Writing Up A Storm

Writer's Wretreat ~ Be Back Soon

"The Journey," 1903, Elizabeth Shippen Green

This illustration of a child looking out the window on a journey on a train seems like the perfect way to tell you that I, too, must go on a little journey. I won't be going by train, and I won't be going very far.

I've been a little under the weather lately. I have not been able to post nor to reply to comments nor to visit blogs, and I feel very bad about that. No ooomph at all. I've thought it was just the long hot summer. I adore autumn, winter, and spring in Austin, but the long hot summer is very hard on me. As soon as it sets in, I begin to long for the first autumnal cold front. I begin to scrounge the earth for old leaves, for wisps of wind, and remnants of rain.

But then it occurred to me that perhaps I am in need of a Writer's Wretreat. I know I said something a while back about wanting to give up worrying about being a writer, but I'm not sure that I can. I don't know who I am without my writing. A Writer's Wretreat might be the perfect remedy for the long hot summer. And for everything else, too.

In the summer of 1997, I went by train all alone from Austin to northern Illinois to visit my favorite uncle and aunt. When I arrived at their home, my uncle had hung this sign over the guestroom door:

Author's Abode

Scribbler's Sanctuary

Writer's Wretreat

Today I will hang the writer's sign on my own boxroom door, and we will see what comes of it. I have only just recently realized that I've never written a post that was titled "Once Upon a Time." That seems like a terrible lapse on my part. Perhaps I will begin my retreat by making notes on just such a post for when I return.

But I will miss being here in blog world. When I first started blogging, I did not know that this lovely group of total strangers would not only find my little blog, but would come by so faithfully to visit me and leave me all your wonderful comments.

You have meant the world to me. You have been a thousand lights in the deep dark forest for me. I cannot tell you what it has meant to me to find such kindness and generosity, so many loving hearts and kindred spirits. And I have loved visiting your blogs and learning so much from you. 

I will miss each one of you. Please don't forget me! I promise to be back very soon.

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Looking into Pockets

This is the pocket on my mother's favorite apron. The animals have faded, but I can still make them out: a moose, cow, polar bear, cat, and reindeer, a little duck to the side, and a couple of red-feathered birds above. This might be a nod to the story of the ark, although there is only one of each animal, and it appears to be snowing rather than raining.

My mother wore an apron every day of her life. In her last ten years here in Austin with me, she would put her apron on in the morning to protect her clothing while she did the crossword puzzle, and she didn't take it off unless she went out. I did her laundry, and this is the apron I washed the most for her.

Another reason my mother wore an apron was for the pocket. She kept a stash of tissues in it. Her apron pocket was often her only pocket, and when she took it off, she was pocketless.

We women have gotten the vote, but we are still far behind in getting pockets.

I wrote a story a while back about a mountain woman who wore a dress with tote-bag-size pockets. I often like to create props for my stories, to show to children or to jump-start my own imagination, so I made the mountain woman's dress with its gigantic pockets, gathered along the top edge to increase the volume.

And aren't these very fine pockets?

When paper girl saw them, she wanted just such a pocket, too. I tried to explain they were actually a little large, and we had a long talk about the use of exaggeration in literature, but she gave me this look as if to say that literary devices had nothing to do with her.

And speaking of literature, I think she has been dipping into my hoard of old nursery rhymes. This one comes to mind:

Please give her a pocket
sewed into her smocklet
with buttons to lock it,
for keeping the moon and the sun,
or the stars, one by one,
or feathers from flocklets
and blueprints of rockets,
for who knows what will come
from her having had pockets?

And any day now she'll be wanting a pocket doll, too, to put into her pocket.

A Pocket Doll from The Ragtime Doll Company

I have a sweet reader who owns The Ragtime Doll Company, located in northern Maine and western New Brunswick. Ragtime Dolls offers patterns for recreating old-fashioned rag dolls, including this precious pocket doll, and some miniature doll-size patterns for traditional American quilts, such as "Rail Fence" and "Honey Bee."

