Laundry Line Divine

This snowless winter has not failed to pile drifts of inertia around my legs.
I want to crawl back in to bed on these gray mornings.
Hibernation. I hear my dear friend Anne Davin tell me January is time to hibernate.
I am healthy. I am well. I am not depressed.
I have taken stock of the past year.
I have stored the seeds of my desires for this New Year, this new year of the dragon-though for me it feels like the year of the squirrel. I host visions of a petite gray furred creature encircled in a nest of oak leaves, sleeping out the windy days in a high treetop.

Knowing that I had work to do today, that napping was an option, I took the morning more slowly than usual. I did not jump on to my computer. I let myself stay in my jammies. Thursdays are my art day. My husband and I have arranged ourselves around this day being the one day of the week where phone calls, appointments, music lessons, SAT prep class arrangements, pizza runs for late night paper writers, laundry duties and all the rest are handled by him. We have a life that has room for this. Jonathan’s office is in our attic. He is very disciplined when it comes to time, so, for one day a week, he makes this work.
When I say Jonathan is my hero, you now know just what I mean.

It came to me this quiet morning that I could treat myself as I would treat my best friend. No hurrying. No pressure to produce. Lots of tea.

I sat in my red chair by the window. This is the place where I write early in the morning, where I conduct my long phone calls, where the dome of silence is almost visible, where I can look out over our yard at crow’s eye level. My red chair is my crow’s-nest on my ship of dreams. There I sat and read this by Jan Phillips as the steel ceilinged morning passed me by.

“…I remember that I owe my creative spirit all the time and tenderness I would give my dearest beloved. One is as precious as the other.”

Now, at the later end of this day where rain has begun to fall, lowering the moods of the skiers in my household, I have risen to the occasion of some creating today. My Arthouse Sketchbook project is coming together. Here is one of the pages I have prepared to write in to. The title, which was given to me, is ‘Forks and Spoons’.
I cannot get away from the ordinary things that make our lives extraordinary. I love that.

What sustains me on days like today, where the momentum of all my projects stills and the energy that is my normal operating speed has slowed by winter grabbing my ankles and thickening blood, is this comfort. Being tender with myself today has made it possible to show up here with you and ask:

What sustains you?
What is it you would do for your best friend today?
Could you possibly do that very thing for yourself?

I listened to a recorded call while I worked at my art table. Sage Levine of Women on Purpose interviewed
Reverend Deborah Johnson about intentional living.
Rev. Johnson said this:

God has given you custody of you.

I have taken custody of myself today. I am my very own best friend.
And, I am taking me to bed.

Tell me more.
What sustains you in the bleak mid-winter?

Thank you for being here,
All my love,
S

PS There are some wonderful things happening on Out of the Mouths of Babes.
Tomorrow, Sherry Collier’s post goes up. Monday, Linda Jackson’s post arrives.
Next week, more amazing women will appear. You are encouraged to visit the blog and comment. Let these long gray days be filled with inspiration from other women.

PPS. If you want to read an absolutely beautiful piece on the power of women’s friendships, read this. Thank you Emily Rapp.

Do you ache to be valued?
Do you yearn to do something with your hours that expresses more of your soul?
Have you closeted an early passion that is crying to be let out in to the world?
Do you have piles of notes for a book you have not yet written?

I am of the firm conviction that we are born artistic. We are born delighted with what our senses report to us. We begin to organize those impressions in a myriad of ways. Our fascination grows in to passion, which, for some becomes a career or for others a hobby. Many times that creativity falls away after we outgrow our fingerpainting aprons. Whatever happens along the route to adulthood that squelched our creativity is part of what makes us unique.

I sought success in a career as an actor, which kicked my self-esteem to the curb many times. However, my foundered acting career did not kill my creative spirit.
In the writing of my first book, Laundry Line Divine: A Wild Soul Book for Mothers, I have come to value my creativity in all it’s faces. And I have come to see its catalyzing power to improve the quality of my life, how it has built in me a resilience in adversity and has led me to find meaningful self-expression that I can manage while raising my children with my husband.
My creative spirit has allowed me joy I could not have accessed otherwise.
I don’t think you have to be a woman or a mother to be creative. Every human being has the capacity for wonder and expression. Each of our days are speckled with choices that emerge from that delightful sense that is uniquely ours. I write about motherhood, because, as you know, I am a mother. And, motherhood provides a certain set of conditions that severely impact a woman’s overt acts of creativity.

For the past few weeks, I have worked feverishly on the non-fiction book proposal for LLD with my writing coach, Stephanie Gunning. I am honing my proposal in preparation for sending it out to literary agents. This has caused a stirring of thought in me about my mission in life, my own personal manifesto, if you will.

