Dearest friends, you mean so very much to me. I am alone much of every day and someone said, “When you’re alone, your critical voice is louder” and I’ve found that to be true. However, I never get very far down that path, because you come along side me and walk with me for a bit. I may be thousands of miles from you, yet your encouragement and kindness reach me and set my feet upon the ground or set me free to soar about in the sky. Whatever I need.
Perhaps friendship can be compared to a unexpected warm and sunny day in the midst of winter. You spread a blanket on the ground and lay down, looking at the bluest sky, to experience and memorize the warmth – to appreciate it. That rare warm day soaks into your soul, to be recalled and savored the rest of winter. That’s you, my friend of today and my friend of tomorrow. You are my rare warm day in winter.
Thank you for your phone calls, for your texts, comments on my posts, for your prayers, and for just sending good thoughts my way. To those who are near, thank you for having a cup of coffee with me, for laughter and conversation. To another, thank you for the walk at the Botanical path with your pups and for letting me hold the leash on one. To yet another who calls to check on me and chat about your filming projects. To those friends who were there in a difficult job, thank you for being present and not giving up. Your faithfulness to show up made the day sweeter and more bearable.
At the tab called Works and specifically the pull down called Art. I’ve updated that page with more artwork. I’m doing more and more artwork, getting ready for something great. So I added some of my favorite pieces from the past in anticipation of that.
The kite, the spaceship and aliens, the owls, popcorn, cocoa, the cat, and an easy one – the bear with the blanket parachute?
The origin of this bit of art
I drew this little piece of artwork in 2020. The pet shop was created using Adobe Illustrator. It was my first project and I learned so much. The grocery store was hand drawn and colored with colored pencil. The tree and border were drawn with pen and ink, and then colored in Procreate with my Apple Pencil. The moon was from a real photograph that I took of the moon from the back deck of the log home that I lived in back then. It was a time before many unfortunate things happened in my life. I took the photograph with my Canon Mark II, 5D digital camera, on a tripod. This little project was the result of putting together every creative thing I’ve learned over my lifetime, with the exception of film and writing.
Drawing (making myself exercise discipline to be still and draw), my favorite reference book, and my Sophia.
Drawing
My ear, using a mirror rather than a photo or my phone. Staying “alpha”.
Reference book
Lessons in Classical Drawing (Essential Techniques From Inside the Atelier) by Juliette Aristides
This was the first reference book I read cover to cover. When I purchased it, I figured it would be helpful in going beyond where I was with drawing. It turned out to be a world-changer. Its now full of stickies and notes.
Sophia
She will always be my friend. She participates in our life together. Chasing my shadow. Sitting on my art desk, beside me, and stroking my hair to ask for grooming. Pulling my hand to her so I’ll talk to her or pet her as she falls asleep. Going around a corner and seeing her there, her head cocked to one side. Greeting me at the door when I come home from wherever. Watching her play with her toys and finding them all over the house after I’ve picked them up. She’s awesome.
Today’s steps for the 2 laps around Havenly were 2,771. Hm. To get 10,000 steps I’d need to go around about 7.2 times. I’ll work up to it. Temperatures will be high for the next few days.
On my walk, I heard stones being walked on. Crunch, crunch. The area around each house is covered with stones and some of them are actually kind of beautiful.
When I got closer to the sound, it was a woman walking a couple of steps in front of her house, a watering can in her hand. She bent over to water the plants, like the grassy-looking thing in front of my house — desert plants that grow here and don’t need much water. But I admired the woman for caring about the plants in front of her house. In fact, seeing another human being out and about here made me feel happy. It’s a new community and for the first many months I lived here, I rarely saw anyone at all. Here, at last, was a human. Yay! She never looked up or I would have said hello.