The little pocket doll captured my heart, all tucked into her pocket bed, with her clothing hanging from buttons. And it all folds up into a little folded pocket.

This reminded me of a tiny one-inch doll that I had once, lost forever now in that place where lost things go. I must have been about eight or nine when this doll was mine. It was bubblegum-pink, with moveable legs and arms, so I could make it sit with its little arms outstretched, reaching for me.

It needed a bed, and I got the idea that a powder puff would make the perfect bed. I have this huge memory of being in a five-and-dime store with my very own change in my hand, picking out a pinkish powder puff, and walking up to the counter all alone, my little heart beating with an outrageous fear and trembling.

Since I was not allowed to wear makeup nor to smoke, I thought that powder puffs were in the same category as cigarettes, and that I would never be allowed to buy one. I might even be arrested for trying to buy one! But the lady at the counter took my money and handed me the powder puff, and I ran all the way home, still expecting to be found out. What a terrible risk I took to make sure my tiny doll slept in such a cloud of luxury!

All of this is to say how precious pocket dolls are, and to urge you to peek at the pocket doll here from The Ragtime Doll Company.

A dear friend of mine made these sweet little pocket dolls for me to show me the kind of dolls she played with as a child. These are made from miniature shampoo or lotion bottles, the kind you get in hotels. They are a reminder of how little it takes to make an imaginary world for a child.

An empty bottle, a scrap of fabric, a piece of yarn, a length of ribbon, a secret hiding place inside a pocket . . .

Which brings us to the great question posed in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings:

"What has it got in its pocketses?"

"Setting Sail in a Pocket"

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A Reply to All

This post is my reply to all the wonderful comments you left me on my last post "In the Beginning." Your memories and your thoughts about this subject are so perfect that I felt each comment needed to stand by itself. Even my husband added a memory of his own about "The Missing Chrome Pencil." 

Your insights into what makes each of us begin to become ourselves are so thoughtful, and tender, and touching beyond words. I thank each one of you for taking the time to put into words something that is not easy to put into words.

Your comments made me realize that not everyone is struck with the sense of destiny that pounced on me when I was only nine years old. In retrospect, I wish I had not been so thunderstruck with this thought that I was going to be a writer. It has driven me my whole life to work in the wee hours of the night when I should have been sleeping.

My paper girl wanted the pen from my header, so I (reluctantly) gave it to her, and you can see she is somewhat weighed down by it. Is she going to want to become a writer, too? I can't tell if she is trying to write, however. It looks more as if she were plowing.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a writer. The problem is that if you think you should write, you are driven to publish. If you have the good fortune to publish one book, you must publish a second one. If you publish a second book, you must publish a third. There is no rest for you. You must go on and on. Publish or perish, indeed.

But I have finally rebelled against my own fate. How wonderful that this little blog lets me write and publish as I please so that I can spend the rest of my time not writing!!

Oh good! There she goes with a stack of books to read. Let her curl up with words that someone else has written.

When I was nine and decided to become a writer, I was spending the summer with my grandmother. In the evenings an aunt and uncle always came for supper, and after supper we four played games at a cardtable in front of the fireplace where summer flowers were kept instead of a winter fire.

We played Clue, Go-Fishing, Old Maid, and Authors. Authors is a card game featuring thirteen authors with four cards for each author showing the titles of four different books. The idea was get all four Mark Twain cards or all four Hawthorne cards, etc., to make sets. The person with the most sets won the game.

I wonder now if playing Authors during the whole of that fateful summer triggered the dangerous idea in my head that I too would be an author and write books. Perhaps this card game should be required to have a warning label printed on the back.

Well, we can only live one childhood and one life and I cannot go back and change mine now, but I do want to let go of feeling that I must become one thing or another.

I would like to just be.

Oh better still! My paper girl has given up both writing and books, and is busy making a bicycle with rabbit.

I feel so indescribably happy for her. I thought I could put this into words, and I find that I can't. But maybe becoming and being are one and the same?

She will need some handlebars. She might want a basket, too. I think I will set the bigger questions of the universe aside for now and go and see if she wants some help. . .

