I should walk a mile or two.
I could swim half of that.
Oh, What to do?
‘Tis this towel that makes my butt look fat,
So I should move, but oh boo-hoo.
Just one last sketch once I fix my hat.
Should a, Could a, Nah!
Author: Picking My Battles
Slow Down, Mama Bear
It’s not time to hibernate, but it’s the latter half of summer, and this mama bear needed some time to slow down. A slow day of watching kids get up when they needed to get up, people get breakfast when they were ready. A slow day of painting from morning till noon. And just like that, there is a rumble of energy building again.
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Get Back
Sometimes, to get the important parts of your life back, you need to get back to the people and places that have mattered most to you.
You need to forget about doing things the right way or making anything “good” and just embrace being in the moment, so that in those moments with the people and places that matter, peace will finally find you again.
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Reconnect
Yesterday I went plein air painting with a friend. It was a brand new experience, and at first I think we’re both worried that we would spend too much time talking and not enough painting. In the beginning we did, but as we each found our own part of the scenery that was compelling for us, we fell into a childlike state of parallel “play,” a collaborative contemplation.
Soon, the pencil and brush seemed to move by themselves, and a peace that only comes from meditating on the ordinary miracles of trees and fields settled over us, only to be broken, briefly by the occasional passerby. There were no expectations for what we would produce, and neither of us shared our work at the end.
I Still can’t quite connect to painting with oil again, but that was a smaller point yesterday. There was a bigger connection happening. 
Without saying a word, we both realized that the point of the day had been the peace and not the pieces.
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Painting and Pondering
For ages I’ve wrestled with the ethics of painting with a medium that requires the purchase of little plastic tubes of pigment that will ultimately end up in a landfill. My neurodivergent brain perseverates on the idea that all these creations will end up at a garage sale, and then the landfill. Does the world really need more pretty pictures of landscapes?
I know when we move to a city next year, I will paint the things that I find beautiful there and I wonder again, does the world need more pretty pictures?
As election season gets uglier, however, I realize the answer to that is a resounding yes!
I paint the landscape Vermont, because it is increasingly developed and less wild, and I want to share a beauty that I think is worth protecting. When we go to the city I’m always drawn to parks, filled with people from different walks of life, and I don’t want to get better at painting people. That expression of community is also rare and precious.
As I was standing in a field, trying to remember how to paint (not quite there yet), I was able to remember exactly why I need to meet these things. When I’m standing there, I feel like the little mermaid if she was middle aged and fat and still wanting to be part of those precious parts of the world.
So there won’t be anything profound or deep. There’ll just be more pretty pictures (I hope), but I think it’s actually maybe, just maybe what we do need.
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Slow Impact
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.
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Keeping It Simple
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. 
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Discover, Create, Repeat
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.
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High Summer
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.
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The New World
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?
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Getting to Know Again
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.
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Bits of Winter
Watching news in bits and pieces,
Teaching in the lines and making my America
With every fathomed phoneme and math fact mastered.
