"Adventure"

I need a new adventure.  I'm not sure what this is going to be yet, but it has to be more exciting than making applesauce or watching Pete and Dave fixing my shed this week.

Last night I dreamt about "adventure" and remembered walking in a South Carolina plantation garden.  I am delicate in the sun, so I had on a big, floppy hat and a long, loose skirt while everyone else was dressed in Ugly American summer wear.  That's too-tight tank tops with lewd slogans and too-tight shorts.

There was a guy in a holey shirt that had faded a light salmon.  I suppose the shirt started out red?  I couldn't look away from the curly blonde fur on his shoulders while he couldn't bother to check his unruly kids.  His wife's chest oozed around all the edges.  I must've looked like another flower in the garden by comparison.

A British man pulled up in a super cute red convertible.  He was dressed impeccably, as he had a business meeting in the Big House.  Nothing more than light conversation happened with him, but I guess I've always wondered "what if".  He was clearly interested, and I was interested too, but I regretfully watched him walk away.  I was probably being responsible about something.  Sometimes I hate that about myself.

We all face moments of opportunities gained or lost.  Often those moments are as ephemeral as catching a falling leaf in the breeze.  I think most of the time we don't recognize the chance or the choice, but sometimes we do.  Not taking that chance in the moment is the choice of a different future.  Too often, the reason we don't take a risk is because of misguided inhibitions and fear.

I listened to a radio program, Reclaiming Conversation: ThePower of Talk in the Digital Age.  Psychologist author, Sherry Turkle, has researched what's happening with people who are glued to their devices.  People text instead of talking face to face, and have lost the ability to empathize.  They have so many fears, they avoid personal interactions.  How many opportunities are lost because they're hiding behind their phones?

I'm  upset that people don't know how to sit down and have a cup of tea with a friend for an afternoon or how to actually get together meaningfully in a romantic relationship.  I share lunch with the ladies in my office every day, and we talk about stuff.  We like each other, suffer each other's quirks, and support each other.  This stuff matters, and people need to put down their phones and notice that it matters.

I'm glad I drove to SC to walk in a plantation garden.  I regret not asking that man to join me for lunch.  I'm glad I'm a responsible worker.  I regret giving too much of my life to jobs.  All of these little choices end up being the sum of our lives.

I'm trying to think of ideas for my next adventure -- to go somewhere, do something new, expand my life in some way.  Maybe I'll actually fill out the paperwork for a passport?  Take a class or say "hi" to the next guy who looks at me?  Do you have any suggestions?

I'm usually terrible at remembering to show works in progress (WIP).  I thought I'd try to remember to show you this piece as I go along.  This is on a 3' x 12" canvas that my buddy Korki gave me.  Thanks!

"Sleep"

I had a dream when I was a kid.  I climbed a tree and turned into a hawk.  I looked out at the world from that high place and felt free.  I started flying, and another hawk joined me.  We spent a perfect summer day flying together and I loved him.  Eventually we went back to my tree but I didn't want to wake up or for him to go away.  He promised he'd find me when we grew up.  That dream gave me hope for a long time.

Flying dreams are the best, though I had a different kind of flying dream when I was married.  I was flying around with a friend and my husband wanted to join us.  I told him it's easy, come join us.  He kept jumping and trying but couldn't do it.  I suppose my subconscious was telling me he wasn't my hawk lover and the marriage wasn't right, but at the same time I felt so much joy in the flying.  Was my subconscious telling me to be true to my nature and find my own kind?

I value the information in dreams.  I wasn't ready to get divorced, but the message stayed with me.  I felt the inevitability of where the marriage was going.

Sometimes I wake up and write my dreams down.  Once, I got a pencil and paper and fell face first into my pillow, writing the dream left-handed in the dark as I fell asleep again.  That made for interesting reading in the morning, especially since I wrote several lines over each other.

...side trip into my dream folder.  I'm not sure what to make of "Chocolate fish hand.  Kind of pathetic, but sweet too."  Where did that come from?  My waking mind doesn't think stuff like this.  I don't think I'm creative enough awake to come up with a chocolate fish hand, but I think dreams exist to help us.  They give us a different way to look at things that we shove out of our day thoughts.

People long gone still haunt my dreams and effect my waking life.  I had a moment like that this week when people were talking about an 11 year old girl killing a baby.  That's horrible, and I remembered Vaughn.  He was a horrible boy who regularly threatened to kill me, kill my family, kill my dog and make me watch.  He left dead animals in my yard to emphasize the threats.

Vaughn has been in my dreams all my life even though he drove his car into a tree and died years ago.  When I have a Vaughn dream I know the fears I'm facing in the present are visceral, important.  The fear and rage I feel, but keep tightly clenched inside, hurts me.  Dreams provide the lesson that I have the power to do something about it.

