I walk daily in the woods for PT and sensory input, but lifting anything over 5 pounds has been banned until next week.
Our big, fat, orange tabby has a strong opinions about why not picking him up as much (he’s in the 17 pound range). Despite the heat in and the rules has managed to keep up with your daily ritual of slow impact cat yoga. I’m sharing his favorite pose above.
Under the heading, keeping the focus on better living through creativity, I always come back to my blog, no matter how many people are or aren’t reading it.
This summer that means issuing any temps to turn it into web store. Art and prints are  still for sale, but you’ll be able to find them when I have them on my Etsy store going forward. 
When you go about rediscovering the world in middle age, you don’t feel like an adult — confident about what you know and comfortable with the things you don’t know. Suddenly, you know nothing.
I have joked to my husband that, for the last two weeks, I’ve felt a bit like Milton Wadams from Office Space, shuffling and mumbling as I reprocess each sensation and landscape — gravel under the feet, the plaintive sound of an orange cat needing to be petted just so, dishes arriving at the dentist.
Now, I’m actually learning to embrace the shuffling and robotic processing of sensory input. Rather than being a malcontented, midlife crisis, I’m trying to experience the world as if I were a child again.
My only source of malcontent has been how difficult painting has become difficult this week. The sensors still seem disconnected from output. Partly out of desperation (knowing that non-writing/drawing artist is a monster courting disaster) my post-labyrinthectomy journey of discovery seems to be bringing me back to my blog – my original writing and drawing diary.
Now, as I am watching every little detail around me, I mentally record the mundane and magical moments around our yard like a robot, searching, not for artificial intelligence, but authentic interaction with the world. This voyage of discovery will undoubtedly reroute my journey of creation.
When I was first diagnosed with Ménière’s disease three years ago, I was told that it was a disability that automatically disqualified you from multiple professions. Two years ago, I was told to stop using stairs taking public transportation by myself because likely and actual unpredictable “drop attacks.” I was told the disease would end when I lost my hearing in the affected air.
Last week, when I give up the hearing to prevent any more false, it would’ve been easy to see the change as a loss, as acquiring more disability.
Instead, the opposite is happening. It may take some time to be able to drive again, and the shuffling will probably persist for a while. That’s OK because the shuffling is part of rediscovery, and that will lead to a whole new chapter of creativity.
High Summer, Oil on Canvas, 20” x 20”
It is only recently that I realized that the practice of finding my voice was less about settling on a genre and more about continued exploration and experimentation. It is why the abstract and the concrete are mutually inclusive for me.
Scott, the person who boards our ancient mutt Katy, while we’re away, has taken to calling her Old Lady Katy. She’s over 13 and navigating the world as a senior citizen.
This week, missing my left inner ear, my entire life is about navigation.
Saturday, the Big Guy after took Thing2 to work, I decided to take advantage of a break in the rain and walk part way up our 900’ gravel driveway with old lady Katy.
Each old experience — something as simple as walking up the driveway- is brand new. Suddenly, I’m hearing my footsteps on the gravel in a different way. The field of vision jerks a bit more as I move from foot to foot.
I am doddering and feeling a bit like a senior citizen myself (I have many years before I will admit to being in that category.) It’s disorienting, but I suppose that’s what happens when the world is new. And how often do you get to discover a whole new world,let alone when you’re in your fifties?
I did what I had to be done, surrendered my inner ear for balance. Now, though, when I close my eyes and sit on the porch in the sun, sound seems to come through my closed, eyes and little pinpricks, and the world is not the same.
Sound is coming through on one side only. I’ve been learnin to walk again the last two days, connecting the left eye to the right ear.
It’s the perfect summer day. Hadn’t seen the cats for the last three. Sat down and felt the breeze brush up against my skin, once it was a symphony, now it is scratchy and screamy.
More sensory input will help reacclimate, I’m told, but until this moment, I have no idea how much output something as simple as the wind blowing through the trees could make. It’s like I’m getting to know the world around me for the first time.
Watching news in bits and pieces,
Teaching in the lines and making my America
With every fathomed phoneme and math fact mastered.
