Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 60

A Bouquet and an Elegy

...because we all need to gaze on some beauty, and I'm sad that I haven't got time to paint or draw these flowers from my garden today, but nevertheless want to offer something in memory of so many senseless, tragic deaths.

 

And some there be, which have no memorial;

who are perished as though they had never been...

Ecclesiasticus 44:9

 

And if you'd like to listen to something, here is "Nimod," from the Enigma Variations by Edward Elgar.

 

The hope of the world

What a devastating week it's been. I just wanted to post this snapshot I took a few days ago, from the upper floor of a medical clinic. These two waiting mothers had been smiling and interacting happily, drawn together by their children, who just wanted to play with each other. It's not as though Montreal is a city rife with ethnic or racial tension -- it's not, though there is a certain amount of separation, perhaps to be expected in a place where there are so many immigrants. This scene simply made me feel a little better: a reminder both of what's possible, and of the happy naiveté of children who haven't learned hate or fear. Honestly, if the world were run by women, who bear the responsibility for life's continuation in their very bodies, I don't think it would be the way it is.

Moving Beyond Hatred and Fear

Family Coffee Pot and a Fossil (Thinking of Gaza). 9 1/2" x 8 3/4" . Acrylic on paper, July 14, 2014.

Richard Rohr's meditation this morning contained a lot of wisdom. Being a Franciscan, he was talking about how Jesus embodied this way of "being peace," but I've taken the liberty of removing the Christian language, hoping everyone can find the truth in these words without being turned off. What he says is certainly true for me, and my experience. And I appreciate that he states that this is work -- a lifetime of work and practice for most of us.

"Negativity unites most people far more quickly than love. The ego moves forward by contraction, self-protection, and refusal, by saying no. The soul, however, does not proceed by contraction but by expansion. It moves forward not by exclusion, but by inclusion and by saying yes...There is really no other way to save us from ourselves, and from each other, until we are saved from our need to fear and hate.

Conscious love is the totally enlightened, and often entirely nonsensical way out of this universal pattern. Love has to be worked toward, received, and enjoyed, first of all, by facing our preference for fear and hate. But remember, we gather around the negative space quickly, while we “fall into” love rather slowly, and only with lots of practice at falling.

This is exactly what contemplative practice helps us to do. Meditation is refusing to project our anxieties elsewhere, and learning to hold and face them within ourselves and within God."

For once, I used the best hours of my morning to paint today instead of getting lost in my computer and work responsibilities. J.'s parents brought this coffee pot with them when they immigrated to the United States in the mid-1940s. The fossil shell reminded me of the Sea of Galilee, and the "living stones" - a phrase used by Palestinian Christians to describe themselves; a diminishing remnant of two thousand years of Christian presence in Palestine.

Yet More Tragedy

Longtime readers here will know my views on the Middle East situation, and that those views come from many years of familiarity with the cultures and societies in question. So it's probably no surprise that I am feeling pretty sad and discouraged about the latest escalation of violence, and the fact that nearly 100 Palestinians are now dead as a result, with countless more injured.

When are we human beings finally going to internalize the lesson that violence simply begets violence, and that the cycle of retaliation never ends? When are we going to understand that no one is better, purer, more exceptional, or more chosen than anyone else on this planet?

To blame all of this on religion is a cop-out. Yes, religion has been responsible for a great deal of suffering and war throughout history. But ethnic conflict, based often on the conviction that one group is superior to another, has also played a very large part. It doesn't matter where the idea of exceptionalism comes from, or who originates that narrative, it always points to the same ends: prejudice, inequality, oppression, exploitation, separation, subjugation, expulsion, violence and ultimately genocide. These actions are always justified by the powerful who believe that their lives are worth more than the people they are oppressing, and who create a convincing narrative of how threatened they themselves are by the less powerful group.

