Memoir
CURRENT WORK
Memoir is my personal passion. These musings, presented here in monotype, represent a fraction of a body of work that spans decades. They are all birthed from unconscious writing.
Monotype, Ink, Chalk, PencilMatted & Framed 24”X19”
It Felt Like the Truth
It was the dry time before the wet time. The countdown of days to hours to minutes had begun. The floods would be delayed by a month. They knew this. The first morning we rode out, they told me, it all was of a piece on the Delta. It felt like the truth but my imagination was lacking. I looked at the endless grasses and squinted, trying to color them blue, but they remained green sage. We wended our way in the veldt to what they declared an island. It was just shy of a mound; scrub trees and low prickly bushes breaking the horizon line, rising up gently from the big pasture by a few feet. Looking out and around, I now saw, it was one of many. A giraffe shot out. Our front horse shied and as dominoes we all danced sideways.
Life Teaches
Every Spring I step into the same muddy boots, look at the same chaotic patch of dirt and have the same uncertainty. Begin?
The garden is deviant. The future is suspect. The seasons distract. But even they, haven’t kept the Now, from today. Dead leaves and catkins will be sent to distant corners. Pea gravel will be corralled into grooves. Zen gardener, I will sweep the stones. With my eyes, I, will the dog, to cease spilling pebbles across the slate into the green. I breathe in, I breathe out, raise my wintery fuzzy head, haul cushions, placing them on the chairs around the rusting iron table. There is art to making something from nothing, the sun warm on my back, the straw scratchy on my brow. I reach, hoist the rake, and begin to spin gold from dust.
Any Thing
Most of what I believe I can’t prove. I know this to be the way of things. But, knowing, doesn’t keep the head from the ache. Life is mysterious, no matter how much science you throw at it. The great conundrum is by having Something there will never be Nothing. To believe in Nothing is Something. So I spend my days trying not to look straight at any thing. It’s best when I glimpse life from the corner of my eye. These bits, granted access into my snug psyche, allow me to bow down to the unknowing, every day, miracle, of it all. It’s the only way I lay my head to rest at night and raise it up again come morning.
Vicious With Grief
I was vicious with grief when I was a young child of five being denied a purple popsicle. My grief was deep, dark and very heavy. I had presumed that happiness and grief counterbalanced each other, that they were of equal weight. This was long before time had its way with me. Before the scale measuring happiness got stuck on middling, before the leaden load of days threatened to tip me over.
My pursuit for the ever-elusive ice hasn’t changed. What has changed, is that on some days, I get to have it.
Sticky Peace
The machination of sugar releasing into the bloodstream has a muscular component that has been known to manifest on my face as a smile. Sugar won’t solve everything but it has changed many a vibe. When I’m confronted with the illogical, the logical thing to do is to take a donut break. Facing my snarky offspring with a sugar induced beatific visage, has at the very least, the possibility of swaying the negative barrage I innocently trip wired. Flipping the innocuous cardboard lid, I inquire, ever so softly, jelly or Boston crème? And, just like that, peace in our time, sticky peace but peace.
An Artist In Winter
She is tired of the world and its pushiness. It isn’t just her overbearing fellow humans, but nature too has become a nag. She was not having it. The leaves will go unraked, the dog will go un-walked and her partner will get the monosyllabic ah ha, ok, yeah. It’s going to be an exceptionally long winter. But weren’t they all? These truncated days, with their cold slaty edges, gave her no comfort. A pale, Northern European stock, blue eyed, sun starved, vitamin D challenged wimp.
Well, while she was with them, they would all just have to miss her. The dog, the least forgiving, recognizes, that she is off wandering in other lives, other times, other worlds. It’s a gift that should be applauded for the miracle it is, the ability to have her conscious mind hit the road, while still managing not to drown the baby, burn the house down or worse.
The Kindest of Hours
Sit, feel my anguish, sweat my tears. Where does one house this surfeit of feeling? The lover, the friend, the mother, the father, the sister, the brother, the daughter and son. There was a time when emotional parity was the kindness. Disappointment, despair, shame, beckoned us to join them. Be paralyzed with me in my fear, defend my anger! In the kindest of hours we complied, reaching out, down and past the boulders of emotional wastelands, to connection, saying here, I am with you, here.
