Grown Up

I know this isn't entirely unusual, but I spent my entire childhood wanting to be a grown up then spent the last several years as a grown up wishing to be a kid again.

I then noticed that being a grown up is actually kind of more fun.

I'm happy to finally be one.


When I was a kid, sure, there were chores and rules, but essentially, I did whatever I wanted.  Which, after the age of 12 (thanks to orthodics and some se-r-ious blisters) was sitting on my butt alone and reading.  Until I couldn't be around people (much) anymore because I felt so very awkward in the real world, acting on my own.  I didn't want to grow up because I didn't want to have to interact and go to work and not live in those little worlds defined by other people.

After I grew up, I moved in and out of the real world, grown up land.  I could function when I had to, but I chose to live in worlds created and defined by other people.  I think the reason I did that was because I didn't believe I could define a world myself.  I thought that I lacked the power and the skills and the money and the time and the drive.

But I don't.

And that is pretty stupid to live by.

And guess what?  Eating my vegetables tastes better (and my teeth don't feel gritty like when I subsist on sugar) and I feel better.  And my back hurts less if I don't lie in bed and watch TV all day.  And I like people.  I like my friends and my family.  To be honest, I always have but I was pretty sure they didn't like me.  But guess what else?  They seem to.  And paying my bills sucks, so do doing the dishes and keeping the house clean, but I like my life better if they are.  And best of all?  It's MY life.  Not a screen writer's.  Not an author's.  Not a fictional character's.

And not an intangible dream.

And not an impossibility.

Don't ask me why I didn't like being grown up before.  The whole point of growing up is that you aren't powerless anymore.  And I didn't get on board with that right away.  But I think I'm there now.  Of course, I have the attention span of a fly sometimes, so I might need to put a post it on my computer to remind myself.  But honestly?  That frittata that I just made myself was both healthy and delicious.  So maybe it's worth being an adult, so I don't 'have' to microwave all my meals :)

I come with a learning curve....

I have recently realized I have a *bit* of a superiority complex.  Not really shocking if you know I'm an only child, and whether you have the spoiled only child experience or the little adult only child experience, most parents of only children are convinced their kids crap pure gold in one way or another.  Not blaming, not complaining, simply stating.  That being said, I have spent years not noticing because it was relatively well-masked.  Or so central to my thinking that I became blind to it.  One or the other.

I mention this because I have also, recently, said a few things that could be misconstrued.  Possibly some major things.  Possibly major life-changing things that 'misconstrued' is an understatement for, but this is the internet and I'm viewing this as a verbose sketch pad, so....the specifics aren't really applicable.  Besides, me being me, experiential repetition is the ONLY way I learn, so rest assured that this has happened in multiple scales lately.  It also isn't a new thing.  Previously, I have always justified myself by telling myself I was always a few steps ahead and the party in question would understand if they could just have the same beneficial long term perspective I did.  In hindsight, that *might* be the superiority complex talking.

Looking objectively at the situations, I was forced to admit something.  Me talking is a lot like when I'm driving.  I have no idea if this is something other people do, but as I'm driving along- particularly for a couple hours+, I tend to pace myself with other cars.  It helps me not speed (as much) and I have this idea in my head that if I'm speeding with other people, I'm less likely to get picked up.  (not that I speed much, but in truth, I also tend to lag and I really hate cruise)  Anyway, sometimes, I'll stay with another car for a while.  I wonder about the people in it and invent places where they are going and pretend we really are traveling together.  Then they turn off.  (Jerks.)  (Now who am I traveling with?)  And I remember that I knew nothing at all about them.  We just happen to be traveling some of the same roads at the same time at a similar speed.  Yeah, my conversations are like that too.  We happen to be talking about similar things in the same vicinity at the same time.  But the other person has no idea what is happening in my head, and I tend to be filling in some details and then responding to that.  Shooting off in some other directions without at all explaining where I'm headed.

Thank God my closest friends know/are learning that.  (And it is Thanksgiving-- I am really truly blessed with great friends and family and a new job.  Seriously- Thank God.)  It might be time for me to acknowledge that as a flaw and maybe try to be less of a conversational lone wolf.  Perhaps me talking would end better that way.

Starting Small

Ah, fabric dye you are my friend.  Also:: first time trying watercolor block.  Love the shape, wishing it was bigger.  And loving the block principle.

15 Failed Operas

So I have been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately. 

Maybe more than a bit (btw, to do lists should probably be a big no-no for me.  They get impossibly long and binding....and I get rather, well, frustrated).