Further on I passed a woman with an awkward gait as she headed towards the dog park (newly opened this month) with two little dogs (on leashes – yes). Later, on my next lap, I saw her pulling a wheeled suitcase-looking thing towards her car. Maybe she’s a teacher. Yet further on, around the corner, I saw a youngish man walking away from his house (it’s only a few steps from front doors to parked cars here). He was wearing a day pack on his back. Perhaps a teacher or student or lawyer? I heard a sound from the door he’d come out of and it was still open. A woman and a little child were there and the child began to cry. The young man said, “See you when I get back, Birdie” and I wondered if he meant after his hike or after his day at work or when he’s in town next time. After the woman closed the door, the child still cried. I could be wrong, but I sensed sadness there. More than from just the little child.
A little farther along, I saw a woman sitting on a bench in the dog park. A small, dark haired dog sniffed the ground. Every time I pass another house, the same house, (yesterday and today) I smell marijuana. Another house has a lot of clutter on the front porch. A chest freezer, a bunch of metal sheets, an old sign for a business. It made me wonder if someone had been evicted. A bit away from the clutter was a dead bonsai tree, still in its planter. Made me sad.
Another house has what might be a basket or bin outside the door, full of stuff, and a pair of colorful rubber boots lying on the porch. One boot standing and the other laying on its side. As I continued on I heard dogs barking from behind closed doors or from the walled courtyards. I heard someone using a saw. Sounded like wood was being cut. I thought that was cool, picturing someone building something for their house. All of the houses are close together, each with its own courtyard. When you go for a walk you are really only passing within maybe eight or ten feet of each house. I don’t know why, but I love that. I love this little community and its people. It kind of reminds me of some other places I’ve been where the houses were very close, like this, and people sat outside on their porches and talked and waved at everyone who passed by. Some houses here do have porches, but I’ve never seen anyone sitting on one or anyone waving at any passers-by. Maybe I’ll become one.
On my second time around the community I came to the house where I’d heard the saw. A man outside that house was trying to get some pallets out of his car. I don’t know where my courage came from, but I actually asked the man if he was building something. I wondered if this is what being old is like – asking questions of strangers. The man was really nice and stopped to explain. He said he likes to go camping and it’s very expensive to get wood for a campfire, so he gets pallets and cuts them up for firewood. This time the pallets were wedged so tight in the back of his vehicle that he was having to cut them out.
Anyways, it was a wonderful walk. I did see the man with the pallets on another walk and he said he got them out and all cut up. “Good job” I told him. On other day’s I’ve actually seen other people walking and got to chat with them for a bit. There’s Jeanie, 82, with a daughter here in this same community. Amy, who is in her fifties and a grandmother, with children a mile away. And an elderly one-armed man who is 92, very kind, and walks the perimeter of the community, on the outside of the wall rather than within the wall. He was at one of the community functions a while back. We all made posters and at the end we were asked to tell about our favorite thing on our poster. He said his was the picture that we’d cut out because it was something we’d loved and done for the longest. He told us that it was being married. His wife has passed away, but they were married for XX years (I can’t remember the number, but it was a very big number). Jeanie uses the treadmill in the exercise room if it’s too hot to walk outside. It was so nice meeting other humans here. Made it feel a bit more like a real community.
Yesterday (this is still my journal entry, mind you) I got my hair cut. $20. Shampoo and cut. A black man in a t-shirt and work boots washed my hair. He did a great job. Jake. In a band – Motown kind of band. Jenny and Jake. Married. A daughter in the military eight years now. Proud parents. Christians. Recommended a movie playing in theaters to me. A Marvel movie.
– End of journal entry –
These experiences were so good for my soul. I felt less isolated and less like a stranger. I’d have to say, however, that the thing that made me decide to spend some time here is the way this place is both unique, exciting, new-to-me, and yet as if I’ve lived here all my life.
Present Day – It’s going to be 98 today. Every day I say I’m going to head over to the storage place and check on my camper. Every day I end up not going, saying its too hot – that I’ll go in the morning when its still cool. But every morning I lollygag (spend time aimlessly or idle, the dictionary says) and then its late and its hot out again. When I went outside to take the picture of the stones, I saw the one armed man out walking and I came inside intending to walk some laps and go see my camper…but my Fitbit battery was dead. I don’t really wear it anymore. In fact I’m trying to spend a LOT less time using my phone or my Fitbit or any of my technology. More time reading, walking, drawing, and napping. Is that also a sign that I’m old? Yikes! SO! I didn’t go anywhere. Maybe later. Snicker, snicker! Or not.
