Baker Lake trail from memory

From the use it or lose it school of life:

• To strengthen my damaged vision, I will practice seeing by making art.
• To strengthen my foggy thoughts, I will practice mindfulness.
• To strengthen my wheezy lungs, I will breathe light and life by running, hiking, kayaking, and dancing.
• To heal my sad heart, I will love and be loved.
• To heal my sick stomach, I will stop swallowing my grief and fear.
• To heal my aching shoulder, I will reach higher and hug more.

Vision

My vision is failing. Not entirely, but it isn’t perfect any more. I have glaucoma and hyperopia. I can see far better than near, and I need glasses. My eyes are too full of fluid, despite that I have cried almost every day for months now. It isn’t the same fluid. There is also lots of water in my dreams. Drowning fluid, quaking fluid, sad fluid, but that is beside the point. The focus of my vision is no longer on the right spot. It is a bit too far within me (too much introspection?), millimeters beyond the vitreous humor. My optic nerve, the connection between my vision and my perception is thinning. My retinas are cupping. It isn’t right. I ask why. Genetics, predisposition of about six different types, and something else.
My stomach hurts every day. All my life I have put my grief and my guilt and my fear into my stomach. My stomach kindly takes it in, ties itself into knots around it all, and lets me get on with what I must do. Until it can’t hold any more and it seeps out. This time I think it seeped into my eyes. There’s a logic to it, if you look at it just right. I’ve been working so hard. Harder than I’ve ever worked before. I’ve convinced myself that I must succeed in becoming a nurse or die a failure. That was stupid. It isn’t true. Any more than it was true that my mother died a failure because she finally surrendered to her own pain and grief and mistrust after decades of splinting and patching and medicating herself through what she had to do and what she had to bear. Any more than Liam died a failure because he had hardly even begun to live. Any more than Tom will die a failure because he can’t stop MS from stealing away his strength, his patience, his music, his ability to wander through the mountains on his two good legs. Life can take everything from us at any time. It isn’t a failure of will. It’s a fact. We can only succeed at being humble and powerless. We all fail in the end, or else nobody does.
Today is foggy and dark. I know I should be seeing more than I am. Having learned at last that sometimes the body bears messages for the spirit, I have asked myself for days, “What am I not seeing?” I know what I am seeing, and it is good, though it isn’t enough. I see my children, my husband, my family and friends. I see people in need. I see illness, injury, death, and so much loss. I see mountains and forests and the salty sea every chance I get. I see the work I need to do, the books I must read, the values and skills I must learn, the tests I must take and the people I must help. What I haven’t been seeing is the light at the heart of it all. I need inspiration, breath of life. There is no God for me, but there is something more to see than beauty and pain and the passage of time. How many times must I learn that I need to make art? I need it the way some people need to pray. I put one color next to another and I can suddenly see the tapestry as a whole again. It ceases to bombard me with confusing images of need and desperation, projections of my own fear, and settles into a rich and nurturing whole. I need to be who I am in the midst of it all, and who I am is an artist. Art is how I see everything, including myself. The thing I have not been seeing is my art.

Dear Friend,

I got all wigged out about my painting. I really hated seeing it in that art museum-owned gallery. It is lost on the wall amongst all those other bad works of art. It's hanging between two cheesy paintings of birches and above a ceramic plaque of a friendly bear peeping out from between two trees. It looks like an art booth at a flea market. All the glow and color play is lost. It is amazing how deeply off balance I can still get about art. I'm pulling myself back together though. I'm also thanking the stars that I didn't get into grad school for art all those years ago. I'd be a complete nut by now if I were trying to make a living in the art world.

T was no help. He tried, but he didn't know how to reassure me that it is worthwhile to make art, even when it fails to come across in a show. A friend helped, saying things you would have said about how my secret magical side comes out in my paintings. I know that it is not coming across full strength in my art yet. I know that it would take years of painting steadily to get to the point where it did come across. I don't know if I will ever have the time, energy, and will to allow that growth to happen. I hope I will. I think I will have failed at life somehow if I don't. I also think I need to get stronger in order to do it. Instead I feel like I am getting weaker.

When I took Little Miss to the big theater on the college campus for her dress rehearsal yesterday I was led into a practice theater. It was a lot like the little practice theater at AC. Did you ever go in there? It was a high-ceiling room painted all in black with stage lights trained on the center of the space. D and I used to take a boom box and dance in the one at AC. When I was little I had an absolutely amazing art teacher who held classes in a space like that under the main stage at a little theater in Dallas. Suddenly walking into that kind of space yesterday awakened my creativity in a very immediate and powerful way. It was strange. I suddenly wanted to dance and draw and paint big paintings on the floor. I wish I could have a studio like that. It felt like going into my own head or heart, like an infinitely large space inside a small building, absolutely private and safe. I may have to look into renting or borrowing such a space from time to time. I don't think I can turn my bedroom studio into a space like that. With the big windows facing the bay, it is really the opposite kind of space. Sure, I could paint the walls black and hang velvet blackout curtains over the windows, but that would be all wrong.

I am looking forward to our road trip Monday. I am just taking my oil pastels, but I plan to get some good connection to nature and art in between all the driving and camp making work.

Am I insane?

Love,
R

Negativity

I entered a painting in an open hanging at my local museum. It was one of my favorite paintings I did last summer. To my eye, it was colorful, mysterious, rich, and evocative. Painting it made me feel like the power to my senses had been turned up. It felt germinal, like I could paint a hundred spin-offs from it. I didn't though. I started nursing school, and haven't picked up a brush since. Well that's not true. I tried to paint, and I did some oil pastels, but I couldn't develop any momentum working that infrequently.

In the intervening months, I thought about art, wished I could find the time to paint, and painted in my imagination. The longer I don't paint though, the more I lose my connection to my own creativity and feelings. Paint helps me be more me. When I don't paint, I lose my inner compass, and couldn't even tell you what I care about or what i don't. I start hating things like sex and food and living. In other words, I don't paint for the art. I paint to stay sane. Yes, I want to like what I paint, but I mostly don't...so that isn't why I do it.

But when I see my tiny, insignificant, pointless little waste of canvas and pigment on a museum wall surrounded by a dozen other future garage sale rejects...I really just want to burn it all. I feel terrible for burdening the world with more human crap.

At least this negative crap isn't taking up any physical space.