True North

Little Photographer

Since my last post was about how I worked my camera into the ground, this may be somewhat um... ironic timing, but I've been admiring the photographic work of another, smaller, member of the family lately, and I thought I share some of her work. I hope she doesn't mind. But since I've just put it together that lending a four year-old my camera was the likely cause of its demise, I'm going to post these without asking (she's asleep anyway) and call it even.

I've tried to encourage Stella's creativity by letting her take pictures pretty much whenever she asks, which she's been doing for years now. Now, let's face facts here: she's four. The great majority of her shots are terribly out of focus, even unrecognizable, and she has a penchant for taking pictures of a blank computer screen. Or the floor. But lately some patterns have emerged in her perspective. She takes pictures of her life. She does funny little still lives and portraits of us. She captures things no one else does.

Like pictures of me. Doing ridiculous things. The price you pay for being the family photographer is that there are rarely any pictures taken of you. Now, thanks to Stella, there is a small but growing collection of Mommy pictures. Mommy dancing. Mommy looking surprised. You get the idea. Also, somewhat hilariously, because of our height difference many of these pictures have a really excellent view up my nostrils. Talk about perspective.

Stella's also the only one who consistently takes pictures of our dog, Vega. I love how she got Vega under the bed in this quiet little moment. My nostrils aside, Stella's lower point of view affords her a seeing of things it would never occur to me to see. And because she doesn't think about anyone else looking at the picture besides herself and maybe me, she takes some of the most intimate pictures of our family life. The only reason I have pictures of Maeve nursing is because of Stella. 

I like that she doesn't think about whether something is beautiful before she takes its picture. I'm not even sure she thinks about whether something is interesting. I don't think she thinks about it at all, not in the way I do, anyway. She just takes the picture because she wants to. There's something wonderfully fearless and adventurous about children when it comes to creative endeavors. I can learn a lot from Miss Stella.

So Long Camera

Is there a Shangri-la for electronic equipment? A paradise where my elementary school tape player is no longer forced to suffer through endless bouts of Roxette's It Must Have Been Love, and my dorm room coffee maker is finally clean? If so, I hope someone is saving a picturesque little corner for my camera, because it deserves a nice rest. My camera is dying. It's been pretty beat up for a while now, and for ages I've lived with the fact that the lens cap doesn't want to stay on. But lately things have gotten serious. Now when I turn the camera on, it immediately takes it upon itself to turn off. The battery chamber refuses to stay closed. I think it's hopeless.

I don't exactly see a new camera on the horizon, at least not the one I really want. The truth is, I had outgrown the old camera. I kept asking it to do things it really wasn't capable of, like being in focus without using the flash. But I knew its strengths and, in a way, I think any style I have as a photographer has been a result of this camera's limitations. With other media (painting in particular) it is easy to blame myself when the result doesn't turn out looking like it did in my head, but with this slightly inadequate camera, I could always blame the camera. It sort of freed me up to make mistakes and try things because I wasn't taking the failures personally. 

I have a few pictures waiting in the wings for this blog, taken before the camera's swan song, but soon enough those will run out. I hope you'll bear with me.

And Santa, if you're reading, I've (mostly) been very good this year...

Tradition

My mom and I took Stella to the Nutcracker on Sunday. New York City Ballet, at Lincoln Center. The real deal. It was such a delight because Stella was thrilled about the whole thing, from getting dressed up in her fancy dress and new shoes, to sitting in the gold jewel-box of the New York State Theater waiting for it to begin, to the gummy bears at intermission, to the ending when Clara and the prince depart in a flying reindeer-pulled sleigh.

It really is a ballet designed for children; it's flamboyant and kitschy and colorful and, for cryin' out loud, candy features a prominent role. The whole second act is less part of a narrative and more a variety revue, with the music, choreography, and costumes all changing with each new section like some sort of greatest hits collection. The minute your four-year-old mind starts to wander, poof! there's a man in drag on stilts, wearing a hoop skirt big enough to fit eight pirouetting tweens inside. Stella was in heaven.

