My Groups

OK, so I maybe haven't done a very good job promoting the yahoo groups. I used to have a couple more, but they languished, as many of these groups tends to do. The three I have now--The Art Journal, The Creative Life, and Altered Artwear--are all doing well. The Creative Life is the least lively, and I'd like help in changing that, as there's a lot of potential. I need others to pitch out ideas for conversations--in all of the groups, really. That's what they're for:  to talk about the things we love.


Anyway--I rearranged the sidebar over there and made some links so you can just click and join those groups. You have to be approved, but jeez:  you just send me a note so I know you're not a spambot, and you're in. 


Jump in!

Podcast with Art Therapist Karen Wallace

Talking with Karen Wallace was eye-opening for me. I've never had therapy (quit that! I heard you mumbling, "Duh. Like we can't tell.") and am not much for ruminating or trying to figure out what I feel about stuff. But her approach to figuring out what's holding you back in your pursuit of time in the studio is down-to-earth and makes perfect sense. As I said this past weekend, it made me realize some of my own avoidance strategies.


Shoe shopping, for instance. Yikes.


Karen and I are going to be doing more together, so stay tuned. She's got a lot to offer, and if you've got questions about art therapy, let us know.


Now get yourself a sheet of paper and something to write with and settle back to listen to Karen. 


As always, there are several ways you can listen. There's this little player, below (and isn't it groovy? Libsyn, the podcast host, did a bunch of changing this past weekend, and now there's this player that I didn't even have to tweak--that was always my least favorite part of posting podcasts, and now I no longer have to do it--yay!), or you can go here, or you can click on the podcast link over there in the sidebar.


Enjoy~~

This Week's Give-Away: Strathmore Visual Journals!

Oh, my little chickadees! Do I have a treat for y'all this week! Jeanette Gile, marketing person for Strathmore, contacted me a while back after reading here of my frustration with the new journals. She offered to send me a selection to test. Since I don't do watercolor or collage in my journals, I told her I wasn't the best one to test these, and she said she'd send them anyway and I could give them away here on the blog. Wow! What a wonderful person~~this was an excellent idea! 


She sent me three (I already gave away one of the drawing journals, here): watercolor, mixed media, and bristol. Look! She even put orange tissue paper in the box! Is this woman cool or what?

OK. I thought about how best to do this. At first I thought I'd have three drawings, with three winners. But I could see one or two of the winners just putting the books up on a shelf somewhere, and that would defeat the whole purpose for Jeanette's sending these to me. I want it to be fun, of course, but I also want it to be useful to as many people as possible, so here's what we're going to do--there are some strings attached this time around.


In order to put your name in the hat for these three journals, you have to:


1) Be a member of my online group, theartjournal. Easy peasy--just go here and sign up if you haven't already joined us. (There's also a link over there in the sidebar.)


2) You have to agree to really test these journals, trying out a variety of media in each one. Give them a workout! And keep notes about it.


3) Take photos of your experiments.


4) Share your results. I want you to share them on your own blog, if you have one. Also with theartjournal group, of course. And with Jeanette and Strathmore--I'll give you the email address for that. She welcomes feedback, and we're hoping that everyone's feedback will result in even better visual journals. 


OK? So it's going to be a little work--if you win, you're going to have to really play in these. No putting them on a shelf! We'll all be waiting for your reports. You don't have to do fine collages and wonderful paintings or anything--you can just do a whole slew of swatch tests of all your markers and pens and paints and glues and stuff. It doesn't have to be lovely--it just needs to be extensive. Carry them around with you, see how the pages and covers hold up. You know. We'll want to know your favorite one and why.


Three journals, one of each kind. 5.5" x 8" The last page of each may have my own pen test marks in it, but you won't mind, right?


Post a comment and check back. I'll pick on Friday. Good luck, and thanks, Jeanette!


XO

Escaping from Your Fabulous Life

I overslept this morning and woke up feeling fuzzy and disoriented, and there wasn't even anything to blame it on--no late night (I turned off the lights at 1 am, just like I usually do), no wine (still living without that), no drama. Maybe I'll blame it on the cool damp weather. As I sat in bed with Moe in my lap and that first cup of coffee, the ideas began to come, slowly, and then with increasing speed. How can I describe it to you? You know that scene in The Green Mile (one of our favorite movies ever) where John Coffee tilts back his head and the flies/bees/winged demons from hell pour of of his mouth? 


Like that, but they're pouring *into* my head. But wait! Then they turn into glittering iridescent dragonflies, but sparkling and twinkling, like fireflies. In my head. And I'm in there, too, standing with my head tilted back, watching them as more and more pour in and swirl around me, twinkling and glittering and sparkling, and I know I need to grab my net and try to capture them. But I can't--I'm just overwhelmed.


And suddenly, out of nowhere, it hits me: I want to go to the mall and look at shoes.


Huh? What's this? I *hate* the mall. Plus I have more shoes--and bags--than any woman has any reason to own, ever. And as I sit with this--normally I'd get up and go do something else, to distract myself, but Moe is in my lap, happy and purring, and I don't disturb them if I can help it--I realize Something Huge.


Yesterday I did a podcast with Karen Wallace, which I'll get up later today--I'd put it here, but she deserves her own post, so come back later. Karen is an art therapist, and she talked about a workshop she did last month at Valley Ridge. Omigod:  Valley Ridge! It must have been fabulous, indeed.


Now, y'all know I'm not a touchy-feely kind of person--I'm not into delving into feelings and exploring my psyche and talking about how I feel--I have a really hard time even *knowing* how I feel, much less trying to articulate that. But Karen did a little exercise with me (which you'll get to do when you listen to the podcast), and it was easy and not vee-vee-woo-woo at all, and she talked about the ways we experience resistance. She works with a lot of artists who have blocks or who are stuck, and she talked about paying attention to how we feel when it's time to go into the studio, how we may find ourselves suddenly needing to fold clothes or mow the lawn or start dinner.


