Make it New: Mending at Rock & Sling

Happy Not-Quite-So-New-Year, friends! So 2019 was quite a year, and I have spent very little time with this blog. I have instead been up to my neck with various and assorted Things, some fabulous, some not-so. One of the best things is that last fall I went back to school for a master's degree in English. Do I dare say I've resolved to post more here in 2020? For today, here is a link to my new post over at Rock & Sling: Make it New: Mending.




Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Rainbow Boy

I am so grateful that Rock & Sling provided me the space to share some of my thoughts about faith, identity, and family in October. Rainbow Boy has been up on their blog for a couple of weeks, and it is completely by accident that I haven't shared the link here. It took a long time to put into words, and it is still a highly imperfect thing, but I hope it will speak to others.

Artist Series at Rock & Sling

Thank you to Rock & Sling for the opportunity to share one of the books that is inspiring me right now. I haven't read The Wide-Awake Princess to my kids in years, but it is still speaking to me. Now more than ever. You can read the whole blog post here.



Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

New(ish)

Slowly, slowly, I am adding things to Bark Bread Designs. And learning things, and reading things, and trying to catch some of the ideas that flicker in my head. If I can get them onto paper they stay longer, grow brighter. Some make it into the world, which I am glad for--the whole birthing process, and holding what I've made (poem, paper thing, mended thing) and sending it forth into the unknown--I love all of it. Other ideas--I have to remind myself to enjoy all those sparks flying around inside. All that light and warmth.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

We Can Work With This, Too

Maybe you don't know what you will come up with. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the color is the thing, and the playing with it--layering and adding, covering and taking away. After a while the paper takes on its own life, and while you did not find the thing you were trying to create, you found something else and it was beautiful. Think of it as a collaboration between you and Chance. I  am open, you tell God, you tell the universe, you tell the people you love. We can work with this, too, without losing ourselves, without forgetting our dreams. It's just that the canvas is so much bigger than we had anticipated.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Coptic Stitch Journals

These days I have to think in terms of projects. While I work on one the others wait, patiently or otherwise. I finish things, but usually not within the time frame I had imagined. Some days this is frustrating, but other days I can totally bask in the warmth of knowing that I do finish things, contrary to how I saw myself when I was much younger, and not only that but I like the things I eventually put out into the world. Most days that is really a whole lot of warmth, and it is helping me to get more comfortable with the backlog of Things Waiting.

One recent project is this group of hand bound journals/sketchbooks/blank books. Pink is not a color I turn to very often, but back in February I was recovering from influenza and bronchitis, thinking about how nice spring would feel, and probably feeling the influence of Valentine's Day everywhere I turned. I wanted pink--glowing, tender, robust, healthy, promising pink in deep-breathing, loving shades. I also wanted to play with watercolors and so, slowly, these journals were born.

Somewhere towards the end of finishing one of these journals, I had the impression that I was creating a small world. And hopefully someone else will take this simple small world into their hands and feel the call to create their own world or worlds within it. That is my hope for these little blank books. I think our souls ache to create and birth and converse as much now as ever in our history.

This, too, is an encouragement when I start to get overwhelmed by all the Things Waiting. They will be finished because they are needed.

These three are available in my Etsy shop, Bark Bread Designs:

These two are available locally at an antique store, along with some other items I have made. (If you are interested in these, please message me.)

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

"Imprint" at Rock and Sling

It is an honor to have my piece, "Imprint," up on the Rock and Sling blog this week. It pulls together some things I have been mulling over for months (sparked by the baby mouse and its siblings pictured below) and I am so pleased to be able to finally have it out in the world. You can read it here.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

What I Did This Summer

So I've been playing with paper for a long time. And long ago when I went off to college I thought I would have time to study both art and music seriously. When it became clear that I had to focus on one or the other, I told myself I would take art classes again someday, maybe after I got my big orchestra job. And life went differently than that. That's okay, though, because hovering on the side of my writing all this time has been this desire to extend words and thought more and more into a physical realm. This summer I took several classes at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and my head and heart are bursting. (It's a magical place, and I can't wait to go back again.) The pictures above are things I made in class--now I'm trying to find time for skill-building, and practice, and ways to bring some of the ideas in my head to life. I have so much to learn, and I'm so excited.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

From My Reading, 2/22/17

I started, but never finished, reading George Orwell's 1984 in high school. Eventually I will get back to it, but I am glad now that I read this first. 

From Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley:

"But why is it prohibited?" asked the Savage. In the excitement of meeting a man who had read Shakespeare he had momentarily forgotten everything else. 

The Controller shrugged his shoulders. "Because it's old; that's the chief reason. We haven't any use for old things here."

"Even when they're beautiful?"

"Particularly when they're beautiful. Beauty's attractive, and we don't want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones."

