color and light One Good Thing One Creative Thing Day 5

One Good Thing: Watching the sunrise over breakfast.



One Creative Thing: [Written at the library yesterday]

I have to admit I hate crayons. Even as a child I hated then. their colors are dull and they never stay sharp enough. I clearly remember repeatedly trying to color shapes only to find the crayon drawing on the other side of the line. I know that there were kids in my class who could color perfectly, their lines were never crossed and when they filled in shapes the colors covered evenly with all the strokes going in the same direction.

After crayons we were introduced to colored pencils, 12 color boxes of Prisomcolor to be exact. While I could sharpen the point as much as I wanted the colors were still bland, no matter how hard I pushed. I craved the streaks of vibrant colors as much as I wanted to create the images in my head. But I was still sloppy and would get in trouble for not following the directions (remember this was just lower school). I tried, I really did, but my hands just couldn't move the pencils as delicately as the projects called for.

At home was a different story. Here I had my father's old watercolors that I would spend my Saturday mornings painting with rather than watching cartoons (the TV was in my parents bedroom). I remember years of painting little landscapes on scrap paper. I would create them with repeated lines; obsessing over the exact tone of the ocean, the sand, the clouds above. Each of them would be tiny worlds that I could enter. Around that time I was reading the Secret Garden and was enamored with the Scottish Moors. I drew scene after scene of what I thought those moors would look like.

When I had painted the pans empty my father would take me to the neighborhood art store to choose a new set. He was adimant that I use "real" paints not the flashy kids ones (whose flash was in the packaging not the paint). In the end I would usually come home with a yellow enamel box of Pelikan paints, the same sort I used all the way through college. My father never studied art or teaching but he knew what he liked to look at enjoyed reading about art. If he was going to have to hang the pieces that I did up then he wanted to like what he was looking at. In his mind this meant that I should have the supplies that would give me the best chance of taking the idea from my mind to the paper.

It was during these hours alone in his shop that I would play with the brushes, pigments and water, learning how each of them worked. While my princesses stood out as sloopy among the giant crowds of homogenious royalty that hung in the hallways of my school at home, with the watercolors my work was delicate.

The difference was simple; at school I was limited to choosing the colors and perhaps a little pattern while at home I was free to paint as I pleased for as long as I wanted to (or not at all). At school we were each handed a box of scented markers (at least these were vibrant) that no adult would pick up. At home I was given real supplies, pencils and paints that I would still use today. In retrospect there was no question about where my real art making was going on but at the time I sure I must be the worst artist in the world because I couldn't get my flowers to look just like the girl who sat next to me in class (who by the way was always weatring matching Benneton socks and shirts).

I knew. I knew not to stop what I was doing at home, in some ways I couldn't. I felt it when my father would take me for long Saturdays of walking from gallery to gallery in SoHo and I knew it when we would spend entire days in a single wing of the Met. I could see it in the modern paintings and I could see it in the cases of African masks. So I didn't stop. After each of these days out with my dad I would come home and try my hand at what I had seen.

Even now when I return to visit my father and find relics of my childhood art around the house. Its survival over the past three decades is not sentimentality, although that I am his daughteris part of it, they are all pieces that he felt were beyond my age when I created them. He knew it then and despite himself has directed me in this direction. I always find it amusing when I hear about parents who brought their children up to be doctors or lawyers and I respond that I was brought up to be an artist.

At this point it is up to me. If I really want to be this artist that I can be I have to work at it put in the time and space. Otherwise I am jut another person who messes around with paint.

When I Stole Time

I stole hours today, no one noticed that they were gone but I took them. Alone at a table I wrote, the quite of the library. Among the laptops at the tables I was the lone notebook and I reveled in the ink and paper. I wrote until it was a rhythm, until I no longer had to think of the next word, until the pages blurred. I lost myself in blue ink and thoughts, I left behind the staid brown ink-the sepia that has glued me together for the past few months. Occasionally inspired by a thought I would search out a book, read a few lines, then return to writing. When I finally left the library a small cairn of them marked my seat.

Now typing I realize again why I love paper and ink. Typing takes me a step away from my words, from forming the curves and lines that make the letters. Here I am repeating the thoughts of my mind but on paper it is my mind leaking to the page.

Longing

For the last few days I have been longing for snow. Usually I am excited for autumn and I am happy that it is here but something in me wants winter with it's long dark nights and white days. Mainly though I have been dreaming of the smell of snow how it smells like water but without the humid after tones. After a year filled with bright colors and shades of pink and orange I want the restfulness of whites and grays.... Or maybe it is the silence I crave, the year has been filled with noise and I am ready again to retreat into my head and empty out a little, spend more time making than planning. In winter I am less inclined to run all over the place and I need this pause.