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In the Beginning

"A Girl Writing," Henriette Browne (1829-1901)

I chanced upon this painting of a girl writing at her desk and yet momentarily distracted by a little bird, and it took me back in time to the first little story that I wrote and typed and bound into a little booklet.

I was about nine years old, spending the summer with my grandmother. She gave me some typing paper and let me use an old typewriter. I cut the paper into sheets to make a smallish book, about 5 x 7 inches. I labored over the first page, starting half-way down with my title and the words "Chapter One" carefully centered.

And then I tried my best to write the rest of the first page so that the sentences were justified on both the left and the right, because that was the way it was in real books. I puzzled and puzzled and puzzled over how to do this. I could only manage it by counting how many letters and spaces could go on a line, and then trying to write words that would somehow make sense and also add up to this magic number. It meant having to change many, many words. For example, I might change "red" to "blue" if I needed just one more letter on that particular line.

Luckily, there was only room for a very short paragraph on this first page, for I had to give up the effort to justify my story after that, although I worried over that right-hand raggedy edge (so unprofessional!) for days (or maybe just a few minutes).

This little story is long lost, but I remember the title: "Katy's Quest." And I remember choosing the name "Katy" for my heroine because it was the closest I could get to "Kari" without actually using my own name. The story was a little mystery, but I have no recollection of the plot.

And I am struck just this very moment at how my title was such a precursor to my whole life, for I have been ever since on "Kari's quest" to find whatever it is that I am always and forever looking for.

Henriette Browne's painting not only takes me back in time, it is also a metaphor for my whole life, for like the little writer in the painting, I have been forever torn between my writing and my fascination with looking at the world around me. 

And the more I look into this painting, the more I want to explore that moment in childhood when we latch onto something that makes us feel that this is what our life is all about. When did each of us begin to be who we are?

I suppose we have many beginnings. One of my beginnings is this little mystery that I wrote when I was nine. Before this moment I loved reading stories; after this moment I loved writing stories.

This past week I went searching for other young girls caught in the beginning.

"Sewing," William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)

Here is a young girl caught in a moment of sewing a piece of antique-golden cloth. I love her bare feet, and the way in which this painter seems to have surprised her at her work. In a second, she will pierce the cloth with her needle and draw the thread through, just so.

"Knitting Girl," Albert Anker (1831-1910)

This little girl is so involved in her knitting that she does not seem to know her portrait is being painted at all. You can almost see her counting the stitches. And I love how she seems to be playing those knitting needles as if they were a musical instrument!

 Self-portrait of Caterina van Hemessen, (1528-1587)

According to Wikipedia, Caterina "is often given the distinction of creating the first self-portrait of an artist, of either gender, depicted seated at an easel."

I love it that this painting dates all the way back to the 1500s, a young girl at an easel at a time when women simply did not become painters or musicians or writers, except in some limited way of being exposed just enough to culture to make a nice showing of the feminine arts in the drawing room before company.

And to think of how little is known about Caterina van Hemessen! I never heard of her before I found this painting when I went looking for "girls painting in art."

"In the Secret Garden," Gustave Doyen (1837 - ?)

Those of us who grew up with The Secret Garden will not forget that moment when Mary finds a little sharp piece of wood and begins to dig in the earth to clear a space around the tiny green plants trying to come up through the weeds and grass.

"Now they look as if they could breathe," she said.

Postcard, Elizaveta Merkuryevna Bem (1843-1914)

And here is a little teacher-storyteller enchanting her captive audience with her tales and perhaps her magic potions. I did not play with my dolls very much, but I had friends who had whole classrooms and theaters of dolls, with lessons and dramas that unfolded day by day.

"Alone in the World," William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905)

There were a number of paintings of young musicians, but I chose this one partly because of the title: "Seule au Monde" or "Alone in the World." All of my young girls were chosen, in fact, for that quality of aloneness that each painting seemed to evoke, for I think that it is often when we are absolutely alone that we have the chance to find out who we are.

Like the little writer in the top painting, this girl seems to be torn between her violin and something in the world that we cannot see, something that the faraway look in her eyes is dwelling upon.

