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The Tuesday NIght Club

January 5th, 2010

I love Tuesday night drinks with my creative companion. We meet once a week “To talk of many things: Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–Of cabbages–and kings–.” Tonight we discussed our feelings about our mothers, our love of textiles and embroidery, travel, living more boldly, books we’ve read, dinner parties, cosmetic surgery (should we? should we not? should we waive judgment on friends who have? do dyeing your eyebrows count?) and blogging. Somehow, meeting once a week in a setting divorced from our “real” workaday lives makes it easier to expose our deepest selves. Tonight we agreed that 2010 should be a high voltage year for both of us. My first step: finding a flat to rent in London for a month this summer. I’m afraid to put my hand on that live wire, but how can I resist that dare I’ve made to myself?

Posted in Creative Process, Fresh Ideas, Inspiration | 2 Comments »

Brand-New Vintage

December 29th, 2009

I found these shoes at Urban Outfitters and what I love about them, aside from the cheap price, is that they look broken in and beamed here from a more romantic era. As if they were worn by Zelda Fitzgerald in a night of mad dancing and packed away and stored in a trunk in an attic until they showed up in a Paris flea market decades later. As if they were danced in all night, leaving a trail of sequins behind on a snowy street in Montmartre, like breadcrumbs the owner’s lover would follow to her garret apartment overlooking the rooftops of the city. As if they were left behind during the German occupation of Paris, shoved to the back of a closet by a fragile Audrey Hepburn look-alike in her haste to flee to London, where she worked on the Enigma decoder until the liberation. As if they were handmade for a famously reclusive ballerina, lined with linen and lavished with sequins to match her legendary amber eyes. Every time I put them on, I’m imagining another life I could have lived, a path those shoes could have taken.

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A Sea Change

December 29th, 2009

My daughter and son-in-law own a big-bottomed broad of a boat…stable, cozy (even a little gas burning “fireplace”) and curvaceous. During the holidays, we went out in Puget Sound looking for orca whales, and even though we didn’t find any, it was a spectacular experience. Freezing, but the sunset and Twin Peaks moody landscape made it magical. I hate cold weather and I’m afraid of water, but I piled on hat, gloves and lots of layers to sit outside in the bow until I finally lost feeling in my face. What I rediscovered was that when you surrender to being in the moment, the moment gradually overcomes your misery. I was without my constant companions — cell phone, books and laptop. No one to chat with because they were all wisely staying warm in the cabin. It was just me and smoky sky and deep silence, except for the sound of the boat and the waves we made. I don’t think I would ever be able to live in the Northwest (or Northeast), but winter in all its spareness and solitude is not possible to experience in the same way in the south. Just as I could never live on a boat but I can understand the relief of paring down your possessions to stow in a few cubbies, the freedom of drifting from island to island, the notion of pulling up anchor for the next best place. For a few hours, my life was unmoored … untied from Costco, CNN, the Comcast bill, dry cleaning, deadlines and the sadness of post-holiday sales (which it seems to me to be a bit like post-coital tristesse). We were messing about in boats and it was good.

Posted in Home, Inspiration | 2 Comments »

Return to Sender

November 18th, 2009

Daily Om tells me to grow my soul. Daily Bite tells me how to save the planet. Daily Candy incites me to buy, buy, buy. Daily Kabbalah Tuneup warns me to ward off negative thoughts. The Daily Beast keeps me up to date on celebrities and politics in a shouting sort of way. To round off the morning, The Writer’s Almanac sends me a poem a day, and Notes from the Universe sends a daily “personal” message geared just to me–and their other 150,000 other subscribers. Inspirational, environmental or just plain eye candy — I’m not sure all of these daily messages add that much to my life. In fact, sometimes it feels like I’m being pecked to death by virtual ducks. In Ted Mooney’s 1981 novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets, some of the characters would drop in their tracks, stricken by a malady called “information sickness,” in which the collection of information led to an insatiable hunger for yet more information. I believe the symptoms included bleeding from the ears. When I open my email, I understand how that could happen. And it doesn’t help just to delete the messages unread — their very arrival makes me feel like I’m behind in my homework before I even start my day. So I’m going to have to decide if my world will be rocked if I unsubscribe and try to take care of my own soul, be my own cheerleader, find my own Amazing Finds, start writing my own little poems again and remember to put out the recycling every other week without benefit of a digital elbow in the ribs. It might be like pushing off into uncharted territory since I barely remember life before the Daily Nag, but I’m sure it will leave a little more of the daily silence that ideas need in order to take root.

Posted in Change, Inspiration | 2 Comments »

Looking UP

October 12th, 2009

I’ve been very aware lately of how I walk with my head down and my eyes on the ground most of the time. Of course, there are lots of beautiful little things to notice down there, but I don’t think that’s why I do it. It’s a posture that involves a bent neck, a kind of subservient keeping-a-low-profile attitude, and I suspect it’s developed over time until it’s become not only a way of walking, but a way of thinking about myself. I know intellectually how much I’ve accomplished with the little I began with and how hard I worked to do it, but that knowledge doesn’t seem to penetrate my heart. Deep down I’m still a wannabe, not a winner, according to some arcane emotional math I use to arrive at that conclusion. I’ve known for a long time that was my particular psychic battle, but until I saw it reflected in my physical posture it never made that satisfying “click” that signals an aha! moment. It may be a lifelong struggle, but now I have a practical weapon to use instead of lobbing happy affirmations to my image in the mirror Stuart-Smalley style. Whenever I catch myself walking with my head down, neck bent in surrender to life, I lift it up and remind myself of something I’m proud of. It might be as silly as pretending I just gained an inch or so in height or that I’m balancing something on my head or as concrete as remembering I finished writing the magazine cover and it was good. I have to do it over and over again every day, but connecting the physical sensation with the mental reminder was a genuine breakthrough for me.

