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.

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.

Hot Hot Heat

I started a new folder for pictures on my computer yesterday: Summer 2008. I had been waiting for a more "official" date to make the switch from Spring to Summer - the equinox, say, or Stella's last day of school. But here in the northeast it is so extraordinarily hot, it feels like Summer is crashing the party, and she's here to stay.

It's difficult to get motivated to do anything in weather like this. And yet I'm not satisfied with that. I've been noticing lately how very, very loud my Excuser is - you know, that little voice in your head that rationalizes why not to do something. Last night I had actually gotten both kids to bed at a decent time and had a couple of delicious, solitary hours to myself in the evening, and I thought "Here's my chance to work on a project." And then my next thought was, "But there's all that laundry to fold," and the crazy part was that I was actually relieved. Whew, close call! Might have had to make some art - lucky for me, there are chores to do. What is that about?!

So, for the record, I compromised last night. I didn't fold the clothes, but I didn't exert a whole lot of creative energy either. I colored. In my grown-up coloring book. And I feel kind of proud of that, actually. At least I noticed how silly I was being. Dumb old Excuser. Folding laundry?! Sheesh.

Similarly, while the heat has been slowing us down considerably, I've been trying to challenge myself out of the rationale that since it's uncomfortable, all we should do in the afternoon is sit in the air conditioning and watch television. Yuck. Yesterday, in my quest to find a cool place for the girls to play outside, I discovered a local nature preserve that I'd never taken the time to explore before, and it was enchanting. (All these pictures were taken there.)

See the moon up there? She was keeping us company.

So here I am, still in the beginning of what is, evidently, a pretty slow process. Taking baby steps out of my comfort zone, making an effort to notice beauty (and to notice my own silly, self-defeatist thoughts), and always, always forgiving myself for not being somewhere else and something more. It feels pretty good. Right Now is awfully lovely, 100 degree weather and all.

A Very Old, Very Young Idea

Recently, my mom was rearranging things in her apartment and found a tin full of these tiles. When she gave them to me, they clacked around so loudly in their metal container, it was like she was pulling out a rattlesnake. We unfastened the tin and Stella immediately pounced  on the pink ones. I, meanwhile, was busy falling down the rabbit hole that opens up under your feet when you get a whiff or a listen or a feel of something so intensely evocative of your childhood. You know exactly what I mean, right? Even now, days later, I can't see this particular combination of colors and shapes, or feel their glossiness in my hands, without simultaneously smelling the lobby of our apartment building on 20th Street and tasting a cinnamon raisin from Ess-a-Bagel.

At the school I had the immense fortune to attend until 5th grade, we did a number of projects with these little guys. Ashtrays in particular, I seem to remember. (Because there's no more tender gift to give one's parents when you're six than a handmade ashtray...) I don't know for sure how all these tiles ended up in our house, but I'm guessing I must have systematically sneaked them all home, one at a time, in my little pockets. Not because I was a wee kleptomaniac but because I had fallen in love with them. This one looked like fairy wings, that one looked like the ocean. They are tiny, the small square ones no larger than my pinkie nail, but when I was a child they had vast depths. (Similarly, I have never met an opal I didn't long to jump inside of.) I don't think I ever had a specific project intended for them. I just wanted to look at them.

All of which has got me thinking the past few days about how I saw the world when I was a kid, and when and how I started to put together the idea that art would be an unrequited love. I remember a dream I had, very young, maybe four, in which I was illustrating a book. I was working on a large, two-page spread, drawing a tree. The magic of this dream was that the tree was flowing out of the marker, finished, onto the paper, every detail of branch and leaf perfect despite that all I had done was scribbled across the page. I remember I woke up, thrilled to my toes at my new talent. But no, I was too young to think in those words. It wasn't the talent, per se, that excited me, it was the lingering joy and ease of drawing this tree.  The dream had been so much fun. It must have been early in the morning, or maybe naptime, because I got out of bed, got my crayons, and sat in a square of light on the floor of my room to try it again. And I remember being so disappointed, crushed is not too strong a word, when the crayon line I scribbled across this page was just... a crayon line.

I don't know exactly what I decided it all meant at the time, but I do know that that sense of disappointment and sadness has been built upon, since.  And it's so silly. It was a dream! About magical art supplies! It was a wonderful dream. But it wasn't some sort of cosmic message about the ease of talent. Yes, there is that "place" I go, that artists and athletes and others talk about going, where the creative doing seems to flow unbidden. The Zone.  But it takes an awful lot of practice to get there with any regularity, and if you don't love or at least appreciate the practice part, then what the heck are you doing it all for? Like anything else in life (relationships, anyone?), the slog is just as much a part of the whole as the moments of transcendent happiness. If you're expecting transcendence all day every day, well, you're pretty much sunk from the get-go.

So here's to getting un-sunk. Here's to forgiving the mistakes and the hard work. Here's to learning how to draw a tree. And here's to, at long last, making something with those tiles.