When I’m about to embark on something new, different, and a little daunting, I often remind myself to “go with the flow,” stay in the present, and loosen my grip on the controls. I imagine myself diving off a cliff and taking a very long ride down into a warm, welcoming sea.
Putting away my expectations, hopes, and fears and just taking the new adventure one step at a time allows me to release the burdensome stones that tend to accumulate during everyday life.
It’s like spring cleaning for the mind. We take a few steps back,
put the past aside,
and step into the light.
The photos above were taken at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine. Walking into this atrium was like stepping into a serenity bath. These figures are locked in their quiet reveries for all time. Standing among them, I felt all the residual heaviness I’d accumulated over the past winter vaporize under their cool gazes.
Stuck as they are, these statues remind us that we can lighten our mental load by letting go of those tightly held ideas that hold us back. Instead of jumping in to make “wise” pronouncements about people and things, we can instead bolster our wisdom by simply holding still and taking the time to listen and observe.
In a few days I’ll be traveling to new places. The landscape, culture, and people will be very different from what I am used to. We won’t even speak the same language. So that I don’t miss anything and take it all in, I’m going to follow my own advice. Mentally, at least, I’m packing light.
January is when we realize that the bills, the deadlines, and other unpleasantness we put aside for the holidays are still waiting. They didn’t disappear when we turned the last page of our 2012 calendars and entered the new year.
The color palette outside makes me realize that as much as I admire those clean-looking, all white interiors in design books, I could never, ever live in one. Even a pink-ish sky at sunset looks cold and lonely.
There’s nothing like January, with its anemic sky, dirty snow, and “clean slate” reputation to make you take stock and focus. In fact, focus is one of my key words for 2013. I’ve never been one to write down New Year’s resolutions, so this is a first.
It’s time to rein in my dilettante tendencies, stop dabbling, stay off the internet, avoid the TV, and write more, read more, listen to more music, and do all of it with the intensity I had as a girl. Back then, my mom amused herself by saying nonsensical things to me while I was reading, just to see how long it would take to pull me back from wherever the book had sent me. In fact, it took several minutes before her voice would penetrate my fictional world and I’d look up, blinking as though awakening from a deep sleep.
These days, my eyes are on the book, but my brain is elsewhere — worrying about friends, thinking about the laundry, or anxiously tallying the balance in our bank account.
Gone too are the days when I would lie on my bed for hours listening to music, so fully caught up in its emotion that the world outside my bedroom walls ceased to exist.
Sometimes, often, writing pulls me into the “zone” where I am so engaged with the words that I forget about time, that loaf of bread I’d meant to start, or my loved one’s need for civilized conversation.
I want to transfer that intensity into other domains: to do more, feel more, know more. But I can’t do any of that without fully committing to the task at hand.
There are other words on my 2013 list as well, but first I’m going to concentrate on focus. The white days of January seem like a good time to start.
Sometime during the summer of 2009, I received an email from my friend, Martha Nichols, inviting me to participate in a literary blog she was starting called “Talking Writing.” A seasoned writer and editor, Martha sent the email to several of her writing colleagues asking them to participate in and comment on her new endeavor.
A year later, in the fall of 2010, Martha and the equally experienced, Elizabeth Langosy, with some help from me, launched Talking Writing: A Magazine for Writers. Since that time, I have had the great luck and pleasure to be a part of this groundbreaking endeavor.
Working long hours, Martha and Elizabeth have poured their brilliance and passion into creating a fully formed magazine that is beautiful to look at and loaded with thoughtful and unique voices and perspectives. If you haven’t read it, you should.
In fact, I’d encourage all of my blogging friends to think about pitching a piece or two. TW can’t offer you money — what literary magazine can? — but you will have the satisfaction of working with its talented team of editors, and your byline will appear in the pages of a zine that receives close to 9000 hits per month.
While I enjoy the freedom of writing unedited on my own blog, it also feels good to put myself in the hands of these capable and talented women. They help their writers develop their pieces in the most supportive way possible. Martha and Elizabeth are great teachers and they always make my work better.
So I was flattered when they asked to republish a post from my blog. Martha assured me that it just required a “few, minor edits.” And while she was true to her word, those edits helped turn a blog post into a publishable piece.
