Last week my friend Erica announced on Facebook that she was hankering for a lobster — with lots of drawn butter. “Anyone want to join me?” she asked.
It sounded good to me, and before you could say “summer day trip,” Paul, Karina, and I were in the car driving north to meet her in Rockport.
The lobster was a bit small and a little disappointing, but it was followed by a memorable walk in Halibut Point Park. The park is home to a quarry, which borders the ocean.
While I held onto Karina’s leash, Paul took aim with the camera. His photos show why I think Cape Ann is one of the most beautiful and unique places on earth.
(That’s me in the blue hat.)
Karina handled the rocks like a mountain goat, and she surprised us all by lying down on a bed of green seaweed at the bottom of a tidal pool. I wasn’t quick enough to catch her La Dolce Vita moment, but the seaweed was more patient.
The waves were mesmerizing and I stood rooted to the spot, just watching and listening (that’s Paul and Erica discussing cormorants in the background).
When we got home, I remembered something I’d seen while scanning some old photographs. We’d been here before.
These were taken on a September camping trip circa 1990, when the boys were still boys, my hair an unfaded red, and Paul wore ’80s sunglasses before they were considered “retro.”
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.
Yep, it’s a pretty slow day here at the homestead. We’re just sitting around and thinking, cogitating, mulling things over, chewing the fat with ourselves. You get the picture
When I find myself stuck in the mental doldrums where there is both everything and nothing to write about, I look for inspiration elsewhere.
I didn’t have to look far: This morning two beautiful pieces about traveling crossed my screen almost simultaneously.
The first is by my long-time friend Martha Nichols. In her piece, “Why Travel?” she describes what travel does to her “inner landscape.”
“When you go to a new place, you’re more vulnerable,” she writes. “It’s as if a crack of light opens in the clouds, illuminating your inner landscape as well as what’s passing outside.”
This piece reminds me that no matter how far I roam, I can never escape myself. Martha explains why the hard parts of travel are also the most valuable.
Then, over at Lost in Arles, my new friend Heather Robinson tells the story of how she came to live in Arles. She says it’s a story that bears repeating and I say it’s a story worth sharing.
“Inside an abandoned church, we looked at the work of Harry Gruyaert’s ‘Rivages,’ ” she recalls. “We turned ourselves towards beauty and that stirring surged up into tears. We knew. This was where we were ready to be.”
Indeed, Heather’s entire blog is a celebration of the beauty she finds in the landscape, villages, and food around her. Every one of her posts is un petit cadeau dropped into my inbox.
And then, because I also needed a bit of bucking up, I reread a favorite piece by Dominique Browning. “Go where the love is,” she advises.
“That means not only doing what you love, but being where people love you–where they understand what you do, and, more important, where they have an affinity for who you are. Where the wellspring of creativity can be nurtured.”
And that’s what I’ve been doing these past couple of years as I search for new ways of working. Her post reminds me that if I keep planting the right kind of seeds, something satisfying and meaningful will eventually take root.
And finally, I leave you with this video of fearless young women cruising down la Sierra de Madrid. I may have a middle-aged body, but my spirit still soars like a twenty-something’s and I can feel the wind in my face and the road vibrating under my wheels as I watch them sail down the mountain on their longboards.
During my sophomore year of high school, my mother took me to a jewelry store at the local shopping center. She wanted to buy me a bracelet. The two of us picked out a nearly one-inch-wide cuff of sterling silver.
I remember the day as being sunny, and not too cold as we walked outside from store to store. Looking back, I imagine us chatting and laughing at some story about one of her friends. We were comfortable together. At the time, it seemed like an ordinary mother-daughter moment.
A few months later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and a year after that, she was gone forever. In the wake of those facts, that we ever enjoyed such ordinary moments seems extraordinary.
Now that I’m a mom myself, I’ve learned to savor the everyday time with my sons. It’s in those moments when we truly connect as people. It might happen in the car, for example, when a son finally ‘fesses up to what’s been on his mind, or plugs in his iPod to share some music that exposes his softer, romantic side.
