chronicled & illustrated

birthday present!,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

Today is my birthday. This is a wonderful surprise gift from my husband. I’m thrilled to bits and pieces and would be out taking photos except that the battery has to charge first.
I should be reading the manual but I can only absorb so much at a time. Especially before I’ve even had a chance to take one shot!

Here’s a poem written on my birthday in 1995, revised for today

Birth Day

Sunday,
glistening glinting
but growing grayer
Yesterday,
not as showy
but with morning rolling into
an afternoon of full summer
changing to cool deep night
full of fire flies and intimacy
dissolving into the first thunderstorm
of a dry season

Today
is no memory
yet
present moment
elusive fleeting
already gone
capture impossible
unlike those fire flies
who let themselves
be caught
Let me catch
this moment more fully
these summery sights
this singular smell
symphonious overlapping sounds

As I write,
the sun comes
through clustering clouds
for the third time
I know
because I am witness
that today is no better
than the last two days
I know
because it is now
if there were but one
in all of creation
this would be
the day

I ended my last post by saying I’d be busy for a while with my school girl friends who were going to be visiting from Texas. But instead I’m here because they opted out of coming. It was a shock, as they cancelled abruptly the day before they were to arrive and the decision was already made without my input.

I’m still wandering around picking up the pieces.

My friend decided not to come because the forecast for the week was for rain. She says it’s just a postponement and not a cancellation but that just makes me laugh because when—I wonder—does she think she can come to Nova Scotia with a guaranteed forecast of no rain?

I’m using this photo manipulation I call “Peeling Rain” since it’s supposedly a rainy post.

Peeling rain seems especially appropriate since it’s NOT a rainy morning here in Cape Breton. It’s a gorgeous, perfect summer’s day. Bright sun, light breeze, slightly cool. All I can think is that it’s their loss. They…stuck as they are in blisteringly hot Texas for the summer. And yet, it is my loss as well. I would have loved to have shared this day with them.

Here is my proof of the wonders of a Nova Scotian summer day. All taken this morning, July 5th:

“inner sunshine”

“joy around”

“bee happy”

“blue breeze”

“volunteers”

“purple non-rain”

made myself laugh with that title.

So, I will attempt to regain my focus and work on that almost finished short story…or maybe I should go lie in the hammock and soak up the warmth before it starts to rain.

Cheers.

attention span,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

Summer isn’t good for concentrating. Maybe it’s the leaves rustling or the birds singing or the clouds rolling by. I’d say it’s the heat, but here in Nova Scotia, we haven’t had any yet. It’s summer’s long days of sunlight that can both seem to last forever and pass by in a flash. The on again/ off again activity level. Hurry up and relax.

This is a piece I did the other night after having put a big push on to get several end of the month articles published in the zine followed by the subscriber’s email update. I needed a creative activity that was involving without being involved. For several hours I immersed myself in my photos and photoshop. (I don’t really use Photoshop. For this kind of photo manipulation I use a super simple product called ArcSoft Photostudio. Easy and quick.)

I keep way too many of my digital photos. That’s because I use many of them in these layered art pieces and it’s hard to predict which will be useful later on. I’ve always enjoyed the idea that there are no failures—only the raw material for other kinds of art. I used to tear up paintings I didn’t feel were successful. Then I’d use the wonderfully torn fragments as collage material for others. This is the same.

For the next week all my attention will be with my childhood friends who’ll be visiting from Texas. We’ll laugh.

Tra la~~~

in through the windows,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

I’m reminded this morning of the Woody Allen quote, “Eighty percent of life is showing up.”
My husband tells a story about when he was in high school and had a job selling shoes. Well, selling shoes is, according to him, an overstatement. He rarely sold any. He hated the job as most of it entailed standing around for several hours doing nothing but trying to look busy. And yet, even though he hated it and rarely sold anything, his boss loved him. When he mentioned this paradox to his father, his dad told him that the boss liked him because he always showed up. He was reliable and there, just in case someone wanted to buy a pair of shoes!

