Hurdles
“MESA”, 60″ x 40″, 1999, m/m
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For a short time in grade school I was a hurdler.
In Phys. Ed. the coach would set up a short run of them and we’d have ourselves a meet.
I was a struggling hurdler.
Gymnastics was my game and truth be told: I was slow on my feet.
My body has an interestingly vivid memory of what it took to clear one of these things.
Set your heart on overdrive.
RUN!
LEAN into the hurdle at perfect time to allow a
JUMP UP!
STRETCH one leg out in front farther than you know possible.
COMPACT your body into a tight thing that takes up little space.
At the same time exert big energy to PULL other leg up into a bent knee and LIFT knee as high as possible.
Maybe clear the hurdle.
Feel free.
When one does hurdles it is a good idea to pull every ounce of energy in toward yourself as close as you can get it.
That container of life that you make yourself is what you feed off of as you sprint into the netherlands.
Nothing messy. Nothing out of place. No cells being used for anything other than making it over the hurdle as a streamlined and elegant machine intent on getting to the other side.
I am writing this today to remind Cathy of what it takes to heal herself.
The Look
detail of hand-painted silk robe, 1987
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I watched a guy sitting alone, yesterday.
He was in his early 30′s. Young.
At the table next to him sat another man with his daughter of about 4 years old dressed in a pink dress and barrettes holding her hair.
The first man had a book on his lap but he only pretended to read.
His real interest lay watching the table next door as the father gently negotiated breakfast with his daughter.
They were so connected and I could sense an easy and loving exchange between the two like they were of the same skin.
And of course, they were.
The other guy kept his surreptitious gaze on them for a long time.
He was enchanted, it seemed.
Curious, mystified and longing.
Awed by the simple theater unfolding of father and daughter.
It was the look of a person who was not too familiar with kids and had none of his own but wanted the heart-splitting love and utter trust that seems to come with parenting if you’re lucky.
I know this look of which I speak.
One can only concoct it if you’ve never had children. And I chose not to.
My art career always came first and in all honesty, I was never drawn in that direction.
Until now. Now, at a spry 55 years of age.
Now and only now do I know in my bones I would have been a great mom.
And so.. if you watch me carefully, you can catch me with THE LOOK sometimes.
Secretly watching others in that most precious of love-zones.. healthy family.
What does one do with all that love in there that went unused and unrecognized for the good part of a lifetime?
I often watch as I turn it on teenagers.
Kids hangin’ on the corner so wrapped up in whether they look right get a gentle and direct smile from me.
Money, sometimes.
Behind their “I’m so cool that I can’t say thank you” demeanor, I know they soften in my presence.
And so… I move through life spreading little tid-bits of love like that to the younger generation.
I know it makes a difference because I remember those that smiled at me.
Hardware
detail of painting, m/m
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I’m telling you.. humor and humility are my finest virtues these days.
My best traits used to be stuff like honesty and a sense of humanitarianism.
But now… I laugh more and count on good lipstick to cover for the raw realities of my companion, MS.
Yesterday at the physical therapist’s office, I rose from the table following a session with mini shock treatments stimulating my lazy musculature.
My knees have always tended toward hyper-extension but now, as there is even less structural integration in my right leg, my knee just wants to slam back as far as it can when I walk.
I’ve had what they call an AFO for quite awhile which is a fiberglass sheath that goes from foot to under the knee.
It is a leopard print which seems to entertain me and PT-types.
Foot drop is a common issue in MS which is when muscles weaken which govern lifting one’s foot up to clear the ground when walking.
The AFO takes care of that.
My new knee brace extends from just below the knee joint and goes up to mid-thigh.
It is made from a cool techno- metal and straps around my leg with velcro.
Very light. Gives me great support. Can’t see it under clothes. I walk better.
Straighter. Inching toward forgotten pride. It helps me meet life full on.
So.. I’m in the therapist’s office putting all my contraptions on and blithley whizzing through the various velcro straps and such.
She is trying to help me and suddenly looks up with half-wet doe eyes and says: “HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT YOUR BRACE?”
Well.. I almost lost it.
Such sincere compassion and real curiousity and presence.
She very nearly took me into my ‘cry-zone.’
But partnered up with tears and sprinting out in front is laughter.
And that’s who got there first.
Often, in this grueling testing ground of character, I just CAN’T feel.
Not in the moment at least.