I am a full-time mother of two teenaged kids, a boy, 17 and a girl about to 14. I live with my husband in the mountains of western Massachusetts. I have been an artist my whole life. I am thinking you have been too. Truly, we are all born creative. We just seal that zone of our life off sometimes, to find meaningful employment or to please the expectations of others. There are scads of reasons why hoisting a paintbrush on a canvas is impractical and a waste of precious time. Sure. I can see how it happens. I have lived my version of that story. For whatever reason, I have continually found a way to create, no matter what the conditions of my life are.

I started life as a collagist at the age of four, cutting out images I loved and gluing them in to this giant scrapbook that sits on my shelf now, 47 years later. When I was about 7, I discovered that theatre was to be my life. I played a boy who turned in to a rat in an after school program production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. What could ever be better than disappearing behind khaki boy shorts and knee highs in to a rat costume, shoving my fuzzy hair under rat ears while standing jammed in a bathroom stall at Potawatomi Park in Chicago. In that moment, I felt my passion ignite.

Left to my own devices, which I was from the moment I considered where to go to college, I pursued theatre until I was 30 years old. I had some success. I became a theatre artist, marked forever with discerning taste in new plays and a loathing of bad lighting. I love plays. I love the stage. I love seeing good plays, which I will see over and over, like some people ride a rollercoaster. The ride of an artfully created production captures every human sense and transforms our daily reality in to something quite magnificent. Many years have passed since I have played a role in a scripted play. I have done readings, studied singing, and read my kids hours and hours of stories with all my training at the tip of my tongue.
All my life, before, during and since doing theatre, I have been a fiber artist. I learned to sew from my Grandma Mimi when I was ten. The skills she taught me enabled me to sew costumes in high school, got me a good job in college in the costume shop of my theatre department and kept me from having to waitress during my years in New York City. I worked for the Martha Graham Dance Company, re-creating costumes from Martha’s early solos for her company of stunning dancers. I sewed clothing for the Cabbage Patch Kids magazine sets, under the direction and design of a woman who was a costumer to Miss Piggy herself.

Along the way, I met my husband. By that time, I had segued from costumes in to fine women’s clothing, custom created in my apartment. I enjoyed having my business, but could not keep this up once I gave birth to our son. We eventually moved to the Berkshires and my creativity flowed in to running our household, developing my fiber art skills by learning to knit and felt, and into gardening.

I don’t do things lightly. I jump in full throttle. I learn to do things until I have a certain level of mastery over them or decide they are not for me. There are things I have tried and put aside. I like to do things well. For this reason, I have studied and can capably brew compost tea for my tomato plants, save seeds for next years’ crop of nicotiana. I have learned to grow and preserve quince. I love to bead, make ribbon embroidery and french braid my daughter’s hair. I even won a ribbon for skillet tossing, but that is another story.

None of this is that extraordinary you know. I bet there are things you have learned in the recent past that you never thought you could do. All these things I do are just different faces of my creativity pouring forth. I guess those early collages or playing at boy who turns in to a rat opened the gates of my creativity and they have never completely closed. In the process of writing my book, I have begun to see and celebrate the value my creativity has brought to my becoming the happy, excited, authentic mature woman who I am today. Yes, I can say that with full authority. I thank all the glue sticks, morning-glory seeds and embroidery floss that I have ever touched for leading me to this moment of recognition.

What is this all about? It is about taking ownership of your own exquisite creative forces. I don’t want you to quit your job or anything. I just want you to let yourself play a bit. The things I have learned to do have found a spot in my daily life as a mother at home with kids. Picking strawberries led me to making jam. Needing to cover bare baby heads led me to knitting. Loving textiles, textures and color has led me to becoming a mixed media collage artist. Being passionate about communicating has led me to a five-year postal art collaboration which has now become a way for me to lead others to discover their own expression in their daily lives.

Over the next weeks on this Laundry Line, I will be writing about creative women. There are so many people who inspire me, making art with their days. However humble an expression may be, the will to create beauty is ceaseless and essential to our human spirit.
Here is what I found on a very cool website:

There is something very moving about the way these humble women are driven to be creative, in lived, everyday sense. It gives us much to reflect on what we take for granted as the provenance of art: for one, their painting is not the unique creation of any single individual but a tradition grown in a community. The work is not produced for a market, but for themselves, as well as the community at large. And viewed in the context of their lives, art doesn’t seem to be a luxury that has to be bought by opportunities and free time.” ~ Gita Wolf

This quote is from Nurturing Walls: Indian Women’s Animal Art by Meena Women. Read the article here.

Even doodling has value. Chalk drawings on the sidewalk too. If you let yourself make one origami crane out of the free newspaper you picked up yesterday, you might discover something new about yourself.

I dare you.
Tell me what you created this week.

Here are my doodles in my collage-a-day journal.

Tomorrow’s post will be about my Arthouse Sketchbook Project submission. I met a wonderful artist online who shared some of the pages of her sketchbook. She inspired me to take part in the next Arthouse Sketchbook Project. Read here about that.

More to come,
With love,
S

PS If you have read to the bottom of this page, maybe you agree with me, this feels like the beginning of my manifesto. Any feedback you give me would be appreciated. xoxoxox