Big Mujer, Chico Chair

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Staying Between the Lines

I started experimenting with color this weekend. The paintbrush is a foreign instrument. I prefer pens. You can control them. They are precise.

Paintbrushes are the opposite. Flimsy and loose. You can’t stop the red from bleeding off the lips and on to the chin. Kind of like when you apply too much lipstick. It gets on your teeth, smears your upper lip. It’s a mess, but even lipstick comes in a tube and can be applied between the lines.

My relationship to painting and painting instruments is young. Like where I once was with writing and writing instruments. When I was in college my handwriting was small and compact. People I studied with commented on how tidy my class notes were, and I was popular with students who made a habit of missing class.

Now, with so many years of writing under my belt, my handwriting is big and loopy. I sometimes can’t read it myself. I still start out small but once I get going in a piece, my hand loosens up. It has to to keep up with my thoughts.

I watch my daughter when she paints. She finishes a painting in ten or fifteen minutes. She never stays between the lines. Colors bleed. Sometimes the black sky dominates. Her paintings are beautiful. She tells me, “Look, Mom,” and then she says, “I like this one.”

When I was her age I was already a perfectionist. My parents encouraged me to be a realist. The more life-like my houses–with their three-dimensional roofs–the more encouragement I received. Grade school teachers, too, handed out gold stars for stiff, upright trees and intact, smiling families standing in a row.

I picked up drawing last summer after years of hiatus. I’m still tight with my hand; hence, the doodles. Just finish the piece, I tell myself. Finish it, turn the page, do the next one.

I don’t know that I’ll ever do anything with my art but publish it on this blog. I’m not worrying about it much right now. The blog at least has me drawing again. And it’s getting me curious about the paint stuff. Color, hue, tone, and the brushes. Wow. The variety is endless.

Mostly I’m sick of not coloring outside the lines. It’s become metaphor for the way I sometimes live my life. Cautiously. I’m ready to let go.

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PRACTICE: Spring Chicks

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PRACTICE – Spring Break – 10min

Last week there were cracked pocks of ice along the trail in the park near my house. This week, no snow remains. Only dead dry crinkled brown with lime green shooting through the cracks. The ice skating pond across the street is almost dry. There are pools of water waiting to soak into permafrosted soil. I am lonely. I am lonely most days. I was writing about this in another practice this morning. I think it’s part of a contemplative life, this loneliness.

I want to go walk the labyrinth. I wonder if the snow has melted from her curves. I need to go pick up my taxes and mail them. I want to run wild. It’s not possible. I have obligations and responsibilities. Next weekend, I’m going up to Duluth with Liz. It will be thawing on the North Shore, too.

A photo of Wordraw standing near Caffe Tazza flicked across the screensaver as I was writing. I briefly glanced up and there he was on his cell phone to a friend with a newborn. I remember the lady bugs in the window of the Taos storefront. And how warm the sun was on my face. Spring comes to Taos earlier than here in the North. I wonder if it’s the way the ground freezes real hard here. And tumbles out of itself in gusty March winds.

It doesn’t feel like a typical March. Seventies yesterday. We opened the windows and a cross breeze blew through the house most of the day. I am weary. And need a break. Next weekend away will feel good to me. I am noticing that I am ready to make a life of this writing thing. Not really the way I thought it would look. I might never get to do just one thing around writing. It may always be this combination of darts in and out of the real world and the fictional one in my mind.

I was perusing creative writing blogs this morning. I saw one in Portuguese, one in Swedish. I opened them but I couldn’t read them. I simply stared at the characters on the page, hoping something would sink through to me. I am that connected to someone who speaks Portuguese or lives in Sweden. And they are that close to me. I shrink when I realize that they will probably be able to read my blog. Because English is the dominant culture language.

I’ve been reintroduced to dominant culture thinking through Riane Eisler and Jean Shinoda Bolen and Alice Walker in the last month. I listen. I read. But all I have to do is go walk the labyrinth and the barriers melt away. The Spring thaw. Because that’s what happens with archetypes. All people can relate to them. The universal language.

But I’m supposed to be writing about spring break. When I was in college, we didn’t take the kind of wild spring breaks I see on TV these days. Thank goodness for small favors, to quote my mother. We might head over to a remote beach at the ocean for a day and walk the boardwalk. Back then I owned a mint green Ford Econoline van with my lover. I worked at an Alert gas station in the summers. Or pumped gas for semi’s.

It’s hard to remember spring breaks. Everything seemed to run right into fall and winter.

Monday, March 26th, 2007

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PRACTICE: Spring Break – 10min

Funny how on this Spring Break Monday morning I want the tile floor to be warm. It’s cold, cold as tile can be on a still cool morning. If I turn on the heat, then my mid-morning the whole house will be stuffy.

Spring. A transitional season. A season of wind, sudden snowfall, 80-degree days that make you fret summer will be a scorcher. Or today. A “normal” spring day. A breeze will start up by noon. The temperature will hit 68. Clouds will gather by late afternoon. A chance for rainstorms tomorrow.

I’m making it up. We had rain all Friday night and most of Saturday. Then sun yesterday. I’d like to say spring is my favorite season. A hopeful season. Warmth after a long, cold winter. The shoots on the elm trees are so brilliant green they make your eyes hurt. Especially elms, the weed of trees. Nasty little yellow seeds that by planting time will blow across fields and roads, move like swarms close to the ground.

Spring, and if it weren’t for the ushering in of summer I could pass on it. If I lived further north spring might be a continuation of winter. Nothing to write home about.

Good news is my allergies are not spring allergies. People around here are sneezing and crying about their allergies. Radio DJs home sick on a workday morning. I wouldn’t mind staying home, not sick, though. I wouldn’t mind being a kid again, having the week off for Spring Break. Wouldn’t mind spring one bit at all.

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