Once Upon a Time
Where lies the actual and the ideal? Ask a parent about the upbringing of their young and you will get a tale that the grown child will most assuredly turn aside. Which of these once upon a time narratives have the beginning included in the whole of the story? The truth is fictionalized and distorted. The shared experience? A fairy tale.
It isn’t the cold that kills, it’s the emotional starvation. The expectation, that a mother must fade, obligingly and quietly, makes tears well up in the heart. Opinion and perspective, no longer required, is akin to be being set out on the ice floe.
Caution Tape
It was as frightening as she imagined having her personal world scatter shot to the four winds. The pieces that kept her whole were moving faster than fast away and she couldn’t grab them back. Anxiety outran any logical thinking and it quickly settled and made itself at home, burrowing deep into all the soft dark places, like the heart, the spleen and the spine.
She was being held together with caution tape, the flimsy plastic kind that snaps apart on a whim. She would have to change. She would have to talk differently, walk differently. This was freefall and she would have to adapt. She would be different.
U.S.A. Life
People bleed. Avert your eyes. Bumble along, keep an eye on the gutter, an eye on your feet and an eye on the road. Inevitably, everyone will spill face up or down in the gravelly bits. Bruising, chafing, cutting and scarring is assured. Having a high tolerance for pain is essential. Remaining on the curb, small, prone and quiet is not an option. You will be forced to pull your bloodied self up, shake off the dreck and get back on the road. Again.
Molding the butchering into a palatable form should be left to artisans and tradesmen. A Sisyphean task. In this endeavor, creative souls have been driven mad, while expressing in song, poem, paint and mural the horror and loss. After all, they too had hopes of making a difference. What they and every other citizen hadn’t taken into account, was a country resolute in its resolve never to change.
Breathe
The day is drawing in, more quickly for some than others. Breathing the same air out, in, on the same spinning ball, feeling the same rich, porous, shallow, deep, jumbled sand, between incalculable toes. I have never claimed to live on a small planet. I feel the immensity of any square mile. But tonight distance dwindles as bombs fall four thousand miles away. My gut, it clenches, as my mouth fills with dust and my ears begin to roar. Words? They fail me.
Morpheus’s Doorstep
The sun is still up as the dog whines, the children scream, and the dinner goes cold. I long to be lying prone, enveloped in softness, where oblivion is welcoming, as the psychic curtain falls and fevered visions dance fast and freely across my screen lids. It’s a creative blur, whirl and wonder between lights out and rise and shine. Treading Morpheus’s doorstep, my feelings, a singularity; bearing no commonality, no touchstone.
Should it be any different in this divine cavern than in conscious daylight? Where, in my own breath, I walk not knowing another’s exhalation? I am as comfortable in this hypnotic embrace as I am when hot with a willful pulse.
How many nights have I counted in this lifetime? Will I wish I had lucidly filed, bound and printed them in a book made of horn? Holding fast to the thread, will there be enough to keep me company in my fleshy old age, to help lull me back, back to that apperceptive slumber.
Rise
Sometimes it’s enough to slowly rinse the dishes, lining them up neat and in order, putting one, then another, with their fork and knife mate, their cup and spoon cousin and their fat pot uncle. I walk away, leaving them at peace, knowing I have helped them achieve their life’s goals. But mostly it won’t do, because I was born to eat the stars and no amount of day to day grounding will soothe a flighty nature. Spending a lifetime whittling away at wings longing to soar, I must rise. Space, beautiful space, is calling.
We Must Transform
I take a small step, quiet, softly unnoticed. In. Out. Hardly a breath registering on the life scale. People do live on this thin dermis of the world. It won’t do. Like a newly hatched dull Mayfly skating across the pond, reaching for the light, we both must transform.
I go quick and deep, making my way backward to the beginning. Space, space is calling. Soaring up, emerging, gulping big complete crisp air. I shed my skin. I am brilliant.
Spring Doesn’t Care
Spring doesn’t care. She never has and she never will. She has no sense of urgency. She lacks focus. She is fickle. She can be hot and steamy, flashing her colored wares indiscriminately, but before I can say margarita please! she turns cold and vindictive, leaving the Easter bunny showing barely a whisker under a foot of snow.
