Monday, August 21, 2017
8:24 p.m.
Red and Live Oaks groan in motion with every thunderstorm. After the light and clamor, what falls from the tree’s heights is anyone’s guess until the following afternoon. It is not always elves bowling in the dark cloud shelf above, neither is it giants taking heavy slats of mahogany to the ants crawling about on the roof. The disturbance is a herald for the coming of autumn. The sounds and sights are a warning that changes in nature reflect the human psyche’s coming dormancy. As usual, I am late, naked, and bereft to the announcement. For me summer just got started. Whether or not I have dunked my head under chlorinated waves at the local pool is not the point. Lessons in an outdoor classroom just started to get comfortable. No doubt because the cool winds that careen Colorado’s mountains and made their way South. Paying attention to the weather, I can conclude that wet gales are too a sign of autumn. The sign of emotional transformation will soon follow. What I expect is that my mind will get lost in the storm clouds. Everything else will be forgotten.
October borders the land between the living and the dead. I would be hiding with the bees in childhood memories of forsythias if I said I sat in the land of the living most of my life. Bolstering that lie would confirm me as shallow, confused, and a portent of confusion. The occasion of my Grandmother’s death when I was nine may have ushered me over to that sensitivity to hide and covet my emotional numbness. Since then, neither the death of family nor animals garners a public reaction from me. I go away physically and emotionally. Sometimes I go far away. Those images of death paired with words and faces find me in my safe places like painting on the studio desk or quilting in the green wing-backed chair.
For me, crying is not the sole method of healing. Recognizing a moment as the last visitation to a relative gives the beginnings of closure. For me, opportunities to heal come and go, both sign, symbol, and face throughout the year. At those times being alone allows for repairing a deeper wound. It need be done in silence and awareness. The perfect time for this is the stillness and reflection garnered by autumn. October is the cusp of that perfect situation before moving into the nature of loss and letting go as seen in winter.
I just started revisiting that distance between the clouds of where I sit and where my grandfather may be. The presence of his sight wracked my brain the last year in graduate school. I cannot argue that the art continued in a familiar vein since the day I began studies. What happened the last two semesters was that the vapid air of meaninglessness that I accused myself of all ebbed away under hammer, nail, wax, and oil paint. My work took on a life that I saw existed only between the pages of the arts of ancient civilizations. I usually cannot see what I have done until I take a photograph of the piece. Then, the angle of the camera shot did not make a difference. I could see the validity of complicated beginnings coming to successful fruition and relations. In shock, I sat in reflection over one painting, Priapus Mons, for most of that year. The pain of the craft and ingenuity of the designing eye dragged me into a fire lit cave for a little while.
At the end of that graduating year, the cast mystical air had left. Well, so I thought. That mystical air I called out as my grandfather’s dreaming. It was a journey that began after his death when I was in high school. My process of grieving shifted into a mental alertness that is difficult to manage. Being awake and dreaming his property and the sights around made no bones about following me over 2,000 miles away. I spent six years in graduate school wading in waters over my head when it came to carving out an image and style for me. Painting the sights of emotional transformation and painful attachments between dream and sleeping bodies is what I understand occurred in and out of the studio. The work was never a matter of making objects of power. If anything it was matter of building objects that facilitated a cognitive change in the viewer. In other words I was creating objects that helped bridge the way between worlds. By its use you could leave and return.
The journey of words began in the journals in college. The journey of effects started in the studio of graduate school. Damned if I do not need a map to know where I am at now. On second thought, I know my body is at home and I am a notch or two below being fully awake. Tonight I just might resist sleep, but one instance is for sure the sights will make themselves known if necessary. One question I cannot answer is when school was over, why would I think that the dreaming had left? I am staring a stack of unfinished work and my hand shakes. The smell of bee’s wax is lingering in my nostrils and I am envisioning layers of quilts on the bed. October calls with a portent of chilled air hovering over rust and yellow ochre colored leaves. Unlike the containment of summer’s fully blossomed trees, the space between buildings echoes the stillness of the grave. Anticipating grandfather’s image come All Hallow’s Eve, I am preparing for a cold room and rain. I need pull out the picture album and trace my finger across his tell tale furrow over the brows. My mother has it, my uncle has it, my brother has it, and so do I. That furrow means I have somewhere to belong. It also means the psyche’s work of pulling rocks and filling ditches in my soul starts at the lunar helm before granddad shows his face. I am confused though how to proceed this year. All Hallow’s Eve through All Saint’s and Soul’s Day is the one time I check in and answer to my ancestors. I may fall of into slumber before those midnight hours, but I always feel resolved come then end of the three days. This year I am finally worried. How do I explain I promised and planned to quilt through this and the solar New Year? Yes, this is a good question. How do you answer to your ancestors? Especially when the questions foment beneath your sternum or when guilt born from the knowledge of wrong wrings your hands. When your word is like blood when you enter into a promise how do you answer your gatekeepers who are made of kin flesh?
Pain is shooting up and down my spine. I am curled over in disappointment and fear. On second hopes, my grandfather may have something to ask other than am I still taking care of my mother? One year gone from here, he left me with the thought that he was going off to fight for me. Where he went, I do not know. Against whom I do not know. I may need to do the talking this time, even if he does not return this year. Like grandfather’s quiet, I have my secrets stemming from sharp and thread. I have bled from the tips of fingers too much not to. Grandfather trained for World War II. I may learn more of code as a quilter than I would ever understand alone. I may have never had much of a chance to choose a path. For now I can say that seduction and boredom dictate too much when one is sensitive and lonely. Art not only passes the time, but also comforts. Of the dead or living I am in good company.
October is coming and I am in a tizzy. Being pulled into old mindsets cannot take control. The open autumn breeze is destroying my knees. I do not expect prayer to dismiss former attentions that tear away from the creative mind. I feel like the oracle at Delphi about to take a seat over the chasm. One thing I did forget is that the sun is still firmly placed in the sky and continues to be the reflection of the moon by and by. Whatever sensitivity brings over the October’s ridge, will be grace and an offering to the living.
~As ever, stay hungry and curious.