home is where one starts from

becoming a house

"home is where one starts from. as we grow older
the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
of dead and living. not the intense moment
isolated, with no before and after,
but a lifetime burning in every moment..." (ts eliot)

this post is all the same things things i've been saying since i started posting. i repeat myself for myself, to remind myself, and remember as i am figuring things out. but i'm going to stop with all the home talk, because after this week i am leaving home. for the second time. at the right time. i wanted to leave lots of times before, more than i do now, but then wasn't right. so this is my reminder. this is because it is important to tell what He has done.
halfway through my sophomore year of college i firmly decided to quit school. what i said i wanted was a year alone. i begged and cried saying i needed time away from people. but i was convinced to stick it out and finish. and i did, and i was okay. i enjoyed my last two years. i finished a semester early because i could. if i close my eyes and remember back to who i was my sophomore year, why i wanted to quit life...i remember everything feeling empty and colorless. i had trouble breathing. i couldn't care well, and when i did it was unbearable. i did a lot of pretending in order to be left alone. i pretended to sleep so i could think without interruption. i pretended to read, or run errands, because being in company made me feel so much more lonely than being alone. nothing meant anything to me. i couldn't understand the whys in all the things i did, and i hated that.
i still don't know what all this was. counselors weren't much help. they named it anxiety and depression. i was given medication to help me move on, but i still didn't know what the real root reason was. it was an intensified version of an inner uneasiness i've always carried. what is that? why? but i set my questions aside and finished school, with hopes of picking them up again and talking to them when i had all the time i needed. maybe i'm slow to life, but i need time.
and i just had all that time. i'm not clear on everything now, but i am clear on some things, and i'm more okay with the things i can't know. but i'm wanting to know more. i had to ask for my mind to be expanded, because really, i'm pretty simple, and i can't understand all the things i want to know. but even in this wanting, it's just want, it's not need. i'm more okay with the mystery. i smile at it.
all my life turning points so far haven't felt big. i never cared for graduations. i didn't want to attend them. the important ages i've turned were anticlimactic. turning points weren't turning points. but this is, this leaving home again. it's important for me because i arrived with all myself, and i'm leaving as someone very different, someone i still have to get to know. i'm emptied, and i'm in no rush to fill up again. the filling can happen gradually. rightly.
when i moved home, that first december and january, were the worst months i have ever known. and it had nothing to do with me. home at that time was a camp my family had been involved with since i was four. it's woods and trails and constant visitors were one of my greatest comforts growing up. i would have lived their forever. but that winter, in all the snow, it was all crushed for us. a series of terrible circumstances i won't tell now. we were grieving, and few could understand. when you are wronged you want people to know, but they can't, and it doesn't matter. losing a ministry is a hard death to handle.
we had to leave, and so decided to go ten minutes down the road to the little cabin and land that were never meant to be lived in. it was a summer escape-- dirty, no hot water, cracks in the walls for the wind to blow through, holes in the roof where the rain poured in. tiny. not enough space for my spacious family. but we did it, and it's become the most beautiful place to be.
once we were settled there, there was nothing but time. i had thought i would get a job, but i was too far out in the country then, and it just never worked out. i wasn't pressured to. i painted. my mom and i read all morning long. i took walks, sat by the pond, layed in the grass. wrestling always, in every little thing.
doing dishes i would think, what if this is it? if this is everything, always for me, how is it enough? it has to be enough. what if i am suddenly paralyzed and i can't even wash dishes, how will that be enough? there has to be something that is enough no matter the scenario i come up with. enough has to be more than what i have or what i do. i wrestled. i measured every moment.
i lost a lot of things over time. i lost my need to feel important based on education, work, talents. titles. all the doing and events give a shallow sense of importance. i didn't do much more than dishes. if i could find contentment in so little, i wouldn't be afraid of more. because though i want things in life badly, i've always had a fear of the good things...a fear that i would put my everything into them, love them too much, and then they would be taken away, and i would have nothing. i would be nothing. so if i could be content on the nothing side, i could be content with everything, content no matter what.
i also lost my need for purpose, and that one was harder to let go. when i was younger i wanted to be a missionary abroad because that sounded like the highest calling. i imagined i would be a martyr. i wanted a great, dramatic story. i needed God to need me to do great things. but that's not enough for me--to exist for a purpose. i don't want to lose myself to some cause in the world. i'm sure i have a purpose, many, but i'm not needing them to feel valued. i don't need much. i don't feel entitled...just thankful.
i don't want to sound like this time has made me whole and perfect. hardly. but i've gotten past a big shadow in my life so that i can begin. i've been altered. i like children lots more than i used to. you would think, having grown up around tons of kids, that i would just naturally be amazing with them. i am too impatient for that. i want to spend time with them on my terms. i have a hard time looking past myself and paying attention. but living with, and mothering, and sistering, my three youngest sisters has changed me. i really like kids now...and i guess i just really like people more now. i wanted to be away from them, and now i see why i need to be with them. i've been cared for, and i've started to care.
a year and a half at home. eleven months with my parents and three little sisters. four months with my grandparents. one month with my sister amy somewhere in there. a year of living at the family hub of activity, the place all my scattered siblings return quite frequently. the last five months, teaching art once a week to kids in the hospital. hours, days, months painting on my own, selling my work for the first time, loving a gift, wanting so much to know it more--be better. one day devoted to holding a silent retreat out at our property, just because we discovered silence is important. a year and a half just to be if that's what i chose.
and now i am going to chattanooga. this is my last week at my family's property. aside from packing and writing love notes to the people i'm leaving, i'm spending it out in my hills and woods. i don't know much of what i will do in chattanooga, but i'm moving into my sister's big crazy house with her and her family. i don't want to work more than part-time, because i want time with them. i have to keep painting. i want to walk around in a neighborhood, around downtown, take the bus. i've applied for an internship at the children's hospital with child life workers---a job that actually pays you to comfort sick kids. if i don't get the internship, i guess i'll just have to volunteer. i don't know how long i will stay in chattanooga. maybe six months, possibly forever. i've never had the ability or want to plan my life out, but i've never been let down for my lack of forethought. i enjoy the surprise.