Does each person have to choose between what we most want to do and the world-at-large? Is it always that way, I wonder? Or, instead of choosing, do we always find ourselves stealing time for one away from time for the other?

"Beggar," Ilya Yefimovich Repin (1844–1930)

And then I stumbled upon this sweet little "beggar" or "fisher girl," and she quite broke my heart. A child, or anyone, in these kinds of rags always gives us pause.

These are the frayed rags of poverty, and even though art and poetry can make these rags beautiful, in reality they tell us the story of a fragile life being lived too far on the edge.

I have had this very child walk into my classroom, and while I know only too well how much better our schools need to be, I am also very proud to know that, in almost every single public school in our country, on her first day of class this child will be given all that is in our power to give her: a free lunch, writing paper, textbooks, and a little supply box in which she will find a pencil, a box of crayons, a pair of scissors, a bottle of glue. She will be assigned to a social worker, a nurse will check her over, and there will be new clothes for her, too. In fact, she will be clothed in new things before she walks into the classroom.

She is my reason for wanting our public schools to be the very best in the world, for in her, but for the grace of God, we might find ourselves.

Sometimes our beginning is in that moment when someone sees us in our time of greatest need and reaches out to us.

Oh, I will have to come back to this little girl again, but for now, I put her here, as if she were a vow, to bear witness to the importance of the turning points in our lives, for turning points can make the difference between being lost and being saved.

"A Little Princess," Written by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Illustrated by Ethel Franklin Betts

Which brings me full circle back to A Little Princess. I wrote about "All the Little Princesses" here. My post about Sara in the attic might be my letter to the world, or one of them, at any rate (I seem to have too much to say).

I think that I myself am forever at this attic window, imagining the world, and maybe not quite living in it yet. I love this painting of Sara imagining her life against all odds.

And so, dear reader, this long, meandering post is all to say that I would love to know if there was a time in your childhood, or later on, when you wrote a poem or painted a picture or planted a seed or took something apart to see how it worked or baked a cake or sewed or knitted or hammered or chiseled or burst into song or knelt down in prayer, and said to yourself that this is what your life was going to be all about. 

Please do tell me about it in a comment, if you should feel that you could.

In the beginning . . .

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Looking into Cupboards

"Still life with cupboard for bottles and books," 1650, unnamed German artist

I found this painting of a cupboard to illustrate "Old Mother Hubbard." The whole of this nursery rhyme is rather long and can be found here. But I have always thought that the words should be different, or that perhaps there could be just one more stanza:

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to her cupboard
    To look for the day and the light.
But when she got there
The cupboard was bare
    So she filled it with stars and the night.

Is it legal to alter a nursery rhyme? I wouldn't want to get into trouble!

My little version of Old Mother Hubbard says what I want to say about what it means to be human. For we often go to our own cupboards and find them bare of what we are looking for, and hence we must fill them ourselves with whatever we can find at hand. And don't we always find that we have the most amazing treasures at hand?

I have always loved the idea that sometimes, when we cannot find the light, we can be nourished by the starry dark instead.

And I love the idea that, if the words to an old nursery rhyme do not quite say what we are looking for, we can re-imagine those words.

I meant to publish this post last Thursday as a nursery rhyme in lieu of my usual Thursday children's picture book, but I couldn't sleep the Wednesday night before, and then I couldn't think Thursday morning from the lack of sleep, and then I suddenly realized that I am actually retired and don't really have to do anything, and it was such a liberating thought.

I know my posts have become fewer and farther between, but I think I am just trying to find my own rhythm. I might be more erratic about posting in the future, instead of trying to stick to a schedule. I'm just letting you know I might be more laid back here.

I want to look into some cupboards to find some things that I've been missing or wondering about.

 "Interior with an Open Glass Cabinet," Paul Barthel (1862–1933)

I love this painting of a woman looking into her cupboard, the kind of cupboard that is sometimes called a china cupboard. Maybe she is trying to find the day and the light, or a memory, or perhaps only a tablecloth.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know that I've been trying to clean my house for the longest time. I'll open a drawer with the best intentions of getting rid of the clutter inside it, but I get lost instead, in memories, in musings.

