I'm a Painter Too

It is funny talking about what I do in my days, because it is mostly based on paying someone for the luxury of time and ideas. I hire an expert when I paint, write, play guitar, look deeply into my psyche so they can push me deeper. Thinking about it makes me both proud that I forge on and embarrassed that I need so much help (and at the expense).

At Tuesday's painting, Nancy (the teacher) suggested I commit to smoother blocks of color. Professor Joel Sheesley used to say the same about my pencil marks, to make confident lines that hold. It applies to music too, Sean saying start at the end of the count, keep playing, sing on clue, all in sync with him.

I'd like to be more committed to the spaces around those places, the ones where we are out playing, where I ask questions of my neighbors, the thinking in the car where I can sit and listen to my kids tell stories. It takes intentional silence for me to hear.

The best moments this week are in the fact that I don't have it together. Isaac and I sitting in the dealership for 2 hours playing with magnetic frogs. I don't have to stress about not making food, a messy toilet bowl, because the seat is clean enough. I am showing up and ok with imperfection, with people being disappointed. I continue to consider how when people try to play at being their own "god," they expect everyone else to respond to their emotions. It is fraught with them being discontent and me always failing them (because I can't perfectly please them all the time, and if I try, I am no longer me but an attempted copy robot like copy of them).

I just don't want to live myself as disappointed. I want to live as glad for sunshine, for a moment on the step of my neighbor sharing a cancer story, anticipating David's music recital at 1:45 where he will play the kettle drum, knowing Isaac gets an hour with Maureen all by himself, which he loves.

I did begin a painting on Wednesday night all my own of water and a dock. I kept thinking I would add two little bodies sitting with backs to me at the end. I still might, but my husband said no. He really liked it and said keep making them and we can put them up all over the house. I enjoy that it is my own and I can't help but love that it delights him as well.

Oil Paints

I went with two friends to my first painting class, since before kids. It in the Ann Arbor Art Studio, which I thought was like a one room school-house, but upon arrival I found it was three floors and filled with sculptors, printmakers, jewelers and the like. The ceramics crew cat called with, Ceramics is Better. On introduction to our class, we were told Acrylics were like first impressions and there was no room to change or discover. Our teacher's passion is for the journey.

She stated early that the education was a dialogue and that she would work with us, but we had to talk back. This was quickly true as she engaged with me about how I see and what I see and drew over my page. I was torn in the yes, tell me, the no, I disagree and then the "Oh no, what is she going to tell the next person."

Graduating Three's

My son is three and graduating into the 4's pre-school class. They had a slide show, got diplomas and yes, wore caps. Maybe I don't need to save for college after all. Maybe he knows everything he needs to be my side-kick forever. Isaac stays close, manages around my chaos and has endless patience for waiting.

He and his best friend sang "Let it Go," with all the passion of the original version and the words to match! They claim each other as best friends. I have to wonder what makes friends so insistent on seeing each other. Is it that they are together 5 4 to 5 times a week, their shared interests, the sense that two can exist as themselves in the same space. These boys do laps around any object or interior loop, fake laugh in the car next to each other and give great hugs. Half the time you hear one calling the other's name and when its time to leave even after several hours, there is resistance.

I wonder what it is? Could it be a child's sense of the immediate? I continue to ponder life as an adult, with regulations and boundaries and support networks. Those who seem most satisfied are about deep relationships with themselves and others. I sorta long to throw a tantrum when I have to leave my friend Karen's house  (and thus linger slightly too long) or to sit for days with a friend in Chicago, or to avoid talking on the phone, because I won't want to hang up or have to deal with the other distractions simultaneously. I think that the gift and joy for these boys is that they can just be together with no qualifications and it's beautiful. I long for it for them and for myself and will continue to order my chaos for better chances at this!

Blessed journeying!

The work is not the work?

I am sitting writing. I want to have a great short story or novel that someone else can read and be changed by or find rest in, or experience some pleasure in knowing another character as a true friend.
I am reworking a story/narrative that has a female preacher, because I want to be one. I don't want to give personal testimony (because the words feel stale) and I don't even feel qualified to interpret the bible, nor to my shame, do I spend much time trying, but I want to say something that makes people believe in God and themselves as his children and live! Yesterday I felt the opposite, struggling to prepare a snack and wanting to sleep.

As I scribble now, I keep thinking, but I should be working. My friend Melissa said the same thing last night. [She feels to me like one whose existence somewhat makes my own more important.] She has been living her dream of writing in Thailand, yet she too wonders if she is really doing the work she is supposed to be doing. Being content in working and living out my calling, I have to fight the critic that says you'll never be enough and its someone else's fault and out of my control, so I should just quit already. My counter for right now is that wherever I am, I am enough.

But that too is false. I'm not enough, but Christ is, he has to be! Then as I doubt, I cry it out, "Please be enough!"

I ordered a new traveling guitar [because my other one isn't enough] that will be easy to transport, and I obsess about where it is in the postal system and when it will arrive, but I fear that like when I picked up my last Seagull acoustical guitar, the minute I get it, I will stop playing. My fear is that the object will take all my attention and I will miss out on my fingers picking at its strings. I still feel guilty because I play mellow life stories, and nothing connected with Jesus. The conflict tears my in two and I consider not playing. Is this tension my conscience telling me to change, or a demon trying to get me to give up trying?

