A foot of snow pack, melting fast on a rainy 60 degree, to be followed by an ice storm made for a foggy, beautiful day the other day.
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Rejoice and Be Glad
It was a sunny six degrees by the time I got Thing2 to the school door, and, after a weekend of sub- sub-zero temps, the sky was so gloriously blue that I had to stop myself from blurted out how much it felt like spring. Knowing the mention of the five-letter S word would scare it off like showing a rodent its shadow in February, I silently ran my errands, making mental paintings of the trees and the shadows on the still-crisp snow.
Even a text from Thing1 reminding me he needed to practice driving stick (in mom’s car of course) couldn’t dim the feeling that it was as close to a perfect day as anyone could ask for. I’m not religious, but whenever Mother Nature is putting on a show like that, the greeting from Psalms that opened services at my parents’ old church runs through my head:
“This is the day that the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
Whether you think a beautiful day was made or just happened, there’s something to be said for the missive to rejoice and be glad for it.
I admit to being a bit of a worrier. I worry about Thing1’s healthcare prospects as he’s starting to leave the nest. I worry about ever being able to retire. I worry about the growing number of displaced people around the world or if we’re moving closer to blowing up the human race with every single day.
I’ve been guilty of not rejoicing for days on end and even contemplating throwing away the rest of my personal collection of days.
My failure to rejoice in the moment — even for just a moment each day — is being rectified. Over the last few months I decided to make a change in my life and go back to school so that, in the long run, I would have more time to work on art and to feel like my life work will make a contribution. I’ve enjoyed school as an adult but as soon as I was immersed in study, I felt as if a fog was clearing.
The world started opening up, and I suddenly started to see the possibilities as well as the dangers. Despite a new mountain of work and all the same worries, I had more energy everyday. Without even realizing it, I was rejoicing.
Even if yesterday had been the last day, not rejoicing in the beauty of sun on the snow would not minimize any current troubles. Acknowledging the gift of that day, however is a recognition that there is always beauty, and worry cannot diminish it, even if it tries to obstruct it sometimes.
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That’s No Lady
We thought we were starting with Lady Jane Grey (yes I watch too many historical dramas) and Gentleman Jim. Well, 5 minutes after we got home, we decided our swaggering orange tabby was more of a confirmed country boy and started calling him Jim-Bob.
We still thought Jane was very ladylike as she hung back under the coffee table and curled up in cardboard boxes in the sun.
That night one of the house mice made the mistake of venturing out from behind a cupboard to steal a piece of Katy’s kibble.
A ball of grey shot across the living room and kitchen, and the mouse scampered back to his hiding place. Little Jane was on the hunt however, and she was ready to tear apart our kitchen to get to it.
She didn’t get it, but she was in the mood for a hunt.
Everything was fair game. Bits of string, hands under blankets, feathers. Nothing was safe.
She spotted Katy-the-Wonder-Dog’s thumping tail and crouched for the attack, but then decided she didn’t really want to hunt anymore.
For now.
When the light is right or she just feels like it, however, Lady Jane becomes a fuzzy poltergeist. A one-woman weapon of mass distractedness. She’s a calamity.
Which is how I suggested a better name for her might be Calamity Jane.
I wish I could say it wouldn’t help her fit into her new life at Casa Chaos better.
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Cocooning
It was -17 this morning — so cold it froze the batteries in our brand new weather station.
These are the mornings our wood cookstove-heated earth-sheltered house wraps us up in a snowbound chrysalis. I got to pat myself on the back for having thought to get the wood bins overloaded Friday morning before the cold snap known as ‘Winter’ began in earnest.
As I cooked a farmer’s breakfast for our family who no longer has responsibility for anything resembling a farm animal (unless reformed barn cats count) or any intention of leaving the house for chores or pleasure until the mercury hits zero, I feel like Ma Ingalls in the Little House books. Then I remember that by this hour of an ordinary 17-below morning that Ma would have already done the farm chores and still be having a good hair day.
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Progressions
A Winters Nap
Learning to draw on the iPad has been easier than I thought. It’s just different sensation from drawing on paper but no more different a sensation than painting.
I spent the first few weeks experimenting with the first page of a book I’ve been working on over the last six months. I still sense this new tool will ultimately speed up my workflow, but as I tried different variations, I’ve noticed an unpleasant quirk creeping back into my work.
