This morning, I hung a new painting on my wall. It was done by Charles Passarelli; a 92 year old artist who spends his summers up here in the Leelanau Peninsula painting and teaching workshops in watercolor.
The painting joins three others done by well known painters and they all share the same subject matter: Willowbrook Mill. That’s the wedding and event venue I own with my family and it’s a charming and beautiful space that’s stood on this land since 1879. Well known and well loved as locals and tourists alike hold memories of this place from all its incarnations through the years.
When I hung the new painting, I turned to look at the three other pieces we have of Willowbrook and it was so clear how differently each painter had seen the exact same subject. And these aren’t just painters with a small “p”. These are PAINTERS. Plein Air winners and highly sought after artists known around the country. Hell, one of them, Neil Walling, literally, wrote the book on Plein Air Painting. And there they were, painting this sweet old building.
The differences in the images were angles and locations that gave them their best view on that day in that particular light. Their styles are different, from the dreamy soft strokes of Pat’s painting to the crisp, almost photographic brilliance of shadows, light and detail in Charless’ piece.
Same subject yet different circumstances, different perspectives, different feelings. It just depends on who’s looking.
Looking at the different perspectives, I remembered doing a personal growth workshop years ago. At one point during the workshop weekend, a participant was in a conversation with the presenter about an ongoing war he was locked into with a relative. “But she’s wrong! That’s not who I am! Why does she think that? Ask anyone and they’ll tell you! I am not that kind of person!”
The presenter chuckled and then proceeded to share this gem. I paraphrase because it’s been a long freaking time since I heard it but it was so good a response that it burned into my hippocampus like the Oscar Meyer bologna jingle.
He said, “Dude. If I brought 100 people into this room who have known you at 100 different points in your life, they would tell us 100 different stories about who you are. Why? Because each experience of you is unique. It comes with a fresh perspective of who you are right this moment if they just met you. Or maybe it comes with an airport full of baggage if it’s someone like a sibling who still hasn’t resolved the missing Hot Wheels Crisis of 1970. It depends on who’s looking at you. “
And damn if that isn’t the truth. It sure as hell is when it comes to me.
To some people, I am the shoulder they lean on, the maker of tea and the bringer of the soft blanket so they can curl up and escape the world for a while. To others, I am the evil overlord who swept in and severed the ties to the free flowing cash cow that they relied on to maintain their worry free (to them) existence. Or I’m the business woman who doesn’t have a filter when it comes to getting things done that need doing. In my 20s, I had a friend who called me Frank. A little bit because of my last name. A lot because I said whatever the hell I wanted to say.
100 different people, 100 different versions of me. And every one of them is 100% accurate.
To those individuals, given the little information they had about me and given whatever the source was that gave them this information, they formed a picture that will never be changed until they actually spend time with me and dispel rumors to learn the truth.
I have a nephew who grew up far away from me and our only interactions were few and far between when he was little. Everything he thought he knew about me, he learned from my sister; a famously unreliable source. We had the opportunity to spend several days together when his own sister got married in the South and each evening, after his wife put their daughter to bed, we would sit and talk into the night.
On the last day of the wedding festivities he shook his head and said he was completely blown away at how opposite every one of his expectations about me were, given the story he had been fed all of his life. Apparently, I would have been a great character in a Stephen King novel complete with Satanic worship and veins running with hydrochloric acid. Huh.
Sadly, people’s thoughts, opinions, positions, judgements are not visible like the different views and perspectives we can see in pieces of art.
Maybe it’s why we are so drawn to art. It’s so real. There it sits for us to ponder. A painting, a sculpture, a song, a story. All the dark and light, beauty and ugliness, depth and shallowness there for our eyes and hearts and minds to do with what we will.
Many years ago, I started a project I was calling The Three Questions. These three questions would “paint” a picture of your relationship with another person. They would, if the participants were brave enough to be honest, tell you exactly what you need to know about who you are to them. And it would tell them exactly how you wish that would change.
Are you ready for the questions? Here we go…
How do I see you?
How do I think you see me?
How do I wish you saw me?
That’s it. So simple. So clear. So deadly. Take a moment and think through the people who affect you in your life and just imagine their answers to these questions. And remember that their responses are coming from historical data they have about you and also where their perspective was when the data was “collected”.
I double dog dare you to do this with at least three people. Buckle up. You’re going to get a painting of yourself that will either have you crying tears of joy at the love fest or reaching for the headache meds and dark place to curl up as you rethink everything you thought was true. So, yeah. Have fun with that!
Good morning. GOOD morning. Good MORNING! Such an innocuous statement. It really shouldn’t elicit a Sci-Fi level of goose bumps and foreboding and yet, here we are.
14,965. That’s how many times I’ve heard Good Morning just from the H. in the past 40 years.
Were they all good mornings? Of course not. Because I am not a robot. And that is why my case feels so cranked at this moment.
