The smoke in the air from all the fires changed the colors of the sky and land. It was good to be shaken out of my normal palette, trying to match these more neutralized tones.
detail from Sunflowers, Rows
detail of Diving Platform in progress
Process of Harbor Reflections
For two years I’ve been wanting to address my fascination with watery reflections. I’m finally taking the time and energy to address this self-assigned challenge. Here, then is my version of Oliver’s work; these, my efforts to quench my thirst by sipping at waters, no doubt, flavored by the feet of seagulls; my sitting at the harbor of my longing.
Mornings at Blackwater
by Mary Oliver
For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
it was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
feet of ducks.
And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.
What I want to say is
the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.
So come to the pond
or the river of your imagination
or the harbor of your longing,
and put your lips to the world.
Harbor, Mast in progress
Harbor, Rigging in progress
Focusing on these reflections and attempting to represent them is not unlike the sentiments of this song, Both Sides Now
Paint Without Hope
ACCEPTANCE
Suspension. Anticipation. Waiting.
Waiting is not my cup of tea.
Waiting is not even my cup of lemon juice-cayenne pepper-honey cleanse.
Picture here my Not-even-if-I-pinch-my-nose-will-I-enjoy-this look.
That’s how “unfun” waiting is, and how “not easy”.
Could that be why it keeps bumping me in the forehead? That I’ve been practicing so much waiting that it could become my very being if I let it? So what lessons do I need to learn?
Waiting is addressed by the Buddhist idea of Satori, Christianity’s “The Lord’s Prayer”, the Hebraic Kabbalah, the Muslim Islam, and let’s not forget page 417 of the The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Taught by various means, it seems to me that the truly wise and enlightened among us have transcended our limited sense of waiting, and reached an understanding of acceptance.
Rather than center on the waiting experiences of being paused, anticipatory, and disempowered I accept the nature of our
short-sighted,
unilluminated,
finite,
subordinate,
teensy-weensy,
wobbly
unsustainable
lives.
And did I mention that acceptance is being OK with all that? I mean… being really, okay. As in cool, okay. As in That’s cool. So, what’s on tap today? As in No prob. Surf’s Up.
Referring to our experience of a theater curtain drawing upwards or a riding a train slowly pulling into an illuminated station, T.S. Eliot offers us a set of intriguing metaphors for waiting in a section of his East Coker poem of The Four Quartets. By first using incidents that we might associate with relative warmth and safety and peaceful anticipation, Eliot woos us into recognizing that waiting can also include moments of the terror, like being conscious but incapacitated. Eliot quickly takes us through moments where we mindlessly and obligingly accept "not yet fully knowing” to advising that we ought never start bouncing in our seats like kids before Christmas; no, we can’t always get what we want and we don’t even know what to hope for. Just wait.
If this makes you feel ineffective, try replacing the verb of “wait” in his poem with the verb that defines your true passion or your heart’s calling. Maybe your joy comes from being a teacher, a researcher, a counselor, a politician, a parent, a writer, an engineer. Any of these verbs could take their turns. I myself could replace “Wait” with a verb that means “pursuing the reflection of beauty/love/awe of the universe through my handiwork of painting, pottery and parenting along with some poetry and baking, oh gardening and trail running too”.
I’ll have to see if some other language has a word for all that. I suppose I could just plug in “Paint” but that seems oversimplified. But Eliot himself just picked one verb: WAIT.
Wait Without Hope
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.
As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
T. S. Eliot, Excerpt from the “East Coker” section of The Four Quartets
Carry a Big Brush and Squint
Key to painting well, or so it seems to work for me: use too big of a brush and squint.
Work in Progress. 48 x 60 inches.
The Neon Gods, We've Made
Give us ears that we may hear the truth
Give us eyes that see
What gods enslave us.
Taillights. 2017. Oil on Panel. 8x 12 inches.
Stones and Wrens Speak of the Same
How is it that we learn about God? How is it that we witness others’ relationships with and pursuit of God? I think Merton and Oliver have caught several of these conversations.
I Happened To Be Standing
Mary Oliver
I don’t know where prayers go,
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opossum pray as it
crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can’t really
call being alive.
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.
While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don’t know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn’t pursuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.
But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be
if it isn’t a prayer?
So I just listened, my pen in the air.
In Silence
Thomas Merton
Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your
name.
Listen
to the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?
Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.
Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.
O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you
speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.
“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?”
at the edge of the unknown venturing forward
Mapping systems are a long-running fascination for me; their purpose to fix into place and closely define a landscape that is context-bound. This poems does a brilliant job of applying those quandaries to the self.
What does self-discovery or self-revelation mean when the role of women in particular, has historically been so subordinate/dependent to or defined/intertwined by their relationships with others? Is it possible to remove a definition of the self from its surrounding relational context? What does it mean for a woman, mid-stride in life, to willing enter unknown territory and map new relationships or create a new key for reading the old maps?