Dwayne Walker, in his YouTube video entitled “Where Does Art Come From” tells us that art has the power to capture moments and while time erases and diminishes, art saves and preserves. Time tries to wash things away. We make art because it lets us time travel. Art is a portal, allowing us to speed across time, documenting our presence right here and now, for then…proving we were here. Dwayne tells us that art is how we build a bridge between every version of ourselves. He says we make art because something sacred happens when we do. We make art because our soul has to. My final note from his video is where the title of this post comes from. The world needs more memory keepers.
Those are my favorite parts of the video. Dwayne puts words to what I’ve been unable to describe for over sixty years.
My daughter and I call ourselves memory keepers. We thought we were the ones to invent the term, but not so. There are many memory keepers in the world. We are artists, writers, musicians — creatives.
So like the Spanish sword fighter, Diego Montoya, from Princess Bride said, “we must go back to the beginning”.
I’m writing about this because I’ve been feeling quite blue lately. A lot of things are weighing on my heart. To make things worse, I’ve been feeling like my ability to do art is gone. It’s as if all the years of creating art were just a dream. Yet when I think of what Diego Montoya said about going back to the beginning, I find myself thinking back to my childhood – to when I was ten and discovered the wonder of writing and art.
Here I am, seventy years old, trying to reclaim that wonder, to see if it could rekindle a fire within me and shed light on the truth that the things hurting my heart of hearts aren’t bigger or truer than the fact that I’m going to be just fine. I’m looking at the world around me like a child, seeing it as if for the very first time. It feels like I’m learning to draw all over again, because drawing starts with “seeing”. Not looking. Really seeing. I’ve taught that in classes so many times and I believed it. I must have been seeing or I wouldn’t have been able to render things correctly. Yet I was teaching about seeing with my eyes. Now I’m learning to see with my eyes AND my heart and maybe even a childlike imagination. This time I want what I draw to have heart and soul in it – to have meaning. I’m doing the work for myself this time and doing it just to enjoy the doing of it.
It started the other day when I drew the circle piece that is at the top of my previous post. I used colored pencils on watercolor paper, wanting to see what colored pencil looked like on that very textured paper. If I’d used watercolor paint, it would have had a completely different look.
A while back I drew a cube. I tucked it away for several weeks. When I came across it yesterday, I laid it out on the desk, looking at it all morning, wondering what I could do with it. Also on my desk was a rubber band wrapped around three colored pencils from the previous circle project. Hm, I thought. What could I do with them? Why worry about ruining the carefully sketched cube? Just do it. I set about filling in the cube with the two yellows and one violet. The paper was Marker paper and had a very smooth texture. I loved the way it felt, softly putting colored pencil layers on that paper. It was a new style of drawing and coloring for me.
Working on the cube transported me up and away from my worries and made me feel more like the child I was long ago. It let me exist in the moment and that moment lasted as long as I wanted.
I’ve been unsuccessful in my attempts to find a job. At first I hoped to find something where I get to sit down (after my last assignment where I stood and walked between 8,000 and 18,000 steps a day). Now I’m just hoping for a job, period. Applying for pretty much anything. I have so much experience in finance and budget, spreadsheets, databases, analysis, etc. I’ve owned my own company. I’ve been a manager, a supervisor, the boss, and also the lowest ranking. Yet I don’t have what it takes to get a real-life job. I don’t know Quickbooks or any of the new systems. I’m seventy years old, living in a place where I know only a couple of people. Family is far away. I chose this place because it’s warm in winter. I have a history of accidents, when driving on snow and ice and would be afraid to leave the house, which would be so awful.
What do I do well? Hands down, I do art. Art has given my life meaning even when there was nothing else. It has given me purpose. For the past year, I’ve lost that meaning and that purpose. I’ve made decisions that seemed absolutely right and then had horrible consequences. I’ve come to doubt myself. In everything.