A decade and a half ago, as some of you know, my husband and I helped from a Muslim-Christian group that met once a month for prayer and friendship, sharing our stories and celebrations and a meal. We met for three years, from the second Intifada through 9/11 and the beginning of the Iraq war. During that time we made repeated personal invitations to the Jewish community to join us. I met with the local Rabbi who assured me of his support, but neither he nor any of the members of the local synagogue ever came to a meeting. I am very sorry about that, because we all could have learned a lot from one another. We did work together with some Jewish anti-war protesters, almost all women who were part of the group Women in Black. Some of the people who joined our weekly street-corner protests against the Iraq war and Israeli violence in Gaza were Jewish, and very courageous for the stand they were taking for peace. One of those people was the poet Grace Paley, who I was privileged to know. Another was Susannah Heschel, professor at Dartmouth and daughter of Abraham Heschel. Like my dear friend Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, their voices truly were crying in the wilderness -- not too pejorative a term for America on this particular topic. In Israel itself, the moderate and progressive voice has always been much stronger and more consistent, but the government -- like the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the ongoing drone war against "terrorists" that has killed countless civilians, women, and children -- has consistently taken a different path, one which has made the world far less safe and far more radicalized than it was in 2000.

A group of pilgrims from our cathedral recently went to the Holy Land, spending quite a lot of time in Palestine. They met with Parents without Borders, and heard the stories of Palestinian and Jewish parents who have worked tirelessly for peace, while grieving their own personal tragedies. We don't hear enough of those stories in our media here, and we don't do nearly enough to support peace efforts, hospitals, schools, cultural and relief programs that are attempting to care for the victims of this awful conflict without regard to their ethnicity or religion.

Please don't use the comment box to take sides and argue about politics; it is utterly pointless and if that starts happening -- as it does whenever I've mentioned this issue here -- I will close the comments. We need to find solutions, and to look deep within ourselves. This is an ongoing tragedy in which Americans participate through our tax dollars, and which will ultimately affect us all. Ask yourself what you can actually do. I try to continue to act in memory of my father-in-law and mother-in-law, both of whom experienced these conflicts first-hand, but also lived in Damascus and Beirut and Alexandria at a time when all three religions lived together harmoniously. Inpired by the knowledge that this was possible, thay always hoped and worked for a better world for their children.

The Beekeepers

The Beekeepers, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c.1568

Just because.

On the Table

Still life with honeypot, glass salt shaker and fan. Fountain pen on paper, 9" x 6".

I've always liked the way certain objects recur in some artists' still lives, whether it's for their interesting shapes or their symbolism/role, or both. It seems like this little honeypot may be one of those objects for me. The top and saucer are silver, and the pot iself is glass. It was my mother's, and has a little chip on the rim from a spoon, but I don't remember her ever using it. In our old house there was a pantry off the kitchen, with broad shelves. We never kept food in there though - it became more of a closet for overflow dishes and seldom-used equipment; my father added a coat rack for our winter coats, and built a hanging rack for the vacuum cleaner hose and nozzles; the pantry was the home of the carpet sweeper...that sort of thing.

The honeypot lived on one of those broad shelves, behind a teapot and a set of cups: I can remember it quite clearly, but it never came out to the table, probably because we seldom used honey, except for the squeezable bear that was kept with the baking supplies. Eventually, when my parents moved to their house on the lake, the honeypot came along and was kept in a more prominent place near the everyday sugar bowl and cream itcher, but it was never filled, and never used.

So, a few weeks ago when I was at the lake house, I took it out and brought it back with me; I polished the silver and cleaned the glass, and set it on our table -- that's when I made this drawing.

Last week I bought some new honey with delicious flavor -- a piece of comb suspended within it like an insect in amber -- and filled the pot. I study it as I sit at the table: the little silver bee perched on it the top of its old-fashioned, domed hive, reminding me sometimes of pair of bronzed baby shoes and other times of ancient Greek gold ewelry in the shape of bees. I sit there wondering why it intrigues me so much, wondering where it came from, aware I'll probably never know.

Happy Fourth

Delphinium petals and a fossil, acrylic on paper, 6" x 3"

Once again, this is part of a larger painting, but when I got out the cropping corners, this is the part that I liked - partly because I'm partial to that fossil, but also because the composition and colors just work better. In the full version below, I think the leaves on the left side are too fussy and the daisies feel a little too literal - in this style of painting simple shapes are required, and a lot of attention to positive/negative balance. I do like the stiles of the chairback, though.

The national holiday up here, of course, is July 1, Canada Day, but for me the Fourth of July will always mean parades, cookouts, bonfires, and fireworks, American-style. We've been in the studio all day but are about ready to go home, have a drink, watch some soccer, and maybe fire up the seldom-used grill.

Enjoy!

"Your job is to do the pointing"

A recent piece by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian, titled "How to Think about Writing," caught my attention (thanks to Martine Page for the link) because he seemed to be describing how I've always felt about blogging -- at least the sort of blogging I do, and like to read -- but it also applies generally to much of the writing I admire.

