The End of America

Many Exciting Returns: The Artist's Life

Those of you have been following my blog, (at all) will be happy to know I have decided to finish my MA in Literature, but I have also decided to forgo a PhD to return to my training in art and illustration. This has made me happier than I have been in years, having the faith and heart to follow my passions.

I want to read and make and write and draw beautiful books. So that's what I'm going to do.

And it's been incredible! By allowing myself this freedom of choice, my creative juices which I had been unwittingly been stifling have been flowing, rushing through my head, filling it with images and story ideas, including a new faery tale take on Sleeping Beauty, the story never told. We all know about Aurora (named for the morning star) but we never hear the other side of the story, the one told by her twin sister Vesper, the evening star.


And it has alread begun to wind its way out of my head and onto pen and paper:


"This is a story that has been told a thousand times a thousand, and never once has it been told correctly. Once upon a time, there was a tower and a dragon, a splinter and a briar, but they got it wrong, they usually do, historians are rarely capable of trustworthiness, especially when magic is involved. What you must understand firstly is that my sister was never called Briar Rose. She never made it out of the tower. I was the one who was sent away to the cottage in the woods."

In the Body

Sorry I haven't been on here in two weeks, those just flew by! Wow. I am nearing the end of the semester and time is short these days. Plus just coming out of the Thanksgiving holidays ...

A grad student's work is never done. I can't believe fall break is over, but there are just 3 weeks left until Winter Break starting Dec. 14. And the semester will be over, I will have written 50 pages of research documents, and handed them forward under the ruling of the paper gods.

But today I am stuck in the body being sick. I woke up coughing. Completely out of nowhere and its awful. I may have to cancel classes today... Anybody know the fastest holistic way to shutdown a cough?

Emergen-C
echinacea
goldenseal
garlic?

The Crossroads

This is going to be an extension of "Woes & Throes" -- because I am looking for a way to relate to what lies before me -- and -- I am trying to listen for the feeling that tells me: Bingo. Nailed it. Yes!

I always second guess myself. And I am learning that I have become enamored and obsessed with denying my own personal divine feminine, in favor of the masculine nature I can wield so well -- although, I find this is the major cause of my exhaustion. Trying to fit my plethora of round expansive pegs into small singular holes, which requires neither imagination nor allows for a proper expression of self. So, if I want to be happy -- and I do -- I have to change. I have discovered that much of my issues surrounding my, well, life is due to this struggle with feeling seen, important, smart enough. It has been such an ego trip for years, and I still stumble over it. I don't know why it still surprises me when this happens, as I have never as of yet been able to give it up.

Since I was ten, I wanted to be an artist-writer. But having gone through school and being slowed, as well as finding myself un-nerved by my peers around me that were better than I was, I lost faith, heart and ambition and went after another course of study. I do not regret pursuing Humanities or Literature, but I do regret leaving the art behind completely for so many many years.

On Tuesday I will complete my 6 week re-introduction into Drawing Fundamentals and what was so incredible is the somatic memory. My body remembers how to do this. My mind shuts off entirely (gloriously) and I get to live in the present moment as long as I am creating. This happens with writing too, but not in the same way -- words still pour forth when I write, but when I draw, it's just me, the paper and all eternity.

I have three options (four?) awaiting me after my MA which do not require me to move out of state (and this is attractive because M and I are really liking Boulder and Colorado in general -- we talk about wanting to see other places, but with us getting married next summer and already talking about family, we are wanting something more stable and yet unlimited in desirability) and they are as follows:

1. Pursue an MFA in Fiction or Literary Non-Fiction (low-residency via Warren Wilson or Goddard or Seattle Pacific) and become the novelist I have always wanted to be.

2. Go for a PhD in Theology & Culture through the joint program at the University of Denver and then come back and possibly teach at my own Alma Mater in a joint position in the Religious Studies and Comparative Literature departments.

3. Go into a classically training art program here in Boulder and become proficient in drawing, painting and sculpture.

(options 4 & 5 are dependent on choosing option #3)

4. With this new acquisition of skills, apply to the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design and get a BFA in Illustration -- thereby becoming equipped to illustrate children's books in the manner of those who always inspired me as a child: Barbra Helen Berger, Chris Van Allsburg, Arthur Rackham, Brian Froud, Alan Lee?

5. Become the Art Lady. This means that while doing my own projects I offer private and group art lessons to children of various ages in the Boulder area, just as I had received them in Iowa when I was a child (at this time I would like to give thanks my own teachers from the age of 7 until 14: Jewell MacDonald and Patty Hancock. You taught me so well, and I didn't even realize it). My mother actually suggested this option and I had never considered it, but it gave me such a warm happy feeling about it...

SO. These are my options. And none of them are bad in any way -- but the question is, "Which Way is My Way?" As Andre the Giant questions Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride.

