Category: Art Journey

I’ve graduated from a lot of things in my life. I hold two Associate degrees and was, for many years, a registered nurse. More school and a truckload of student loans resulted in a whole bunch of alphabet soup which translates, in case you’re curious, into Bachelor of Arts,  Master of Divinity and  Doctor of Ministry degrees.

This week, I graduated from Color of Woman 2018. I am, officially, a teacher of Intentional Creativity.

I’m really excited!

And, there’s a party. Many of my paint sisters are in Hawaii. The rest of us will join in on Zoom. The directions include “dressing up”. I’m busting out the fancy velvet trappings from the last graduation… and a bit of bubbly. The studio angels have all rsvp’d and are resting up in anticipation, eager, I’m sure, for the promised treats.

Luther may not know it, but he’s been helping me get ready. He’s an excellent role model for what happens when one lets go and allows themselves to have a new experience. These days he actually enjoys meeting new people and being rubbed and petted, which is a miracle, given where he was when he arrived in our lives.

Luther’s new engagement in life didn’t come from him guilt-tripping himself. It didn’t come from me telling him how he ought to be.

Part of it came, I suspect, from experiencing his sisters be with people and be ok.

And a lot of it came from taking tiny new steps, one after the other.

If you’ve been hanging around for a while, you may have heard about a guy named Bill Harris who helped me understand that we pretty much have to have new experiences in order to shift our ways of being.

We’re all busy perceiving our universe through complicated sets of filters such as beliefs, values, language, and so forth. Most of the filtering in unconscious. When we have a new experience there’s an opportunity for new information to get through our filters and begin to shift our map of reality which, in turn, creates the possibility of new responses to life and new choices for the future.

Or, if you prefer, it’s kind of a right brain-left brain thing.

Some of you have been sitting on my couch or in my rocking chairs, sipping tea and looking for change for years. While you were learning, I was learning, too.

Our filters are so strong that talking ourselves into having a new experience is often very hard. We have to actually DO something different. Preferably something that engages us at many levels of awareness.

Pick up a paintbrush. Write a poem. Start a journal. Learn to build furniture. Become a quilter. Plant a garden. Compose music. Make a pot of soup. Find an intentional way to take what’s useful from old stories and manifest them into something you can see or feel or hear and want in your life.

Suddenly, many new things become possible!

I’m all ready for next. And, for those of you in the US, just in case you haven’t yet, please stop on your way to the art store or the journal store or the kitchen or even to the basement to find your fabric stash, and vote. Intentionally.

I wasn’t too good at being pregnant.

Part of that was, no doubt, context. Newly single. Stressed. Scared. No real idea of what the future held. The only thing I knew for sure is that I loved and fiercely adored the wee being growing inside me.

Another part of that was, by all accounts, genetic. There’s a long history, on my Mom’s side of the family, of what we used to call Toxemia, but now refer to as pre-eclampsia.

High blood pressure. Major food restrictions. And really, really, really fat ankles.

Timing Braxton-Hicks contractions every night for a week before I finally went into active labor.

Then, I rang the big red bell and had grand mal seizures in labor. I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say that Dave and I made it and I feel hugely blessed.

I’m kind of back in that place just now, pregnant with a book and a new way of being in the world.

My ankles are better this time!

I’m reminded, though, of the Braxton-Hicks experience, in these days.

My Initiate Book, or graduation project, for Color of Woman is out of my control, in this moment, off in the land of electronic formatting.

Soon, it will be time for editing, which is when the next part of my labor will begin.

Well, not begin, so much, as actually result in a birth.

Until then, I am practicing the fine arts of asking for help and releasing the need for control.

For now, I am waiting. Waiting on a wise and talented friend to make her magic, even in the midst of several life complications of her own. Aided by a bit of pimento cheese!

Today, I have coped by binge watching Grey’s Anatomy and plotting Intentional Creativity workshop dates in my calendar. I’m also having occasional fantasies about video workshops, which seem, for now, to be shouted down by my inner critic reminding me that it hasn’t been a good week for me in tech land.

It’s been chilly and rainy, which makes the floors wet and the big dogs happy.

A couple of domestic projects have been crossed off the list.

I have a plan hatching for the first few weeks in November. Bookkeeping and connection building will be involved. And an exploration of the Colorful Scars painting workshop. And rest. And lots of bone broth. Somehow, the freezer is bare!

In this moment, my phone is feeling seriously empowered by my checking every 5 or 6 minutes for messages.

Tonight, some marathon dog grooming. And an Italy flashback, complete with local, artisanal Coppa, a very fine Italian Asiago raw milk cheese, and some Georgia organic sourdough crackers.

Next on my list… learning how to slipcover a wing back chair which I might just need to know shortly. There is a granddaughter involved!

For now, pacing in the waiting room!

Life is complicated. Making a difference is good.

 

 

In 1990, I graduated from the Master of Divinity program at Columbia Theological Seminary, got married, and received a call to serve the St. John Presbyterian church in Fayetteville, TN as their solo pastor, all within one week.

Bill and I spent a fair chunk of our honeymoon with the Examination Committee of the Presbytery of Middle Tennessee, which was interesting, but not terribly romantic.

Then, we went back to Atlanta with just a matter of days before we needed to be ready to move.

Finding a mover was a whole other challenge. As they wandered through my apartment and Bill’s dorm room, the most frequent comment was, “Why do you have all these books??? Nobody needs this many books!”