I seem to need great swaths of silence in my life, long moments in which I am posed inside a still-life, doing nothing. If someone followed me around with a camera, they would be at a loss to explain what I am doing, wandering from here to there, looking into cupboards, peeking into books, staring into space. 

I'm at a loss to explain it, too.

So I made a little cupboard this week, to try to get closer to the mystery of this business of looking into cupboards.

My cupboard is made out of corrugated cardboard with a little latch that my husband just happened to have. The cupboard is 8 inches high, and 12 inches across. It's just a pair of cupboard doors at the moment, the actual cupboard is an imaginary space behind it. Anything in the world might lie behind these doors.

"Behind closed doors" is often used to indicate those intimacies that proper Victorian writers never write about, which is why I shy away from reading anything written after the Victorian era.

But perhaps the closed doors to a cupboard would not be quite so dangerous to peek into?

I undid the latch, and a violin, of all things, fell out. I don't play a violin and I don't own a violin, but I love the look of a violin, the sound of a violin. And after I had made the piano keys here, it occurred to me that a little paper, a little fabric, and a few strands of embroidery thread could make a violin, too.

I am following the most mysterious muse these days. I do feel as if I am under the spell of Tennyson: mine is not to wonder why, mine is but to do or die.

Well, I definitely feel that I am on a path, but must it be a warpath? It feels that way sometimes, and sometimes it is that way.

As I sit here making things out of paper and fabric, I am often aware that there are people all around the world who are in harm's way or who are facing unbearable sadness or who are lost, and I bow my head before this knowledge, and hope with all my heart that some wondrous music of the spheres is being created from every drumbeat of every step that we take upon this earth.

I have no way of knowing what might come of my making such a quiet violin.

I've always been in the middle of writing a story that had a rough beginning, middle, and end. But these days I find myself in the middle of something that has no such guideposts. This little violin, for example, has no particular end in sight at all. It's only 9 inches long. What can it do?

Perhaps someone will find it here and take it one step further and make it into something else.

Oh, someone did find it! Two someones. In case you don't recognize her without her wild hair, that's my paper girl. I've been working on stylizing her a little. She's had a bad-hair-day ever since her birth, poor thing, so I've covered her head with an elfin cap for now.

As far as I can tell, she really doesn't give a hoot about her hair, and anyway, she's very busy exploring this curious instrument that she found inside my cupboard.

She has her own thoughts. She has her own hopes and dreams. I cannot quite see inside her little paper head.

Uh oh, there she goes! And wouldn't you know it would be just like this?

It's true what they say about writers and our characters: we really don't have any control over them. We create them and then they go off and do as they please. It seems this applies to paper creations as well.

I wonder what she plans on doing with my red violin string? Oh, look, here’s a clue, for she seems to have written a stanza of her own:

Little Girl Hubbard
went to her cupboard
    to look for some snow and a sled.
But when she got there
the cupboard was bare
    so she filled it with bright red thread.

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Under the Understory

The first time I heard the word "understory" I was living in the redwoods in Northern California, and I immediately fell in love with the thought of kneeling down beneath the great canopy of the redwoods and finding something called an understory.

I laid this little fabric tent (above) onto the floor of an understory beneath a canopy of wild onions in my own backyard. Wikipedia says the understory "is the area of a forest which grows at the lowest height level below the forest canopy." 

I can never go to the woods without falling into a deep contemplation of the understory, and last week was no exception. We used to go to the woods to go camping, but lately we've gone for "lazy picnics," and last week we went for a little nap. 

We like to go to The Lost Pines of Texas in Bastrop. The Handbook of Texas says here that this "narrow belt of loblolly pines stretches some thirteen miles across and is thought to be an ancient resident of Central Texas, perhaps part of a larger pine forest that shrank in size during or after the Pleistocene or so-called Ice Age."

Oh, I love that: an ancient resident ~ with an understory! I always go prepared to sit on the forest floor and listen to it tell me its ancient stories.