A little later in the conversation, the Controller explains why none of the new things written can be like "Othello":

"Because our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel--and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma. Which you go and chuck out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!" He laughed. "Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello! My good boy!"

The Savage was silent for a little. "All the same," he insisted obstinately, "Othello's good, Othello's better than those feelies."

"Of course it is," the Controller agreed. "But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead."

"But they don't mean anything." 

"They mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience."

"But they're...they're told by an idiot."

"The Controller laughed. "You're not being very polite to your friend, Mr. Watson. One of our most distinguished Emotional Engineers..."

"But he's right," said Helmholtz gloomily. "Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say..."

"Precisely. But that requires the most enormous ingenuity. You're making flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel--works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation."

The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible."

"Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."

*     *     *

More and more I find myself wondering what we are buying, and buying into. How normal it seems in this corner of the world to expect and demand comfort and ease. How natural it seems to be to allow oneself to behave and be treated as first and foremost a consumer. How often I hear people confusing education with job-training. Does it raise a fight in you, the way it does me?

*     *     *

My other offering today, something old and beautiful. Spent, I suppose. But look:

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Thankful, 11/13/15:

For when words fail but you still have a voice.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Thankful, 11/1/15:

For interruptions. For the unexpected, the unplanned, the break in the pattern. For when your attention and intentions are netted and drawn: See this. What will you do with it?

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Feet on the Ground, Head in the Clouds

I have been writing, I really have. Nothing here, nothing to show publicly, but I have been writing. This is something I have to remind myself. I miss this place, and it weighs on me when I am away. 

For the week following my last post I focused almost entirely on poetry here—an experience so wonderful it seems entirely appropriate that I arrived and returned home by soaring through the air, above the clouds. I wrote poems, read poems, talked about poems, analyzed poems, listened to poems—to the point that my spirit was willing but my body was weak. I attended every reading, presentation, and open mic I could, tossed in a few museums and shops, and more deep conversations than I can count. My journal is filled with proof of it all: quotes, fragments of poems, words to remember, books to read, movies to watch, people to find online.

Then I flew through the air once again, not home but to northern Michigan to meet up with the rest of my family and bring Oldest home from Interlochen. (This is a wonderful thing, having him home. And yes he grew, immeasurably.)

Since getting home: more writing, but almost as if I had forgotten the previous week. For the last week and a half I have been crafting and re-crafting my life word by word: emails to parents of students, to parents of prospective students, to administrators, to teachers, to friends, to family. Applications, questionnaires, registration forms. Meetings, conversations, questions. I enjoy this kind of crafting less, but it  always presents itself as more urgent. I have to stop sometimes to remind myself that they both serve a life, that both are urgent, and that if for a week I dared to believe I was a poet, I can continue to believe it now.

So I keep trying to pull life together—through emails, through conversations, through notes in my kids’ lunches, through poems and blog posts and other writings. Maybe I will dare to call it all poetry of one sort or another, at least in those moments I remember flying through the air, over the clouds.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Learning to Speak

1. Yes, I am convinced by now that God speaks—all day, all night—in a stream of beauty and oddities, in kindness, in the words of friends and strangers, and also in pain, in shake-up, in freak occurrence—anything that cracks the veneer we seem so fond of. There was a time I could not pray words, at all. Had nothing but some kind of silent reaching, and looking, and listening, hoped that what I had could be enough. If I could see one beautiful thing, or enter into a phrase of music that reached for heaven, or hear words from a friend or a book that touched the rawest, hurt places, I could take that personally. Maybe God was not silent. Maybe I could listen more carefully. Maybe I could learn better the language I was hearing the most. It is a delicate, difficult language—

2. We visited Oldest at music camp and after four weeks finally got to hear him talk and talk. It was the most comforting wonderful sound. I took pictures of him, even though he did not want me to—couldn't help it. Mostly I took them from the side or behind, but in one picture he is looking straight at me, part pained, part perplexed. Why, Mom? When we hugged him goodbye (two more weeks) and left I was not crushed—only because he told us things. At the parent meeting on the first day of camp, we were given advice: You are not doing anything interesting. There is nothing going on at home, you are not having an amazing vacation without your child. You do not need to encourage homesickness, and your sons and daughters need to focus fully on what they are doing here. I am trying to follow this advice, remembering that “We miss you” gets boring, anyway. I send texts and pictures: oddities, funny happenings, shared memories. Translation: I love you. I am here, always. Recently it dawned on me what language I am speaking.

