chronicled & illustrated

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?)

learning our colours,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

One evening while in Maine, I picked up my granddaughter, Acadia, and took her for a little drive. It was getting toward dusk. We stopped between my son’s house and my rented cottage several times as Cadi was asking to “see the water.” We got in and out of the car and took short walks.

These days, she holds tightly to one of my fingers as we walk. I showed her things. A bird flying. White cherry blossoms and lilacs. Bees on the bushes. A feather. A pine cone. The sound the water makes as it rushes over the rocks. The older boys playing on the other side of the street.

Our last stop was where this photo was taken. The wetlands at this spot are always stunning to see whether it’s sun, fog, rain, morning, noon or night. This day had been gloriously sunny. One of those late spring days when the new warmth, super-blue sky and the fresh young leaves and grasses combine for a spectacular crispness that will soon blur into summer fullness—rich, deep green, hot, but no longer new.

As the sun went down I held Cadi while snapping a dozen photos or so. She was patient with me and afterward we talked about what was happening to the colour of the clouds. I reminded her that they are usually white but that sometimes when the sun goes away for the night they change into a variety of colours. Cadi’s only just learning her colours. She has the idea now, but the specifics as to green, blue, red are still in process. Sometimes she gets them right and sometimes she doesn’t.

I started naming the colours in the sky.

“Pink.” “Orange.” “Violet.”

“Yellow,” whispered Cadi, her eyes fixed on the sunset.

“Yes,” I agreed, so pleased that she was with me, “yellow, too.”

READING: I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes by Jaclyn Moriarity
WRITING: NetWorld, a short story
PLANNING: Our new front porch
WATCHING: A mama woodpecker feeding her babies in a tree outside the bedroom window

old words,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

This list looks old because it is. A vintage list of words compiled and typed on an honest-to-God typewriter because no one had a home computer in 1975.

A year or so earlier, I had asked my sister and a couple of close friends if they would be interested in getting together weekly to *talk.* I made it clear that my idea was to have a group where we could discuss personal life issues in a deep and real way. My sister and friends took me up on the offer, they asked a few people they knew and soon seven of us were meeting weekly, taking turns at each others home.

In our living rooms with husbands, boyfriends and eventually children politely asked to Leave Us Alone, we talked about our lives. This was no ‘koffee-klatch’. We tackled big issues like how to deal with anger and confrontation. How to change ingrained bad habits or alter those traits we were born with but didn’t like, into more adaptive ways of behaving insofar as that is possible.

We called ourselves simply, Group. Membership changed. Some of the original seven didn’t stay long. Others came in and some of those lasted and some didn’t. I moved away and came back and moved away again, as did others. But we met —looking back on it—with astounding regularity. At first we always had wine and cheese and fruit and crackers and later as we matured, decided that the wine was getting in our way and switched to tea. In later years, we find wine is acceptable once again.

The list, though. The list was an exercise that we did. We kept finding ourselves dealing with feelings, emotions. We encouraged each other, in turn, to talk in depth about how we felt about whatever issue was causing us a problem and repeatedly we realized that we didn’t have the vocabulary for expressing exactly what we felt. So we came up with The List. It was fun to think of every emotion we could. There were debates about whether a certain thing was, in fact, an emotion or a behavior. It was instructive.

Later, if someone expressed feeling MAD, we could refer her to the list where she might find that particular MAD was more precisely, alienated, hopeless, ignored and frustrated. This seemed helpful. We realized that the big widely-painted emotions were not just one simple emotion but a unique set of emotions that felt predominantly mad, sad, or glad.

To be able to express the nuances of what we felt led us to know ourselves more fully and to ultimately know others with more insight. In order to deal with complex emotional issues (that affect all the practical issues: jobs, marriages, parenting, family), we found that it helped to first name, then untangle all the emotions involved.

There are four of us who survived several decades together. We no longer get together weekly in each other’s living rooms but we email and get together when we can. We still call ourselves “Group.” The earnest exploration we did all of those weeks, and the wisdom we accumulated still informs our lives in profound ways.

When I forget what was learned, Group is there to remind me.

We don’t have to look at the list anymore. In fact, we never used it that much. Like so many things in life, it was in the process of doing it that the learning took place.