My adult self can look at all of this and say again, "I'm free from worrying about failing. I will fail and look up to Jesus for his knowing and loving and hope for me and then go on and fail again." I can also play music, and tell stories and now matter the content, it speaks to who God is or who he isn't. My work is to keep at the work of listening, because Christ is no longer a pile of bones and strips of fabric rotting in a dark cave and therefore, neither am I. Asking myself the question the angel asked Mary, "Why am I looking for the living among the dead?" I am free to sit and write or not write about a female preacher or a homeless heroin adict as I seek to know what it means to be known by Christ.

What Happened to Sophie Wilder? (Really!!)

I stepped into The Common Cup Coffee shop, and discovered the artist, Tess Smith. She has these beautiful watercolor paintings that blur the lines of animals in action and the splattered colors of the camouflaged spaces they embody. She is interested in a split second when they are in motion, landing, shifting and blurring our vision with their presence. The one I can't stop staring at is and old soul kine of octopus who is letting off ink. I imagine the huge circular quiet face disappearing in purple brown liquid, hiding from whatever is near.

There is an article my therapist referenced recently about when a person gets stressed, something in their brain changes, making the person want to avoid all adventure, to make the person want to go into hiding. I have felt like that this week, avoiding my closest friends, continuing to function robotically, while also wanting to shut down. When I asked my partner for advice, he suggested I stop doing certain things, to which I responded, that if I did say no, it wouldn't help because the actual requirements of my day could not change. So do I want to stay this way? To be safe and stuck and justifiable to my own disappointing plight?

Part of my struggle is that when around other people, I make them central, I make their subjective reality greater then my own (in essence I blow them up and shrink myself down). I hate even writing this because I fear that the people I long to connect with most will think they should not engage with me, because they want to protect me from what I do when around anyone. I want to read and do what would make YOU feel good or affirmed, but I give up a lot in squelching my own subjective reality. It is very emptying. Thus when my closest friends call, I don't know who I am in order to pick-up and say hello. When people with great needs pounce or even strangers show up, I instead offer them everything I can, because it feels safer to make them so big, I don't have to deal with what I am doing.

I recently read Andre Acimen's A Conversation with my Deaf Mother in the New Yorker, and am struck by how his mother's training in pretending she could hear stunted her learning on complex processing of data. The woman had difficulty connecting dots and seeing how something might evolve. I find the idea fascinating as I consider my own hangups. Yesterday my heather would not turn on. I could have looked at the furnace, youtubed possible problems and fix, but I didn't, I couldn't believe I would know how to process it. Instead I called someone else who I believe has a brain that can understand Furnaces. I also have difficulty deciding to commit to new plays in Bridge, to bidding on points and feeling more comfortable with the chances of winning big over the security of staying safe. But safety doesn't satisfy me when I reflect back on it.

Last night I finished Christopher Beha's novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder. In it, he considers Sophie Wilder's life's end and consciously chooses not to decide it, because he can't. As an artist, I believe he knows that life and death are viable options on any given day. Based on who [i.e. the reader] is in each characters head, a decision has to be made [i.e. the reader has to make it]. As I am writing this, I suddenly know what happened (or is happening) and now that I think about it, I suppose everyone who reads it does too. It stems from one's own sense of God, either as a destroyer or a lover. Because of sin and how I can't possibly save myself, I can choose to force my own end, or to look for a bigger source for help! That's it!

While Sophie does not know if she can be forgiven for a classified unforgivable sin, I do know. The author brings up Judas Iscariot and how Judas had no choice in betraying Christ and is condemned, but even in that, I choose to believe he is able to repent and be forgiven (except that none of that is up to me, thank goodness). The sense that it is better that he never be born, may be in the moments he has to deal with himself, which for each of us (Christ himself on the cross and separated from God), the notion of our own shit seems too great to the point we can't bear it. I guess the question is did Judas in life or after, decide to trust in Christ? The reality Christopher writes is that we could not exist without God is in this world (in our lives). We have souls outside of our shell-like bodies.

I would encourage you to read it while even now wondering if I am capable of understanding what living in Christ's death for me and choosing life in him on earth and after looks like! I suppose for me, it means continuing to seek out his face, his image in things and people and history, with some serious petitions of God to support me in seeing who he is and believing I am capable of learning somethings new!

Stopping in Mid-Sentence

I have packed myself in, reading books about the land for book clubs, books by authors speaking at Calvin's Writing Conference, books to spur me on in new endeavors. I am full of characters and stories and real survival of others, while forgetful of phones and tasks and streams of conversation. I am franticly speeding to school, events and commitments and somehow I find that when I sit down, I am unable to get back up. Yesterday I considered calling someone for help, even though I knew that was absurd. What is happened to me? I can always will myself to my feet, be pulled by little hands, but yesterday was hard.

The voice I heard while sitting was God's words as he spoke to Job, saying who are you in light of me? Who made you? Who knows you? Who formed the entire space wherein you dwell. I also imagined my mom arriving late to my games, but always on a path, going from one moment, one child, one prayer meeting, one meal to the next. She was always moving, but also holding onto a book a knitting project ready for the stagnant patches in between.

I know what I need to do is stay on the ground, lean into the quiet, but somehow all I want to do is dart forward, find some intertia to keep me in perpetual activity. If I move, then I won't get stuck again on the floor, wasting precious minutes. I drive longing for more books, a new pair of jeans, a space to run in? Why? Why do I think we should drive the family to Chicago for 2 days, sign up for more camps, find play dates and adventures to keep me from stopping?