I crave continuity of calendar. I look at the date and acknowledge the unpredictability of the vernal equinox and my heart sinks faster than the thermostat. She is not only buffeting my body with her forty mile per hour gusts but she is also battering my spirit with her mercurial, long winded, poor attitude. I have no patience for her. I count the days till I am once more in the arms of true love, my fiery, hot, Apollo summer.
Pandemic Year
I’m making tracks across the kitchen floor into the bedroom, aimlessly turning left for the bathroom, backtracking through the living room and endlessly descending the same basement stairs. I wish I were as wily as the fox who intentionally misleads, but behind these antics there is no brain, no purpose, no scheme. My nature has mutated into a whirling dervish, whose days are marching into weeks, that slide into months, which add up to eternity. There is no indicator as to when I might stop making this wood floor trench. I remain an enduring, feral pacing animal, on this anniversary pandemic year.
I Will Call This Hope
Become the Earth. Lay yourself down. Don’t mind the ants. Go prone. Flat back to flat Earth. Eyes wide open. Brace yourself. Yes. That is you, spinning on a ball, spinning through sunny dark space. Brace yourself. Vertigo. Breathe. Swallow. Wave your arms and legs. Make a Blossom Angel. It is Spring. It helps, this becoming one with the ants, grass and dirt. Open your eyes! Look up. Breathe.
Begin to see the sky. It’s been a long downcast winter of a time, of head observing shuffling feet, but now the nautilus that is you must uncoil. Stand upright. Face the day. The sky is no longer grey filled with snow showers. It really is gloriously glorious and a smile is out of practice, but time changes all and tears will come fast and easy. A new sky to go with a new smile. I will call this hope.
The Dreams of Old Women
The dreams of old women are time capsules that no hour glass can claim. Yes, the grey ones have cares matching their strands, but beneath their locks no longer gold, red, or brown, they dance. Below their hooded lids the tic of the clock has lost the will. The dreams of the old reek of coffee and butter, Balinese beaches, a firstborns breathe, a young dog’s smile, a Parisian view, a Bedouin desert at sunrise. Beyond any grasp, it all shimmers and fades. An old woman’s dreams are where worlds within worlds are to be envied and where the weight of time has no value.
I Imagine Nothing
Of the past year passing, I had been relieved. Now, I harbor nothing but kindness towards it, and the year to come, nothing but wariness. My low-level anxiety makes for jittery days. My skin crawling self could use a rest. I would like to step out of it and hang it in the armoire next to a pickle jar housing my brain. But it won’t be enough, because my eyes will refuse to remain glued shut, and my ears, even if I cut them off, throw them to the dogs, and walk away, will continue to buzz, as they have long been beyond needing their fleshy shells to torture. In my dreams, I imagine nothing. Remaining upfront and present, reality reigns. I allow a moment where different scenarios take priority of place, other days, other months, other years, and I bitterly laugh at my not so distant foolish self and lack of imagination for the actuality that is.
It Endures
Delicate like porcelain am I in the chaos of the world, but if care is taken, I can last lifetimes. A skill to be mastered, like the balance of a dragon fly, caught between cool air and cool water. The wind will lift, while the water reflects, and now what was one is two. One for the heavens and one for the deep ages. Chaos in its nature will divide and ground, but beauty and peace, it too endures.
Flying
Today I swim with the fishes. They are fine and we are one. We dash this way and then that way and before we know it, we are in a new world. My school is golden white, so individually small, tremendously massive united. This is the closest I come to flying. As we move, it is now, time is unleashed. I am weightless, arms fluid, no resistance, our water, warmer than air. There is comfort. I am close to the single cell dividing as I ever can be. But here, in this now, this moment, I’m safe, as Mother cannot find me.
Wednesday the Pandemic Arrived
Wednesday, the Pandemic arrived.
Only yesterday she had seen the world differently. It and she had held a benevolent way of being. Today, danger was in the air. What was her communal birth right, her breath, was no longer to be trusted. Leaving the shelter of any stick/stone/mud/brick/tent/palace/hovel was now a law breaking, life threatening endeavor. She wondered whether the cat and dog should be alarmed, whether they too were part of the problem? Nothing was conclusive, nothing was off the table. She was smart, smart enough to know, that in the coming weeks and months, there would be much magical thinking and imploring to the Gods for mercy.
