Are You Listening?

Over the past several months of  art classes, I’ve had a broad range of teachers. Some are young (well, at least younger than I am) and some are closer to my age. Some are laid-back and relaxed while others are structured. They are sculptors, painters, potters and sketchers. All are artists, and all of them seem to have a similar way of deciding how to make art. Are you ready? Here it is:

They pay attention to what “speaks” to them.

Time and time again, I’ve heard these words spoken in different voices. It serves both as explanation for how they do what they do, and as advice for how I go about my own art. In fact, I learned very quickly that when critiquing someone’s work not to say “I like it.” Actually, in most classes, I’m not allowed to say these words. The phrase really doesn’t given any information to the artist, doesn’t tell her or him what works and what doesn’t or, more importantly, how the art affects me. We learn to say things like “I notice that you varied the material from the top to the bottom” or “I respond to the color red you used in the piece.”

That’s the way it’s supposed to work:  art speaks, we respond. We all know what it’s like to feel moved by art—a vivid painting, joyous music, a great book, a dancer’s movement across a stage. Still, it’s hard to pin down what it is that moves us. Why does my heart well up every time I hear George Bizet’s Adagio for Strings? Why does my favorite William Stafford poem, The Way It Is, bring tears every single time I read it? What is it that I am actually hearing or noticing when art grabs my attention?

It turns out, I’m responding to my own life.

At least that’s what I learned this week when I read an article week about scientists at New York University who just published research on the brain’s aesthetic response to art in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience. The subjects in the study were shown a selection of 109 pieces of art. These works of art came from a variety of cultural traditions, including American, European, Indian, and Japanese, and from several historical periods. Images were representational and abstract, and included several classifications (e.g., female, male figure, a mixed group, still life, landscape, or abstract). Using fMRI imaging as well as behavioral reporting, researchers were able to scan  subjects’ brains while they viewed a wide variety of art. The subjects also reported which art pieces elicited an emotional response. In other words, they shared which images “spoke” to them.

Not surprisingly, all the of subjects used the brain’s sensory, or occipito-temporal regions, to gather information about what their eyes were actually seeing, regardless of whether or not the subject reported being moved by the image. However, another pattern emerged . Although the subjects varied widely in which types of art appealed to them, when they did respond emotionally, they all showed a significant increase in activity in a specific network of frontal and sub-cortical regions in response to artworks they reported as highly moving.

What I found even more interesting is that these regions belong to the part of the brain’s “Default Mode Network” (DMN), which had previously been associated with inward contemplation and self-assessment. As the article reported:

The most moving paintings produce a selective activation of a network of brain regions which is known to activate when we think about personally relevant matters such as our own personality traits and daydreams, or when we contemplate our future.”

What is so interesting to me about this study is not that it confirms that art can and does speak, but that it speaks to each of us personally. My response to art gives me information about “personally relevant matters,” relying on the same transmission system used to give me information about my personality traits, my dreams and my future. When I contemplate art, therefore, I am in a way contemplating my own life. Information about my own aesthetic response can very well provide clues about ways in which I can contribute that are uniquely my own.

Maybe this seems obvious to everyone else. Perhaps it is a truism that we are best at creating the things we love in the world. I’ve learned that listening to art feels very much like listening for options in your life. It helps to be quiet and free of distractions. It helps to be curious and open-minded about what you will find. And then you listen. What pushes you to respond? What makes your heart well up, or bring you to tears? What moves you? How can you include more of these things in your life? What does it inspire you to bring to the world yourself?

There is a whole big world of beauty out there. It’s speaking to us all the time. It’s up to us hear it, to decide what it is saying to us, and how we want to respond.

Attention

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

I’ve seen these two lines from Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day, several times. They are usually quoted by themselves, separate from the longer poem. Usually, they are called upon to remind us that our lives are precious, that we each get to live only one life. We’d best have a plan to use it for something worthy, meaningful or enriching. Not waste it. Live with intention.

Today, for some reason,  I felt compelled to read the whole poem and to see those lines in context. I was shocked, I tell you. Shocked! The point was different than I thought it was. Although I do  believe that being intentional about how we live our days is a critical factor in living a meaningful life—to make sure we aren’t frittering away our time on sitcom re-runs or caught in a high-stress cycle of busy work— Oliver’s poem isn’t, after all,  about goal-setting or making 5-year plans. Instead of being about intention,  it speaks about attention, which is related, but not at all the same.

