December 23, 2014 – Blessed by Black Labs

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Joe and I have had three black Labradors – all boys.  Well the first one, Bud, was really Joe’s dog. He was nine when Joe and I started dating – when I lived in a house that had white carpet and a white sofa.  It was my girly-girl house.  My dad called it my little “bijoux.”  After my divorce, I just knew that I’d share my life with another husband and I wanted a period of time when I could live in a more feminine and refined house than would be comfortable for the kind of guy’s-guy I’m attracted to!  The first time he came over with Bud, I put blankets down on the carpets and instructed them that he had to stay right over there, with all his black dog hair.

Joe was diagnosed with lymphoma six days after our first date.  So within a few weeks, we not only knew that he was going to become very sick from the chemotherapy treatments prescribed for him, but also that we were “the one” for each other.  So he, and his black dog moved in with me in my white house.  Joe had to stay overnight in the hospital for the second chemo treatment, leaving me at home with Bud, the black dog.  I’d never had a dog in my thirty-something life and I was actually a bit scared of him.  Poor guy, he must have been pretty uneasy with me too!

In the morning I had to leave him in the house to go to work in the city (San Francisco).  Since Joe’s dad was picking him up and bringing home about 8am, I thought Bud wouldn’t be there alone long.  Timing is NEVER as expected in the hospital though, and they were several hours late getting home. In the meantime, Bud had to pee. I’d shut all the doors to the bedrooms and bathroom in the hallway wanting to keep him as corralled as possible. He tried to get in to each room by chewing all of the door jambs, as well as scratching at the French door to the backyard before finally relieving himself on the white carpet in the living room. Joe came home to his girlfriend-of-one-month’s perfect white house with shredded door jambs and a big pee spot on the white rug.  Oh… no.

I guess I passed some kind of test when I didn’t completely freak out when he called me at work to tell me. Oh, well. What were we to do? He’s in the construction industry and got someone to repair the wood work and we had the carpet cleaned.  I had no idea I should have made him go for a pee before leaving!

About a year and a half after old Bud died, we got BJ (Buddy Junior). BJ and I were pals – we walked every day together and we played “stair-ball”- a game where he dropped the ball down the stairs and I threw it back up to him. He died suddenly in an accident when he was 5 and a half years old.  I watched it happen.  It was an awful experience.  I couldn’t sleep for a couple of nights, for the flashes of memory that kept coming up.  We missed our BJ-boy so much, it was a very difficult time. Was there ever going to be another dog who would play stair-ball?  Was I ever going to love another dog like I did him? Joe asked me, what if I could love another dog even more?  (Yes, he’s a pretty amazing guy.)

For anyone who doesn’t know, Labs shed. They shed a lot. All the time.  Fur goes everywhere. The furniture, our clothes – I find it in my food sometimes – and fur even sticks to the moist paint in my palette.  I mean everywhere. If we don’t sweep the hardwood floors for several days, dust bunnies of black dog hair form in the corners.  Pretty serious shedding.

There came a day after BJ died, a few weeks had passed, when I swept the hardwood floors and there was no dog hair.  I was not relieved for the lack of mess. My grief welled up anew. No dog hair meant no BJ.

Our dogs bring such great energy to our house and to our marriage.  They are family – so easy to love. As Valerie, a student of mine, puts it, there is a special chamber in our hearts for our love of them. But it’s still easy to get annoyed by the fur, the mess, the inconvenience.

We now have Bo (short for BoJangles). We got him four months after BJ died, at seven weeks old (I first held him at 3 weeks).  He’s now 4 and a half.  And I believe they share the same spirit – but that’s another post.  I can honestly say, that I have a completely transformed relationship with the dog hair that is all over our world. We have this pup, we have his fur.  It’s a great way to look at a lot of things:  a friend one day expressed her exasperation at her son’s finger prints all over the refrigerator – I gently reminded her she has a son!  Even though he never means to, my hubby tracks dirt in the house with his running shoes – and I have an awesome husband.  Our big oak tree out front drops leaves all over our yard, 365 days a year.  Yesterday Joe was bemoaning how he’d just cleaned up the side patio and the wind covered it again with leaves. I said “one day we won’t live under this tree.”  Joe said “and when we don’t, I will miss it.”

There’s another way of looking at this that helps my perfectionism take a step back.  Who says that the one who is “messy” is the one with the problem?  What if the problem is mine, needing everything to be so neat all the time?

I’m all about creating freedom – including for myself.  I can help myself free from my perfectionism by reminding myself that what I love will always come with something that will challenge me.  Everything in life is a mixed bag, as my God-mother Donna tells me.  I want to be free to enjoy the blessing part of the mix.

Right now, Bo-Doggy is lying flat on his side on his dog blanket on the bed with me as I write, occasionally taking a deep breath and letting it out with a sigh.  Yes, there’s dog fur on the blanket, and he’s an enormous blessing in our lives.  He’s also great at playing stair-ball. Even better than when he was BJ.   In this moment, his presence feels pretty miraculous. I’ll take that over a fur-free life any day.

May the magic of believing in miracles bring you joy and delight too.  I wish you a Merry Christmas, a Happy Channukah, a blessed Solstice or whatever you celebrate this time of year.  And a happy and healthy 2015.  I am so very grateful for you in my life.

Love,

Cara

December 16, 2014 – Let it shine

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This past week my coach, Lissa Boles, suggested I share with you why I now write a journal post every week.   In thinking about this, I reflected on how, as much as I love to write and am told how much people appreciate it, it was SO not that way for much of my life.  In high school I loved Math, Physics, Chemistry and French. Proving geometric theorems was fun!  Give me any math word problem – I ate ‘em up!  But, I got through English. Blue books were not my friends.  This carried into college. I remember reading Voltaire for a Humanities class and being required to write an essay about character motivation in light of the era or something like that – and being totally, thoroughly flummoxed!  I had not a clue!  My brain just does NOT work that way!