This is the top canopy of the loblolly pines.

This is down lower, looking into the dense understory.

Going down into the understory.

Going down, down, down to where fallen trees have provided places to sit to listen to the understory. If you look to the right in this photo, you can see the stems of the seedlings that grow in this netherworld.

And here we are, peeking under the understory. It looks like a whole little woods of its own, but this photo is of seedlings that are only two or three feet high at the most. You can see how this little world just goes on and on. It's no wonder there are fairies and wee folk who are said to live in such places.

When we got back home from our little nap in the woods, I saw this forest of wild onions in our backyard in a new way, and wondered what lay beneath its canopy.

This long thin swath of wild onions that grows in our yard is perhaps no more and no less than this: "a narrow belt of wild onions that stretches some unknown miles across and is thought to be an ancient resident of the world, part of a larger forest of onions that shrank in size since the Ice Age . . ."

This ancient resident is growing right up against the wire mesh of the fence between our yard and our neighbor's. I love having this little wilderness so close at hand.

 I knelt down before the understory beneath the wild onions.

And then, onto this lush green understory, I nestled a piece of fabric on a piece of twine between two forked sticks, using miniature wooden clothespins. 

I suppose I wanted to recreate the camp-out that I had not been on, the tent I had not slept in. It takes so little to have what you want. Sometimes it's really all about the words that we use to describe an event, to talk about our lives.

For I went to the woods fully intending "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life," but I fell fast asleep in the understory, far beneath the tops of the trees. In the wind. I had not even thought to bring a blanket with me, so I slept beneath an extra plaid flannel shirt that I had stuffed into my backpack, "just in case."

And now that I am back home, I am beginning to think about living on wild onions and pecans and pecan-bark stew . . .

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Traveling Companions

"Travelling Companions," Augustus Egg (1816-1863)

I've been holding this painting in the palm of my hand, wanting to write about it, waiting for the right time. And then Jude of Spirit Cloth wrote a post titled "the inevitable" about her realization that a piece of art she has been working on is going to be a lifetime project. Jude said:

"i am on the slow road home. i hope you will join me while i find my way.  i have developed a soft spot for traveling companions."

I thought of the painting above immediately. Jude's words and this painting have taken me down a meandering path, a lifetime path of my own.

The painting shows two women on a train, and because the two ladies are virtually identical, any number of interpretations have surrounded this 1862 painting by Augustus Egg. I think the artist might be saying that we are our own best traveling companion. Certainly, we must start with ourselves upon the journey of our life. Those of us who don't mind being alone know that we can get along fairly well with our own company.

But Jude's words take the next step, for we really do not want to always be alone with our own self.

One of the women on the train is reading a book, and it is in books that many of us find our first traveling companions. I know that I have. I've kept company with Louisa May Alcott and Frances Hodgson Burnett and Emily Dickinson and Willa Cather and Virginia Woolfe for years and years. They've been the most faithful friends to me!

When I am in my darkest hours, these writers are always there, and their words comfort me. Words written by others can be very powerful medicine. I found these words below by chance, and was utterly stunned by the power in them:

"There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken, a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable. There is a sorrow beyond grief which leads to joy and a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength. There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being. There is a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges cut the heart as we break open to the place inside which is unbreakable and whole, while learning to sing."

Rashani Réa

What an unshatterable and powerful beauty lies in these words! And while we can hold onto words like these, still, we need to find friends who will hear both our deep cry and our song. Most of us are very lucky if we can find two or three such friends in our lifetime. I have found mine in both expected and in very unexpected places, the dearest people whom I love with all my heart.

These are the traveling companions who bear witness to our lives. They are the ones who actually hold our hands, the ones who want our hopes and dreams to come true. And sometimes they come in the shape of furry creatures!

So, in thinking about this post, I made a traveling companion for my paper girl. And while I was tearing my little rabbit out of paper, and then arranging the girl and the rabbit for a photo, I thought about the surprising new traveling companions whom I have found in this blogging world, the ones that Jude is talking about.