Here’s the full poem:

The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

So what does Mary Oliver suggest I do with my one wild and precious life?

Pay attention.

Be idle and blessed.

I wish I could say I was good at this. I’m learning, but it’s taking a while. I’m the type of person who regularly loses my car in a parking lot. To be fair,  I am  directionally challenged and can get easily turned around, but it’s not just that. Mostly  I’m just not in my car when I leave it. Or rather, my body may turn off the ignition, remove my seat belt and lock the door, but my mind is already ten minutes ahead,  walking the aisles of the grocery store, navigating the mall, or ordering my coffee. I would waste less time if I just spent two minutes out of each hour breathing deeply and checking in with my surroundings. That way, I might actually appreciate the smell of the daphne blooming on the bush by my front door. I might see the insanely green fronds of the sword fern unfurling just off the pathway. I might spend a few moments studying the way a bird nibbles on a single seed at the feeder.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Pausing long enough to look—really look—at something is a form of meditation that will slow your breath, lower your blood pressure, and calm your stress.

Really looking at something and being grateful for it is the best sort of prayer.

What I Intend, and What I Get

Two stories.

1.

My sculpture class meets for six hours each Friday. It’s the third of  three art classes I’m taking this term, and the one in which I have the least experience. And by least experience I mean absolutely none. Nothing. Other than the Play-Doh I messed around with as a kid, I have never sculpted anything. I signed up for Sculpture-Mixed Media with the expectation that I would learn techniques to work with different materials—clay, wire, wood, paper.  I figured I would be given  specific assignments, as I was in both my drawing and painting classes, that could help me gain skill and feel some measure of success with each type of media.

The teacher for my sculpture class apparently had a completely different idea. Instead of opening the first class by taking attendance and figuring out who was  going to spend the term with him, he instead asked if anybody had seen any good art lately. Or even bad art. He didn’t get around to the class list until well into the third hour of the class. I scanned through the syllabus, frantic to figure out what I would be learning and how it would be taught, only to realize with ever growing panic that there would be two assignments all term, giving us roughly half of the term to work on each one. Aside from a brief research project on the work of a living sculptor, there were no other requirements. No supplies list. No schedule of techniques taught. No guidelines. We were instructed to show up the following week with sketches for our first sculpture and the supplies we wanted to use.

I was not only panicked, I was angry. How was I supposed to learn anything if the teacher didn’t seem to want to teach me. At the end of the six-hour class, during which I had learned nothing more than what tools were available in the wood shop, I approached him, asking if he could give me any further guidance. I explained that I was a rank beginner, and until I learned what types of materials were commonly used and how to use them, it was hard to know how to create anything. His response?

“What do you want to say with your art?”

Really? That’s all he had for me? How do I know what to say if I don’t know how to say it! I was seriously peeved and huffed my way home where I proceeded to vent for about an hour to Doug and Sarah and just about anyone else who would listen. After I calmed down, I decided that I would just have to figure it out for myself. As upset as I was, I was convinced that my teacher was a caring person who wanted to help me if I could formulate a question, but that it would be up to me to decide what I needed to know. I made a trip to the art supply store, wandered through the sculpture aisle and bought some wire and some clay.

But I also thought about his other question. What did I want to say? Since I plan to work with art in a therapeutic context, I wanted my sculpture to say something about my decision to go back to school, to combine art therapy with writing and teaching. I wanted to say something about what I’ve learned in my fifty years about where your life leads you, even if you are surprised along the way.

2.

This morning, I woke up early and checked my computer. My daughter Sarah had posted something to my Facebook page the night before. It was a quote from Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,  an influential voice especially for my children’s generation. This quote was from his book The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul:

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

How could she know that that was the message I needed today. Well, to be fair, it wouldn’t hurt me to be reminded of it most days. Where did I intend to go? When I was in grade school, I wanted to be an author/illustrator. I was an avid reader and a bit of a loner and found comfort in books. I  was captured by the notion that I could feel so connected, so understood by an author of a story, even one I’d never met. That’s what I wanted, to write something that would touch another person in that way. Over the years, I refined what I wanted in a career and in  life: that connection through meaningful work and meaningful relationships.