And I keep looking at my art and it's slow progress, the lack of time I have for it; and I feel like a total failure.  Then I look back at the times in the past where I felt like a total failure; and I realize that I was producing WAY more work then than I am now.  Then I REALLY feel like a total failure.  Artistically anyway. 

And I'm reading this book.  (I'm always reading some book.  I'm beginning to wonder if I ever actually have any original thoughts because I begin so many sentences with 'So, I'm reading this book.....'  Then I remember I'm a painter so it doesn't really matter if I quote a lot of books.)  In the book, it says that Verdi wrote 15 epic fail operas before Rigoletto.  And he was 38 when Rigoletto finally made it.  So I realize: I'm good.  I have like 10 years to write 15 operas.  That is totally doable.  In 11 years, maybe I'll be a failure.  But I have a lot of time before I find that out.  I just need to keep working.  Keeping making those little things that fail and hope they turn into bigger things that fail.  And then hope that they multiply into more things that fail.  We'll see how I feel about them all failing in the morning, but I think that I can do this keep on trying thing.  I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm also artistically really young.  I'm ok with still being a little lost.

Meanwhile, I really want to name my next body of work '15 Failed Operas'.

Heritage of Faith

My life has been very different from most of the women in my family (maternal side). Themes and traits run through the 4 generations, similarities, but I generally am quite aware of a separation, a distance, a canyon between common ground.

Some days, however, that is bridged in a moment without even their presence.

I was hit with that feeling tonight in small group, as I have been many times in the last year- ever since the idea of heritage of faith came up in a teaching...somewhere...and then again in prayer. I am fortunate in that- though I walked away from God and faith for several years, I am part of a line of women who believe. As we sat and prayed together, someone spoke with this momentary hitch in their voice, and I was reminded so strongly of sitting, as a kid, in my great-grandmother's living room, listening to my grandma and great-grandma pray and read the Bible. I was so bored during those summer trips, and I was so uncomfortable sitting in that still hot living room with the window air conditioner, and I never understood why the two of them cried, why their voices broke, why there were great big pauses in their prayers. I never understood the weight (and the wait lol) of why we sat there. But now, I am so grateful to have that memory. I come from a line of women of powerful faith, women who know the Holy Spirit- even if I had no idea then. It is always such a gift to remember this, to know that I pray like them now-- I hope someday my belief will roll off my as theirs did/does off of them.

I have been thinking lately about the individual nature of belief in Christ, how God reveals the same things over and over to his followers as they each grow and mature, each following this same path to Him trodden by millions over the generations. It is always a new faith to each believer, to each generation. It has to be learned new, learned personally. But inheritance, earthly inheritance, can have special value too.


....and relating to art....

'Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other's shoulders and building upon each other's hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel.'

-Judy Chicago

Just because we each have to learn on our own doesn't mean we have to reinvent the wheel. There is so much to be gained from reflecting on our own heritage, even if we do have to do it ourselves too.

What does it mean to heal?

Does it simply mean to be what you were once before, before you were sick, before you were hurt, before you were broken?  Or is it like a bone, going beyond what was before and into something further, something stronger, something more?  Does healing finish when the act is done or when you realize you are healed?  Or does it not end until you have grown, grown past being less to begin with?

The dictionary simply says to return to sound condition.  Interesting that the word origin relates to Helen, a name we associate so frequently with one known for all the bits of her that did not heal....though her spirit learned to cope and more forward.

I have to say I think it means something more.  I think it means going beyond simple restoration, beyond growing, and into the lack of fear of injury, the lack of resentment toward the period of weakness.

I was once an artist.  I made things, then as now, out of the overflow of my heart.  I realize now that that overflow was pus.  Putrid, while beautiful, evidence of injury.  Of infection.  And I lost the overflow for a long time, as the wound was bound up.  It took a long time for me to heal.  A long time.  Much longer than the thousand separate instants in which I was wounded.  And I thought the scar tissue, the stretched and shiny part of my emotions, I thought that was the hole where art used to be.  But I never realized it.  I never realized that I shied away from the scar, didn't push it, didn't try.  I mean, I did in private.  I made little things, I showed around old things, I talked as if I didn't know the scar was there.

I realized a year ago the wound was gone.  And I realize this morning that I could try to stretch the old wounded area again.  But I will never know until I try and fall again.  But, God willing, the falls will eventually lead to standing again.

