Everything Is Good ... Gone for GOOD reasons this time

Sometimes timing is freaky. I sat down to write this and there was a message from one of my followers. Timing is all. Anyway, I will be online next weekend with studies from the three, yes, count 'em, THREE paintings I am working on. I have been singing a lot. I am not sure that I have mentioned that I sing. In fact, the group of women with whom I sing every Thursday night formed a smaller group that practices before the larger circle. We performed together at a coffee house just over a week ago.

I will be honest. I was hesitant about joining the singing circle. The first two times I went, I was uncomfortable with the GoddessEarthSpiritIsOurMotherLoveUnitesUsIntheInfinite sort of thing. Until one night we all broke into harmonies, and a sound unlike any I've been a part of flew around the room, catching my heart and making me tear up.

We could be singing Blah, blah, blah, for all I care. It's the sound that gets to me. And somewhere along the line I became a clear soprano. I've never been one before. I could sing soprano, but it was never easy. So I can BELT out an alto rock song as well as I could when I was twenty, and that sure is fun. (I sang "White Rabbit" extemporaneously, before the thing started.) But now I can harmonize with a clear, sweet soprano voice that comes from someone else in my body. No. Really. Must be. Can't be me.

And I am leaving for Littleton, NH on Tuesday, to scatter the last of my sister's ashes in the Connecticut River Source Lakes. One of them. We'll decide that on Wednesday. It's long overdue, but I could not have traveled so far until now. Her best friend--my other big sister, to me--and I will go and come back home on Thursday.

ALL three paintings were inspired from my hospital story. It will take a very long time to finish two of them. One is nearly done. As I said, I will put some studies of them in here, so you can see what I have been up to.  Whether or not I will publish the last hospital story remains to be decided. Not for a bit, I don't think. My soul's flitted off to different things for now. I tend to listen to that voice.

AND, I've been using my exercise bike three-four days a week for about an hour each time. This requires a two hour recovery, but it is finally helping me start to lose the sixty pounds I have that I should lose. I've lost ten... in six weeks, which is slow. Still, slow is okay. I am not out to win a beauty contest. My goals are clear: to get as healthy as I can get and to keep walking. Period.

There was one week that was brutal, but it was only one out of the last five or six weeks. I was terrified, truly, because both feet were numb for three full days. I could not drive. Walking was odd, to say the least. I could feel the impact of each step when I was barefoot, but not as the sensation of the skin, more as the impact of two solid surfaces. It took a full week for the pain to subside, the swelling to go down, for the feeling to fully return. Didn't want to write about it. Didn't want to talk about it. I simply wanted it to go away. Which it did.

I am struggling a bit with the decision of whether to stay only one more year in my wonderful home, or give myself two years. Money, of course, is the issue. I have limited assets and they will be depleted by half if I stay two more years. I am eligible for enormous subsidy by going into a small elderly or assisted housing place. I don't want to go. And I don't know whether that's a spoiled brat talking, or whether it's a legitimate voice. I have room to paint here. I would not, elsewhere. The wait list is about a year, so I may do it, just in case. I want to stay in my new home. Paint. Have company. Feel this alive.

That's the thing; I am alive in every fiber of my being at last. I have not been like this for weeks in a row ... not for three years now. And even three years ago, it was short-lived. Since Jean Ellen died, I have been partly numb and asleep inside. I was awakened when one man returned. He brought out the Jetty in me again... I have to admit that about him whether or not I want to! He did. I almost lost her again when I lost my health, my career, and my home all at once, but nope. She kept yelling at me to let her come out and play.

And one day last week it occurred to me. He was the one who had said, "I wish you could wake up every day and Jetty could tell you what she needs: to rest, to sing, to write, or to paint ... or all three, without your having to worry about money, without your having to panic." I turned that into MY words as soon as he was gone. And I resented him because HE was going to rescue me.

Blecchhh.... pity pity pity. Since when have I thought I needed rescuing? Ugh.

Well, last week I realized I WAS asking myself that question every day and had been for a month! Only in his words, with the addition of "to focus on getting stronger, to dance" in there. And I am trying to put the money stuff OUT of the picture again for at LEAST six months. But I do ask myself that question. And the answer lately has been all combinations of focusing on getting well, dancing, singing, and painting! AND, without the OR!