Sitting in the darkened theater, listening to that gorgeous music that's as familiar as a lullaby, I thought about how one Christmas when I was a teenager I convinced my mom to take me to the Nutcracker after a number of years not having seen it, and how disappointed I had been. Not that there was anything wrong with it of course - I'm pretty sure NYCB doesn't actually fail at anything, they're the best, I would say they're always on point but it'd be a terrible pun - but it was completely missing the luminous magic I remembered pouring off the stage when I was little. I had simply outgrown being excited about a land of candy or a growing-before-your-eyes Christmas tree, but I felt broken. 

Last Sunday, cuddling with Stella over the armrest and hearing her small whispering voice in my ear, "Mommy! Herr Drosselmeyer is up on the clock! What is he doing?" or admiring her straight little back as she perched on the edge of her seat like a horse in the starting gate, repairs were made. I know what a cliche it is to say you see things newly when you see them through the eyes of a child, but I've always taken that to mean you get the opportunity to see the way the child sees, and this was more than that. Being there with Stella allowed me to appreciate the nuances, the artistry, the workmanship of the ballet in a new but distinctly adult way. Creating the right mood of excitement and fun for Stella meant that I had to look beyond the judgements I would, I'm ashamed to say, probably have brought to Nutcracker: that it is, if not actually tacky, at least unhip. And oh, what I would have missed. The Sugarplum Fairy's pas de deux with her Cavalier, for example, was exquisite. It's a big, breathtaking piece of choreograhy, lots of lifts, but like any classical ballet it can look stiff and soulless in the wrong hands. Sarah Mearns danced the part and I thought she was brilliant. She has to be crazy young, she was only just made principal this year, but I was pretty blown away. And the children! The children were amazing! There are far more parts for children in Nutcracker than in an average ballet; it's another reason it is such a fun show for kids in the audience. Again, I'm sure given that it's NYCB that the children are always fantastic, culled from the School of American Ballet as they are, but I'm not sure how much I would have appreciated them without Stella's good influence. Being there with my excited, starry-eyed little girl just increased my enjoyment so much, I was able to really sink in and watch, and see. At the end of the day, Stella told me, "Today was the happiest day I ever had in my entire life." And I had to agree, it was definitely on my own top ten.

{1983}

 

{2008}

So here's to renewed traditions. May it be the first (again) of many. And may I remember, when my own little ones are teenagers and they get it into their heads to go see Nutcracker at Christmas for old time's sake, to tell them to wait until they have little ones of their own.

Bringing Outside In

Lest the pictures here at True North fool you, I've gotta cop to the fact that I'm not... actually... muchofanoutdoorsperson. There, I said it: my shameful little secret. I want to be. My husband is a genuine boyscout who enjoys building things out of wood in our backyard in the freezing rain, and my hodgepodge spiritual life basically pivots around the changing of the seasons. I want to be someone who goes for long hikes and takes her family camping and forages for wild mushrooms in her spare time. But what can you do? I spent my formative years in Manhattan. The deck is stacked against me.

Point is, while I really am loving all the gorgeous, burnished colors outside, I am also kind of thankful to the rain and the nip in the air for the excuse to stay inside. I love a rambling, cozy, inside day, with plenty of time to eat, read, do art projects, eat some more, watch a movie, do a puzzle, toodle around on the internet, eat again... Doesn't that just sound so pleasant? But staying inside does not mean living in a hermetically sealed box; one of my favorite ways to celebrate the seasons is to incorporate them into our home. The leaves we collect from the ground on our walks home from the school bus. The return to rich, comforting foods (and drinks!). The talking and reading we do about chillier days and their colors, longer nights and their creatures. Did I mention the drinks?

Dried leaves and family drawings of pumpkins hanging from the seasonal mobile in our kitchen.

 
The autumn section in The Circle of Seasons by Gerda Muller, a recent library discovery, with soft, beautiful illustrations (which are not actually as... jaundiced as they appear here, I assure you).

My grandmother's china owl perched on the table, reminding me of her.

Hearty autumnal brews. We're slightly obsessed with beer.

I know the time will come - probably too quickly - when, suffering from a vitamin D deficiency and too many Sleeping Beauty viewings, I will think back to this celebration of all things cozy and laugh bitterly. But I think the changing emotions are as much a part of the circle as the changing temperatures, and even the cold and boring winter darkness has something to teach. For now, I will enjoy my cozy fall home.