It makes me so sad, this place I’ve come to be, in my life. At seventy I sure never would have believed this would be what it’s like. Of course, I’m working at accepting that and stepping away from the conversations I’ve had with myself about where I wish I were, where I was, and who I lost.
What hurts the most is that I have so much to give. So much to offer. I’m compassionate and kind. I give away smiles as often as I can, because they’re free and they make such a difference. I believe in God and am so thankful that he gave his son, such a huge sacrifice, for one such as me. Me, the mistake maker.
My life is no longer about forever homes and close family, but is about finding a way to be alone, but independent, and to let go of everything I knew. I have to forget about what was, because if I don’t it takes me down, down, down, into a pit that gets harder and harder to climb out of.
Art, something that has been with me nearly my entire life, is where I find rest and solitude. Spending time with art makes me feel like maybe God is really right here. After all, he is the great creator. He speaks “create”. When I create, it feels like I’m speaking it, too. Like God and I are sharing it. Speaking the same language.
Wow! I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. I am the same me as I’ve always been. I do have more aches and pains as time passes, but I’m essentially the same on the inside. I can see myself at seven years old sitting on a pile of gravel, my knobby knees and long skinny legs on either side of a cement block – my grinding table. With a tiny cardboard box that might have held a necklace or bracelet long ago, and a flat stone for grinding, I spent the summer turning small granular, sparkly stones into “gold dust”. I was going to grind enough little stones to fill my sandbox. I didn’t get enough dust to fill the little box, much less a sandbox. That didn’t really matter. It didn’t upset me or make me give up. It was the doing of the thing that made me feel so great. So focused. My family life was a disaster, but while I sat on that pile of stones, nothing else existed.
I turned sixty a month after my mom passed away. I was an orphan. It was something that hit me on the head. I don’t know if a realization hitting one on the head can do brain damage, but I’ve never been the same since. I’m not damaged, but most assuredly I’m different. It was as if I woke from a deep sleep. Maybe you’ve heard the expression “I’ve had a day”. For me it was “I’ve had a decade”. I saw some things I didn’t want to see and had to face some things I didn’t want to face. And here I am. Seventy.
For the past three or four years I’ve thought I couldn’t do art anymore. Not that I didn’t want to. I just felt like whatever ability I’d had was absolutely, positively gone. Wrung out of me like dish water out of a rag. Art was my purpose. Losing my ability to do art meant I’d lost my purpose. According to Victor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search For Meaning, those who have no purpose, no meaning, die. And so I was prepared to die.
But Then!
Tonight I watched a couple of videos on YouTube about not being able to paint and on not being able to finish a painting/creation. It was quite a wake-up call for me. One person spoke of the inability to paint as being part of a story – the story of your life. She called her viewers/followers to think about what the plot for their life might be. Hm. I had to think about that. In fact, I’m still thinking about it. I want to figure it out, because the fact that she described it all so very well made me want to understand and benefit from her words. She spoke of how we are the heroine and perhaps the protagonist at the same time. She talked about the parts of all stories. There must be a conflict phase. Perhaps when an artist thinks they can no longer paint it’s just the conflict part of their story. She went on to say that characters do the most growing during the conflict. I felt a spark of hope at that.
I realize that I’m mixing tenses in my story here. This tiny little bit of story. I don’t care. It’s mine to tell and I’m renting this bit of internet space to tell it. Leave a comment if it bothers you more than necessary.
Okay. I’m in the conflict phase of my life. I’ve been divorced four years and its been four years of relief, total abandon (in a good way), going into debt (not a good thing), making good decisions and bad decisions, all of which may well be necessary in the larger picture. As my very good friend, Terri, just told me, if all the recent bad stuff hadn’t happened, we never would have met. More about that later.
The second video
Talked of giving up on art/writing/etc. Many famous people gave up on projects. DaVinci, for example. Mozart. The Greats! Not all things get finished. Selling one’s work validates the creative. What, of ourselves, we put into our work is what people spend their hard earned money to purchase. That feels good. Something you say with paint or words or music and the way you say it strikes a chord with the purchaser. They’ll hang that story on their wall for a long time, hopefully. When our work doesn’t sell, it fills us with doubt. For me, it was the act of deciding to return to traveling about in a camper, wanting to live a simpler and less expensive life. There would be no room for all of my unsold, but much loved works of art and I wasn’t going to rent a storage unit and have them bake to death in there. So I unframed them all, stuffed them into a leather portfolio, and threw the frames into the dumpster. From then on, I would confine my work to small projects that could endure in a camper and probably never be seen by anyone but me.