“Porcelain Bones,” appeared here last March as “Inside a Potter’s Studio, a Daughter Finds Answers.” I hope you will give the edited version a read. While you are there, check out the rest of TW’s November/December issue — and if you haven’t already, take a few extra seconds to subscribe.
When it comes to technology, I can be a bit shy. And, yes, shy is the right word here. Whenever I get a new piece of equipment, I don’t dive in and immerse myself by either experimenting with all of the buttons, or by cozying up with the manual on the couch for a few hours.
I like to circle, develop a feel, and take my time. Even the unpacking should be a bit ceremonial.
But as I mentioned in a previous post, our camera died. The new one arrived just as we were about to drive up to Maine for a few days. We had been invited to spend some time with friends on Little Cranberry Island, across the water from Acadia National Park.
You travel to the island via the mail boat. And once there, you don’t feel stranded, but life does proceed at a calmer, more sedate pace.
The view from our hosts’ front door is spacious.
And here’s what you see when you walk around the island.
One of the best things about the trip was spending time with our hosts’ 10-year-old son. I love that he is in our lives. And I’m so glad he came along when he did. It has been a privilege to witness his development from baby, to toddler, to a thinking, feeling human being. He is whip smart and funny.
He’s not shy about technology, oh no. He asked if he could use my camera while we were on the mail boat. His nimble fingers made short work of finding the special effects button.
Photo by Nick Howe
Photo by Nick Howe
Once on the mainland, we took a walk around Jordan Pond inside Acadia National Park.
Photo by Nick Howe
So, dear readers, may your remaining summer days be both slow and sweet, and may their memory keep you warm during the shorter, cooler ones ahead.
As for me, my “shyness” should dissipate soon and I expect I’ll keep busy and warm by poking, prodding, and giving this new camera the third degree.
Women who are in their sixties and older have been on my mind lately. While I have a few years before my own 60th birthday, I’m noticing that late middle-age/ early old age can be one of the most powerful and vibrant times in a woman’s life.
It started at a Patty Larkin concert that took place right here in Concord. I’ve listened to her music for years, but I’d never seen her in person.
If you’d asked me to describe her voice, I’d have told you that it has a smile in it. And after seeing her play, I can now say that, in fact, she does smile when she sings.
From where I sat, Larkin looked and sounded like a woman in her early forties. Her body is toned, and her smooth, youthful voice reveals none of the wear and tear that often comes with time. And the inventive way she noodled around on her electric guitar reminded me of my 29-year-old son, who plays and composes experimental music.
“How old do you think she is?” I asked my husband during intermission. He pulled out his smartphone and looked her up. “Sixty-one,” he told me. Really? Wow.
Close up she may not look quite as young as she does from afar, but the vibrancy and joy she exudes while performing is that of an artist at the height of her powers.
A few weeks later, another powerful, older woman came across my radar. I reviewed Lilly Ledbetter’s memoir, Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond.
After 19 years as a supervisor, Ledbetter learned that Goodyear was paying her significantly less than her male counterparts. She took her battle for fair pay all the way to the Supreme Court.
The court decided against her, ruling that the statute of limitations had run out on her claim. She lost her personal battle, but she had the guts (and grit) to persevere so that the rest of us wouldn’t be treated in the same way.
In one of his first official actions as President, Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, which provides a more reasonable time limit for such claims. Now in her early 70s, Ledbetter went from the factory floor, to testify before Congress.
While reading Ledbetter’s memoir — which I could barely put down—I was reminded of how filthy factory work is (I welded electronic bug zappers during college), and of the gauntlet many women must run when they work with men who are unable to check their sexual urges at the workplace door.
Ledbetter isn’t an artist, nor is she a glamorous celebrity (though she’s both eloquent and elegant in words and appearance), but a regular person who grew up in poverty, worked grueling hours to help support her family, and then became a spokeswoman for us all. She is forever on my list of inspirational women.
Then last week, at another event in town, I heard historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, 69, and photographer Annie Leibovitz, 62, discuss Leibovitz’s latest project, “Pilgrimage,” which is currently on exhibit at the Concord Museum.
These two smart, articulate women shared personal stories filled with self-deprecating humor. And while Goodwin awakened my somewhat dormant interest in history, my focus was on Leibovitz.
“Pilgrimage” is a photographic study of places and the personal effects, work, and surroundings of several historical figures. Some of them, Thoreau, Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott once lived here in Concord.