"i am here or there, or elsewhere. in my beginning.

which you had never known

"He led you through the vast and dreadful desert, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions. He brought you water out of hard rock. He gave you manna to eat in the desert, something your fathers had never known, to humble and test you so that in the end it might go well with you." -Deuteronomy 8:15&16

"mid-bar"- hebrew for wilderness, means an uninhabited plain or sterile country, but in a poetical sense it also means the instrument of speech, "the mouth". so the midbar, the desert, can mean "the place God speaks"

"mahn hu"-- manna, the bread God sent down from heaven in the desert, was named by the israelites, and it means "a portion of Him"

i like to know these things when i read about the israelites in the desert, when i think about wilderness in general.

and in my sleep

at night i have this sense that everything around me is white. in the moonlight and my tossing and half-waking, there is gesso. i am gessoing a piece of wood and then scraping it all off, again and again. somehow my tossing is the effort. i am being painted white. this work seems to last all night, and then i wake and find the coffee and color.

today i handed this painting over to its owner, finally finished. it is a (little late) birthday gift for a wife and mother. a painting of her husband and sons. i thought about her as i made it, so i hope she knows.

up close

isolated

last evening in a break from errands, my grandmother and i drove through cook-out for a hamburger. we parked beside the building to eat and watch the other drive-thru-ers. i saw a very heavy woman drive up, and asked my grandmother how people get to this point. not just over-weight, but practically unable to walk—the mom from “what’s eating gilbert grape.” eating would have to be full-time. a friend who struggled in this area once confided to me that she drove from one fast food place to the next on her way home before dinner. i watched the woman drive away from cook-out to the empty lot across the street. she parked, lights out, and sat alone to eat.

progress

and again my inmost life rushes louder,

as if moved now between steeper banks.

objects become ever more related to me,

and all pictures ever more perused.

i feel myself more trusting in the nameless:

with my senses, as with birds, i reach

into the windy heavens from the oak,

and into the small ponds' broken-off day

my feeling sinks, as if it stood on fishes.

- rainer maria rilke

it's like a hurricane inside her

...it comes and goes

painting for kids

i finished painting animals all over a little girl's room today. anna followed me around and chattered and laid around on the bed while i stood up there painting. it was fun, mindless work. and it was nice having tiny company for much of it.

go to sleep

reclining figures make me find my camera, especially when the scene involves children.
a mini-vacation with my family in charlotte, a night at a hotel, lots of pictures of lounging/sleepy children.
my mother said all my pictures from the weekend looked kind of morbid. i took a lot, a lot. i think they're beautiful. but still, in an effort to show my sisters do breath and move (all too much), i included the last picture of carson.

i'm quitting falling

"there was something about him she wanted to learn, grown into, and hide inside..." (the english patient)

hundreds of absurd crushes based on nothing more than a quiet demeanor, a hand at the guitar, a look of concentration, dark curly hair. a few times of having fallen--all too quickly, carelessly, hard.
outside of my ridiculousness, passion, and imagination stand 3 clear moments. 3 people to make me think...to know, exactly what i want. a priest and 2 hebrew scholars. all at least 40 years older than me, and all married.
they have a presence, words with presence, more than words. powerful and gentle. but mostly, a taste of truth. their words make me feel free. truth is my favorite.
beauty can manipulate. arts make me feel--sometimes falsely. i believe to many written words, even my own insanity. creators inspire me, but that's not enough. i want truth. i want to climb inside and take a walk, and lose all my forgetting. trash my self-made reality.
i sat across from the third tonight. talk of torah, and observing, and godliness. words to make me come out of hiding. exactly what i want. what i want to be like. more than just a heart that aches and bleeds and cares, a heart full of truth. wake me up.