[how much of the map] by Francine Steele
how much of the map could be labeled
terra incognita
how much unknown invisible to others how much of myself could I shake off
abandon the most remote regions those undiscovered places inside
[I barely know] exist
though the map is not the territory
how I am drawn to leave behind the pattern
for the path for a minute
an hour for one whole day
I’d be like a Wintu describing the body using cardinal directions
he touches me on the west arm
the river is to the east
when we return his east arm circles around me and the river
stays to the west
without that landscape to connect to who am I apart from what surrounds me
at the edge of the unknown venturing forward doubling back knowing
what I see depends on where I am
but not to be lost simply to be confused
five days or forty following the desire not to know
before the first turn where I am going
The Mystical "And"
The breeze carries aromas of warm, ripe salmon berries. Drifting up the hill, sunrise-heated, this air touches as a passing lover might the berries that are just beginning to swell, engorging pink and heavy where just days ago delicate purple petals hung limp, sheltered under dew-laden leaves. Where does the smell of fully ripe berries come from then on this spring morning? A hope? A memory? A desire? I see the buds and I savor the ready fruit.
When we use the concept of "and", we brush at the divine. There is something other-worldly about our momentary inclusiveness; a fling into transcendence when we scrape at ideas of essence, dualities, even multiplicities, timelessness.
We honor the individual AND we recognize our inextricable connections.
We haven't experienced perfect love AND yet we pursue it.
We have been hurt in love AND yet we still hope for it.
In love, we say yes AND we say no.
I am an artist. I am making oatmeal, and picking lice out of my daughter's hair (again) and I am an artist. I spend days teaching and I am artist. I enter my favorite trance-like state applying paint or massaging a lump of clay and I am artist. And I'm an artist when I stare blankly and tremble at my empty easel and dry paint palette. When I'm on the floor crying with empty hands, I am an artist. It's been weeks without disciplined studio work and I'm an artist. There have been years in which I haven't touched my paints even a single time. And yet an artist.
I am a mother. I am a teacher. I am a community member. I am a lover and a friend. I am a daughter, I am a giver and a receiver. I laugh and I grieve. I lean in and I lean out. Aspects of myself swell and surge with my focused attention or reckless passion, as others grow lean from inattention or abandonment.
What other "ands"? Yours? The ones I apply to the world? How often do we allow the "and"? We can be at peace and we can not understand. We can accept and we can let go. We can walk confidently and walk without knowing the destination.
The berries are not ripe this morning and they exist in fullness. Their aroma fills their air, as does my small understanding of potential and product. We are in an unending flow of conception and decay. I see the buds and I savor the ready fruit. Hopes. Memories. Desires.
A Walk, Rainer Maria Rilke
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-
and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
Translated by Robert Bly
Come Dance with Me
Like so many of you, this winter I worked in the middle of grief.
We showed up, didn't we?
We opened the documents,
consulted colleagues,
plugged away on the research,
filled in the blanks
all the while tracking on The Great Sorrow,
and Our Righteous Indignation,
hearing roars about The Fear of the Future,
reeling in How We Got to This Place,
chorusing And Who Will Care for the Children?!
Even in this darkness, work got done. I don't know about you, but I'm not entirely sure how that happened. People would ask what I was working on. How many times did I admit that often I physically <could not see what I was doing>? Because of that a lot of shitty painting happened. But here were are- and all of that process hangs in the group of work now on the gallery walls.
What I see is light. As I worked through this night, I still focused on the light. You'll see it on the walls: more sunrises than sunsets; several cloudy skies. But the real illumination I worked from came from the people in my life. These were the beacons for the way forward, the hope and joy in my life.
So, here's my toast on the opening of this show:
To John: for opening his doors, giving me space;
To my parents: for welcoming me into the world, providing me with a home;
To Carla: for offering love like breath, essential, consistent, life-sustaining;
To Renee: for steering myself back to myself;
To Allison and Shawn: for literally building a future for me, building a family here for us, building structures for my work;
To our Davis community, many in particular: for continuing to be our family, offering homes for us and my work, putting distance and time into their proper places;
To Alma and Jack: for being my eternal flames- a bank of sanctuary candles- who keep my own fire lit.
The wick of love is never consumed. Our lights will shine over any wall, through the longest of tunnels, nights, or winters. We carry it inside of ourselves, people on fire!
Skål! Come dance with me!
Peace
"The Peace of Wild Things" – Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.
For a time, I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Lover of the Light
At the beginning of July 2016 I first went up a trail above the old Miller Rellim site, wherein lies "the ridge" featured a few times in The From Here series. Within a mile of the trailhead I stopped short as a towering Roosevelt elk bull stepped out from the ferns into the trail 25 yards ahead. He stood bearing his 6 point crowns staring me down, and I beseeched him to remain confident in his threat assessment. We calmly waited while his herd came through, grazing down the ravine.