Sometimes we connect over food, or while walking around a son’s new neighborhood. A spark might flare in a complicit, but loving, exchange of looks triggered by something amusing that Dad has just said or done (usually in the kitchen).
I love those exchanges. They say, “I know you,” and they almost always show me something new about myself and the people I love.
My mom has been gone for my entire adult life. And while the example she set as a mother is forever imprinted on my psyche, it’s the men in my life who have taught me the real down-in-the-trenches lessons of mom-dom.
My husband not only taught me how to make an infant laugh, he continues to give me the young man’s point-of-view when there’s something going on that I just don’t get. And each of my sons, in moments both painful and gratifying, have shown me something that I needed to know, or pushed me to acknowledge something that I didn’t want to see.
So this Mother’s Day, as I remember my own mother, I also give a nod to the men in my life. Thanks guys, you make my life more beautiful every day.
It was a busy week in the woods for Karina and me. On Monday, she was chased by a giant. (Apologies in advance for the poor filming. Think “The Blair Witch Project.”)
(Next time I’ll hold the camera horizontally.)
Then on Thursday, when we reached the spot where I usually let Karina off her leash, she suddenly lurched forward. There was a rush of wings and a bird I’d never seen before flew up onto a nearby tree.
It looked a lot like my old friend Woody Woodpecker. I wondered if I was hallucinating. How could something so fabulous be here?
I wasn’t quick enough with the iPhone to get a photo. In fact, I wish I hadn’t tried, because by the time I’d dug it out of my pocket, the bird had silently disappeared.
When I got home, I learned that it was a pileated woodpecker, fairly common in these parts, even though I’d never seen one before.
Photo courtesy of National Geographic
On Friday, we went back and gathered evidence.
And then this morning, I was reminded that in addition to giants and woodpeckers, fabulous things are turning up in these woods all the time.
Lady slippers are one of my favorite harbingers of spring. They are something I have seen my entire life. Some years they spring up all over these woods. Theirs is a delicate beauty.
I want my grandchildren to come here and see them some day, and I want them to feel the thrill that I felt when I saw my first pileated woodpecker.
That’s a big reason why I write for Moms Clean Air Force. We all need to protect our Mother Earth. In addition to this week’s woodland adventures with Karina, I also wrote a post for them about why Concord’s ban on plastic water bottles is a step forward for clean air.
In gardening, as in life, it’s easy to get stuck in the weeds. It’s easy to focus on the unwelcome clumps of grass and dandelions, the bugs, and the Hostas behind the garage that aren’t coming back.
We gardeners have to remind ourselves that the garden is there to enjoy. It’s a place to bathe our eyes in beauty; inhale the scent of the ground, the trees, the plants and their flowers; and absorb the steady thrum of nature all around us.
It’s true that sometimes what we have doesn’t live up to our vision, but what in life ever does?
So after spending these past weeks lingering in life’s doldrums, I decided to back away from my desk, pick up my camera, and admire what is growing all around me.
Here is a wide view of our back garden, painstakingly dug out of an established lawn. It took a couple of seasons to remove all the grass, (which continues to fight its way back in). I love it best in spring when it is a sea of blues and greens, punctuated with a smattering of winey red.
Just look at these Bleeding Hearts. Doesn’t their amazing shape and pure color make your own heart go pit-a-pat?
So many shades of ivory.
And here is some Solomon’s Seal getting ready to unfurl its string of pearls. These plants, along with some May Apple came from Marilyn, my neighbor at the Hawthorne Inn. These plants were already 50 years old when she first brought them down from Maine 35 years ago.
Oooh and there’s my Painted Fern! I always keep my fingers crossed that it will return each year.
The longer I’ve gardened, the more I’ve come to value the foliage as much as the flower. The leaves have to be interesting, because they are what you see for most of the growing season.