i am a brief frenzy

last week i worked four long days assembling, arranging, and cleaning furniture for a show room. i enjoyed helping create a space, but 4 days of real work left me aching for my paints. it's good to feel thankful for the time i have...especially since it is almost up.

the last 2 days i've been a frantic painter, partly out of joy, and partly because i have a deadline. i'm pacing, and running my hands through my hair, and taking my shoes on and the off, and eating meals all too fast. i am feel somewhat like that nervous excitement you get when you're falling for someone, and somewhat jittery like i've had extreme amounts of strong coffee. since neither are true, i think i must be in love with paint.

this is the painting with the deadline. the faces obviously are not finished.

when i work on one thing, i end up working a little on everything i have laying around, so today i went back to quite a few. the painting above is an attempt to interpret some music. i'm not there yet.

this also is the beginning of a musical expression.

i should have finished this months ago and sent it to my nephew mason. (katie i'll send it to your new house). tomorrow i'm painting animals on the walls of a children's room. it's my first semi-mural commission.

i'm thinking of doing a series of paintings/drawings of pregnant women. i need my 2 sisters who are prengant to grow their stomachs faster so they can pose for me. babies happen so slow, and i am impatient.

some blue leftover from painting. i love the colors left behind on my skin, and clothes, and palette. it's a shame they can't be kept.

northfork makes me want

an ark home. and a church missing the wall behind the pulpit. and a limping wooden animal in the front yard. and a boy who is a broken angel. and so much dust open space. and light. and a flood. and a plane.

a delightfully peculiar movie. worth watching for the looking.
thank you, to whichever sister it was that recommended this a while back.

my dearling

since i moved down a long road from my littlest siblings, i now only see them sundays. and we make a big deal of it...or they do, talking as if i betrayed them moving away, with plans to move farther away.
these pictures are of marley, because she will sit with me for hours sucking her thumb.
i was 12 when she was born. i claimed her in a way, and devoted myself to holding her. there are lots of pictures of us together in her earliest years. there's one of me wearing her on my back, with her pacifier in my mouth.
i shared a room with my sister jamie when she was born, right beside our parent's room. we were so excited to have a baby in the house, we insisted on having the crib put in our room.
after she was a little older and would take a bottle, we helped take care of her at night. jamie more so than me, because i hate being woken so often, and learned to sleep through the constant crying.
but on one of my generous nights, i saved marley from her crib and took her back to bed with me. i woke up later in the night unable to find her. i looked under all the covers and pillows and every little place, but i couldn't find her anywhere. i finally found her asleep on the floor right under my bed. i have no idea how she got there. somehow she survived, and still lets me hold her.

out of doubt

a small library and i sit alone on the orange couch. a doll house. coloring books. video games. art supplies behind me on shelves. books and pamphlets surround me: "when someone in your family has cancer," "bone marrow transplants," "radiation therapy and you," "acute lymphocytic leukemia ," and the one that draws my eye most, "katie has cancer." these things aren't my reality. i took pamphlets home a couple of times, but they didn't much help my understanding of disease.
all i see are children. today in the last room, a tiny face. only eyes. she stares into mine, laughing, studying, hardly noticing the things i pull out of my bag for her. she stares in the same way my grandmother stopped to sneak into the neighbors yard to smell and touch their flowers. deeply. shamelessly. so i stare back, and we stare until she's taken away, until she's out the door. at the end of the hall there's is nothing left for me to do. i've come at a bad time for everyone it seems.
so i sit in the library to wait it out. and instead of reading, i pull out the census and scan down the list. children's names, ages, room numbers, diseases. and i hover over one and pray, and then another. i pray out of my doubt. it used to paralyze me, but now it makes me do the things i have trouble believing. i ask God where he is in my prayers. i used to ask him if he is.
all day in my head i hear: "katie has cancer." katie has cancer, and i don't know what to do. i spend so little time at the hospital. my prayers feel lacking. i am lacking. i don't have understanding to pray out of. but these prayers are my every prayers. katie has cancer, so where are you?
i doubt still, maybe worse than i did in the past. but in all the unanswers and crying and crawling, i find i am not the same doubter as before. i have more peace. i somehow have a trust of the silence. i say to God, "you know, i only trust you...only you," and i know i mean it because of the little smile my lips can't resist...as if, during my doubtful thoughts, i have to whisper my heart's secret trust to God.
i'm resting more easily with silence. he is so quiet with me. katie has cancer, and he is somewhere. one place i know for sure, is me.

i want so badly to believe...

my grandmother tells me cardinals mate for life. it always made her especially sad to find one of them dead, knowing it left behind a lonely bird. i never thought much of cardinals before. now i watch them.

