Category: navigating the big curves

the tender movement of time and space

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maya was down a few weeks ago with a scratchy throat, so i made her the hot toddy we had growing up when our throats were sore. maya doesn’t remember having had it, which is strange as it is a soothing mix of raw apple cider vinegar, hot water and honey that i drink even when i’m not sick. maya loved it and from the kitchen i said yes, me too, as she brought her empty cup to be rinsed. reaching to take it, the room zoomed and tilted for a quick second and suddenly i was back in my childhood home, sinking deep in to the orange sofa under the sick-comforter, my dad stirring honey in to a mug, i love lucy reruns on the tv.

those triggers, of smell, or sound, or an unearthed remembrance – that pull us completely out of our present and in to an encapsulated set of moments that exist only in our memories and our heart – never fail to blindside me in their astonishing, exacting, just-as-it-was-ness. i felt my dad as though he were in the room, so deeply, and i thought you’re here, you’re still here, i will always find you if i need to. thoughts of him are of course always quietly in the back of my mind, but there are those more powerful moments when out of nowhere i feel or sense him. in the morning shadow on my studio wall, sparkling in the dust motes when the sun hits them just so, his voice somehow intermingled with the johnny cash song pouring from a car radio next to me at the stoplight. the quiet ache of missing him and my loneliness for him doesn’t ever really go away; it just shifts like gears between low and high. for my sister it is the same, for however bullish and egotistical and unsolicited-advice-yielding as he could be, my father loved us, and all of his family, to the moon, and was available always for a hug, a long conversation, a dirty joke, a dirty martini. his death, almost eight years ago, was my first great loss outside of a few flattening heartbreaks and some moments i would pay to revisit or re-do. i’ve lost friends and loves, but saying goodbye to my father so unexpectedly and suddenly knocked the wind from my body, and it never came back in quite the same way.

it was the first time that i remember thinking, okay, so these are the moments. the crystalline, gorgeous, painful moments being a human on this planet means all of us will experience at some point. for many of us they float a sky length away and don’t enter our younger psyche except as something that will happen later, well beyond the consuming thoughts of love, accrual, sex, success, family, failure and joy that shape our opening decades. these sorts of preoccupations are natural as we brightly rule our singular and unique kingdoms while we’re here. but here’s the thing. for all of the intense focus on self instead of the collective or the community, we are here, taking up space and oxygen for a mere breath of time as it extends from the past, sits for what to us is a lifetime but to the universe is just an eyeblink, before continuing on to a billion different futures. time does seem to speed up, acutely so when we acknowledge at some point in our middle lives that there is less of it in front of us, and its movement, its perpetual march, and the spaces we create within it, are so fleeting and tender.

here, in the last years of my fifties, at a time when the sky seems to be falling, and a global chill descends upon most of us who are paying attention to what is happening in the world, i work harder than ever to create beauty. I could outline the gloom (and its possible cures) that exists currently, and i have tried, for my daughter, to do just that; to assuage her anxiety and alarm at what she and her generation are privy to politically and environmentally on a global scale every single day. we talk about weather patterns more disrupted than we’ve witnessed in our lifetimes due to climate change. populism and nationalism on the rise. atrocities of war taking place in ways we hoped and trusted would never happen again. consumption and waste and planet-choking materials filling our waterways, our atmosphere, impacting our bodies and animal, plant and sea life in every stretch of land here. my daughter is 20, and wonders constantly where things will be in 10, 15, 25 years. i look for answers, because that is my job as her parent, and her friend. and though we discuss and explore and share what we’re both seeing online and outside our door, and how much overwhelm we feel, i stay away from telling her, this is how it has been for millennium. wars have raged, over land and religion and money. borders have been marked and walls have been built. humanity has taken what they need when they need it. tragically, the speed and scope of how much we need as the earth’s population grows, and the tools and technology available to us to fill our endless hunger, means we have tipped the scales to an extent we may not be able to come back from.

i have searched to understand why i hesitate to point out humanity’s failings to maya. i have come to realize that although i feel deep pain and bewilderment when i look past my one little life and see the mess out there beyond my own horizon, i am at the very same time still enchanted with the magic that is this planet. much more so than i when i was younger, and self-immersed, and trusting blindly that the earth will keep turning and endings will mostly be good. from a more seasoned viewpoint over here, those preoccupations diminish in significance, replaced with the truths and absolutes of this rotating sphere of life, which are dazzling. it is astonishing to learn how earth continues to live and support all living things after millions and millions of years. astonishing to acknowledge the finite and delicate recipe that must be maintained to sustain that life. astonishing to witness, even in our brief time here, her constant evolution, her inherent nature to create balance, her tenacity and power. and most importantly, to realize how desperately she needs our care.