Sometimes one steps away from the computer to fill the well. That's all. It is always temporary. I cannot imagine my life now without writing, including my blog, even if only fifteen of you eighty-eight are willing to hang in there with me.

So I will take pictures of my paintings, tell you their stories, and ramble on and on next weekend. Thanks for thinking of me there, all of you. Life is a miracle to me. Truly. How can it not? A couple of nights a week, I turn out all the lights, I put on my gypsy skirt and a tank top and I dance to music from the nineties, the music I danced my way to freedom after my husband ran out of my life. Peter Gabriel's "Us" and Bruce Hornsby's CD with "Fields of Gray" on it. Not all my FAVORITE music, but selections that I cannot stay still for. And they remind my of those years in my forties when I was slim and strong, but in pain and trying to find my solitary strength and joy. No one can see me, including me. All I know is the music, the dark and absolute abandon, while I set the girl free.

See ya!

Pneumonia and the Safest Place

Betweet 2000 and the end of 2001, my friend who is like a sister to me, and who had two very small children, was struck with kidney failure several times and fought to keep her life. I lived half the time at my house and half at hers. My sister and I had decided to hang onto our home in case G died, which she nearly did six times in a year and a half. We knew we might be raising two children because, by his own admission, C was no kind of a father to raise kids alone. Then my minister, a friend who had helped me through my husband's desertion and daughter's death, whose wife was a dear friend, hanged himself. And my brother was diagnosed with terminal liver disease one month before his older son hanged himself. Then Jack died. Then my voice teacher and choir director and friend of ten years died.

It was not a good eighteen months.

And at the end of that time (G is STILL with us), my women had an inkling that I would fail if I did not get the hell out of Dodge for a bit. So Nancy, who was going to take a professional photography course in Santa Fe, consulted with my sister about sending me with her. They colluded, this bunch. And for Christmas of 2001, I had a ticket to Santa Fe and a hotel to stay in and ten days to call my own!

Perfect. And it was. Only on the plane ride home, I contracted an odd strain of bacterial pneumonia. Four days after I was home, my fever spiked and I was terribly, terribly ill. I saw the doctor and he gave me two choices. "The hospital today, or you do absolutely NOTHING for the next three days, let other people take care of you, do your breathing treatments religiously and find some way to keep your breathing deep and even. I will see you then, and if you are better, you may continue that way. 2/10ths of a degree higher temperature, you are in the hospital. And do NOT lie down to sleep at night."

Painting My Way Home
I painted. I remembered, in my counseling, yes, I DID do visualizing when the flashbacks started to come. I learned to keep them from coming by a strong, strong visualization of the safest, most serene spot I could imagine. I had two. One was at Sandy Hook, New Jersey. I gave that painting away. The other, my fifth painting ever, is this. I am sorry about the reflection. I gave it to my sister when she was having a particularly rough time two years later. I worked on this every day, played Handel's Watermusik in the background and focused on breathing. It is just watercolor. I surrounded myself with New Hampshire pictures. Water. Granite. Pine. Mountains. The Flume. The Basin. Roadside rushing water. The Lake. You name it. At the other end of the room I did the same with pictures from my Runaways to Red Bank. Nothing but Sandy Hook, West Long Branch, the ocean, rocks. sand. I would move back and forth between paintings, then the couch, paintings, the couch, for about eight or ten hours. I had a gallon of ice water there as well, and a cooler with more ice.

By Still Waters, Peace

From this painting everything else has sprung. I am a woman of granite and water. Mad rushing water has smoothed my edges. Pools of calm reflect the colors of ages. I am a woman of pine and birch, of seasons and extremes, of dark and light. (Well, and I'm just plain nuts to boot, lest you think I've gone all mythical mystic goddess on you.) Northern writers have just as many layers as the southern writers do. It took me until I was about forty-five to know that for sure.

