Laundry Line Divine

“I believe I am worth the time it takes to create whatever I feel called to create.”
Jan Phillips The Artist’s Creed

Do you feel stingy with yourself sometimes? That taking time for yourself is just too luxurious an act when there is so much more to be done in your day. Dinner to cook, clutter to clear, papers to grade, people to listen to…all these things that make up the pastiche of your home life, those things can soak up your hours like a fresh sponge takes up spilled wine. Completely.

And there you are at the end of the day, with your manuscript untouched for the fifth year, your paint drying in their tubes, the hat you started to felt a lump in the bottom of a forgotten basket. How could you possibly write a letter, it has been so long, the recipients have lost the threads of your connection and it is just too much to bear?

How?

I have felt this way. I have wept as I frosted cakes or washed the 75th cup of the day, shed tears over unwritten words. But there, in those acts, those quotidian acts of mothering, I began to feel the beauty of my life unfold when I began to take pleasure in and love the work I was doing. I began to see even doing laundry as an entry point to my creativity, as an expression of myself. Here is what my friend Beth Bornstein Dunnington wrote on her Face book page yesterday. Beth and I studied acting together in New York City with Deborah Hedwall at Ensemble Studio Theatre. Over the years of our friendship, we had no inkling that today, nearly thirty years later, having children and marriages and travels and our careers, we could share the inspiration wrought at a laundry line.

“Today hung clothes on a clothesline in my back yard (hidden to everyone by us, so no one has to look out their window in Hawaii and see our sheets when they’re trying to see the ocean) and I have to say how AMAZING everything smells and feels!!! More work to hang things up, but it doesn’t compare to a dryer. Memories of watching the old Jewish bubbie, my grandmother, and my aunt hanging clothes between buildings in back of their 3-decker house in Revere, MA. Clothespins in Bubbie’s mouth as she used the pulley thing to reel the clothes in and out. Everyone on top of everyone in those homes, but this amazing village of women! Not even sure where the men were back then, but they aren’t in these memories at all… Great to watch all of it when I was a kid. I thought about them today when I put a clothespin in my mouth. Especially my girl, Nana Anna. ♥” by Beth Bornstein Dunnington

Do you see how Beth allowed the act of hanging up her sheets to inspire a long string of memories that gave way to a story. The comment thread on her FB post bears witness to the communal experiences connected by a clothesline!

Then, last night, before the bat started sweeping low in our bedroom interrupting precious sleep, I read these words by another she-ro, Laurie Colwin.

“This made Nellie think of the thousands of things they did not know and would never know: that family glaze of common references, jokes, events, calamities- that sense of a family being like a kitchen midden: layer upon layer of the things daily life is made of.”

We, women, mothers, artists, are fabricating a new archeology by creating art from the immediacy of our daily lives. In celebrating these acts, by harnessing the massive power of women’s voices- muffled for centuries and strengthening daily, by telling just how it is for you and me telling just how it is for me, we construct something not meant to compost with the banana peels, but to reside in our collective memory and to be carried on. Beth’s memory of her Bubbie, mouth full of wooden clothespins, smiling in the sun, squinting to see across the glare of white sheets in to the next laundry maze where aproned woman and overalls and socks create a panorama of daily life- yes- this has value today because this life is vanishing quickly. More and more people are living in cities where the chance to hang laundry, to stand under a 250 year old maple and look at the sky, where the pace of life prevents us from taking these moments to pause and reflect and be inspired. I love city life, but if I still lived in NYC, I’d need to be vigilant about keeping connected to the natural and daily rhythms of life.

Laundry Line Divine came to be when I stood out at that line and knew it is mine as a full time mom to hang that wash and it is also mine to express myself, as a creative person, using the language and metaphor of my daily life. I could not deny who I was and pretend to be someone who did not have to be free by three o’clock to meet the bus or cancel an appointment because I have a sick child or need to help on the class play.
I am a woman, a rampantly alive woman, who is a wife and mother. I am also a woman who is vigorously determined to stand for my value and the value of others willing to tell their stories. Particularly women’s stories.