For the most part, I’ve been successful in achieving both. I’ve been able to work as a writer, a teacher and a counselor, all of which is meaningful to me. I have many relationships that enrich my life—my husband and kids, parents and sisters and in-laws and friends, the baristas at our coffee shop, my ex-husband’s family, my husband’s ex-wife. However, the path to achieving those things has been anything but smooth.  And I must say, I expected them to be smooth. I’d always imagined  I would marry and have children. I planned to have an interesting, challenging career that paid well and allowed me to wear nice clothes to work. I’ve had lots of intentions and five-year plans and ten-year plans, and for the most part, they worked. They got me moving and pointed me in the direction that I wanted to go. Without intentionality, I run the risk of wandering around in the dark, depending on chance to light my way. I’m a big fan of planning where I want to go.

The problem with my five- and ten-year plans, however, was that they didn’t allow for the times when my life didn’t turn out the way I’d planned. I hadn’t counted on being a divorced, single mother. When I remarried a wonderful man with two kids of his own, and later had another child, I hadn’t realized that the most interesting, challenging job I could ever encounter was being the parent in a blended family of four kids with three different parental structures. Two of our children spent the school year living out-of-state with their mom. I hadn’t foreseen that the only time we had together as a  family would be in hotel rooms in another state, or during summer vacations in our home. We needed one parent to be flexible and free enough to manage our non-traditional family structure.  I was working as a college counselor, a job that paid reasonably well and allowed me to wear nice clothes to work. Still, we reasoned that since Doug worked for his own business, which was harder to quit than my job at the college, I would trade in my briefcase for a diaper bag. Beyond the rationale, I knew in my heart that I should be the one to manage the home front.

And so I stepped away from the career I’d imagined—17 years ago. In the meantime I’ve cobbled together different work experiences, none of them as structured or as well-paid as the one I left. I worked part-time for Doug’s company,  volunteered at the kids’ schools, and started my own company helping people write their own stories. None of it looked the way I imagined it when I was a shy ten-year-old hiding out in the school library, imaging a connection with a distant, unknown reader. I couldn’t have predicted any of it. It’s an odd mess of experiences and lessons I’ve accumulated, filled with plane flights and parent-teacher conferences, conversations with old soldiers and young moms. I never could have planned it, but it is, after all, absolutely what I needed to do.

3.

My painting and drawing classes are full of intention. In each, I have a syllabus which lists the weekly assignments and a teacher who guides me through it week by week. I have supplies I am taught how to use and I see examples of how my work ought to look when I’m finished. I like this way of working and I’m comfortable with it.

My sculpture class is another way of working. I am learning to throw off the guidelines, toss out my expectations, and get down to the most basic question: What do I want say with my most basic form of art—my life? What materials,  experiences and techniques will  help me to say it?

I’m making a tree out of wire, one strand for each of the 100 years I hope to live. Its roots are planted in a worn, well-read book , it’s branches stretched from a twisted trunk, reaching upward, outward. I’m not exactly sure how I’ll do it.

4.

I want to go back and talk to the little girl I was and tell her that I am, after all, writing, reaching out to connect to distant, unknown readers. Every Friday.

The Things That Matter

Neawanaka is a fictional town on the Oregon coast, and the setting of Brian Doyle’s novel, Mink River. Doyle is a local Oregon writer and his book has been getting a lot of attention around town lately, including being assigned  to my daughter’s high school English class. However, the book deserves notice from anyone, even those living outside of Oregon’s borders. Doyle’s prose is . . . . luscious. Earthy and evocative, layered and lyrical. Plus, much to the surprise and consternation of my daughter and her high school English class, Doyle breaks all sorts of rules of writing. He makes up words. He plays fast and loose with punctuation and traditional sentence structure.  And he makes it work brilliantly.

One of the best sections of the whole book is a passage at the beginning of Chapter 30, in which “the man with six days to live” talks with a young boy, Daniel.  They are sitting on the porch at night and he tells Daniel,

These things matter to me, son. The way hawks huddle their shoulders angrily against hissing snow. Wrens whirring in the bare bones of bushes in winter. The way swallows and swifts veer and whirl and swim and slice and carve and curve and swerve. The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass. Salmonberries thimbleberries cloudberries snowberries elderberries salalberries gooseberries. My children learning to read. My wife’s voice velvet in my ear at night in the dark under the covers.

The passage goes on for over a page, just one long paragraph. It is delicious to read and to savor, bringing with it tactile, spicy memories of things we all know and love, but often overlook: folding laundry warm from the dryer, fresh mown lawns, or the sound of ice shaken in drinks. I could happily copy out the whole section for you but I wouldn’t want to deprive you of the joy of searching it out and reading it for yourself. Heck, read the whole book.

