A Year Since, Part III

No matter how wonderful painting and drawing is, I am grieving a part of me that seemed so committed, while admitting that those "tired ofs" are there, and the "oulda sisters" exist behind that door. I visit the idea of doors closing and windows opening, and hold onto it. I am back to working on doors that seemed closed, but were left open a crack, for instance, my lifetime quest to make my own Tarot Deck with all of my new realizations, complete with 79 poems that have yet to be fully edited and loaded. Then there are people are asking me if I'd consider doing a special portrait for them! Of course, I would! I'm learning how to set that idea to a reality score of inner music. Composing a real plan for it. I am also in a place of learning how to look at the windows around me.

Rainy Afternoon, Oil Pastels on Archival Paper, 11" x 17"

Physically other doors that have closed and don’t seem to be cracking open are hearing in my left ear, feelings on the left side of my face, and taste on the left side of my tongue. This is due to nerves taking their time to rebuild connections, or not. Also, I had a grand mal seizure in December that has me off the road (you should be happy about this!) and that has in turn limited my ability to be a useful chauffeur mom, and to getting to anything but the grocery store when someone can take me. I really relate to Arab women and those under house arrest now. To be constantly accompanied is both wonderful and uncomfortably demeaning. Don't feel sorry for me. It is just a thing.

It also means that I have to make peace with being on anti-seizure medications for the rest of my life, according to all the neurologists I've visited, and this is a huge drag. Better than having seizures. Yes. That. But, I’m still fighting acceptance of this for the long haul. I give in for the time being. This means I really have to look at ways to make that work -- which turns out for me to be changing my lifestyle choices - diet, exercise, self-care, how to be a productive mom and person and ways to make a living from my home (back to writing??). Oy! Never ending things that fate has given me. Everyone has them.

To focus on what CAN BE DONE is the thing.  If you haven't seen "Silverlining Playbook," yet, this is where I am highly recommending it.

I can be a great mom somehow right? Even if I cannot be there to scoop up, to deliver... I’m looking for that purpose, and meantime realizing that my kids’ lives are not about me anymore in any way, shape or form. I realized this by remembering my love of the Bay City Rollers back in the day, and realizing that they've already grown past that time and I know I didn't give a shit what my parents were doing even then. They’re out there discovering themselves and experiencing things they’ll never share with me. This is what every mother goes through. The empty nest. I’m just getting an advanced, slowed-down, warning. You know, mother birds do not stay in empty nests. They return to an adventure of flying.

I begin flying by learning about being an artist from something other than my childhood. There are a FEW (Har, many) how-to books, classes and crafts (like how to frame and mat an oil pastel piece) to take in. I can take some of the business skills I developed as a freelance writer and editor and apply them to an art career. Heck, ten years or more in Consumer Products branding, copy and content ought to be valuable to an artist. It is not really like I’m giving up on my experience so far, I'm just changing its focus from writing about the visual to making the visual. Who knows? It may bring me full circle.

I can make my body stronger and less dependent on medication to prevent the brain from having a lightning storm, if I keep after what I know. I know I have to reduce swelling, and I know going to a low-glycemic practice, and to keep walking is part of that. Perhaps I will find more. It will be a step-by-step thing. It took me 32 tries to quit smoking cigarettes for good many years ago. I must be approaching that with quitting gluten. Let the 33rd try be the one that lasts.

C,G, Jung Laughs, Oil Pastels on Black Archival Paper, 19" x 25" 

I can face the failure/success question little-by-little, first by linking my work of art to a higher goal of preparation and exposure by entering into an art contest. (I tell all my screenwriting students to consider it a real step along the way, to submit their screenplays to well-respected contests). Maybe if you vote, I'll win something that could help me along the way, a "full studio" Super Shawn Taboret, a nifty piece of furniture that would make it possible for me to do professional level artwork at home.

I could learn that asking for help is not a bad thing. I could use your help. I would really appreciate your help. All I'm asking you to do is to click on the painting to the left. When you land at Daniel Smith's Art Contest, click to "Monthly Voting Gallery," and then go to page two. You'll find this painting about half-way down the page. I am putting myself out there to see what the next step might be and to challenge myself to get beyond a shyness I have about having my work seen beyond a hundred FB friends. I don't know what will happen, but right now I appreciate what I'm learning about what I can do everyday to sell myself tall rather than short. You, by the way, can vote once every 24 hours for the rest of February 2013, if you so choose. Please choose.