Or go to the mall and look at OMIGOD shoes!


And it made sense to me, even though I didn't think it had anything to do with me. I am not a procrastinator, and I don't feel stuck. I get a ton of stuff done every day, and I meet deadlines and cross things off my to-do list. So it had nothing to do with me, right?


But then this morning, when that thing happened--that swarm of glittering, gorgeously sparkling ideas filled my head--and I was sitting there thinking, as I always do, "How will I ever capture all of these and bring them to life?"--I suddenly found myself wondering if Dillard's got in their new shipment of Born boots for fall. 


And this time I was awake enough to go, "Whoa. How did *that* happen?" And because Moe was in my lap and I couldn't jump up and go do something else, feeling all scattered and psycho and like a loser because I have, apparently, developed Post-Menopausal ADHD, I had to sit there. "Sit with it," as they say. 


I realized that this happens all the time:  when things are going well and I'm filled with ideas and things I want to do, I keep getting this urge to go buy stuff. Now, this may not seem strange if you're someone who likes to go buy stuff all the time, but that's not me:  I can go for months and months without buying anything but the necessities--ink cartridges, notebooks, hair color. And then, suddenly, I find myself buying shoes. Or bags. Or not buying them, but going to look at them. Fondle them. Try them on. Imagine wearing them with various other things, some of which I might also need to go look at. 


Here's what I'm realizing, even as I type this:  my life is pretty great right now. I'm getting to do a bunch of stuff I've wanted to do for a long time. I'm getting to learn some new stuff, and I'm seeing some opportunities that might arise, if I can figure out how to do some other stuff. There are lots and lots of things I want to do, and some of them are daunting, and some of them will just take a lot of hard work, and some of them are just pure fun (still a lot of work, but not really *hard* work). All together, all of this can be just overwhelming. Where to start? What to do next? How to try to get it all done? And what's most timely? What opportunities need to be pursued right now, before they fade away? 


And so when the glittering, sparkling ideas fill my head, instead of reaching for first one, then another, and letting them light on my finger as I write them down, I freak, standing there, staring at them, and then bolting.


For the mall. Where I can walk through the neat aisles, surrounded by subtle scents and bright lights and canned music and the smell of leather and perfume, and everything else fades away--the buzzing, the glittering, the ideas swooping and swirling. And I and my crazy brain become just normal.


For you, it might not be shopping. It might be watching tv. Surfing the web. Talking on the phone. Eating chocolate. Reading. What is it for you, that thing you do when you feel overwhelmed by the possibilities of your life? When you have time to work on a painting or draw in your sketchbook, do you suddenly find yourself baking a pan of brownies? Do you remember you need to scrape the soap scum off the bottom of the bathtub? Clean the oven? Walk the dog? Call your sister? Change the oil in the truck? 


I realize that when I go out into the world and shop, I feel normal for a little while. The ideas rush out of my brain--you can't entertain both a swarm of ideas AND clever merchandising ploys, not at the same time. The buzzing stops, the ideas swarm out just like the flies out of John Coffee's mouth. My brain goes, "Oooh, look! Pretty clogs! Soft!" just as if I'd given it a rattle and a chocolate weetabix. 


So what's your escape? I want you to pay attention and see what it is that your own brain is using as an escape when the ideas flow in and you're overwhelmed with the possibilities to make and do and be. Shopping? Eating? Media? Facebook? 


Come back later. Bring your notebook and a pen and listen to Karen. There's more here to think about, and this weekend seems like a pretty good time to start. I know I'm going to be making a lot of notes, so join me, OK?


XO

Hey, Annette L!

How about some Ice Resin, along with some little bezel-y things, for you? I figure if The Creative Muse lifted her head, you shouldn't have to wait until after the holidays to entertain her. 


Send me your address, and I'll get this in the mail next time I brave the lines at the post office~~


Congratulations!

Hey, Caatje!

I know, I know--after every time I do an International Give-Away Mailing, I come home gritching and swear I'm never going to do it again. I SEE why magazines charge so much for overseas subscriptions--holy moly!


But I can't resist sending this copy of Somerset Studio to someone who can't go out to the store and buy it, because that's just wrong. So, Caatje, send me your name and address, and I'll get this in the mail to you next time I go to the PO. 


Congratulations!

Susan Lenart Kazmer in Paris!

Susan and I were talking at Art Unraveled in Phoenix in August, and she was telling me about teaching again in Paris and how I should go. Oh, sure--I'd just hope on the plane and go with them! Right. 

But wait! I *could* go to Paris with them, at least via Skype! Maybe I can't walk along the Parisian streets or taste the cafe au lait, but I do get to sit in a Parisian cafe and talk about clothes. Oooh, la, la! And now you get to come along, too--you can hear the waiters banging around and talking in the background, and you can imagine the jazz musicians Susan heard and smell the fresh-baked bread in the kitchen right behind us. Come along and listen to Susan talk about exploring one of her favorite cities--let it be yours, too~~


You can listen to the podcast with the little player below, or you can go to Notes from the Voodoo Lounge on iTunes, or you can go over there in the sidebar or go to my blog page at libsyn.com. Wow--all those ways to listen!




Then you might want to watch Susan in action--here's a little video of her at Art Unraveled talking about her Ice Resin journal pages:




Does Ice Resin sound like something you'd want to try? Ahhhh--are you in luck! Susan and her right-hand marketing guru and all-round fabulous person, Jen Cushman, thought you might be interested in giving it a try, so they hooked me up with this awesome give-away:

 package of Susan's very own Ice Resin. Go here to find out more about it and to buy some now, if you can't wait for Friday.

and two of her bezels with cool little metal gears for embedding.


Wow! Is that cool or what?




So listen, watch, go check out the website, and then post a comment. Check back on Friday, and good luck!

This Week's Give-Away: Somerset Studio with Katie Kendrick

I don't know about everyone else, but my copy of Somerset Studio was late, late, late. It's not the fault of the magazine--they're as frustrated as everyone else. 