My degree is in Computer Science and all my electives were natural sciences, classes about the natural world:  Oceanography, Geography, Geology, Meteorology.  I love maps and categorizing things.  I have a brain that loves to find order in disorder. But writing?  I subscribed to something I heard my dad say:  “writing is easy, all you have to do is stare at a piece of paper until your forehead bleeds!”  That is, until it was about something I cared about – writing stories of my experiences.  When I was going to a church that occasionally invited members of the community to offer reflections as part of the Sunday services, I started writing stories to share.  But, I really got going when preparing for my first Open Studios.  I was inspired to write a little story for each painting and put together an “Art Journal.”  I remember sitting outside on the patio with my laptop on my lap, just tapping away, one painting after the other.  I have continued for each new painting I’ve done since.  And all these stories are on my website, helping to further illuminate the images I paint.

What comes to me now is that the impetus to write has sprung from these places:

• I am a seeker and have been following a path of self-development for decades, demonstrating my tendency to “look under the rock.”
• Witnessing others making art for the past three years in my painting groups, has caused me to consciously observe, and start to see patterns in the creative process.
• I’m a connecter – I see patterns, similarities, parallels (there’s that logic brain, who knew?!) And it seems useful to share the connections I see.
• What I write, like the well of paintings, is in me – there’s that quote from the Gospel of St. Thomas I included in a post in November – and I do not want to be destroyed!

For at least a few years I’ve had the sense that I had something to write, to share, beyond writing about my art.  When I started regularly posting at the beginning of October, it was in spite of the fear that I’d not keep it up – that I’d get pulled away and peter out.  This remains a risk and a possibility, but I’m into my third month and writing a post for Tuesday is becoming what I do.  The discipline is good for me. It’s growing me to do this.  At first, I thought I would need lots of feedback and response in order to keep doing it. Even though I’m getting very little, it’s ok, I’m still writing!

I appreciate very much when I hear that you read what I write and tell me that it was worthwhile for you to read it.  It definitely fuels me to keep this up. And what I didn’t expect would happen as I have continued this practice, is that I am sticking with it even if you don’t.  I am doing this because it is in me, just as I paint because the paintings are in me.  At the same time, I do need you. I didn’t start to paint with much regularity until I had an audience. Until there were people who might be wondering – and even wanting – what I might paint next.  So as it is with this journal.  If I didn’t post these online, available for you to read them, I wouldn’t feel compelled to write them.  It sounds like I’m contradicting myself.  It’s subtle, but there is a distinction.  I write because it’s in me, and I keep writing because you are there to receive it.

Sharing what comes of me – of us – is risky. We are revealed, exposed and open to judgment. And we have to face the voices inside that might say “who are you to do this?”  But the seeker in me wins out.  I write – and paint – because I am fully on the bandwagon that we are all invited on – to let our light shine.  Who doesn’t feel more alive singing “This Little Light of Mine”? (Don’t believe me, watch/hear Bruce Springsteen lead it here. I dare you to sing along!)

This piece from Maryanne Williamson is so often quoted, but it is so worth including here:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

I write – and I paint – for us, which in my experience is where God lives most powerfully – in our connection. In these darkest days, this darkest season here in the northern hemisphere, when we celebrate the light, I invite you to join me, in whatever way you are called to – to let it shine.

Love,

Cara

 

 

December 9, 2014 – Stepping back

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One of my most treasured friendships is with an extraordinary woman named Randi. We met at the start of her first, my second year of college. We were suite-mates in the dorm El Conquistador in San Diego. She was not quite 17, I was not quite 19.  Though over the decades (!) we have woven in and out of being in regular communication, this is one of those friendships that picks right up where it left off, the closeness and ease never abating. Life took Randi east, to business school at Wharton and a brilliantly successful career in the health-related business world.  She is married to one of the most unique and special guys I know and together they have a remarkable daughter, now in college.  I love that though our life circumstances and even the filters through which we take life in are so incredibly different, we have such a deep appreciation for each other.  She said yesterday in a message to me that she grounds me and I inspire her. What a blessing.

We had a chat on New Year’s Day not quite a year ago that resulted in her coming out in March to learn to paint.  I love sharing painting with her. And she mentors me in how I run my art and teaching business. She’s just unflappable, always looking for the strategy or solution for my current “problem.”

Last week, on the way to the Thursday group, my tall latte cup full of roobois tea and milk went flying all over the front of my car, my pant leg and my new white jacket!  I had slammed on the breaks after looking down for one second and the cars in front of me had stopped for a bus pulling out.  I had gotten myself all frazzled with all that was on my plate: I had six cases of new mugs to put in individual boxes, art to bring in to hang for the open house on the weekend, prints to prepare, the announcement email to craft and send. The calendar orders were coming in along with the questions and problems with the online system. Instead of walking Bo (and myself) I’d spent all morning responding to these emails.  I now have a whole new appreciation for customer service departments!  So, I didn’t think straight about putting my tea in one of my new steel travel mugs with a lid before getting on the road!

My thoughts were all over the place, like flies buzzing around the kitchen, suddenly switching directions!  I knew I had to shift my energy, so I called Randi.