This morning the daily greeting slapped me upside the head like Bill Murray realizing he was caught in a groundhog day loop…still. I know what H said, but what I heard was “Reset to Start.” My response, like so many mornings in the past few decades, has devolved into a monosyllabic grunt somewhere between *hey* and *ungh*. I don’t want to do the same day over and over until the end of my time on the planet. I want to mix it up! And it appears that even if I begin the “who talks first” morning ritual, the response is…. You guessed it.
It’s time for some new morning greetings beyond that two word replication. Something with some style, some humor. Just another way to acknowledge that, yes, we have survived sleep mode one more time. My favorite would be the recent meme, “So, it appears the assassins have failed again.” Love that. But it’s only fresh once.
Maybe “Weird dreams last night?” or how about “Did that new pillow configuration make your neck hurt less?” Or even a segue like, “…as I was saying…” or, “Welcome back!” Anything would be better than 14,966. Anything!
We hold onto rituals we think are required pleasantries without ever stopping to ask why or if we can change them or delete the practice altogether. Like saying “Bless you” after someone sneezes. It’s Medieval. Literally. They believed that in the exact moment a sneeze happened, that your heart stopped beating and it was a prime opportunity for the devil to jump into your heart. So they quickly stopped that chance with a sticky God Gob blocking the entrance until you were back to monitoring your own devil holes.
If you grow up Catholic, there are a plethora of weird and archaic practices like the God Gob Devil Blocker move. We didn’t question them because we also believed that a bunch of guys in dresses and women in scary penguin costumes had some magical access to the inner workings of the Universe and to question them was to put our very souls in jeopardy.
I guess we should feel lucky we dodged a bullet that they didn’t make a required catch phrase for other body functions as well. Though some 10 year old part of my brain is itching to hear the approved flatulence mantra. Mine would be “Christ on a cracker! What died inside you?”
My new mission is finding alternatives to expected social pleasantries. No more “Have a good day!” From now on, it shall be “Have a different day!”
Thanks for letting me vent. Now, get out there and make up some ridiculous sayings to change the trajectory of your day.
Ten years ago, a health issue led to some questions, that led to some answers, that then led to the destruction of my imagined life and its imagined stability. And that led to what felt like my brain melting and my soul howling out into the void.
If my life were a melatonin induced freaky dream, it would have found me climbing the rope in the gym back in grade school, slapping my hand on the rafter to signal my arrival and then looking down to see someone had lit the rope on fire and it was fast approaching the soles of my Keds.
I have always listened to the Universe as it has guided me on my way. It hasn’t been an easy sprint from point A to point B. In fact, it took me a few decades to figure out that my spiritual guides might be slightly sadistic bastards that thought leading me on wild goose chases was highly entertaining. Case in point: at age 27 I was guided to pack my life in the desert and follow love to a northern city only to be met with a full stop, u-turn and a “Just kidding! Hang in there for seven months in this new location and your work will take you to your next stop which we aren’t going to tell you about until you’re seriously questioning all your life choices! It’ll be great! Trust us!” See? Sadistic.
I sat still. Miserably. Heartbroken. But then the next stop did put me on a path that held a pretty clear route for three more decades. Until the brain melting happened.
So, there I was ten years ago, at my kitchen table in East Lansing; charred bits of my old life flaking off me; writing like a mad woman on the wall I had painted into a giant chalkboard for big ideas. It was handy for menu planning, thought processing, doodling and list making. It’s too easy to lose the post-it notes or the 37th spiral notebook you write the big ideas in, but you’d have to be Criss Angel to lose a wall. So there you go.
New Life Goals!
Uh… Happiness? Nah. Too vague. Success? At what? And really, isn’t “success” the achievement of a singular goal? Then you set up a new hurdle to jump. Screw that. This brain exfoliation went on for a while.
Until I ran into a thought that stopped the brain leakage. “What the hell do I actually want now?” Staring at the doodles, finally, some strong words shouldered their way to the front of my burned brain.
Yahtzee!
The first word was COMMUNITY.
I wanted a real community of friends and neighbors who I could interact with, create with, commiserate with on whatever shenanigans we would get up to. I had lived in that house in that college town for two decades and for reasons that no longer matter, I had only connected with a handful of people. Those were lonely years. And I was done with that.
The second strong word was MOVE. Five years prior, I had set a deadline for a decision to be made for the years ahead and if the spouse hadn’t come up with a viable plan to relocate somewhere that I had a say in selecting, then I was going to make the choice and he could come along or not. Afterall, I had uprooted my life three times at this point, each time moving for his work that took me farther and farther away from a location where any of my eclectic skill sets were viable career choices.
Ten years ago, it was clear that I needed to get out a metaphorical machete and start clearing a path to where I was supposed to be. It was a true winter of the soul where I had retreated, hibernating and trying to keep the delicate seeds of dreams alive while I let my listening stretch out again to those sadistic guide bastards to hear where I needed to move next.
NORTH. That was the word. I don’t think there are any coincidences because I know how those sneaky bastards work, but I had two simultaneous invitations to go north for visits from two women I’d known for years who both lived at the tops of two Michigan Peninsulas; one in the Keweenaw and the other in the Leelanau. They did not know each other so three guesses who set this up.