But it's here now, and I have an extra copy to share. This issue has my profile of Katie Kendrick, who's just fabulous. I want to go live in her closet--she alters all her clothes, making this from that and that from two of those. I LOVE her style and want to go watch her work. Plus she's just nice, you know? It's always great to work with someone about whom you can say that honestly.


Go here to see Katie's work.


OK, people. I've been trying forEVER to get the cover image uploaded so you can see what this issue looks like, and blogger isn't going to let it happen today. I even scanned IN the cover, in case it just didn't like the image I snatched from the website. But non. No photo upload this morning, dang it. Go here if you want to see the issue I'm giving away. I'll try again later to add the image--after blogger finishes its little snit and decides to play nice again. Sorry about that.

Anyway, so post a comment. I'll pick on Friday. You'll check back then. Although you might want to check back sooner--there's something else coming up this week that you might not want to miss out on--


Good luck!

Soldering 101: A Little Soldering Video

I realized I still had all my Soldering Stuff and thought I'd do a little video to give people an idea of what's involved. Not a comprehensive lesson, but an introduction:

Hey, Cody!

You win the Kitchen Tarot Deck--it was hard to choose this week because y'all all had wonderful reasons for wanting these in your lives. But Cody has a *bunch* of reasons, and I like knowing that these are going to be used and enjoyed. Wish I had a couple dozen decks to give away--in my next life, you know, I'll ask for that to happen.


Congratulations, Cody!


Thanks for playing--and don't forget to check back:  more amazing-ness lined up!


XO

Sometimes You Need a Do-Over

And, boy, howdy, I sure did with this video-format-uploading thang. So here's that same video, exported a different way. It's so pathetic, because when I realized last night that the quality of that first one was so much worse than the ones I've been doing lately, I thought, "Eh. Live and learn; you'll do it the other way next time." But every. Single. Time. I woke up during the night (and, honeys, those are legion), it's what was in my head: "crappy video, crappy video," and I knew sometime around 2:45 this morning that I was going to have to do it all over again today. Oh, not the whole video editing part! Good lord, no! But the format-uploading-I- don't-understand-at-all part? Yeah. That part.


So here it is. I don't expect you to watch it again. But if you just happen to be One Of Us and you watched it last night and went, "Ick, what lousy video quality! I wonder if I'll be able to live knowing this exists on the planet!" well, then. This is for you:

Tattoo You! You Had Questions? I Have Answers!

Huh. Leaf + Web.

I swear two things: 1) this leaf was not here when I wrote the last post and mentioned fall leaves and 2) I did not go out and put it there.

Nope. I noticed it while lying on my back doing sit-ups, a boring thing I do every day because the stronger the stomach muscles, the better off the back muscles, and the better off the back muscles, the better off the neck muscles, and. . . .


Who knew doing sit-ups could be so fortuitous? A fall leaf AND a spider web!


Sure, I could say, "Geez, I need to clean these windows!" But? Eh. I'd rather admire how the prism reflects that gorgeous yellow-green.


Only 120 more sit-ups to go--

Life is Not a Dress Rehearsal

That's a cliche, isn't it? As soon as I wrote it, I'm all like, "Ummmm. I think I've read that somewhere before." Oh, well. Let's use it anyway, shall we?

We've been watching all the seasons of Art 21: Art in the 21st Century. I Netflixed all of them on someone's recommendation--I can't even remember whose, but thank you! Because at first, we were loving these--The EGE, too. It was great to listen to the artists talk about their work, never mind that it was obvious from the way they talked that they'd all been to Art School, with a capital "A." 

[And let me say here that I am not impressed by art school. Oh, sure, I'm impressed by school. School is a wonderful thing. Education is a wonderful thing. You don't get two people like me and The EGE, whose parents drilled the importance of education into our heads from infancy, and then who went on to teach--we have, between us, 60 years combined teaching and substituting from first grade (he'll never do THAT again) through college--you don't get that and not think education is important. No. But art school? My god. What's up with art school? I know, I know. it's where you go and learn important stuff about art. But I've got to tell you: I've known lots and lots of artists of every skill level and every kind of inspiration. Some have been to art school. Many have not. And i guarantee that you can't look at the art and pick out which ones went and which ones didn't. It's not like those who went to art school are making Great Art and those who didn't are building things out of hot glue and pipe cleaners. But you can sure tell who's been and who hasn't been when they quit making the art and starting TALKING about the art, like in these episodes we've been watching. Holy moly. I'll take the non-art-school person any day to be stuck with in an elevator for an hour.]

But what struck me most--beyond the total stick-up-the-butt, esoteric monologue of the Art School Graduates--what struck both of us, actually--after the first season, was the Issues these artists have, issues that seem to be the overriding force driving their art. It got to the point, here at the end of the third season, that we could look at the artist and know what they were going to talk about. Women artists were bound to talk about the angst of being female and the things society has done to women and not understood about women. Black artists were going to talk about being black and the sense of fear and alienation that that engenders. At one point last night I turned to The EGE and asked, in all seriousness, "Do you go around all the time thinking about being black?"  

He looked at me the way he sometimes does, like surely The White Woman Who Lives in His House has lost her mind, and paused and said, "Uh. No." But if you're white and listening to these people, you have to wonder if that's what they do:  walk around all day thinking about Being Black. And then I began to wonder if it weren't some kind of schtick for these Art School People. They're black. Most of the patrons and customers and attendees at openings in New Yrok City are going to be white--not all, of course, but a bunch. And you want them to feel something when they look at your art, so why not lean really heavily on the things that wold be most foreign to them, the most exotic? Your deep and abiding angst at being black in a white America. Or at being female in a male-dominated culture where you're taught, from tiny girlhood, that men are dangerous and will rape you if you're not constantly vigilant?

And so I fast-forwarded through most of the 3rd seasons because, you know what? I'm tired of angst. I mean really, really, really tired of it. Also because both of us were doing so much eye-rolling I began to fear for the future of our vision.