A very unscientific philosophy of education that every child is capable of learning propelled my teaching career into my current research. We all come to education with different backgrounds, histories, and biologies. Those differences, however, don’t support a thesis that only some of us are capable of learning. Rather, we learn at different rates and respond to different reinforcers.
Anecdotal evidence from parents and teachers, as well as national statistics, however, tell us that many children are not learning the fundamental skills needed to survive and thrive in modern society. The numbers from The Nations Report Card, for example, show that only 37% of high school seniors read proficiently (NAEP Reading: National Achievement-Level Results, n.d.). The numbers for math are equally concerning (NAEP Mathematics 2019 Highlights Grade 12, n.d.).
In my classroom, I morph from a researcher into a warrior for reading. As the last stop before high school, I am also one of the last opportunities many of my students will have to acquire functional literacy. For most of my teaching career, I have worked with older students in similar academic situations, and the injustice of children finding their way to middle and high school — barely able to read – has, year after year, prompts the question of how the systems that are supposed to support them allow this to happen.
It is against that backdrop that my dissertation questions are evolving. How were they taught each of these years? How are the skills allowed to keep lagging? What tools and methods do schools and teachers need to better serve all of the children coming through our system?
For years, I have blogged about creativity and the gift of mental clarity it provides at the end of a stressful day. Painting is a gateway to serenity for me, but between blogging and painting, I struggle with identity of purpose. Am I a writer who paints or an artist who writes? Should that identity matter?
A few weeks ago, feeling conflicted and spending more time reading than painting, I did an online personality/aptitude test. This particular test placed an emphasis on interest-driven aptitudes, and my “type” came back as “Maven/Maker” — someone whose creative output serves their learning. Taking the results with a giant grain of salt (Pittenger, 1993), I indulged in a bit of bias confirmation.
I was a “problem reader” in first grade. Teachers reprimanded me for not paying attention and reading ahead to see what happened in group books. When my parents said “lights out,” I’d put my “Little House” books on the floor close enough to the door to catch the upstairs hall light, so I could still silently bound into bed when they came up the stairs.
When a blogging class revived my creative life, I spent hours learning how to set up a blog, how to illustrate with this method or that, and, ultimately how to start painting. To be sure, writing and painting happened, but a disproportionate amount of time was spent researching. Some people good-naturedly chided me as the “eternal student,” and, familiar with the historically pejorative connotation of the phrase, I sometimes worried that all the study was an act of fear or creative insecurity.
Now, I’m realizing that creativity may not be my endgame. Creativity is the vehicle. My paintings and posts are not the expression of things learned. They are the learning, and learning should be a life-long endeavor.
Recognizing core parts of your identity is liberating. It helps you pick your battles. For me, it is the beginning of a new understanding and phase of my creativity. It is also a new chapter in my blog as I start my dissertation journey and journal.
I know what creativity has brought to my life. It plays a key role in my teaching. I teach, however, because I do love to learn, and I want my kids to love learning for its own sake. Now, I want my creative life — including my blog – to serve that idea by celebrating it.
Sources:
NAEP Mathematics 2019 Highlights Grade 12. (n.d.). Retrieved March 16, 2024, from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/mathematics/2019/g12/
NAEP Reading: National Achievement-Level Results. (n.d.). Retrieved March 16, 2024, from https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=12
Pittenger, D. J. (1993). The Utility of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Review of Educational Research, 63(4), 467–488. https://doi.org/10.2307/1170497
One of the weirdest things about Ménière’s disease is that when the weather, and the air pressure change, you can feel it. I know it’s not just me, because when I visit chat rooms of other people with this wacko disease, I see other people reporting the same exact symptoms, that, in any other forum would, be cause for being involuntarily committed.
Right now the wind outside is pounding, and, even though we’re in a house with walls of 10 inch concrete, and 3 feet of dirt surrounding it, I am rocking. My brain literally thinks we are wrapped in a hammock being tossed back-and-forth even though I am literally lying on my bed holding on the mattress, so I don’t fall off.
Are used to love blustery days, especially at the beach, standing at the top of a bluff, feeling the wind and spray blast against my skin. These days, however, it seems as if mother nature isn’t respecting my boundaries.
But the wind howling and bringing down trees outside have to be her way of reminding that there are some things you just can’t control.