if you watched the nova series ‘the planets’, at one point you saw a linear diagram of the planets and our sun aligned by size. it was stunning to take in how tiny our planet is, and as ridiculous as it sounds, seeing earth, in the context of and dwarfed by a vast universe and its other enormous planets, brought a sort of calm and acceptance that would seem counterintuitive upon realizing our infinitesimal position in a very big picture. feeling that smallness was a sort of instant wakeup call that my time here, in my little house, in my lovely beach town, in this state, this country, this continent, on this planet, is only as big and significant as i make it, as any of us make it. and what i know is that the biggest bigness any of us will feel and create here, is fueled by loving and caring for each other.

and so this is what i choose to give to my daughter. to move from the very big picture which can be overwhelming in its doom and gloom, to the smaller pictures that make up our lives. to embrace what is so essentially human about the human race. so much of it has to do with ritual, and tradition, and comfort. those moments we carve out amongst the chaos to embrace stillness and sit in beauty. an evening walk. curling up with a book and a pot of hot tea. setting the holiday table for those who will come to celebrate. the warmth of wrapping your hands around a steaming cup of coffee. singing full out to the car radio with the windows down. being with the people we adore as much as we are able. dancing in the kitchen with a pal to motown while chopping tomatoes for the spaghetti sauce. choosing grace, and graciousness. being with animals, and spending time outside, among the trees. maya pushes back about the imbalances in the universe and how she is to embrace all of the beauty and warmth i’ve tried to bring to her as though those imbalances don’t exist. i remind her, they are man-made, and as such, must be man-unmade. how to do that mom, she asks. and i can only say, be true, be kind. have a light footstep on this planet. be present, and notice where there is need. keep your eyes open to others who are hurting, but describe boundaries to protect your tender heart. have integrity. love well, and deeply. live well, and deeply.

in a week my best friend, the one i have adored and cherished since the moment we met at 17, will arrive from amsterdam to soak up some sunshine and my family’s love of her for a deliciously long set of days. i’m not sure what we will do during that time, but i know we will have morning coffee and evening cocktails, and that the spaces in between will be perfect and imperfect and possibly even tough a few times as we lead such different lives, so many miles away from each other, and will adjust to being together. i will look in to her face and she into mine, and we will see things we haven’t seen before; wisdom, sadness, a new wrinkle or two, a spot or freckle that wasn’t there last time, a fresh inlet or outlet of happiness. and there too will be all of the moments our lives have intersected, our memories spanning decades close by or at a great distance. and signe’s face, the one i love so much, will be as beautiful as it was the day we first noticed each other at a language camp in central holland 41 years ago.

and when signe is gone, and it is just me and maya sitting at the table having coffee together, i will tell her, this is why. why we stay. and persist. and foster hope. for the people we love, for the deep tears and hysterical laughter. for the gorgeousness of good food and the comfort of your favorite old sweater. for seeing the lilt of your true love’s wrist a thousand times and breathing in their scent when they lean in to kiss you. for family and friends, how we nourish their souls and they ours. how one day maya, you will get on a plane, move through time and space to arrive elsewhere, walk through a few doors, and see in front of you a face you recognize, have longed for, and a love that spans everything, and makes it all make sense.

awetism

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saturday mornings here in the wee house start with fresh, dark coffee and chocolate chip pancakes. maya pours her first cup and lets me sleep in until she jumps in my bed demanding frothed milk for her second. these mornings are slow and sweet, and at this time of year, the heater is on, the dogs are snuggled together in the doggo bed, and kcrw is on the radio as i am warming the milk.

often the soundtrack to our morning ritual is the 9am radio show ‘life examined’ hosted by jonathan bastian. if you don’t know or listen to him, you absolutely should. his is a measured and gentle approach to all sorts of current and compelling topics that cover philosophy, wellness, addiction, individuality, love, and loneliness, to name a smattering. this morning’s episode was ‘autism, it’s not a disease, it’s a different way of being’ and as it was announced – while i was frothing and maya happened to walk through the kitchen – we locked eyes, cracked up, and high-fived as maya moved on to the living room.