Over the last five days, I’ve been finishing up on The Practically Creative Quarter. This is the second full month of the new format and it’s working out great. The site functions well and—while it’s still a lot of work—it’s doable. Instead of working three solid months to get it ready, I can do a little each week and still have a variety of new things for people to read and see.

So there’s the showing up part.

That’s eighty percent of it, right?

Not really. Because the eighty percent has to include the future as well as the past! Consistency is difficult for me, so I know from experience that two months means nothing. I can fall off this wagon in a heartbeat. That’s why I always need the practical side of me to show up along side the creative side. The first PCQ was creative but not practical. The new version is, I hope, both.

But this morning, I’m being nagged by that other twenty percent. What’s that, Woody? Well we know, don’t we? It’s being good. It’s being unique. It’s offering—showing off—something that people want.

I didn’t start The PCQ to show off. From the beginning, it was about me wanting a place to process creativity. If I still have issues with creativity—need for perfection, trouble finishing things, over-stretching my limitations, and more—I knew that other people do too. So I thought I’d share those challenges with others. What I’ve learned and what I’m learning. But somewhere in all that, I have to deal with the exposure of myself—repeatedly, as it turns out. I often have a bad, let-down day after an email update goes out to my subscribers.

I was writing a piece of fiction last week where a grandmother is watching her granddaughter practice a performance. It’s just the two of them; the granddaughter is talented and very good in the performance. Afterward the little girl gets quiet and comes to sit very close to the grandmother. The grandmother leans down and whispers to her, “Sometimes we can end up feeling that we did something wrong even when everyone tells us we’re good.”

Those words, coming out of my character’s mouth, surprised me. I didn’t know I was going to write that but it sums up my feelings about the showing off part of showing up.

No matter how many people are reading The PCQ (and the numbers are good!)—I feel like the granddaughter in my story, wishing I had a comforting grandmother to snuggle up against. Someone who would know instinctively the down side of showing off.

And yet, those are momentary feelings. The project that is The PCQ is still about process. It’s not perfect because I’m not and because I have sworn off even yearning toward perfection.

My plan is to show up and take the eighty percent odds that it’ll be good enough.

THE ILLUSTRATION: this is a photograph of light hitting a watercolor painting. Speaking of showing off, it was the first painting of mine (done over 20 years ago!) that I felt was good enough to be framed. I loved the way this photograph turned out because the “real” light seems to be coming in through the painted window. Illusions.

READING: Causeway, Linden MacIntyre
EXPECTING: Company! two childhood friends are spontaneously flying up from Texas for a week!
HOPING: We have decent weather (what else?)

two loves,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

So now it’s time to write. I have other things to do, of course. I am supposed to be working on the update of the EPIC website.

It’s so far overdue that I’m embarrassed—even though there is no one but me upset by it or waiting for it (though my husband will definitely like it—and me —when it’s done!). As well, I accumulated other things to do while I was away. I started a small artist’s site for my son and promised him some business cards. I want to do that asap because his career is taking off in small ways and I want to give him what I can to help. And of course, those are *fun* things to do. There are other things on the to-do list as well. But none of them are crucial. They are all things that can be fitted in around whatever is most important.

So now, it’s time to write.

All the way down to Maine, I thought about three stories in various stages. First I thought about the one I had just started. I have about a page and a half written. JUST a beginning…but, the idea came to me full-fledged (a rarity!) and with hours by myself to do nothing but drive and think, I filled in a lot of what was vague. Or, I think I did. One never really knows until the writing is being done. Sometimes what is in your head, isn’t what comes out on paper and stories can definitely take sharp turns that weren’t on the planned journey.

A second story I thought about was one I did a lot of work on a year or more ago. I liked it, it seemed like a good beginning, but I never could push myself to finish it. So I thought it through. Decided what needed to happen. How I could improve the tone of the piece. I don’t even think it would take that long to have a finished first draft.

The third thing I thought about was just an idea for a story. It has to do with music and communication and ‘races’ of ‘people’ who use music for their own ends. I am not sure yet what else. It’s definitely NOT a story yet but I write down the whiff of an idea here so as not to forget or minimize it as a future possibility.

