small miracles

this evening we got a call from toni-ann.  Theres a baby duck! it was in my house and now it might be under the deck, do you want to come rescue a baby duck?  yes, of course.  another recruit.  me and james hop right to it.  i guess we're the go-to people in edison for all your animal rescue needs.  

we go running down the street,  across town, around the flutter inn and along the slough we walk with a salmon net in hand, trying to track the little bugger down.  more elusive than you think, that baby duck is; we can't seem to find it under any porch or bush.  every cat seems suspect, i eye them suspiciously.  every dark corner is a hiding spot, a possibility.  we ask john and mike, have you seen the baby duckling?  they point.  there it is, james says, and i see it: the tiniest of things,  brown like the mud, tearing ass down the middle of the slough.  we follow it closely with our eyes, but soon lose track of it under a dock.

 after waiting a few minutes for it to reappear, we give up, decide to go home, to let nature take its course.  will the baby duck die without our intervention?  maybe.  we'll never know.  sometimes it's hard to make that call, but really, nature does what she wants around here where she's left to be herself.  yes, she'll do what she wants, with that duckling and with us too.  sometimes it's the miracle of life she gives us, and sometimes its the hard lesson of death.  one thing i've learned is that i have very little control.  and it's all a miracle, every bit of it.  it's all beautiful, really, it's just a matter of how you look at it. 

more important things

i haven't felt much like writing lately.  or painting.   i've been waiting until the last minute to do it.  and then just slogging my way through it.  that's just the way it is sometimes, and sometimes you can't fight it.  call it procrastination, call it avoidance, call it adrenal exhaustion....call it what you will.  a few weeks back into this one-a-day thing, now i remember why i was so excited to be done with it, once and for all.  

i started a cleanse last weekend, thinking of all the things that needed spring cleaning, little ol' me might need it the very most. no sugar, no wheat, no dairy, no meat....no booze. that's an awful lot of no's.  i thought that maybe it would up my motivation and energy, but so far i feel like it's only kicked up a bunch of dust and made me miss all of my favorite vices.  they were, after all, something i looked forward to.  every day.

there are plenty of things i do feel like doing, things that i am excited about...like spacing out, weeding the garden, picking the twining morning glory off of branches.    i like to walk in the school field, watching the pups run, holding james hand and watching the clouds play on the hills in the distance.  

and i always have time and energy to  fill the bird feeders.  i could sit and watch them birdies eat forever.  yes, i love it so much it even distracts me, like a buzzing cell phone, distracts me from almost every other thing i'm doing. 

and lately, i anxiously await the birth of baby birds around the premises as their mamas sit long and hard on those eggs.  i love to listen to the new baby robins, two of them, gently testing out their voices, squawking above my bedroom door in the morning. 

i love to watch the flowers bloom around me.  i stare at the colors long and hard, trying to burn those blossoms into my retinas for when i want to paint a picture full of life, long after the flowers have all fallen.  spring has hit the valley fast and hard this year, like a freight train, and i'm standing at the edge of the track marveling at it's force and velocity.

needless to say, i get distracted from my work.  but all of these other things take precedence sometimes.  sometimes, work must wait. for more important things.

playing catch-up

 

(as a pair)

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it's not that i haven't been working...i have.  but i just can't seem to get myself to sit in front of the computer when it's sunny.  so here are the last five days worth of one-a-days.  now that it's raining, that rug in the backyard grass and the vulnerable little seedlings won't need me as much, and maybe one of these days, i can spit out some wisdom.  until then, i'll be trying desperately to squeeze everything  i can in to one short day.

lightness

 today, when we went to the river dike to walk the dogs, the grass was all mowed down.  i took it as a good sign, being that it was haircut day and all, looking for signs everywhere to help me muster up the courage to cut my hair in the first place.  it is, after all, a part of me, that hair is a timeline of my life.  but it's spring, and somehow, the new growth around me encourages me to shed the past.  the dogs reveled in the short grass path, the ability to see, how cutting the tangled tall grass makes space, makes way for new growth.  they ran joyfully hard and fast, two dogs full steam ahead, stopping every now and again to sniff the mounds of dry grass along the edges, hunting like coyotes for casualties of the mower blade, a mouse or vole carcass to swallow whole.  they are smart like that, instinctual, and we let them be wild on these walks.  for us, it's an exercise in trust.  because nature usually takes care of us, if we allow it the space to do so.  and we don't want to raise little obedient robots, after all. 