At the base of this ridge, where the cliffs crumble into dunes, and the dunes into the ocean, I ran along the beach just a few days later. Again, my breath caught and my legs halted as my eyes distinguished two young elk romping in the surf. Sensing my presence they galloped back into the dunes.
Such is the music of the spheres, that I would also during the same month stumble across this music video by Mumford and Sons. How I relate to a humanly-blind, stumbling faith leading to the ecstatic.
sunrise hits the ravine below Last Chance trail
Secret O'Life
"The secret of love is in opening up your heart.
It's okay to feel afraid, but don't let that stand in your way.
Cause anyone knows that love is the only road."
~James Taylor
a daily invocation
Each morning I stop at my turn around point on whatever trail I'm on, always trees in sight.
Orienting myself to face southward, I feel through my body a rooting through my feet. I lift from Mountain to stand in Volcano, easy to do among towering redwoods or supple alders or leaning cedars. I inhale the strength of these persevering giants; I exhale my grief, entrusting it into their transformative capacity.
Then, breathing and flowing though a variety of Warrior and Triangle poses, I turn to face each of the cardinal directions, and invite these things into my life:
from the south, winds of change, forward progress;
from the north, a sense of direction, focus;
from the west, hope, inspiration;
from the east peace, acceptance.
As I flow from east to west, from south to the north I think about the relationships between experiencing change and having a sense of direction, and between the states of hope and a peace. Sometimes this means stretching between with Warrior III or finding a binding pose. Resting my weight on my hands as they touch the ground is a vital part of this moving prayer, as I ground myself and connect with all the other life rooted in this earth.
detail from "Ridge, Sun From Here"
Diving In, the Show Goes On Afterall
What is your reaction to an opportunity? Have you watched these divers?
Stacked and Framed
Stacked and framed- all without hitting the prison's weight room. Thanks to Shawn Eckart, a master craftsman, artist of woods and waves and whiskeys. Should you purchase a painting from the From Here series, you'll also be taking home a highly-crafted poplar and redwood joined frame made in his shop, under an apple tree where the elk shed their antlers.
detail from "Ridge, Blue"
Tree
Tree, by Florence Grossman
One night in winter
after the tree had begged for many nights
to come in
I gave permission.
It was not an easy arrangement
the problem of blankets
a place to sleep
the branches curious to touch everything.
Eventually it could compose itself
by the fire.
I would read aloud.
It would listen and nod.
I am sorry it is not spring.
Sap is dripping on the rug.
The branches are feeling their way toward the door.
sketched foundation of "Orchard, Green"
The Light that Fights
My latest Position Paper, by Bob Hicok
A little bit of hammering
goes a long way toward making
the kind of noise I want my heart
to look up to—or have you ever
gone into a woods and applauded the light
that fights its way to the ground,
and the shadows, and the explosions
of feathers where blue jays
have been ripped into the bright
and hungry future of hawks—
and there’s this—writing an etude
by pushing pianos off a cliff
until one of them howls or whispers
just so—like a vagrant
slipping into a clean bed
or a man lifting a dying child
toward the sun and begging help,
rescue—if my eyes could speak,
they’d be mouths—the tongues
of my fingers ask to be words
against your skin—and when I
was a librarian, I lost my job
for exhorting patrons to sing
“Bye Bye Miss American Pie”—
it’s not what we do here, I was told—
yet I know this is a world
made by volcanoes, and don’t want
to keep this awareness of kaboom
to myself—so have picked up
my zither and begun walking
and strumming like an idiot
who thinks music is all
a body needs to feed itself—
and though I haven’t eaten
in years, I have been fed.
wet paint and texture of "Birds, Redwings From Here"
Pushing Air/Rise
detail from "Birds, Shore From Here"
detail of "Birds, Crows From Here"
Invitation to "From Here"
Dear Friends and Family,
Where do we go from here? Are you from here? From here on out, things will be... From here on, I will...
The phrase "from here" implies being in a place with some perspective, perhaps with some elevation having been gained, yet one in which we don't stay long, only to catch our breath, anticipate the next steps, and charge back in. "From here" also may imply a place of origin and a different, desirable destination.
My latest series of work has been done in such figurative and literal places. The series "From Here" will be hung at the Natsoulas gallery from March 15th to April 2nd. In the work you might recognize the physical places I've lived this year, along with some gained consideration and hope.
We'll have a reception on the evening of Saturday, March 25th from 7-9pm, and I would love to see you all THERE!
I invite you to preview the work here at juliebsmiley.com. Over the coming days I'll be adding photos of these works in progress to <THIS> Notes section of the site.
With love from here to eternity,
Julie
PS. How can I not leave you with some music?! Here's one that fits.
detail from in progress "Orchard, Gray From Here"