One things I do know, however, if why He heals.  It's because He loves me. [and you....and you....you get the idea]

**This post was hand-written when I conceptualized this blog as my return to art....aka my return to finding out if I can tolerate falling on my face.  I'm sure now that I can, but I kind of had to actually fall on my face out in the real world before I knew that.  I did want to share this, though, if not in its hand-written format (trust me, you are glad it isn't in it's hand-written format) because it is the beginning.  The first.  And I think if I can't share it, I fail.  I fail in trying to fail.  Well, trying not to fail but being ok with failing being an option.**

Things I've learned

::subtitle:: Things I should have probably already known

1.  Never outline a blog post.

2.  Never outline a blog post and then actually type the post after 10:30 at night.

3.  Never outline a blog post and then get obsessed with hitting every point on the outline, in the order you thought of them.

4.  Never outline a blog post and cling to the outline and the conclusion you came to in the outline as though it is a term paper.  At least in my case.  I'm posting as a [very vague] form of art.  Outlines and art don't make good bedfellows.

5.  Never outline a blog post and then stop yourself from interacting further with the subject at hand.

6.  Never outline a blog post and somehow leave any kind of idea of a thesis out of the outline and out of the actual post.

7.  Just to recap, never outline a blog post.

Almost as soon as I hit post, I knew my last post was a lot of rambling, resulting from a really good idea.  Seed of an idea anyway.  I think it missed the mark on maturing into an actual idea.  The point I was trying to make was that while empathy drives many interactions and choices in each person's life, on a corporate level, I believe that a large part of great and/or popular art and literature comes to be considered great exactly because of the detachment displayed in it.  Empathy seems to me to have been relegated to secret and 'lower' realms of pain and secret desire--I am referring to these as separate entities, though I know they often intertwine.  And I don't deny that empathy has been one of it's own grave diggers (I have a book on my shelf from my depressive past titled The Journey from Abandonment to Healing in which empathy spectacularly prevents itself from being taken seriously).  It came as a shock to me to think about this, when I so want to create a reaction in viewers (or readers) through my art.  I had this great revelation of 'Hey, someone recognizes the same thing that I do!' about shared emotion, which was followed by thinking of how that would be a great basis for successful art, which was followed by the let down (similar to what I would imagine C.S. Lewis experienced in the story I referenced) of realizing that, no, reaction in not what makes art famous or memorable.  So I'm going to be fighting against the tide.  But I'm ok with that-- honestly, it was never really happy, comfortable feelings I wanted to invoke anyway.

Empathy

"Those who did it often, on the other hand, lived for that alone.  The felt so good that their lips were sealed as if they were tombs, because they knew that their lives depended on their discretion.  they never spoke of their exploits, they confided in no one, they feigned indifference [...] They formed a secret society, whose members recognized each other all over the world without need of a common language, which is why Florentino Ariza was not surprised by the girl's reply: she was one of them, and therefore she knew that he knew that she knew."

--Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez  (paperback edition p. 183)

Empathy.  Knowing they know that I know that they know......and so on.  A wise friend told me that of the 10 people who want to help people with a specific kind of pain or brokenness, 9 have experience the same pain or been broken the same way themselves.  I believe that is more true and more far reaching than most people ever realize.

We, as people, want others to know how we feel.  Or to know that they absolutely do NOT know how we feel.  Our friendships and tastes are based on empathetic urges- 'does this thing or this person speak in terms I know to be true from my own experience?'  I read somewhere once that most musical singles are about love or sex or heartbreak: experiences that are universally the same, no matter how different we each want to believe them to be when they are happening to us.  (I banned Jewel at work forever and ever when I was going through a break-up.  Self-identifying with Jewel was a bad couple weeks *laughing*).

So I wonder, is it powerful omni-present empathy that emanates and defines great works of art and literature?  If we all want to be spoken to in our own secret language, are tastes defined by the empathetic projections of creators everywhere?

As I thought about empathy and about the 'secret societies' I have seen and been a part of in my life (and if you don't agree that these are pervasive, think.  I'm sure you know at least one woman who always seems to find 'that kind of guy'-  That guy is feeling something from her before he even knows her, and he is twisting it to his advantage), I would love to think that the most successful artists and writers hit the public on some unseen common empathetic note.  That they make us feel something, deep in our souls, and that as a reward for seeing that fundamental note in humanity they rise to be known, venerated.  However, I hardly think that is the case.

