Janet Geib Pretti, Sculptor

The Leaning Curve of Gratitude, Mary Chapin Carpenter

Sunday morning I woke to the sound of Mary Chapin Carpenter reading her NPR This I Believe essay titled The Learning Curve of Gratitude.

The day before a friend had sung her favorite Chapin Carpenter song in a clear but breathless voice ravaged by asthma and chronic pulmonary disease. My friend struggles with a host of chronic illnesses and in recent months caring for her husband post cardiac surgery. She is tired of being ill. Her children have grown weary of her always being ill and are serving up indifference, guilt, and conditions for their love. She is between a rock and a hard place and sees no glimmer of change in the foreseeable future. A granddaughter stopped by to confront her about the growing rift in the family, wanting to know what she was doing about it, and she replied "I pray". She tried to answer her granddaughter's next question, "So what does that do?" as honestly and sincerely as possible, but moved on to another topic when the granddaughter scoffed "well you can get that from yoga". I smiled at the image of my very Catholic, frail friend bowed by the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis, twisted into a yoga pretzel pose.

After her granddaughter left, we sat in her garden and she talked of her determination to live each day with grace and gratitude. Mary Chapin Carpenter summed up what that means quite well in her essay when she wrote:

"What I want more than ever is to appreciate that I have this day, and tomorrow and hopefully days beyond that. I am experiencing the learning curve of gratitude.

I don't want to say "have a nice day" like a robot. I don't want to get mad at the elderly driver in front of me. I don't want to go crazy when my Internet access is messed up. I don't want to be jealous of someone else's success. You could say that this litany of sins indicates that I don't want to be human. The learning curve of gratitude, however, is showing me exactly how human I am."

Chapin Carpenter's complete essay can be found at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11182405.  Striving to be content to live simply with gratitude is not an easy thing, especially now when we are trained from birth to want more and more and more, to expect to always "have it our way", and to feel cheated or defeated when life doesn't turn out as we planned.  Eventually most of us will have to struggle with the learning curve of gratitude.

I look forward Mary Chapin Carpenter's next album.  Her songs have always been rooted in life.  The songs she writes now will be born from her struggle to reach a state of gratitude and they will resonate with those of us who also search for peace and gratitude along roads we never dreamed life would take us.

"The Sell"

This week our community had an opportunity to meet four finalists for the college dean overseeing programs in our county. Each applicant was allotted precisely three minutes for his/her vision, followed by a question and answer period. The first question to the first applicant started with "I feel I just heard the Fuller Brush man". We all inhaled sharply and the candidate graciously responded. But the questioner had a point, all four candidates had three minutes to sell themselves and they had to make the most of it. I would like to think it is just Americans who seem to turn everything into selling a product or an idea or a person. It seems to be our number one competitive sport.

I am an alumnus of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at the University of Oregon, though in my day my fellow grad students liked to call it the School of Arts and Allied Architecture. As a result I receive their quarterly newsletter. The recent newsletter featured an interdisciplinary initiative exporing how architecture and museums convey the memory of war and if it was possible to do that in a way that might prevent future conflict.  I was reminded of the funereal architecture class that Maya Lin talked about in her book Boundaries which started her inquiry into memorials and eventually led to her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The U of O initiative also concluded with a competition and the winning entries were included in the newsletter. The thumbnail photos were too small to read or understand the proposals, but big enough to show the quality of presentation needed to be competitive today. I found myself pulling out Maya Lin’s book to revisit her original proposal - simple drawings, simple statement. We live in a technological world where desktop publishing is readily accessible, over-the-top presentations are expected, and flash is often used to sell otherwise average or even mediocre products. I wonder if we would even be capable of recognizing the exquisite simplicity of Maya Lin’s vision in the midst of today’s slick hype.

Even I can turn into a used car salesman to prod a student to take the leap to get the education to make their dreams a reality. But I struggle when it is personal, when it is art. It is such a delicate balance. I am easily wooed by hype if I don’t remind myself to look deeper and I often fail to make "the sale" because if feels awkward if not sleazy. Yet in the end we all buy and sell something.

And then there is a matter of how much is enough. In the same newsletter was an article about a design duo that limit their architecture practice to four projects a year so they have time for other art projects. How do we not get caught up in the competition of "the sell", so that we still are centered, capable of being content with less rather than more, with genuine rather than hype?