"Meet Me on the Equinox"

Tantalizing golden light of false autumn (thanks, Texas!) filters through my windows. I get an itch between my shoulder blades this time of year, jealously dreaming of what I imagine real fall must feel like: misty mornings, and trees arrayed in red and gold. These are things I have never experienced. I’m working on my West Texas series, and the light pulls at my attention. I want to be outside, where the vastness and buoyant air beckon.

Meet me on the Equinox

Meet me half-way…

After a few weeks of intense art deadlines, I gave myself a bit of a break, but I’m back at it prepping for fall and winter shows. There’s just not enough time. Covid supply chain issues have made getting art supplies- particularly Venetian Plaster- difficult. I’m not sure what it’s like in other parts of the world (or even in other parts of the US), but here in Texas there’s a weird dichotomy to daily life: near pre-pandemic busy obligations, little news on Covid, groaning expectations in all realms of life; but at the same time, store shelves are bare, places are short staffed, and it’s really hard to plan anything concrete due to rolling quarantines and cancellations. It’s exhausting. We had Covid in my household at the end of August and we still haven’t caught up - and we were so lucky. I am able to do far less than I could, even this time last year, because I am so drained.

When we went camping this past summer, most of the other campers near us were either teachers or first responders. In fact, one night our camp host in New Mexico told us the entire campground was full of first responders, EMTs and teachers. We had the best conversations and the best time, sitting around the fire and talking about how grateful we were to be there. We didn’t discuss what we’d been through the past year- nobody did!- it seemed we had shared experiences, and also a shared need of renewal, fellowship, and spiritual rest. We thanked all the first responders we met, and were surprised and humbled when they thanked us for our service. The most any of us said about the past year was “It’s been really hard. We are so happy to be here, now.” We had no cell service, no access to social media or news.

It was so nice.

I am longing for campfires, stars, and reading at night by lantern-light.

Here’s to making it through this latest gauntlet. I’m going to celebrate with my first solo show! Milagros: Visions of the Desert opens at the Susan L Sistrunk Fine Art Gallery in Waco on Saturday, November 27 with a reception 5-8 pm. I’ll be there and I will give a brief artist talk about my inspiration and my process. I can’t wait to share what I’ve been working on over the past few months. Check out the event page here!

Surrounded By Stars

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.

Erosion

Uncertain times. I’ve begun working in a new medium (alcohol ink). The inks dry quickly and are difficult to control: artistic vision has to be comfortable coexisting with a certain amount of chaos to work with this stuff. Over time, and with practice, the chaos becomes… predictable. I can impart a measure of control because I know, generally, how the materials want to behave. I wonder if I gravitate towards this style because I am caught in such turbulent times. It is impossible to plan anything more than a couple of weeks out right now. Desire hangs suspended.

I’m reading On the Road. I am stuck at home.

My family and I escaped Dallas briefly to visit dear friends in Northern Colorado. What a balm to the spirit is fellowship and time spent with friends! And the mountains always soften the tension of concrete that builds behind my eyes when I’m stuck in the city. I live with longing for vast, un-peopled spaces. My daughter started reading My Side of the Mountain (one of my favorite books when I was a little younger than she is now), and it has been fun to listen to her questions and hear how she relates to the merits of habitable trees.

Slowly now the evening changes his garments

held for him by a rim of ancient trees;

you gaze: and the landscape divides and leaves you,

one sinking and one rising toward the sky.

And you are left, to none belonging wholly,

not so dark as a silent house, nor quite

so surely pledged unto eternity

as that which grows to star and climbs the night.

To you is left (unspeakably confused)

your life, gigantic, ripening, full of fears,

so that it, now hemmed in, now grasping all,

is changed in you by turns to stone and stars.

-Rilke, translated by FC MacIntyre

August approaches. With it, questions I’ve put on hold since March. What was February, some unreal dream? Where was I? Who was I, several months ago?

In February, I received my acceptance into a Masters of Visual Arts program at the University of Texas at Dallas. I had completed by application for Distinguished Teacher at my district, and was praying that the merit salary I hoped to earn this fall would offset the cost of tuition so that I could finally finally go back to school. I’ve learned so much since I scraped my way through graduation in 2007. I really, desperately, want to go back to school.

I’ve learned that education is still mainly for the wealthy. Most graduate programs in the arts require a full time commitment and preclude having a job. This institutional mindset infuriates me: working students shouldn’t be barred from higher learning simply because they have to balance work and school; likewise, the mindset of a working student brings a pragmatism, and an ethos of hard work and dedication, to a graduate program. With the insane cost of higher ed, the mind reels at how one could even afford to take time off to just… have the luxury of being a student.

I had, I thought, found a way to maintain employment in a job I love (and have worked so very hard to attain), and work towards my masters. My seniors and I had bonded over the application process and shared joy at our acceptances, trepidation at the work that awaited us in the fall.