The man in the video said the first part of our life is outward, when we’re focusing on jobs, growing our lives and having families. The second part is the inward part, when we focus on ourselves.
Reflections of Life
In the newest video in the “Reflections of Life” series, on YouTube, the man being interviewed said that when you’re alone, doing things alone, your critical voice is louder. So true! “AMEN!” I wanted to shout. In the last couple of centuries, civilization has taken upon itself, change at a ludicrous speed. We went from the pony express to mail sent by jet. Perhaps soon, it’ll be mail sent by spacecraft or teleporter. Civilization is hurtling towards a precipice with no slowing down. Maybe all that change is bad, but maybe it’s good. We won’t know until we fling ourselves over the edge.
The past three years have given me pause. Time to reflect, to be mindful of the moments instead of the days. I’ve had lots of time to do so. My life in a small camper was nothing like life in a 6,000 square foot log home. I could clean my entire dwelling in minutes. I had everything I owned with me in that little space. If I bought something new, something else had to go. No alarm clock was needed. Dinner could be eaten at any hour. My path was like the path of an ant on fine dirt. All criss-crossing and seeming destination-less. Folks came and went in my life – sometimes for a day, sometimes for a season. It was a season and a day made up of moments. Moments lived and experienced slowly and deliciously. It was like getting to eat fine French pastries for every meal.
And then the bad thing happened!
That something happened in late October 2024 and nothing has been the same since. That’s a story for another day. The only thing that matters is where I am now. I’m seventy and I’m still me, but my feet are on a path I didn’t foresee. We shall see.
When I was about ten, I was allowed to walk up to the square in our village and go to the book-mobile. I would get as many books as I could carry. They were thin, so I got quite a few. Back home (you don’t know you have too many books until you have to carry them a couple blocks) I’d spread out a blanket on the grass and lay on there with my stack of books. Not being conscious of the need to make the books last until the next library day, I’d read them all in one afternoon.
I also took time to watch the clouds. I hadn’t studied clouds in school yet. I was of a mind that the clouds were stationary and the earth turned beneath them. I would stare up at the clouds, imagining my speck of a self lying on the surface of the planet, slowly turning, and the still clouds showed how fast I was moving along beneath them.
Summer days were a fine thing. They were the days of one-piece sun suits that tied at the shoulders, of going barefoot or, at worst, wearing flip flops that hurt the space between my big toe and its neighbor for two or three days of very dirty feet at end of day, and of freshly cut grass, leaving a checkerboard look from the lawn mower wheels.
Our dog, Minnie, would be tied out on the front yard, tethered to a metal cork-screw spike that went into the earth. She would be stretched as far from the spike as she could get, making a taut line for running children to trip over. She saw it as he mission to warn off passers-by.
There were other good things about summer days, but those are for another time. Thank you for visiting with me. May these memories bring to mind some of your own.
I dreamed of becoming a great artist, but it was not to be. Yes, I am an artist and will always be, but a quiet artist who just had to make art, with all my heart.
I think God was the first artist. The first creator. He sculpted the hills and mountains, the valleys and river beds. He hung clouds, galaxies and the universe above for our delight. When I create art, I feel like I’m speaking God’s native tongue and like he’s there beside me, ready to give a high five. In fact, it’s like he’s there beside me, watching my heart be poured onto the paper or canvas and he’s smiling and saying, in his own creative way, “well done”. His smile is like a hug. Creating is a language. It’s the words between the lines. It gives us glimpses of something deep in our hearts.
When someone smiles at me, I’m like a puppy who’s tail wags so fast its like an airplane propeller, whirring into a blur. Oh, to be seen.
I’ve slowed, nearly to a stop, in my ambitions, but not in my purpose. I give away smiles.