Glorious Decrepit

I have been thinking more about the idea of collecting beautiful moments out in the world, and about how photography is a great way to archive such a collection. So I've started a new category here at True North, called favorite sights. I plan to post a new favorite sight each Tuesday, and I invite you to play along with me: observing the sights you tend to collect as you go through your life, photographing them if that's your thing (and even if it's not!), letting me know all about it back here in the comments section.

I am enamored of broken down old buildings, especially homes and warehouses. I don't know why. This is one of those things I try not to analyze too much. The eye just likes what it likes, and asking why is so language-oriented, so rational - I think it often stifles the magic to know why an artist does what they do, whether that artist is a renowned playwright, or your own collecting self. That's a topic for a whole other post. Suffice it to say I have some Miss Havisham tendencies and like it when things look a tad bit decayed. So on our recent drive out to the Rockaways and back through Brooklyn, I was thrilled to discover these lovely, decrepit old buildings:

 

 

 

What are some of your favorite sights?

Autumnal

There has been so much going on around here lately. A new school for Stella, a broken leg for Chris, a birthday for Maeve. Lots of comfort food cooking and Halloween crafts and rugby games (see above: broken leg) and reading. Not, however, a lot of blogging. Not any blogging. Thinking about the reasons why not, AGAIN, seems just too tedious, and yet I think it's valuable to revisit this idea of perfection being, like, the worst thing to ever happen to creative expression. At first I was just really busy for a couple of days with getting Stella ready to start school (uniforms, lunch box, the whole shebang), but then the longer I stayed away from my little space here, the more I felt like I needed a really great post to start up again. The more I felt like it must not be a very good blog. Oy. This will not be a really great post, but I've decided I don't care. I'm here anyway. I will not judge myself about my blog. Hey, it's a mantra for us all.

So, autumn. It's been a funny sort of autumn. It is the end of October, but here in downstate New York the leaves haven't reached their peak. A majority of the trees are still green. It's as if early fall is taking up 95% of the season and then in one single day the leaves will turn and fall and - boom! - it'll be winter. So it was especially grand to hit up the local farmer's market this morning and get a nice big dose of fall.

I loved these ugly-beautiful gourds.

And the proud line-up of pumpkins.

And my super grown-up girl, waiting to get her own pickle-on-a-stick from the pickle stand. (Not actually autumnal, I realize, but similarly infused with nostalgia: she's old enough to pay for it by herself?)

My lovely singer-songwriter friend, Sarah Hinawi, was serenading us from a corner of the market, and in between choosing macoun apples and organic kale, we watched Stella and her buddies run around sucking on honey sticks and petting doggies. It was perfect. I love fall.

Collection

The other day, on Oswald, the cartoon octopus and his hot dog dog are going for a walk when they encounter the cartoon daisy (named Daisy).  She is gathering rare leaves for her leaf collection, and she opens her collection book with much pride in order to show Oswald and Weenie a brown leaf, a speckled leaf, and a leaf that reminds her of Oswald. Oswald is very impressed, and comments to Weenie that Daisy really loves her collection.

Then Oswald and Weenie run into Henry, the cartoon penguin, who has washed his spoon collection and is hanging the spoons out on the line to dry. He is reverent and a little bit pompous about his collection; as Oswald is saying goodbye, Henry is holding one of the spoons up to the sunshine and saying, "Look at that baby shine!"

Well by now, as you can imagine, Oswald is feeling most inadequate about his own collection deficiency. He decides he will start collecting clouds. Of course this proves difficult, eventually impossible, because even if you manage to climb the very highest hill in the city and capture a cloud, it will vanish in your hands every time. Oswald is an optimist, though, and so instead of getting discouraged, he makes himself comfortable on his back and invites Weenie and Daisy and Henry to do the same so that they can all look up at the sky and admire his beautiful collection.

You are not familiar with Oswald? Perhaps you don't have a four year old who watches too much children's programming while you are busy doing the dishes and drinking your fourth cup of coffee and anxiously flipping the pages of Pottery Barn, deciding whether you prefer parsley or ember for the upholstery on that sofa you have no plans to purchase. Well, no matter. Because Oswald is not actually the point here. The point is this: collecting clouds.