There is a photo my father took years ago of cattails in the snow. The reeds are black against a white of late afternoon winter sun, that is what I want my world to look like. I want it to taste the way it tastes when I suck the water out of a fist full of snow and I want it to smell like fires and water and cold all at once.

Rather than being frustrated by my longing it invigorates me. It is the action verb winter not the noun.

I am the Storm

I'm not sure if I should be posting this here, it's sort of personal.

We are broke , search the couch for change to buy milk sort of broke. I didn't think we were going to be here again. It wasn't the supposed to be this way. But then no one ever plans on going broke and certainly not when they spent a year writing a business plan and securing funding for the business- the business that your husband went to graduate school for four year to do.

Where does this leave you but borrowing money from your parents again, to pay rent. Of course, this money comes with the rights. The ones where they can start telling you what you should be doing now. The ones that mean despite being 35 and despite the many hours on our own hashing out what went wrong and what we need to change, they are entitled to go through all of this again with the biting feel of parental disappointed, akin to being fifteen.

Your decisions are judged and everything you do is doubted. Bring into this a happy 2 year old who everyone loves. Suddenly he is the subject of scrutiny, is he speaking enough, does he eat the right things, what if he's sick can we care for him? You feel watched from afar, you try to give all the right information, the truth highlighting progress; both your's and the 2 year old. But it is difficult when most days are spent just getting between morning and bedtime. It's hard to make enough progress for people when you work at the speed of life and their expectations are at the speed of imagination. It's hard to explain how life can't be put aside to make things happen, how a crying son can't be left to later. Then there are the few minutes a day you used to have yourself can. Those few moments that are all you have left, except that someone else has a claim on them. All of this adds to the stress, the feelings, and to the life you are still living.

The feelings are so complicated you are almost 35 and you have a 2 year old who you are moving again for the 2nd time since he was born. There are days you can't look at his always happy face because it makes you cry. You know that he is witnessing all those things in your house that you swore against before you had a child. It makes you want to cry knowing that every time you correct him (no hitting, no ripping books) he cries a little longer and a little louder. You are afraid that you will ruin this happy child. But you are so tired and stressed that it is hard not to be frustrated in front of him, and even with him. It hurts more when you know how you want to be with him and haven't the energy to do it.

Instead you two take long walks-where you can think while he jumps from steps and later sleeps in the stroller- and play with puppets sometimes, which is easier than other games. Other days are good you get out and see friends (and their chickens) you make your meals together and draw together. On the good days there is some order to things there are games and naps. On those days it seems like it could stay that way, but you can't do it not with all the stresses in your life. Maybe the next morning, or the next, something will set off again and life will not fit. You will be in the playground too long or too short, the very favorite wooden spoon will be missing just as the sink is filled for playing. Then you will both be grumpy, because you won't get to play and I won't get a rest, especially when Baba is gone for eleven hours for work- leaving us without a car.

To be honest there are days that are worse- ones where I wake up a storm and nothing you or Baba does will make it better. My tears will flow. I will want to hide, and I will want to be the center of attention. I will stomp my feet and yell or I will curl in a ball and cry. On these days I ruin everything for everyone, even if the fight is inside of me it spills out around me. Baba needs to pick up the pieces of debris; the frightened child, the crumpled Mama. As the storm in me drifts I start to look for the possibilities. The next day will be delicate, all of us recovering from the storm but the next will be back to normal, until our stresses begin to rise again.

That Green String

It's still tied to the whole in a snap
the top one on my jean jacket,
that green string.
Back when everything was in doubt,
like now,
we would all knit on Thursdays
at the bar with our beers or wine
by our sides.
We all seemed to be in transition
new lives shifting
new friendships.
The tumult of uncertainty and
winterness was everywhere.

New England cold in Colorado.
But those Thursday nights there
was a bit of lightness (of heart)
and new adventures planned.
Still days were counted in between.
In a long lingering conversation
(of art and books and politics and music)
we wanted to remember how engaged
and warm it felt.

So each of us cut from our skeins
a little bit to tie where they might be remembered
through the hole in my top layer
a bit of cotton a bit of cotton still remains
each time I see it my mind echos
with the warmth of beer and friends
'there's always knitting' said with humor and love.

Thoughts on Reading and Writing, a review of Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer

Until recently I did not really understand how to read and see what great writing was. I either was infected with the habits of a student, determined to find the meaning in every pieces of fiction or read things on such a visceral level that the story flowed into me more than being consciously read. This was also how I would approach my own writing. First I would write from the soul feeling as if I was channeling someone else's tale. Then as I rewrote I first attack the grammar and then try to match and place the meanings I wanted to get across, a messy and ineffectual process. I would be happy when I would create a good sentence but I saw it as a random and special occurrence rather than a goal.

