Starting Over

I’m starting over again.  I squirted a couple dozen shiny, bright blobs of oil paint onto my ancient glass palette, unleashing the smell of linseed and terror. I don’t even know why painting scares me. It feels a little like a dream in which I’m trying to fly but can only manage longish leaps with lots of useless arm flapping.

I work too hard at everything, and my life responds by eagerly meeting my frenetic activity with frenetic demand. I have the sense that art shouldn’t be so much work.

The hardest part is always starting…and starting again…and again. Once I’m working I begin to see in paint and ink and graphite. I begin to see in full color again as art meets life and visions unfold like dreams.

I know the rewards of painting. It isn’t the product on the canvas, though sometimes that does, against all odds, have merit. It’s the way painting makes me see and think and feel. Traditionally it makes me feel a bit manic because I have to really psych myself up to even try to paint, and then I often crash and burn afterward. It makes me moody, but that’s probably a more honest way for me to be, given the life I’ve made for myself. Moody and half wild beats the dessicated, somnolent version of myself that I drag from task to task most of the time. I suspect now that I’m too tired to generate much mania and will have to content myself with doggedness.

This time I’m starting with Anguilla, a mashup of a painting I fell in love with at the villa we stayed in and the feeling of floating warm and buoyant on the clear salt sea under golden sunlight. Anguilla was a vacation from the frenzy that is my life. My only objective was to rest and to simply be. Naturally I found a bit of space opening up in my mind and heart. As the first flight took us up and away from Seattle I felt myself disentangling from all my obligations, all the tentacles of demand snapping back on themselves, my big messy life falling behind and folding in on itself like a dead spider. With a bit more distance I found I could look back at it with some perspective. I could see themes and meanings emerging, whereas when I was fully entangled I could only see immediate needs and impending disasters. From Anguilla my home life looked like a vignette in a snow globe or a doll’s house.

Now I have started painting again and it feels like I’ve opened a big world of color and texture and confusion. It’s going to take patience and doggedness to make any sense of it. I see surrealism, selfies, color, houses….not at all what I imagined before I started. I’ve done this enough times to realize that’s a good thing.  The easel is where the things you thought you wanted to paint go to die and where the paint whispers what it needs you to do.

Touchstone (reworked)

Cold salty waves finger stones on the shore
as I arrive breathless from my run.

The next translucent peak
melts around my hand

as I reach
and touch the polished stones,
each a luminous singular world
multiplied into the trillions since she died.
All the days she's missed,
crystallized and laid to rest.
"I love you, mom."
as I bring her salty kiss to my lips
and turn to run again.

Touchstone

TOUCHSTONE

A cold salty wave polishes stones on the shore
as I arrive, breathless from my run.
Suspended seaweed parts
and the next crystalline peak
melts around my hand as I reach
and touch my mother's touchstones,
each a luminous singular world
multiplied into the trillions since she died.
All the days she's missed,
fossilized and laid to rest.
"I love you, mom."
as I bring her salty kiss to my lips
and turn to run again.

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.

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

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.