Leibovitz began the project during a difficult time in her own life. She needed to do something that wasn’t an editor’s assignment, but that was instead self-driven and that satisfied her own interests and curiousity. In healing herself, she did what many of us do —what I do when I’m overwhelmed, sad, or in a rut — she shifted gears and focused on the minutiae.
While I might weed the garden, detail the house, or start a cooking project, Leibovitz focused her camera on the light outside Emerson’s window, the beat-up surface of Virginia Woolf’s desk, and Georgia O’Keefe’s box of handmade pastels.
Both Leibovitz and Goodwin agreed that it is these kinds of details that make the person come alive. Later, as I walked through the exhibit past photographs of Annie Oakley’s riding boots, Marion Anderson’s concert gown, and the top edge of Eleanor Roosevelt’s desk drawer, etched with her signature, they came alive for me too.
Rather than becoming diminished as they age, these women are only getting stronger. I have heard women my own age complain that they feel invisible. With no regular job and an empty nest, I occasionally feel this way too.
Women like these show us that we don’t have to fade away. If we keep working, doing, and learning, we can be better, we can do more.
I leave you with another video of Patty Larkin. Check out the way she works that electric guitar with her bow.
My fascination with creativity started at our kitchen table, where I’d sit across from my grandfather, both of us drawing. One day, while I worked with my pencil and crayons, he painted a landscape on the back of an old shirt box. I don’t know what happened to it, but I still have this one that he painted on canvas.
Painting by Jacob Scheinfein
Back then all I cared about was my inability to make “realistic” drawings. Too bad he didn’t tell me (or maybe he did and I don’t remember) that making art is much more about perseverance and hard work than it is about innate talent and inspiration.
As artist Chuck Close says, “ Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.”
Practice may not always make perfect, but it does put you on the road to creation. It helps you figure out what you like to do and helps you develop skills and goals. If my grandfather were alive today, I’d ask him, Why that house, those mountains, that tree? Does the scene on canvas match the one in your head? Was there a message behind it? What were you thinking about when you took out your paints and got to work? What was your intention?
A few weeks ago, this video of designer Karin Eriksson at work in her pottery studio, captured my attention. In it, Eriksson seems both deliberate and intentional as she measures out her lump of clay, places it on her wheel, and goes to work. She knows what form she wants that lump of clay to take and how to get it there.
In this case, I’m guessing, the form is already designed — we don’t see if any “rejects” or “seconds” come out of her kiln — and so this video is about process and control, not about what went on in her head when she made the prototype for these pieces. Perhaps this work was executed exactly as planned, but it also may be the result of trial and error or happy accident.
For photographer Sally Mann, accidents are part of the plan. She captures her images using old cameras, faulty lenses, and prints them using the wet-plate collodion process. The resulting photographs have streaks, dust spots, and other “imperfections.” She likes the element of the unexpected that her process engenders. As she says in this clip, “I feel I’m at the whim of the angel of chance because all these wonderful things happen on the plates.”
Last year, when I interviewed artist Sophia Ainslie, she said that in some of her work, “… accident was an important part of the process.” But even when your goal is specificity and deliberation, you have to work with mistakes, “If the mark happens to be in the wrong place—whatever that may mean—,” Ainslie told me, “then you’ve got to run with it and make it right.”
When putting my own ideas down on paper — as opposed to writing up an interview, for example — I may have a broad sense of what I want to say, a tiny kernel of an idea, or even just a feeling to build on, and the bulk of the piece comes while I’m writing and rewriting it. As Chuck Close suggests, I often don’t discover where I’m going until I get to work.
Sometimes I’m hit by that hyperbolic “bolt of lightening” that puts me in “the zone,” and the words seem to flow of their own accord. But that rarely happens.
The other morning my friend Kathleen told me that she has so many ideas that she is having a hard time settling on a direction for an upcoming show. Then the next day she reported that she’d just spent a whole day working on a new piece only to be disappointed with the outcome.
I tried to remind her that this always happens when she’s starting a project. And then I joked that as a writer, when I’m not satisfied, I can just hit the “delete” button. She didn’t laugh. For artists, the cost of rebooting is much more than frustration and dejection — the materials they use are expensive.
Here is some of her work-in- progress.
Photo and artwork by Kathleen Volp
In their tiny gem of a book, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking David Bayles & Ted Orland caution that, “The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.”