Last week I read Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer. She starts the book focusing on words and works outwards through sentences and paragraphs and onto gestures, narration and further. Prose's main point is that great writers really do work to create great sentences, leave out whatever is unneeded and focus on the whole of what is presented. And, that readers today, especially in academia focus too much on meaning and not enough on the art of the writing. This does not mean that we should not search for meaning in the stories, only that it can be found through thorough reading not through a hunting.

Inspired by this and Molly, I picked up my copy of Fidelity by Wendell Berry. Choosing a story that I had not made notes in I read it for the words and feelings. I was left silent at the end.

This morning I picked up the same book and read another story, again for the words and feelings and was actually left with tears in my eyes by the end. Now I am beginning to understand what it means to write; and how much more than storytelling it is.

Afterwards, to amuse myself, I looked through one of the stories that I had marked up (thankfully in pencil) for an independent course on the importance of place I had taken a few years ago. First, I realized that I had no memory of the story. Then, seeing what I had underlined, it was obvious that my reading had been cursory, only reading for story line and 'relevant' phrases. Even in terms of the course I was taking this was unsuccessful, since much of the importance of place is found deeper not just in the sentences that mentioned place. There was so much more to the story than what I had seen during that first reading.

I realize now that so much of my distaste of certain books, most read for classes, was not because of the books themselves. Rather it was the method that we were trained to read them. My high school English courses resembled biology more than art. I remember specifically an entire quarter of ninth grade that was dedicated to Jane Eyre. This included two weeks spent on one chapter where we were given the task of dissecting and sourcing every single paragraph for meaning. At the end of the two weeks we took a test which we could bring notes to. My partner and I had ten typed pages of references and translations (and we were not 'smart' kids).

For what reason? I am sure at fifteen all I gained from the class was a distaste for anything written before 1950. This lasted until only a few years ago.

For those of you invested in your children's learning, especially at home, I suggest you read Prose's book. In someways it is a great form of parental deschooling. For that matter anyone who reads for pleasure should read it to see a new facet of any short story or novel. I think this is a book that I will pick up every few years as a reminder.

Six Words

Both ways, I saw constant reinvention.

Meredith tagged me with this writing exercise. The aim was to write a six word memoir. Some how six words was both too short and too long. SO there you go my six words.

I tag Trish, Patti and Amanda.

new article published

Having a Bite at the General Store

The Reemergence of the General Store in New England

By Stacey Bloomfield

I have this memory from about thirty years ago of going down the hill with my friend’s grandfather to pick up some milk at the Cummington store. I remember we wanted to go so we could get a Marathon bar. As usual the place was lit by bare bulbs and a bunch of men sat around a small wood stove in coveralls. read the rest here.

on being paralyzed

there are days when i have too much in my mind focus on any one of them. there are characters greeting asking for plots to inhabit, projects i want to add to my ever growing list, business plans that need implementing. the list goes on and i find as each appears in my mind it competes for attention until nothing really is clearly a thought just a series of ideas.

then there will be one word, or image or phrase that settles in my mind, one that needs to be turned into something. there it will stay until it is taken care of, not just in rough form but until it is a full formed something. some days these internal requests are simple or at least somewhat formed. Others, like today are persistent but with out hope of immediate creation.

i was greeted during a drive with the phrase you ambiguous little fuck, said by some character to another who are good friends of opposite sexes it is said in humor. but that is all i was given. i've spent the rest of the day beginning to create the world where this phrase was spoken. i need lots of time with paper and pen to see where this takes me.

in the mean time i feel as though everything else in my life needs pushing aside, something that is an impossibility, so now i will begin the process of stealing moments to see where this goes, meeting new characters to fallen in love with and to nurture. for me writing a story is like making a new friend, it is always exciting at first a manic crush of knowing and supposing. and like real people my characters surprise me with things about themselves and places they persuade me to go.

to describe this to someone not in the middle of these feelings it is like having a crush on someone new who wants to give you all the attention in the world. it has the wonder and excitement as well as the underlying discontented pain of insecurity. for the case of writing it is my own wonder if i an really the person who is supposed to be telling this story and in the end if anyone else would care to hear what i have written.

that being said i would add that while i am the writer i can not honestly claim that the stories are my own since they seem to just come to me as if i am being told them. often i stay up late because i want to know what is going to happen next.

of course i haven't felt thing way since before alder so i have no idea the logistics of doing this along with all the other things that are going on in our life. back in denver when we were just a vaguely married couple i could always find a spare six hours here and there to delve into these characters. happily i took advantage of it and do not look back in regret. so i'm off to be sucked into a new world... who knows i might even get to feel a first kiss again (being the thing i miss most about being monogamous)

New Article Published

See New York, Make Art

A Visit to Etsy Open Lab Night

By Stacey Bloomfield

It is a Monday evening in New York and I find myself on the subway heading to Brooklyn. The car is filled with young people with laptops and messenger bags heading home from work. They don’t look like they work in offices but the occasional building pass gives them away. At DeKalb Avenue I get off the train and walk over to Gold Street to the Clock Tower Building.

