mmmm

I have loved pie for many reasons in my life. And now I keep finding more--especially juxtaposed a long work week.

I like my job, but I am still learning where I fit there. I am still drawing boundaries and forming a workplace identity of sorts. I want to be reliable and helpful, but ours is an industry of constant crisis and need. It becomes difficult to know where the real crisis is and what is something that will be there tomorrow. I was asked to work this weekend. I said no. Why? Because I am tired with a deep tiredness that pulls on my bones stronger than gravity. And because I need time to do other things that make me feel human. In short, I need time away from the machine.

I needed time to make a pie.

I have on several occasions given all of my reasons for loving pie. I must at this point add a few more as my appreciation matures. Now, I love making pie because the butter I knead into the crust slips between my fingers and into all of the cracks, cuts, and callouses I have earned. (I used to have such beautiful hands.) I love that fitting a crust to a pie plate is just the right shaped to massage tired muscles in hands that have been stretching and wrestling, grasping and tightening. I love that I can take as long as I need to and no one yells 'hurry!' I love that I can have a glass of wine while I work.

My list of reasons to love pie keeps growing. But I think that an important reason that has been there all along, though often without words, is the shape. Pies are a circle. They have no points or rough edges. They have nothing hidden away in some secret corner. Just a circle, wrapped in crust. And I? I am... so unlike that. I forget to share myself. I take and I take. I do it to take care of myself. I do it so that no one else has to. I do it because I'm not sure anyone else wants to. Even when I take care of others...I often forget to give any bit of myself.

Pies don't think about that silly stuff. They are not brownies with the corners that often get burnt while the middle stays gooey. They aren't cookies all broken up into pieces you can fit in your hand or pocket (or stolen on the sly). They don't freak out if they leave the freezer (like ice cream). Nah. They just go from mixing bowl to oven to plate with all of their messy insides...still messy but ready to share at a moment's notice. Wish I could be like that. Guess I got things to look forward too.

Anyway, I like pie. I identify with it in that, it is effortlessly what I am trying (with much effort) to be.

in summary

In high school, I made art to justify my existence. ...Which, if you know my highschool, is funny.

The people I went to highschool with joked that artists had no souls. I was asked regularly how any of it was 'practical' and what it 'contributed to society'. In general, art was viewed as a superfluous function of the upper class bending to society's expectations of a nice, pretty, and presentable exterior. Often, artists seemed to be viewed as poor people who had little else to offer the world and so made things which were tolerated, patronized (in every sense and meaning of the word), and occasionally appreciated. I will never know if these were the products of poor communication or the precise intentions of those around me...or an evil mixture in between.

I knew of course that none of this was true. And I knew with the knowing that does not need to be defended or strengthened because the roots are deep and strong. It was a knowing that merely grew out of the soil I had. That is a very good thing too because if that knowing had broken, I surely would have drowned a long time ago. That knowing was my anchor, my life preserver, heck my whole vessel!

And it justified the breaths I took, the eating and sleeping I needed, and the relationships I made. It gave pain a purpose, and joy too.

--I don't say any of this to be melodramatic. Rather, I want to explain and, in my explanation, to understand for myself this journey so that I may know where it is I am going.--

It was the backdrop of my mental energy and the safeguard of my emotional stability which allowed me access to spirituality and honesty.

Then I moved to Portland. I reasoned that my art supplies could not fit into a dorm room and that I would leave them behind. I created a few good things that year discovering quickly that I still had this need to make stuff, though it was not so much out of this need to justify my existence. Rather,  I think it came from this need to grow and to sort through the old ideas to see which ones I would take with me.

But I found so many photographers in Portland that I could find no more meaning in it. It was an empty medium because I found myself having to justify my existence as an artist. That was my tree with the deep roots that anchored me through all those years of feeling like a non-person. Suddenly the bar had been raised and it was not enough to be a person. My art was my evidence that I was a person. To have to defend that my art was art was unconscionable. Rather than summon any form of bravery, I quickly surrendered the ground on which I stood. My camera began to stay home more and more. In Montana, my camera bag was put on with my belt and shoes everyday. There had been so many things to see that I was sure I could bring a new perspective to. In Portland, glass eyes abounded looking every where and every way. I could not see the forest for the trees.