Since I started taking more pictures (of subjects other than my own children), and since I started writing once and a while in this here blog, and since I decided that although I didn't know how exactly, I was going to move Creativity to a higher slot on the priority list, I have felt such a rich and exciting change in the way I experience my life. I tried to explain this in the car to my husband recently and I don't think I was particularly successful - he listened to me ramble a while and then smiled at me affectionately and told me something he had heard about the presidential election. I don't know if I will do a better job explaining it here.

I think I have become a collector of clouds. I have always fallen in love with little snippets of life: the look on the girl's face at the county fair as she took my tickets for the ferris wheel and popped her gum, my own hand holding a cigarette and a very blue drink at a club opening in London, a rusty power plant I drove by once... And always, this falling in love for just a second was followed by an uncomfortable and unfathomable nostalgia. It may sound completely loopy, but I think that a disproportionate amount of my life has been wasted agonizing that I would never be able to recreate this moment later in the future.

Suddenly I don't care anymore. The nostalgia has been replaced, by and large, with an abounding sense of joy. I don't have to squander my time anymore trying to pin down the clouds, it is enough to notice and admire them. Photography helps. (I was sure that was going to be the answer to Oswald's dilemma - take pictures of the clouds you want to collect!) But mostly this change has happened as a result of more active noticing on my part; rather than waiting like a doormat for the falling in love moments to arrive, I have been seeking them out, courting them. It is hard not to feel as though beauty and grace are scarce when their arrival is unpredictable, much as it would be hard not to feel hungry if you didn't know when your next meal was coming.  But all it took was a new kind of noticing, of feeling lucky that anything I see can be included in my collection, and it is now clear that beauty and grace are abundant and renewable resources.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott says this about writing: There is a door we all want to walk through, and writing can help you find it and open it. Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up.

Writing, yes. Including blogging. Also photography, painting, acting, design, cooking, heck probably quilting will do it too. Whatever gets you really seeing and responding, whatever gets you to cherish your relationship with yourself, whatever makes you feel like you could collect the whole darn sky.

If I get nothing more out of writing this blog than this, it will be more than I ever expected.

Wood love

I recently found this website, a jewelry artist who makes rings out of wood. Sustainable or recycled wood. The rings are GOR.GEOUS. Seriously, go have a look in the gallery. And while you're at it, read some of the descriptions and FAQ's - I'm always inspired when I hear an artist speaking of their medium so respectfully. On the website it says that the rings are far more durable than one would think a wooden ring could be, if they are taken care of properly, but that they cannot guarantee the ring will last x number of years because it may not: "It is our sincere hope that your ring be a source of joy and harmony for the time it shares your journey with you." I am all for convenience - I admit, for instance, to being disproportionately thrilled by he arrival of a drive-through Starbucks in our area - but so often the choice for convenience seems to be a choice away from specialness and meaning, and that saddens me. I love the idea of using the good china for no particular reason, yes, even though you'll need to wash it by hand later on; I appreciate a handmade gift so very, very much more than a shiny new gadget from the store; and I am intrigued by thought of buying a ring - even a wedding ring - that you know may not last forever but that will make your life more special for the time it shares your journey with you.

But I also just loved all that luscious wood on the ring website. Warm, beautiful wood.

Creative (and Pink!)

As I was taking this picture, I was thinking to myself, "Why am I taking this picture? Am I really going to blog about sorbet?" And you know what my answer was? I said to myself, "Self," I said, "chill out. This is not any old sorbet, it is watermelon raspberry sorbet that you made yourself not three minutes ago basically out of thin air, not following a recipe or anything. That's being creative, my friend," I said. Sometimes I need to remind myself, because it's awfully easy to get stuck in thinking the only valuable creative pursuit would be painting a canvas that could be hung on the wall. Or maybe watermelon raspberry sorbet if it were made by, like, Grant Achatz or someone, but not me.

This sorbet was really easy to make and refreshing on such a hot night as tonight, and Stella really liked it. I'd give you a real recipe except there was no measuring involved. I just had some watermelon in the freezer that I'd been wondering what to do with, and tonight Stella wanted ice cream but I wanted to give her something moderately healthy instead. I tossed the melon into a blender, added some frozen raspberries just because my general life philosophy is that raspberries make everything better, gave the whole thing a squirt from the honey bear and a little water to get the right consistency, and whizzed it up. If I made this again I might get more adventurous with a little mint or lemon juice to give it more bite, and maybe simple syrup instead of the honey since the taste of the honey interfered just a tad with the watermelony-ness of it. But it's all good. The color alone made it fun to eat.