What I will do is encourage you to spend a few quiet moments and start your own list. What are the things that matter to you? Of course, when pressed, we will all quite accurately mention that our families are important, as are our friends, good health and peaceful nations. No arguments here. But what specific things make a difference to you. What small moments jolt you to joy. These are treasures. These are worth recording.

I decided to write a list for myself, a la Doyle. I’m sure, given time,  I will be able to refine it, or add to it. There are so many things that matter. However, here’s my first attempt, brushed down in about an hour.

 These things matter to me.

The way a single maple leaf transfers its russet imprint on wet concrete. The thick ink of my fountain pen rolled over the page of my Moleskine journal. The flutter of a chickadee darting at the feeder, it’s black cap and puffed out white chest. Being stunned by a poem. Wood smoke. A great blue heron stilted on a dock, so still I don’t see it until I row past. Creamy thick oil paint brushed on white canvas. My mother’s potato soup on the day of the first snow of my childhood winters. Starfish. The curve of a warm coffee cup in my hand. Kissing the salty foreheads of my children  when they were small. Kissing their foreheads now. The poetic names of flowers–plumeria, delphinium, gardenia, clematis, wisteria. Leaning over to tuck my daughter Kate into bed when she was a toddler, and the way she would gently roll strands of hair at the nape of my neck between her small fingers. The way it would keep me an extra twenty minutes, the stalling successful. Hedgehogs. The way the fingers of my husband Doug interlace mine. Floating on my back, held up by a warm ocean. Pearls. Quail running from brush to wood pile, their crests bobbing.  My sisters’ faces, mirroring my own. Sea turtle ballet in green water. The pleasure of towels folded properly. My son Sam, age 8, hugging me like he won’t ever let go. Sam, taller than I am now, hugging me the same way still. Rain on a tin roof. The laughter of women. The barn smell of horses and leather. The smell of chlorine on Doug’s skin when he hugs me after swimming. Candles. The pop and crack of a wood fire on a cold day. Pugs. Driving my daughter Katherine to ballet in high school, a half hour each way in traffic, listening to pop songs, listening to her think out loud. The quiet of snow. The way September sunlight angles and burnishes autumn trees.  Sliding into clean sheets. The way my daughter Sarah used to say “callapitter” for caterpillar, and “nay-naise” for mayonnaise, which was so adorable I never corrected her. The way Kate taught her to say it properly. The soulfulness of dogs’ eyes. The bittersweet taste of dark chocolate on my tongue. The birthstones of my children–sapphire, amethyst, ruby, sapphire–set in platinum, circling my finger. The curve of Doug’s shoulders. The silver starfish hung on a chain around my neck. The sound of the word grace when I say it softly, whispered as a prayer, floating past my teeth. Grace.

What are the things that matter to you?

What I Learned From My Daughter–and My Dog

Our 20-year-old daughter, Kate, is all about animals. She feels about animals they way I feel about, say, books, or coffee, or chocolate. We’re talking passion. She is seriously, irrevocably connected in a way I have seldom seen and has loved all creatures great and small (with the significant exception of any sort of spider) since she was an infant. For Christmas, she regularly asked to adopt whales and dolphins and wolves instead of wanting store-bought presents. A favorite family story involves a whale she adopted when she was 10-years-old. Named Double-Stuff, it was an orca that was part of J-Pod, one of three groups of wild whales that lived permanently in the cold waters around the San Juan Islands in Washington State. From the time she proudly hung Double-Stuff’s picture on her bedroom wall, she pestered us to take her to visit him.

Finally we relented one July, taking the ferry to the islands and scheduling a whale-watching trip that left the dock in Friday Harbor. Armed with binoculars, we took off with a naturalist on board. Kate was beside herself with excitement.

“But Kate,” I warned, “you realize that Double-Stuff is a wild whale. He could be anywhere. We might see some whales, but the chances of you getting to see your whale on this trip are pretty small.”

She just nodded sagely, forgiving me for my lack of faith.

The boat had been motoring for all of about 20 minutes when the captain got a radio report that a whale pod had been sighted, and he changed the boat’s bearings. Ten minutes later we could see the distinctive dorsal fins of orcas breaking the surface. The naturalist peered through her binoculars, checking her reference books.