I guess I'm blogging more than I thought I would. Oh, well. Here is the mother painting for me. Again, apologies for the reflection's muted color and lines, but perhaps you can get the feel of it. Oh. I finished both in nine days. On the tenth I rested! No hospital. I was very close to well.

And whenever I look at this painting I seem to automatically breathe more deeply, and I disappear there to rest.

Three Photos, an Old Poem, a Painting in my Brain...

... and another ramble from a memory.  In the seventies and early eighties, I had an "aunt and uncle" who built a dreamhouse on Cape Cod. Joy was actually my mom's first cousin, but they grew up around the corner from one another in New York (Flushing), so felt the relationship was more like sisters. She was about ten years younger than mom and we always thought of her as Aunt Joy. It was to her place in Paris my sister and I went during the summer of '74, when I was graduated from college.

My aunt designed and had built a wondrous home at the Cape, to which  my sister, my best friend G, and I would run for a joint birthday celebration of G's and mine. Joy was a gourmet cook and would make us fabulous meals. She was estranged from her daughter and I was the surrogate. Or so she said.

You know what? For now I will cut to the chase. Four years after I was married, she called one day and told us Jack's "Ship had come in." He was a brilliant man--ultimately part of the group that invented the early voice recognition for telephones. A computer scientist who put himself through school playing, as he called it "cocktail hour piano." He relocated from his position for ITT (Then) International to form his own research company and he said that he had sold at long last, one of his patents. Joy was ecstatic and immediately they called me and told me that I would never have to worry about Mark's and my kids' education again. They had a big dinner for all four of us kids and our children to tell us they were setting up college funds for the kids and were giving every adult in the group an income GIFT of $10k a year! To us, it was something.

And if I could not trust my surrogate parents, the aunt who had been there for me during my twenties, when my mom's drinking had overtaken her more than half the time, well...

And they called me especially, telling me that they were sending me fifteen thousand dollars to get a GOOD CAR and pay for the added auto insurance, title fees, etc. The check did not come, but they insisted there were glitches. In the meantime, I called G, who was newly out of law school, that she should plan on a vacation.

One of G's shots related to
where this ramble's headed

She and I were renting a place in New Hampshire to take a long dreamed of vacation together so she could have autumn shots of New Hampshire.  She had an affinity for shots in the mist, taken through foliage, and of reflections.  The Lake beckoned. I kept putting off getting the car, though, wisely thinking it was best to simply pay, not get a short-term loan. But I made our reservations.

Finally, Jack called and said, "I just mailed the check. Why don't you get the car."

Mark said, "Honey. Let's go get that car you picked out and just take the loan and pay it off in a few days. It's the only one on the lot."

We got it. It was the color of my skin when I got a tan. Back then I had only lately given up tanning...

I called Joy and told her, then drove to my folks' house later in the day so that they could see I no longer had the breakdown king of cars. The phone rang. My dad got off the phone.

"It was a lie. Jack was picked up by the police, drunk, trying to buy a gun and shoot himself. He didn't sell a thing. He refinanced their paid for house and made it look like they were rich. He is penniless."

And I had a car we could not pay for.

There is far more to that story, but that is enough. My parents helped us out. And my husband said that we would FIND THE MONEY and to just go on vacation.  We had lately found out that my dad was dying...

part of the image G gave me for my wall

G and I went and it was wonderful. I would park my brand new, comfy car, and she would get herself into contortions to take pictures. And in the course of our adventures, we found this One House Island (that may be our name for it) on, yes, Golden Pond.


 When we got home, of course, all hell broke loose for year after year after year, it seemed.

But along the way, I wrote poetry. I do not say it was good poetry, but it helped me.  And one night I dreamed an image, and the next day wrote a poem so that I would not forget.

The other shot she took

Dream Witch of Holderness
In the mist, a castle-cottage
Rising silent from the water
Like the Loch Ness Monster --
You startle.

Un-turreted, but towering;
Alone, on small island nestled,
Where no safe harbor welcomes --
Only rocks.

Does your dock draw up at night?

Does your long-necked, pine-crowned bough
(So still and silent serpent
Over now day-misted lake)
Snake further still in the dark?

Turning gently to its queen,
"Dear Sorceress within,"
Does it whispering to you ask
"Where do we wander tonight?"