As I started to paint, Riders on the Storm, my favorite Lake Michigan music, was taking me out of the mood of the painting. I switched to Pavarotti, Nessun Dorma evoking la dolce vita, and smiled at the irony.
La Vita di Thing1 has been many things — adventurous, heart-wrenching, miraculous. It has rarely been peaceful.
Still, it was easy to get lost in the music and then the memory as the painting took shape, creating the kind of peace that only comes with stopping to appreciate, unreservedly, the good moments that make up your life.
My paintbrushes were still for most of the break, and that could have made me cranky. This holiday, however, creativity showed up in unexpected ways.
Two days before Christmas, Covid forced a sudden reconfiguration of our family gathering, turning our house into holiday central for my parents. Having hosted off and on for almost 30 years now, planning holiday menus is still fun but hardly an adventure into the unknown.
And then Thing1, our newly-minted adult, and Thing2 gave it a creative twist. Avid cooks, they asked if they could take charge of the main courses.
I’m no dummy so of course I said be my guest (the forgotten Achilles’ heel in my plan was that neither of them is an avid dishwasher). Turning them loose on the main course menu, meant reconfiguring side dishes, and suddenly planning a holiday meal was an adventure again.
I thought the rest of the break would be in the studio, but my sister, having been cheated by Covid out of a family gathering, invited us to Connecticut for the next weekend. I am as outgoing as a slug in the winter, living under the electric blanket until the cats wake us up to be fed, but knew we should go.
It turned another lesson in the value of letting fate run things.
Each of us running half an empty nest, my sister and I found our families creating new traditions as adult siblings without our parents. The pay off was a reminder that sometimes the family you choose is the family you grew up with, but the weekend had just begun.
We used the trip to catch up with the Big Guy’s sister and our other adult nephew at his music production studio in the same town. It was a chance for Thing2, an increasingly serious musician, to a few hours as a studio musician while the adults caught up over coffee.
Thing2 rarely lets me videotape his playing. All my brag videos are concert bootlegs and snippets of impromptu shows, but suddenly we were blessed with hours of unguarded music.
I hadn’t painted a drop in weeks, but creativity had permeated every minute from all directions. And therein lay a lesson that I recognized only as I was walking to my car after work the day after break, energized and ready to return to my studio.
Sometimes finding your creativity as much about the feeding of your soul, as it is in the exercising of an idea.
In the last month, I’ve painted paintings, made jewelry, written poems and papers, created immersive virtual field trips for my students, and designed two new home plans. For years, I thought my creative bursts of frenzied energy were distractions from pursuing painting seriously, but, as I get closer to starting a dissertation and putting on an art exhibit, the bursts seem to be more than mere distractions.
When I paint, I feel as if I’m breathing again, but the same feeling happens with so many other creative pursuits (even writing a research paper). I couldn’t put my finger on it until Thing2, an increasingly serious musician emerged from his room with his guitar on Christmas afternoon. He gave us all an impromptu concert of the Vince Guaraldi version of “O Tannenbaum,” surprising us, not with his ability to pull a new note-perfect song out of his hat in a few minutes, but with his choice of tunes.
He started as a confirmed rock guitarist a few years ago, seeking out the classics (“Mom, have you ever heard of this really old band called Led Zeppelin?”) and discovering future classics. He was less excited by jazz or classical, but, recently, his search for new challenges has led him down previously ignored paths and to additional instruments and expressions of music. Bossa Nova is in the same playlist as AC/DC, Metallica, and Count Basie.
And I realized that my youngest isn’t just a guitar player. He’s a musician – an eternal apprentice to his craft.
It made me think about my own creative journey and the path my blog has taken over the last 10 years.
This blog has never been about making money — even from my paintings. It has had paintings but not been about painting. It has had cartoons without being about cartoons. It has had art without specifically being only about art (until recently).
For most of its life, this blog has been exactly what it says — Dispatches from the Creative Homefront. It has been about finding the creativity in the mundane activities that make up most of our lives. And last, but not least, it’s been about the hope that people reading the blog leave it a little happier than when they clicked on it.
It’s not a way to make money (hey, I’m a teacher after all), but it is one way to make a blog.
Picking My Battles 