I'm tired of people using their misery to make a point, or to get attention, or to bond with other miserable people. I'm tired of people hauling out their childhood from 50 years ago as an excuse for not being able to experience love and joy and productivity. I'm tired of people wearing their misery like a huge growth sticking out of the middle of their forehead so that you can't not notice it, but you can't notice it, either. It's like the elephant in the middle of the living room. It's there, and it's not going anywhere, but you kind of don't want to mention it to your hostess, less she think it's invisible.

And here's the part you've heard before, but you're going to hear it again--if not from me, from someone else. If you're a believer, you may really believe that life IS, indeed, a dress rehearsal, and that at the end of your life, you're going to be swept up into heaven where you'll sit at the right hand of god and walk on streets paved in gold and eat cavier, or however it goes, and so you don't really need to try to make the best use of THIS life, because it doesn't really count. You get a do-over.

If that's what you believe, you don't really need to keep reading if you don't want to. I'm just going to irritate you, and what I say won't do any good. Go. Have some cake. Come back later, and we'll talk about something else.

Here's what I believe:  you get one life. There's no guarantee that it will be shining and glorious. There's no guarantee that it will be long had healthy. There's no guarantee that you will find true love or right livelihood. There is, in short, no guarantee at all. All you can count on is that it's going to be your one and only life, and you get to do with it pretty much what you want to. 

Right hear a bunch of y'all are going, "Yeah, yeah, that's easy for you to say! You're lucky. You haven't had to deal with--"and here you think about the things  you've had to deal with that have made your life what it is.

The truth? You've made your life what it is. No, I'm NOT saying you're responsible for the bad things that have happened to you. No, I am not. What I'm saying is that you're responsible for the way you've reacted to the bad things that have happened to you. 

Let's say that your childhood sucked the big winkie. Let's say that it was sad and abusive and scary. That's horrible, it really is. It's a lot to deal with. But at some point you grew up and got away. You got out, went out into the world. What you've done with your life since then has been up to you. If you relive the years of misery in your memory, in your conversations (and you know the kind of people I'm talking about:  you see them in the grocery store and say, "Hey, Ted, how are you?" and they go, "Well, today's tough. It's the anniversary of the day my father locked me in the shed when I was five." And you'll express sympathy, and the next time you see them and again, perhaps against your better judgement, as how they are, they're like, "Yeah, it's tough. Winter's always tough. That's when my mother went away and left us without any heat or electricity." And you're very sympathetic. But you know, this person, Ted, is like 50 years old. And he's walking through the produce aisle buying bananas, but in his head, it's still 1955. And it will always be 1955, or 1959. And he will always be thinking aobut some hurt or pain or disappointment, carrying it with him like a precious bundle he dare not set down. And then one day he will die, never having experienced anything except 50 or 60 or 70 years of carrying around that bundle),[OK--here you have to jump back up there before the parentheses] you're not ever going to experience everything else life has to offer. That's really trite, isn't it? "All that life has to offer." Sorry about that, but I don't know how else to say it:  there's this thing. "Life." It's a huge thing, with infinite possibilities. Places to live. People to know. Work to do. Things to see. Food to taste. Weather to experience. But if you don't look at it that way, you can spend the whole of it--your 50 or 75 or 103 years--in a tiny little room with one 40-watt bulb and a tv set, never even looking out the window.

And Ted, with his bundle? What's the point? What good is it going to do him, carrying it around and talking about it? Is it going to make him a better human being? No. Think about the flip side, the person who had just as bad a childhood but long ago decided that what she was going to take from that wasn't the constant mulling over the pain and hurt, but the decision to be someone who walked through the world making up for that crappy energy by loving and being gentle, spreading kindness and light. 

You're saying, maybe, that it's not that easy. But I didn't say it was easy. Nothing's easy, really, unless you never do anything at all except lie on the couch and watch daytime tv and wait for someone to feed you. That would be easy. Life isn't supposed to be easy. When people say, "Life is a gift," maybe you're thinking it's a gift like a full mani-pedi over at the mall, where you plunk yourself down and shut your eyes and let someone else do the work on those feet you've been too lazy to do. No. It's a gift like a trip to the Sudan: fabulous and scary, maybe a little hot, with some flies, exciting, full of new experiences, maybe a lost passport, lots of amazing people. Food you might not want to try again but will remember long, long after the dysentery has passed. You know:  life = an adventure.

I know I keep telling you this, but it's important. I want you not just to read my words but to feel what I'm telling you, to really think about and understand the concept behind this:  if you keep your focus on the past, you don't have a present. Remember what I told you about Carter Smith? Who lost everything--his parents died within hours of each other, and the family house burned to the ground? The house that had his studio? And he talked--he talked to me for many, many hours--about how hard he works to get people to understand that if they're always looking back at what happened before, they're never looking at what's going on now, or what might be possible in the future. Think of it literally, if you need to:  if you're looking behind you, over your shoulder, you're not going to be able to see what's under your feet right now, never mind what's up the street ahead of you. You're guaranteed to stumble, and you're going to miss a lot.

People say, well, you need to work through issues. OK. Let's say you believe that. How many times do you have to work through them? Let's say you had some trauma as an adult--rape, divorce, assault. You get help, and you maybe have some therapy. And then you talk about it. And you talk about it some more, and you attend group meetings, and you write about it in your journal. and you make art about it. And ten years later, you're still working through it. Facing it. Dealing with it. Here's the deal:  because you're still focusing on it, it's like it happened yesterday. If you think about something today, it's present today. You've made it real today by giving it attention, by creating thoughts around it. So you're never ten years past something. You're only as far past it as the last time you thought about it.