My dog, Olivia is fat with the tears she’s licked from my face over time.
So they’re there, sure.
But humor is my elixir of choice these days.
And believe me.. it’s VERY real and not a front.
If you saw the brace contraption you’d likely marvel at the engineering involved and we’d quickly move on to talk about the latest VANITY FAIR magazine article on Lady Gaga and I’d tell you I really had no idea who she was until I read that article and we’d laugh at the absurdity of my disconnect from really important things.
Creation / Destruction
“FINE LINE”, 1998, 11″ x 11″ x 4″, m/m
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Two years ago I burned a large collection of past paintings.
They had been shipped back to me from a long time gallery I had worked with which was closing it’s doors.
When I saw the work unwrapped in my studio, none of it felt like me.
It wasn’t bad work at all, in my eyes.
Just past tense.
Sometimes, the life from which a work of art is born is instilled in the piece itself and that life can carry a work for eons.
It will have a substance all it’s own and a stand-alone quality.
This past work I was now confronting was created from a less-than-authentic place in me.
And it showed.
Perhaps not to others but surely I could tell.
And so..what does one do faced with this situation?
Put the work back into the marketplace hoping for a check here and there?
I have reached a point in my life where I DO feel true and real.
My conscience would not let me return the work to be sold.
So I burned it.
I made a ceremony out of the event and invited friends and had someone take a chainsaw to my paintings before they met their demise.
The point of all this drama was to let the universe know that I was seriously ready for change.
It was the beginning of my MS symptomology rearing it’s head in ways could not avoid.
My right hand was not working well and I was tired.
Intuitively, I knew that healing could only come from me taking a stand in my life for a shift away from anything I was giving energy to which did not serve me in some way.
And so.. how does one do that?
By burning my work I was consciously making room for something new to arrive.
And arrive it did.
And continues to do so.
And I marvel at the courage it actually takes to radically invite and welcome change.
If I had done it in a ‘tidy’ way, I might still be steeped in a ‘Cathy’ I wasn’t all that fond of.
Here is a photograph of the Hindu goddess KALI, the creator / destroyer.
She is not pretty.
Fierce? Yes.
But probably not your first choice as a dinner partner.
The thing is that change is messy and exhausting and it can rip your heart out from the horror of it all.
But KALI never leaves us empty if we feed her with our courage like that.
Her rewards can be beyond anything we know.
But we never know until we strike the match.
Dad
hand-painted silk neckties, 1985
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My father died when he was 51.
He had this whole secret life at General Motors where he bossed a good number of people around.
And they let him I think because he was good at it, they probably liked and respected him and they needed their job.
That was his very private and unknown-to-us life.
Nice suits, 5′ tall nude woman sculpture in his giant, glassy office and the run of basement to top floor of the many- acred tech center spread.
The one day we kids were privy to this part of our father was on children’s day when we visited him there and sat terrified in the executive dining room for lunch as he awkwardly introduced his offspring to friends.
It pains me to think about it.
He sure looked the part in the glossy hallways there.
But I didn’t recognize the guy.
For me, I knew him catching minnows with us at the lake.
And making a real wooden red sailboat from scratch on which I spent many hours afloat.
Carving a too fast saucer run for us in the frigid air after a snowstorm,
And drunkenly waiting until he could go to work the next day.
I loved him.
And I knew he loved me.
But it was very quiet parenting he did.
More show-and-tell.
And because I was enchanted with power tools and turpentine and sawdust, he tolerated my tentative shadowing of him.
I would follow him to the workshop and he’d make stuff like enameled copper boxes or cast a fish in plaster from the creek below our house.
But something was eating him from the inside out and he kept it so quiet but I knew.
I didn’t know the thing’s name as I was so young but I was smart enough to see his unhappiness.
And so I was glad he had the secret world of General Motors to shine in.
And shiny he was.
I think he died of a broken heart because he spent a lifetime managing artists when what he really wanted to do was be one.
Living inauthentically takes it’s toll.
The legacy he left me is fearlessness around power.
Tools, people, big and scary corporate dealings, too- nice suit jackets and men in huddles.
He also left me the simple love of working with my hands.
He helped me become confident in my approach to life as a sensitive and creative being.
He inadvertently showed me the edge of madness.
That thing that happens when no one sees the real you.
And so… my life has been one of a collector; I find those in whose eyes I can see myself clearly, honestly and truly.
