#Poetry Break: Mindful

Sunflower (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

Mindful

  - by Mary Oliver

Every Day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for—
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant—
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

#PoetryBreak kitchenette building

kitchenette building 


By Gwendolyn Brooks

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,

Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong

Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”

But could a dream send up through onion fumes

Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes

And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,

Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,

Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,

Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!

Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,

We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

#SOL17: Waking Up

Forgive Yourself (M.A. Reilly, 6.3.17)

Have I been sleeping?

I've been so still 

Afraid of crumbling 

     - Melissa Etheridge

I.

I did not know I was sleeping awake--walking through the days and months after Rob's death with eyes open wide, and yet, somehow blind. At such times, sadness is more buoy than anchor. It keeps afloat the body that has little direction it can name or know. It gives meaning to the march of days and nights that follow the death helping to soften that slow trickle of time by the waning and waxing of tears.  At first trepidation creeped into my steps and living felt more tenuous than not. The simplest decisions felt too overwhelming to make.

These first year was marked by getting through, crying less, feeling more, and eventually beginning to notice the world beyond my immediate reach still pulsed with life.


II.

Image I made in March.

For the last two months I have drawn, painted, collaged, or photographed a face each day as part of a 100-Day Challenge. I wonder about my choice of subject. What exactly is it that I needed to learn?

Was it simply a matter of learning to draw parts: mouths, eyes, ears, noses, the line of the jaw as I first told myself?  Or was it more complicated?

Was I trying to relearn the curve of my own face? To know how the tremble of lips does give way to the lightening of eyes?  Each time I dropped white paint into the iris of an eye, I animated that image. Was this process a means to also animate myself?

Possibility is not an external matter--a Holy Grail to seek. Rather, hope and possibility are rekindled within and among others.


III.

My son recently told me to stop feeling sorry for myself. I bristled at his words and initially felt even sorrier for myself until this too felt burdensome and I stopped. Years ago a therapist I was seeing gave me a directive I did not want to do. I quickly asked, How will I ever do that?

He didn't answer me at first. Rather he asked me to lift one of my feet off of the carpet and I did.

"Like that," he told me.

Like that.

It is not that I haven't been busy. I have. But beneath these activities, I have been a body waiting. A woman waiting for something to change.


IV.

How do you move through grief?  How do you separate grief from a body?
Lift your heart off of the floor. Secure it where it has always belonged, and move on, knowing grief will follow, but it will not lead.


V.

It was Edward Said who wisely told us that we are well past a beginning before we can name it. The distance between Rob's illness and death, the aftermath, and now is measurable--allowing me to see my husband's life and death, and the continuation of my life, my son's life--here, now.

There is hope and possibility these days and I cannot locate a single event that marked this transformation as fact for there is no single event, no shining moment. As I mourned, life around me continued and I slowly tested welcoming the roar and press of living with tender hands--so often supported by others.

This life, I call my own, is what I make. It is so often about what we make, alone and with others. Sometimes it is that complicated and that simple. 

#PoetryBreak: Fat Is Not a Fairy Tale

Self portrait made on a sunny day in Paris.

Fat Is Not a Fairy Tale

   -   Jane Yolen

I am thinking of a fairy tale,
Cinder Elephant,
Sleeping Tubby,
Snow Weight,
where the princess is not
anorexic, wasp-waisted,
flinging herself down the stairs.

I am thinking of a fairy tale,
Hansel and Great,
Repoundsel,
Bounty and the Beast,
where the beauty
has a pillowed breast,
and fingers plump as sausage.

I am thinking of a fairy tale
that is not yet written,
for a teller not yet born,
for a listener not yet conceived,
for a world not yet won,
where everything round is good:
the sun, wheels, cookies, and the princess.

#SOL17: Wonder

A foggy morning in Leonia, NJ. I was on my way to Manhattan and just had to stop. I was two miles from the GWB entrance.

If you are an artist, it is work that fulfills and makes you come into wholeness, and that goes on through a lifetime. Whatever the wounds that have to heal, the moment of creation assures that all is well, that one is still in tune with the universe, that the inner chaos can be proved and distilled into order and beauty. —May Sarton 

I.

For as long as I can recall, I have been fascinated with and attentive to light. Lambent light of dusk, the almost watery Maine light Hopper captured, the variations of light Monet's haystacks allows us to see, and the light that disperses fog that I have learned to see through the lens of my camera--all of these and more have taught me to look and look again. I can recall one afternoon telling Rob that some days I made it into work in Morristown, NJ and did not recall driving there as much as I could narrate what was happening with the light of day as I moved along in stop and go traffic on a highway.

Learning to look is different than seeing.


II.

I measure time with light. Dawn, near dawn, mid-day, dusk, twilights, midnight are more about the presence and absence of light than they are representations of time on a clock. Such representations are so often wrong and certainly one could well argue that the invention and our uses of mechanical clocks has harmed more than helped.

Interval measurement assumes that time is relative and we know that time is not.



III.

I am healing myself by making art--making forms of captured light. Grief is no easy matter, nor is finding myself a single parent of an 18-year-old.  Some days I feel like I am failing at everything. Other days, not so much.

Last night found me awake at 3 a.m. mixing paints to create tints and shades for a painting I am making. I felt compelled to make something. I'm not sure how long I was painting as I consulted no clock, but what I do know was that true night was gone.