I kept on painting though. It was slow going but I took on harder projects. I stretched a bit and grew. I wrote when the painting was sour. Then I moved into a house with seven women and I was never alone, never not watched, and never allowed to just exist without a defense. It felt as though I had to justify my entrance into the house I lived in. I paid taxes in stress and in a total creative block. When my only successful attempt at pushing through the darkness was accidentally knocked over and broken (being glass), I hit a wall. I was officially too busy existing to think about if I should or not much less what it meant for me to exist. More machine than woman, I tried to keep up and in keeping up I lost any kind of anchor. Even writing itself became a chore that I imposed upon myself to remember who I wanted to be when I finally surfaced from whatever cavern I had fallen into. I lived this way for a year.

But I did not surface after that. My resources were dry. My intuition was tied in a knot around my creativity. My mind's eye hardly had the strength to open. So many of the muscles I relied on to buoy me in my earlier years had atrophied and could not yet be trusted with the full weight of my needs.

And so here I am at the end of a long stretch of surviving, coming out of survival, transitioning, and attempting to stabilize. Four years of giving up the way I justify my own existence later and I have a lot of questions to ask myself. I think it will feel like deep sea diving and gardening at the same time. There are some roots which need to be nourished and driven down deep so that I have something to tie this creaky vessel of mine to.

I am a hurricane. It is not that I am bent on destruction but just that movement and wind are all that I really know and life around me is so fragile. I am a storm stretched between the ground and the sky. I cannot hope to leave either behind.

A quote from the book I am reading says, "The more abstract our life plan, the easier it will be to feel good about it but the harder it will be to know concretely what we are affirming. The more concrete our life plan, the easier it will be to know what our tasks are but the more likely we are to overwhelm ourselves with tasks and narrow our possibilities." This same book (The Van Gogh Blues) cites a lack of meaning in life as one of the primary causes of depression in 'creative people'. Now, we will ignore the fact that I do not comprehend the existence of uncreative people. We will also ignore the word depression because it is an overdiagnosed, misunderstood (but real) state of being with a lot of baggage.

Let us call it hopelessness. Let us call it sadness. Let us call it whatever name we find ourselves saying after dark when we should be asleep but something is sitting on our chest keeping us awake by sheer force of panic. It may stay for awhile or it may visit only briefly. I have hours of despair in which I do not comprehend what it means for me to be alive and living much less what I am supposed to do about it. I have always had these hours interspersed with my life and they never once made me feel like I had the right to end my life or harm myself in any conscious way. Yet, I am coming to understand them as a kind of mild depression, which is funny in a way because I never set myself to reading about depression only Van Gogh.

My struggle has always been to sail the storm that I am, to understand where I find myself and what to do about it. Abstract wrapped up in concrete. If I get too specific, the wind kicks up and beats against the barriers and boundaries. If I remain nondescript, my hurricane becomes clumsy and I become self conscious of my dangerous blustering as I aimlessly tear through life. I may understand this and be able to define life in a meaningful way, but I do not cease to be a hurricane. And that is something I am coming to terms with.

I was a hurricane of a child and have never really purged myself of the storm. I am constantly in danger of being pulled apart between the ground and the sky only to discover that I am full of an ocean that must be sailed. I have only learned to sail more (and sometimes less) expertly over the years in an effort to connect the parts of me that are deeply rooted in reality as I understand it with the parts of me that resist definition, classification, limitation, and reservation.

I am one part sailor, one part cartographer, and another part ocean but two parts hurricane. Life and living are very much about getting all of those parts to sync up without letting any of them win. Not just for my own benefit, but also for the sake of those around me.