Frustrating but true for all of us, whether we express ourselves through music, words, or images. As Kathleen says, “It’s all about bringing your own voice to your work. You have to be clear and be true to that voice.”
Doing so is hard work. It is painful, messy, and frustrating. But it is also satisfying, affirming, and just plain wonderful.
So, artists, photographers, writers, musicians and bloggers,
Where do your ideas come from?
How much of your creation is about controlling your medium and how much is about overcoming obstacles and setting yourself free?
Before this week of rain I’d been putting some hard labor into our back garden, digging up ferns with root systems that were crowding out other, more delicate plants. Husband pitched in too. Not one to mess around, he made short work of the ferns using a hand axe.
As a reward for my labors and to seek a bit of inspiration, I joined my friend Cheryl in Little Compton, Rhode Island, where we visited Sakonnet Garden.
While it was cloudy and drizzling when I left Concord, the weather in Little Compton featured clear blue skies and a warm sun.
The two of us wandered through a series of garden rooms, chatting and taking pictures. Sakonnet garden is like a well-designed house.
There are a variety of ceiling heights. You enter down a long “hallway” and then feel a sense of release as you enter the first room.
There are a variety of wall treatments
And they’ve furnished the place using a wide array of textures
These ferns aren’t posing any problems
And because it feels so much like a house, visitors misplace keys and glasses just like they do at home.
My friend Cheryl is a skilled photographer. You can see her magical vision of the garden here.
You can only visit the garden during its Open Days. The next one is on Saturday, June 9.
Paul and I recently watched Pina, a documentary about the work of German choreographer Pina Bausch, who died in the summer of 2009.
The music, the settings, the dancers, and their stories about Bausch are stuck in my head.
According to Pina‘s website, filmmaker Wim Wenders
… takes the audience on a sensual, visually stunning journey of discovery into a new dimension: straight onto the stage with the legendary Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch ensemble, he follows the dancers out of the theatre into the city and the surrounding areas of Wuppertal – the place, which for 35 years was the home and centre for Pina Bausch’s creativity.
These works are performed by dancers who are fearless. They give their all, each one pushing him or herself to the edge while maintaining a level of control that only the very skilled have mastered.
For example, in the clip below a dancer flirts with the edge of a cliff throughout his frantic, headlong performance. In another dance, a woman dives off a chair toward the floor through a “hoop” made by her partner’s arms. The move was as nonchalant as a shrug and it took my breath away.
The dancers’ thoughts, which are dispersed throughout the film, reveal a leader who was generous about soliciting participation from others in her vision. Rather than hold her performers to her own closed concept of what a particular dance should be, Bausch had the confidence and the courage to let them fly.
One dancer remembers Bausch telling her “you just have to get crazier.” Another says she told him to “scare me!” Bausch trusted her dancers, and by doing so she taught them to trust themselves.
Exhibiting mastery of a discipline without being shackled by it, while eloquently expressing the human condition, is something artists strive for. It must have been thrilling to have a leader who asserted her authority by encouraging those in her dance troupe to “let ‘er rip!”
One of the great things about having adult children is that, well, they are adults! Adults who are also fabulous hosts. Our son Ben recently moved into his first roommate-less apartment. And he has a sofa bed, a really comfortable one. So on this visit, we stayed at his place in Brooklyn.
We arrived on Thursday afternoon. A professional trumpet player, Ben needed to finish his warm-ups for a gig that night. He sent us off to the nearby subway station with instructions for how to get to an interesting shopping district.
We checked out the shops and waited for Ben to join us at a local cafe. Dinner was at a nearby Ethiopian restaurant.
That night, we heard Ben play with Sxip Shirey. Wild, crazy music that makes people get up and dance. There are no videos on Youtube of this particular evening, but the one below gives you the idea. (Warning: language!)
I’ll bet you’ve never heard anyone make music with a megaphone and a siren before! Paul and I were also impressed by Xavier, the group’s vocalist. Xavier sang some sexually nasty-in-a-good-way lyrics with the voice of an angel while maintaining a look of wide-eyed innocence.
For example, he sang this one by Minnie Riperton, reminding us that her repertoire was much bigger than her well-known hit, “Loving You.”
