So much changes, so much stays the same. I spent my summer trying to build resilience: learning to breath and coexist within overwhelming uncertainty. Yesterday, I mourned as I deferred my enrollment in an MA in Visual Arts at UTD; created three new sets of ink paintings; changed the wall color in my daughter’s room from pink to frosty blue; read outside while a storm rolled over the city.
To abide in these times is strange and slow. I feel as though I am existing at once in and out of time (I think TS Eliot said that). Doubling down on the Serenity Prayer, I’ve been burning with intention. By golly, I will work to change what things I can (I said that). My kids are in virtual school, my husband is teaching virtually and I started in-service on Thursday. The year rolls on toward its crisis.
Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time
But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time
(Bob Dylan said that)
I’ve been meaning to write for a while, but instead I’ve walked around with all these words beating behind my eyelids. Half turned phrases circulate, percolate, evaporate. They pulse through me along with all the oil paintings I should have finished this summer. “Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah.”
August is one of my favorite words. It swells pregnant and full in the mouth and the brain, anticipating change after the plodding summer months of hot, cloned days under bleached out Texas skies. The first rain in weeks. The first evening where it is 80 degrees before midnight. A break in the sameness of Dallas summer.
Yesterday evening I sat outside on a hill overlooking downtown. The heat index was 110 degrees at 6:30. The air was still and hot, but not as oppressive as I had expected. I was reading, and watching the sky. Summer thunderstorms are spectral; you might feel the building humidity, see the sky boil, watch lightning flash far away, only to be disappointed when the storm fizzles out, full of sound and fury- signifying nothing. How can the air be so wet, and not a drop of rain?
When I saw the first wispy clouds out west, I didn’t hold my breath; couldn’t have anyway- it was too darn hot. The waxing moon rose eastward over some empty office buildings and cracked out parking lots. The sun set like a ship on fire, smoky clouds billowing in the heat over downtown. Could have been a Turner painting, the light all bruised, diffused. Lightning followed. I read about some men on a hot bus ride in Basque country. I guess that August hope sprang up in my throat when I felt the wind whip up from the west. Outflow winds don’t mean much, but the clouds towered overhead. I went home and watered my poor, heat stricken geraniums as the wind began to rise. Then the rain came, like angry tears. Large, hard splatters hit the cement against their will.
In these slow, still months, it’s easier to feel the earth’s thrumming and the changing of the seasons. The contrast between the land and its creatures, and this human machine we’ve made, with its frantic arguments, frenetic energy. It’s been an existential summer. I’ve produced a lot of work, but very few finished oil paintings. August hopes hang suspended. When the storm breaks, maybe I’ll be ready to create something with purpose.
“…In the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.”
So go the days.