Let's use me as an example, shall we? My mother died 4 years ago. I have to stop and count because I don't keep track of anniversaries. If I did, if I celebrated the anniversary of her death, it would be as if she had just died, as if I had just lost my mother. I don't think about it all the time. I don't wish she were still alive because I am a logical person:  she would be 84, and she had not been having an easy time of aging. She would be in a nursing home, probably in a wheel chair, maybe still tied to the bed. She would be miserable. Her last month was pretty hideous, but it's over. She's gone. Thinking "what if," or what I might have done to be a better daughter, or how our lives together might have been different--what's the point? Whatever time I gave to feeling regret or sadness would be time I don't have to feel joy or hope or passion for any of the million things I feel passionate about. Spending an hour a day grieving for my mother wouldn't give her a do-over. It wouldn't bring her back and give her another decade of a happy, healthy life. It wouldn't do anything but make me sad for an hour a day. My misery wouldn't "honor" her. Being miserable doesn't say, "Look how much I loved my mother! Look what a wonderful daughter I was!" No. It just says, simply, "Look how miserable I am." 

When we belonged to Survivors of Homicide, everyone talked all the time about "closure." You've heard that, ad nauseum. About what needs to be done so someone can Have Closure. About how to Get Closure. Sure, there are real sorts of closure:  the funeral. The trial. The sentencing. But there's the other kind, and here's what you see:  someone suffers a trauma. They recover physically, they get some help, they go on. But every once in a while they go to a meeting and talk about it again and cry. It's cathartic. There's much sympathy. Maybe a couple months later, the same thing happens, maybe in a differnt setting. Maybe they have group meetings regularly, where they talk about the trauma and relive it and again feel catharsis and again think, oh, now I have closure. And then again.

This can go on forever. Because you will never have closure on ANYTHING if you keep revisiting it. Say you get dumped by someone you love. They move to Alaska. You grieve for a while. You get a new haircut and take up bowling, and you meet someone and fall in love and move in together. You move on. You have a life. One might say you've Found Closure, esp. if you see in the newspaper that your former love has married someone who is maybe kind of obviously not working in any sort of professional field. Or partaking, perhaps, in what most of us know as Dental Hygiene. 

Say, on ther other hand, this person dumps you but moves into the apartment downstairs. You see them every day. You see their new love, and you see how toned and fit they both are. You think about them constantly and are always thinking, what if, what if. You don't get the new haircut and you don't take up bowling because you're stuck in the past, thinking about someone who's not there any more--because there's no one who's as "not there" as someone who used to love you once but now doesn't.


The thing about "closure," the thing you hear people talking about, as in "We just need closure," is that people think it means that if they talk about something enough, ruminate about it enough, mull it over and rehash it enough, it will go away. This is not true, of course. If you keep giving it attention, it will follow you just like that puppy that follows you ever day on your walk. The more you stop and talk to him and tell him to go back in his yard, the more he wags his tail and wants to stay right with you. You know the only way to keep from having him follow you all the way home is to walk another route.


There were people in Survivors of Homicide who'd been there since the beginning, who came to every meeting and retold their story every time someone new joined the group. There were always tears, and there was always a lot of sympathy. In some cases, this went on for years. It may well still be going on, with those same people, almost 20 years later, telling their horrible, terrible, hugely sad stories. Month after month after month. I see some of these people now and then, and they carry their huge grief with them. That precious little bundle.


Other people, people whose own grief was just as huge, came to a couple meetings, told their story, had their trial, and then dropped away. They didn't come back. If you saw them in public, they were apologetic, as if they'd let The Group down, but they said they had to move on. When you saw them, they looked good--alive, and vibrant. Sure, they had a hole in their heart, just like the people who came to the meetings and retold their stories. But they weren't looking over their shoulders, focused on the past.


So what I want to tell you, if I haven't lost you already, if you haven't wandered away and gotten a beer and are watching reruns of some show I can't reference because, geesh, I don't even know the titles of the Fall Line-Up, is this: you may have a decade of life ahead of you, or a year, or half a century, or more. Nobody knows. You can spend it any way you want. Sure, you're going to have to work and pay bills, unless you want to get really radical and 1) move Off the Grid and learn to compost your own waste or 2) move in with your sister and her husband, Ernie, and share a bedroom with his Amazonian reptile collection. You have responsibilities to your family and the people who depend on you. But the rest is up to you. You can live in joy or misery. You can focus on your  memories and the pain in your joints and the opportunities you missed, or you can focus on the breeze coming in through the window and how it smells like autumn, and how that makes you want to open that tube of burnt umber paint and try to capture the sense of the seasons changing to gold and orange.


There's plenty of room for misery in the world, and there are many, many people who will help you live in it. There are therapists who make money helping you go over it and over it and over it. (There are other therapists who really, truly want to help you get past it. Look for them.) There are ministers who do the same. There are "friends" who like you best when you're down and they can commiserate or be the strong one who holds you up. There are tons of self-help books that rely on people's continuous need for re-visiting the past and "dealing with it." There's an entire segment of society that needs you to focus on your past and think about how miserable you are because of it. If you don't, they can't make money.


There's another way. You can sit there, right now, and say, "I'm going to start, at this moment, living my life." Instead of thinking about what happened before, you can be open--think of this very literally, seeing yourself with your eyes opened wide and your arms spread in welcome--to what's here right now and what's in that moment right ahead of this one, and the one right after that. If you're miserable because your sister called you and reminded you what a loser Mom thought you were, always and forever, and you have a scotch or two and get in bed, you're going to miss the leaf that's tangled in the spider web on the outside of the window. You won't see how it moves back and forth, just like a sail on a boat on the lake. You won't see the way the clouds slip over the moon, just like ghosts sailing through the night sky. 


Your choice. It's your life. You get to decide how you want to live it. Pour the scotch, take the bottle with you, get in bed in your ratty nightgown with your paperback book and stew in the misery of your life? Or turn out all the lights and open the window and lean against the window sill, quiet, listening, open to the air and the clouds, the dying leaves and the noise, the grit of the night streets in the city or the howl of coyotes in the country or the sound of your neighbor's air conditioner: life.


