Infinite Acorns

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it takes to be an artist in terms of creating a work and then sending it out into the world.  My amazingly talented friend just completed a beautiful project designed to let ten random subjects know they were noticed in this life.  She devoted endless hours and her personal resources to painting full size oil paintings of people she encountered in her daily life.  Eight of the ten portraits landed in the hands of the subjects.  The last two portraits remaining on the streets where she placed them did not.

In the days before these portraits disappeared I desperately wanted to protect them for her and their intended recipients, first from weather and then from people who wanted them for themselves.  Another talented friend and I were prepared to pull a heist ourselves to save them from a relentless rain.  We let it ride after meeting up with the artist.  We wanted to let the project be seen by passersby.  We let go, a little bit.

Nicole Bourgea has done an amazing job of letting go.  She hopes the people who took the last portraits had some profound reason for taking something that clearly did not belong to them.

I have had a hard time letting go.  This project and these last two paintings in particular moved me.  They moved my family.  My little girl ran her hands across the thick paint of a portrait of a surveyor, she kissed the bottom edge.  I've spent the past few days walking my neighborhood with eyes wide, searching, hoping that one of the homeless people I know has squirreled the treasure away.

Today I realized that my inability to let go was keeping me from my own art.  I have my own little squirrel to thank for this realization.  She led me into the park and spent two hours reminding me that it is all as easy as collecting acorns and spending your time finding as many pleasing uses for them as you can.  I had big plans of hiking as vigorously as you can with a three-year-old, but she was determined to stop in the place that had the most acorns and refused to budge.  Everything she needed was in that spot and she didn't waste a moment.  Constantly creating and enjoying her moment in time.  It was contagious.  Suddenly I was sketching acorns, gathering more, photographing her and little berries I would have breezed past to get to the trail.

If we linger too long on the life of art after its creation we are choking out the art that is waiting to be created.

In short, Ta-Da! We can pick more acorns!

Fall, Because I Want To

I don't know if it is my cultural training or my squirrel instinct, but when fall falls, I feel the need to reinvent myself through a new wardrobe and intellectual pursuits.

I've become a scholar of cuisine in the past weeks.  I've been cranking out pasta from a recipe I dreamed up and soups because I've grown weary of summer salads.  I've taken to books on photography and have revisited math from days gone by.

I love what I'm learning, but what I love even more is the desire to learn.  I'm a summer girl, born in June and  I've always owned my months of summer.  As I've evolved I've taken ownership over all of the seasons.  There is something magical and important in each one.

Summer allows for the shallow end of my stream, where cold brook water pools over ancient rocks and I thrive, chasing butterflies and catching crawdads.  Fall brings out my apple-picker self, my acorn collector, my veiny leaf admirer and slows me down.  This is where I am at right now.

As much as I want to wear my strapless dresses of summer on these hot fall days I feel like I'm a butterfly who missed the migration.  I want to camouflage myself in tones of dying leaves, plaid and woolen.  I'm  sniffing the bindings of yellowed books in search of an intellectural drey that will keep me safe through winter.

I will nest, I will rest, but not until I've learned enough to move on.

Dear BBQ Chicken,

Dear BBQ Chicken,

            You have been on the pedestal of joyful moments.  My birthday meal, is there a greater honor?  Dad mixing his beer bbq sauce, the sound of metal slowly scraping circles on metal as he stood on the wooden porch.  Dry summer air, heat and sunshine, charcoal and lighter fluid burning in the belly of the black backyard grill.  Pabst Blue Ribbon—a ribbon on every can!  Dad, snapping back the tab and the cracking escape of carbonation as the thin gold bubble stream trickled into the dark red thickness and fizzled a revolt.  My brothers and I barefoot and moving easily in the freedom of summer, walnuts hidden in the prosperous green grass growing a little longer than regulation, clothes hanging, waving flags in celebration of the sun.  My birthday, a celebration of me.  The passing of a year, always looking forward.  Cake and presents, swimming, running, playing, exploring, dreaming, living, being, happy.  Youth.  A family.  A time that felt like forever.  You were there, BBQ Chicken.  We feasted on you.  Dad, master of BBQ chicken.  He left you on the grill until the moment of perfection and then he grasped you between tongs and placed you piled on yourself on a platter.  We feasted on you.  You were the one meal that we were allowed to eat entirely like pigs.  We ended the meal looking like survivors of a massacre.  There weren’t enough napkins in the world.  We were animals.  Everyone loved you.  You were delicious. 