I love it when young musicians turn music from my generation into their own. One day I’ll find a video of Xavier singing this. When I do, I promise to share it with you. In the meantime, here’s a clip of Xavier that Ben just sent me. Given my previous simile, the song is appropriately entitled, “Angel.”
A couple of nights later, we heard Ben play at the annual Balkan Shout-Out with Raya Brass Band. You can view the video below to get a taste of their music and what it’s like to attend a performance, but definitely take some time to listen to clips from their new album.
We have seen this group play many times — two of those times were in our own back yard. It has been a lot of fun watching Ben develop his skills in this genre, which has unusual rhythms, and allows for improvisation. As you see in the video, it also involves a lot of dancing.
There were some quieter moments as well. Not only did Ben provide us with a place to stay, he treated us to a mouth-watering and memorable dinner at Flatbush Farm in Park Slope. The three of us talked and joked — I am so grateful that both my sons are willing to let us witness and experience the people and things in their lives that are important to them.
We also took a walk through the Brooklyn Museum. I wanted to see the Keith Haring exhibit, but I was most impressed by a section of the museum called “visible storage.”
Items not currently on display are housed behind glass in a darkish area. Here I am wandering through.
A cool bike with raccoon tails — familiar accessories to those of us of a certain age—has its own case.
You’ll have to forgive the quality of these photos. They were taken with my phone and, as I mentioned, it was kind of dark in there.
Each encased item had a corresponding number. You can learn more about a particular object by entering its number into one of the iPads attached to pedestals throughout the area.
Something about this space reminds me of green design. Perhaps because every inch is used in the most engaging and educational way.
Parents Weekend ended with brunch on Sunday morning. I’m not sure when the next one will be, but I’m thinking maybe once a quarter would be nice. Often enough, but not so often that we wear out our welcome.
A few weeks ago I hung up the phone after a brief chat with my stepmother and burst into tears. “Why so sad?” I wondered.
About to enter her 89th year, and plagued by Parkinson’s disease, it makes sense that I would be sad after hearing her faint voice leak across the wires. But I sensed that this feeling of loss went much, much deeper.
Edith married my father two years after my mother died. I was nineteen years old, a college sophomore. Although I have grown fond of her as the years have passed, I greeted her arrival in my life with ambivalence.
She was in her early fifties when she met my father, and had never been married. As a result, she was completely clueless when it came to dealing with an angry, grieving teenager. We now get along just fine, and she has been a good grandmother to my children, but the deep well of loss I felt that day was not just for her.
Then, on a wet, snowy Thursday, a new friend and I visited Elizabeth Cohen’s pottery studio. Art was everywhere, beginning with her front steps.
These concrete leaves were made by another local artist.
Her studio was small, but held a multitude of porcelain objects in varying shades of cream, while just outside the window the falling snow whitened the air, the trees, and the ground,
Inside the kiln.
Her mugs mold themselves right into your hands. I now own four of them.
But the piece that struck me the most was a set of carved nesting bowls. It looked so fragile that I was afraid to touch it, even through my camera lens. Here’s a photo of it taken by Elizabeth.
The three of us paused over the piece while Elizabeth explained that her mother had died in the past year, and that these carved porcelain nesting bowls had been inspired by her aging bones. My friend, who is something of an expert when it comes to beautiful objects, seemed particularly taken by them.
As the snow ended, and the weekend came and went, I rolled the image of those bony bowls over and over in my mind. Eventually, it all came together, the sadness, the delicately carved porcelain — the smaller, more solid pieces nestled into the larger more porous ones.
It occurred to me, as it did when I married my husband, and birthed my children, that here was yet another event that I wouldn’t share with my mother. I’d never witness her body’s natural aging process — her bones becoming brittle, her hair turning white. She would again be absent, not there to show me the way. Indeed, I am already seven years older than she was when she died.
That’s one reason why watching my stepmother’s decline has awakened an old, old sadness. And yet, thinking back to my afternoon in that cozy studio, surrounded by white both inside and out, I know something else too.
I am not so alone. I was happy as I explored that creative nest, getting to know two other women: One my age, the other a bit younger, one who whips up confections with words, the other who does the same with clay.
I will miss my mother until the day I die, just as I’ll never stop looking for her in my family, friends, and in the new people I meet. She will be forever gone and gone too soon. But each layer of connection I make is like those bowls: I will cradle some, and others will cradle me.
