Day 8. There you Always are

“Sometimes I Need Only to Stand Wherever I am to be Blessed” 8 in diamater, oil on canvas

Yesterday, after posting my painting with the great blue heron, I went for a run. I haven’t been running much lately–  the December marathon felt like a triple exclamation point and now I hardly know how to start the next sentence. But I went, and about halfway in, a great blue heron flew above and over me and then disappeared into the vast distance.

If you followed my 31 in 31 last year, you know that the great blue heron, particularly one flying above me on a run, was a big theme. And if you didn’t, you’re now all caught up. 

There you are, Love, I thought in reference to my day 7 painting. There you always are. 

When I look at today’s painting, I hear a line from Mary Oliver’s Poem “It was Early” which I’ve included below.

 

It was Early

By Mary Oliver

It was early, which has always been my hour to begin looking at the world

and of course, even in the darkness, to begin listening into it,

especially under the pines where the owl lives and sometimes calls out

as I walk by, as he did on this morning. So many gifts!

What do they mean?  In the marshes where the pink light was just arriving

the mink with his bristle tail was stalking the soft-eared mice,

and in the pines the cones were heavy, each one ordained to open.

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.

Little mink, let me watch you.

Little mice, run and run.

Dear pine cone, let me hold you as you open.

 

 

** I’m doing something a little different this year. I’ll post each painting at (or close to) 10 am each day this month and they will be available for purchase on my site. However, the pieces will not be shipped out or available for pick up until February 26, after the run of the gallery show.

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Day 3. Ease.

 

“You Have My Full Attention” 4×4, oil on canvas

“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed”

– Mary Oliver

 

A while back, before it finally and suddenly turned winter(ish) cold, I was leaving my house to go for a walk and stopped a few yards from my driveway to watch a very large bee who was going about her business in the weed-flowers that had grown thick, tall and lush in the ditch where we often lose soccer balls that have to be oh so carefully retrieved without falling in. 

Ever since I started reading Mary Oliver, I see things like bees as a call to prayer and prayer as the art of paying deep and loving attention.

So I did what I knew she would have me do, and I lingered and watched with my full attention. The bee, so often mischaracterized as “busy,” was diving its entire body into the heart of a bloom. There was no hesitation, no embarrassment, just a full-bodied response to its purpose, and, perhaps, its delight. 

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions anymore, but I did think of a word I want to guide me in 2024. 

Ease

The opposite of hustle and hurry. A deep and long and attention-filled breath. And while the bee may have long been a mascot for hurry, what I saw in the weeds was something different– an ease and whole-heartedness I’m using as my New Year’s aspiration. 

What word speaks to you this new year? 

** I’m doing something a little different this year. I’ll post each painting at (or close to) 10 am each day this month and they will be available for purchase on my site. However, the pieces will not be shipped out or available for pick up until February 26, after the run of the gallery show. 

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Day 22. You do not have to be good.


“Family of Things” 6×6, oil on canvas

Every time I do a 31 in 31 there comes a point where I hit a wall. I question work I once adored. I worry that, contrary to the stacks of paintings that have already collected and which stand firmly in evidence of my ability to create, that I will not be able to finish the 31 days. 

Yesterday was my wall. Brick, not too tall, just tall enough that scaling it would require some help. A rope maybe. Some sticky shoes like a cartoon where the character walks up the wall parallel to the ground.

And then that wall whispered to me, as it often does, the words from a Mary Oliver poem. “You don’t have to be good,” it said. “You don’t have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting…the world offers itself to your imagination.”

And I saw a photograph of geese saved in one of my pinterest folders, and even though the painting didn’t seem like it would turn out, I did it anyway, knowing I did not have to be good. Just present. Just a part of the family of things.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

–Mary Oliver

 

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Day 3. Doesn’t everything die and too soon?

“This Fleeting Moment” 6×6, oil on canvas

When I was in highschool, I used to tell people not to get me flowers ever. They don’t do anything I bemoaned. They die so quickly, I argued. 

But I hadn’t started making art yet back then, and I didn’t yet appreciate things without overt practical functions. Color was not yet, to borrow from Monet, “my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.” 

In one of her most famous poems, Mary Oliver writes “doesn’t everything die at last and too soon?” Yes. Everything. Maybe the practical thing flowers do is remind me to pay attention to the transitory, to put myself in the way of fleeting beauty so that awe might take hold.  

I never tell people not to buy my flowers anymore, and I often buy them for myself nearly every time I make a grocery run. I know they will die and too soon. But I also know they assert some sacredness about a space, claiming it in time, asking me to consider its beauty.

 

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Watchless.

 

“Today” by Mary Oliver 

Today I’m flying low and I’m

not saying a word.

I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

 

The world goes on as it must,

the bees in the garden rumbling a little,

the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.

And so forth.

 

But I’m taking the day off.

Quiet as a feather.

I hardly move though really I’m traveling

a terrific distance.

 

Stillness. One of the doors

into the temple.

 

A door into the temple opened for me unexpectedly:

Way back in long-lost May, I was playing basketball with my oldest stepson (he will be more than happy to tell you that he beat me) when, scrambling for a loose ball, I cracked my Apple watch on the pavement. It didn’t seem like the end of the world, just a scratch, and I’m not very particular about such things. But then the watch started activating the emergency call system without being prompted. It would start beeping menacingly and counting down from five. Sometimes I could get it to stop, and a few times it went right on ahead and called 911, and I had to profusely apologize for wasting the dispatcher’s time. I quickly decided just to turn it off (which also activated the emergency call system). I think it was trying to break up with me. 

It’s been about one fully watchless week. After a long walk with my husband on a quick anniversary trip, we joked that while he had 20,000 steps, I had none. Without a means to measure them, certainly they could not exist. Without a watch, was I even a person at all? Did passerbys just see a man walking down a path chatting to some invisible force just to his right? 

As fate would have it, a business outside our hotel posted this sign on the sidewalk we passed each day of our trip, another reminder that time does not need to be incessantly watched over, managed or even observed. 

It’s been a full week of not knowing how many steps I’ve taken, miles I’ve walked or run, how many calories I’ve burned. It’s been a week of not getting texts on my wrist and then whispering a response into it. I’ve been slower to respond. I’ve missed things.

But for all I’ve missed, I’ve gained perhaps twice as much. I’m noticing the gifts this little change has offered to me–  enjoying a walk instead of the numbers it grants me at the end, working intuitively on a painting rather than setting timers for how long a certain part should take me. 

I wrote recently about how I memorized Mary Oliver’s “When I am Among the Trees” and what a joy having those words stored inside me has been and how often I access them. I have repeated to myself daily the end of that poem, even more so since breaking the watch: “And you too have come into the world to do this/to go easy/to be filled with light/ and to shine.” Instead of measuring all the things a watch can, I’m using this line as my ruler– if I am doing these three things, it does not matter the miles, the emails, the to do’s, the social media posts (or the number of likes and comments). If I, too, have come into the world to do these things (and I think we all have) they supersede all else, releasing me of the burden to constantly do more. 

The poem that begins this post is written into the background of the painting that you also see at the start. I think “Today” is up next for me to memorize. So that I can cling to it when I’m all bustle and no stillness.

I’m already shopping for a new watch, but I’m not in a rush to buy it. When I do settle in on one, I’m going to take off many of the notifications I’ve previously relied on. I’m going to have a healthier watch relationship. If before I was a stalker to time, now I want to let it do its thing as I do mine. Mindful of but not obsessed with it. 

I would love to know where you find quiet, how you slow down, and if anything has ever shown you that not measuring might be the easiest route to joy

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