With humor and wisdom, she met me where I was and reinforced something I’ve known – that ultimately, what I need to be doing is primarily painting and teaching –the two things that no one else can do.  Yes.  I need help. Ten minutes into the conversation, I felt like a different person. Even though there wasn’t any help on the way, I had another perspective on the situation. I was no longer down in it, where all I could see were the thick trees. She helped me rise up and see the forest.

It occurred to me that this is parallel to what I see happen in the artists in my groups – and in me – when we paint.  It’s so easy to pick apart what we are doing when we are close in, intimate with the detail.  The critical voice in my head is telling me that the shapes are awkward, the colors are off, that it looks contrived and not natural like the thing I’m attempting to represent. I said all these things to myself about the in-progress painting of persimmons I’m slowly working on above. What it takes is stepping back.  I put the painting across the room and it can be astonishing how different it looks.  It allows me to see the painting that is emerging, in its entirety.  From here I can also see what’s needed – where I want it to be darker or softer or more vibrant.

I love my Thursdays and Fridays. I walk around our space while everyone is working on their paintings, exclaiming how incredible their work is.  They often look at me in faint disbelief.   So, I ask if I can hold up their paintings for them.  Without fail, the rest of the group responds with great appreciation and often specific feedback about what they like.  And then I see on the painter’s face a dawning of the vision that the rest of us have for their work.

It’s a bummer that this is how it goes!  We cannot appreciate our work in the way that others can.  It’s like all the cooks I know (me included) who can’t enjoy the food we’ve prepared like the rest of the diners do.  For me it takes not just physical distance, stepping back, but also time.  Generally it’s a few months after finishing a painting, when it’s up and framed, that the parts of it that still bug me start to fade and I begin to see what everyone else does.

Being down in the details of our paintings, our work is necessary.  It’s being engaged – getting stuff done – the rubber and the road.  But a life-diet of nothing but engagement brings on monotony, tedium, boredom, hyper-criticism and overwhelm. In talking about how we view our artwork, when we are working intently on it, I find myself using the analogy that it’s like looking at our chin with a 10x mirror (yikes), instead of looking back and taking in our whole face, including our shining eyes.  We need perspective to take in the broad view, to see it in context. From here we can see whole other possibilities and respond in a much more useful way.

It’s powerful for me to me to think about my life as a creation, just like a painting.  My moment last week was a 10x mirror moment, and I’m grateful for Randi helping me to step back.  We need each other for this.  As a connection-oriented being, I love that it’s set up this way – that our best life doesn’t come out of operating completely independently (as if that’s really possible, anyway).  We are channels for creation. When we are in the process, as whatever we are creating is actively coming through us, it takes others to reflect to us the beauty of our hard work – or at least to remind us to step back and take a breath.  As we wind up the year it’s a good time to do just this. Yes, I am listening to myself as I write this!

Wishing you moments of reflection in the midst of what can be a busy season.

Love,

Cara

December 2, 2014 – Practice and devotion

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I am part of a coaching group.  We are a remarkable group of women who are bringing our purposeful work into the world, with the support of each other and our gifted teacher and mentor, Lissa Boles.  One of my sister-coachees, Lyn offered to me a self-study experience of a program she created called Nine Days to Peace.  Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Nine days and I have peace?  I have never easily created structure for myself and for a while I have had been living with this desire to re-commit to a daily spiritual practice, so I said a big “yes” to her offer.

I started my nine days on November 22, the new moon.  Farmers have been planting seeds under the new moon for eons. The energies of the dark night are good for beginnings.  We all start in the dark of our mother’s bodies.  Newness emerges from the darkness.  On the first day I spent a few hours puttering in my “pink room,” a second sleeping room in our house, where I sleep often.  There’s a bay window and my grandmother’s old sewing machine on the side of the bed where I set up an extended altar space with meaningful objects from my mothers, grandmothers, teachers, dear friends, Paris – and my Joseph – so they all would accompany me each day as I practiced.  I added candles and hung “Full Circle” – a painting with a lot of my journey in it – above everything.

Then I faithfully started the nine-days, lighting candles, creating my intentions, writing in my journal, having sweet time connected to myself, my deepest longings – and the God of my heart.  I played sacred music, I listened the recordings of Lyn’s guidance she provided me. Even as I write this, I slip into the soft, lovely feeling of the space I created.  For several mornings I continued. It was just what I was hungering for.

And then, Thanksgiving happened – we hosted 14 for dinner.  I got pulled right out of my morning rhythm by all the to-do’s.  I managed to circle back in the evening to light a quick candle and read my intentions before bed – absolutely exhausted from all the do-ing.  The day after, I stayed in bed until 10:45. I can’t remember the last time I’d been in bed that late!  I’d slept and rested through the time I’d sit and be focused on my practice.  And, though I didn’t do much on Friday, I didn’t circle back – until the end of the day again to quickly read my intentions before bed.  The spell had been broken – I’d drifted away from my practice after six days.  I had to drag myself back to it on Saturday morning to finish the last two days. I did finish the nine days, at the very least reading my intentions to myself every day. But at the end I was left feeling like I’d not done it “right.”

I started the process with a bright, shiny optimism about what was to come of the nine days.  I know this about me – and it’s a sweet part of me.  But there is a naiveté to it.  I forget about the long haul.  The long haul is where it all happens.  Mastery comes out of time with butt in the chair.  This is still a muscle I work – I maybe always will.  I have no problem getting wholly enthused about a new exercise class or avoiding sweets for a while, or a renewed plan to paint every single day.  And then life happens. I get off track and things get loosey-goosey.  And…I remember I’m a feminine being, and we feminine beings are most naturally oriented by what happens outside of us.  This is how it’s meant to be.  Our babies need us to care for them in the moment they need it, not when we are ready to come out of ourselves.  But even after the babies are grown, it’s work, real work to follow our inner selves consistently.

