upcoming events

I am certainly blog-prolific today. Blog-orific? Anyhow, it's the first large-ish chunk of time I've had in a while to just do my thing, and I have done just that today, including updating this blog a few times with ideas that have jangled around my head for a while. I've got plenty of them, which leads to upcoming events/classes/etc that I'm excited about.

• The Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival (next weekend! woot!). Alpacas, goats, sheep, very fuzzy bunnies, YARN!!!!! and other fiberiffic items to see, buy, and squeeze.
  
• The 2008 MICA commencement exhibition, which showcases all the work by this year's graduates in all MICA programs of study. A couple of my dear bible study friends will be showing, and I can't wait to see what they have come up with! Also, it's a great place to find good deals on original artwork.
  
• My crochet necklace workshop at Spinster Yarns and Fibers! May 10, Saturday from 3-6 PM, come and make a beaded necklace with my pattern published in Jewelry With a Hook! Scroll down on the link, and you'll see one of my examples for the class. Super fun!
• For the past few years, I have been a teacher at Grace Fellowship's Creative Expressions classes--their Wednesday women's bible study ends the semester with a day of fun classes on everything from how to sing, making your own baby food, flower arranging, to crochet and drawing classes (which I taught). It's just an hour and a half, but it's really fun and the ladies are great. This year I'm teaching "Inspiration: Tapping into your God-given creativity," for those ladies who really want to be creative but don't know where to start. Let me know if you would like to sign up, it's May 7 from 9:30 to 11 AM.
  
• Last but not least, my best friend's mom is having a garden party to celebrate her new greenhouse. Part of the celebrations will be the opportunity to purchase handmade items, half of the proceeds going to Baltimore Christian School. I will be making lots of crocheted flowers and small accessories to sell, so that's exciting and fun.

Oh, and one last thing: I made a sortof calligraphy piece for an auction last week to benefit Blood:Water Baltimore, and it actually sold! It looks different from nearly everything I have ever done, and I wasn't sure if I hated it or not. Seriously. I can't even remember clearly what it looked like when it was done, as I finished it about 5 minutes before I needed to drop it off for the show. Well anyway, it is gone now to a good home (or at least they can use the frame for something good), and I'll get a little and give a little money to a good cause.

my life as a cartoon character

Since my inauguration as a mother, I have become a much lighter sleeper (though not physically lighter, unfortunately). A combat veteran with a knife under his pillow could not have more lightning-quick responses to the slightest noise. When A was still an infant and cried in the middle of the night, it would jolt me so much that I'd be coursing with nervous energy for hours afterward. The scene in Pulp Fiction comes to mind, where the heroin-overdosed Mia Wallace gets an adrenaline shot to the heart and gasps immediately to life.

Thankfully, my reflexes have softened a bit over time, and it's only when A cries that I have that visceral electric shock of wakefulness. Even so, I am much more bothered by noises at night, and quickly become irritated when I am trying to sleep in, and hear everything going on outside my window. Such was this morning's experience, from 2 AM when I went to sleep till 10, when D brought up a lovely cup of tea to coax me into the land of the conscious.

My night was like the Looney Tunes cartoon where Sylvester was living in the lighthouse, and a series of mirrors and the pendulum of the clock beamed the full force of the light into his eyes, one irritation after another, until he went insane with rage and thwarted sleep. It's always the false hope bit that escalates the annoyance: the noise/light/vibration stops, and you think, "Aah, finally I can----BANG BANG BANG BANG!!!!" AUUUUGH!!

First it was the apparent 8-alarm fire or massacre or something that drove every available fire truck and ambulance out of their stations and screaming along nearby roads. Then speeding motorists with accompanied yells of anger from people who escaped with their lives, then it was the woodpecker. A singularly annoying sound, persistent, regular, and loud even with the windows closed. Then the car alarm directly under the bedroom window, which sounded like it had driven up the wall and parked on my bedside table. And then the coup-de-grace: the little black terrier hell-hound across the street. This dog weighs no more than 8 pounds, but each shrieking bark is like an ice pick driven into your ear drum. They should send that dog to Guantanamo Bay to be used on especially recalcitrant detainees. Though I think it would be too inhumane a punishment.