i was with my grandparent's on their 49th wedding anniversary. in the morning she leaned against his shoulder and playfully sang an old song. her mom had sung it to her as a child, and she has kept singing it over the years. that day for the first time it was close to a truth. my grandfather wiped a tear. i asked her to sing it again and again all day long.
it goes like this:

on the old farmhouse veranda
there sat silas and miranda
thinking of the days gone by
he said deary don't be weary
you have always been so cheery
don't let a tear, dear dim your eye
she said they're not tears of sadness silas
they're just tears of gladness
for it's 50 years today since we were wed
and the old man's dim eyes brightened
and his stern old heart was lightened
as he turned to her and said:
put on your old gray bonnet
with the blue ribbons on it
and i'll hitch old dobbin to the shay
through the fields of clover we will ride
on up to dover on our golden wedding day...

i know you by heart

a lack of color

take time

a man takes up his friend’s bet to live a year alone, walled up in a garden of solitude. was that chekhov’s story? i can’t remember, but ever since reading it, i’ve wanted a year of my own: no responsibility, no conversation, no needs, everything temporary...a pause. the small things become the large things.
march with my grandparent’s is over, and now there is only april left. our days are slow, the ticking of the old clock always audible, sometimes loud, other times faint behind house noises. late at night when i’m the only one up, sometimes i set my book down to watch the pendulum swinging. it seems to be underwater, smooth, round—constant. empty moments watched.
my days start first with coffee, then a blurry-eyed walk down to fetch the newspaper. there is reading, and more reading. aprons, music, paint, and ink. we watch the birds, my grandmother naming them off to me: a finch, sparrows, chickadees, a titmouse. the red-headed woodpecker, an occasional blue jay, lots of cardinals—the females brown with flaming red beaks. absurd acrobatic squirrels who we try to scare away, only to find them sneaking back. they remind me of the squirrels and pigeons beth and i used to laugh at in the city. a fat pigeon, head bobbing faster than could be safe, waddles away. we both notice and laugh hard. i like that neither has to point or explain.
i read in between the small daily tasks and time spent painting. i just began the english patient—words for eating. “i fell burning into the desert.” i read imagining i am hana in the destroyed villa, with her ghost patient, and books, and soon visitors. the secret history left me wanting scotch and cigarettes, and loving the word “tousle”.
at 2:30 i get the mail for my grandfather, looking up at treetops on the short walk down. the branches make me think of black lines in a stained glass window. an abstract one. it will be a disappointment to have my view of those lines taken by spring. at the mailbox i wonder about the neighbors across the street in the dark house. i imagine them the type to like my art, so i decide to sneak a little something in their mailbox when all the cars are gone from their drive.
at evening-time we might have wine. twice now i’ve put on my apron, lit candles, and prepared a dinner without help. the amelie soundtrack is perfect for evening cooking time, unless i’m in the mood to sing along. i am discovering that i’m not the wretched cook i’ve always claimed to be. a timer is the key. with a timer nothing burns. one meal, for a side we had acorn squash, cut in half to be eaten out of like bowls. if i was a squash i would be the acorn.
we look through boxes of pictures. my grandparent’s sort through family history, they tell stories. we recently got a tape recorder for keeping their stories. i am the interviewer.
they call me jane because i asked them to. i’m glad they play along. i used to want to be jane and step into tarzan’s jungles. as a child my grandmother wanted her name changed from "myra mable" to "myra jane". it’s a perfect kind of name.
the warmest day of march, i painted out on the deck, until tree shadows crept over, sending me back indoors. once inside i realized i was burnt. i like the warm skin feeling of a slight sunburn. growing up in florida, we often took beach trips to the gulf, where we played in the ocean and built sand mermaids. almost without fail, we returned home with terrible sunburns—the feverish kind. we would smother each other in aloe, and lie around miserably until our burns calmed and our skin fell off. i try to avoid that now, but i also still avoid sunblock.
most days here are gray outside, and warm with a fire inside. there is a remote control to turn on the fireplace. a couple times i almost accidentally threw some trash on the fake logs.
one peculiar day, blue skies turned suddenly, ominously dark. they were a green gray color, which my grandmother says means dangerous weather. just as i was stepping out of the garage to look up at the danger, huge balls of sleet began crashing onto the asphalt. wind, ice cracking, no rain yet. it was perfect, but sadly i didn’t witness the predicted tornados.
last evening i took pink roses outback to dispose of them. it was the moment before sunset and the air was pink. the atmosphere does that sometimes—tints the world so subtly. it usually occurs in the befores and afters. i miss the yellow atmosphere that used to happen...i believe after rain. everything bright and clear, but not washed out with intense white sunlight, rather it’s a dim yellow, like looking through colored sunglasses, the air holding wet pieces of the sun.