I am a big believer that whatever is revealed is perfectly ordered.  My prevailing intention about myself and my process is to refrain from making anything about me “wrong.”  Of course I got off track because of Thanksgiving! Of course it was hard to come back when I was exhausted!  The fruit of the nine days is this: a deeper level of acceptance of this aspect of my nature.  Accepting that this is how I am gives me a new way to engage with staying on track.  There is a part of me that is quite idealistic; it so wants for my dreams to unfold smoothly and effortlessly. When I lose focus, that part makes stuff up about how I’ll never be, never have… whatever my intention is.

I see this dyamic in myself and others in our painting journeys.  One not-insignificant aspect of joining one of my weekly groups is the structure of – at least once a week – actually sitting down to paint.  There’s no laundry to fold, no email to respond to, it’s time to paint. Otherwise (and I know this intimately) it can be so hard brush off the distractions.  Painting is a spiritual practice to me.  It’s a devotion.  I just looked up the word devotion. There are several meanings. Two are “deep love and commitment” and “great dedication and loyalty.”  These things don’t mean anything if it’s easy all the time.  Devotions are inherently not-easy.  We bring ourselves to them in the face of what pulls us away.

Today, I sit with these guideposts:

• I am devoted – to my inner life, to painting and teaching, to write to you once a week, to be-ing love as much as I can be.
• I know that these devotions are bumped into by my life, inner and outer, pulling me away.
• And, I endeavor to gently accept myself as I watch the rhythms, the seasons of my practice.

My experience is this acceptance creates space for whatever it is that brings me back.  Which is completely mysterious to me – what does bring us back?  What comes to me in this moment is…  that which brings us back is Grace.

Wishing you the space for Grace to seep in.

Love,

Cara

November 25, 2014 – The matter of mattering

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When I was in college, I worked summers setting tile – on kitchen counters, around bathtubs, floors, even the stalls of an office building restroom.  My biggest job was laying heavy 12”x12” pavers on the floors of a home in Paradise Cay in Tiburon.  It took many days to work my way from the family room, down a hallway, into the breakfast room, around a kitchen island and back to the family room.  It wasn’t until I met back up with the tiles I’d set at the start, and found that my layout worked – the grout lines actually lined up in both directions!  I was brave in the undertaking – and lucky! If the grout lines had been off, it would have been a huge problem!  As a tile setter I learned to work with a water-cooled tile saw.  It was fun to run my finger right on the blade, showing off how it wouldn’t cut skin. It was also fun doing something that is done by mostly guys.  Oh, how far I have come!

Though I cannot imagine ever being able to work that physically hard again (the boxes of the pavers I lifted and carried were 75 lbs each!), it is useful to know how to work a tile saw.  Today I used my (contractor) brother Joe’s tile saw to cut a few tiles for our kitchen backsplash where we took out a microwave and put in an exhaust hood. Here they are ready to be grouted tomorrow.  I also cut the broken handles off a whole bunch of mugs that were damaged in the first shipment.  It’s so hard to toss things that could be useful – Mom and I thought they might make good pencil holders to give away. After I was done, I realized that I really, really should have been using ear plugs – the saw has a sharp, grinding sound and my ears were ringing.  At least I did think to put on a pair of sunglasses to protect my eyes!  When I was 19 and 20, I never protected either!

Taking good care of myself – physical and otherwise – has never been natural or come easily to me.  It’s always been a struggle to tend to my own needs – drink enough water, get enough rest, or say “I don’t think so” when I ought to.  My orientation, my focus is always “out there,” before it is “in here.”  It’s automatic for me to get what you are feeling before I know where I am.  What this means is that my feelings can get really big before I notice them. Having the capacity to intuit others’ feelings has served me – it allows me to provide a special kind of attention. But, unless I care for me, it’s not sustainable and eventually, I can get pretty ugly when I go on tilt.

There’s a connection here to the quest I’ve been on for what seems like forever – to grow and understand myself.  I’m looking to either transcend this way of being, or find a way to be at peace with it (most likely a combination of both). In this quest, I’ve come back over and over to my deepest, darkest shadow belief:  “I don’t matter.”  Today, in my current circumstances, I so know I matter.  I matter tremendously – not just to those who love me, but I matter to me.  And yet – that belief persists largely unconsciously.  It is at the root of how hard it is to care for myself.

Lately I’ve been living in the question, “what would it take to live my life, make choices, with the deep belief, “I matter”?  So what actually matters?  I am both a physical being living in a body in the manifest world, and I am non-physical – a spirit, a soul that is eternal, not bound by the start and end of physical life.

This past week, Joe and I had an interaction that led me to an awakening about this idea of my mattering.  In part of our conversation, I operated from what felt like my higher self, able to see beyond the circumstances, able to bring an element of spirit to the present moment.  And in the next moment, I did just the opposite. I operated from my fear that I didn’t matter, that what I wanted was again not going to come to be. It went badly.  The contrast in that conversation woke me up.  I realized where I’d gone, I found my center again and apologized to him.

Right afterwards, on my walk with Bo, it sifted in:  my eternal self is beyond the realm of mattering or not mattering, there’s no not-mattering in the eternal, mattering is implicit.  But, as a human being living an earthly life, I matter – I have very real needs.  And, if I don’t tend to those needs, it’s nearly impossible for me to access my eternal self, to be the source of love in the situations I find myself in.  There’s no more worthwhile way to spend this life than to be love as much as I can.  As I write this, it seems like a “well, duh” kind of thing. Nevertheless, the way it sifted in felt fresh and potent.