So I'm up, ok?? I give up! You won! Your lawnmowers, leaf-blowers, vacuum cleaners and pre-pubescent belligerent children with wiffle balls can have it all! Just don't stare too much at the tufts of hair I've pulled out of my own head and the sandy purple bags under my bloodshot eyes. I just might have to fire up the power washer.

titles of books I might never write

I like thinking up new ideas for nonfiction books--you know, essays, polemics, diatribes on whatever bee resides in my bonnet at the time. Rarely do I ever go beyond the catchy title. Perhaps it proves that I am not a writer, as it seems writers have the opposite problem. Pages and pages and chapters flow from their minds, but what to call this conglomeration? Just call me, I'll help. Here are the books I'll write:

• The Perfect Book (on perfectionism. Also proof that I am a perfectionist, as I have not begun the book, since I know it will not be perfect...)
• Motherhood by the Book. Essays on my first year or so of pregnancy and motherhood, and the incredibly ridiculous, unhelpful, panic-inducing advice I found in parenting books.
• Clanging Symbols, which would be a polemic on the vacuity of evangelical aesthetic tastes. It would have a mutilated Thomas Kinkaide painting on the front, perhaps, which would immediately get me sued for all I'm worth and damned by millions of nostalgic religious grandmas.
  

And here is an idea for a horror story that I thought up one night while nursing A:

• The Monitor. A new mom is struggling with the physical demands, emotions and hormones that have overwhelmed her as she takes care of her baby. One day during naptime, she hears voices over the baby monitor--voices that are not her baby, but evil voices and terrifying things that are happening. She rushes up the stairs, finds everything as peaceful as it was when she left. Is the monitor picking up something from the neighborhood, or something that happened long ago, or is she merely delusional with postpartum psychosis? Yes, it's a horrible pitch, but I bet someone could make a silk purse from it.
  

golden bowls

Come and check out my new blog, which is an experimental art installation idea that I'd love to have tons of people join. It's all about prayer, and gold, and beautiful things.

distilled thoughts

It feels like the past three weeks have nothing to show for them except an excessive amount of thoughts in my head and a much-increased credit card bill. Ok, and some new friends, long-overdue conversations with dear friends, and an almost-daily nap. Nowadays, I nap more than my son does, which is a sad proof of my physical exhaustion, the passing of time and also the certainty of 2 hours of daylight to myself. I have been incredibly spoiled, please understand, and I know that full well. Many kids give up naps when they're 2, or earlier, and many kids also were never trained to sleep well or don't have the disposition for it. Or they're just stubborn as hell and enjoy making their parents miserable. That has not been my experience, thank God, and it has been an incalculable mercy to me, with all my other issues and fragility, that my son at least sleeps well every day and has a cheerful disposition. My name might have been in the news otherwise, one of those "bad mommy" stories that make one shake one's head and tsk over, and say "What's wrong with this world?" God has had mercy on me in so many ways. Let me count the ways, so I do not wind up complaining about my lot in life or my sufferings as an artist, great though they may be...(pity me, right?)

I was so, SO encouraged to go to the Transforming Culture Symposium. It was a concentrated dose of excellence, fellowship, sound teaching and camaraderie. It was confirmation of my calling to be an artist, and a challenge to offer the work of my hands as a sacrifice to God. It was also a reminder that it will not be easy, and that I cannot attempt this or anything alone and unsupported. As Barbara Nicolosi said (my favorite speaker there), "There are two types of people in this world: artists and people who support them." This, I think, was partially in jest and also dead-serious. None of us create in a vacuum, unlike God, though we do need vast amounts of alone-time to examine and cogitate and experiment. The challenge is to emerge from that time alone to be with normal people, to relax our brains enough to enjoy things and people just as they are, without trying to improve them or put them to other uses or exercise our creativity and criticism on. To resist the temptation to further separate oneself from people, i.e. "the further I get from the things I care about, the less I care about how much further away I get," a cogent quote from Robert Smith. He knows a lot about the melancholy, the sucking pull of stardom and the drive to keep tinkering with something even years after it's been released.

