Mystery
textile design on silk, 1987
____________________________
I have the oddest feeling a new life is waiting in the wings for me.
I have certainly had many, many incarnations lived out in just this present lifetime.
And so, it seems another is just around the bend.
There is not too much fear.. some, truth be told, but the pull toward this new thing, whatever it is wins out over trepidation.
In the transition I don’t trust myself in the world.
My fuse is short and my tolerance level low.
I was meandering through my favorite bookstore yesterday looking for solace and a gorgeous amazonian black
woman sat at a small table with a sign offering intuitive readings.
I seldom choose ‘in-store’ guidance givers but I was drawn to sit with her and after all was said and done I left with the knowledge I needn’t look anywhere other than the avenues I now depend on for way-showing.
Illness fosters drawing at straws when answers aren’t forthcoming.
And always, I am asked to return to home base..
Close my eyes and go inside and ask for what I need.
Have the where-with-all to tolerate the stillness it takes to STOP.
Weirdly, this is so challenging for me.. the curtailing of incessant ‘going out there’ for answers.
We all seem to be heading fast and furiously away from stillness what with all the bells and whistles in our techno-age.
Where is our tolerance for silence?
Our ability to sit soaking in the unknown trusting it’s innate intelligence?
Knowing that we don’t know and that has to be ok sometimes even if it makes us wiggle and squirm.
Jonah’s Pool
If I were forced to choose a time in my life that I hold most dear it would be my high school years at Cranbrook.
In truth, my name was called each morning in classes across the lake at KINGSWOOD, the girl’s school part of the educational community.
But I likely was not there to answer.
I was given the gift of an education at Cranbrook by my grandmother.
A number of my ancestors names were carved (legally) in the halls of both schools upon graduation.
The Cranbrook Community is a rarified piece of real estate; both of the mind and the earthen kind.
I will write more about my time there another day but I woke this morning thinking about Jonah’s Pool.
The pack I ran with were boys, mostly.
Smart and sassy, irreverent and intense.
I loved them. Love them still.
They saved me but they likely don’t know that.
We laughed and cut class and smoked pot and walked around the grounds at Cranbrook in the process of becoming the men and women we are today.
We just looked around at things.. life.. and took note. We were too high to put the pieces together back then but later on in life we did.
It was the finest backstory you could ever imagine.
Jonah’s Pool was dark. And surrounded on all sides by green. And BIG! And in off hours, private.
It served as a swimming pool for the boarding students, teachers and all those associated with Cranbrook.
It felt like a secret place as you walked through the glade and the big, black water opened up in front of you.
I was too depressed most of the time in high school.
That pool gave me freedom as I crept through the green gates of hedge in the half light of Michigan evenings.
I scanned the still water and if I found no one there, I left my clothes on the bank and dove into the dark.
I never quite knew what was under that water.
Could have been anything.
But the mystery and surrender of the dive called me and I kept listening over the years.
It was medicine, that water.
A private reverie.
A grand erasure.
And I was new.
And I was new.
Today, so many years past, here in the desert, I remember.
Secret Color
When I was living in Boston in the 80’s, I worked as a textile designer for my company called BETES de COULEUR (Beast of Color).
We sold very expensive hand-painted mens and women’s wear.
We didn’t sell too many actually, so the life of the business was short.
But we did do great stuff.
And got oodles of good press.
We made things like this robe from a vast and filthy loft in a bad part of town.
It was a very alive place, that loft.
My partner loved heavy metal music and I learned to tune it out and hunker down in my area focused on color and pattern and dye and brushes and color…
I have always known how to create my own world.
Initially out of necessity and then as I got older, out of necessity again.
This robe is the last remaining piece from our collections.
It hangs in my closet.
I love how it just looks like a fairly plain blue robe until you open it up.
In my own life these days I watch how I am very judicious about when and with whom I show my own colors.
I used to splash them around all over the place.
SEE ME! SEE ME!!
Invisibility? NO! … SEE ME!
How funny that these days invisibility is not an option as I wobble around town with my walker and wheelchair.
Not really funny but how weird that life has given me what I wanted.
The thing is that I now choose very consciously where and with whom I show my colors.
They are hard won and precious.
There is nothing about me that even resembles splashy these days.
But I am not without the spontaneity of a water balloon toss..
It’s just that it isn’t an everyday event.
You never can tell when the wind might catch the hem of my robe and turn it such that you think you see color but aren’t at all sure that you saw anything at all.
Great Day
detail, textile design
___________________
Went gallivanting yesterday.
I called an old friend I hadn’t seen in a few years as his relationship with another woman precluded ours.We had separated on good terms but there seemed no room for me in his life after that so I let it be.
I got gutsy the other day and called him up.
I broke our silence recently and called him. I asked if he still wanted to be my friend.
There are people in life with whom I have formed a secure and satisfying bond and neither distance nor time seems to have any effect.
This friend is one of those gifts; too valuable to toss into the corner with an “Oh, well…”
He told me that yes, indeed, he would like to be my friend.
Interestingly, he is in the process of unweaving his prior relationship but I had no notion of picking up where we left off.. I want him solely as my friend.
