Dizzying tumult of summer, bleached-white sunny afternoon windows and simmering city pavement. I clawed past the finish line in late June, and once summer finally arrived, it swept me up- caught me in a rough net of all the neglected life stuff from the past 18 months. I honestly can’t even remember how it felt that first week at the end of June… I was already running out of time.
It’s weird to revisit this post now, from within the context of another pandemic school year. I began writing it at the end of July. Cases hadn’t reached their frenzied pitch yet, and I was not yet back in the classroom full time.
I had begun writing… about hope. And a breath of air. And stars. All those gleaming points of light that seem so impossibly miraculous. How camping in New Mexico felt like coming home to myself, to a much more firm and clear reality, when I could see the stars above my head at night. Now it is August and what an August it has been; I am cherishing the memory of those stars and reassuring myself that the knowledge of those stars is more important and sacred when I cannot see them. They persist. So must I.
***
I had been painting again. I moved out of my classroom at my old school, into my new room at my new school, and reorganized my studio space. Finished some commissioned work, started on other commissioned work. With the living-trauma of the last year firmly behind me, I finally found the heart space I needed to invest myself in painting again.
I am jealous of my time to the point of neuroticism- and frankly, I could not give my time to my work, when my time was needed at home. Time passes faster, in a scary way, when I’m painting. Whole afternoons or evenings, I look up and the light has changed outside the studio windows. I was gone -elsewhere- for hours, and I grieve because I did not feel the time as it passed. Time, irretrievable. As Eliot said,
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.”
So I painted during that short breath between the Covid deep-dive that is pandemic teaching and parenting in Texas. I painted while I could afford to lose myself in time. New works for Kettle Art, a painting for auction at the State Fair of Texas, and a series for my solo show in November in Waco.
Perhaps this was the sweetest summer, home and on the road with my children, giving thanks through my whole spirit for a change in circumstance, for making it through, for God’s grace in all things in all ways, always. Sweeter, because it was shorter; sweeter, because nothing was guaranteed; sweeter, in oil paint messes and sleep and morning couch snuggles with tussled, summer-smelling hair.
In July, my family drove nine hours to Cimarron Canyon in New Mexico. We arrived after nightfall and set up camp by lantern light. After we tucked our kids into bed in the tent, my husband and I turned off the lanterns and shared a beer beneath a sky full of stars. No campfire, our huddled forms perched atop a picnic table. The limitless, inky mountains, vague washes of shadow color. Entire universes could hide in their arms. Stars like jewels, scattered generously over our heads.
“And you, you took me in
You loved me then,
You never wasted time.”
The mind reels, looking up in a quiet campground, seeing what is there always, finally un-obscured by city lights. Heady sensation, climbing to 8000 feet in a day, driving from 100 degree humidity and landing after sunset, across the border of the Sangre de Cristos, where all the stars are visible and the sound of the water and the smell of pine and wind and wildness contains the whole world.
For me, it was an appreciated reminder that we are all connected. We are all small. We can rejoice in our smallness; our temporal lives -no matter how significant we feel our lives are- pass quickly, but we are held together in a common embrace by a benevolence of earth and sky.
Maybe it would be easier to be better, if we could always see the stars.