I am consciously avoiding the temptation to feel like a “whole new me” about this.  And I deeply believe that the shadow (including my shadow) is an intrinsic element of manifest life.  There’s no ridding ourselves of it. I will have shadow beliefs until “I” am no longer in this body.  The tender hope that I live in today, even as I forget to put in ear plugs when running a loud machine, is that the dawning I had a few days ago continues to resonate, ripple, bubble up in my consciousness progressively more. I so want that, if it’s like a muscle being exercised, it strengthens.

I recently heard the words come out of my mouth in support of someone else, “be gentle with yourself for not being good at taking care of yourself.” I’m directing these words to myself, taking me back to the statement I’ve said in these posts a few weeks running now, “if I could take better care of myself, I would.” You might say that’s a copout. But it’s a present moment thing. It doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity to do better down the path.  We are here to shine the light of presence, of consciousness into the darkness of the shadow – without the separating impact of sitting in judgment.  That includes me to me.  Work in progress.  Human.  Perfectly imperfect.  This is a nice place to rest this week.  To feel my gratitude for all that has been bestowed upon me in this life – light and shadow, as we in the U.S. gather to feast and offer our thanks for our blessings.

I thank you for being who you are to me.

Cara

November 18, 2014 – When in doubt, cook!

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My dad took over cooking our family dinners when I was in junior high. My mom started two businesses and he was teaching at a special high school, where the kids had a shorter than normal day.  He found himself with more time and picked up cooking dinner.   He shopped every day and came home. Then he and I made dinner together.  I learned how to handle knives, cut up a chicken, chop an onion and make a white sauce.  It seems to me, unless we eat out somewhere, I’ve been part of making dinner nearly every night of my life since.  In a lot of ways, cooking is much more natural and intuitive to me than painting.  Though I love to peruse cookbooks, I most often cook without a recipe. I have a sense of what’s in the house without looking in the cupboards and refrigerator.  When asked what my specialty is, I say it’s cooking a nice meal with what’s in the kitchen.

When I was 14, I baby-sat for a woman in Woodacre who had three kids.  I stayed overnight while she went on a yoga retreat – in the days when no one went on yoga retreats.  This included making dinner for the kids and me.  Seems she forgot to leave much food in the house. I remember scraping the last bits of chicken of a carcass for tacos and roasting raw cashews in a skillet with a bit of butter and salt for extra warm protein.  I was fourteen!  Though it’s inconceivable to me now that she left her kids with me overnight (did I mention the toilet was backed up, meaning we had to go next door to use the bathroom, and that I ended up with poison oak from having slept in her sheets?), it’s good story to tell – and I now look back and see the start of my “specialty.”

It’s become who I am. I cook. I find myself saying “when in doubt, cook” and I have a Penzey’s spices bumper sticker on my car that says “Love People. Cook them Tasty Food.”  I just love that it doesn’t say Penzey’s spices anywhere on it. They aren’t marketing themselves, they are marketing cooking!

I’ve recently been working with an amazing coach (everyone could use one!). Recently when we were talking about my cooking, she shared with me something she read in a book called “Built to Last.”  All the people profiled in the book, people who had built sustainable bodies of work that have endured – every one of them has a passion that seems unrelated to their main work. And if they didn’t devote time to this other passion, their work would suffer.  It’s not a hobby, it’s a necessity.  It’s not a luxury, It’s a foundational practice that makes the rest of their work possible.

For me, this is cooking.  The Tuesday after this year’s Sausalito Art Festival, I got all the art and festival gear put away, I checked in with my husband’s office. I came home about 3:00 and actually let myself have a little nap. I woke up at 3:30, went into the kitchen and cooked. I processed the mountain of tomatoes from my parents’ huge vegetable garden that had been accusing me of neglecting them, lest they get overripe and go bad. I made an eggplant Parmigiana with the two eggplants that had just started to shrivel.  I stuffed one of the gigantic zucchini with a ground chicken mixture and sauced it with some of the tomatoes.  I cooked for three hours, in bare feet, the house quiet, Bo lying on the floor waiting for goodies to fall.  I felt back inside myself again.  Cooking does that for me.

Late last week, I was headed home. Joe wasn’t going to be home for dinner. In the car at a stop light, I was thinking about what I’d make myself. I wanted something like spaghetti carbonara, but I wasn’t in the mood for meat (I often eat meatless when I’m on my own).  I immediately thought of the cremini mushrooms at home, fresh rosemary and garlic.  Mushrooms and eggs are wonderful together, so why not?  When I got home I did a quick web search for vegetarian carbonara and found one with tomato (?) and asparagus (not!) and another with zucchini, better, but not what I had in mind.  So I made it up. And it was delicious, warm, satisfying, savory, creamy but not too heavy or rich.  I’d absolutely make it again.  Here’s what I did, including my yet-untested improvements (basically more garlic and rosemary). Let me know if you make it and if so, if you changed it – made it your own – and how you liked it.  I learned the method of cooking the not-quite-done pasta with some of the pasta water in a sauté pan from Michael Chiraello.  The results are delicious. If you’ve never done so, give it a try.  Buon appetito!

Spaghetti Mushroom Carbonara

• ½ lb. spaghetti or thin spaghetti
• 2 T olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 ½ – 2 t. fresh rosemary, finely minced
• 12 or so (more is fine too) medium cremini (brown) mushrooms, thinly sliced
• 1 egg, beaten in a small bowl
• ½ c. freshly grated parmesan cheese, added to the egg, plus extra for serving
• Freshly grated black pepper
• Chopped parsley

Put a pot of amply-salted water to boil. Cook spaghetti until it’s just barely under-done.