These Japanese Anemones are one example. They provide texture all summer. Then in the fall, they sprout their deep pink and white flowers. A lovely surprise when everything else in the garden has started to fade.
Lady’s Mantle leaves love to cup rainwater and dew, but they are experiencing an unusually dry spring. These plants came from Kathleen’s garden.
Like the Lady’s Mantle, this Yarrow from my friend Connie will eventually sport flat hats of yellow flowers. But it is already giving off its own musky scent. In fact, that aroma stopped me cold the first spring after I’d planted it, when I took it for a weed and almost pulled it out.
My friend Beverly, gardener extraordinaire, who lives in a little cottage down the street, shared some European Ginger with me a few years ago. It won’t bloom at all, but the sight of those crisp, shiny leaves can really cool you down on a hot day.
It’s so much easier to get stuck in the weeds/doldrums than it is to pull oneself out. But as any gardener knows, growing a garden takes persistance, care, and a bit of faith. You have to plant seeds, water, and pay attention. Eventually roots will form and something wonderful will emerge from the soil.
This sign is a gift from Carol, one of our oldest friends. Whenever I feel as though no one else gets me, she always does.
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!”
It has been a week of changes here at our little homestead.
On Monday, our son Karsten left for his Peace Corps assignment. He will be living and working in Morocco for the next 27 months. He had been staying with us off and on since June, and was here full-time for his last six weeks in the states.
The house feels pretty empty. Not that he was loud or took up a ton of space, but his presence — the smell of his cooking; the sound of his voice as he practiced his Arabic; and the buzz of excitement as he greeted the dog every time he walked in the door — is suddenly gone.
Karina still listens for him, jumping up and barking every time a car door slams. One night Paul found her alone in the dark, at her favorite post, waiting for him to come home.
But our collective melancholy over Karsten’s departure is more than matched by our excitement for him and his new adventure, his new life.
Then it was Wednesday, my birthday.
And we were in the middle of a freakishly warm week. This photo of our back yard, taken on March 21, 2012 provides a snapshot of what Dominique Browning, cofounder and senior director of Moms Clean Air Force calls “climate disruption.”
First, we have chunks of our ancient willow trees littering our lawn. This was the work of Hurricane Irene, which severed an entire trunk of one tree last August, and the heavy snow from New England’s “Halloween snowstorm,” which brought down several large branches.
These trees are so old, they touch the sky.
Then we have the daffodils. I was born within a day of the spring equinox, yet I don’t remember ever seeing daffodils bloom on my birthday.
Change inside. Change outside.
I was thinking about all of this when I woke up on Friday and opened my email to find this question from Seth Godin.
Did you wake up fresh today, a new start, a blank slate with resources and opportunities… or is today yet another day of living out the narrative you’ve been engaged in for years?
Funny, because with Paul’s semi-retirement, and both sons launched, and then this week re-launched, our conversations are full of ideas for changing our narrative as a couple. Where do we want to live? Where can we live? What work will we do? And what do we want to accomplish in the years ahead?
But Godin is talking about changes within ourselves, and I think his advice is particularly relevant for people who are in their fifties and sixties. As he observes,
The truth though, is that doing what you’ve been doing is going to get you what you’ve been getting. If the narrative is getting in the way, if the archetypes you’ve been modeling and the worldview you’ve been nursing no longer match the culture, the economy or your goals, something’s got to give.
… When patterns in engagements with the people around you become well-worn and ineffective, are they persistent because they have to be, or because the story demands it?
Change is everywhere. Change is hard. And creating internal climate disruption — re-examining old habits of perception and decision-making that persist because that is what we have always done — is the hardest change of all.
This isn’t about hunkering down for a session of self-blame or questioning every decision we have made since our 18th birthday. Not at all. It’s about opening the doors and windows of our mind, letting in fresh air and light, and viewing the world through a different lens.
Because when we clear away old baggage and take another look, we make room for new growth.
Shifting Gears 