Enter Covid.

August approaches. I need to make some decisions that I’ve put off due to uncertainty, yet things are even less certain now than they were in March. I am a teacher. Will I be returning to the classroom? I’ve been advised to update my will and carry disability this year. Teaching is already an emotionally rewarding/draining profession that requires so much investment. I am trying to be realistic about what the upcoming semester will mean for my mental health. Should I pay $3500/class to start a graduate degree when I have these new stressors? Can I justify the expense?

This public health crisis underscores the fragility of our social contracts. That’s a big, broad, general statement, but it bears mentioning because, if August approaches… so does November. There’s little consensus about anything in our country. What truths do we hold to be self evident, exactly? Do we hold to Truth at all?

I am a teacher. I have seen my countrymen disparage my profession for years. Now I am seeing my neighbors demand their tax dollars back. I watch as politicians devalue the lives of the kids I teach. I witness my own health and livelihood politicized.

Ironically, many of the problems we face today are the consequences of our cultural attitude towards education. We’ve earned this mess.

. . .

Stone, and stars share common elements. Perhaps the theme of this disjointed rambling is: that which may seem incongruous, opposed, unlikely- is not altogether separate at all. Living with flux is learning to breath on the precipice, and finding there a moment of balance. And if we are to salvage ourselves, we must learn to value one another. We must understand that the success of our nation depends upon our collective attitude towards these inalienable rights: that my neighbor’s rights and my own are equally valid, full stop. Polarization leads to radicalization, and that slope is steep and slippery.

Season's Meanderings

Do you feel a sense of kinship with a particular season? Is it easier to abide in Autumn, with its falling leaves and crisp air and pumpkin spice promises? Or spring, when the fresh earth smell makes all things new? I am trying to learn to love January, though this dark time of the year is often cloudy and characterized by a cold that isn’t really cold (in Dallas), just damp, cloudy, and slow… like a dripping faucet. Wouldn’t it be nice to find peace and belonging in all seasons? I confess, I miss December’s cheerful Christmas lights that hold the winter’s dark at bay. I wish we could keep them up a little while longer, until the seasonal darkness lifts and the trees begin to bud. I’m already examining the bare branches for the first signs of new life. Yes, I know it is far too early yet.

This time of year, I gravitate to bold colors in my work. Cobalt and rubine and vermillion ease my mind when all the world is grey. I have taken a break after a busy 2019, and I am ready to roll up my sleeves and see what new sorts of messes I can make. Desert colors dance behind my eyelids. I’d love to experience all the seasons in West Texas, in Northern New Mexico. The quality of the light changes, and that, of course, changes everything.

For me, as I plot my yearly travels for painting references, the question is not only where, but when. Where and when would you travel, if you had the opportunity?

Abiquiu, New Mexico before a summer monsoon. June, 2019.

Tales from the Desert

After traveling through the depressing landscape of oil fields, tumble weeds and tumbling trash piles blown about by the unrelenting wind on the Texas plains, the Davis Mountains rise up almost shockingly- the land changes so quickly near Pecos, Texas.

These Texas Mountains keep their secrets. From afar, they appear rosy and mostly barren- but plant life and wildlife abound when you are in the high passes and the valleys. And spring, spring, glorious spring, brings out beautiful colors in the desert. Ocatillo blossoms are coral red and improbably tall. Prickly pears stud the in-between-spaces with purple, green, and warm yellow flowers. The desert has so many faces, so many colors. Fragrant, four foot tall bluebonnets run rampant, if you know where to look for them.

We spent about a week in West Texas, primarily in Big Bend, Terlingua and Boquillas. It was not nearly enough time. We met hospitable people in various towns, enjoyed a meal in Mexico after crossing the Rio Grande on a rowboat, and hiked the Chisos and Davis Mountains.

Apart from the natural beauty of the land, I so enjoyed the time I spent with the people I met along the border. A series is taking shape in my mind (and on my easel), juxtaposing the arresting landscape, the kindness we encountered, and the views of people at the border, with the political rhetoric we are fed through the news and social media.

“The Wall” is an inescapable spectre. It is part of our national zeitgeist, and its implications become more tangible the closer you get to the border. Locals share their views in road signs and embroidered trinkets, while those far away spin away at their fear-fueled agenda. The backdrop to all this is the land herself. Eternal, sharp edged, and oblivious to these man-made cares. The land, and the creatures abiding there, and the cross-border dialogue of the locals tell a much different story than the myths we read online.

What is a chimera? It is a fearsome beast; but it is also an illusion. So much of what we read is built on carefully crafted propaganda: intended to elicit an emotional response. And then, there is the concrete: Earth, and animals, and people who cultivate their lives on this land.

Ocatillos, oil and mixed media, 2019

A “forest” of whimsical ocatillos blooms on the border between Texas and Mexico. These improbable plants grow to be more than twelve feet tall.