Author, Artist, Seeker, Explorer

State of the Oak Trees

Posted on October 17, 2012

>>> October 17, 2012 Audio Diary:  click here <<<

The story of the oak trees in our yard and how they’re inspiring me today.

Categories: Dear Diary

Objects

Posted on October 11, 2012

The sale of our house in Santa Monica will be final this Tuesday. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but we are still clearing a few things out. Today I found a handful of silverware and two tupperware containers in one of the kitchen drawers for goodness sake! I’ve moved so many times, and have always considered myself such a pro – pro packer, pro mover, pro organizer, pro unpacker, pro homesteader. But this particular move, for some reason, has felt like a long piece of taffy that just keeps getting pulled farther out. Even after the final piece of paper is deposited into the final file on Tuesday and the house is no longer in our name there will be more transition-related details to attend to. The work of being fully settled up north isn’t quite finished, and I have been moving through this entire experience accepting it as a different kind of journey from one home to another – different in its length and depth and breadth, in its hue and texture and flavor.

I spent all of yesterday doing work around the house in Santa Barbara, and this involved everything from working on a slow drain in our bathtub to dusting the shelves in my studio top to bottom. I got one of our closets better organized and hung a few more items on our walls. I emptied the trash everywhere. I (finally) put away a few items that had been sitting in my studio, items that weren’t in the way, per se, but were in the way visually. They were just there, and now that they aren’t the whole room feels lighter. Once that particular task was finished and my shelves were sparkling clean, I felt, for the first time since we moved, that my studio was finished. My desk is clear, the area around my easel spacious. I even put a new ready-to-paint panel on it, just to make it as easy as possible to try to learn how to use a paintbrush again whenever the inspiration strikes me.

Cleaning my shelves – which involved taking everything off of each shelf so it could be dusted – was kind of like flipping through a three-dimensional scrapbook of my life. I handled my collection of vintage books – found all over the world – and tiny bowls of tiny seashells I found as a little girl. I dusted off a vintage toy elephant, a wooden cigar box, and a diorama by this artist. I re-arranged my bird’s nests, a few photographs and a small stack of match boxes that my grandpa brought back from Japan. I held each object carefully and thought about what it meant to me – where it came from, why it was meaningful to me. Everything held a different memory, telling the story of my life in tiny snippets small enough to fit in my hand.

The objects in my home – artwork, pictures, even dishes – have changed bit by bit with every move. Each home has been a blank canvas – a new opportunity to try out different arrangements, make room for something new and carve out space for whatever I can’t part with. What an extraordinary and deeply personal project it is to create a space that reflects all that I cherish most – which is always, in the end, memories. It is the stories behind these objects, not the objects themselves. All the more reason to pull them out from time to time, one by one, to dust off, hold in my hand, and say a prayer of thanks for.

Categories: Dear Diary

Updates of a Mundane Sort

Posted on October 9, 2012

Many apologies for any of you subscribed to this blog, as you may have been inundated with a long scroll of archived entries popping up in your feed. When I transferred everything over to the new site, all of my photos went haywire or disappeared. While I felt a lit bit bonkers for taking the time to go through well over a hundred entries to tidy everything up, I was having a hard time with the idea of a big part of this website being such a mess. It would have been like moving into our new house and setting up every room except one, and leaving that last room a jumbled pile of boxes, bags and whatnot.

I decided to approach this somewhat tedious project as a virtual scrapbooking endeavor. There are a number of stories, images and musings I’ve posted since 2005 that I would like to keep intact, so this website can be a fairly comprehensive overview of my work over the past nearly eight years. I might pull some of my favorite entries over from my previous blog over the next few weeks as well, as many entries didn’t even make it over to the new site this past August. The nice thing about that project is that it can be done slowly, over time. For the photo formatting on the entries that are already over here, it felt better to power through them and get everything in good working order once and for all.

In other news, our Santa Monica house sold (holla!), and all will be final in exactly one week. We’re still tying up all the remaining loose ends down there, and once it is all finished we will release a huge sigh of relief. It was a good house, that one. It was a good house.

Categories: Mundania

Surrender

Posted on October 4, 2012

I have been dealing with fierce resistance to most digital activities, this new website in particular. It all got up and running fairly easily, but then all the images from my blog archives up and vanished, and I haven’t had the brain space to try to delve into that. Part of this is because of travel and the continuation of our transition from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara and part of it is because I’m not entirely convinced it is a worthwhile endeavor to figure out how to get all those images back where they belong. Is anyone really going to be reading my archives? I am tempted to unload them all more than to try solving the mystery of my image disappearance. It’s a new website, right? So maybe it is time to release all the writings I’ve accumulated since 2005 and move forward with a clean slate.

