Promise

Someone else’s pain has no place here, in the space where my breath catches. Most people’s pain doesn’t make it that far—I’m good at leaving it with its owner.

Yours, though.

Each time I see it, I draw that frozen knot into me for the smallest moment, even knowing there’s nothing I can do for it. I hold it close, hoping one heartbeat, the warmth of one indrawn breath might melt it.

But it’s full enough in here already, I know that, and there’s no room. I let it go on the out breath.

Still, if you’ll let me, I’ll touch it softly each time it comes up, in the only way a friend can: I’ll place my hand quietly on your heart and witness from the outside. I won’t expect to be the one to transform anything. I’ll sit with you for as long as it takes, listening patiently for the sharp cracks and gentle dripping of the thaw.

Morning

Some days are bad, and some nights. And then you stretch, reach out a little. And someone precious to you reaches back, offers you a hug--long distance, impossible. And though you'd like the real hug, just the offer, so genuine, is enough to move you along for now. You dissolve a little, melting the fear. You sleep.

And in the morning, there's quiet on that long distance line. But the quiet isn't silence. It's just the quiet of two friends, lying in the grass together, holding hands maybe. Long distance, impossible. And yet, still somehow, together, staring up through leaves moving gently in a breeze, faces dappled by sunlight.

Puzzle Pieces

The best pieces are the ones you don’t expect. Pieces lost, maybe, in the spirit world before birth, or saved by the gods as surprise gifts, meant to be found bit by bit as you go along your way. Maybe you only see them when you’ve grown enough to do so, when you can see how well they fit you.

But you still love the other pieces, they still evoke tenderness and longing in you. They gave you shape, after all, when all you had of “something more” was faith that it must exist.

This is about beauty, and completion (maybe), and feeling whole.

This is about landscape. Maybe:

The scent of eucalyptus and coastal sage, and the way the fog blows in from the ocean to cloak the hills; the way the wind shapes the Monterey cypresses like a giant bonsai master.

But you still love the lushness of the other pieces, the way a mountain is automatically something covered with trees, the way rain drips off branches on old city streets. The way you smell rain coming.

But the pieces are all yours; it’s not about choosing.

Maybe it’s about being brave enough to change the shape of things, when it means losing an already beautiful contour.

And maybe there’s nothing outside of the puzzle—no loss, none of the completion you imagined, nothing other than loving the pieces you love and constantly being brave enough to shift them around. The picture was so pretty, but everything breaks or changes. The moment you think you can see just how it’s supposed to look, another of your pieces turns up, and your landscape rotates with the earth on its axis, and you’re dazzled all over again.

Voices

The self portrait class. Will I ever post about anything else? Are you bored yet? Well, I'm not, and this here's my blog! (Well, and Lis's blog too, of course...Lis, are you bored yet?)

I'm kind of joking. But kind of obsessed! These classes are just pushing my thinking buttons so hard. And that's nice. I like a well-engaged thinking button.

ANYWAY. The work for this week (and for life as an artist, no?) is to start thinking about our visual voices. Visual voice. It turns out, I have one. What I can see so far is that, in part, it has kind of a dreamy, Romantic, nature vibe to it. Which, when I think about my jewelry designs, doesn't seem that odd. (It also has a goofy vibe, which also is not surprising.)

One of my classmates is a novelist, and she and I started a casual sort of exchange about how/whether our visual voices line up with our writing voices. I think my voices line up pretty directly in some ways, and inspired by Johanna's self portraits, which often incorporate words, I decided to play with a photo I would have written off, except that it made a perfect backdrop for a prose poem (or lyrical fragment, as I generally prefer to call them) I wrote a while back. I had several people in mind when I wrote this, but mostly, it was for my dad. And now I realize it makes a pretty good note to self as well.

I don't love the technical execution of this photo/writing conglomeration. It still feels more conglomeratory than composed, but partly that's because editing photos on Picnik has some technical limitations (possibly operator-generated technical limitations, but still). Also, I do not love that this experiment resulted in line breaks--there was no getting around it, so I just tried to break the lines in ways that suggest they were not meant to be poetically chosen line breaks. The original piece is very much a block of text, and I much prefer that. Oh well. The goal here wasn't finalized, perfect art, anyway, but rather exploration and discovery. (If you can't read the words, you can click on the photo to enlarge it.)