This is all motivating to me because I had just about given up on writing short stories. Novels, it seems, are my forte. A short story feels frustrating and limiting and I began telling myself that it was okay for me not to write short stories if I didn’t want to. But now…with a collaboration project in the planning stages, I’m motivated again. If I can pull off any of these ideas, it’ll please me to have gotten back to a written form that I should be able to participate in whether it’s my favourite or not.

READING: Tales of Protections by Eric Fosnes Hansen (book club this Saturday!)
WRITING: NetWorld, a short story
WEBBING: Quintessential Abstractions, an artist’s website
PHYSICALLY: lousy, I’ve got a cold
EMOTIONALLY: calm, optimistic

The Illustration: this is a layered composition made up of one of my doodles (marker and gelpens) and pages of my writing. Click on it to see a larger version on flickr.

it’s slip-sliding thru new b,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

I arrived home from my trip to Maine last night around 12:30am.

The day started off hard and just seemed to—not get worse—but just stay hard to the end. Saying good-bye to my son and granddaughter was emotionally hard. Physically I’m at low ebb with a cold coming on. I had three hours of work to get the rented house back in shape before leaving. This became complicated when I hit my head on a wall lamp causing the thing to crash to the floor and smash into smithereens. And then, an 11 hour drive.

I kept comforting myself with how much worse it not only could be but has been! I was remembering the day I left to drive home from Maine last March. It was bitterly cold with high winds and I had to muscle my luggage down a narrow set of stairs and over slippery ice to get it into the car. Then as I neared home late, late that night, heavy blinding snow made the last 3 hours literally life-threatening. Yesterday was NOT that bad and I made sure I never forgot it!

But it made me wonder what it is that makes me do that. I always compare whatever I’m struggling with with something worse that I’ve been through in the past. When I was young and hadn’t been through much, I used to compare a challenge with the time I had to give an oral report on the Algerian-French War in French! Now it seems silly but then, to give an oral report was bad enough, but to do it in another language seemed like an impossibility. And yet, I did it, (I got a ‘B’ and was grateful) so I used it for years as proof to myself that I could do impossible things!

If I can’t come up with something worse that’s happened to me, I comfort myself with the fact that it’s not anywhere near as bad as what others have been through. I clearly remember being miserable during a 24+ hour car trip with my first husband, two young sons and a mother-in-law in a small car. I was sitting in the back literally on the edge of a too small, non-ergonomically designed seat with everything in my body tired and achy. But I was thinking that it simply wasn’t that bad because imagine the poor pioneer women in covered wagons!

Can’t I just be miserable?

Evidently not. Oh, I do my fair share of moaning and groaning. I can be a real baby when sick or injured. But if it’s something I have to get through, it seems to be in my nature to mentally sustain myself with reasons why it’s not that bad. I can then realize that packing up the car on a muggy day in June is certainly preferrable to a blizzardish one in March. That a late night drive alone in familiar territory with a loving husband waiting at home to give me a warm, hearfelt embrace when I FINALLY pull into to the driveway is really just something to get through and not something to wish away. My life is and has been easy and full of many days without danger or real hardship. I know I should not forget that.

I can still feel buffeted and bruised by my day yesterday. Take a day to recover my bearings. Do blog entries. Open mail. Wash my hair. Be with my husband. And remember things like…

…when I was in Junior High School, I did a dramatic interpretation from a play called All the Way Home by Tad Mosel (the playwright’s name is not from memory but from Google). I remember little about it except that the right to do it at a speech tournament was ‘willed’ to me by one Cheryl Somebody, a tournament-winning actress who had gone on to high school at the end of the previous year. What I do remember is that the excerpt required me to sing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot at the end. This isn’t another story about hard things I’ve been through, as for some reason, doing acting wasn’t nearly as difficult as oral reports in French! My now-husband was in that Speech Class and still talks about being wowed by my sweet soprano tremolo. I tell him it was nerves he heard, but that he believes differently makes me smile, makes me happy. I’m not much of a soprano anymore but he and I still sing together at home—where I am now once again pleasantly ensconced.