If you're still with me--if I haven't irritated or bored you, you might want to read the book I'm just finishing:  Breakfast with Buddha. It's a novel, not particularly deep. But maybe it is. Whatever--it's got me thinking, and you might enjoy it, too. Or not. Maybe just go for a walk. It doesn't matter where you are:  you can walk on sidewalks or in sand or through the park or the financial district or the neighborhood. Walk. Look around you. Breathe. Don't look over your shoulder--you might miss something wonderful.


XO

This Week's Give-Away: Susan Shie's "The Kitchen Tarot" Deck

I love Susan Shie's work--hers were the first art quilts I ever saw, and I've been entranced ever since. I've been lucky enough to see several In Real Life--unbelievably, one of her art quilts was actually here in the Museum of the Southwest several years ago. Whoa. There's a surprise.

(No, this was not one of the quilts shown in Midland. Snort. I couldn't resist, though--the idea of this quilt in Midland makes me very, very happy.)

When I found out there was an exhibit at Thirteen Moons Gallery in Santa Fe, (now Jane Sauer Gallery) years ago, I was chagrined that I couldn't attend. I sent a note to Jane Sauer, the owner, asking if there was any literature, postcards, a book. She printed out everything she had and sent it to me. So cool! I was hooked for life. On Susan, on Jane, on Thirteen Moons.


Susan is a contributor in my third book, Living the Creative Life, and was, in fact, instrumental in my pushing through with the idea. Without her encouragement, I probably would have abandoned the the whole thing when it was first rejected.


So of course I had to have The Kitchen Tarot: A 22-Card Deck by Susan Shie, with a Guidebook by Dennis Fairchild. I've been following, sporadically, her creation of the quilts in the Kitchen Tarot, and I couldn't wait to see them all together. And they are very, very cool. The two problems for me personally are 1) the details--and Susan's work is wonderfully, marvelously detailed--are too tiny for me to see. This is probably more a function of my eyesight than it is of anything else and 2) I don't do tarot. Even though I participated in an artists' tarot deck creation, I had no idea what I was doing and pretty much had to be led by the hand the whole way. I'm sorry to say that my touchy-feely/spiritual side is about the size of a grain of sand. People often think if you're non-religious, that means you believe in something else, something mystical, perhaps. Sadly, no. While I've had some really nice tarot decks over the years, they're not much use to me unless I wanted to frame them as art. And for that, I'd want them larger, you know? I love this deck, but I *hate* the thought of it sitting in its box on the bookshelf. That seems wrong to me, not in the spirit in which Susan created these images.

(Let me know, please, how you feel about the size of these photos. I uploaded them much smaller, to make the page load faster. Which do you prefer:  larger, clickable images and slower load time, or smaller, faster images?)

Still, this is a wonderful deck of cards, and I'd like it to go to someone who 1) loves Susan's work as much as I do (if that's possible) and would actually use them and appreciate them. Here's what the back of the box says about this deck:


"A colorful, contemporary alternative to the traditional tarot deck, The Kitchen Tarot's 22 cards and accompanying guidebook combine mouthwatering artwork ad soul-nourishing affirmations on every card and page. The words and images speak to the heart and imagination through the powerful symbolism of mythic and domestic archetypes, as well as the divinatory message of classical tarot. Designed to awaken intuition, generate ideas, and stimulate thought processes, this deck is instantly accessible to beginners and also provides a depth of insights and new understandings for the experienced.


"This boxed set includes the 22 Major Arcana cards created by artist Susan Shie. The fun and easy-to-read guidebook by author Dennis Fairchild offers explanations about the cards' meanings; shows how to use them in forecasting; and provides advice for harmonizing family, work, romance, and spirit--everything but the kitchen sink! Learning the tarot has never been easier--or more appetizing!"


To enter, tell us something about Susan's work or about tarot in your life or both. Tell us stories!


And then, as always, check back on Friday--but of course you'll be back before then, lest you miss something. Another video, perhaps?


XO

Frequently Asked Questions

Oh, my. My, my, my. I fear this is the start of something scary indeed. Way scary. Big scary.


It was a lousy day, and in an effort to cheer myself up--and to further practice my iMovie-Making Skills--I did a little video of myself. And then another. And then made those into a movie. With music and stuff! 


And here's the pathetic and very scary part:  it was so much fun I can't wait to do more AND I start giggling every. single. time. I watch it. Isn't that just the most pathetic thing? Not just that I crack myself up, but that I do it OVER & OVER & OVER.


Yikes. Is all I can say.


So anyway, here it is. And yes, I really *do* want you to send me questions--I think that would be a total hoot, don't you? Either that or you're going to be getting whatever goofy idea I come up with next. So much better to mangle my own self in a video than the other people I've been trying to put into movies.


So whaddaya think? Hope you laughed out loud--is it too much to hope that someone actually snorted?


If the little player above didn't work for you, you can watch on Youtube. Thanks so much for coming by! And remember to send me questions--oboy, oboy. . . .

Everything is Change

I love change. I hate change. I embrace change. I grumble about change. I get excited about change.


None of it matters, of course. Change is like oxygen: it's everywhere, and we couldn't live without it.


Kind of like the iPhone, but less insidious. (For those of you who hate "smart phones" and think the name itself is an oxymoron.)


I've been thinking a lot about change lately. My walking route takes me through the museum grounds twice a day, sometimes more. The Museum of the Southwest is housed in the Old Turner Mansion, just half a dozen blocks from our house. A dozen blocks in the other direction, to the east, and there's the library. The library and the museum are sort of constants in my life in Midland, two of the few things that have been around ever since we moved here in 1970.


This week of the year is the week before SeptemberFest, the annual arts and crafts fair on the museum grounds. While Midlanders aren't big on arts and crafts fairs, they do love the rare chance to walk around and drink beer in public, so even though artists are often surprised that a place with so much money doesn't seem to equal a place where artists can sell a lot of their work (unless it features cows and/or pump jacks), there are always a lot of people out. They may not spend much money, but they show up and wander around with their beers.