To read more go to here

bonus entry New Article published

Heading to the desert is a craving for me, as the sun begins to return but the days are still filled with snow I start to crave the feel of sandstone under my fingers and the smell of new sage. This want for land that is both scrubbed clean and busy with life has been with me always, but until I met the desert I did not know what it was. . .

Read the rest at Travels in Paradise.

Fiction Happens

Fiction Happens
Originally uploaded by Ink Spots

I had two whole hours of writing time at the coffee shop this morning. I forgot how much writing is like breathing to me. I use one of those books filled with subject ideas to start from since I have no real on going story. I'm back in my old habit of writing four or five pages and then summarizing where the piece would go if it was a full length novel (ha). Then I keep the idea in a fold with the others, then I can go back to it if the ideas stick with me over time.

The process of writing amuses me, at least my own. While it is very creative and free I find that I work best in a consistent environment, coffee shop, yellow lined pad, blue pen (preferably my mother's fountain pen). Of course the more time the better and if I can remember to bring this CD with me all the better.

Then I start writing, the words flow out with no plan, I am surprised often by where they take me. I can feel my breath change, become slower and more even. I loose myself in the worlds I create, I can see what my characters see down to the dirt in the corner of the room. When I pause or stop the world around me is sharper, more vivid. The present becomes written to me, I walk for a while in narrative.

The New Years Post

It seems like New Years is a good time to take stock of my life. Family has all left and we have entered the lull of winter where the sun is returning but the ground has months to thaw. It is the time of year when coyote stories can be told and favors asked of the moon. For now I'll just look back and look forward.

LOOKING BACK

Started Writing for Travels in Paradise
Kevin Graduated from Grad School
Moved to Vermont
Started a Seven Mountain
Started Blogging
Learned to really use a sewing machine

LOOKING FORWARD

I know myself well enough that listing my hopes for the next year will lead to disappointment instead I will share my resolutions for the up coming year, and the story behind them.

1) To make our house more of a home, giving Alder his own room with a bed, keeping the house much neater, not letting my projects migrate around the house as much.

2) To bring story telling back into my life.

I don't know how you come up with your resolutions. Growing up we actually made them for each other not for ourselves, but Kevin doesn't like that practice so I have had to create my own over the last eight years. So this year I thought about what might be something that will help make my busy life happier, and having a home that I want to spend time in topped the list. We shared them as we went to bed on New Year's Eve (yes we were asleep before 11). That night I had a dream, not one that I can remember what happened during it but I know that the point of the dream was that I need to bring storytelling back into my life.

Before Alder was born I wrote a lot, every morning before work I would write for an hour or two. When we first moved to Denver and I still didn't have a job I took a two month break from hunting to finish a novel, which no one has ever read. It was an eight hour a day job and I cried when it was done because I was lonely for the characters that I had gotten so used to spending every day with. But since our lives have gotten busy with Alder and moving and business my writing has been limited to the blog and my biweekly articles. I don't even get to read a lots of novels any more.

But this dream I had made it clear that my second New Years Resolution would be to bring storytelling back into my life. When I told this to Kevin he agreed, he is even willing to help me find time during the week when I can got write away from the house. I have my stack of yellow pads and fountain pen waiting for me and I can't wait to begin.

Article Published

I have a new article at Travels in Paradise.

Enjoy your holidays....

New Article Published

There is furniture to paint, stuff to price, a cash register to program. It's 9 in the morning and I already feel like I'm waisting time.

I do have a new article "The American Flea Market"

Hope everyone had a great National Buy Nothing Day.

What I Did with my Morning

That's where I spent my morning. My other job, Travels in Paradise, is relaunching the website tomorrow and they wanted another article. So I ducked out to a coffee shop a few towns away to write. It's exciting, this new site is focused on the articles and we've removed the gear reviews. I think we're planning on have new articles up on th 15th and 30 every month.