around one bend and then another we walked, until ahead, i spotted a coyote, hunting those same grass mounds as my pups.  colored grey as a sandy beach, all feral rough and fluffy, he didn't see us coming.  a rare sighting.  i froze, and then turned to make sure my boys were close.  coyotes are everywhere here, but they are elusive.  the wind must have been blowing in just the right direction, hiding our scent, so we were closer than i've ever been.  i took it as a good sign, and couldn't get the picture of that coyote out of my head as i drove up to town to get my long locks lopped.  

driving home with two cut braids in my bag, i felt lighter than i have in a while.

because

maybe you've noticed that the last few paintings haven't been for sale.  that's because i'm working on a series of illustrations for bellingham's subdued stringband jamboree.  who knows: these drawings might be on a poster, or maybe a ticket, a coaster, or maybe even a t-shirt.  but mostly, they're just a gift, a thank you, inspired by the enormously talented and supportive music community of this region, a community of players and listeners and venues that work really hard and give it everything they've got, for nothing more than the love of music and the joy it spreads.  there are few causes more worthy.

channeling

lately, my work has really started to remind me of my mom's.  i'm drawing animals in people costumes doing things that people do, if we were smarter we'd act more like animals and less like people, i think to myself.  i'm drawing while i'm sitting in the sunny backyard, surrounded by mourning doves, finches and hummingbirds, ducks, dogs and cats, all of my "friends" that i've somehow lured here to live here, with food water shelter and a soft voice only for them.  it's only natural that these creatures would make their way into my artwork.

 nowadays, there's a certain way that my hand wiggles to make the mouse's or bear's hair, or how i leave the highlights in the eye as two tiny dots of white, there's a finesse with the line, these certain things, that remind me of mom's illustrations.  i look at these pictures i've painted when they're done, and it feels like she drew them.  and sometimes, it feels strangely like i'm not even behind the wheel, like she's doing all the driving here.  it's a trance-like state, a deliberate intention with the work that i've never had before.  

all my life i searched for it, something to call my own, some purpose behind my pen....call it experience, call it a signature style, call it a good teacher's influence or just call it an idea that springs up amidst artists block....sometimes, it's hard to know what you want out of a piece of art that you're about to make.  sometimes, the pressure is frightening.  and sometimes, when you don't know any better, you think too long and too hard about it, and it comes out all wrong.  

nowadays, i've learned to just let the drawings draw themselves.

duality

max the cat's blindness is getting worse.  he started bumping into things today, going into the wrong corners, looking blankly into the sky.  it may be the fault of his kidneys, or it may be diabetes.  it may be high blood pressure.  or, it just may be old man blindness.   it's hard to know.  with a cat of sixteen going on twenty, sometimes its just so hard to know....what to do, or when to jump...when to go to the vet, when to spend another thousand dollars we don't have, on antibiotics and tooth extractions, on x-rays and blood tests....it's hard to know when to turn the lights off,  or when to do nothing and let nature take its course.  as with everything in life, sometimes you have to make the hard choices, and sometimes you just sit on your hands and wait for those choices to make themselves.  which is worse?  i don't really know.

yes, animal ownership is a challenge. it tests my patience, my courage, and my intuition, daily.  sometimes it takes everything out of me.  and sometimes it fills me up.  it's unpredictable, hard to know what card you're going to draw on any given day.  for instance, yesterday, i drew the JOKER.   

yesterday, just like every other day, i took the dogs for their evening run, this time by myself.  to the wide open field at the elementary school filled with glowing dandelions wishes we walked.  i let them off leash, and instantly, sunny bolted.  this doesn't usually happen.  usually, my dogs are good boys.  feeling helpless, i run off to find him, yelling sunny, get back here. COME HERE!!  I feel like an idiot.  soon he comes a'runnin, looking like mischief.  no sooner do i turn around to find samish chowing down on something by the tennis court.  i run over to try and stop him but sunny beats me to it.  they have a royal buffet until i huff and puff over there to find them feasting on a pile of smelly barf, hidden under grass.  ugh.  i leash them up, exasperated, and cry a little, feeling beaten at the game. i guess that's parenting for you:  every mistake is a lesson learned.

tomorrow's a new day, i tell myself, try to reassure myself.  and of course, it always is.  because today, those pups were perfect little angels, sleeping all day in the warm sun of the backyard while i worked.