Whenever I project my thinking into the future, intuitively, to ask myself: What will my life look like: I have seen the same thing since I was barely twenty: a nice house, cheerful, lots of windows -- a big kitchen, cats , dogs and my kids... and an art studio out back. Even when I wasn't doing art, this has been the same vision, unchanging. No where in there do I see myself driving to school everyday or teaching everyday. As much as I enjoy teaching, I know that when I have my kids, I'm going to want to be with them. shrug

I feel like that character on Mona Lisa Smile, played by Julia Stiles -- the smart would-have-been Law School Bound Intelligent lass and she tells Julia Roberts: "You told us we could be anything we wanted. This is what I want." Thereby denying her schooling in the public sphere and allowing it to augment her private sphere. The issue is I feel I am both the Stiles and Roberts' characters rolled into one body. I both want what I want, and am frightened by the "be a mom" label. I see what it did to my mom. And it frightens me a little... but. I do not want to live my life afraid of how others might label me. I just want the best live ever and on that, I am not willing to compromise.

Early Early

I woke up at about five this morning. Mostly due to kitty squabbles and their hunger issues. But Instead of going back to bed, I watched the sun come up. And I am always grateful when I am awake to experience this. I'd like to do it every morning. Maybe I will. Starting today...

I think there is something missing from our lives if we over-sleep and over-stimulate ourselves that we never feel the ability to get up when the whole non-human world does.

It's November (albeit, it has been an exceptionally warm November in Colorado, thus-far) and the birds are still out in the morning, the air was cool and vibratory. Yes. I went outside with M's furry clogs on my feet and scuffled around taking pictures of the amazing clouds and the glimpse of the flatirons that we have from our front yard or dining room window... I will have to post those later because the battery pack is recharging, presently.

But I think, if you can -- wake up early at least once a week and watch the sky grow light... it's like magic.

(I can't wait for Fall break, however, in all truth, this leaves me about a month to write 50 pages for my grad classes' final project/papers. One paper is going to be comparing space and place in Willa Cather and Melville novels. The other will concern itself with Rushdie's Midnight's Children. )

I find myself (my somatic consciousness) leaning again towards smoothies. Odd, when it's kind of cold in energy, but I really am not liking the foods I always used to like (i.e. cooked). They make me congested and sap my energy. It's really quite amazing, using myself as my own chemistry experiment -- after my juice feast, my body tells me right away which substances are a no-go. I guess my body has always been pretty good about that, I just wasn't listening.

I think listening is going to be my theme for the next year. I turn 27 on Tuesday, which is a Nine, numerologically (sp) speaking. A double nine too! Wow. A year of completion. And it will be. This next year I will graduate from my Masters, I will get married (wow!), I am subscribing to a year's worth of The Best Day Ever! and -- well. I don't know what else. But I will be listening for it.

“A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.”Antoine de Saint-Exupery

(Juice for the morning: cilantro-celery-pineapple. One of the best!)

Woes & Throes

Sorry I have been relatively mute for the past week or so. Class, grad school, & life - in whatever configuration you may want to order them... they have been affecting me. But, so is my ever ongoing issues surrounding my path, spiritual, occupational and otherwise. * Side note (way off topic): for those of you who were following me through my juice feast, yeah... the juicer I ordered back then, arrived. Today. Anyway. I have always been caught between art and writing. I am an academic, but I always wanted to be an artist. I was on the track too. I had private art lessons since I was seven up until the age of, (we'll be generous and say) 16, where at that point I was living in JH and the only art classes available were of the public school sphere. So, I did that. It wasn't until my freshman year at UA-Tucson that I realized, of all my classes I was taking, my studio classes bit the worst. And I fully blame this on their curriculum req’s i.e. "everyone starts at the bottom" even if one had a color theory portfolio going back to when they were nine... all the same: the experience kind of killed it for me. So -- I threw myself into the topics that were interesting to me: all those things that would eventually garner me a BA in humanities once I transferred to CU. That is, art history, literature, philosophy, religion, anthropology. I am currently pursuing my MA in Literature in Colorado as well. But here's the sad thing. I have let myself be corrupted by Literature with a capital L. I used to be mythology nerd, sci-fi, fantasy and faerie tales: stories of the mythic mind, magical realism, folklore and the hidden allegories they are the vessels for. My Masters, until now, had ruined my love of reading... but I am considering that maybe I am not reading the right things. I am insanely interested, fascinated, hooked on the comparative study of religion and their mythic counterparts: as they are all the same story, essentially. All religions conspire to allow humankind to arrive at the same place, almost always via the same ends, bearing the same path-markers. It does not matter if you are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sufi, Hindu, Jainist, Pagan, Egyptologist, Buddhist: everything leads to absolutely the same outcome. But our understanding of this as a culture is supremely thwarted and compressed/oppressed. We have lost our ability to relate to God on mystical levels, and have limited ourselves to the literal ones... how unfortunate...