In the meantime, heat the olive oil in a sauté pan large enough to hold all the cooked pasta.  Add the minced garlic and let it sizzle just a few seconds (unless you like flavor of toasted garlic).  Then toss in the sliced mushrooms, stir around just a bit to coat with oil and let them cook undisturbed over high/med-high heat until they start to lightly color – a few minutes.  Then stir/sauté until they are fully cooked and any liquid they have released has been cooked away.  Towards the end of the mushrooms cooking, add the rosemary.  If the pasta is not done yet, turn the heat off or down low.

When the pasta is barely done, save about a cup or so of the pasta cooking water before draining the pasta.  I actually don’t drain the pasta, I use my pronged pasta scoop to lift it out of the water and into the sauté pan, it only takes a few scoops.  Ladle in a bit of the pasta water, about a half a cup at a time. Cook over high heat, stirring constantly, sort of risotto-style, to finish cooking the pasta and adhere the flavors to it. Add more water as needed.  When the pasta is done and all the liquid has cooked away –  you want it still moist, but not swimming – off the heat, add the egg and cheese and quickly stir to evenly coat the pasta with the egg.  Season with ground black pepper if you wish.  Sprinkle chopped parsley on top and serve with extra grated cheese, to your taste.

Serves 2-3 depending upon appetite!

November 11, 2014 – Can we learn faster and easier?

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I wish I could go back to my 13 year old self to ask her why she decided, as a high school freshman, to take French.  I don’t remember if it was a lark, or if there was something deeper.  In any case, my teacher, Monsieur Terando sparked in me a love of languages, especially French. I took French all four years and two more in college. By my last year I had dreams in French. (Isn’t that weird how we know that we are dreaming in another language?)  But, I didn’t take it any further because I wasn’t into French literature; I wanted to communicate in French and was not at all literary!

As any of you who’ve read what I write about my paintings know, I still have this thing about France, Paris in particular – where I had a stay in my early 30’s and have visited many times since.  There is a glinty vein of Parisian-French that runs through me.  I also love Italy. There’s something captivating about the energy of Italy, the food, the style, the countryside, the art – it’s an entrancing place.  Since I have a solidly functional command of French, it’s been especially frustrating to me to be unable to communicate like that in Italy. I would love to speak Italian like I do French.  Besides being convenient, I feel different when I speak French. It’s as if that vein takes me over. I’m not just speaking French, my experience of the place is much more intimate and personal – it’s as if I am French.  I’d love to connect in that same way in Italy.

Fast-forward to last week:  I happened upon a neighbor and her new doggy on my morning hike with Bo. She had to turn off her Pimsleur Spanish lesson on her iPhone to talk to me.  This had me come home to look up language learning programs. Our family has been talking about a trip to Italy next year to celebrate our dad’s new knee and Italian has been calling to me.  Which was most effective?  Pimsleur has been around forever, I’d seen ads for Rosetta Stone in the airport… Poking around online, I ended up on a website called Fluent in 3 Months with Benny the Irish Polyglot.  He’s written a book by the same title and has taught himself a bunch of languages really quickly.  I love it!  Something outside the box.  I’m just a few days into his free email series and I am incredibly inspired by his philosophy.

He talks about learning – in his world, languages – in a way that can apply to learning in general. He says you can’t learn to speak a language without speaking! And speaking right from the start, even before you learn how!  We often (and I have so experienced this) are frozen, unable to say anything, for fear of making mistakes.  He suggests you adopt a confidence and just go for it.

The inspiration immediately had me translate his philosophy to what I teach – painting watercolor. Just as you can’t learn to speak a language without speaking, you can’t learn to paint without painting!  There is a proverb I read on Benny’s site that is telling – and hilarious – it goes:  “If skill could be gained by watching, every dog would become a butcher.” We’ve got to get messy!  There have been budding artists in my classes and groups who are quite afraid to paint. I often find myself saying “it’s just a piece of paper, it’s not your worthiness!”   Just last week, I was hearing one painter in the Friday group express disappointment in how a wash looked to her. I suggested she instead say to herself:  “huh?” in sort of a, “isn’t that curious?” tone.

You see, in whatever we do, if we could do better we would.  We could look at missing the mark along the way as simply information, feedback about what that particular way of doing it resulted in.  Huh?  is freedom to swing out and see what happens.  Just like speaking to someone in a language I don’t yet know, even before I can come up with the correct words.  Benny says it speeds up learning languages, what if it also speeds up learning how to work with watercolor?   I’m going to keep following Benny’s pointers to learn Italian (we’ll see about the 3 months), and I’m going to apply this philosophy even more with the artists my groups. I bet that second-guessing ourselves slows us down.  As I read in a recent Seth Godin post “Taking delight in the journey takes confidence. It pushes the envelope of design. And it’s fun.”  So where do we get the confidence if we don’t have it?  We get it from each other, by risking together, it’s way more safe to make mistakes.  I say:  Andiamo!   Let’s have some fun!