I think it's amazing how things are coming together like they are. Right now working consists of writing, making things, and interacting with some amazing women who are making the products that we are going to sell. Amanda, Julie, Zoe, Eva, Kwan, Natalie, Julia, Cheryl, Erin, Cheryl, Lori, Carol, Marissa, Bettina, and Valerie. So far we have actually used etsy to find most of our producers.

Madeleine L’Engle 1918-2007

I was going to write something different about eggplants and cooking them until they are nothing more than a sweet mass but the eggplants went bad. Then found out that Madelein L'Engle died on Thursday. She has been a writer that I have loved and looked up to for years.

I remember reading Wrinkle in Time on the floor of my summer camp's library. Not the first time but again when I was eighteen and a counselor. It was a rainy day off and there was nothing better to hide away in the library that was only used in the evenings. Over that summer I continued to re-read all of the O'Keefe and Murry family novels (think A Swiftly Tilting Planet or The Arm of a Starfish). It was the summer before college and I fell somewhere between child and adult the books were my escape.

Then a few years later a good friend gave me a copy of And Both Were Young commenting that Flip was me. It was the first time I had read a character that had spoken directly to me as a soul, and one of the few that ever has. I have read this book over and over again lending it out to people who want to understand me better. It probably one of her least known books but it will always be my favorite.

As a writer, and I have been making up stories since I could talk, she has been inspirational because of how she created an entire universe that was so magical and practical at the same time. One that was grounded in our world with a little Einstein, quantum physics, and mythology add to it. Like other loved books I marvel how she was able to write something that felt so personal to me yet was also loved by so many other people who I little in common.

Even now when I am dissuaded on adult fiction I drift back to her books as a respite in good writing. Don't just limit yourself to the children's books her adult ones are also wonderful. If there is a heaven like in the stories I am sure that god has reserved Madeleine's first century or so to discuss the inner workings of her world and the entire creation process.

Dolores LaChapelle

The following is my next article to be published at Travels in Paradise.

The first winter I was in Colorado I took an avalanche course at Hesperus Ski Hill, a one lift hill where cows grazed in the summer. It was not the full course that they gave up at the Silverton Avalanche School but it was a solid start for someone who liked to cross country ski in the backcountry. Among our instructors was a married couple who were full of stories of the old days of backcountry skiing. As the years have past the memory faded. Until the other day when I was reading a magazine and there was an obituary for Dolores LaChapelle. In thinking about what I know about her life I believe the couple was her and her husband.

LaChapelle is among a group of environmental writers who shared a philosophy known as Deep Ecology. As Alan Drengson of the Foundation of Deep Ecology explains Deep Ecology is "the long-range deep approach involves redesigning our whole systems based on values and methods that truly preserve the ecological and cultural diversity of natural systems."

Dolores focused on the sacred connection between people and the natural world. She explored this through ritual, backcountry skiing and the sacred connection between the earth and women. Her writings were hefty and academic and her ideas we spiritual in nature. She felt that "If we are to truly connect with the land, we need to change our perceptions and our approach more than our location." LaChapelle lived out her philosophies in Silverton Colorado where she divided her time between writing and directing the Way of the Mountain Leaning Center. In her spare time, Dolores also skied the back country.

As a mother I find myself looking for spiritual connections more often. LaChapelle's belief that ritual as a form of connection to the earth and ones community has infiltrated our life. She saw the connection between our lives and the planet we live on in a feminine way. How was I to know who the funny old woman with her tales of teaching members of the Army Corps of Engineers how to detonate avalanches in the seventies had so much more to teach.

As a family we are creating our own rituals, we hike in the canyon with the apple trees every spring when they are in bloom to welcome their sweetness. As my son is drifting off to sleep I sing him songs of the mountains and seas. When choosing our wedding date we decided to coincide it with Lammas which is the celebration of the first wheat harvest in the Celtic tradition. To recognize both our marriage and Lammas the spot where we were married has a garden that blooms around that time.

It is my understanding of the importance of these rituals that we seek out that is the gift that the words of Dolores LaChapelle gave me.

One of her articles is here

For more information on Deep Ecology you can find it here

My First Business Meeting

No I am not going to bore you with what it was about. I'm just surprised how good it felt to be out in the world doing something "legitimate" where the topic of conversation never once landed on children. Where I could ask questions without being looked at as a mom asking them.

Before Alder was born a lot of my work revolved around educational philosophy and logistics, now I am usually focused on what we can do for the day that interests both of us. I have left the cerebral world for the tangible one and I really like the change. Even in my writing my focus is on life and the world around us not theory. But some days I miss the debate, the research, the synthesis of ideas.

Today I got to stretch some of those muscles for a little while.

More Articles Published

Another article published! Actually two there was one last week as well. Soon I'll be doing gear reviews as well.