines. Otherwise your man will be all screw-jiggy. Pre-shrink the fabric, or your man will turn out to be smaller than you’d hoped. Sew the darts first, and remember to give that tummy a good tuck, or you’ll be sorry later! Watch those zippers. A badly placed zipper can cause serious functional problems. It’s fun to be different, but not too different!”
from “Making a Man” in Good Bones by Margaret Atwood
I noticed plants from a young age, and early on I realized there was more of a story than just decorative growing, leafing things. My Camano Island grandfather had a garden that he put my sister and me to work in when we visited, harvesting and shelling peas, thinning carrots, making cuttings to propagate geraniums or roses. My dad's dad showed me where the thimbleberries grew in the woods behind the cabin in Montana, their soft tart bodies and impossible seediness smearing on my fingers. We two sisters were eager co-conspirators on any huckleberry hunting trip with our grandma, affectionately known as the Huckleberry Queen. Knowledge on a cellular level of where to find optimal spots for picking grew as we did. I am anchored and buoyed by idea that if we just know where to look in the things that grow around us, we can find food.
It's the end of the growing season here, but there's still so much to glean. I'm finding some hope in kale starts, straggling mint, and the near-raisins drying along the parking lot at the grocery store.
Raisins, Town & Country parking lot, Bainbridge Island, 2017
In a passing conversation with friends today, the topic of writing for oneself in public came up. One point that was made was in regard to the importance of sharing your unique voice: that it is enough to speak, that there is art in this act alone.
I've mused plenty in previous writing and in conversation about the struggle this effort embodies for me, and yet I always leave wondering how others navigate. The pull to create is unconditional for me, it is a known and a necessary. But life intercedes, and as a mom with a full time job outside of my artwork, it can wash over days without much left for making. Add to that a big need for my days to carry the weight of social agenda, of doing good beyond my navel. I'm fortunate to be engaged with work that weaves this together in strong ways, and I'm still seeking ways in which I can cultivate an artistic practice that restores and nurtures in equal proportion.
Pussy Riot Protest, Vigelandsparken, Oslo, Norway, 2013
I've been advocating for getting curious.
Right now, there is almost nothing more elusive and simultaneously more appealing than this: slowing down, observing, breathing and considering deeply. Some of the times I have reached this kind of equilibrium have been on beach walks, many of which yielded a stone in my pocket, often with stripe around it. I've always believed that ring rocks were powerful magic, and that standing on a beach with your back to the water, tossing the rock over your left shoulder, you'd be able to catalyze that energy in to a wish.
I've been leaning heavily on others' words lately, and quieter than I would like to feel, especially while engaged with a blog. This is not really a typical nor a comfortable place for me. All the same, I'm attempting to understand what's at work.
Where is the line between making oneself heard and listening?
Fog outside Ellensburg, 2017
Today marks the halfway point of my intention for posting 100 days, fifty posts in on the path toward my 50. It's significant and arbitrary, and I'm drawn to post an indicator of another half-life, 25 years ago.
"Memory, history, and relics offer routes to the past best traversed in combination. Each route requires the others for the journey to be significant and credible. Relics trigger recollection, which history affirms and extends backward in time. History in isolation is barren and lifeless; relics mean only what history and memory convey... Which route we follow at any given moment is not always clear," writes David Lowenthal in The Past is a Foreign Country.
This relic shows me happy with people who are engaging thoughtfully with art and each other. That's enough for right now.
“Both wisdom and knowledge are based on experience, but wisdom more so than knowledge, which frequently retains experience only through the filter of conceptual thought, at times discarding the seeds of life. In contrast, wisdom often stammers, or speaks in images, symbols, paradoxes, or even riddles.”
Gyorgi Doczi, The Power of Limits
stars in my coffee
Today again reminded that just because you’ve got the right words doesn’t mean you’ve mastered the actions to support them.
And in the end, finding the joy is really what a day needs to be about.
Getting it done, 2017
dark blue eye on the moon
