Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Bit of winter. 9 degrees here on Shadow Mountain this morning. No snow and little snow for us in the forecast. Though. Across the divide they’re getting good snow. Our snowpack is 119% of normal and way ahead of last year. Important data for so many people.
Friday and Saturday were more or less rest days. The week through Thursday night found me pretty damned tired. Worth it though. Gabe threw himself in my arms after his concert. Ruth leaned in for a hug as I left Swigert headed for home. Jon seems to have gained some important insight about himself and the reality of his situation. Kate learned the cause of her months long struggle with nausea and abdominal pain, weight loss. Enough for one week. Thanksgiving moon, indeed.
I’ve not been idle. Using some small, 5×7, canvases I’ve begun to use oil paints. My first effort is here. Doesn’t pop like I hoped it would. I have three more of these small canvases painted with an undercoat. One yellow, one sap green, and one violet. Trying color field painting. Mark Rothko is my favorite abstract painter, so I thought I’d see what I could make using him as my inspiration.
This is venturing into really unknown territory since I know little about oil paints, about oil paint brushes, how to make colors do what I want, canvas. Since I began messing around with sumi-e a while back, I’ve found myself wanting to extend myself, get way outside my comfort zone. A key motivation for me in all this is regaining some tactile work, hand work. When I was a gardener, a bee keeper, a domestic lumber jack, I got lots of opportunity to use my hands, to interact with the physical world. Since moving to the mountains, not so much after the fire mitigation work.
After 12 years as a guide and docent at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, art became an integral part of my life; yet, I’ve struggled to keep art in my life since moving to Colorado. The museums here are not compelling and driving down the hill takes time. Reading about art, looking at it online or in books has not given me the satisfaction I’ve searched for. Painting myself, which necessitates a look into art materials, theory, and careful looking at artists whose work I’d like to use as inspiration, may. I’m not there yet, but I’m having a hell of a lot of fun.
In addition to trying color field painting, I’m going to use the sumi-e ink and brushes to create bespoke Hebrew letters, astrology glyphs, and alchemical symbols. My work in the second kabbalah class, on the mystery and magic of Hebrew, prompted this. I found working with the symbols and letters directly gave me a way into understanding them. I’m also going to create mandalas.
I’ve also continued my reading about astrology. I continue to vacillate between the long time skeptic and the interested novice. Some of the writing is childish, even moronic. That puts me off. Then, though, there’s Tarnas and the Inner Sky by Steven Forrest. Archetypes, too, by Jung and Hillman. A new book on Jung and Astrology. Still trying to figure out my birth chart, how to read it, understand it. Lots to investigate here.
In spite of the various outside turbulence, or, perhaps because of it, these new areas of learning have helped keep me sane, eager. I’ll be at them for a while yet.
Last night, as the kids and I were making pizza over at CBE, I got a call from Kate. Cell service is dicey in the mountains, but I finally understood. The door blew open, again, and all three dogs escaped. Uh-oh. That meant I put on my hat and left, telling Tara on the way out, “Our dogs escaped. It’s more important.” Drove home. Kate tried to call me three times but for some reason I didn’t hear the calls. The neighbor had brought the dogs home while I was on my way. Since it’s 30 minutes each way by the time I got home and found this out, it was too late to return. I’ve not been a reliable teacher this first semester.
Happy to have some good news to report about Jon. Went to his court date yesterday. His inner attitude seems to be shifting away from anger about the divorce (understandable, but not helpful) toward getting on with his life, accepting the constraints of the restraining order (unreasonable, but legally enforceable, as he just discovered). He wants to get his art in a gallery or up for sale. This is big because it’s a key part of his identity that lay fallow during the twelve years of his marriage. He needs positive reinforcement and he’s had more than his share of negatives over the last few years.
He’s a very talented, smart guy who can handle all the work necessary to remodel his home, replace an axle in his car, ski a great line down an A-basin bowl, teach elementary age kids how to express themselves. I hope he can organize his life so these thing line up, move him forward, and make him feel good about himself.
I’m feeling a bit stressed, a lot going on. Religious school tonight. I’m taking pizza makings and teaching a unit on holidays, especially winter holidays. The kids will reimagine, reconstruct a new winter holiday. Tomorrow morning Kate has two imaging studies, looking for zebras. Tomorrow evening is Gabe’s winter concert in Stapleton. A sequelae of the hearing yesterday is that Jon can’t, for the moment, attend. The old protection order carved out an exception to the 100 yards rule for events with the kids, things like parent-teacher conferences, concerts, doctor visits, but the law is a blunt instrument. Yesterday by default it eliminated those exceptions. Jon wants me to go to represent our side of the family. Important for Gabe. I’ll go.
Got reinforced shortly after the move out here when I had to deal with prostate cancer. That shook me. I worked hard to keep myself upright and maybe, in the process, began to consolidate a lot of learning. A major part of that consolidation came from the support I got from family and friends. Oh. Life can be good, even when it’s bad. Weird. Since the move, it’s been one damned thing after another, or it feels that way right now. Those things forced a going deep, being honest, being grateful a lot. Now, four years later, our move anniversary is the Winter Solstice, my Colorado Self, the one born in the alembic of all those insults, has asserted itself.
Warmer, 31, and cloudy. The waning Thanksgiving Moon lit my morning walk to the loft through a veil of patchy cumulus. The neighbor in the rental put up an inflatable turkey with a pilgrim hat a week or so ago. Now there’s a Northpole sign on their mailbox, a Santa Claus and Christmas lights. They did wait until Thanksgiving was over. Most of us on our stretch of Black Mountain Drive have less glam. We have lights on at night all year, but just a strand in the front and along the walkway up to the loft. Holiseason brings out the inner kid. That’s Eduardo and Holly’s lights in the distance.
I’m finding a peculiar satisfaction in domestic work. Dishes in the dishwasher right after use. Throw a load in the washer when I get up in the morning. Cooking what we have. There’s a thread through the day, things to do that are active and loving. I’ve come to like it. One of the things I noted a long time ago was that women’s work (in a stereotypical sense) dealt with life’s basics. Eat. Clean. Support. Repetitive. The clothes always get dirty. The dishes come after cooking. No matter what groceries and other supplies have to be purchased. Rinse and repeat. It makes sense to me now how homemaking is a noble art, a task unfairly distributed by past gender roles, yes, but so important to the well-being of a family.
There is also a more general, vaguer issue for me. As Kate’s life continues to revolve around pain and nausea, weight loss, it restricts her movements. She’s in the house, often in bed or in her chair or on the bench upstairs at the table. This has a centrifugal force for me, too, pulling me in, keeping me here. No, I do not resent it, that’s not my point. I’m speaking now of a more subtle influence, a coloring of the spirit, a darkening of it. I find myself tired, sleepy, more than makes sense to me unless I factor this in.
First full day yesterday without SeoAh and Murdoch. SeoAh texted last night and said they’d made it back home.
Kate’s tough, willing. I admire her and her ability to stay with the daily routines eating small meals, more of them. Getting up and moving, doing her exercises. Engaging the tasks that she can. Her mind is sharp, the crosswords still get done, her advice is as sensible and acute as ever.
I’m at Dino’s on far west Colfax, near Kipling. This is an Italian place that my friend Alan Rubin used to visit when he grew up on west Colfax, further east, into Denver. The old orthodox neighborhood. Much like, I guess, the northside of Minneapolis at about the same time. His dad was a brilliant immigrant who ended up running a string of dry cleaners, doing very well. Dino’s, founded in 1963, hasn’t changed its decor since then, we both guessed. Great pizza.