Then silent as owl's flight,
Does my Innisfree arise,
Unfurling gold-scaled dragon wings,
And vanish?

Do you color these worlds I dream?


In my head I took the dock in the background and combined it with the memory of a giant fallen tree you cannot see from this angle. It snakes into the Lake a good ten feet, but it is from a direction where she could not get a decent picture. There rocks in the right background jutting out to the left.  G took many photos of misty still waters, brilliant foliage breaking through it. She has a painting I did based on her work hanging next to the two inspiration shots at her house, in fact. We used to be like that, working off of each other's art. The image in my head had more the mist of the first painting.

 I dreamed that poem once again. Last night. I have to work on it now. I don't know whether I yet have the skill for it, but I have to try. Eventually I will get it, I know. Plus I have to finish the painting "Snow on October Fire" too. This means I'll not be writing for a bit. Not long, but probably not more--except on comments, of course!  Joy died before Christmas. Jack's senility has made him kind... such a gentle surprise. Many difficult memories reside with these two as well--I may or may not write of them. But I remembered the Joy who was there for me, and tried for thirty-five years to find her again. She left when she lost that Cape House. She never came back...

But has so often been the case, out of a time of pain and turmoil, came nuggets of great beauty and wonder for me, and a simple children's poem, and an image that haunts me still. I had to wait until I could BEGIN to paint it, until I could feel Joy's death as LOSS, to find my way back to it again.

In Arnold's words, "Ah'll be Bahck."

PS
I just finished a sketch that has promise! Kinda excited now.

New Painting finished

Water or no water, stress or no stress, I find I have to paint to calm down and reconnect with myself.  Sometimes even humor doesn't work for me. Bruce, I trust you and your wife are dancing up a storm. No. Scratch that. NO STORMS!

Anyway, here's another painting.

I realize it may not be to some folks' taste, but that's fine.  The yellow shows up brighter on my screen than it does in the picture. If I wanted to take the time I would tone it down--it is more of a pale lemon, like the yellow in the upper right edge and toward the bottom. And everyone's screen looks different, so it doesn't matter.  I just kind of like putting my pictures here, too... just to remind myself that when I am not writing, I am still pursuing art and something that satisfies me way down deep where I live.  This one is Heaven's Garden 1. Once again, I dreamed the painting and then dreamed another that is all the fire, summer colors of the garden. I'm working on another spring painting that involves daffodils and scilla--I think I will be painting dreamlike scenes for some time.

So. For better or worse, that's what I was working on during the last ten days. I am wishing you all a wonderful Easter weekend, if that's a religious holiday that is important to you. If not? Well, just happy APRIL. Spring for REAL.

WOO HOO

I have been awarded Social Security Disability. I am eligible immediately for Medicare. The first hurdle toward my reconstructed self has been CLEARED.

I have dreamed of coral reefs two nights in a row now. Time for a new painting, I guess, while I work on the two unfinished.

Such a New Year's gift. The judge wrote her decision BEFORE the Christmas break, only a couple of weeks after the hearing. She was clear and, well, it validated a good deal, this judgment of hers.  I will be able to be financially okay for at least ten months and, hopefully my house will sell before that time is done.

I find myself hoping only to move forward, to not just reconstruct myself as an artist and writer, as one who creates solely what is in my heart and imagination, but to feel that I can tutor as well. I LOVE helping kids unlock their curiosity, finding the words that help them over their own hurdles. It is challenging and fun, too. I am only eight in my brain, so it seems a natural fit, no?

I want the new year to propel me toward simple peace, toward loving my friends better, toward more productivity and choices that keep me on the planet a LONG time.  I want to write the wonder of my life, which was the gift that got me through the pain--the gifts of my mother, my father, and my sister, really. Each had their own whimsy and sense of the absurd that they gave to me.  And the wonder that was my brother Jack's willingness to protect me the best he could from the violence of the other brother. And of our friendship as children and teenagers. In his own disease, he committed one horror, but ONLY one. Mostly, as his birthday draws near,  I remember Robin Hood, calling to me as I hid in the closet. Calling to me when his own torture was over and the monster had wandered off, losing interest in causing him pain. "Maid Marion, Maid Marion. The Sheriff is Gone. It's safe to come out."