And, so, the blog series goes on. Beth has given me a piece to open this next chapter of ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’. Leigh Strimbeck will be here. Jennifer Boire. Lori Landau. Karen Arp-Sandel. Miranda Hersey. Susan Hajec. I will keep you posted.

If you have no idea where to start or what your own authentic voice sounds like, read my friend Regena’s post today about intuition. I will continue to share with you resources for tuning your ears to your own voice.

Until we meet again, look up Laurie Colwin’s cookbooks A Writer in the Kitchen and A Writer Returns to the Kitchen. They were just inducted in to the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame. Janet and I are thrilled. We are planning a Laurie Colwin event with our friend Alana. More on all this later.

Time to work on that yearbook.
All my best love to you and thanks for returning to the Laundry Line,

S

Almost Always on Thursdays

Where do you write?
When, what time of day can you hold your pen to a few sentences?
Who do you write about?
What is the sentence you are afraid to write?
Are you willing to write one small sentence today that is a step toward your innermost truth? Even when it is hard?

At night make me one

With the darkness.

In the morning make me one

With the light.

Wendell Berry

Every morning I sit in my red chair, this red chair
and write in my journal.
I began daily writing when I was 14 when my English teacher required us to keep a daily log. I began collaging and writing in to spiral notebooks. There have been gaps of time when I did not write so diligently and you could probably parallel my well-being and sanity levels with whether or not I was writing. Whenever I return after a hiatus, I tumble as if in to the palms of the Divine- the open pages a prayerful sanctum, the place where my deepest fears and thoughts have safe harbor and where, with listening forged from discipline, I am able to create.

I don’t take the time I have to create lightly. There are many who would prefer if I would help with this or that effort. I have to be vigilant in how I divide my hours. After years of full time mothering with brief dips in to my own work, I have leveled the scales a bit and given myself more and more time to create. Though I have not yet generated a strong income stream with my work, the engagement of pleasure in everything I do has so massively offset the discomfort of changing my availability to outside pulls on my time, I am encouraged to just work on. My husband supports me in this. He picks up the areas of childcare that I let slip for a few hours each day and almost always on Thursdays. Our partnership is founded in the belief that our marriage is here to shelter each other’s flames. My greatest joy is to feel JNB’s engagement in his life, in his work and parenting. He is a brilliant man and I love that his work supplies us with all we need to raise this family together. My tenure as the full time Mom who makes art within the hours of my daily life is firmly at the center of how we operate. I cannot thread sentences together consistently without his support. He cannot do his work without my support. Together, we share this gift of parenting our two children and within a few steps of my studio, he works at his desk, changing the mold for how certain areas of law are practiced.

That red chair is my starting place. I pray. I meditate. I Spring Clean with my Sister Goddess friends. I check in with my partners in the practices of The Seven Sacred Steps. I write my daily pages, I brag, I state my gratitude and my desires. I read Rumi and Jan Phillips and Mary Oliver and Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I read Eleanor Estes and Diane Gaboldon. I read Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley and Anne Lamott. I watch crows, bluebirds and the laundry flapping in the spring air. I set my sails for a day like today, which being Thursday means I don’t have to take care of a kid thing until about 2pm. I wish it was til 6pm, but today that is not the case.

My friend Lori Landau sits in a red chair too when she begins her day. Her chair is her launching pad too. We are both yoginis, taking our practice of meditation and asana in do our daily lives, in to our art and our communications. Lori and I and Karen have shared our writing and mail art. Our budding friendship is a result of us intersecting on Face book, supporting each other’s work and flourishing in that light.

Sharing is becoming a verb of the highest magnitude these days. Between Pinterest and FB and Google and Tumblr and all the other social media outlets, you could spend hours upon hours drifting the waves of the web and picking up inspiration. I do not take your time lightly and thank you for finding yourself here on the Laundry Line.