3. It is a tricky one, this language. Delicate, difficult—language of giraffe’s eye, seed fluff, spark—language of lifted veils and torn curtains. Language of accumulation: snowflake-upon-snowflake, word-upon-word, phrase-upon-phrase. Tear-upon-tear and kindness-upon-kindness. The stars speak it fluently, also the very old, and the very young. And trees, their arms forever lifted. I am only learning, the syllables clumsy on my tongue but also round, smooth. Phrases catch in my head, circle softly, carve deep. I hear them in dreams, they fall at my feet. Listen, and listen. Finally venture a word here and there, cringing at my own accent: beads of honey, hints of salt. 

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

On My Mind

I have been thinking about the power of transforming something, and the power of re-telling a story.

I have been thinking about this, and making more flowers.

I have been thinking about the heart—the meaning—of a poem, hidden in a cluster of words at the heart of the larger poem. (Poet Helen Frost was one of six authors and illustrators Middle and I got to hear speak at the Children’s Literature Festival at Truman State University Friday. I am still floating a little bit.)

I have been thinking about how mixed in with the rain that fell outside the dining room window yesterday were tiny white petals from our flowering pear tree. And mixed in with the raindrops clinging to branches out the back kitchen window were tiny green leaf buds.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Found, Day 27

Made it through the Monday after Spring Break, extra-tired and extra-energized all at once, gobbling up my alone time and gobbling up time with my kids, alike. My brain is a little mushy tonight, but not too mushy for this magic over at thisiscolossal.com. 

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Found, Day 9

It is ice-cold today (11°, sky-blue, bare,)

but I have found a patch of sunlight

to cover and warm my legs while I practice.

The heat stays with me when I get up—

while I light a candle

(tangerine and bergamot, mandarin and thyme)

partly just because

partly in honor of the moment,

in honor of being awake,

in honor of the chance to tease out

the meaning of what’s in front of me.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Listen

I figure if things are making sounds they are asking you to listen.

*     *     *

Early, early in the morning. I am awake for no reason but since I am the thoughts have started rushing in and swirling around. First the details: schedule, after-school activities, the never-ending to do list. But then, louder: You are going to let everybody down. You will not be able to do this well. Who do you think you are, anyway? The fears and details need to be answered. They are quieted, often, when I turn to face them. But they are not the only thing to listen to in this early-morning dark. There are also the crickets outside. I can let the silver whir envelop me for a moment. I can hear it as the mating call of countless insects, yes, but I can just as easily hear it as something else, entirely: the fading-away of summer, a gilding of the dark air, the easy praise of a creature fulfilling its calling simply by being, by whirring.

*     *     *

If I have been quiet, these last few months, I have also been listening. It is something, I’m starting to believe, that requires the whole body.

Listen to the fears—we must, I suppose—but listen, also, to the crickets. The crickets should also be required listening.

Listen to the words on the page. Sitting down with a book recently has been like sitting down hungry to a good hot meal—the kind that brings forth an extra prayer, an exhaled Thank you as I take in the first bite. Often, when reading, the inhalation follows: Tell me. I want to eat the words, absorb their marrow into my own, internalize, understand, live the good I find.

This listening—I don’t know how my own voice fits in to it. I only know that it’s hard to listen when I'm making noise, myself. That too often the echo of my own voice makes me cringe.

I believe there are stories to tell. I know that the conversation I want to have with the world is not a conversation if I remain silent. But this deep quiet seems necessary. It is nourishment, it is fuel. It is something, maybe, taking shape.

And all around me there are requests to be heard:

Listen to the words of the song.

Listen to the pictures on the wall, in the book, in your memory.

Listen to the small hand that grabs yours, the eyes (big, deep, wide, scared, friendly) that seek out yours.

Listen to the friend who says she can’t take it anymore.

Listen to the voices everywhere that are frustrated, angry, hurt, afraid: Ferguson, Liberia, Iraq, Syria, Gaza.

Listen to the voices right there beside you in your life—what is asked, what is told, what is left out.

Listen to the wind, the birds, the sunrise.

Listen to what takes shape in your life.

Listen, and be changed.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

The Violin Project, Year 2: Notes from the First Day of Class

Seventeen is a big number. Seven returning students, ten new students. When I group them that way it all looks very manageable. All together they look like more than the sum of their parts. 

They were excited, yesterday, coming in. Eyes big. The new ones wanted to know when they would have violins. They are ready to play concertos. One child informed me, very seriously, “I’m doing violin because my mom said I had to.” One gave me five examples of How Fast A Learner I Am. We will move slowly, and that is hard but at the same time easier—so much less overwhelming than “Here’s your violin, this is how you hold it. Here’s your bow, this is how you hold it. Now play.” And I think we will have fun, regardless of how we ended up together in the first place.

I don’t know who was more nervous, the kids or I. For them I want to project calm and confidence, but every year is new, the territory fresh and a little wild, and every year I wonder if I am really up to this new year of teaching. I have trouble feeling calm.

And then we start, and everything’s okay.