I've also thought a bit lately about how much I love liturgy, formal liturgy like what I experienced at my Lutheran school, and the Episcopal church I attended in Virginia. One of the speakers defined liturgy as, "whatever a church does during their worship time," which is quite a catch-all and probably offended some people who are more "go-with-the-flow" types. But everyone gets into a pattern, or some sort of order, whether they call it a liturgy or not. The problem is that some liturgy is just plain bad. Sometimes there is such an obsession with novelty that we wind up sinning and offering something unacceptable to God. The benefit of a formal liturgy is something I think Annie Dillard said: "It's what people have said to God for hundreds of years without getting killed." That isn't the reason I like liturgy, but it's comforting all the same. To know that God's ok with these things being said to and about him--it gives us something to go on, a form to emulate and a mercy that we're not just randomly pushing worship buttons until one explodes in our faces. But I digress.

My thoughts are more along this line: I have too many ideas in my head. Each idea presents a plethora of other ideas, solutions to that idea, explorations of offshoots of those ideas, and on and on. Sometimes the result is something brilliant, but most of the time I'm merely overwhelmed and paralyzed by the infinity before me. My friend talks about creativity as "thinking inside the box," rather than outside--we need limitations in order to be creative within those parameters (whether the parameter is the edge of our canvas, choice and limitations of materials, subject matter, etc...).

So, where does liturgy fit into the chaos? It is simply this: it is an infinite comfort to me to know, each week, the structure and order of the liturgy. Though there are changes with the church year, they are quite minimal and the over-arching form remains the same. Even within that form, there is a great deal of leeway with hymn choices, sermon topics, seasonal meditations, and even the list of people to pray for each week. It is so lovely to come from the chaos and disorder of my own mind to the unchangeable-but-always-new character of God.

Another thing that was touched upon by several different speakers during the conference was the notion of time, the church calendar, the ebb and flow, the feast/fast nature of marking the seasons. It seems that we are getting farther and farther away from dependence on seasonal restraints; we can get strawberries year-round (though perhaps not great ones), as somewhere in the world it's always springtime, travel takes so much less time that we are not as awed by distance and vastness, we're annoyed when it takes a couple minutes to download a large file, Christmas junk is available for purchase even before Halloween. There's a constant rush to go on to the next marker, the next holiday, the next opportunity to consume goods, and very little time to actually enjoy the moment we are experiencing--even to experience the moment as it is. It's so much harder to wait on God, to submit to time, to savor or to mourn. A week after the Virginia Tech massacre, someone was quoted saying, "I am still having a hard time getting over it." A week?? I daresay you're having a hard time. There's time again. How long does it take to grieve? To answer prayer? To celebrate? How efficient is God in all this? The short answer: He's not. He's excessive in every way, both good and infuriating excessiveness.

Our culture is so obsessed with "happiness" and success, putting a brave face on, getting over things and moving on, cutting losses and medicating difficult ones. It seeps into church life with happy-crappy worship songs, sickly treacly Hallmark "artwork" glamorizing a time that never existed, and urging people who are depressed to just pray more and have more faith. Hardly anyone talks about death, or suffering, or depression or difficult sacrifices in church--unless it's a glib reference to the cross, or the vague hints that "I've struggled with a lot of stuff in my life, and now I've grown so much in the Lord." The songs are all about how much I'm praising You, how it will all be ok in heaven and I want to dance forever. No more sorrows rolling like sea-billows. I need those sea-billows, I need to know that I am not the only one scrabbling onto a piece of driftwood in the dark, while a glistening cruise liner slides by, deaf to my shouts for help. Conversely, when I'm the one on the beautiful ship, I need to remember the dark mystery and terror of the waters below me, and keep the search lights on.

There are many, many other things that have been germinating in my mind since the symposium, or were called out of the recesses there, which I will need to go into at another time. There's enough for a book or two or three, though that will have to wait.

sorting it all out

Wow. It is safe to say that I am completely overwhelmed. I spent 4 days in Texas this week for the Transforming Culture Symposium, and it feels like all of the stuff bearing down on me before I left was lifted there, then came crashing down all over again when I returned. I have always been a little too ambitious for my own good, and a little too optimistic about what my mind and body can handle in a short period of time. Even so, the symposium was an incredible experience, and gave me even more ideas, connections, lovely new friends (hi seela!), and professional mentors in the fields which I am most passionate--art and Christian experience and thought. The exhaustion I feel today is completely worth it, but I am still exhausted all the same.