I had a discussion with my kids last night at the dinner table. I was quite pleased with the meal- roast turkey breast, faro and veggies and a raw green dip that Ben slathered over the meat. We began with a feverish argument about our summer plans. But, by some alchemical action that I only witnessed, Catherine steered the tension towards another topic and soon Ben was holding forth on ‘commodification’ The three of us began talking about their Waldorf grade school experiences. I drew examples from their upbringing of our family value of hand and homemade living. Of being the source or close to the point of origination of our food, and other necessities. We have raised our children in the presence of laundry flapping in the wind of our backyard. We have cooked meals with and for them, stressed to the point of nagging at times the virtue of making things if we can, before we buy things. In their adolescent years this has become more challenging. Potato chips seem to taste much better out of a sealed bag shipped to us from far away. Just yesterday our friend Alana’s cookbook arrived with a recipe for potato chips I am eager to try.

Locally sourced food and locally sourced collaborators fill my days. My art collaborator Karen Arp-Sandel and I connect with mail art nearly every week. The authors from my first ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’ event are women that I cross paths with here in the Berkshires. One of these authors, Jenny Laird, harks from around the block and though we hardly ever lay eyes on each other, we are connected by our care for one another, our witness of our children’s growing and our willingness to be transparent with each other.

Jenny’s reading on March 2 was chillingly fierce. She described a night she and her husband spent in a Ronald McDonald House hotel room having just given birth to their amazing son Quinn. Jenny’s dark night birthed her fierce beautiful mothering. We were mesmerized by the humor she found in a desperately sad situation. And, as her friends today, we are constantly inspired by the grace she brings to her mothering Quinn, a diminutive wonder of a boy. I see Quinn out walking with his various friends from my red chair, see him pause to watch a vehicle pass him, his eyes locked on the motion whizzing past him.

Jenny sends out writing prompts to her students and friends who like that sort of mail. Today I wrote on this one: The dark space between the stars.

Here, I fall
limitless black
no claim on shape or dimension
your hole, gravity evaporates and my million parts fragment to triune dust.
let me hide here
from all I know not
all I fear for this and that
let me be, in this limitless expanse
away from budding crocus, purple lobed beacon of bright
and stay my pressing pulse against ebon emptiness.

I take Jenny’s prompts like sightings of the Northern Lights over the oaks that stand between our homes. I know she is over there, expressing her brilliance in the sky of her home life, shedding her light on those close to her. I feel lucky to be near her. And am so grateful for all she has shared with ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’.

Today’s new ‘Out’ blog post is by Sarah Buttenwieser, from Northampton, MA. Sarah came to my attention through Bess Hochstein and Gina Hyams, two more ‘Out’ supporters. Sarah writes from a different space, nearly a closet. Sarah writes a wonderful blog here.

Where ever you write or create, in whatever corner of your home over which you hang your ‘do not disturb’ sign, the courage to take the time to express yourself- to make your ‘inner’ ‘outer’- is vital to the evolution of our species. Sharing our stories, the grizzly and the glorious, all have the positive action of drawing near another soul in need of warmth. Just today I heard from a friend I have known since 5th grade, who has quietly been reading these posts on LLD and took the magnificent action of submitting her first piece of art to the Arthouse Coop. What joy!

Jan Phillips writes this in her book, No Ordinary Time:

What inspires us? The creations of others, in any form- stories, poems, images. We love to see what people are creating. It’s what feeds us, sustains us, entertains us, alters us consciously, emotionally, spiritually.

Thank you for reading me here.
Thank you for following the ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’ blog series.
Thank you for taking a stand for your own creativity.

I honor that step.
Right now, my laundry flaps in the spring air.
I will step out to stand in the sun and give thanks for another chance to tell you mine, hoping that you will tell me yours.

Love, S

I am steeped in talking about ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’ and pondering the importance of creativity in my life and the lives of all people. In less that a week, we will premiere our first ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes: An Evening of Mothers Reading to Others’ at The Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. Since I began this work, of talking about the transformation that creativity incited in my own life as a mother and the stories of my days with my children, I have met with a massive longing of other women to tell their stories. My friend Marion Roach, in Albany hosts a memoir project worth looking in to. And another friend Cori Howard of She Writes, hosts a ‘Momoir’ project. Here on the Laundry Line, I am hosting the ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’ blog series.

Today’s ‘Out’ post is by Dara McKinley of Volver Now,in Seattle. Dara’s post is viscerally charged with the passion of a mother witnessing loss. In it’s brief cut, like a neat split of the skin revealing hot red blood, Dara stands in grief witnessing the power of creativity.