We began yesterday with background music (Twinkle Theme and Variations) and coloring (treble clefs) and snacks, and worked our way into learning each others’ names, standing still, listening to and following instructions. The newcomers will be painting the fence, Karate Kid-style, for a while, and that tends to fly in the face of young peoples’ expectations. But it is like the scarf I have been knitting for months and months: day-to-day the progress is slow, and certainly not our culture’s usual way of acquiring things. But I got used to the slowness, and I enjoy the process. Recently—suddenly, it seemed—I noticed that the thing has length. Someday I will wear it and forget how long it took to make. Someday, suddenly, we will look at each other over our violins and say, “Look how much we’ve learned!”

Here’s what else I forget, and have to keep re-discovering: it’s not just every year that is new. Every day is new. Getting to know each other, fence-painting, problem-solving—we are in it together. What luck. I can’t wait.

For more about The Violin Project, click here, or visit our Facebook page.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

What I've Been Up To

(Besides taking pictures)

Teaching:

I find teaching a difficult thing to write about, but I daily feel my brain churning away at the mystery of it all. I start to feel a little lost when I take too long a break from it, and I feel consumed by it by the middle of each semester. I dream of having a secretary to handle the details—scheduling, snacks, fundraising. But the actual teaching part—being part of and witness to so many lives, so many struggles, so much growth—I am all at once thankful and stretched and puzzled and energized and drained. The Violin Project, especially, is intense—7 kids and several wonderful volunteers and I—we have spent many hours together. The time and work are turning into something special. (Much of our year together is in pictures on our Facebook page.)

Last week my students performed with our community string orchestra. Everybody worked hard, prepared well, played beautifully. 

Non-blog writing:

A couple of projects that have needed more than I’ve been able to give. It was good to give them more of my time, even though they are not yet finished. The bit of momentum behind them is encouraging.

On the blog:

There are a number of new titles on my Music Resources: Picture Books, Etc. page. There are so many good books out there. Let me know what I've missed!

Oh—and making stuff:

These are slow-moving projects but I refuse to give them up completely. At the very least they are good for the soul.

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email

Tractable/Intractable

“Mommy, what are you reading on your phone?”

“I’m reading about a word. Every day I get an email with a different word, telling me what it means. See? Today’s word is tractable. It can be used to describe a person. It means ‘Easily handled, managed, or controlled.’”

Brief pause.

“Wow.” 

Another brief pause. 

“You are not tractable. You are not at all tractable.”

And I had been smiling to myself because it seemed awfully ironic, reading this definition to Youngest, of all people.

*     *     *

It can be a bitter thing, coming up against what you cannot control. 

*     *     *

Husband and I took a walk Easter evening. It was warm, the sky moving from dusk to dark. The lights along the walking path and along the street lit up the new life on trees and shrubs in magical ways. Buds like jewels, white-flowered trees like ghosts, all against a deepening blue sky. And I stopped more and more often to try to capture what I saw. And few of the pictures turned out.

We agreed that this is maybe the most frustrating and wonderful thing about a camera, at least from the skill-level from which we both operate: you cannot always get the camera to see what your eyes see. But sometimes the picture you end up with is still beautiful, and so much more than what you were trying for.

If this is not art and life all wrapped up together, I don’t know what is.

The lack of control we have in our lives can be painful and frustrating and harsh. I rail against it and exhaust myself fighting it. And yet when I can find the art in all of it—when I can pull the beauty out, or discover it shining in the middle of a stinking, heaping mess—that is grace and beauty and everything Best. Everything I love and want most. This is a mystery I both struggle with and want to sink myself deeply into.

*     *     *

This brings me back to Lent, and the Wordless series I recently finished to mark the season. This was the third year of this project, and each time I enjoy it and stress about it all at once. It is welcome in that so often I arrive at a point where I am sick of the sound my own voice—whether spoken or in writing. I want a break from it, and from subjecting others to it, at least for a time. Even though I know from experience that not speaking is a form of death.

And so, the pictures. This, people. I saw this today and it was beautiful. Or hopeful. Or full of meaning. Can you see it, too? Every day wondering if maybe this was the day I wouldn’t discover something, or if I did, that I wouldn’t be able to capture and share it. Finding one picture a day is not the biggest act of faith there is, but every day it tested me. Some days I couldn’t show you exactly what I saw, but the camera found something better. Many days I wondered if I was communicating anything at all. Every day I put whatever I had out into the world with a mixture of feeling compelled to do it and also unworthy. I’m not sure why I keep feeling surprised by that mixture of hope and hopelessness, but I do.

I know that the important part is acting on the hope. Pulling out the beauty. Seeing the light when it shines out from, or into, dark places. Walking right down the middle of tractable and intractable. This has to be what art is and what life is, all wrapped up together. 

Subscribe to Dreamer by Email