So to sum it all up, my year of recovery: My gratitude runs deep. I accept the bits I cannot change...mostly. I can turn away from closed doors and let go of clothes that don't fit. I can ask for help...and even accept it. I can be content by embracing curiosity and dislodging expectations. I don't know what tomorrow brings...

2013 © Amanda Morris Johnson

Sign Posts of Gratitude

When in possession of an unwanted benign brain tumor, and the havoc that causes, the feelings of gratitude may be a little more challenging for me to touch daily, but they don’t go away. In fact, recognizing what I am honestly grateful for picks me up when I’m down. Feeling gracious and thankful when life is giving me big reasons to shrug and be sunk into self-pity is not natural, perhaps. Perhaps, I have to scrape away a layer of gunk to put my mind where I want it to be, but the work is necessary in order to have perspective and meet the opportunities of the day with open arms. I’m not going to lie about it and say, it is oh so easy I just have to sing a little song and I’m right back where I belong. No. It is a conscious effort that I choose to make not only for myself but for everyone around me.

I’m not lying about how hard it is to find the attitude of gratitude, and I’m not lying about things I'm actually grateful for today. To prance around as if this brain tumor is nothing; though, maybe in fits of denial I will go there sometimes; is a dishonor to myself and everyone who has reached out to support me through this rather tight, dark passage. So, while I spend hours in bed staring at the ceiling as it spins around above me, I am grateful to have voices sending prayers out into the ethers for me. It brings me to tears to think of it, and,with that support, I know I cannot fail to emerge from the other side of this tunnel somehow braver and stronger than when I went in.

I’m grateful for the messages of support, suggestions and curiosity that I receive, even if I cannot answer them very quickly. And, when I am tired of talking, writing, chatting about the situation, I am grateful that there is a power off, and a shutdown button on all communications. I’m grateful that I’m learning how to use those buttons. Blush. I’m grateful that the support I receive respects my boundaries and many limitations right now.

My gratitude to my husband for keeping down the drama is a bottomless well. He is my touchstone, the go-to person when I feel it is all too much. He seems to love me even with all the trouble I cause, and I really do cause a raucus, and he proclaims me beautiful when my face is swollen from allergic reactions. He remembers to keep the laundry cycling through, and he’s even learning to cook. He is rising to the challenge of this time in our lives. What woman would not be grateful for that kind of love?

I have children who cleaned our home on their Saturday, without complaint. (Yes. There are children like that in this world.) They read to me when I was in bed, feverish and in pain, and combed my hair and held my hand.  If this isn’t touching to you, I don’t know what to tell you. Of course, they are children and they have their wants and needs, but it does occur to them to set those aside now and then and look at what is actually going on around them, and for this I’m grateful.

I have parents who would like to lean in and fuss over me, and yet they know that I’m not that kind of gal. They respect my space and let me ask them for assistance when I need it. My mom is giving up her beautiful Santa Fe for a week to come and drive me around (since I can’t take medication for anti-convulsion, I can’t drive, in case, just in case…) and sort my laundry. And, tomorrow is her 70-something birthday and she’s willing to hang out with a space cadet who may or may not muster making a cake for her. My step-mom sends up little snacks, takes my kids out of this sick space for afternoons and sleepovers. My dad actually left his lazy-boy and has driven (which he does not like to do ) up to my home several times to check in, and let me tell you it is a surprise always, and he’s smart enough to stay only 15 minutes even though the drive takes him an hour.

I am grateful for my writing because, though I haven't accomplished much with it in the world out there, it has been my most faithful friend, listened to me without judgment and allowed me to work out on the page what to do in every situation of my life. I could not ask for anything better from it, as there are definitely times that I've droned on and on about the same thing and yet finally a breakthrough happens that changes the course of my life. I am deeply grateful to be able to share a fraction of my writing with anyone who has the patience to read it.

So, these are my true gratitude attitudes for this Thanksgiving weekend. They are not grand in the scheme of all possibility, but they are sweet and poignant and meaningful at a time in my life when I need quiet more than parades.  I look forward to getting through this and looking back grateful that I knew my gifts well enough to put sign posts on them. I’m very blessed. May you take a moment to find what matters to you, that which gives your lives a little more ease and mark them with your own kind of sign post.