This is the week when we watch the preparations for SeptemberFest--the fence going up, the tents rising over the grass, the tables coming out of storage. Usually by today, everything's pretty much ready:  the big preview party is tomorrow night, the one where you buy tickets in advance, for $150 a couple and up, depending on where and with whom you want to sit. If you want exclusive seating on the front porch of the mansion, where you can share air with Midland's Elite, well. If you're willing to pay, you're in.


It's always funny to me how these things work. If you want to do something and make it public but kind of want to make sure The Great Unwashed don't show up to mingle with you, you slap on a ticket price that makes normal people go, "Huh?"  And then you convince everyone to dress up and talk about it. We often see these preview parties as we take the evening walk on Friday night. I'm glad they have them, as it gives the artists a chance to schmooze with people who have money and might possibly be willing to part with it in exchange for original art. I hope that they do:  people with money to spare should be willing to support those who make the world more interesting and beautiful. At least that's my idea.


Anyway. So as we've been walking this week, it's been kind of obvious that things have changed. Even if I didn't already know some of the story, I'd know something was up because the fence hasn't even arrived, much less been set up. And the deal is:  almost all of the museum staff is gone. At some point during the summer, some Important Guy (I heard his name, but it didn't mean anything to me) in Midland did a "personal survey," whatever that is, and said that people didn't like what was going on at the museum. What that was, nobody seems to know. But they fired the director and brought in some interim woman, some other Important Midlander who, I've heard, is a bitch on wheels. She fired and/or ran off almost all the rest of the staff, leaving just a few die-hards who refused to leave. So things were odd. The summer lawn concerts didn't have trash barrels, for instance--they didn't arrange for that. And the membership renewal letters didn't go out on time.


And the fence hasn't gone up.


Those are just the tiny outward signs of big change. What will that change be? I have no idea, but it's interesting to watch myself react to it. I've always complained because the museum tends to have a lot of art that features cows and horses, oil paintings by people I've never heard of. I've suggested several exhibits, artists I know who do cool stuff, to no avail. These are artists who've had exhibits in museums in other cities, so it's not like I'm suggesting an exhibit of my friend's crocheted tea cozies or something. So change might be good:  we might get a wider variety of contemporary art, stuff I actually want to look at. The openings might be more well-attended, with a larger group of younger members--you know the membership is old when The EGE and I are the youngest people there.


But still:  it's change, and I can feel myself feeling unsettled by it: it's not that the exhibits at the museum are important to my life, or that I spend a lot of time thinking about the museum. It's that I walk through the grounds several times every day and don't see the people I've always seen. They'd be out taking a cigarette break, and we've wave and say, "Hi." Or I'd look up at the security cameras and grin, knowing they were in their office, glancing up at their monitors. Now they're gone. The one guy who's left looks lonely and sad. And who knows what will happen next?


At the other end of my neighborhood, at the library downtown, big changes are also underway. They hired Outside Consultants to come in and evaluate the library, and the report was not glowing. They fired the director, who's a friend. They've gotten rid of the VHS tapes, and they're going to bring in more computers, more stuff for kids, more materials for the 40%+ Hispanic population of Midland. They say the library is underused and so has to change to reflect the changing times. They have to serve the whole community, not just those people who are regular patrons of the library--you know, the ones who actually come to the library to read and check out books. They can no longer force the homeless people to find somewhere else to sleep, and they don't try to collect fines from people who refuse to pay. They're not allowed to shush noisy children, and they have to accommodate the kids who are dumped there while their parents leave to run errands, or have a date, or go home and take a nap, or whatever adults do when they leave their three kids unattended in a public place. A public place that has the world's smelliest man alternately talking to himself and snoring in one of the chairs. 


I complained about this yesterday, when I went in to check in a couple books and wanted to sit down and finished the last few pages of one of them. There are several very nice comfortable upholstered chairs, and I headed over to sit in one. But there, behind the pillar, was The Smelly Guy, sitting in one of the chairs, snoring, and stinking worse than anything I smell on a regular basis. And I clean out cat boxes, OK? I'm not talking a little bit of an odor. This guy makes me gag from 10 feet. He's filthy. Always. And he never smiles, and he often gumbles as he walks around town, trailing a huge cloud of funk after him.


The librarian said they can't ask him to leave, and they can't wake him up. She says he doesn't hurt anyone, that he's never been violent that they know of, that he's pretty much OK as long as he takes his meds.


I asked, "OK, so he has the right to be here. What about the rest of us? What about those of us who pay taxes, and who have been coming here regularly for 40 years? What rights do we have?" I heard myself saying this and was astounded. But I couldn't help it. We can't sit in the chairs because he sits in all of them. We can't sit anywhere near him without choking. For people like me, he's terrifying:  visibly filthy, noxious, looking like he might, at any moment, decide to use the carpet as a toilet. 


And it's not like these guys--he's not the only one who camps at the library, which is just a couple blocks from the Salvation Army--are completely harmless. I know of two instances in the last year or so--one just this past summer--where one of them exposed himself to young women. In the library. I was there once when they called the sheriff.


So there's this change, too. The library, where I spent long Saturday afternoons when I was in high school, where I discovered T.S. Eliot and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," is changing. Oh, it's changed in the past--they enlarged it, moved the entrance around the corner, changed the lay-out. Got the fancy chairs. But now things are really changing. The director and several members of the staff were UU's, which was about the only thing, I'm sure, that kept a balance of books. Without that stabilizing influence, the "Left Behind" books and the glowing glitter bios of Glenn Beck will edge out anything deemed too controversial. Which is pretty much anything else. Already the Inspirational Fiction section takes up more room than the mysteries, which is a complete bafflement to me.