And I would untie him and bathe the cuts or the bruises myself. Jack gave me my very life, I think.

It is a new year. Some of the limbo has suddenly ended. I am acutely aware that I was given more gifts than my share, I think. I called my friends who had been long awaiting good news. It took three hours of laughing and crying and just being happy.

I have virtual friends in here, many of whom have reached out to me beyond the blog. I have thanked you all before, but I simply must again. The progress on the book is slow, but it has to be. I have made peace with many things in these months of chaos and pain.

Long ago, in the early days of biofeedback pain therapy, I named the pain Louise. My  middle name and my paternal grandma's name. I may have mentioned this elsewhere. I did this because my grandma taught me many things as a small child, and I adored cooking next to her, eating lunches she made for Jude and me at the Lake on rainy days--we sat at a lace-edged tableclothed card table, on the screened in porch, eating egg salad sandwiches cut on the diagonals with the crusts off, off of special plates with a spot on them for the chocolate milk-filled glasses. And we had M&M's for dessert. Grandma would serve her two little wild girls as if we were grand ladies. It made us giggle, as we sat in overalls and t-shirts, barefoot. Huck Finn girls with Lady Louise. Grandma mourned the demise of whale-bone corsets. She showed me how to dip candles for fun and we churned butter.

But when I hit puberty I learned that Louise was mean to my mother. She spied on us. She was bitter. A vicious gossip sometimes. Louise was not likable, barely lovable, in fact--but she was my grandma, part of my being, part of who I was, part of my life.

The Louise of my body, born of spinal disease, has tamed my tendency to self-destruct. Pain is not something we want. I don't want it.  But it's here. It is part of my life. Louise is here and saved my life and made it hell and I cannot discard it. I must live with it and use my heart and soul to find the ways to use it to FORCE me into going after the dream.

I never gave myself permission to paint, to sing, to write simply what I WANTED. To create from my own music for the sake of creation. Well, I can't do it on deadlines any more. There is no path left for me but to do what I want!

So, tell me. What sort of irony is in that? I mean, talk about a dope learning things the hard way!

I will be getting the first step of financial respite. I have accepted what IS in relation to my spine. I KEEP ON STANDING UP. But I know enough to sit down or lie down when I have to.

It IS a happy new year. Thank you to any of you who keep no looking for me to write. There will be more.
Woo HOO.

Painting for My Life

I never thought that painting could take the place of singing in my life — at least in part. Before the shingles aftermath, I sang in choirs and choruses. It was the way I got my jolt of art beyond myself and connected with people in the strictly social way. By that I mean having casual relationships with people built around a mutual interest, where we laugh together and produce together, but were not necessarily wrapped around one another's lives. That door is closed to me now, as is even the enjoyment of listening. That was a tortuous adjustment for me.

I forget how much I miss those sorts of relationships in my life, but I do. I work at home. I pursue largely solitary joys, and since my neighborhood successfully blocked my attempt to create this sort of community in my home, I find my sense of isolation has grown. The degeneration of my spine precludes the trips to the gym now as well. So I search for the thing that will bring me casual company.

I have found, however, something beyond writing, to give me the jolt of creation.

Yet I feel something else happening as I get back into some routines of painting. The act of teaching a friend is waking me up. We hand a painting back and forth, each adding a piece of herself to the work started by the other. It is an electric process because whatever we envision in each step must necessarily change the next time the painting returns. She and I wrote together as adolescents, building on one another's riffs. Now Paige and I do the same with our art. She has not let herself paint or draw. And I have not let myself fly. Her imagination frees my own. We paint, draw, tear, paste. We laugh.

And it spills over into my solitary art.

I love the rhythm of collage and painting. I built a peony from scratch. One layer of tissue at a time, I built my flower, lightly tinting each petal. Fifteen minutes here and there, and from a blank paper rose something I've never done, captured my impression of the blossom from a tree peony. It excited me and made me cry. I thought of my mother and her joy at the slow art of flower gardening, how it made her seem to be more alive. I have felt barren for so long, and there it was before me--this birthing of something from my own mind. Once more I felt the thrill of the process and result, both. I had not felt that for three years, when I began the huge painting I just finished two weeks ago--my vision of a treasured memory with my dad.