Beyond that little snag, I have also felt at a loss as to what I ought to be writing about. This year has been about transition – about moving and my husband’s retirement and changes in family dynamics. It has not been about writing a book or planning an art show or getting my passport stamped. And while it is tempting to turn this into a “Finding My Way to the Quieter Life” kind of narrative, my journey as of late has simply felt too personal to share here. Not because it is bad, but because I am still figuring things out, still deep in the tangles of an unknown forest, unsure of where I am going and even more unsure of how I’m supposed to get there (wherever it is I am supposed to be headed.) I wrote here about embracing my work as a Student of Stillness, and I am, indeed, savoring this process, but there are all kinds of other things churning beneath the surface as I take more time to slice an apple, hang a picture and play with Tilda. There are details in my family and my marriage and in the fact of our brand new zip code that are all still working themselves out, and I am consistently being confronted with the choice to slide into an abysmal depression or look up to the sky and rise to the challenges, whatever they may be. I am teetering, truth be told, but doing my best to choose light, to choose softness, to choose – most of all – to surrender.

Around eight years ago, the rug was pulled out from under me when a business partnership and license deal fell to pieces. It was a time of uncertainty, unknown and upheaval, as it coincided with our move from Santa Barbara to Santa Monica and a whole new life. Despite all the anger and resistance I was feeling about all of it, I knew deep down that I had to trust that the losses I was experiencing were happening so that something else – something that was mean to be – had the space it needed to take root and grow. That something else turned out to be mixed media work and writing, my blog and my work in this community, work that likely could not have happened had that Big Deal gone through.

While I am not experiencing the recent changes in my life with the same level of resentment and frustration of that particular chapter, I do find myself going back to the same place in my heart that got me through it, the one that keeps saying, “Trust, trust.” The difference this time is that I’m letting that trust float freely. In 2004 my trust had a very specific target – it was trust that Something Better Will Reveal Itself, and that Something was related to my work. This time around I’m trying not to box it in and not to give it an agenda. This time around the trust isn’t directed any farther than the moment I’m experiencing and the breath that carries me through it. It is trust in what is front of me, and trust in the unknown ahead.

“…Around the age of fifty, my ideals and values began to change. Now I see great value in laziness, understood as giving up both effort and the attempt to justify my life. I have come to appreciate the teaching I have found in many religions that praises holy ignorance. And I have been discovering how to live with little consciousness…The most remarkable statement James Hillman ever made about the soul is that the soul leads us into unconsciousness, and that for our own benefit. When we fall in love or become absorbed in work or are seized by a powerful depression, we lose control and perspective. The soul takes over and from a dimmer place takes the lead. We don’t know exactly what we are doing or whether we should be doing it. By remaining in this psychic fog, we may end up in a place we have been searching for all our lives…For the imagination to flourish, we may have to surrender, as do artists of all kinds, to a looser life and a more liberated imagination. We may have to say words and make things while not knowing what is going on. We may have to become somebody we never intended to be. We may have to let life happen in a way that challenges our plans, our values, and our hopes.”  ~ Thomas Moore.

Categories: Dear Diary

{Slowly Coming Back}

Posted on October 1, 2012

I am very slowly but surely getting back into the swing of things after a big east coast journey. I’d like to begin my online re-entry by letting you know about the latest offering from the lovely and amazing Jen Lee. I took one of her classes at last month’s Squam Art Workshops and am thrilled to be participating in her 7-week Story Academy. It officially kicked off today but you can still register!

Categories: News + Miscellany

{Hello}

Posted on September 17, 2012

I’m dealing with some technical issues, so my latest Audio Diary and photos will have to wait a bit longer before I can get them over here. I had to steal the above photo from my bestie (the second time in a week I’ve highjacked her beautiful pictures!)

For now, I’d like to share two things…

1.  Registration for the March 2013 Matrilumina Event is now open and spaces are filling!

2.  What I shared on Facebook yesterday:  Sometimes the love is so strong and powerful I think I might burst.

More soon…

Categories: News + Miscellany

The Day She Became My Dog

Posted on September 7, 2012

>>> September 7, 2012 Audio Diary:  click here <<<

I recorded this story this morning using my Voice Memo feature on my iPhone – which is what I’ve been using so far – but the recording was too long to email. I then tried to sync the voice memos to my computer, but it refused to cooperate (and a little online research tells me I’m not the only to have run into this particular snag.) Not to be defeated, I pulled out my Blue Snowball microphone and recorded the recording that way. There’s a teeny glitch in the beginning, but after that it all came through intact.

So after much fuss and frustration, I hereby present not A Tilda Story, but THE Tilda Story.

{Click on the arrows on the sides of the images to see the entire Tilda Gallery.}

Categories: Dear Diary