November 4, 2014 – I started the day really crabby…

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I woke up yesterday morning in the worst, dark funk.  I’ve not been sleeping well, but that’s been the case on and off for over two years now.  This felt like something else.  I spent a lot of the weekend doing things that needed doing – stocking the larder (Costco, Trader Joe’s…), laundry, cooking for a family dinner – all things we  have to do – and that I do all the time, quite happily. I’m a very domestic lady and I really like keeping house.  But the studio has been still and dark a whole lot in the last weeks. With preparing for, leading and then recovering my energies from my first retreat and what seems like more teaching/leading than ever, I’ve found the impetus to go make my own art languishing. For the second weekend in a row, I told myself at the start I’d spend a lot of time painting, drawing, playing with color.  And I didn’t.  I just found myself pulled away by other things, with a remote sense that I wasn’t in my studio…

Sunday morning, just after awaking, I found myself tossing about in my head how I might set up a color mixing panel to play with the colors that can be made with three paints/pigments. It’s something I started in the color class that I led in October and has been a puzzle ever since. So hopped out of bed, made my warm lemon water and cozied up in my chair at my painting table.  I sat there in my fuzzy pink bathrobe and furry slippers playing with color arrangements.  I hadn’t even brushed my teeth! It’s something my logic brain loves – a puzzle! I spent an hour sorting out what to do and then mixing colors. Heaven.

I ended up figuring out a way to fill the 12×6 squares in a logical way to explore the range of color.  Who knew that we could make all these gorgeous and varied colors with just three pigments?  There is a part of me that loves just looking at the colors and another loves creating structure out of a jumble.  I’m an organizer-artist!  I had so much fun!  But then the rest of the day, I never circled back.

What all this showed me is that I must, must, must have some kind of play in my art-life, as well as simply giving myself the time to immerse in what I want to paint. I’ve been so focused on my desire to help others free their creativity that I’ve been starving mine in a way. I did finish “Rest” recently, and have been working in bits here and there on a sweet doggy portrait.  I’ve got four paintings that have been started over the past year or so and are nagging me to finish them. This is not what I’m craving. Maybe it’s what is keeping me from painting – and making me crabby – my telling myself I ought to finish them – like finishing my homework, rather than sink my brushes into the rain-dropped Fuyu persimmons that I took while up in Healdsburg, the day after the retreat.  This is the *photo* below (the painting will come):

Tomorrow I am teaching a Photoshop Elements for Artists class for the first time, and I’m not yet all ready (I’m one who gives merit to the saying “if it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done” – it’s just how I roll!).  So, today will hold more time on the computer – so that I can help others do the fun and satisfying composition work with software, before starting to draw and paint.  I did a bunch of work on the persimmon image above. It’s a key part of my process.  I love using technology to compose.  These tools are here at our disposal, so why not?

But – AND, I know that unless I carve out time to play with my brushes, or at least draw the persimmons, I will not be who I need to be tomorrow for them.

Sometime last year, I had this insight:  after having been a teacher and guide for other watercolorists for a few years now, my experience is that this is what I’m made for. There are lots of skilled and inspiring artists in the world.  If I think about how I was put together and the life that has lead me to where I am, being with people in their creative journeys (which are really their life journeys) is what I’m “meant” to do.  What followed was that I knew I must continue to paint my own paintings, because I need to stay in my own art-making process in order to best serve them in theirs, otherwise I’d be out of touch and could not have integrity in what I said to them, especially when it gets hard, which is often!

Today, this insight expands. Yes, I’m meant to teach, but there are paintings in me and they want out!  And when they are not let out, I am a very unhappy human.  There is a quote from a chapter heading in Dawna Markova’s “I Will Not Die an Unlived Life,” attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of St. Thomas.  I recently wrote it out, all colorful and playful.

It’s a bit intense, but Jesus was intense!  I have loved this idea, been emboldened by it, but yesterday and today, I feel it.  I started yesterday by making a huge, long to-do list, and ended up getting hardly any of it got done.  The art-maker had blockaded my “productivity” in protest!  I think it’s worse once we have given our lives, ourselves to our creative expression, once the flow gets really going, it’s much more painful when it’s stopped.  Take heed of that art-maker! She/He is quite a force!

To your creative expression –

Cara

October 28, 2014 – On the way to hallelujah

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Walking through our neighborhood for the past 13 years with our black Labradors, I’ve gotten to know many of our neighbors – especially the other doggy people.  It’s lovely how our pups connect us. 

The other morning, as Bo and I were bounding back down Marinda Dr to our street, we saw a neighbor out in his driveway.  He’s a tall, slender guy with a playful humor who loves Labs – we’ve heard his stories about his Labs growing up – the one who played catch with herself on their sloped driveway, and the one whose tail was broken when his brothers and he used him as a tugboat in the lake! Yikes!  He called us over and said “hey, I’m so sorry about the other day –  I had grandkids around and lots going on and I couldn’t really say hi.”  His apology was so heart-felt – as if he’d been thinking about it and was glad to repair things with me.  I had a only a wisp of a memory of the time he was talking about – but without any sense of any slight on his part.  I had no idea what he was apologizing for!

His apology left me with a feeling of appreciation for his concern for Bo and me – he really cares to give us his time of day.   And it had me recall so many times I’d felt badly because of things a voice inside told me I’d done to wrong others. One time was this past summer.  I twisted myself up in the terrible feeling that my choice of words in an email to a friend had been insensitive.  When I didn’t hear back from her, I was convinced that was why.  I wasn’t able to release myself until I heard from her that she hadn’t given it a second thought. She hadn’t gotten back to me right  away because she was busy!

As much as I find this feeling incredibly uncomfortable, I have come to honor this part of our inner critic.  We are beings who need to belong within our circles of humans in order to survive, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually.  If we aren’t checking ourselves at all, we can erode the natural instinct in others to care for us.  I lived with someone who never said “I’m sorry” in fourteen years.  I am not with him anymore for good reason!  This capacity carries with it a kind of sweetness which holds us together.

Of course our inner critics can go too far. There is so much written and spoken about dealing with our inner critics for a good reason.  Being too hard on ourselves is crippling.  That said, I have this penchant for looking for the light in the dark – there is good reason healthy people have a functioning critic.