In the past, whenever my creativity has felt stunted as it was during a very busy autumn, I’ve gone back to basics — a pocket sketchbook and a black pen. The pocket sketchbook reminds me that The only pressure is to get something down on the page. Indelible, ink ensures that corrections are impossible. Mistakes will happen, and the only thing you can do is to move forward. Freeing oneself from any expectation of perfection is like prying the lid off a mason jar filled with fireflies that have been waiting to get out all night. Suddenly you’re in the darkness. The results are irregular and uncontrolled and surprisingly beautiful.
Drawing on the iPad lets you correct mistakes; it lets you anticipate and try to prevent them. Being able to create images with a different layer for every section means being able to edit one section without accidentally disrupting another. It’s a wonderful safety net when digitizing a final version of a rough draft, but it does take some planning.
That detail is where the devil lurks. You focus on the final image, but instead of letting it flow organically, it’s easy to get caught up in figuring out the steps through the maze and even easier to begin worrying if the image is good enough. Could it be better if you removed this layer and replaced it with that?
I didn’t realize I’ve been doing just that until the second day of my kick starter when I wanted to copy a photo of Thing2 snuggled up with Jim-Bob. Deciding that tracing the photo would be too constricting because of changes I wanted to make, I started a rough sketch with the pencil tool. This is the point in my sketchbook, where I get lost in my subject. On the iPad, however, I was thinking about how I would do the next layer and what style it should be. As I began focusing on potential mistakes instead of just creating, my devilish inner critic stirred, and the firefly light flickered.
I started the second layer, determined to focus on progress, not perfection. The result was something new for me along with the recognition that discovering when not to use each tool in your art kit can the most important thing you’ll learn.
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A Tale of Country Kitties
One of the facts of country life is that other critters live in the woods with your pets. Snoop, our fat black feline god of pleasure found out in August that fishers weren’t as easy to escape as bears, and we saw him no more.
We all mourned him – especially Thing2 who spends more time on the floor with the animals than anyone else in the family.
The house mice tried to feign sympathy, but there was no mourning period in the nooks and crannies behind the walls. We knew we needed a new mouser.
Thing1’s girlfriend’s (yes you read that right) family owns a few barn cats who, in addition to being excellent mousers were prolific breeders this summer. So a few Saturday ago after I got off work, we decided to see if any of the kittens could be coaxed into the slothful life of a housecat.
We had two semi-willing takers (bribed with a bit of catnip) and named them Lady Jane (because she was so grey and seemingly dainty) and Gentleman Jim who seems more like Jim-Bob now.
We got them home and Jim-Bob promptly swatted Katy-the-Wondering-Dog’s nose, confirming her opinion that cats are freaking crazy and making us wonder if a barn cat could be happy as a housecat.
It took them less than an hour to convert.
Jim-Bob unlocked the age-old wisdom of cats that tells them that humans are bad hunters but excellent servants and sampled every lap and couch. Jane — not sure if she or Katy would be the bigger wimp — held back a bit, waiting until bedtime to snuggle up with the human of her choice (Thing2 in this case).
There’s something magical about an animal that can live in the wild but still prefers to occupy the laps of very unmagical humans. I don’t know if it was magic or just the vibration from the purring, but it didn’t take us more than an hour to realize how much we had missed having cats, even if only for a month or two.
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Kickstart – No Funding Required
I’m kicking off the new year with a jumpstart to my blog.
The recharge includes a return to a name – Picking My Battles. It’s mantra that helped keep me focused on creating for the first few years — even when I was almost as busy as I am now. And, what the hey? The formula worked before, and sometimes sequels are better than the original.
When I inaugurated Picking My Battles, Thing1 and Thing2 — then 12 and 5, were the primary focus of my and the Big Guy’s lives. Six years later the domestic front, much like the deck chairs on the Titanic, has been rearranged a bit, but the chaos still seems to be the consistently constant.
Six years ago, the day would go from peanut butter sandwiches to carpools to work to bills to homework. Fast-forward to the present, and I’m still a domestic anti-goddess, the Big Guy is still a rock, Thing1 has morphed into a college-bound, jolly greens-eating Giant, and my tutu-wearing free spirit, Thing2 is a bigger free spirit with way more expensive fashion sense. So, somehow, in order to carve out time to create books or paintings or cartoons and get healthy and strong again, life still boils down to learning to pick the important battles.
You can read the updated blog by visiting http://www.rachelbarlow.com or http://www.pickingmybattles.com.
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Recess
It’s December, and school is out. I have homework over the break, and work never stops. Still, this is close to recess as I normally get. And recess is time to play.
