Apprentice to a Mountain: Chapter 3, Section 2
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Maybe this is the apocalypse? We continue to go to work and order lattes while the planet wobbles and burns, children shoot children, and a disease ravages the human population.
What is the difference between depression and grief?
In the deep quiet of exquisite grief is a gem of extraordinary beauty.
As I sit here in the middle of the day in my pajamas, I ask one question over and over:
What is here at this moment?
There is courage in the act of stopping, quieting, and asking. Part of me prefers not to know.
What is here in this moment?
I look up the word courage, looking for deeper meaning in its source.
Courage - to speak one’s mind by telling all of one’s heart; strength in the face of pain
This is what I mean to do here, my dear, among these pages with you. To speak from the very middle of a moment, from the heart.
What does this being alive really feel like?
Can I feel strength in the collapse? Beauty in the grief? Clarity in the koan?
Practice, practice, practice.
July 2020, when we immerse in water, and walk through the sunflowers, black-eyed susans, poppies oh poppies!
I love to look straight down on a batch of meadow, to observe all the different plants tangled together, the dancing vegetable world. I discover Purple Avens, a quiet, drooping bloom on a maroon stem, between the more raucous star flower, tall grasses, and clovers.
As the seasons roll through the field, I collect new flowers, leaves, and roots for ink making. I have pieces of watercolor paper pinned to the barn walls. They are covered with irregular circles made with a pen and filled with a dab of ink. Underneath I have scrawled the plant name and any modifier used, such as iron or alum, to shift the color.
A friend who teaches art at our town’s elementary school has children mix their own colors and name them. The class creates a guide to these colors, not unlike my ink charts but the names of the paints are wondrous: cotton candy, peace, warm water, poop.
My color chart is only slightly helpful because natural ink’s colors shift over time. They shift depending on how much I brush on the paper. They shift if they run into another ink on the page. They shift when they dry. I imagine they will shift over the years to come. I suppose this fact in combination with not buying commercial pigments makes this artistic process an anti-capitalist act.
I paint with the paper flat on the table. If I were to paint with the paper vertical, the inks would run. They are watery, like conventional inks or watercolors. I can build up the amount of pigment on the page, leaving the painting to dry over days in between layers. I am always surprised when I come back and view the dried painting for the first time.
When I first started creating with these inks, I would make small abstract paintings. I was fascinated to watch how the inks would move, often merging into each other and creating islands of new color. The shared organic makeup of the materials means they can talk to each other, to respond, and combine. It took a few months of open experimentation for the form of the mountain to appear.
Swipe, dab, pour, pause.
Swipe, dab, pour, pause.
There are cobwebs over the ink bottles. I pull them away to uncover the creative corners of myself. Inspiration feels as dense and copious as the blades of grass in our field. But to live from there through all of life’s other roles, that is another matter.
To make a mark with a pigment? How did this come about? Why is this such a profound act? I can feel the resonance up through the ages, as I gaze at images of cave paintings.
I am here. I see you. We are here.
I sit out on the stool in my barn studio space, listening to a chorus of crickets in the late summer golden light. So many voices are trying to pull me off this chair - the barn cat litter needs to be changed; an area in the house needs electrical repair; family members will visit soon; and work thoughts are poking their head up in the silence. But every moment is like this one, only the details change.
In the recent summer months, I have felt miles away from this backyard stool. Monitoring social media and news feeds as the pandemic and Black Lives Matter police violence mounts. Unable to gauge what is being informed and what is fueling anxiety.
As the pandemic goes on, both kids and our son’s long time girlfriend are at the house most of the time. I am back to the sisyphean task of feeding teenagers - buy food, cook food, ‘there’s nothing in this house to eat’, buy food, cook food…
If I had a choice (do I have a choice?) I would have only three jobs: parent, householder, and creative. I have tried that at times, particularly when the kids were younger, but it is nearly impossible for our family of four to live on the income of my husband’s job, as the town clerk (mayor) of our little town in Vermont.
Are you curious about me separating out parent and householder? Householder is all the parts that go along with running a house and a family, apart from the lifelong emotional work of parenting. Bills, house and car repairs, schedules, transportation, meals.
Instead I have seven jobs: parent, householder/accountant, artist, writer, grant writer, art program administrator, and teacher. I see this as a failure of our culture to value creative expression as valued work, not just for the most famous artists. And by turn this message makes it a herculean task for artists to value what they bring to the table, unless it has a high price tag.
My beloved therapist helps me to celebrate my divine inner voice, to lean into that part of myself, a more subtle form of doing. This act, or non-act, would be the cornerstone, across parenting, artistry, writing, being in a marriage, and spiritual life. But it is hard to get the world to pay you for deep listening to the world’s song and expressing images of that mystery.
I sometimes worry that I was meant to live a monastic life, feeling so at odds with the options laid out before me. I speak for the artists, writers, caregivers, crafters, herbalists, seekers and homesteaders among these pages.
The loud Archie Bunker voice in my head is saying deep listening is not doing anything, it is not enough, you are not enough. But my spicy inner rebel would like nothing more than to flick this guy the bird, quit my jobs, and live in peace with little income. I implore all the voices in my head to take a deep breath together and look for a middle road.
I grew up terrified to be an artist, the connotation in my family with artist was insanity. My grandfather Rich being held up as the example of an artist, the half-cocked playwright who moved to Vermont in the 1930’s, his children growing up in poverty and his insanity. He was my mother's father and as with most family stories this one was more nuanced than I perceived as a child, as he was, in fact, bipolar and emotionally abusive, having nothing to do with being an artist and living in Vermont. Not only did I hear the creative muse beacon me but I fell in love with a Vermonter in college and moved back to my maternal homeland after an early life as a city dweller.
My husband grew up with artist parents, and a childhood spent going from craft show to craft show, to sell wood turned objects and furniture, with a profound sense of insecurity. These early years have become mythic tales of perseverance and creative fortitude. But in my husband’s adult life, he revels in consistency, security, and his ordinary job.
So this is the dance in our household. What is someone who desires the unchained existence of a creative life, married with children to someone who has been wounded from that very pursuit? Perhaps because we have so much to learn and offer to each other. He reminds me of balance and I remind him of passion.
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