Anyhow --- I can’t decide now: Do I go back to art? Becoming classically trained? Raise my kids in an atmosphere where I give art classes to local families, and write stories until I fall asleep by candle light like Jo March in Little Women? Do I pursue a PhD in Theology & Culture? And MFA? What am I supposed to do with all of my interests without relegating myself to being in school forever?

Beginning

So, November is National Novel Writing month and so I am back to working on mine-- I have snippets (some of which I have included here) from various places in the text, 25 page worth: but I finally took a stab at the opening, as follows:

The Electric Lighthouse

BEFORE THE STORY: LILIA’S REQUEST

The day that Evangaline gave me the book, I did not immediately know what she had handed down to me; all that had been bestowed and buried, all that we would leave behind. After the fires and the ash both fell away, it was no longer her secret to keep. As I finally opened the worn and faded cover on the long train-ride that would carry me away from Maine and my father’s Lighthouse, I felt the weight of the story seep into me. Like my sister’s fear of sadness and her love of the things of flight – and I knew finally what I was supposed to say. And with this book, with its apple green binding, the cracked leather fragile and wrinkled along the folded corners, the pen-knife engraved seals on the cover, I became the caretaker of my father’s story. In the end one might say what you are about to read is, perhaps, more a ghost story than anything else. And there are ghosts here but it is also a story of our castle and the sea.

My father’s castle cannot be found in any book. And those who once knew it, and where it stood have long since died, and the jut of land that it stood upon along that small strip of coast is now called by another name and mostly, it has been reclaimed by the water it was once guard and sentry to. But what I would come to know as my father’s castle did not belong to him either. Nor his grandfather, from whom he had inherited its keep. And this would be the beginning of all the trouble. But we must start before then.

Chapter One

At the age of eleven, Simon Weatherfield lost his mother. It was only a fever and a small cough, she said. Then one day as she was bringing in the cows from pasture, she died in the fields, watching the first snow of the year come across the White Mountains. The doctors said she had been born with an enlarged heart and looking directly into Simon’s gray eyes, made sure he understood. And since his father, had gone to fight in the Red River War and died trying to remove Kiowa Indians from the middle plains just two years earlier, there was the issue of who would raise the boy. Like his mother, he was an only child and so there were no living aunts or uncles to take him in. And his father’s family was still in England and either had received no word of the orphaned son or refusing to be bothered, they had been silent on the matter just the same. Finally, the courthouse in Exeter came to discover the whereabouts of his dead mother’s still extant father. A professor of Letters retired from Harvard, who had taken up residence in Maine with his second wife, and it was there that Simon would go to live.

_____________________________________________

He would often dream of his mother, she would come the fifth hour of All Souls and he would wake, cold and see her sitting in the rocking chair in the corner of the room, looking out over the sea. Just as in life, she rarely spoke; her movements, small. She smiled her lop-sided smile. He had always pictured her like some human-shaped hot water kettle, constructed to bare secrets, songs, mirroring the images and the mysteries. He had never seen her cry, not even when word came that his father was dead. He had waited for her to cry out in pain or fear or grief but she didn’t, she accepted everything that moved around her, as though nothing more than leaves in a burst of wind. And now she sat, full clothed in sashes and white cotton tied to her ankles, which made a shisking sound across the floor. Her eyes were cold and grey but they also shone with a bright stillness that comforted him even in their eeriness. And he would stay in bed, knowing that he could not approach her, nor touch her, for then she would dissipate like a mist burned away by the sun; he would simply wait for her to speak.

_____________________________________

It wouldn’t be until years later when I would find myself sitting with Jack at his kitchen table in a farmhouse in Iowa, that it would all seem right again. I don’t think they ever really wrote. I think Clover was ashamed, and Jack felt the smart in that -- felt in his body her absence like any lover would, the bitter tugging from a memory emblazoned by the one they had lost. I think he had just been so frightened of disappearing completely that his need to survive no matter what cost came screaming in behind his minds eye and in an instant he felt the only thing he could do was the one thing that he did: and he left all of us behind.

It was late spring. That day the sun was warm on the green grass, and the oaks shaded the porch where one could just as easily sit and hear the creek and see the rows of corn, as look over the pastures before the hill where Jack’s two little girls ran and laughed in the barnyard, skipping and dancing as they fed chickens. I realized then that he had found peace in a way that perhaps, none of the rest of us ever would.
As I had sat looking at him then, all grown up, a beard darkening his cheeks, he seemed for the first time in all the time I had known him, filled with his own light, finally a glow completely independent from his twin’s effervescence. I had to swallow, because I felt my throat tighten, and I blinked and said: “I’m really happy for you, Jack.”

He cocked his head at me, reached out to wipe the tear that slipped down my chin and he smiled. “Me too.”