We all have this -- the power to recognize our issues in our dreams, the power to face it, the strength to come up with solutions.  Our dreams are the product of our own minds.  We don't have to explain them to anyone else.  It is the most private of all aspects of our ourselves.  They are our joys and our fears.  They are us at the most essential level -- even if it's a chocolate fish hand, but mostly I like flying.

This eagle is ancient history.  I did it for a printer who wanted to show customers thermography, a heat process which makes a special powder turn into a glossy, embossed surface.  It's usually used on business cards.  This was printed as regular 4-color process, but the dark brown and white were added on top in thermography.  Even though I did this for a job, I think it's also a good example of how to get printed samples of your work.  Talk to a printer and maybe you can both end up with a sample to show potential customers.

"Wings"

This week everyone has been telling me that I’ll find my wings at work, but I’ve been trying very hard to feel the ground beneath my feet.  In case you missed last week’s post, my boss died suddenly, and I’ve been scrambling to keep everything moving as seamlessly as possible.

I’m really lucky.  The people in my office know their jobs and care about doing them well.  My vendors have offered to help me out however they can.  Before my boss’ sudden demise, she was training me to take over her job for her eventual retirement.  Really, I couldn’t ask for a better situation.  Well, I suppose I could ask, but that would just be greedy.

Sometimes I’ve caught myself thinking everyone fantasizes about being the boss when they’re worker bees.  I’ve racked up plenty of time with those fantasies, all the way up to the last time I was the boss and getting squeezed from both above and below.  Middle management isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.  Everybody wants something and wants to know why you haven’t gotten it for them yet.

After the last management stint I did, I decided I was happier as a worker bee.  Let other people deal with problems, I’ll just do what I’m told and keep my head down.  It was kind of nice at first, but after a while I started noticing the stupid things management did, and started having managerial fantasies again.  Maybe it’s an inescapable human condition?

I won’t bore you with my multiple discussions with personnel and accounting this week, or the binders I brought home for the weekend that have inspiring titles like “Statement of Accountability”.  That isn’t sexy.  It’s better to think about the Pantone swatch book I chucked in my desk drawer today.  It’s not like I have to pick out that many colors at this job, but it’s one of those things that I have to cling onto to remember that my job isn’t entirely statistics.

I fell into this job.  I originally planned on doing some data entry as a reliable PT gig to support my art addiction.  It was close to home, and I didn’t want to tax my brain too hard.  I quickly found out data entry is hard, and my boss quickly discovered my previous fund raising was an asset.  Win/win, and I got to work with printers in developing direct mail campaigns.  I went along with the plan to teach me about data base segments, attributes, research, and other stuff that seemed suspiciously anti-art minded.

Now I’m wondering about how to have it all.  I like the idea of a real paycheck.  Money comes in handy, and there’s nothing like not having money for a while to remind us of that.  The problem with money is that it takes a lot of time and energy to earn it.  Painting a masterpiece takes a backseat to the pleasure I had today moving furniture around to make a more effective work space.

It seems like there are always trade-offs.  When I made this hawk, I made a minor salary at a park district.  I loved my job, but there never seemed to be enough $ to ever get beyond basic survival.  The ironic thing is that I made this hawk as part of a fund raising campaign for a wildlife rehab center.  Now I make more $, but I’m not doing scratchboard hawks.  Which is more important?  Can we ever really have it all?

"Edge"

My sisters and I used to climb our wild cherry tree.  I’m the little one that still needed help.  I remember it as a big tree, but it doesn’t really look very big in the photo.  Maybe everything looks big when you’re small.  The tree got hit by lightning in the historic 4^th of July storm when I was 8.  The tragic tree death was reduced to firewood stacked up on the side of the shed, and Dad kept handling it and commenting that it was a good, hard wood with a pretty color.  He started carving.

We had an old anvil bolted onto the workbench in the garage.  The anvil was a relic from Mom’s string of blacksmith ancestors.  Dad clamped a chunk of our tree in the vise, and happily banged at it for hours.  The first attempts weren’t spectacular, but they were interesting and functional.  He got better at it the more years he banged away in the garage, and at some point the wild cherry wood wasn’t used in the fireplace any more.

This hawk, or maybe eagle, wasn’t his best, but it wasn’t his worst either.  Mostly it’s mine, and I’m glad to have something my dad made with his own hands out of our tree on an anvil of my ancestors.  Maybe part of its significance to me is that it helps me understand my father better.  Dad died in an accident when I was a teenager.  My memories are of paternal dictatorship, sometimes a benign dictatorship and sometimes not, but never equal – and even so, we were compatible.  I understand his carving, his need to do it, his sense of accomplishment when he managed to make thin wings out of wood.

…Which is not to say that I have Dad’s skill with things with sharp edges.  When I was little, Dad gave me a jackknife, and Mom took it away.  This happened a bunch of times, and I’ll admit Mom had good reason to take my knives away even if Dad seemed to think whittling was a necessary part of childhood.  It just isn’t one of my better skills.  I’ve quit counting my hospital visits and figure my artistic endeavors should remain 2-dimensional.