Another recent creative endeavor has been that I am finally getting back to learning how to knit! Hooray. I recently reconnected with my Aunt Joanne, and when she heard I wanted to knit, her response was an enthusiastic, "I'll teach you!" So one day last week I piled the girls in the car and drove her and my Uncle Joe's house, where I learned to knit on their porch, drinking iced coffee and listening to classic rock while the babes played in the grass. It was the best darn tutorial ever.

There were three things she helped me with that really made a difference. The first is metal knitting needles. I had been using the beautiful wooden ones I originally bought for myself, and I do love them but there's just not enough slip on them for a beginner such as myself. I think the wooden needles were contributing to my knitting so tightly.

Which leads me to the second thing: loosen up. Literally and figuratively. I was being a real perfectionist about this whole thing and it was not leading to anything good - I had nothing to show for my previous knitting attempts because I kept unraveling it all, and it wasn't particularly enjoyable either. Kind of oddly stressful, actually. Joanne laughed at me in the nicest possible way and basically just told me to stop it.

The third and really most important thing she taught me was continental style. Holding the yarn in the left hand, looped over the left pointer finger, makes for much better flow. It is fewer total movements per stitch, and less to think about when you're doing it. Don't get me wrong, I'm still awkward as heck, but I can see that it's possible now. If you're interested in continental knitting, there's this youtube video by the host of the CraftSanity podcast that seems helpful.

Completely off the subject, I'm noticing a preponderance of pink on this blog lately, a phenomenon I must blame squarely on Miss Stella. I think so much about the ways I influence her that it's funny now to notice, as she gets older, the ways in which she influences me. I would never have been particularly attracted to pink in the past, but now I see pink and I don't even necessarily think how much Stella would like it, I just think, "Oh, pink! Lovely." (I had to buy a new alarm clock recently. One guess what color it is...) Kind of like how I say "actually" a lot, but so does Stella, and I can't really remember anymore whether I say it because she does, or she says it because I do. Who knew parenting would lead to these totally irrelevant, pleasurable, Winnie-the-Pooh type thoughts? Life is such a surprise.

Elephant

Okay, so part of me is hesitant to reveal this information. Not that it's some deep, dark secret or anything, but I have seen what can happen. The worst case scenario. There was a young woman I went to college with who made the mistake of telling her friends and family that she liked frogs, and you should have seen her dorm room. Frog tchotchkes on every surface. It was disturbing.

I have a thing for elephants. I think they are beautiful. Hence the elephants in these pictures, which are scattered around our home. (Discreetly.) And the more I learn about them, the more struck I am by how much we have in common with them. They have long childhoods (they don't start reproducing until they're teenagers) and long lives (70 years). They give birth to one baby at a time in labors that can last anywhere from minutes to days. They nurse their babies up to two years or more, with newborns suckling only for a few minutes at a time, but many times a day. (Hmm, that sounds familiar.) The babies are brought up by the whole herd, an extended family network of female adults, and Wikipedia says:

a new calf is usually the centre of attention for all herd members. All the adults and most of the other young will gather around the newborn, touching and caressing it with their trunks.

Wow. That is a good birth story.

And then there is this article, which I dare anyone not to be moved by. Make sure to click over to the second page, it's the ending that is really remarkable.

You may wonder why the heck I'm writing about elephants here. I sort of wonder that myself. I felt compelled? I know there are trained elephants who can supposedly paint self-portraits or whatever, and that's cool I guess, but that's not the draw here. (Ha. No pun intended.) I'm trying to give a little more attention to the seemingly random sources of interest and inspiration in my life, see what they have to show me. Clearly the appeal with elephants has something to do with their strong communal mothering and compassionate friendship - things I both have and aspire to. But then, there's also Ganesh, the Hindu god with the elephant head who is the Remover of Obstacles. Isn't that great? (I especially love that evidently part of that particular divine duty is not just removing obstacles but actually putting them in the path of those who need to learn a certain lesson. Indeed.) Remover of Obstacles. Fitting for a blog about reclaiming the artist within, no?