Frustrated, and trying desperately to get sermons planned for my first few weeks in St. John’s pulpit, I finally told one of the movers that I didn’t need opinions about how many books we had. I just needed to know how much it was going to cost to get them to Tennessee!

When he burst out laughing, I decided he was the guy for us.

We rented a house, sight-unseen, for Fayetteville was not remotely a hot market for renters and there was what there was. On our first day in “town” we had a massive tire blow-out which resulted in Bill changing the tire on the edge of the road with commentary from the resident cows.

We were, as my old friend Dorothy exclaimed, “not in Kansas anymore, Toto!”

Now, it’s more than a bit possible that you’re wondering why I’m telling you this story today.

That’s easy!

You see, I’m back in just such an experience of quantum change in my universe, with graduation from Color of Woman galloping toward me.

And I’m certain of very little except that whatever comes next is what I am called to be and do and create.

Okay, I’m also certain that I have a wee bit of writing, a truckload of proofreading, and way more than the optimal amount of photo sorting to accomplish in what feels like the next 27 minutes.

And there are some things they forgot to tell me in school!

So yesterday, surprisingly, I painted. The CODEX painting which, thus far, looks very night sky-ish. (Also a lot like my favorite paint pants!) Dots and dots and more dots. Dots of gratitude. And, as I painted, I realized that it was the first time I’d really painted since before I left for Italy.

It felt great!

Today, Bill and I unloaded 60 pounds of dog food into the freezer, accompanied by an enthusiastic chorus of tail wagging. More to come tomorrow.

Tonight, fabulous butternut squash soup in a base of homemade beef broth.

And gallons of the digital version of red ink.

Change is always stressful, even when it’s change that we long for with all our hearts. It’s also the only way to get where we’ve never been before.

I’m pretty tired. And in, all the way!

ps… Luther wanted me to tell you that he’s working on a blog post. Stay tuned!

 

 

 

If you’ve been reading along you know that I’ve just been in Tuscany. It was fabulous!

Scenery, history, art, community, food, music, paint, wisdom, and the divine feminine.

Stunning. Amazing. Breath-taking. Insert your favorite over-the-top adjectives here…

Having wended my way back to my usual side of the wee pond, though, I’ve noticed a couple of other things.

Before I tell you what they are, you need to know that I had knee surgery, a lot, and I have a deal with my surgeon who yells when I fall down.

Wheelchairs in airports.

And, as I’ve mentioned, the extent of my knowledge of French and Italian comes mainly from Food Network. All of which is great if you’re ordering dinner and considerably less optimal if you’re traveling alone, need assistance, and don’t speak the language!

Brief timeout to report that it’s a lovely, cool-ish evening in Atlanta and my trip out to the deck with the big dogs suggests that this year’s high school tuba player is a huge improvement over recent years!

Which, obviously, reminds me, as short on news as I still am, that there are a whole lot of people on the northern gulf coast of the US who are not having nearly so pleasant an evening.

Which, in turn, reminds me of the old saying my therapist buddies are so fond of:

Perspective isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

Which is, I suspect, the biggest reminder of wisdom I carried home with me from Italy for I have had a huge experience in releasing the illusion of control.

I began to learn, a long time ago, that we really don’t have control over much in the world.

On a good day, we have influence.

There were moments, mostly in the airport in Paris, when I felt I had very little even of that.

Frankly, I was pretty stressed.

Tight connections. A sprawling, unfamiliar, not at all accessible airport teeming with equally stressed beings who don’t even notice a person in a wheelchair while they’re yelling into/saving the world with their cell phones and counting their kids.

People, intended to be helpful, adamantly declining to speak English even though they clearly understood me.

Elevators. Buses. Time ticking by for the last flight home of the day. And enough luggage to be a major lesson in packing light. Not enough hands for the walking stick. Well, you get the drift.

And the realization, many hours later, that I made it.

Thanks in large part to the driver in Florence who asked wise questions about US politics on the terrifying trip through narrow, crowded streets to the airport.

A true global citizen, he shared some of his observations on politics in Italy and inquired about the Stacey Abrams button on the collar of my treasured denim vest.

Then, when we arrived at the airport, he helped me out at the curb, parked the car, and helped with my luggage — and translations — until the Air France folks were on board with my requests, checked my bag, and summoned a wheel chair.

When I offered to shake hands in real appreciation, he kissed my hand instead and wished me safe travels.

The world got just a bit smaller in that moment. And a bit more united.

I spent much of the trip home pondering the large and diverse refugee community nested around my neighborhood.

Quite apart from my frequent hunting and gathering excursions to the DeKalb International Farmers Market, filled as they usually are with sign language, bowing, and waving at babies, I suddenly have a much deeper perspective into what it must be like for recent arrivals to the US to shop and work and find home here.

You might even suppose that I have become, rather than simply the artist, one of the beings who appears above, sheltered in the embrace of Bella Mama.

Which may just be the beginning of wisdom.

Next year’s trip will be the south of France, in Mary Magdalene country. It will, apparently, be a bit more challenging in terms of exertion.

I’ve decided to frame my massive sense of the calling to go by seeing this past week as the beginning of my “training” for next year.

My guiding inquiry has become, What would need to be true in order for this to be possible for me?

Some of the answers, of course, will be external. Most of them, I suspect, are entirely internal.

 I am, even now, doing my part, encouraged by the affirmation newly applied to the front of my  journal from this trip.

TUTTO E POSSIBILE…………………..All is possible 

So be it for me, and for each of you.

For now, praying with dots for determined wisdom and fierce compassion in the world.

ps… Please vote!