When I started my blog, barely ten months ago, I had no idea I would find real friends in this world of the cloud.

I've been calling this incredible company of women "the sisterhood of the cloud." I've been so amazed at how many women are blogging about their art, and reaching out to perfect strangers to comment, to encourage, to offer suggestions, to teach, to share.

A silhouette of Louisa May Alcott by Steve Moyle on a notecard

I used to write long hand-written or typed letters. But I rarely write a real letter any more. Maybe that is why I love replying to comments so much, for it is like writing a little mini-letter to each person who has taken the time to drop by and leave a note for me.

Every comment gives me something new to think about, and, as I compose my reply, I will find myself seeing something new, too. And I love finding ways to play upon words, or to take someone's words and mirror them back in a different way.

Note: If you are new to blogs and commenting, I might add here that you are always welcome to reply to someone's comment, too. Just select "Reply" under any comment and leave your own response for the commenter. Or you can reply to my reply, too. Or you can go straight to the larger comment box and leave your own comment. I love how TypePad makes this kind of conversation possible. And I love hearing from you!

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And so, somewhat more than midway upon the journey of my life, I find myself in a dark wood where there is a net and a cloud and a sisterhood that calls to me to come traveling with them. I don't know where I am going or what I am doing, but I feel that same sense of enchantment and adventure that I have always felt in the middle of a dark wood.

I cannot say it better than Jude said it, so I will end with her words again:

"i am on the slow road home. i hope you will join me while i find my way.  i have developed a soft spot for traveling companions."

And now I really really must write a real letter to my two college roommates, for, alas, I am the one who is behind in the real-letter-writing!

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Walking Into the World

If my paper girl is to go out into the world, I felt she needed to be outfitted with boots and a backpack and the light of the moon. A shadow intruded, like a cloud, in the lower left-hand corner, something I might think about making happen intentionally sometimes, for I like the effect here. She seems to be lifted above the dangers of dark clouds.

"Outfitters" is such a wonderful word, with all its hints and promises of hiking and canoeing and mountaineering. And this makes me think of a Latin proverb that I found somewhere:

"Solvitur ambulando."
or
"The problem is solved by walking around."

I often find this to be true. I always long for the winter months in Austin so that I may walk in order to think more clearly about one thing or another, but the truth is, it is often just cold enough to make long problem-solving walks a little uncomfortable. I find myself hurrying home instead.

But these first days of spring are calling to me to put my boots on, grab my backpack, and take to the avenues (in lieu of the mountains).

So, to encourage long walks, I gave my paper girl a walking stick, too. This one is modeled after the walking stick my mother-in-law Oleta gave me, a very wonderful gnarled old stick which served for years as a favorite prop during story time. (I must take a photo of it!) 

I love the walking stick in Enchanted April and how it got planted into the earth at the end, and sprouted roots, and grew and grew.  (Enchanted April is a gem of a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, and a gem of a movie, too. I have read and watched both many times.)

And I'm quite sure there is a little notebook inside that backpack, for my paper girl will want to take notes. Hmmmmm. Little notebook and pencil. Going on my to-do list this very minute.

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The Journey

Instead of spring cleaning, I have been spring dreaming, spring musing, and spring worrying, which is how I pretty much spend my days any time of year, I'm afraid, dreaming, musing, and worrying. And I've been dwelling on the word "journey" and wondering how it fits into my own life now, for I don't really intend upon setting foot outside my door, with suitcase in hand, to go on a journey anymore, and yet, every day I travel so far afield in my thoughts that I am very sleepy by the time the sun goes down.

I've also been reading a wondrous blog called The Hermitage, in which Rima's travels in a caravan in Scotland and the beginnings of her new life in a 16th century cottage have taken me back to my own flower-child days of wandering about in a Volkswagen camper and of leaving that life and starting over again. This all got me to thinking about how do I continue my own journey now? How, some thirty and forty years later, do I go on "the journey" without setting a foot outside?

And, curiously, I lit upon these piano keys.