Why the hell not? I packed my car and hit the road to Copper Harbor. I had a great visit with my friend and the miles on the road alone helped air out my head. The morning of my departure from her house, I sat alone on the dock with my coffee and threw out to the Universe a request for a sign to let me know if our communication line was open so I could pick up the next bread crumb they tossed on my path. I did not see a bird fly over, but as I raised my cup towards my mouth, a feather dropped right into it with a satisfying plunk. Hilarious. Message received. As Ellie in the book Contact frantically reported to the control room team, “we are good to go!”.
Next stop Northport. I had some very interesting days in this tiny town and I met a lot of people and already had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last time I visited. Sitting at the donut shop before hitting the road, my friend asked what I saw myself doing next, and I said I wanted to create gatherings where people can celebrate and learn and interact with their community. She pointed across the street and said that building was for sale. We walked over and got a tour from the owners who were outside tending plants. The very second I stepped into the ballroom, everything that was twisted and broken in my soul straightened out and said “THIS”. THIS is my future.
It still took another three years to bring together all the wiggly bits and pieces to finally take over this building and another seven years to become one with this beautiful business in a lovely town with a real community of friends and neighbors, but it happened. Ten long freaking years.
So, the moral of this story is that when your life explodes and your brain melts, it’s a really good time to reopen your communication channels with Sadistic Bastards Are Us. I mean your spiritual guides. Let them lead you on a merry chase as they move you closer to your own next step. The golden part is just over that hill with the steep incline, razor wire, fire ants and random lightning strikes. Come on! It’ll be fun! And ten years from now you’ll look back and laugh.
A word from the Patron Saint of Sadistic Bastards-
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward” Soren Kierkegaard
Can I just say that the Toon Me App is ridiculously fun? The self portrait image at the top of the article is from 2012, taken in my kitchen in East Lansing, next to my chalkboard wall. The other images are from Toon Me’s portal access to the Faerie Realm.
I am thankful for the beautiful spaces of my home and my work that flow with people and the opportunity they offer to witness as we celebrate happy things, mourn our losses, commiserate on worldly matters, or laugh out loud over the perfect madness of life on Earth
I am thankful for a community that rallies when one of us needs something we can not do alone
I am thankful when cancer fails at its job to wreck a life
I am thankful for the change agents who make loud noises about things and wake others up to the fact that the old system no longer works and it is time find a better way
I am thankful to the Universe that has coaxed and cajoled, led and dragged me towards the next and the next and the next small and large adventure in my life
I am thankful to the ever growing circle of family and friends who have arrived at my door on the road of love and for my chance to welcome them in
I am thankful for the gifts of music and art and word crafting and food creation that keep my soul skipping like a kid to their wild playgrounds
I am thankful for this new day where there is another chance for hard hearts and closed tight minds to open and stay that way
I am thankful for the rich and funny, small and large conversations I have had with friends, loved ones and strangers that brought baskets of ideas and inexplicable joy
And I am thankful for my life and the thousand things that allow me to dream something that is not there now and the ability to make them happen
A few years ago, when Betsy Ernst started talking about raising money so we could open our own Pottery Studio here at the Northport Arts Association I had one of those full body shivers. The kind that rattles your soul a bit and whispers in your ear, “Pay attention! This is gonna be good!”
The last time my hands were covered in slip and happily shaping things from clay was way back in the early 1970s out in Scottsdale, Arizona.
My good friend who had moved there from Morristown, New Jersey had gotten a brand new neighbor. When he introduced me to Sissy, she was unpacking her things after relocating from Asbury Park. Her former roommate back home was dating some musician named Springsteen. I wonder what happened to that guy. Sissy was a free bird, hippy-dippy chick like me and amongst her moving treasures were stained glass making tools and clay things.
She shared a lot of skills and we had a great time getting messy and making art. Life happened and things changed as they always do. Divorce. Moving North. Moving South. Remarriage. Kids. Work. Moving North again. Kids launching out into the world. Moving farther North. You know the drill. Somewhere along the road, things just filled in the space where clay used to live.
So here I am now, four days away from jumping into a clay class with the NAA teacher, Tina Greco and I am ridiculously excited!
When my kids asked me what I wanted for Christmas last year, I announced that I was going to take clay classes at the brand new NAA Clay Studio after the wedding season was over at Willowbrook. My son presented me with a clay tool set that has way too much stuff in it but I’m eventually going to use every single thing.
The point is that a lot of us left things that brought us joy somewhere back along the road and until the Universe drops a big sign in front of us, we sort of forget what we used to love.
Anticipating these classes is like remembering a song I loved. I can hum the tune, but I’ve forgotten the words. I’m thinking that when I get in there with Tina guiding me, the words will come back again and I’ll be singing some clay pieces to life with the same joy I had when I was 22.
It’s a great time to check out the classes at the Northport Arts Association! We’re growing more every day and the variety of classes is impressive! Renew your membership if you’ve let it lapse or get over here and join us!
Find your joy again and let’s see what’s been hiding in your artistic soul waiting to be asked to come out into the light.
Word Ninja Girl 