my daughter is autistic. she doesn’t have autism, she is autistic. i frame it this way because autism is not something one has or contracts – like a disease, affliction, or disability – it is simply who one is. maya’s dad and i knew early on that maya was responding to the world around her in ways that were atypical of most of the toddlers who were a part of our lives. her pals would see the ocean when we’d gather at the beach and make a run for it. maya would be in my lap, fearful or uninterested in the expanse of sand and water in front of her, instead focused intently on a leaf or beach pail or sleeve cuff. she would not dance to the music we played for her but instead turn the cd cover over and over, running her fingers over the corners and ridges. she obsessed over books while the other littles were dressing up as princesses, and was reading by the time she was three.

ricky and i did enough research to know that maya’s autism was asperger’s, now called autism spectrum disorder, years before she was diagnosed. maya is deeply intelligent, perceptive and empathetic, with a quick wit and wickedly sarcastic sense of humor. she never really had the terrible twos and though we hit a wall around four, it was all very normal developmentally, and happening to friends of ours who had little ones around the same age. by this time ricky and i had separated, and as we were finding our way out of marriage and back to friendship, we continued to spend time together as a family. maya would hit sudden snags of frustration, communication or navigation, and i would watch as ricky would dispel the situation with humor. it astonished me, him inherently knowing how to de-escalate tough moments before they took hold (when they did it could take hours to restore calm) and so i watched and learned to emulate what he was doing. maya grew to understand the dynamic, and as she got older, would hit back brutally with one-liners or one-uppers as some of the tougher moments were collectively circumvented by wit.

elementary school was a perfect cocoon of safety and nurturing, and maya’s intelligence and tenderness was seen and supported by most every adult there. but she struggled with social dynamics, and when work or life had me unexpectedly driving by her school at recess, my heart would dissolve in to a thousand pieces seeing her alone on a bench with a book while other students were playing tetherball, jumping rope, or having snacks together. it happened more than once, and i would sit in my car and cry, then call ricky. maya and her classmates were getting older, and the unconditional kindness that had been a part of all of them when they were very young was disappearing. kids were noticing that maya was different, couldn’t keep up with shifting social norms, had trouble navigating dynamics, and was starting to stim more acutely to counter her anxiety. middle school kicked things in to high gear as hormones took over, and we watched our lively and beautiful girl get the wind knocked out of her again and again. maya made and lost friends as they matured more quickly and moved on, was bullied and harassed, and ultimately became very singular, eating alone, spending her time out of class with her nose in her phone, constructing a thick armor of deflection to protect herself.

many of the conversations ricky and i had over those years of middle and then high school circled around the idea of getting maya to adjust, integrate, normalize. it was not because we didn’t adore our daughter exactly as she was, for she is remarkable and funny and sweet beyond belief. but every parent knows the pain of witnessing your child hurting – it fills you with an ache that is bigger than any ache before it, and you will sell your soul and your most treasured possessions to take it away. i walked into maya’s high school – a tiny charter in a crappy neighborhood that we thanked our lucky stars for every day – and found my daughter sitting in an almost comatose state on the floor of the faculty lounge. she was fifteen, had gone off her meds without telling anyone, and plummeted into a loss of coping skills right in the middle of a morning class. i sat on the floor of that lounge with my arms wrapped around her and rocked her for an hour before gathering up her things so i could take her home and snuggle her into bed.

maya went back on her meds and told ricky and me she had thought she didn’t need them. the darkness and inability to function scared her, and seemed to mark a moment where she began to recognize and own her autism. life resumed but there was still that singularity – she didn’t have a special friend or group she connected with in school, and was overly connected to her online community, who had found one another on instagram & twitter during middle school. we worried, we got involved, we backed off. we scheduled frozen yogurt dates, looked for places where she would find like-minded, like-hearted teens to connect with. nothing landed. we worried some more. and then the pandemic hit.

maya’s high school was shuttered mid-day on march 12th. we got the call to get there as soon as possible; i pulled up to see maya’s classmates in front crying and hugging, not knowing when they would see each other again. i couldn’t spot my girl anywhere, and then out the door she came – petite, carrying her ridiculously heavy backpack, and trying to hide the biggest cheshire cat grin stretching across her face. i jumped up and down in front of our car so she would see me waiting, and when she did, she ran to me, throwing herself in to my arms, giggling and hollering and freaking out. the look on her face and the energy surrounding her were so anchored in who she was as a younger person, it took me a few moments to recognize both. even under that backpack a heaviness was lifting, and there in the mix of her happiness i cried, for the sudden knowledge of all the anxiety and masking and self-critique she carries every day was palpable and devastating, and the thought i kept having was how deeply exhausted my child must be moving through the world never feeling settled. we grabbed lattes, headed home, and i watched maya exhale years of stress for the rest of the afternoon, and the weeks and months that followed.