The shape of trees in my neighbor's yard were distinguishable from the darkness.

Drawing Realistic Faces: A Few Tips

from my Art Journal (May 2017)

1. Closing one eye flattens the world. To draw a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional piece of paper, close one eye. (From: Parks, Carrie Stuart. Secrets to Drawing Realistic Faces (p. 39). F+W Media. )
2. Here are a set of tools to help train your mind to recognize shapes. They are: 

• Isolate: To see shapes by studying individual shapes separately. The first artistic technique is to isolate the shape. Look at the works of any artist, and you will find sketches of eyes, hands and parts of the face. These artists are isolating each of the different components of the whole of the art that they will be doing.

• Simplify: A tool for learning to see shapes by seeking the simplest expression of that shape in the form of a straight or curving line.

• Relate: A tool for learning to see shapes by using one shape to help see a second shape. 

• Measure: A tool for seeing shapes by measuring a smaller shape and comparing it to a larger shape. 

• Invert: Turn the line drawing you're trying to copy upside down. It is best to use a line drawing for this technique, not a photo.

• Rename: A tool for seeing the shape in facial features by renaming that feature in terms of shape.

• Incline: Use a ruler for checking subtle angles in the facial features by using a ruler.

• Negative space: A viewfinder allows you to see a positive shape (solid space) clearer by focusing on the negative shape (empty space) next to it. Using a viewfinder can help you to isolate the figure so you can better see the negative space. Make your own by cutting a square out of a pice of paper.

• Question: A tool for seeing angles and shapes more clearly by asking yourself exactly what it is you are seeing. This tool is so named because you ask questions: What is the line/edge doing? In what direction is it going?

• Compare: A tool for seeing shapes more clearly by tracing that shape from the photograph, tracing your own drawing and comparing the two shapes as line drawings.

• Flatten: A tool for seeing a three-dimensional shape more clearly by closing one eye to level the image into two dimensions.

(from Parks, Carrie Stuart. Secrets to Drawing Realistic Faces, pp. 44 - 58. F+W Media. )

#SOL17: Do Not Look Away from Life

Walker Evans, Subway Portrait, 1941, Gelatin silver print, from here.

It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long. 

                   - Walker Evans,  Many Are Called, quoted in the Afterward, p. 197.

I. 

One birthday, Rob gave me a book of photographs made by Walker Evans. He knew my love for photography and the iconic images are certainly ones I have long appreciated. The bit of advice by the artist that tops this post comes from a book of images Walker made while riding New York subways. 

It is also advice I now take to heart. 

Witnessing your husband die an early death, only sharpens Evans' words--resulting in a clarity so brilliant it is hard to look away.  

Perspectives alter. 

Evans is right--We are all not here long. We ought to make the most of it.


II.

I began reading Sheryl Sandberg's and Adam Grant's Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resistance, and Finding Joy earlier in the week. Their discussion about post-traumatic growth--the capacity to grow from trauma--resonated. They write,

...post-traumatic growth could take five different forms: finding personal strength, gaining appreciation, forming deeper relationships, discovering more meaning in life, and seeing new possibilities (p. 79).

In the bereavement group I have participated in during the last 14 months, post-traumatic growth can be seen in the women I have come to know. I want to say that these are exceptional women, but that would be a partial-truth. They are also beautifully ordinary. Perhaps like you. Certainly like me. 

In this group, I see women who find personal strength in the adversity they are experiencing, who show appreciation for dwelling in the beauty of a moment of an ordinary day, who question their lives and what they are making of their lives, and perhaps most significantly--they are women who speak of what is possible. In seeking possibility, joy unfolds. 

What I have mostly learned is that how we name what happens and re-happens to those we love and ourselves are choices we make. That we are each responsible for those choices may be the most significant understanding I have garnered during the last 20 months since Rob was first diagnosed. 

I am responsible for my own life. You are responsible for yours.


III.

Recently, I was able to join a writer's group in northern NJ.  At first I had been waitlisted and I was delighted a week ago when I received an email from the group's leader saying there was now an opening.  It's a sharp group and discussing two writers' submitted works reminded me so much of the way Rob and I supported one another for decades.  My husband was my own, personal editor.  No one read my work with a more critical eye, than Rob.  I love when others see things I simply have missed while reading. This new knowledge and perspective is such a gift. I found that to be the case last week as I listened to the other writers' discussing the texts. 

Next month, I plan to share with the group a section of the memoir I am writing. The work is based not only on my husband's death, but also on the life I am creating in the aftermath. There is a grace to knowing deep in my bones what is most essential from what is merely interesting, what is merely catchy. Chronicling Rob's death and the grief and resilience Devon and I struggle with has helped me to discern what matters from what does not.

What I want to contribute via the memoir is some of the understandings that have emerged in the journey these last two years. Grieving, writing, making art, being a single parent, connecting with other widows and so many others--all of it has helped me to not look away from life.  It's like those images Walker Evans made on the subway so many years ago when he pointed a camera at those unknowing and captured ordinary lives being lived. Each image seems to be saying, Do not look away from life. Do not.

Perhaps that is what Rob meant when he told me all those months ago to live brilliantly.  Do not look away from life.