Posted in Change, Inspiration | 4 Comments »

A Room to Grow

September 17th, 2009

“You must have a room or a certain hour of the day or so where you do not know what was in the morning paper, where you do not know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, or what they owe you — but a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are, and what you might be…At first you may find nothing’s happening….But if you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen.” Joseph Campbell quoted in A Sacred Primer, by Elizabeth Harper Neeld

I have an office that is crammed with art supplies and writing supplies and computers and books. The colors are aqua and all my favorite things are there, but I haven’t really made it my own yet. I haven’t lived into it, written into it deeply, settled into its aura. When I think of a sacred place, my mind goes to Villa Spannocchia in Italy, where I spent a magical week writing and simply being in Italy. This little apartment in the back of the villa intrigued me because it seemed so old world and yet very much like a writer’s nook. I like having a dream studio in the back of my mind, but I know I have to inhabit the space where I live and turn it into my dream. What will make it sacred is the work that takes place there, not whether it’s in Italy or not.

Posted in Inspiration | 2 Comments »

How to Turn on the Light

August 27th, 2009

At the worn-out end of summer, when one more day of wet southern heat seems unendurable, I start to long for fall. For the clothes, the cool nights, for saying adios to mosquitoes. Until we get a stretch of drab rainy days that settles in like the dullest sermon in the longest church service you ever endured. Will winter be this sad, I wonder. Suddenly, everything in my yard looks chewed on and just plain defeated. I can’t think of anything I want to fix for dinner. My waistband is too tight and I hate the way my hair looks. I cannot conjure up any happy endings, and it will be a long winter unless I can turn up the creative heat around here. Here’s my preliminary list of S.A.D. busters:

* Light the Lux Perpetua candles that languish on my coffee table.

* Vitamin D

* More music, less news

* Learn the words to some songs and sing along even though I can’t carry a tune. I think humming and singing off key joyfully might release endorphins, and I have a severe endorphin shortage right now.

* Stop trying to control outcomes for my kids’ lives. Trust them to prevail over adversity without my intervention. Pray to some one, some force for them to be okay.

* Remember how good working out feels when it’s over.

* Paint my front door a happy color to make me smile when I come home.

* Get rid of possessions that depress me — the bed in the spare room, the beige area rug that just lies there being dull, the ugly, uncomfortable kitchen table chairs that I’ve been too lazy to replace.

to be continued…

Posted in Inspiration, Lists | 3 Comments »

Ripeness is All

August 12th, 2009

“O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.”

(excerpt from “From Blossoms“)

I thought about this beautiful poem by Li-Young Lee (please read the complete piece!) as I leaned over the kitchen sink biting through burgundy velvet skin into ripe peach flesh, feeling the sticky juice run between my fingers, the stone at the center separate from its nest. When a peach is ready, it can’t be put on hold. It’s now or never. I wish I could as easily squeeze the moments in my life to see if it’s time to act, time to seize an opportunity, time to bite into what life is offering me. Too often, I’ve let a good idea pass its expiration date instead of going for the juice. I love this reminder that now is the time, that life itself is the peach.

Posted in Inspiration | 1 Comment »

Art Everywhere

August 2nd, 2009

I took this photo with my iPhone camera from our third-floor office overlooking rooftops in downtown Charleston, SC. The planes of the buildings are so strong and painterly that they remind me of an Edward Hopper piece. The high clouds in an empty sky add that touch of sadness that draws me to his work so strongly. My photo is just an casual snap — nothing artistic or accomplished about it — but it reminded me that art is quietly taking place all around me, not just in spectacular sunsets or dramatic landscapes. It’s in the pile of empty terracotta pots in my driveway, the shiny red birdfeeder in the rain, a scrap of cloud reflected in a puddle of rain water. Find some art in your life today that you never noticed before, frame it with your eyes and take a mental snap. An article in the NY Times today lamented the loss of serendipity that’s a result of having Google instead of card catalogs, finding music you never heard of by looking through someone’s cd collection, renting from Netflix instead of cruising all the aisles in the video store and finding a random movie you never knew existed. The author feels those kind of accidental discoveries are harder to make in a digital age. I don’t know if I completely agree, but it made me think about how the computer dulls my visionary capacities by focusing my senses on the world of this screen for so much of much of my working/playing life. So I pledge to look at the world outside more, touch more, wander more, browse more, window shop more, squint into the distance more, pick up more real tangible objects with my hands instead of moving the cursor and mouse around, listen more closely, take more pictures, find more art everywhere.

Posted in Inspiration | 6 Comments »

MInd Trips

June 26th, 2009

Where would you go on this magical old bike? I’d visit a couple of places in the past:

- The bench under the magnolia tree in full bloom on the American University campus where I fell in love with my history professor. I could have done without the 7 years of angst, drama and drivel that followed, but I’ll never forget that silent lightning strike of two people colliding in space and time and having their molecules rearranged.

- I’d go to the beach with my kids and watch my young son come up the beach dragging an enormous dead sea turtle he’d found behind him with a rope. Because he was so purely happy and later that became a rarity for him and our relationship, I’d love to go back to that moment and appreciate it more.

- I’d follow the Pacific Coast Highway toward Mendocino again, the great ocean swelling and heaving and changing colors on one side of the road, the swell and curve of the tawny California hills on the other, a surge of Vivaldi leading me on, uniting sea and land, heaven and earth.

Posted in Inspiration | 8 Comments »