I used some of my December bonus to buy an iPad Pro and a pencil, thinking it might be faster to trace illustrations and to scan them in and clean them up in Photoshop. In the long run, it will probably be faster. In the short term, however, it is been an excuse to play just for the sake of playing. I have generated five or 10 iterations of the first page of my book, not making any progress and yet, making tons of it.
After three months where every moment of my life was defined by functionality, sometimes being able to make art just for the sake of art is progress.
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Cat-toons
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The Knowledge of Good
Whether you think it’s allegory or history, you’ve heard the one about Adam and Eve eating that apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
For years, I’ve felt like the bulk of the knowledge I gained has been that of the evil humanity commits against itself and against its only known livable habitat. We turn a blind eye to bad behavior by trusted people. We cluck our tongues at the latest mass shooting and then wrap ourselves in our cocoons until the next horror appears in our social media feeds.
And I’ve been guilty.
I’m guilty because I let fear of that evil, for me spawned in the aftermath of a crime, keep me mummified. I work at home because I’ve been afraid of the world. I’ve tried to keep my kids safe on a mountain, hidden from the world and life.
That fear has been shrinking over the last few years. As I’ve rediscovered my art, I’ve rediscovered the better things about humanity. I’ve seen my son stand up for someone who couldn’t stand up for themselves. I’ve seen people expend enormous energy raising money to help people they barely know.
And last summer I had a chance to pay it forward a little.
I was raising money to buy art supplies for children who were refugees or in foster care. Then a friend who had helped spread the word to raise money for kits for almost 100 children asked if I would lead a drawing workshop for the children. I said yes immediately, even though the only thing I’d ever taught anyone to do is wash their hands after using the potty.
The afternoon started with 15 boys assuring me they couldn’t draw. I know everyone can draw so I started them on a free drawing exercise I had learned.
It took less than 30 minutes for the boys to kill their inner critics and start experimenting.
As they began drawing from their hearts, we saw abstract trees, scenes of and an occasional portrait emerge. We saw art doing exactly what it was supposed to do – open the door to healing.
That workshop was a gift.
I got home and started investigating paths to becoming a teacher, something I’d just been considering for the last year or so.
I neglected the blog through the months of researching certification options and reconfiguring my schedule. The drawing just about stopped.
The education, however, was just beginning.
My own history with mental illness, as well as the experiences of friends who were sometimes at the margins of school society, made special education seem like a good place to make a difference. I got a second experience-building job at an elementary school, and, as I felt like I was starting to be a small part of a small solution, my knowledge of good started to grow.
I’m breathing a little life support into my blog this afternoon, but the reality is that as I watch kids learning to accept others who are not like them and have the chance to give support to kids who might be having a hard time with the business of growing up, my creativity is thriving.
All creativity isn’t an expression of hope, and that’s okay. It’s an expression of how someone feels. But I knew that, for me, constantly feeling afraid of the world was stagnating.
Acquainting myself with a bit more of the Knowledge of Good has prompted ideas for future children’s books. It makes life more colorful. It forces me to engage with the world. And when I stop for a moment to breathe, it makes me aware of how blessedly creative – and hopeful – engagement can be.
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That Mom just isn’t Right
At the beginning of the summer thing one and I traded spaces. He wanted privacy in the attic office/guest room (translation: at least one story between him and T2), I wanted a workspace with a window downstairs, and T2 wanted me close enough closer to him.
So, for the second time this year, I relocated my desk and printer to a new home. The first time I moved them out of a tiny windowless room with a small skylight whose main selling feature was a two walls of books. now I know somethings not right in my head, because it took less than two months before I decided I’d rather be surrounded by the books and paintings then look out the window.
Now I know somethings not right in my head, because it took less than two months before I decided I’d rather be surrounded by the books and paintings then look out the window.
And as John Lennon might’ve said if he had been a nerdy hermit, you might say I’m a bit goofy, but I can’t believe I’m the only one. I hope someday you’ll join me (in your own little cave, of course) and the world will unwind with a few books or even just one.
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Decisions, Decisions
Like most families in the US with a high school senior in the house, we’ve acquired an impressive stack of college brochures over the last few months since Thing1 took his SAT’s.
T1 is very methodical in his evaluations of potential schools, but when we opened a flyer from the University of Chicago, Thing2 introduced a foolproof criterium for putting a school in the ‘must apply’ pile.
As it happens, the library at U Chicago looks strikingly like the dining hall at Hogwarts when photographed in bad light. Recognizing that life is full of difficult decisions, Thing1 is still reading the fine print and trying to figure out if it goes on the ‘more research’ pile.
Thing2 is trying to decide if he wants the school put him in Slitherin or Gryffindor.
Picking My Battles 