Category: Uncategorized

I’ve found it almost impossible to stay indoors since the spring weather started. I felt restless and started wheeling around the neighborhood as much as possible. I wanted to garden but had to face my limitations. I can’t plant, weed, and take care of the little garden by my porch. I had to ask for help, which I have a hard time doing, though I have several generous friends who were available, and the garden got taken care of.

I spent time gathering plants and seeds for the porch, which I can mostly manage. I wanted there to be more turn around space for my wheelchair and not cover every available square inch with pots that I bump into. I mostly succeeded.

I’ve also spent a lot of time just rambling around my neighborhood. The city has been replacing the gas lines on my street, and my established routes have been dug up with lots of long term holes. Last week they accidentally broke a water pipe and the neighborhood was without water for half a day. When it got repaired, the water coming out of our faucets was murky, so my son got in gallons of water from his dad’s house, and we were good til the murk was flushed out of the system.

It’s been so interesting living with my adult son, to see how the roles have switched, and have him take care of so much for me. How wonderful to find that this family love and care still exists, even though roles and personalities have changed so much.

Now the summer heat has forced me to spend more time indoors. I’m not a morning person, so often spend the late afternoon and evening on the porch, or wandering around.

I’ve had a hard time finding space in the apartment to keep working on my Look Closer series. My son has been staying with me for almost a year now. It’s a small apartment, 2 rooms, small dining area, small kitchen, one bathroom — so we’ve had space problems. He’s an artist, too, so we both have painted less than usual.

But he got a job at the beginning of the year, and now he’s found an apartment a few blocks away, so he’ll be moving at the end of this month (next week!!!). Both apartments will seem palatial. And we’ll both enjoy having our independence back, even though we know I will be calling him for help because he’s so close by.

I had just about decided to stick to 8×10″ paintings, or smaller, and get used to living small. I knew my son would not be here forever, but life is so strange now, I didn’t know how long it would take for him to find a place, but he found a practically perfect one, and life is about to open up for both of us.

In another week, I’ll get to arrange the studio with more workable areas — bigger spaces to write and paint. More room to hang and store the paintings I’m making. I can do paintings in whatever size I choose. And there will be room for people to visit more, a lovely thought after over a year of social distancing and isolation.

This morning I woke up to the sound of children laughing instead of jackhammers or bulldozers. The schoolyard across the street had a little family fun-fair, with a bouncy house, frisbee toss, and other games. Later they had a water balloon fight — essential play for this hot summer day.

I hope all is going well for y’all. I should be back to regular blogging and blathering soon.

Stay cool.

The spring saga of the elephant ears:

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I finished another painting for my Look Closer series, on sensuality and bodies in transition.

This painting is part of series I’m painting on sensuality and bodies in transformation called Look Closer.

You can read more about the series here:

Look Closer

Investing In Myself

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Thanks for reading my blog. Feel free to share it, if you’d like.

This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways. 

If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can do so at pay pal

Cards and prints on some of my art is available on Redbubble.  

You can subscribe to this blog by email in the link below this post.

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.

My son and I were discussing language the other day, particularly why certain words are censored, or considered low-class. I’ve had a lifelong interest in slang, in what is considered obscene, what kind of language makes you seem better educated, and what makes you seem low class. I love how language evolves in all directions.

The word “motherfucker” is very popular, as well as, fuck. In some places I’ve lived, fuck and motherfucker are in practically every sentence. In fact, there’s a phrase in my city that explains a certain attitude: Memphis as Fuck. Someone once asked me what that even meant, but it’s just one of those things, if you have to ask you won’t understand. Memphis is both a beautiful and ugly place to live, it’s warm and friendly, it’s mean and impoverished.

Life is like that. Any city, any town, any life — sometimes makes it feel like there’s a war raging against you, that you are subject to be erased. Even though many of us grew up in abusive families, the isolated, all powerful family unit still is our collective delusional ideal. When you grow up in something so far from the delusion you feel like an alien, you feel a sense of shame. So how do you keep an open heart and mind? For me, it was that I found help from kind people outside the boundaries of what was limiting my life. I got sick, a long term disorder, and met people who were different looking, who had different ways to survive. And I found art, poetry, fiction, visual art, music — they all gave me power over the hatefulness a traumatic childhood had planted in me.

I’ve recently delighted in the Allison Russell’s new album Outside Child. It’s an album about power and escape and collaboration and the strength it takes to be kind.

This is a great article about her from NPR:

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/26/1000521784/singer-songwriter-allison-russell-shares-a-personal-saga-of-trauma-and-triumph-o

In all the ways the word motherfucker is used negatively, this is the best use of it I’ve heard in music. I’m making this song a permanent part of the music in my head:

Hope all you joyful motherfuckers feel your own strength and beauty today!