And I've been watching myself react to all this change in my little corner of Midland. I ignore great swaths of my town, preferring not to know what's going on and who's saying what. When we've got some guy ranting about the evils of Islam in the Sunday paper and then showing up at every public meeting to rant about all his other hobby horses, it's best just to stay home, in my own little neighborhood. But now change in encroaching there--the places I go regularly are changing. I can no longer spend an hour at the library. The museum may close. 


I am getting older. The world is changing in big ways and little ways. Some of them I love--I love technology. I love figuring out how to do things I could never have imagined doing a decade ago, like making movies out of video I take with a camera that fits in my pocket. Who would have dreamed?


But other changes? The scary ones involving people who are not like me and ideas I abhor? What about those? I take a walk and catch myself grumbling, and then I take a deep breath and remember what I know:  life is change. Everything is change. Every cell in my body is changing, in ways good and bad. I take in air and change it and send it out. I am a food-changing machine. The light changes, the trees, Clarice, who's growing wildly and finding new obsessions every week (this week it's the bathtub). 


What I have to remind myself is that life is a ride. It's not static, a piece of land we move onto and stake out and tend until we die. That's how I tend to think of it--as something I can shape and groom and harness, like a horse I've adopted. But life isn't a horse; it's the ride on the horse's back. It's climbing on, maybe with a saddle and stirrups, maybe bareback. Maybe your horse is staid and predictable, and maybe it's wild as the wind. It doesn't matter, because it's not about the horse. The ride is what it's all about. Even if your horse is one of those who walks mostly around in circles, in a well-worn path, there's always that day when it will stumble or veer off course or leap the fence and race across the pasture. That's what makes the ride both scary and exhilarating. That's life. You can harness the horse, but you can't ever harness the ride. All you can do is figure out a way to hang on and breathe.

Podcast with Jesse Reno

I've had great fun working with Jesse on a bunch of different projects this year. He's just the best--creative, professional, just a really nice guy. 

For this podcast, I wanted him to talk about something besides the usual things he's always asked to talk about--you'll be able to find out more about that later, so check back--so I asked him about some things he'd mentioned in our earlier conversations. At one point, he and I had talked about what it's like to walk around in a place where you don't really look like everybody else, so I asked him about that. 

To find out more about Jesse, check out his website. To listen to the podcast, as always:  go to iTunes and download it from "Notes from the Voodoo Lounge," or click on that link over there in the sidebar, or--if it shows up for you (I hope it does, but it doesn't always show up for everyone)--click on the little player below. 

I Curse That Fish!

Randy Cohen has a column, "The Ethicist," in the New York Times Magazine. Yesterday someone asked about their friend's responsibility in the following situation:  the friend needed money. The writer went to the bank and took out a wad of cash and, on the way home, was mugged. What, he asked, was his friend's responsibility? Should the friend reimburse him for the loss? 


Cohen replied, "You should endure your loss with stoicism," and then went on to say that, if you blamed your friend for your loss, you could just as easily blame his parents (for giving birth to someone who would, at some point, have bad luck and need a loan from you) or his grandparents (for giving birth to his parents, who in turn gave birth to him. . .), or--you get the idea. He said you can go to a place where "every misfortune can be blamed  on that darn fish who left the sea to walk on dry land and evolved into the woman who broke my heart. I curse that fish."


I LOVE this: "I curse that fish!" I can see it coming in sooo handy in a wide, wide variety of situations. Because surely everything can be blamed on something, right? So much of who I am is my parents' fault, surely. My tendency toward worry. Towards being just the teensiest bit judgmental. My creaking joints, refusing-to-curl hair. And if it's not their fault, then surely I can trace it to my grandparents. Or my childhood. My stint in the educational system. My first boyfriend. My lousy boss at that short little job at Taco Villa. My untimely birth in Arkansas. 


The thing about this is, if you're going to curse the fish, you're going to have to curse a LOT of fish. If you're going to blame your parents for your tendency toward forgetfulness, then think about this: if you believe that some foods increase your memory--say, gingko biloba, for instance--then you can blame your bad memory on the manufacturers who didn't put any of it in your breakfast cereal. And since you know that getting more oxygen to your brain helps with various cognitive skills, you can blame automobile manufacturers for the pollution that interferes with your oxygen intake for your lack of attentiveness in the sales meeting this morning. Blame your childhood playmates for your lack of social skills, blame your stingy dad for your lack of financial savvy. Curse those fish!


See?


I'm not saying that our lives aren't influenced by the things that happen to us. Of course they are. But to continue blaming those things--that lousy childhood, that first husband, that art teacher in third grade (I curse Miss Sterns!)--for what we are today begins to seem a little absurd.  I could say that the reason I don't know how to draw is that Miss Sterns was a horrible witch of a woman who hated kids (she told us she hated us) and did everything she could to make art class a living hell for us from third through sixth grades. Hence my lack of drawing skills.


But that's ridiculous. The reason I can't draw is that my desire to draw is not sufficiently strong enough to compel me to spend time drawing every day until I'm able to draw what I want to draw. I do not do that. Is that Miss Sterns' fault? 


If I were shy, I could easily say it was because my parents were shy and that's the way I was raised. I could do that, and I could make a good case for it. But at some point in adulthood I realized I didn't want to be shy and so set about becoming not shy. I am no longer shy; I don't have that particular fish to curse.


It is, of course, a lot like deciding whether to curse the darkness or light a candle. It's about deciding who and what it is that's in charge of your life. Is it your past? Or is it you? No, you're not in control of things that blindside you or fall out of the sky. Downsizing and outsourcing=not your fault. Curse those fish! If you get whacked on the head by a lump of frozen toilet contents dropped from a 747, feel free to curse that fish, too (if the fish hadn't wandered up on land, developed legs and opposable thumbs, studied aviation and learned to fly. . . .).


For so many other things, though, cursing the fish is a waste of time. Sure, the past might have been lousy. Sure, you suffered, were denied opportunities (art school! that summer in France! a promotion!), got dumped on rather more than is fair. But the fish has moved on. You can, too. 


Curse the fish and keep on walkin'~~