It certainly seems to be well-installed for the art-making process!  I’ve not met anyone who has worked their way out of it.  I see it in myself and, in varying degrees, in every painter who joins our groups or comes to my workshops.  There are a few who paint for the pure joy of it, where it seems their critic is not at play as much. Even these people have doubts about their work at times.

I’ve come to see the critical voice not as something that we overcome in order to live the lives we yearn for, but rather to work with and around.  In the creative process, it often goes by the name “resistance.” In physical exercise, we are strengthened by resistance – our muscles grow if we ask them to lift more weight.  It seems it functions similarly when we create.  I cannot imagine how I could have painted “Hallelujah” until I’d grown my capacities by painting and painting, working around the voice that told me I couldn’t paint that big and bold.

Then there’s the outer critic!  I listened to an interesting interview of Tara Sophia Mohr in which she says that feedback is 100% about the giver of it and not about our work. Huh.  She says she now writes for herself and considers feedback as information about her audience.  The problem is that many of our creator muscles have been weakened or even paralized by negative feedback/criticism.  She says we look for praise in places where we doubt ourselves and/or in line with what we want to be true about us. Of course!  Any form of genuine expression is inherently vulnerable – making it risky, especially at first. This makes it incredibly important to have a safe environment in which to create. If the desire to create is strong enough, it will overcome the voices of resistance.  But we can set it up to help it along.  My experience is that safety allows us to risk and praise is amazingly encouraging, fueling the desire to continue to create.

At our best, we are relational beings who need each other to feed and support our efforts – our lives.  I love the idea that we can develop the capacity to see feedback as all about “them,” watching the parts in us that respond to it – in all the various ways they do – revealing ourselves to us.  After all, we don’t choose the art we make, it chooses us, and we paint/write/create with the skill level we have in this moment. If we could do better, we would!   It follows then, that there’s nothing “wrong” with anything we create. Feedback is just information and the invitation to respond to that information.  For me that’s a formula for creative freedom. Hallelujah!

October 21, 2014 – Firsts, beginnings, starting out

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The first “Life in Full Color” retreat was just this past weekend. I’m still so filled with it that I’m not sure all there is to share of it. I’m still like a fish in the ocean – not conscious of the fact that there’s anything besides water to live in. Eight of us gathered at Vinegrove, a private vineyard in the west part of Healdsburg. It is just what I imagine as “the wine country” – acres of vines, a huge persimmon tree – full of orange fruit, chickens, a lovely flower garden – (there were still roses!) with fun bright-colored furniture and gravel paths. Plus a freshly and beautifully remodeled barn-loft looking out onto it all, which was our studio for the weekend. All this wrapped in only the sound of the birds and a very occasional airplane.

There were seven participants-painters-artists, two of which are regular painters in our weekly groups, two had had taken a Saturday class with me – relatively new painters, but have painted some. And three who had never before taken watercolor brush to paper. I watched them swish the brush in color and take away the whiteness of the paper. It’s a thrilling experience – to make your mark, to transform something in this way. It’s a curious thing for me – what is it in us that has us want, desire, even long to do this? It’s not watercolor, or even painting, for everyone, but it seems that we have factory-installed an impetus to effect change on our world – especially to create something where there wasn’t before.

When I’m out showing my work I often hear people say that they could never do what I do because they have no talent. I have written about talent a bit in the web-page about my weekly groups, but after watching people see their first work this weekend, with varying combinations of delight and judgment, I wanted to explore this idea of talent further. I looked it up online and discovered some interesting meanings. The original ancient Greek meaning was “a weight, especially of gold, or a unit of money.” Hmmm… a way to parcel out value. Much later, in Old French it meant “will, inclination or desire.” Double hmmm.

We do value talent like gold. The meaning of the word now is a “marked natural ability or skill.” It’s as if we are either blessed with it from birth or not. The thing for me is how do we know we have talent, if we’ve never even tried something? What do you think this painting here would say about the innate talent of the artist who painted it?

I painted it about 20 years ago. If I judged my “talent” upon this piece, I might be still slogging myself to the city working in Information Architecture in corporate IT! But there was and is something in me – in us that has us keep at it. I kept painting and evolving as a painter – gaining skills and confidence and coming upon this thing I call “Life in Full Color” that I express with my artwork.

There are skills to be gained, there is a craft to what we do. There’s so much to learn in working with the paint, paper and especially water. Then there is color – and composition. The stuff of art-making. Beginning work is always beginning work and worth celebrating, like a child’s first steps. But it’s never the work of an experienced hand and eye. The more we do it, the more refined our capacity becomes to work with the materials and our vision – what we want to “say” with what we create – clarifies.

It’s more sticking with it than it is anything God-given. And what keeps us doing that comes back to the Old French meaning of “talent.” (Being a huge Francophile, I love that it was Old French!) It’s the desire, the will, and the inclination to paint! It also is linked to what we love. I LOVE watercolor. I love how it moves, I love the purity of paper and color/pigment. I have no choice, it has me. And I love what I paint – flowers, fruit, colorful, artful food, sweet doggy faces. We don’t choose what we love, it chooses us. I cannot will myself to respond to slate grey the way I do magenta-pink!

Here’s what I have come to believe – those of us who make art have been blessed not by “marked natural abilities or skills” so much as we have hearts filled with such desire to make art and such love for color and shape, or for our subjects that we stick to it. It follows that what it is we are here to say comes into form. If this love and desire is in you, follow it! If there’s something stopping you, I’m here to give you permission. Make your mark!