That doesn’t mean I don’t ignore this lesson sometimes.  I used to live at a place that had a big barn full of feral cats and lumber.  I’m from the era when girls weren’t allowed to take woodshop, so my only training for the table saw was from public tv shows and an ex-boyfriend who told me I wasn’t allowed near his tools.  He was probably right about that, but when confronted with a barnful of wood, I decided to give it a shot and made a plant stand.

I suppose if I actually had taken woodshop, I might have a better idea how to make a plant stand, but no, I learned how to make peanut butter cookies and a blue stuffed dolphin in home economics.  I nailed my creation together and felt pretty pleased with myself – until I picked it up by its top and the top popped off.  I found wood glue, screws, and screw plugs in the barn and made more plant stands.  Just like Dad’s carving, I got better.

After the world was littered with plant stands, I made bookshelves, ottomans, and a coffee table.  I’m not claiming that any of this stuff was good, but I made them and felt happy.  The pinnacle of my woodworking success was a bench.  I was feeling so pleased with myself, I decided to carve it too.  7 stitches later, the bench looked pretty good and I quit woodworking.  I feel the temptations sometimes.  The wood calls to me.  I can envision really great walking sticks in it, but somebody else will have to make them.  I really don’t enjoy getting stitches.

"Gesture"

In the olden days, polite people made their rounds to each other’s homes and left calling cards with the servants who answered the doors. The lady of the house wouldn’t be home since she would likewise be making rounds leaving calling cards at other people’s houses. What a civilized gesture, and such a waste of time. If you really want to visit someone, why not show up when they might be home? Oh, right, because you shouldn’t expect to be entertained when you show up unexpectedly. That of course would be most uncivilized.

The relative beauty and expense of your calling card was just a part of the civilization game. If you had a really boring card, you must be either boring, or poor, or possibly really secure with yourself. If you had an extra fancy card, you must be interesting, or rich, or possibly really insecure with yourself. Odds are you probably had a card that fell somewhere in between, which added to the whole guessing game of where you fell into the perpetual pecking order.

This is all very quaint, outdated, and slightly disturbing. It’s a good thing our society has changed since then, right? Maybe not. We might slightly envy the elaborate dresses the fine ladies wore on their useless calling card rounds, but we also now know that they were being sucked in with bone crushing whale bone corsets and wore really impractical shoes. It’s much better to sit around in a t-shirt and leave a message on a girlfriend’s answering machine. I just wish we still had the manservant to listen to the messages and serve us tea.

Society really hasn’t changed very much. We just changed the rules. I go to your blog, you come to mine, I go to yours… it’s all very friendly and enjoyable, albeit with less fresh air than our ancestors got in the buggy ride from house to house. It’s all very civilized. Yep, very courteous and friendly, and I have to admit I really love doing it.

Sometimes visiting blogs is like visiting somebody’s house that has plants everywhere and toys in the yard and odd sculptures hanging from the ceiling. Sometimes it’s like going to the finest mansion in town and feeling kind of awed by what we find hanging on the walls. Sometimes we find out that our neighbors speak a different language or live in grass huts or igloos. It’s all really, really cool. Maybe even more importantly, we find out that there are a lot of nice and interesting people in the world, and we’re lucky to meet them.

These are calling cards I kept when cleaning out my grandma’s house. Maybe my grandma knew who Wm. Clouser was, and who he wanted to “Accept my Love”? The peacock fan is glued at the bottom and bends down to reveal Wm.’s name. Charlie Barro apparently thought that was a good idea with his disembodied hand offering a bouquet of roses “With love and fond wishes”. I wonder who he was trying to impress? Since neither of these men made it into my family tree, why were their cards kept all of these years? Were my ancestors heart breakers or heartbroken?

I scanned in the prettier cards in my collection. Others are simply script fonts engraved on heavy cards, but I like my great-great-grandmother’s card because she was studying penmanship, and that’s her actual writing – which goes to the point of why I keep these things I guess. They were in real people’s hands before they put on their gloves for the buggy ride.

Since it’s Illustration Friday, I put my own business card on top. I feel like I’m cheating a since I posted this hawk last year, but sometimes isn’t it the gesture that counts?

"Caged"

What can you do if you cage a hawk?
Broken wings beating in fury against false walls
She will break herself before being broken
In an unfair prison.

A tethered leg bound to a stump,
Broken wings bound,
Glassy eyes glaring in mistrust,
Flashes of hate piercing your skin.
She would kill you, blind you, hurt you
If she had a chance.

She hangs her drugged head, and
Her broken heart pounds painfully.
Inside hard bandages and soft feathers
Longing, gasping, waiting
For her chance to break loose.

She wants more than vengeance.
She wants the songs and silence of the sky.
So close to God,
So near her soul,
Where she belongs,
Where she rules supreme.

Free.

-- The art was created for Lake Metroparks' Wildlife Rehabilitation Center as part of a fundraising campaign. The poem was not.