            Lately your great grand children have been hanging around a little too close.  I’m talking about the ones who’ve gotten piled on the platter before they’ve even been plucked.  The factory farms started moving in around my family farms in 1990.  They are shameless and they stink.  They are filled with disease, sick poison, vented out through fans on steel sheds.  Chicken against chicken fighting for space while their feet take root around the wire of the cage.  The smell of all of that is interfering with our barbeque.  That smell is making us run inside when we should be perfectly content to stand outside in the summer sun and the glory of our family farm and dip you in beer bbq and grill you to perfection.  At least the city folks can still enjoy you.  

Another Helping

Dear Meat,

            I can’t let you go without taking the time to remember all the moments that earned you a place as happy food memory.  You were there, but for what reason?  Things happen for a reason and it’s undeniable, our paths have been intertwined for a long, long time. 

            You were there for my great-grandparents when German still rolled off their tongues in the new country.  You gave them a way to survive, to succeed, profit and pioneer, O’ Pioneers!  I come from agrarians and entrepreneurs. 

            The business of this new world is based on the barn yard.  If you can keep animals where you live, hunting becomes shopping, less dangerous for you.  You begin to live longer, grow taller and discover leisure time.  But I don’t need to tell you, right Meat? 

            I’m going to step in and share some stories with you because I know your family isn’t around to get you in the know.  You used to belong to a wild creature, one that had equal footing in the universe, one that tried to survive.  The wild was bred out of your line. 

            Don’t worry Meat, I’m not so short-sided that I am only looking at the domesticated you.  I know your more free roots, too.  I know fat corn-fed deer that leap at great lengths to avoid death.  I know feathers with hollow bones riding the wind and landing on a wee pond that have met their end for the love of water.  I have seen you swim in schools, alive and breathing water, falling for a hook.  I know your type—the one with a shell that protects against some things, but not against meat. 

            Please, take your time to let this all sink in.  I’m not going anywhere—not until we say goodbye together.  And who knows about after that.  I’ll try to help.

            I’m going to have to address some of your various forms individually, Meat.  It just wouldn’t be right to leave out the details.

Dear Meat,

Tonight I rediscovered some writing I did a few years back.  I've decided to share it with you bite by bite.  Bon Appetit!

Dear Meat,

            I have given up meat for Lent and in the spirit of pausing, focusing, making change, and taking action I have decided to pick up the habit of writing with discipline (I have a wooden ruler next to me and I will use it).  This is day three of one and day one of the other.  I have to think it out, be the detective, and crack the case of why I eat meat.  This isn’t a permanent cease fire.  In the spirit of open-mindedness I am taking this meatless adventure as it comes.  Who knew lent could be such a county fair of surprises and tiny thrills!  I’m not making any judgments on the carnivores or herbivores.  I’m being here, right now and right now I am putting off what needs to be done.  I need to say goodbye to meat. 

Tell me about highschool...

Hello Friends,

My last post was the intro to a YA book about a girl who didn't see herself in the literary offerings in the teen section of the public library.  She's not a vampire-wannabe, not suicidal, not gay, not the victim of bullies, so what is she?

I think she is going to experiment.  What did you experiment with when you were in highschool?

Please give my character a little help.  Add your comments and help her negotiate in a world that is not magical.

Bookmark: A New YA Book Project

I used to love spending a rainy afternoon in the library when I was a little kid, so I gave it a try today.  I found the tiny corner reserved for teens, dressed up with a second-hand black sofa and a leopard print beanbag meant to simulate a cool place for kids my age.  I checked out the book display and realized that according to the publishing industry and the librarians I was supposed to be either a vampire-wannabe, gay, or suicidal.  There was one more option--victim of bullying, which I'm guessing, plot-wise is probably a result of the first two and a leading cause of the last.

I opted for the free bookmark on the coffee table that lured me in with mustachioed rubber ducks and then schooled me on the dewey decimal system on the flip-side.  I sunk into the beanbag and turned the book mark from duck to dewey and tried to figure out where I belong if the only thing I can relate to in the YA section is a bookmark.