fast forward two and a half years. maya is in her second year of college. one year ago almost exactly she had surgery on her jaw and came through an intense three-month recovery with grace and tenacity. six months before that she graduated from intellectual virtues academy high school with honors, having thrived for a year and a half schooling at home and taking her first college course during her senior year. all of the loneliness, the heartache, feeling atypical, neurodivergent, always on the outside – all of these things i would wish away with a magic wand if given the chance. but in the same breath i use to articulate those words and that pain and this wish, i must also acknowledge that there is a resilience and fortitude in my daughter that got her through a set of months and years that many of her neurotypical peers couldn’t navigate. very slowly maya is integrating back to school on campus, she naps almost every afternoon which has quelled the exhaustion, and she is maturing, albeit more slowly than most. she is scathingly cynical and funny in the exact same moments she is innocent and unworldly. her tenderness runs deep, her touch could calm a wild horse. she struggles and lashes out and beats herself up for not being normal. what’s normal, i ask her, and why would you want to live there, where the landscape is just an average of common traits and behaviors? she laughs and rolls her eyes at me.

maya is still singular, but rather than trying to remedy it, i let it be what it is and trust that maya will find her people and her place when they are ready for her, and she for them. we are working to open doors that will allow her that kind of connection. she has her online community still anchoring her – at one point she told me that without them she may not be here – so i bless them and smile big when i hear her belly laughing in her bedroom as they navigate this turbulent world together. in the end, hers may be a path that is shared with only a few souls who get her. how lucky they will be. how lucky i have been all these years, witnessing and learning and guiding where i have been able. i’ve written it so many times before, she is my teacher much more than i am hers. her insight, her lens on the world, her armored outside and deeply sensitive inside. she is my valentine, my girl, my one and only. she is brilliant, lovely, autistic. she is perfect.

negative space

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sometime in my late thirties, i inherited, from a friend who was downsizing so she could travel, a beautiful armoire that was so enormous ricky and i couldn’t get it through the front door of the elegant old apartment we moved in to after we sold our house. for years it sat in our garage, playing witness to us jumping up and down cursing after ramming our toes or shins in to it, and sucking our stomachs in as we crab-walked between it and the wall of ricky’s studio. it was a behemoth piece of furniture which for rick was in the way of necessities (mountain bike and drums) but for me held the promise of a future space with wider doors and bigger rooms where beautiful behemoth pieces of furniture could happen. it was all a bit strange because it is almost identical to an armoire i drew before ever seeing it for a children’s book i was working on. stranger still because years after receiving it and ultimately finding a house with wide and lovely doors that it could move through, i learned that the person commissioned to design and build it was a very handsome boy i grew up with, attended the same high school as, and perhaps had a wee bit of a crush on.

the power space holds has grown more impactful as i have gotten older. i feel it keenly as i move through my daily life, and now that i am painting again, there are additional layers of space sitting upon my existing preoccupations with space that i also have to attend to. mostly because when a painting is started, regardless really of subject matter or storyline or content, a new space is being created. however it resonates, a little universe that wasn’t there before you made it is now alive in the world, to be beguiled by, disregarded, or anything in between.

i experienced this a short time ago when i was invited to participate in a small group show at a gallery where i live. the piece that showed had been in my studio for months in various incarnations of what it would become, and as happens to me when working on a painting, we had become very good friends. entering the gallery for the art opening and observing it amongst other works, occupying its own lovely space as a thing in the world, took me by surprise. within the context of its new, albeit temporary home, the painting became, right before my eyes, something different and separate from what it had been on my table. It was all grown up, and didn’t need me anymore. if paintings were allowed to have drivers licenses, it probably would have driven itself away from me (in this case to its lovely new owner’s home) without even a backwards glance.

in august of this year i enrolled for a week of online planning sessions with a brilliant art mentor in colorado, then began my first three month program with her in september amongst a wonderful group of other artists from a few far corners of the world. the lot of us have been practicing art for most of our lives, and are at various stages of our careers. many are far more established than i am, having been at it for considerably longer. for me, having just pivoted away from 15 years of designing graphics to fine art, every ounce of everything was brand new and exciting and terrifying. the week long planning sessions were intense; i imagined this was because so much had to be packed in to just five days. it turns out a lot can be packed in to three months as well.