"When you write," Pinker says, "you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, and that you're directing the attention of your reader to that thing."

Perhaps this seems stupidly obvious. How else could anyone write? Yet much bad writing happens when people abandon this approach. Academics can be more concerned with showcasing their knowledge; bureaucrats can be more concerned with covering their backsides; journalists can be more concerned with breaking the news first, or making their readers angry. All interfere with "joint attention", making writing less transparent.

Couldn't agree more, though I never thought of it quite so simply. As Burkeman points out, many writers start with this as a goal, but somehow abandon or forget it along the way. As a meditator, I'd venture to guess that what gets in the way is our ego: the writing becomes about us: our emotions, desires, problems, needs, the particular ax we want to grind. In other words, we forget that the reader is standing beside us, or sitting across from us, waiting for something to unfold; waiting to be delighted, surprised, enlightened; waiting to ponder; waiting for her world to open and shift ever so slightly, waiting to be changed. That can happen through a little quirk of human behavior shown through dialogue, or through a single sentence of luminous descriptive prose, a line of poetry that reveals the familiar through an entirely new lens -- and of course, I think it can also happen through drawing and painting and all the other arts. Burkeman concludes with this advice, worth printing out and putting on my studio wall:

The reader wants to see; your job is to do the pointing.

Of course, it really isn't that simple. First we have to train ourselves to be people who actually see something: people who are able to quiet down enough that we become an eye, an ear, a sensitive skin, but not so sensitive that we cannot bear it. Then we have to learn how to express what we have learned through our senses, intelligence, and experience. Finally, we have to learn how to give it away - how to point our effort toward the invisible reader rather than back at ourselves; how to become a vessel that fills and empties over and over again.

Not a bad way to spend a life.

Tuberous Begonias

It was therapy...I had a tooth pulled Thursday morning and as the novocaine wore off, I did some drawing on the terrace to distract myself. Everything's pretty much OK now. It was good to lose myself in those fuzzy stems, busy petals, and crinkly leaves.

 Begonia 1. Fountain pen on paper, 9" x 6".

 Begonia 2. Fountain pen on paper, 9" x 6".

 Begonia 3. Fountain pen on paper, 9" x 6".

Relics

We took a quick trip across the border recently, for business, and drove through some of the small towns at the very top of New York State. In comparison to the well-kept Quebec farms, these areas look hard-hit by the economic downturn, just as it does in central New York where I grew up. The original downtown of Champlain, New York, is pretty much abandoned, the fine old brick and stone structures empty, boarded-up, windowless. Rouse's Point, on Lake Champlain itself, has a large marina and some restaurants on the main street, but all the shopping has moved to new little malls with a grocery store, post office, drugstore, liquor store and laundry on the outskirts. For bigger shopping trips, the residents probably drive down to Plattsburgh, 20 miles south.

We stopped for lunch at a diner, The Squirrel's Nest, in Rouse's Point. The diner was one half of two connected storefronts; the other was a bar with a few tables and a heavily-varnished massive wooden bar with curved ends made of glass blocks; it looked like it had been there a long time. We sat at a booth in the diner and ordered the soup and half-sandwich special. The soup was hamburg-macaroni -- what my mom used to call hamburg chowder - and it was just as delicious as hers. The turkey salad sandwich came as a piece of roast turkey in bread with mayonnaise - not exactly turkey salad, and without a tomato slice or lettuce leaf in sight -- but good anyway. The placemats and the walls were decorated with black and white historical photographs of the town: fine old homes and hotels, sleighs and snowstorms, factory workers, women in white shirtwaists, carriages, old signs. A few old artifacts and antiques also hung on the walls. As in central New York, a lot of people look to the past for their identity; why wouldn't they?

A stuffed squirrel presided over the restaurant's old soda fountain, with its stainless steel fixtures. "Wow," J. said, "I wonder if they can make a milk shake."

I shrugged. "Why don't you ask?"

But the waitress - a teenage girl -- looked confused at the term "milkshake" and said she'd "have to ask the kitchen."

"Don't worry," J. said. "I was just looking at the old soda fountain and wondered if everything was still working."

"Oh, no," she said, "that stuff is just there for show -- it's, like, from the fifties."

"Yep," I said to J. after she walked away. "And so are we!"