It was truly a near thing, me going at all. Everything has been arranged for quite a while, but the food poisoning decided to linger to an excessive extent. I spent most of Saturday night and Sunday in the hospital, in excruciating pain, hooked up to fluids and potassium and pain killers, while D read to me and dozed beside my bed. We're in the middle of Steinbeck's East of Eden, a stunning narrative of family, insight, cold-blooded contempt, and new life in California. It was a glorious escape, to enter this other world and take my mind off of myself, and the disappointment that I knew was coming. A dehydrated, pain-filled exhausted woman should not get on a plane, alone, and then rent a car in an unknown city. Or eat any Texas BBQ and coleslaw and beans and tex-mex. It was really heart-breaking.

I had resigned myself to staying home, and sleeping on the couch all day like I had been doing for 2 weeks already (coughing like crazy, exhausted, then barfing like crazy, exhausted). Nothing like force of habit. But I started to hope in the evening, and called my doctor and emailed some people to pray for me, for wisdom and healing. I'm not sure it was wise, necessarily, to go, but I really did feel so much better the next day, when my flight was supposed to leave. My sister helped me pack, I loaded up my absurd number of prescription drugs (it's like feast or famine here, pill-wise. I've opened the floodgates now!), bananas, crackers and applesauce (which the TSA inspected carefully, as it probably looked like some sort of gel explosive device in there with all my plugs for gadgets and my beat-up computer), and off I went into the Blue.

There was so much going on at the conference, I spent little time elsewhere or contacting friends. For that, I apologize because I know people were worried and didn't know what was going on. Even now, there are so many people I have not had a chance to contact and I'm just so tired. The weeks leading up to easter were really intense, as I had a horrible cough/cold, along with a big part in the Good Friday service planning--what amounted to pretty much an art installation of sorts in the new sanctuary of our church. I was privileged to use the space for the first time, before it was officially "opened," and it was so rewarding. Briefly, I'll describe what my part of the experience was:

There were about 7 people who were part of the planning for the service, which is usually a contemporary, experiential, sortof stations-of-the-cross thing each year. This year we organized it around the seven last sayings of Christ on the cross, and applying them in a personal way to the congregants, encouraging meditation on scriptures (especially prophecies) that elucidate Jesus' love and sacrifice, and ending on a hopeful, contemplative note. The "room" I was in charge of designing was the last one, with "It is finished," and "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit."

People moved through a corridor of hanging rice papers with deep-red ink writing on them. Scripture passages about the finished work of Christ, the sacrifices, the grace of God, and the veil of the temple ripping in two were on the paper sheets. Then, across a ripped curtain was written, "It is finished." People then passed through the curtain to the main sanctuary space, with scattered chairs about and low lighting, except on the cross and on a tree sapling on the stage. The cross was made from the trunk of a huge tree they had to cut down to build the new building, and it's a stark but beautiful piece framed by the alcoves on the stage. It almost looked like the mouth of a tomb, the way we lit it for the service.

From the base of the cross to the tree was a flowing red piece of fabric that looked like a river of blood (pleasant, eh? well it looked better than it sounds). Johnny Cash's song, Redemption, was playing in the space, and that was the inspiration for the whole idea of the room. Read the lyrics in the link above, and you'll get it. People could spend time listening to the song and thinking about the statement, "Into your hands I commit my spirit," and then they could write their own commitments on a leaf-shaped paper, then come up on the stage to hide it in the folds of the fabric.I used a real cherry tree for the installation, one that we planted a day later and will hopefully produce cherries in a few years--it's self-pollinating and very slender, and I am surprised it survived the shock of being shoved sideways into my car, under door jambs, and other traumas a tree shouldn't experience. It's resilient, apparently, and is putting some tentative buds out as we speak.

Anyway, all the work involved in putting everything together, plus my physical exhaustion, plus being sick, plus fighting off depression and adjusting to medication that I'm not terribly happy with...I've bit off more than I can chew, and it's not a surprise that I haven't been able to chew on much for 2 weeks. God does have stark ways of slowing me down, though I always manage to put up a fight and never completely learn my lessons. Well, take me as I am, as that is all I can be without supernatural intervention.