The world is not divided into two groups, the creative people and the not creative people. If there’s a distinction, it’s between those who are creatively productive and those with unexpressed potential. We’re all creative by default. We’re genetically predisposed to create. Each of us, to varying degrees, is intrinsically motivated to be original and to solve challenging problems. The question to ask is not, “Am I creative?” but rather, “What inspires me and how can I share that?”
Creativity is not about intelligence or information. It’s about inspiration, from the Latin spiritus, meaning “breath, courage, the soul.” Creativity is about being fully alive, living courageously, or as the painter Joan Miro says, “Expressing with precision all the gold sparks the soul gives off.” We inspire each other when we dare to create. We open others’ hearts. We unlock their doors so their spirits can soar. And this is why it matters: because the path through the dark forest can be lit by our work. Others can find their courage in the creations we conjure. Our stories can help people see these times in a new way, understand that this chaos is only a local view of the cosmos evolving beautifully.

this is from Jan Phillips’ Huffington Post of 12.22.11

‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’ lights the path for us all, particularly women.

I found these words by Jan and this author I long to meet in person, Jay Griffiths. I read this quoted text from her article in the Orion Magazine, which is published here in my small town of Great Barrington, MA.

Griffiths writes:

Essential to our self-expression as individuals and as a species, art suggest something of the divine: humanity’s purpose is to “participate in the world-creator’s play of creation,” said Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. …Art is a messenger carrying to its audience what Arthur Miller called “News of the inner world,” and he continued, if people “went too long without such news, they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.”

Mary Oliver, one of the greatest poets of our time, who lives on the other side of my state of Massachusetts, has been ill for a time. Thankfully, her health is improving. There was a call though, with news that this inspired woman was possibly fatally ill, to write tributes to Mary.
I beg you to read this poem, this one poem, and to know the comfort, the warmth, and the necessity of art in your life. Creativity is boundless. Allow yourself the indulgence of time to encounter that which is essential to all of us.

To Begin with, the Sweet Grass

1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say – behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
of this gritty earth gift.

2.

Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs….

4.

Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
The dancer, the potter,
To make me a begging bowl
Which I believe
My soul needs.

And if I come to you,
To the door of your comfortable house
With unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
Will you put something into it?

I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.

5.

We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we change.
Congratulations, if
You have changed.

6.

Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some fabulous reason?

And if you have not been enchanted by this adventure-
Your life-
What would do for you?

7.

What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
through with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

May you love your own light.
And give thanks,
S

Life is scary.

No fooling.

Things happen.
Shit.
Broken legs.
Dropped stitches.
Missed planes.
Car accidents.
Death.
Uprisings.

I know it.
I know you have it all going on in your life, just as I do in mine.
And, up on that banner across the top of this website it reads: “Laundry Line Divine: Seeing and Celebrating the Sacred in Daily Life”.

I guess I better put my money where my mouth is.

This week has been harrowing for the Baum family.
Today we celebrated one week from a hellish day at Albany Medical Center. Last Sunday we spent the day helping our 17 year old traverse the agony of a broken leg in a temporary splint, numerous transfers from bed to gurney and back again for x-rays and cat-scans and the long minutes of waiting for the swelling of his left shin to go down.
It was not an easy day.

But, time has passed.

The week has turned to February. The sky is lighter at 5 pm so I can ice skate at twilight. I scared the crap out of myself today. Let’s say I am still a little jumpy. Iced lakes make a sound not unlike a whale singing below the ocean surface- this deep, resonant twanging. Skating over glassy ice in the moonlight, velvet lavender ice sparkling then- BWOOOONNNNNG. The majestic sound of ice layers forming and the pressure changing across the inner surface of the ice booms across the sublime scene. I knew I would not fall in the water. To a lake skater, this sound is good.

But to an uber-alert Mom who has returned to infant style vigilance when every sound emitted from my son’s bedroom is a possible cry for assistance, I leapt out of my skin.