And I keep them close.
And closer still.
And I walk on with the solace of their gait beside me; barely but very surely there.
Vulnerability
detail of textile painting on wool flannel
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Yesterday I said: “I feel vulnerable” to a friend.
It was weird because that word usually has a ‘less-than-great’ connotation.
And it did when I used it.
I wanted to be seen in a particular way and was afraid that wasn’t going to happen.
So… I felt exposed and vulnerable.
Except there was a hidden sweetness there too.
A part of me that didn’t care all that much being exposed.
My hide was permeable.
I wasn’t an armored truck immune to incoming ‘whatever.’
I looked up the definition of vulnerable and at the bottom of a list of less-than-desirable states of being was the word: TENDER.
That’s what I felt yesterday… tender.
In my past life, feeling tender was just too damn scary.
I was out for full on protection of self no matter what and absolutely unwilling to let the fortress gate down to bridge the moat.
No.. the walls were impenetrable and have pretty much stayed that way for years.
If you met me back then (not so long ago) you’d likely never know the grip I had on myself.
But I had made it through some tough stuff and had a tenuous foundation goin’ for me that no one got to mess with.
So really, that left me INvulnerable at least in my own mind.
Sweet for one’s ego but my heart dried up to some extent.
One of the surprises I’ve received in companionship with MS is making friends with the kind of vulnerability I’m speaking of here.
I certainly don’t go around in the world leaving myself exposed to harm.
But I am letting the old guard down more in certain instances in order to be seen as I am; a woman steeped in her humanity trying to get comfortable with it, love it even, with no apologies.
I am changed. Changing. Very alive.
Imperfect, sure.. in the best sense I think.
I’ve still got the old vestiges of me that want to be seen a certain way.
But that girl would be less-than-authentic.
And I now love truth more than pretense.
I am tender to the touch of life now..
Gold
Abiquiu, NM earth
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I saw purple asters by the side of the road.
They are the unofficial harbingers of Autumn in New Mexico.
It’s my favorite season in the high desert.
Purple and yellow flowers and the impossibly blue sky.
This morning it was hard to get out of bed early.
So I didn’t.
I have a meditation I often do sitting up but today is different.
I laid in bed with the pre-autumn chill for atmosphere and I did this:
.
.
CATHY’S GOLD MEDITATION
. .with closed eyes imagine walking down a path through a dewy meadow heading for a small stream.
.. lean down to feel the perfect temperature of the slow moving brook.
.. leave all clothes and jewelry by the side of a rock and slowly step in.
.. with head pointing into the slight current, lie down in the shallow water and spread your arms a bit away from your body.
.. close the eyes and breathe.
.. imagine the liquid you lie in is gold. Liquid gold.
.. feel it enter the top of the head and make it’s way ever so slowly down your body as it fills each vein and artery, organ, muscle and bone.
.. let the gold reenter the river through your fingers and toes so as you keep relaxing, the separation between you and the river becomes indistinct.
.. keep opening the top of the head to the flow as you surrender to the slight current.
.
.
.
If that’s not church, I don’t know what…
Jump Back
hand-painted silk jersey, 1987
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In my youth (elementary school) I had a friend named Mike Hershman.
One night we took 2 big cans of Nestle’s Quick and poured them into the pool of someone in our subdivision we didn’t like.
I remember feeling dastardly because I actually thought the whole pool would turn dark brown like chocolate.
Needless to say, that is not exactly what happened.
NOTHING happened. Except we laughed till we cried all the way home wrapped in the secret world of childhood shared.
I lived in the basement of our home which had a window well for ventilation purposes, I guess.
I loved living down there as I was far away from the bitter tailings of my family’s dysfunction.
One night, my boyfriend of 4th, 5th and 6th grade, Mark, took his chance and crawled into the window well trying to get into my room (invited guest).
Pretty bold, eh? On both our parts.
The stuff of legend.
The thing is that my dad came into my room just at the moment Mark was halfway in.
We were horrified.. all of us.
My father had no idea how to father, actually, and let my shame be the neon scarlet letter I wore for a long time.
That was a pivotal experience for me as I look back beyond all this adulthood.
Because even though I wore that shame around the house, secretly I LOVED THAT WE DID THAT!
Nothing neutral about those actions.
Devilish, desirous (as much as 10 year olds can muster) and just damn FUN!