I think empathy makes people uncomfortable.  Privacy, especially in the days of the internet, is a luxurious comfort.  If we know that someone knows how we feel, they have violated a part of our world.  Our private world.  And so, where a work might inspire introspection, more often tastes and popularity are determined by status and artifice, and where a work might have even once had a great empathetic insight, popularity dilutes it with shallow intellect and quotes out of context.  I am reminded of an postscript in C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters in which the author learns, second-hand, that his analysis of human nature and sin, was being recommended as a book that would be good to reference in a interview, and being chosen to read from that list because it was the shortest.

So what happens if I want to connect at an empathetic level through art?  What happens if I try to inspire empathy for a specific situation or set of problems through a painting?  Will the language of the secret society win out?  Or is it not even worth the trouble to try, relying instead on clinical detachedness?

I went into examining this subject hopeful and excited- I am good at empathizing, and it seemed to me to make all the sense in the world if empathy was what drew people to art.  If I could use it to have some degree of influence on the priorities and the opinions of others.  But the more I think of it, the more I remember the intrinsic horror of secret societies, or intrusive knowledge.

Regardless, it feels good to know my experience of a language of silent feeling is not isolated.  

-the work of a skilled craftsman-

I will be the first to admit that art seems like the least important of things I could do with my time.  It feels self-serving and, some days, narcissistic and valueless.  Like shouting into the void.  Particularly as a Christian.  I can't shake the feeling from when I was a kid that art just wasn't something that God wanted or had any use for.

As an adult, in a very different kind of church, I have heard all of the teachings on artists being leaders in society and it therefore being important to have followers of Jesus in the arts; the teachings on art as a form of worship; and the teachings on the creative spirit of God being expressed through the artist.  None of that ever connected with me, and, honestly, I'm not ever planning to make preachy art or art specifically about God or done in a time of worship (which in my mind implies a time without critique).....so, why, as a Christian, is art as worth my time as many of the other things I do?  After all, even going to work has a more biblical basis.

Then I remembered the temple and the tabernacle.  When I read the Bible through for the first time, I made myself read the temple plans-- each and every time they occur-- and the instructions for the tabernacle word for word.  I was blown away by the phrase 'the work of a skilled craftsman'.  I'm not sure how many times that phrase occurs (and phrases naming specific crafts like perfumers, embroiders etc.) in Exodus, but every time, it indicates something made well, something beautiful, and something that God deemed necessary.  He named artists of the day specifically, over and over again.

At the beginning of the text, the Lord says to Moses, 'I have given skill to all the craftsmen to make everything I have commanded you.' (Exodus 31:6)  I don't know what I want to make, what I should make, or even if I have been commanded to make anything.  But I know the Lord and how He often works in people.  I think it unlikely He meant 'I have supernaturally endowed these people right now with heretofore unknown skills which they have never practice and now I would like them to use those skills for the first and only time to make something important, you know just a little bit important like the dwelling place of Most Holy God.'  I find it much more likely that He meant He had provided these skills for the craftsmen over a lifetime, shaping them to be ready for this significant task through practice and hard work-- in a sense, destining them for it.

Even Jesus practiced a craft this way: carpentry, learning how wood works and how to bend it to your will (in a natural way) is not quick or easy.  (btw how cool would it be to have been descended from someone in Nazareth and get to tell all your friends, 'Oh, yeah, the kitchen table?  Yeah, it's cool.  My great-great-great-great.....grandmother's neighbor made it.  Yeah, his name was Jesus.  It's no big thing.')

So maybe practicing my craft should take a higher priority.  Maybe not maybe.  Maybe for sure.  Because God can use it--He, after all, values beauty too.

breathe in breathe out

Every day I take in entirely too much information.  I remember it, I process it (sometimes), I store it.....

And then what?

Lately, the information just stays there.  At best it gets bounced off a roommate or a boyfriend or a best friend or a cat.  The cat prefers I utilize options a-c to their fullest.  I have found that I have forgotten how to breathe out information in a meaningful way.  At one time, I would have said this state of affairs was absolutely toxic; maybe it was.  Now, it is simply heavy.  My mind gets enamoured with all the details of lives and opinions and facts from, for and about others, and I forget that I too can contribute.  I should contribute.  Like animals and plants.  Animals (including we humans) breathe in a mixture of various gases, use the oxygen and breathe out the carbon dioxide.  Plants do just the opposite in a sense.  For life, we all need to breathe in and breathe out.

So starting small.  A blog.  Little posts, little writings, little artworks until I regain my 'lung capacity'.  I hope and pray that before long, there will be some air worth breathing in here.