Nothing new, just LOVE YOU, every corner, every crumb

Falling asleep imagining vintage neckties for the fictional Mr. Apotienne.  I believe he might have been drawn to this Klimt-inspired fabric.

The Klimt pattern, called Apple Tree, encourages, perhaps urges me to do what has been calling so annoyingly, like neighbor boys when I was four years old, screaming over the fence for my mother to give them cookies.  The older one, soon after we moved the next year, climbed into his father's oil tanker truck, released the brake and crashed through fencing, foliage, pasture and what-all to collide with the dairy at the end of the block.  We all assumed his life trajectory had just begun.

Paying attention to the hectoring, I did some watercoloring the other day and a disturbingly primitive effort it seemed to be.  A conversation with a sister artist about how her work did not match the expectation either let us soften toward our output.  In my best moments, I am able to see my work, whatever form it takes, as an unclassified rogue beast with a very pointy head, bald, of course, upon which I give it kisses and gentle pats.  The work, for better or worse, is ours, is us.  We will, if we persevere, become better at it and if we don't become better, we will have the virtue of consistency about which we may feel pride.

Such a response is not at all the same as assuming anything we do is wonderful, extraordinary, worth lots of money and why aren't the publishers and gallery owners calling?  The response is the very one we, for I assume I am not alone in this, wish to embrace about all the aspects of ourselves, that of unconditional - yes, I believe it exists - love for all our pointy-headed and warty parts.  We are not intended to demean ourselves, nor our work, both of which are in process, both of which are continually becoming.  We are our most exalted moments and our weakest links, soaring inspiration and the shame-riddled slacking on our exercises.  We love the genius and the backslider equally.  And we love our work, either privately and quietly or openly and with noisy hoo-rah, the same way.  To reject any part of the whole being is punishing, mean and probably familiar. 

We are not witless, we know what work hits the mark and what doesn't.  Love it anyway.  Love it and celebrate it and let it worm its way into your heart where it belongs.  No one ever told me this was a continuum, that each thing was a gateway to the next.  I assumed there was an end we reached where we stopped and accepted this was how it would be for the time we had left.  Nay, nay, I've discovered that it, we, evolve, expand, alter and persist, if we are lucky and willing, growing to fill the impossible largeness of  our pointy-headed selves.

(Very likely I've said all this before, which means I will likely say it again.  I repeat what I need to remember.)

Summer and space

"The summer had inhaled and held its breath too long..."


I run from tv news, even local programs for anything other than weather forecasts, having lost trust in their ability to tell wheat from chaff.  While I spent this last full summer morning visiting with a life-long friend on what we call the stoop of our apartment,  actual news was being made as the space shuttle Endeavour took its farewell aerial tour above California landmarks en route to LA International Airport and its eventual home in LA's California Science Center.  I caught up with its flight as it made a final circle above LAX, then  began the six-mile last leg from the Harbor Freeway to touchdown.  I loved every minute of coverage I saw: the jumping, cheering children on school playgrounds; teary space program fans lining roadsides and elbow-to-elbow at Griffith Park Observatory; low-level passes above the Hollywood sign, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Santa Monica Pier; a tour of the 747 which impossibly ferried Endeavour across the country one last time.

There is not enough in the news that gladdens my heart.  Today was another creature altogether.  From my junior high science class and our first successful satellite through today's curtain calls for one incarnation of the U.S. space program, I have been among the awe-struck.  I choose to believe that our most extraordinary advances in space exploration await.   I've heard of a 100-year plan being put into effect, something so bold that the phrase "bending the space-time continuum" has been used in conjunction with it.  Possibly apocryphal or my own wishful thinking, I have no reason to doubt that it could be true.  Already I envy the wide-eyed. leaping students who will be here to cheer that mission's completion.