The best of my life seems to be surfacing when I pick up my pencil, my brush, my papers. I have begun a diptych of New England, with the unifying thread being a stone wall--my impression of a wall. Winter will melt into spring, burst to the right into summer and drop down into the second part, summer still. Then blazen into fall and fade into winter again. I do not know whether there will be anything beyond texture and color that will be those seasons, but the wall? The wall will be absolutely recognizable as that. To me it is the quintessential New England item, wherever you go. Into the middle of a forest and there it will be, the reminder that so much of our land was once tilled, then allowed to grow wild again. I loved Central Pennsylvania, but I missed my walls. Walls that did nothing so much as invite you to cross them. they marked properties, but did not keep neighbors out. Just cows...

I will find other ways to connect in a group; I feel more confident again. The painting has opened doors I had not recognized were closed. I have walked into a different stage of biological life, but realize that I do not have to allow barrenness to be anything more than that. I am alive again, if not blooming. But, then, Fall foliage is not about flowering, so much as the last dance before sleep. And it can be a long, brilliant, lush season indeed.

The miraculous thing about facing our demons that they do not describe, is how it feels to be free of them at last. If I cannot dance with my legs or sing with my voice, then I will dance with paint, with paper, and with pens. I may just hit sixty in a few years, more alive than I have ever been. We'll see. For now? For now I will simply walk outside and weed the garden and take it from there.

Paint, Paper, and Pens--why bother?

When I was married I read A Room of One's Own until it fell apart. Then I got another copy and had this idea that if we all were in a house with an extra room, I'd have a place other than the dining room table in which to paint a write.

Wrong.

My husband took over the spare room as his study and dressing room, and he cleared a small corner of the room for my "Stuff." I had a rolling table with the then cutting-edge word processor and its paper, and for my meager drawing and painting supplies. To keep it in there meant my rolling it down the hall into the -- you guessed it -- dining room to use. So I put it in the corner of the dining room and thus had, once again, no space that was mine. The kids had their own rooms and took over the family room. Everything else was shared.

I was picking up and taking down and gave up eventually.

Now, in desperation, I return to a dream of my youth and to my late daughter's voice. We don't really lose ourselves, we just don't always locate the right voice for the right audience or the right time in our lives to let that "self" be expressed. Her name was Jessie and the business model in my head was "Jessie's Voice." For now I say "Reinvented Voices" to broaden what was HER idea, that we reinvent the voice we use to let ourselves out.

My first venture into helping people do this for themselves is Paint, Paper, & Pens. Running art workshops in the morning, afternoon and/or evening to help people be a kid. No. Not explore their inner child. Just be a kid. Make a mess without having to clean up. Paint a purple tree or a kitty that looks like a cow. A place where you are charged a quarter when you put your own work down and kicked out for criticizing others. Eight part workshops to start, with right-brain activities to warn up, some group painting exercises, and the last three sessions to create anything people want, together, separately, or some combination of the two.

I'm not an artist, but I can paint well. It's an exploration for me, though I've attended painting classes and creativity and writing workshops. I'm a writer who paints. I would like to see whether I am also a painter. In the meantime, I can work with others to help them explore and remember--remember what it was to paint or draw without worrying about the rules or other people's opinions. To be in the company of other people who want to do the same, and to laugh.

I think this economy needs laughter. I think many of us need some affordable activities that offer us the opportunity to DO, not be done to or to watch others doing. And for many of us, our uncensored creativity was squashed out of us the first time someone said, "That kitty looks like a PIG" or "You went outside the lines!" or "Trees are NOT purple."

Creativity from art spills over into other areas of our lives. I hope to post links to sites on creativity in the future. I hope that people who inquire about my workshops in Connecticut, start checking creativity sites themselves, or take a painting class at college, or move on to many things. Mostly I hope that I can make a modest living while connecting a creative, silly community in the land of Malls and sameness.