When I look to my inner circle these days, safety (physical, emotional, spiritual), an ability to see outside ones self, a good dose of irreverence and the capacity to swim in deep waters are hallmarks of those I keep close to me.
I listen to myself say “feeling safe” over and over in my life. What does that mean?
In the case of yesterday it meant that when he drove my car I trusted his skill.
I felt he kept his eye on me all day in an unobtrusive way, watching out for my well being.
We drove away from Santa Fe and felt the static of the city stayed behind us as we found hidden red dirt roads that looked like good picnic possibilities.
He found a great spot but it was over hill and dale and outside my normal comfort zone of navigating my walker.
I started to go into my default “NO.”
He said, “Just piggyback. Grab hold my neck and I’ll carry you.”
At first, I balked but his offer sounded so normal and without any weirdness attached to it that I said ok.
We sat in this great spot by the river for awhile till the bugs got us and decided to find a better spot.
It was time for me to get up from the ground.
I didn’t know how.
Usually, I have something to push up with but not here.
“I don’t know how to do this, ” I say.
We try a number of different solutions and start laughing.
It all felt so natural (almost) and fun.
I finally made it up and piggybacked to the car while squealing like a schoolgirl.
That whole thing felt safe.
I am so damned uses to the gravity of being CAREFUL and truncating my life in so many ways because of disability.
Yesterday helped me see and feel options.
I certainly DID NOT ‘look good’ as I struggled to get to the picnic place or try to stand up.
NOTHING WAS NORMAL.
I have a new normal.
And I saw it can be fun.
In order for me to settle into my new normal, I will keep those around me I feel I can test untried territory with and risk failure AND success.
I know it’s all an inside job but the company one keeps helps open sticky doors.
My Nephews
silk man’s robe, 1986
_________________________
My nephews rock.
I traveled to Chicago to see part of my family this past weekend and saw these two young men all grown up straight and tall.
But besides that, they are extraordinary human beings.
It is interesting theater to see family after a long absence and witness myself worrying how they will ‘take’ the new disabilities in me I can’t hide and seeing that people who love me can and do RISE to the occasion, whatever the hell it may be.
They got GAME… my family.
A wheelchair was rented, wrested out of the trunk on our arrival and the boys stepped up and pushed their aunt in such a gentlemanly way that I could do nothing but relax into the ride.
I asked my sister: “Is it weird pushing me in a chair?”
“Well… Yes. But we can get used to anything.”
I liked that she told me the truth.
The boys are handsome and extremely engaging creatures in the off moments from techno-plug-in.
In most kids, I have real concern about the addiction to cyber stimulus but not these two.
They talk to you. They look at you for long periods of time in interested ways as we talk. They ask questions. They answer questions with long and interesting sentences. They take a stand on things they believe in and hold to it. They have impeccable manners.
I found myself inspired by them both. Proud to be in their tribe. Eager to give them all I could to help ease their road should they need that.
What DO I have to give them, actually?
The best thing I can think of comes from the movie AVATAR but they borrowed it from revered texts of long ago: “I SEE YOU”
“I SEE YOU.”
I really think that may be the greatest gift we have to offer one another.
I see you beyond your youth and position in the family and expectations of others and insecurities and things you think you know for sure right now.
It’s really more of a feeling thing.
“I feel your heart and it is very, very good.”
I don’t know how it happened that their parents knew how to build a foundation that allowed for these two young men to flourish into the walking goodness they are.
But I’ll let them push me around any old day.
Salmon Swimming Upstream
“SALMON SWIMMING UPSTREAM”, 1985, 5′ x 5′, pigment on wool flannel
_____________________________________________________________________
I remember painting this textile so many years ago and giving it this title because I had no idea how I ever painted such a thing; complicated, otherworldly, beautiful, never-could-do-that-again-if-I-tried.
It made me think of how no painter I have ever experienced has been able to reproduce on canvas the light of the sun flicking off water.
Perhaps EVERY painter has tried this.
But there are just some things too much larger than us to think we could ever tie it down in 2 dimensions.
Salmon fighting to get back to their nesting grounds is another one of those ‘too much bigger than us’ events to try to comprehend.
I look at myself and all those dealing with a chronic health challenge in the same way I see the salmon; WE ARE DOING WHATEVER IT TAKES TO GO HOME TO GROUND FAMILIAR AND SAFE TO US.
No matter if we stop behind a rock where the eddy is softer and we are out of the ferocious current for a moment or a week or a few years.. we rest there.
And then we go out there and fight the fight once again.. on our way home.
For us, home may mean so many things.
We may run out of steam an the midst of the journey and just stop the fight and surrender to the wiles of the gods of the river.
Or the stamina needed to keep on keeping on may be ours and we make headway.
Or, if we are really fortunate, we sense that we are like the turtle and are ALWAYS at home and the journey is decidedly dependent on our point of view.
That right there has been the jewel in my crown so far in life..
I really am getting it that my existence is 100% dictated by my attitude.
Does this mean I don’t get pissy and frustrated and retreat to bed for days at a time sometimes?