I let my heart slow down. I have felt the steady beat of my heart so much this week. I felt it race as I nearly hit the Ortho Resident for humiliating my suffering son by telling him to “man up”. I felt my heart then. Holding my son’s head as he screamed in pain as they put him in that first splint. I felt my heart then. Cuddling Ben today as he hugged me close to thank me for restocking his snack tray, I felt my heart then, too.
At the lake’s edge, I watched the moon shimmer.
I breathed gratitude for being alive.
And I headed home to write to you.

We are celebrating creativity in these early months of 2012. This is my work in the world. The Blog Series for ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’ has 5 posts queued up for this week as more women step up to share their stories. I am so glad Linda Jackson, Sherry Collier, Shari Simpson, Kelly DiNorcia, and Lissa Rankin have posted.

It is not easy to rustle up the time or the appetite to do something other than parent when your arms are wrapped up in meals and care. Wiping and rinsing and brushing and peeling, hanging and sorting and folding and driving and running and debating and arguing and settling and admonishing and reminding and leading and modeling and paring and steeping and sweetening and badgering and cosseting and lacing and racing all just sucks up the hours and who the heck has time to thread the sewing needle anyway?

Legions of women before us out of sheer necessity, spent hours creating things for themselves and their families from materials they may have grown or raised, creating things that would comfort, clothe or cover their children and spouses.

This week’s ‘Out’ blog post by Linda Jackson reveals her connection to her mother and generations of women who have handled fiber. The thread of inventing beauty and utility connects all Linda’s diverse passions.

These antique textiles are from a show I saw at the Chicago Art Institute two weeks ago.

I have carried around this quote for years from Jennie June, a well known American needle worker who said this in 1880:

The little worktables of women’s
fingers, are the playground of
women’s fancies, and their
knitting needless are the
fairy-wands by which they
transform a whole room in to
a spirit isle of dreams.

I want to have an authentic conversation about mothering and creativity. According to Jan Phillips in her extraordinary book No Ordinary Time

“ If someone doesn’t go first, how will authentic conversations ever get started?”

I know it is fun to recall the hours I spent frosting Christmas cookies with my kids. We have all had those wondrous moments creating things with our children. But what I am calling out for here is what is birthed from the deeper places in your soul, the works that cry out to you in the middle of the night.
On one particular needy afternoon this week, Ben could not go for more than 20 minutes or so without me being near him. Pain, distraction, discomfort, warmth, drink- he just needed my company through it all.

I knew this was a temporary state of affairs. I will not be wiping my son’s chin for more than a few more days as he gets stronger and more confident in this new way of being. But, I was torn from my desk; from the slim momentum I had gained in stringing one thought after another. And I was angry.

I could not vent this on him. I would not even leak it to him. But it reminded me of the days, months and years of my early mothering in which this was the case twenty-four seven, even when I had child-care and a supportive husband. I still had to be back on time. I could not slip the yoke of responsibility from my neck permanently.

Mothers have fear that they will never, ever think a complete thought again. You get interrupted. You get distracted. You forget. One of the gifts of this week with Ben and re-entry into such demanding parenting is this thought: With young children, or in my case, time soaking teen agers, a mother has thoughts, but they are erased by distraction, stress, weary brains and bodies. You fear the worst, that you will forget the thread of that magic equation and you do in fact, lose it. How could you possibly hold on to it with the noise of your life diluting your essence?

This is where any connection to creativity comes as saving grace.

Your creativity is the string upon which the jewels of your authentic essence are strung. Your insiders story from the front lines of mothering- that soul food- is what we are able to serve through our acts of creativity.

I don’t wish this week of my life on anyone. I am aware that things could have been so much worse. I am thankful with every breath a prayer that we will all recuperate from this time and perhaps are stronger for it. We certainly will know each other better.

But, I would not exchange this chance of being intimately close to my son again. I am so very sorry he has to suffer this pain, this major time-out of his junior year in high school. And I will press in to my heart these moments of humor borne in vulnerability, of rousing joy at simple progress and the quiet peace of him healing under our care.

I could not have done this without my cell level mission that is Laundry Line Divine. I do see and celebrate the sacred in daily living.
In the ordinary and mundane.
In ambulances and emergency rooms.
On ice slicked evenings with the moon at my toes.

Write on.
Love, S