Daisy Flowers. I love when Jack says those words. We went to hunt for wildflowers yesterday. Up a hill off Lucas Valley. Yellows covered the hillside like I’ve never seen before. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Wind blowing. “I’m cold” says Fiona. I dressed her in pants in the morning before school; she wanted to wear a little pair of white shorts with a pink bow we pulled out of the summer drawer last night for pajamas. “We’re going hiking, I don’t think you should, keep your pants on. “I say. But it’s too late, she already has her pants half off, trying to get them over her thick Keen sandals. “Let me help you” I say. On the hill, I hand her Jacks green and yellow thick plaid shirt from out of my backpack. She has me button it to the top; it’s so hip pared with her flower skorts, navy blue keens, beaded necklace, (she made herself) and short haircut. Which I often have to explain to the little boys at the park that she is a girl and girls have short haircuts too, in fact all the best super hero girls have short hair! Then I explain “What’s in her ears?” when they ask that next. “Her hearing aids” I say. I should add a fantastic story about them being part of her super hero status. I sit on the hillside watching the children, Jack, Fiona, and Valentina have the best time of their life. There is a small, trickling stream that turned into the softest, throwable, mud as the kids play in it. Jack and Fiona both say they want to go home and take a shower more than once, but immediately run back in the mud and stomp and laugh. “I love mud” Jack says. I take it all in. A dream come true. Heaven. Today I am able to work in my studio and go to yoga, where I find my pelvic floor. It is the strangest thing: I studied all about the pelvic floor, hip, internal organs, spine connection last night, then today I go to Yoga and the whole class is about what I had studied the night before. This made my yoga workout today extremely intense focusing on breath and proper alignment and which muscles to engage (instead of being on auto pilot). It was pure serendipity! Spring is bringing me a bounty of inspiration and intuition. My alone time is coming to an end now though. I certainly haven’t gotten enough of it lately. But I appreciate all the time I do get to be alone creating! Namaste.
Category: finding balance
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I have a Dream. I walk by the door of the Gallery, my show is being installed. I can see three small framed portraits being hung, the installers say, “not yet”, they don’t want me to see yet. I wake up. I want to clean my studio. Something inside is leading me, a part of me more certain than emotions or intellectualism. I clean, throw away, I paint all the paintings on board, on canvas, white. All the paintings I’m so-so about. I haven’t been able to work in my studio the past couple Of weeks. I write and complain, it’s because my kids won’t take their naps anymore, its because they are being bad, its because they aren’t giving me any space. I throw away three bags of trash from my studio. I throw away paintings on paper that never worked, that scattered the floor, my press, under my table. I throw away junk left from frantic studio sessions, old yogurt containers with dried yogurt. I couldn’t work in my studio because it was too cluttered with the past. Not because of motherhood. Now there’s space here. I create a special corner for Fiona with her easel and her art supplies. I haven’t had a chance to paint yet; I have all my notebooks opened up to clean white pages, painting surface after painting surface gessoed with only ghosts showing from what was. Fiona tells me she wants to paint in her new spot; It’s after 5:00, I should be making dinner. Alan is playing with Jack in the house; Fiona and I go in my studio, she starts painting, cutting string, gluing, she is completly absorbed in the process. I start drawing, reacting with new lines and reacting with lines that connect with the ghosts of the past paintings. Jack comes in and says he wants to throw paint. I set him up with a canvas and black paint, he starts splattering the paint, Jackson Pollock style. I continue to work, my head feels light and my body free from the neck work I did in yoga this morning. Fiona and I paint for almost two hours together. Alan comes in and says he’s getting really hungry and it’s really late. I tell Fiona, we clean up. I go upstairs and make dinner. I have a dream last night: I’m re-writing a story to read out loud, I get up in front of a group of people and I can’t read myown writing. Its so confusing, I can’t tell what happened to the words. I try to skim it and fill in the blanks, I’m so confused. I wake up and here I am.
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Quiet. I don’t even want to listen to music right now. I’m in my studio, Monday, March 6th, 2017, 1:46 PM. Babies asleep. I haven’t had a chance to get in my studio in forever. It’s been a crazy few weeks of transitions and changes: Jack and Fiona turning three, transitioning to preschool programs, Jack doesn’t start until the 13th, separating Jack and Fiona for the first time, behavioral changes due to all these changes. It’s been intense. I decided right away to just put the studio and writing on the back burner (even though it has been a time I needed it most) but I was so consumed with motherhood and domestic responsibilities I didn’t have any extra time, or energy. Today I finally made it. It takes a while to get into the creative zone. At first, when I came into my studio today I wondered how to get started. I started wondering what to work on, what route to take. It delayed my starting anything, until I mixed some fresh white paint, painted over what had been sitting on the studio floor for weeks. A ghost remained, I started painting and drawing, first using one color, then two, then three, finishing with a slate grey. Letting them dry a little between layers, letting them set up a little. Taking my time. Now I am nearing the end of my studio time today. I have one more hour. Now forty minutes, I opened a bottle of wine, am enjoying a glass and updated my Facebook profile picture!
Last week amidst the changes I had a bit of a scare. I started to develop a twitch! On my face! I had one of these a few years ago, it lasted a year. It was awful! It appeared at the end of an intensely stressful period of my life. When my face started twitching again last week I knew it was time to chill the fuck out! That’s the first thing that came to my mind! When Jack gets in his preschool program I’m adding yoga back into my life. That’s for sure. But when I came in my studio today, I was concerned because I have an absence of rage inside me. Stress and fatigue, but no rage. The rage that I felt during the election cycle and during Trumps first month has subsided. I just keep thinking I will wake up one morning and they will all be gone. Like in “The Leftovers”, Trump and his cabinet and all the creepy crawly republicans trying to pass legislation to fuck the earth and society, they all just disappear. No one knows where they went and only their families care. That’s what I keep hoping. But I’m not mad. I’m not mad at anyone, I don’t care what Trump says or does anymore. He should not be the president and everyone knows it. I tell Jack and Fiona he’s a bad man when they see his picture come up on the television.
We are Democrats, atheists, artists, and scientists. (I’m rooting for my children to become scientists) My husband is a builder. We are free thinking and have incorporated “Robot Dance Parties” into our daily routine. My guilty pleasure is sci fi and dystopian stories and movies. I relish in the imagined quiet of space and the mundane of the day to day. I know how lucky and fortunate I am, and thank my lucky stars. Knowing and tasting wine makes me happy. This is how I am now. My wine is good. I have a feeling everything is going to be O.K. Maybe Trump was a good thing to happen to us, he’s connected us and strengthened us. Even if he causes the destruction of the Earth, our last stand was a united one. That counts for something, doesn’t it?
Dirty Laundry Blog by Jennifer Hynes 