“It’s J-Pod,” she said. “There’s Oreo, the female. Oh, and right behind her is her baby, Double-Stuff.”

From then on I never doubted. I was sure that Kate had called the whale to her. She is a bit of a whale-whisperer, for sure. But she’s not limited to whales. She uses her significant gifts with dogs, cats, lizards, horses, birds, snakes, and wolves. She volunteered at our zoo, hung out at dog parks, and made friends with every animal in our neighborhood. I have no doubt that her future career will include animals in some way.

When she decided to spend her winter break on a service trip to Peru, I wasn’t surprised. The purpose of the trip was to spend two weeks in the very rural village of Pisac, helping families–descendants of the original Incas–build ecological toilets. (They kept a blog as a group, which you can read at Peru Alternative Winter Break.) I was proud of her, of course, and excited that she had this kind of opportunity. The only thing that somewhat surprised me was that the trip wasn’t focused on animals.

That didn’t mean that Kate wouldn’t find animals anyway. She quickly discovered that dogs have a very difficult time in Peru, at least in the area where she was. Most people barely had enough food to feed themselves; there was no surplus to feed dogs as well. Strays roamed streets, sometimes in loosely formed packs, belonging to everyone and no one. None were neutered or spayed. Most weren’t fed regularly. It broke Kate’s heart. She saved part of her lunch everyday and fed it to hungry dogs. She spent her free time bonding with puppies, petting Peruvian perros.

This, of course, did not surprise me. Although she did manage to bring home some beautiful pictures of the day trip they took to Machu Picchu, she came home with far more photographs of dogs and pigs and llamas and cows and alpacas. Never for me was there a better example of Kate’s passion; she sees her world from the perspective of animals. I am in awe of her ability to connect. I was also glad she hadn’t brought home an actual dog.

My love for animals has come more slowly that it did for Kate. As much as I appreciate the grace and simple affection of animals, I’ve never felt particularly tempted to have them stay with me in my house. However, you can’t live with an animal-lover like Kate (or her siblings) and not be affected. With four kids, Doug and I faced some pretty heavy lobbying for a dog. I didn’t think I was ready for that kind of commitment. After all, I already had four children. I was fully encumbered. We went through cats, rabbits, fish, hamsters and guinea pigs in my continuing effort not to get a dog. After a while, I gave up and started searching web sites for the smallest, most hamster-sized dog I could find. I started out with Yorkshire terriers, the kind that could fit in my cupped hands.

So what did we end up with? A Newfoundland puppy we named Abby who grew into a 125-pound dog that mostly sleeps underfoot in my kitchen. She sheds piles of long black fur. I can crack an egg and find an Abby hair inside. She is spectacularly lazy and has to be lifted in and out of the back of our car. Having Abby has created just as much work and commitment as I expected.

But just as Kate called her whale to her through patient trust, Abby has called to me. If Kate is a whale-whisperer, Abby is a people-whisperer. At first, she won me over with her absolute devotion to my children. She seemed able to read their emotions and offer silent, steady support. When Katherine, our oldest, czme home feeling down from a bad day, Abby would meet her at the front door and sit on her feet, forcing Katherine to pet her long enough to feel better. Once our son Sam lagged behind the rest of the family while walking on the beach and Abby trailed him, gradually herding him until he caught up with the rest of us. Kate and Abby had an immediate connection, of course. And Sarah, our youngest who was five-years-old when Abby arrived, has literally grown up with her. I regularly walk into the kitchen and find Sarah sprawled out on the floor, her head on Abby’s side. This, all this, warms a mother’s heart.

But she called to me for my own sake. Abby just turned 11-years-old this month, which makes her ancient in dog years, older even than I am. I take her for short walks, and we commiserate over aging joints and painful hips. She’s taught me about patience and affection. And she’s convinced me that a big, shedding pile of fur in my kitchen is so much more valuable than clean floors and hair-free eggs.

We’ve already been extremely lucky. Newfoundlands live on average six to twelve years, and Abby just passed her eleventh birthday. I try not to think that we’re on borrowed time. We are a bit more indulgent at this point, giving her an extra dog biscuit now and then, an extra little walk. It’s hard to imagine, now, not having had her in my life.

Unlike Kate, I was a harder sell, a tougher case, but Abby won me over. I won’t ever be as passionate about animals as Kate is. That is her gift. But when Kate got home from Peru, while I loved seeing images of the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu, I spent just as much time gushing over pictures of Peruvian puppies.

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