I have had a postcard tucked into my bathroom mirror for years.
It’s a tattered black and white shot of a man and woman barefoot as they run with glee down a winding dirt road.
The feel of it is the same as the window well story; abandoned and free.
Where in the world did I lose that girl?
Intent on making her own rules needing agreement from no one.
I catch a glimpse of her behind the set of my jaw or twinkling shyly in the corner of my crows- footed eyes.
She is in the involuntary salivation driving past an ad for chocolate milkshakes.
And the disregard for the speedometer on a 2 lane lonely highway in the desert.
I absolutely love that girl.
Her voice comes from low in the belly.
And her lines are never straight.
She is prone to laugh at sick humor all the while wearing Chanel No. 5.
Serious, schmereous… yuk.
Louise Hay, who wrote a book, HEAL YOUR BODY on her ideas of the emotional causes of various diseases says under the MS heading: “Iron will, fear, mental hardness.”
I see myself in there.. too much deciding instead of allowing.
Eons of ‘armoring up.’
The affirmation she gives as an antidote is: “I am safe and free.”
I’m really up for abandon these days but what if I’ve forgotten how?
All I need is a little help to begin the sly turn of the corners of my mouth into the start of untamed laughter.
The rest will take care of itself.
Home
detail of painting, m/m
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I’ve been thinking about adobe.
Brown blocks hand formed the way they’ve always done it.
Dirt and straw.
If you’ve ever had the chance to spend time inside an adobe home you likely have never forgotten the feeling you get of being held.
It reminds me of my youth in Michigan when we got blasted with a snowstorm and the following morning the scene was too bright for mortal eyes so I dug my way into huge white drifts of snow.
Secret caves tinted with butter-colored light seeping in through the packed snow.
It was so easy to carve away the insides and I lovingly patted the walls and made shelves and a smooth floor.
It felt more like home than home.
Secret. Mine.
Some guys in the neighborhood I now live in are constructing an adobe addition.
There is a preciousness to the site as they have piled the bricks lovingly around the poured foundation and they watch the weather closely for hint of rain.
Each day these beautiful brown earthen blocks inch higher as the men sing in Spanish and wave at me as I go by.
The whole thing gets covered up in the evening by a garish blue tarp.
Making a home…
I’ve made a few.
Each time I make one they get livelier and more beautiful.
Like more oxygen gets in and anything unnatural or pretentious is discarded at the door.
Here are my essentials:
light
space
quiet
safety
comfort
simplicity
sensuality
nature
That snow cave way back when was a fine, fine template.
Except I never figured out the heat issue.
Probably because I never invited anyone in.
I was too intent on making myself an island.
I just totally forgot the bridge.
For a long, long time I’ve forgotten the bridge.
But lately, I’ve got my drafting table out and a drawing is taking shape that intrigues me.
Still shadowy and indistinct but surely coming of it’s own accord.
It looks bridge-like but one can never be sure.
I think the most respectful thing to do is get out of my own way and let it have it’s own voice; undirected by me.
Because I have little knowledge of this ‘bridgeness’ but I know the island too, too well.
Good Night
detail of painting, m/m
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Lately, the night has been waking me, pleading with me.
I have to take notice when I rise of my own accord without any trace of desire to keep bundled up under the comfort of covers.
It feels as though I am called forward.
Into the dark.
But why?
To hear the rooster announce?
Or take strength from the uncomplicated and static-free air of a pre-dawn?
These hours are always my chance to feel myself clearly in the mystery of things.
If I close my eyes, there is an underlying anticipation.
Of something unknown to me but not of the monster variety.
It feels like a waiting thing that I want to make myself especially beautiful for.
I walk to the kitchen and my legs feel oddly stronger.
It seems in the deepest of night I reclaimed some lost parts of myself and I step lightly.
I sense all the people out there nestled under the small lights of their beloved households.
Love and fears and illness and dreams and courage and herculean strength and boredom and ALL OF IT happening just down the street or round some bend.
The dawn is showing her skirts now.
Life is coming in fast but still at a tolerable rate.
Nature has such an elegant tempo.
Never too fast or slow and reliable to the minute.
She makes me want to be better.
More.
Not really smarter but more PERMEABLE.
More able to allow the full impact of her gifts and lessons and especially gifts.
If you can know and tolerate the dark then she lets you use her to FLY!