Well, no… I am still here in the flesh with every cell of me calibrated toward finding home and a lot of the time I only have the strength to make it to the bed.
And that perceived passivity just kills me sometimes.
Until I get it that it is just an eddy behind a rock in the stream and I remember the last time I hung out in one I was better and stronger and ready to reenter the stream.
Rest, reenter, rest, reenter… smart moves.
Posturing
textile design, 1988, silk
_________________________
The art world is made up of a lot of what you see pictured here.
It is a huge dose of a way of being most of us can relate to because we have it too.
I want you to see me in a certain way so I present that face to you all the while I have my authentic self hidden beneath a good make-up job or pretty smile or so many letters after my name.
You can push the posturing thing in the aesthetic realm or just as effectively by playing victim to anything at all.
A finely tuned ‘woe-is-me’ story has the same effect oftentimes.
I am not minimalizing peoples’ pain and suffering as I certainly have my own share.
What I am trying to get to is the idea that art posturing and illness posturing are seductive because they each do a great job of LOOKING LIKE they draw people closer in but really they are like a cheap, synthetic cologne you might buy on a grimy street in New York.
They both act as a cover.
In the art world, the objective is to be seen as way cool and immune to the horror of the utter precariousness of the fact you are only as fabulous as your last body of work and you are beyond caring what anyone thinks of you.
In reality, the act of creation is an invitation to BE SEEN and taken seriously on some level for most.
It says more about ‘I CARE DEEPLY’ than ‘Who cares?’
In the illness realm, rattling off symptoms and medication and doctor’s names and more symptoms often has the effect of the drone of a beehive; our audience numbs out while trying to support us with a gracious modicum of compassion.
But really.. what likely is underneath the drone is a frightened, exhausted and vulnerable human being not knowing how to find a way to tell their truth.
The attention we all get from the drama of the speaking of human frailty is supposed to take the place of the true connection we might actually get if we said how scared we are.
I am tired of tolerating my own and others’ posturing.
This is a very good sign, I think.
My Home
textile design, 1990, pigment on wool flannel
_____________________________________________
HOME
.
.
What is that lovely thing
.
Meeting us at the threshold?
.
All of me in colors.
.
.
.CA 2010
Layers
“SNAKE IN THE GRASS”, 1980, 4″ x 6′, pigment on wool flannel
______________________________________________________________
I remember creating this piece as a sort of record of my day.
A diary entry if you will.
Revisiting it after all these years I see that things are not all that different.
There is still that snake in the grass in the form of MS which, back then, was probably something like a headache keeping me from a date. (bottom layer)
Still have attention on various relationships which need work or are doing great. (man, woman, ladder)
All my primary symbols making early appearances: ( turtle, 4 directions, ladder, bullseye)
And all the big questions are still rolling around in my brain. (spirals at top with opening toward the heavens ready to get the answers)
So, what IS different?
Mainly my point-of-view.
I can shift it fairly easily these days into a place which feels full-of-life instead of living at the effect of all the cultural and personal overlays we are all at the mercy of.
Until we’re not.
MS = death sentence and incurable… OR… MS = change to be addressed and managed while holding hands with POSSIBILITY.
For goodness sake.. aren’t we all a little bit bored by all the stuff WE ARE SO SURE WE THINK WE KNOW?
The state of boredom is a very powerful one if we let it be and not cave into abject lethargy.
Expand and Contract
textile design, 1987, silk menswear
__________________________________________
I am in love with expansion.
I’m not really that fond of contraction.
That’s my ‘on-the-surface’ thinking.
The cultural overlay that says light is good and the shadows are bad.
Or: happiness is the goal and discontent is to be run from.
Maybe this: Ease is the sought for mode of existence and the bumpy road needs shock absorbers.
The very alive human in me, the concoction of flesh and bones and reason and desire agrees wholeheartedly with those ways of being.
But the ESSENCE of me runs on a different kind of gas.
What if every day I got up and there was the crimson flower I had dreamed of right there at my door blooming and throwing it’s scent my way?
Or we skipped winter altogether and lived inside a constant 75 degree bubble of reliable sunshine and no thunderstorms or flash floods or soft rain of any kind touched our happy but innocent skin?
There is something in me that thrives on the sudden CRACK! of that thunderstorm and the quest for that illusive bloom.
I love sun and thrive on it but wouldn’t give it a second thought if it were my constant companion.
These days, even though I still cower at the contracting part of my life, I know it’s worth.
Having lived within a contracted body for awhile now, I value the stretch and lean into life more than before.
I don’t take the miracles of true connection with people, creatures, the natural world, God for granted as I’ve lived without and I now know the difference.
If I enter challenging territory as I have in the past week, I know it will turn toward the expansive direction at some point (which it has) and I needn’t fear I am stuck inside that place forever.
Truth be told, I often need reminding that the shift WILL take place and the tribe I keep close will remind me when I forget.
I seem to be getting more comfortable with the whole tapestry and not just the even and tidy rows one finds in the very center, but the frayed edges and renegade threads are now elements I call friends.
A little wear and tear makes for an unexpectedly unique and lovely patina that tends to draw me as opposed to the stock item on the shelf.