Field Journal…it’s been a loooong time!

I haven’t posted anything from my field journal in a long time…because I haven’t painted in a long time.  I’ve started a few sketches, but I don’t finish them.   Today was a rare, golden day, and I suddenly had to paint something.  Grabbed the sketching bag and drove to the park.  Sat on the hood of my car at the bottom of a hill because the grass was wet, and just painted what was in front of me.

Renovations

My room has been slowly accumulating clutter the past few months. You know the kind: a few things here and there that have no permanent home. “I’ll find a place for it later.” Then Christmas came and the clutter doubled. Then one day I looked at it all and got depressed. I didn’t feel like finding a place for everything because the task seemed overwhelming. It required going through and throwing away other stuff.

I was chatting to Marianne about how depressed I was about the state of my bedroom and came to the conclusion: “I mean, even when I get it tidy again, it won’t make me happy. It’s just not aesthetically pleasing.”

A breakthrough, I think. I was living with my hodge-podge furniture so long I stopped seeing it.

Marianne (queen of “It Must Be Aesthetically Pleasing to Me”) jumped at the chance to help me finally whip my room into shape. The main center of our “renovation” project includes getting rid of my desk, replacing it with bookshelves, and reorganizing the rest of the room accordingly. I’m bringing in an armchair from another room in the house and creating a reading corner. I purchased a cheap old trunk at the Antique Mall, which we’re going to paint, and I will store my random blankets in there. I’m working on doing something about my bedding, which doesn’t particularly “go” with any other colors in my room.

I was ready to make all these changes in one night, but alas, reality set in. I’ll post some pictures when it’s done, and maybe some “before” pictures if I can find any. (I’m not taking new pictures–I’m not sprucing up the old space just to pull it down.) I’m excited to finally have a real honest-to-goodness sanctuary, instead of just a place to sleep and store my stuff.

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers…

I dread social obligations.  I go to parties just for the food.  I have more friends who are dead or in books (or both) than I do in real life.  I am most decidedly an introvert: the few, the proud, the much-misunderstood, the much-maligned.

And yet…

I have this thing for strangers.  Whether we’ve been thrust together for a brief and necessary interaction (e.g. the man bagging my groceries or the teenager who’s checking my tire pressure), or whether we are just in the same place at the same time (the woman who is also in the baking aisle buying molasses, the old gentleman waiting in line beside me at the post office), I defy the social custom that says we should all quietly ignore one another’s existence, or make as little of it as possible.

Sometimes this is awkward. 

‘Tis love that’s born tonight

I’m not entirely sure what I’ve set out to write today. I’ve had lots of Christmas-y thoughts and feelings lately, though, and I hoped to express some of them.

I know Christmas is a hard time of year for many people: some are lonely, some are grieving, some are suffering. However, as I sit here listening to Christmas music I can’t help but feel…joy.

Of course, Christmas is an incredibly ritualized time of year, and psychological studies have shown that we human beings rely on nostalgia and rituals for comfort. If you’ve had a decent childhood, chances are that Christmas carries incredibly powerful good memories: scents, sounds, sights, feelings. And because childhood is a time of imagination where anything is possible, it’s hard to completely erase all those notes of magic even when you’ve long known Santa Claus doesn’t really bring you presents.

So there’s that, and that’s what I’ve enjoyed about Christmas most of my life: those powerful and happy bits of nostalgia floating in the air. Right now, though, the joy isn’t coming from Christmas cookies or the prospect of presents or the decorations being put up.

I’ve been thinking about the symbols of Christmas. I know lots of people will interpret where we get our traditions from and what they originally symbolized and all of that, but that’s not really what I am thinking of. The scriptures say all things testify of Christ, and that has been on my mind as I contemplate this holiday season.

First of all, I know the Savior wasn’t really born in December. But if we celebrate Easter in the spring–and with it, remember the Atonement and Resurrection of the Savior and the rebirth and new life it gives us–it seems fitting to me that we remember His birth in the winter, when life is cold, dark, and bleak. His birth brought hope, light, and love into a weary, cold, lost world.

So I listen to the lyrics of the sacred Christmas carols and I cry, touched by the messages of joy. I can’t help but be lifted up inside, my heart soaring. There is hope and love for each and every one of us, whatever our situation in life, however we may be grieving or whatever we have done.

I love the Christmas lights put up all over town–in and out of businesses, houses, apartment buildings. Whether or not people realize it, they are testifying of the birth of the Light of the World. Everywhere we have monuments to the light we have to pierce the darkness.

We give gifts to each other–reminiscent, I suppose, of the gifts the wise men gave the Christ child–but they also remind us of the gifts He gives us, those gifts which we can never repay.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

If I were a wise man, I would do my part;

Yet what I can I give him: give my heart.

That I might have the Sky

Before I got my eye put out
I liked as well to see –
As other Creatures, that have Eyes
And know no other way –

But were it told to me — Today –
That I might have the sky
For mine — I tell you that my Heart
Would split, for size of me –

The Meadows — mine –
The Mountains — mine –
All Forests — Stintless Stars –
As much of Noon as I could take
Between my finite eyes –

The Motions of the Dipping Birds –
The Morning’s Amber Road –
For mine — to look at when I liked –
The News would strike me dead –

So safer — guess — with just my soul
Upon the Window pane –
Where other Creatures put their eyes –
Incautious — of the Sun –

Emily Dickinson

Gratitude in the small things

On this pre-Thanksgiving Monday, I’d like to share a small story that happened to me in the past month or so. I wrote this in my private journal after it happened and am copying it from there:

And the world will be better for this

This morning I was almost ready to give up on my MFA program.

Fallen Stars

(Forgive my sloppiness; this is a rapid jotting of a memory)

I live on the upper story of a little old house.  The admittedly unkempt front yard is overrun with ivy.  In order to reach the door to my flat, I take a little path.  It winds through the ivy.

It rained today. I came home tonight and sighed a weary sigh.

I looked up at the sky.

I saw stars.

I glanced down at the path.

I saw stars.

I blinked in utter confusion.  For a moment I thought the stars were so bright they had printed themselves on my sight.  I looked around me again.

It appeared as though several thousand stars had fallen right out of the sky and were lying like lost diamonds scattered among the ivy.

I peered hard through the dark.  In each delicately curved ivy leaf, a pearl of water–larger than a dewdrop–lay.  In every single tiny pool, the full moon was perfectly, dazzlingly reflected.

I stopped in my tracks.  I stopped breathing.  I looked and looked and looked and looked.  I murmured an inadequate prayer.

I walked inside along a path through the stars.

 

“That it will never come again…”

“…is what makes life so sweet.” –Emily Dickinson

Live life now

No trip to New England this year for us. We are going to spend a three-day weekend playing around the area and having autumnal fun, but it will be different. Good, but different.

Going to New England had always been a “someday” plan for Marianne–”someday” she’d take a trip to New England in the autumn, maybe on her honeymoon. One day she started wondering why on earth she was waiting, and asked me to come along and make it happen. After all, what’s the point of being single if you can’t live? When she presented the idea to me, I really dragged my feet. I guess I’ve spent my whole life trying to be rational and frugal. I was worried that treating myself to a week-long vacation–just me and one friend–was crazy.