Chapter Six - Part One - Top Soil

Yesterday winds clocked over 70 miles an hour in my area, and so I looked up the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to understand how wind affects fields. It turns out that farmers lost 5 inches of top soil over most of the arable farmland in America during those terrible dry times. It takes 1,000 years to build one inch of top soil naturally. We know so much about soil composition now because of the hard times of the past, and so of course, we've built up the top soil once again in record time. There are farms. There are growing things.

Sometimes I feel like my adult life has been like a dust bowl. It blew away a lot of the natural goodness and now I am spending a lot of time painstakingly rebuilding the top soil of my life. It opens me up to criticism from some work-a-day people that I'm not doing enough. That hurts my heart because I generally put in a full 18 hours a day of constant work. I rarely sit with my family to play a game. I haven't had a vacation in five years. The pressure to produce is quite something to deal with when I know that I am still unprepared, and so I work to ready the soil by daily work.

Some of my work is housework. Some of my work is taking care of sick kids. Some of my work is cooking dinner for my exhausted husband. Some of my work is volunteering for the schools because I can't give them money right now. All of that work does double duty as a practice of consciousness, and I am in constant gratitude for the moments when I am fully occupied with tasks to be done. But, a hell of a lot of my work is dealing with waste inside my brain and turning it into fertilizer and compost for the top soil of my writing field.

Those empty moments when I deal with nothing but the memories of disappointment, and turning them into the gifts they are, by conscious shifts in perspective is the harder work. As a writer, I do this because my goal is to write about the process of life. It sometimes looks like I'm just walking the dog, or just putting quotes up on Facebook, but I assure you at the end of the day I've contemplated my work and know that only I can judge it as worthy or not. The work is not paid work, but it is work nevertheless. It causes great discomfort for many people close to me to watch me do this without any tangible results. I know that to write what I truly want to write, I must write daily, and for long periods of time, but right now I don't have the top soil for that, and so I'm amending the soil every day with exercises like this blog, like planting little annual flowers of poetry to keep my connection to my intuitive writer's mind, and I pray that my grand idea (and actually I do have one) will finally find a place to be planted that can support its growth. I am learning everyday to trust my process and see that I am supported to do this work, and I am grateful.

Divorce

Hope had become
A thin and brittle branch
Upon which she perched her life.
Without talons, gripping
That view of the world,
She looked unsteady, unsure, and felt it.
Still she insisted on clutching,
Half out of the fear of having to return
The weight of her life to
A trunk she could no longer perceive,
And half out of the pride
That she’d managed so far.

Inevitably, the branch would break
Because wisdom was not in that roost.
Time does not run backwards, and this is
The thing about tree-climbing:
Inching back feels more dangerous
Than falling.
So hope became a fantasy.
Clinging to the unwise choice, she
Dared not
Move.

Refusing to recognize the conditions
She found herself in, kept that false
Security something like a nest,
But left her immobile,
And quickly becoming petrified,
Like ancient rock buried in living tissue.
The slightest disagreement in the balance
Of her needs and desires
Splintered hope further and no duct tape
Encouraged new growth on that branch.

Until she could desire
No more than she needed
And even that was too much
Until there was nothing to do but breathe
Into the SNAP that would,
Finally, plunge her to the ground.



The fall seemed long.
The wind rushed against her.
She wished for wings, for the branch
That had once held her so erratically.
Other branches grabbed at her
Tempting her with promises, but
She kept on falling until the falling
Seemed like all there was to life.
Giddiness took over, laughter spilled
Out of the thrill and she wondered
At how high she’d gone on
Pure fancy,
And if she’d ever have a vision again.

Rock bottom seemed more
Vague than she’d expected.
In fact, she was never sure if
She’d actually hit it, but rather
Had been caught by the twisted roots
Of her vast tree,
Like a net for a trapeze artist,
A welcome surprise.
Oddly, she lay prone, looking up at the
Peculiar path of her fall and wondered at
The Light that now shone through the
Thick of leaves and sticks.

Her hands,
Feeling the gnarled firmness beneath her, stung,
No longer numb to her situation.
Her lungs lurched towards oxygen.
Her face,
Wet with sap and tears,
Did not smile for once, and
For the first time in a long while,
Allowed instead the truth
Of her concern to reveal itself,
As she reached for the bits and pieces
She thought were important.
And, she found her illusory collection
Had been reduced to
Only what she loved,
Her children,
Her body
And her mind.