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Thanks for reading my blog. Feel free to share it, if you’d like.

This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways. 

If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can do so at pay pal

Cards and prints on some of my art is available on Redbubble.  

You can subscribe to this blog by email in the link below this post.

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.

At some point in the last two weeks I started read poet Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. I’ve known since my 20s I need to cultivate delight in this confusing world, and have read Diane Ackerman’s book Cultivating Delight, about her garden, and her reawakening book A Natural History of the Senses. I’ve read many books on keeping hope and delight alive over the years. I need all the help I can get remembering that there is so much goodness in this world.

I try to keep a gratitude list when I find myself caught in the jaws of depression; although sometimes it takes awhile to finally look up and practice that medicine. Depression makes me forget. I forget all that is amazing about life. A veil falls over my eyes, I can’t see clearly. The weight, all the weight of all the wounds in my life, all the mistakes I made (make), take form and it feels as if I’m dragging them along with my every step.

The day before I started reading the Book of Delights, I’d felt that weight start to lift. (It doesn’t really go away, but somehow becomes airborne, troubles are inflated, still tied to me, but so light I hardly notice them, they are buoyant, I feel almost like they’re going to lift me off the ground, make me fly, with the power of pop song, with my beautiful balloons. I have to question it, and every strong emotion — is this really good or bad, or is it a chemical imbalance? I think a state of grace comes when I’m grounded, balanced — my history and mistakes are braided together strong as the bones that support me. Because all paths lead to here — and if I judge myself too harshly, give too much weight to my mistakes, I don’t remember that life is a learning experience, so hard heavy things I go through leads to here, to this hopefully stronger wiser self.)

Ross Gay decided to write an essay on something delightful every day for a year.

“I came up with a handful of rules: write a delight every day for a year: begin and end on my birthday, August 1; draft them quickly; and write them by hand. The rules made it a discipline for me. A practice. Spend time thinking and writing about delight every day.”

I read this on my porch, the book on my cellphone’s Scribd library app, in the palm of my hand. (I like reading books on my phone or kindle because they don’t strain the arthritis in my hands. I read most books this way now — unless they’re illustrated. I want to see the full glory of the combination of illustration, paper, print — the heft of illustrated/art/children’s books.)

Gay wanted to write by hand for several reasons, but the one that delights me was that if he wrote on computer, “it would have less of the actual magic writing is, which comes from our bodies, which we actually think with, quiet as it’s kept.”

I read that and POOF the last traces of my bout of depression vanished. My whole body became something more than it was before. There among the flowers I’ve planted, the little blue table where I set my drinks and my illustrated books, in the warm afternoon, when the sun goes behind the shade tree, I let delight invade my body.

I write by hand almost every morning. During the COVID quarantines I had a long lapse of not writing or painting. It was a manifestation of depression but also the darkness of winter, the minimizing of hope, the glorification of anger, the denial of racism, the doom theme of practically everything I read online.

Then I decided to reread Asta’s Book by Ruth Rendell under the pseudonym Barbara Vine (do we all need secret selves?), which I read in the 1990s. I could remember parts of it vividly, but not really what it was about. In it, the character Asta wrote so lovingly about her friend, her non-judgemental, accepting of every mood and indiscretion friend — her diary. I took up my own handwritten journal practice again, puzzling out my days.

And though I try to write about gratitude, and I try to uplift myself, and use the medicine of language to deal with my disorders and distresses, I also need to write about undelightful things, things I’m not grateful for at all.

Gay wrote an essay on bad dreams — gross bad dreams and the terrible beast of subconscious sexuality. I’ve had such dreams, and they fill me with shame and fear. But Gay finds delight in waking from them. “Very few things have been as delightful as when I woke from that dream, let out a groan, shook off the grossness and shouted Thank you! Thank you! to no one but me.”

Yes, yes!

When I get that floating balloon feeling after a depression, I almost feel grateful for my bipolar disorder, to experience the darkness, then wake up, back to myself, in my degenerating old body, where around me so many things are growing, and far away someone I don’t know is writing and sending delight my way.

Every day now I read an essay or two, after I water the plants, in the late afternoon, on the porch. Traffic wooshes by but I am delighted by the sound, and also of the way all that noise disappears as I read about the small and grand treasures in life someone else witnesses, names, and has shares.

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Thanks for reading my blog. Feel free to share it, if you’d like.

This blog is brought to you by the generosity of people who support me on Patreon , buy my art, and who support me in so many different ways. 

If you’d like to make a one time donation, you can do so at paypal 

Cards and prints on some of my art is available on Redbubble.  

If you find a typo, let me know, and I’ll send you a postcard.