I suddenly went from thoughts of nomadic lives to piano keys to Dante to windows to a paper-cut girl to Mary Oliver. It happened so quickly, like dominoes falling, one after the other. It took me by surprise.

If you will bear with me, I would like to tell you how it happened.

"Musical keyboard with 3 octaves," Tobias R, 2006, Wikipedia

These past weeks I've been very worried about where I am going with my art, and even more worried about the lack of any art taking place at all. I keep finding myself lost midway in the journey of my life, walking around in circles.

I've been asking myself:  Should I try to illustrate one of my stories on my blog?

And then I started asking: How can I illustrate my day-to-day life on my blog?

This seems like the more all-encompassing question.

And then, for some unknown reason, this black and white illustration of piano keys suddenly came to my mind. And even though I don't play a piano and I don't own a piano, I thought that I could make those keys out of strips of fabric. Black fabric for the black keys, and colored fabrics for the white keys, with the colors insisting on being arranged from infra-red to ultra-violet.

Hence the fabric piano keys above.

And no sooner had I made these keys than the colored fabric strips let me know that they wanted to hang down like long deep-forest vines. And so I let them, and ~ poof! ~ this enchanted forest dangled itself before my eyes. And there I was, brought full circle to Dante's Divine Comedy again:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

The translation of these words, translator unknown, that I like the best is this: 

"Midway upon the journey of my life
I found myself in a dark wood,
where the right way was lost."

Look here to consider other translations of Dante's first tercet. I didn't see the one above, and I don't remember where I found this version, but I have been circling around these words for years now.

I would say it's been a good twenty-five years since I entered the mid-point of my life's journey. So far, I've been quite lost in this very enchanted and dark wood the whole time, but not really minding it that much. 

Here the piano-key woods began to tangle up, and to dance and prance around a little.

Here a great wind has begun to blow. It's been very windy here today, the kind of wind that howls and prowls and growls around houses at any time of year where I live.

I think it was the wind blowing these fabric strips sideways like this that made me think about windows.

I wondered if I could make a window out of paper, and it seems that I could, although it needs some work on its frame and its sill. It's the little window latch that lets you know it's a window. Something as small as a window latch can give meaning to five otherwise meaningless strips of paper.

And when I had the window in hand (it measures about 12 x 9 inches), I felt as if I had turned a metaphorical corner and could see a path in the woods that I couldn't see before.

Often, when I sit in my boxroom inside the fragile walls of this old house that I live in, I imagine that I am in some faraway forest fastness. The world outside becomes pathless, mountainous, aerial. If I should peek out my window, I feel that I might see the tangled forest of the hundred-years' spell, or the clouds that surround a monastic dwelling perched upon a lonely mountainside.

If I looked outside, I might see another world.

The piano keys became the vines, and the vines became the curtains, and the curtains fit so perfectly upon this window into other worlds. It happened so quickly.

Once I had this larger tableau to work with, the girl below just walked right into the setting, as if it had been created just for her.

She's about 5 and 1/2 inches tall. She comes from thousands of pages of stories that I have written. She's somewhere between nine and twelve years old, and her name is Lolly, Lilka, Ivy, Evangeline, Yulie, Kit, Sukie, Rusalka. This one might be Rusalka, for Rusalka means "wood sprite," and she does seem to have walked right out of the woods.

I like how the camera picked up the shadows of her fingers and toes, for I could not get her to stand still for her picture.

Here she is, grabbing hold of the curtains, and getting ready to plunge into the world between those long floating strips of fabric. I feel as if nothing can stop her.

And this is where I find my own self plunging into "The Journey" by Mary Oliver:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice -
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.

"Mend your life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.

It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do -
determined to save
the only life that you could save.

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And my little paper girl is suddenly older than I thought, or maybe ageless. And I, too, seem to be neither old nor young, just a woman on a journey. I don't know what any of this will lead to, but this is what I did instead of cleaning during my spring-cleaning break.

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P.S. It was very strange to be gone from the blogging world for so long. It felt a little lonely, as if I were cut off from the whole world, the way you feel when your electricity is out, and you have to light candles in the dark.

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