Laying down my pencil in disgust, I was jolted with the realization that I hadn’t spoken more than the few words needed to buy groceries or greet a neighbor in weeks. My husband was fishing in Alaska. Our cat had died months earlier, but I refused the offer of a neighbor’s kitten out of fear of one day having to grieve its loss.
For years I wondered what was wrong with me. I sifted through my memories for ones to explain the sudden and complete fear that would grip me, unannounced, uninvited. I never was prepared for those moments when my body, my words were hijacked, for my embarrassment, my anger that I had no control, no say in when or what words were allowed to come out of my mouth. After our move to the coast away from friends and the routines of work, it was easy to slip into the life of a recluse. I loved the dramas and rhythms of small town life, but I watched from the sidelines. Within the safety of my fenced off world, my body was rarely triggered to betray me and I was lulled into contentment.
But staring at my stale, lifeless drawing, I suddenly realized that freedom from fear has a price. My life and my art had shriveled within the confines of my self-imposed isolation.
It would be decades before I pieced together the whys of my fear. But the next morning, I crossed the street and welcomed my neighbor’s cat - Stanley into my life, into my heart.
Child of Promise
"No child can escape his community . . . the life of the community flows about him foul or pure, he swims in it, goes to sleep in it and wakes to the new day to find it still about him. He belongs to it: it nourishes him, starves him or poisons him, it gives him the substance of his life." - Joseph K. Hart
Resiliency is the ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune or change, to bounce back in the face of adversity, to see beyond today’s pain to a better tomorrow. I was fortunate to hear Mervlyn Kitashima speak on resiliency. In 2003, she was named National Mother of the year. Mervlyn was born on the island of Kauai in 1955, one of 687 babies tracked from in utero through their early 30's for a comprehensive longitudinal study on resiliency. The study identified factors that put children at risk, but more importantly it discovered resiliency traits and skills that could be fostered to buffer them from the adversity permeating their lives.
Growing up, Mervlyn did not know of the study. She lived one day at a time, trying to survive, trying to thrive. She was a child at risk, or as she prefers - a child of promise. When asked how she overcame the odds, she says she knew how to work. She had a grandmother who loved her, to whom she could run across the cane fields and feel safe for a time. She had a sense of purpose, a belief that life could be better and she was given challenges and opportunities by people with high expectations who considered her worthy, full of promise.
Resiliency is built one smile of encouragement, one safe haven, one skill mastered, one dream at a time. On an airplane we are instructed to put on our own oxygen mask first. In life we must first nurture resiliency in ourselves, then we must nurture it in others.
Anniversary
A thirtieth anniversary seemed as far and improbable as walking on the moon. But days accumulated into years, we matured, memories piled up and problems that need solving continued to crop up. We built a partnership. We became each other’s ballast.
At 68, Elizabeth Layton took a contour drawing class that inspired her to draw prolifically for the last 14 years of her life. Layton laid bare her fears and fantasies with colored, wavering lines in frank and unflattering self portraits. Her husband Glenn appeared in many of the drawings, bemused and bewildered. When I first saw her work in the late 80's, I was fascinated by her image and story. Now it is the portrayals of Glenn and their life together that brings a knowing smile to my face. Layton wrote in the caption for Husband on Scales, "Glenn is game to pose for me however I need. He may balk at first, ‘I can’t stand it. You want me to be a bunny rabbit? NO bunny rabbit.’ But he always comes through".
Lonnie does not pose. He has always been interested and supportive, and over the years less threatened by the all consuming thinking, experiments, revisions, and starting over that begets each piece. He is more confident that I will make it back from these forays. He might say, "You want to pull those wires through that oxygen tubing? No way!" Three tries later, we devise a plan, and he always comes through.
Baggage
There will always be differences over what is right and wrong, what is mine, yours and/or ours, freedom versus rules, change versus keeping things the same. Sometimes we work through the thorniest of disagreements, hurt feelings and anger. Other times everyone is instantly angry, rigid and unyielding.
Anger simmers within all of us. For some it is proudly worn like a second skin, an impervious shield keeping the world at bay. For others, anger is a permission slip to shun and exclude, to sort the world neatly into black and white, good and bad, us and them. I stuff my anger deep inside. It stays hidden, buried under all the petty slights and meanness of daily life until the weight of one more rude or sarcastic comment causes all the hurts to combust in a brilliant flash of cleansing anger.
I thought communication was the key to resolving conflict. Now I believe it is a matter of how we manage our personal baggage - our biases and beliefs, the unhealed wounds of our past, stress, our battered egos, our anger style. If we are lucky, everyone can check their baggage at the door to conflict. But when the first person retreats to the familiar comfort of old baggage, others are tempted to reach for theirs. Anger’s adrenalin overtakes reason and the dysfunction, pettiness, and failures of the past recycle into the present. We hunker down with our baggage, lobbing negativity into the discussion. We thwart any chance of lasting compromise with stubborn resistance or acts of sabotage.
Reflection
After our youngest son left for college, I brought my sculptures home from galleries and out of storage. I was filling a void. I was preparing to "art" again. I needed to remember where I had been and where I was headed before setting art aside to sculpt boys and communities.
I always knew sculpture is my thinking place. I saw individual pieces as snapshots of isolated moments, or sometimes as bookends to a continuum of a thought. Yet in the stillness of the mornings, my eyes tracing their contours as I drank coffee, I began to realize that together the sculptures told a story, my story, our story.
I scoured my workroom for the words scribbled on scratch paper that accumulate when I sculpt. I reread my graduate thesis. I sifted through slides for a record of the false starts and forgotten versions. Finally, I began to put the words and the pictures together. I rearranged them. I wrote more words, finding words for long-avoided pieces, uncovering words from which pieces had yet to grow.
Slowly words stitched the images together. As the gaps and loose ends became glaringly apparent, I knew where to begin. Unfinished pieces were resolved, new pieces evolved, and the parables of my life coalesced into sculpture and words.
