A mother paves her son’s path through life with remembrances.
Here he played.
Here he laughed.
Here his hair bounced in lustrous tumbles as he ran.
Here he bowed his head in secret conference.
Here he won a private victory and smiled his private smile.
Here he stumbled.
Here he fell.
Here she loves you, beautiful boy.
Here she remembers you.
Here she holds you close and never lets you go.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
Whose Design?
Well, the gravity got to be too much there for a while. I found myself circling the rim of a black hole for a bit. I suppose I’m still there. After a few days last week of feeling a brief spark of reason to believe, and responding to it with the thought, “I really want to believe,” I find myself angry again. Either there is no god, or else our omniscient creator is unworthy of love. If anything, he has earned our fearful submission, our baffled surrender to his whim, or our thanks that we have our own share of wonder and misery rather than that of those worse off than us. When events in our lives seem to point to some sort of meaning, when we start to think, “This is meant to be,” we must beware. If the fact that I recently decided to be an oncology nurse is followed by yet another dear friend being diagnosed with cancer and my father randomly sending me the collected writings of my grandfather, the leukemia research pioneer, it is not evidence that God thinks I have chosen the right path. It is evidence that cancer is all too common, that it touches my heart to the core as it did my grandfather’s, and that I have chosen to make meaning of it.
We tend to seek meaning in everything because that is how we learn. We seek out cause and effect relationships automatically, rarely challenging apparent causality. Correlation is enough to satisfy our hunger for meaning. Those who are lucky enough to believe what they are told about God think that those of us who cannot help but disbelieve are selfish and ignorant, willfully turning away from a very real, very present, absolutely perfect being. Why would anyone do that? If I could simply choose to believe that the death of a child was ordained by a perfectly loving being for some greater good that I cannot as yet fathom, why would I not choose to believe that? If I could believe that I would be reunited with all of my loved ones in an eternal realm of perfect happiness and love, how can it possibly be selfish to reject that? It isn’t intellectual arrogance either. I am telling you truthfully, if I could simply believe I would. I can’t. There is no divine beneficence. There is only the luck of the draw. A child is born, grows, learns, strives, is so very beautiful, and he dies suddenly, without any possible reason. What reason can there be? Tell me. I need to know.
What is this great presence you sense, believer? What if it is there for you, but not for me? What if when I seek it, it turns away from me like a locked door? I am no less deserving than you. I proclaimed belief in 1984. I confessed my sins, and easily accepted absolution. I read the Bible. I sought to serve from my heart and have never stopped. How is it that you see God in everything and I see the vastness of unending space-time from the tiniest subatomic particle here there and never-where to the farthest galaxies spinning billions of unfathomable light years away, but no God anywhere? Life is the only possible source of meaning I can see. Finite, irrational, magnificent creators of order we are, from our very DNA up through our finest library, beautiful whether the tiniest crystalline diatom floating weightlessly on the current, the most massive blue whale singing his hunting song to a friend on the other side of the Pacific ocean, or the most ordinary human who ever lived. Plain as he was, even that man was magnificent, improbable, organized, unique, beloved, and loving.
For you, believer, life and love is the proof. You believe that I am looking at a creation and refusing to see the creator. But despite both my heart and my mind wanting to believe, I cannot. What if I was just made that way?
Springtimes have needed you.
And there are stars expecting you to notice them.
From out of the past, a wave rises to meet you
the way the strains of a violin
come through an open window
just as you walk by.
As if it were all by design.
But are you the one designing it?
Rainer Maria Rilke
We tend to seek meaning in everything because that is how we learn. We seek out cause and effect relationships automatically, rarely challenging apparent causality. Correlation is enough to satisfy our hunger for meaning. Those who are lucky enough to believe what they are told about God think that those of us who cannot help but disbelieve are selfish and ignorant, willfully turning away from a very real, very present, absolutely perfect being. Why would anyone do that? If I could simply choose to believe that the death of a child was ordained by a perfectly loving being for some greater good that I cannot as yet fathom, why would I not choose to believe that? If I could believe that I would be reunited with all of my loved ones in an eternal realm of perfect happiness and love, how can it possibly be selfish to reject that? It isn’t intellectual arrogance either. I am telling you truthfully, if I could simply believe I would. I can’t. There is no divine beneficence. There is only the luck of the draw. A child is born, grows, learns, strives, is so very beautiful, and he dies suddenly, without any possible reason. What reason can there be? Tell me. I need to know.
What is this great presence you sense, believer? What if it is there for you, but not for me? What if when I seek it, it turns away from me like a locked door? I am no less deserving than you. I proclaimed belief in 1984. I confessed my sins, and easily accepted absolution. I read the Bible. I sought to serve from my heart and have never stopped. How is it that you see God in everything and I see the vastness of unending space-time from the tiniest subatomic particle here there and never-where to the farthest galaxies spinning billions of unfathomable light years away, but no God anywhere? Life is the only possible source of meaning I can see. Finite, irrational, magnificent creators of order we are, from our very DNA up through our finest library, beautiful whether the tiniest crystalline diatom floating weightlessly on the current, the most massive blue whale singing his hunting song to a friend on the other side of the Pacific ocean, or the most ordinary human who ever lived. Plain as he was, even that man was magnificent, improbable, organized, unique, beloved, and loving.
For you, believer, life and love is the proof. You believe that I am looking at a creation and refusing to see the creator. But despite both my heart and my mind wanting to believe, I cannot. What if I was just made that way?
Springtimes have needed you.
And there are stars expecting you to notice them.
From out of the past, a wave rises to meet you
the way the strains of a violin
come through an open window
just as you walk by.
As if it were all by design.
But are you the one designing it?
Rainer Maria Rilke
Monday, October 3, 2011
Sunday, October 2, 2011
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.
• 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.
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.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
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
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
Friday, June 17, 2011
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.
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