i stayed the course until my daughter had jaw surgery in november, after which the space and momentum of our life got physically very small as we honed in on care giving, cooking small meals that don’t require chewing, and tending to our collective emotional health. it is hard for an eighteen year old to be with at least one of her parents 24 hours a day, and her temporary loss of autonomy meant ours was gone as well. truthfully it has been secretly delicious having my daughter captive and close by these past six weeks, but the planning and energy required has pushed to the back burner much of what takes place during our normal lives. the narrow scope of our new routine probably would have been much harder to manage had we not all been prepared by eighteen months of studying and working from home during the pandemic.

weeks passed and the work piled up. with maya healing at home, there wasn’t enough time in a day to get to all of it, and in the evenings when i usually find a few quiet hours to be in the studio, i was depleted. my daughter was doing beautifully in her recovery, something that should have been enough to bring a restful mind. instead, i felt overwhelmed. i had created a binder for the bounty of tasks and materials coming weekly for my mentorship, and the paperwork took on a life of its own, appearing to actually proliferate while i slept. so many emails and assignments were going unanswered, and in an attempt early one morning to organize and get a handle on everything online, i knocked an entire cup of coffee on to my laptop keyboard just as maya was jumping on zoom for her first class of the day. 

i sprinted for the kitchen and a stack of towels. by the time i got back to my computer it was making a sad little moaning sound, and the power light actually dimmed slowly and blinked a few times before going out entirely. i realized in that moment it was the motherboard’s last breath; i had murdered my laptop. the next hour was an almost out of body experience as i blow dried the battery after getting instructions from my computer-fixer-wizard-friend, and tried not to cry. i opened up the back of the computer and ceremoniously laid towels over everything inside that i could get to; not so much as a eulogy, but to soak up the little puddles of liquid that were everywhere.

with my laptop unavailable and after a few minutes of feeling utterly lost, i realized there was nothing to do but make another coffee, and wait for my computer wizard who wouldn’t come until end of day. i had to rethink and adjust to a day that would not involve anything online. no design, no photo editing, no homework, no banking. an incredible sense of calm washed over me. i had been dismissed from the planned obligations of the day, and it opened before me like a wondrous place i hadn’t visited in a long while. 

my glee was unexpected. the possibility that my hard drive might be damaged, that i could lose hundreds of files of old work, old correspondence, letters from a life time ago, passwords no longer used, saved recipes never cooked, was exhilarating. i’ve got old school 4 x 5 transparencies of most of my artwork, and maya’s entire childhood in photographs saved on an external hard drive. what, beyond that, is really important? if the contents of my hard drive were irretrievable, damaged, obliterated, the sun would shine just as brightly and life would continue on, mine included. the weight of years of work lifted, the unfolding space of the day shifted, and i felt impossibly light and free. i had to ask myself, when did i get so tethered to my life online and the devices that keep me there?

that day changed things. it took one seemingly disastrous moment to be reminded that the amount of time and mental energy required and taken up by obligations and dalliances online is damaging and absurd. i have been compelled and affected by physical space most of my life: it has driven my connection to art and design, inspired me to travel, pushed me to write and explore the landscapes built of words. somewhere along the line, i had allowed the world of my 22 inch monitor to take on the import of larger, freer, more compelling views.

anyone who’s done a bit of art study will know that if negative space goes wrong, it will demand more attention than what created it. once negative space is seen, it can be hard to unsee. but if you want an image to maintain the value you assigned it, its resulting negative space has to remain neutral or serve as a contrast to your central focus. i think of it as the quiet parts of an artwork, a place for the eyes to rest, or a vehicle to make the louder components sing. i also really like it as a metaphor – those things that need to be sent to the background, that are there to support and make shine what is primary. so it makes sense that i am choosing to see my time online as the negative space in my life now. it must exist to embellish the things that are my central to my work and life, and stay in the background where it will enhance my endeavors, not shape them. negative space is not in itself something bad; just the necessary counterpart to all the positives.

i no longer go to bed with my phone close enough to pick up, and i start my day at the pretty marble table sketching and having coffee with my girl while the {new} laptop is safely tucked away. computer and mobile now have a bedtime, unless i am on a deadline or enchanting long distance call, all tabs are closed and the laptop at least is shut down. i don’t want it getting any big ideas, or a misguided sense that it gets to occupy the foreground again, any time soon.