Author: Kay Foley

This term (French, “open air” or “in full air”) is normally used to describe artists painting or drawing outdoors, rendering what they’re seeing at a particular moment in their medium of choice. I wonder if we couldn’t all consider ourselves “plein air artists” when we’re out in the woods and meadows taking in the fragrance of spring, the constantly emerging and changing colors and shapes of flowers and plants. I say we could. I definitely say we should. The act of truly seeing is a creative act, whether we try to recreate what we’re observing or not.

I particularly love the translation “in full air,” since oh my, isn’t the air just terribly, achingly full in spring? There is a woods here in my town, a ten-minute drive from my house. (I know, I am incredibly lucky.) Lately, I’ve been taking extra long walks with my dogs there, since it’s just so beautiful right now and since I can. I can! Again, very lucky. We take the less traveled trail along the creek and then we cross the creek by scrambling down a bank, winding up in the most remote part of the woods, where again we have our choice of trails to follow.  Since it’s spring and new wildflowers are popping up daily and opening up to greet the full air, we climb the big hill, where flowers are plentiful and where we see no one else. I do love people but I also very much LOVE having the woods to just me and my dogs.

I am overwhelmed right now with gratitude. A little bit baffled, even, at my good fortune. For I have the time, the ability and the freedom to do this, morning after morning. Many do not. I do not take this lightly. I realize that at 7:00 or 7:30 a.m., the other cars are taking their owners to jobs. Indoors. Possibly jobs they do not even like. I’m quite certain that many, if not most of them have much better incomes than I do–but I’m quite sure, too, that I am the lucky one. I don’t need many of the things that money can buy. I’m hoping my car, at 180,000 miles, will give me 100,000 more. I don’t mind finding out. My house will be paid for in a few more (10??) years, if I am lucky (which I am). I thank Franklin Delano Roosevelt for helping me live more securely at this stage of life. I thank my sister (my CPA), for making sure I paid in. I am lucky all the way around.

My gratitude lately has been immense. I feel personally blessed by the revolution of this glorious thing that is Spring. I know it’s not actually here for my benefit–but in a way, it is. I benefit from it. I am healed by it. I marvel at it–right here within my grasp. Free of charge. Amazing. Glorious. Spring is a creative act. And if we partake in it, we are creators, too.    

The word “understory” refers to the shrubs and plants growing beneath the main canopy of a forest. Where I live, most of the understory in the woods is, unfortunately, something called bush honeysuckle. While it is bright green and looks like a cheerful thing in early spring, popping into life after the bareness of winter, it is a non-native, invasive plant. Plants like this choke out the native shrubs and plants, filling up the understory of our woods with something whose main virtue is that of shelter for birds. A good thing, for sure, but bush honeysuckle also offers bright red berries that are tasty and appealing to birds but offer no nutritional value. So this is a pretty bad deal all around. Parks and conservation departments urge us to destroy the plants if we have them in our yards, so that they don’t continue to spread.

On a long ramble in the woods the other day, as I enjoyed the long view, I was struck by the similarity between a forest’s understory and what I will call our own understories. Deepak Chopra says that my core self (what some would call the soul) is perfect and cannot be altered or damaged by life, circumstances, or anything I or anyone else could ever do. It (I) will remain perfect for eternity. Oh, I find this amazing!  Mesmerizing. Liberating. My various good and bad traits, my little peccadillos, strengths, vulnerabilities, all of the negative and positive aspects of what I call my personality, he says, are not part of my pure, true self. My pure, true self is perfect. YES.

 

I usually think of myself as the fully fleshed out self that I present to the world, and for that matter, to myself, with all those traits and characteristics, all my various circumstances and all of my history. But to believe Deepak, I am part of the forest–the sycamore, the eucalyptus, the redbud, the maple–perfect just as I am. My understory is all kinds of other things. I want my understory filled with authentic, true-to-me, polite, i.e., non-invasive, elements that belong in and peacefully coexist within the forest. I want my underpinning to be strong but not invasive. I want real and true growth springing from the ground I’m rooted in, a bed of beautiful plans and ideas blooming in me, creativity blossoming, wandering, daydreamy thoughts, innovative ideas that foster, rather than inhibit my own and others’ enrichment. I do not want repetitive, negative thoughts, petty grievances, old slights and hurts choking off all these positives.  I do not want circular thinking, assumptions or fear winding themselves around me and preventing my growth. I want true grounding, unimpeded by my own unwillingness to let go and open up. This is what I want my understory to be.

 

So, just what is my understory? What is yours? Can we alter them? I say yes. Will we? I say yes, at least, for my part, I will. I can and I will alter some things. I can and will do some pruning. For the sake of the forest.

Decisions Decisions – March 24, 2016

Last week I wrote about my difficulty deciding on a series for my online art class with Carla Sonheim, “Y is For Yellow.”  I was really struggling with the idea of settling on my project.  At the same time, I was perseverating on whether or not to visit my sons in New York City over Easter weekend.  I’d been to the Easter Parade once before–a crazy gathering of fabulous cross-dressing men and extravagantly dressed women, wild hats and accoutrements strolling along for several blocks of Fifth Avenue, without any particular form or direction.  Just loads of freewheeling fun and spectacle.  I hankered to go again, dressed to the nines.  But for a variety of reasons, I wavered.  Maybe the weather would be better later in the spring?  But one never knows.  We’ve had a very temperate winter.  My boys were here in early March–maybe I’d want to space these two visits with them further apart.  So I waited long enough that flights were too expensive and I couldn’t go.

 

Some would say I did actually make a decision.  If so, I later regretted it.  Wished I were going.  Felt the need to get away and be there.  Then it seemed as if we could not find a time that worked for all of us.  Oh, I blew it, I thought.  Wringing of hands. But in the end things fell into place and now we have a plan for May.  All is good.  I wrote my sons saying I was very glad they had not inherited my indecisiveness.

 

As to the other issue, my series or project for the class, I’ve settled that, too.  I’ll do a set of black and white drawings of dogs for my upcoming book of dog poems.  This was my first idea and it suddenly became my final one.  I can’t even say how it happened.  It just did.  It fell into place in my heart as the thing I want to do.  So now I’m scribbling away on index cards, drawing dog after dog after dog, hoping for ones I love to appear.

 

The thing I hate about being indecisive is the huge waste of time and energy, mostly energy.  My brain gets in a rut of thinking–trying so very hard to make a decision–that I think of little else.  My mental energy just pours into these questions, as if I were da Vinci, studying architecture or astronomy, when all I’m doing is making up my mind about something actually quite small.  I want to be using my brain for loftier things!  I would love to be more da Vinci-ish, pondering the big mysteries of life.  (I even own a book called How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael J. Gelb.  Excellent book, by the way.)  I understand that life is short, very short and getting shorter by the day–and I want to LIVE it!  I want to see and do and read and experience and learn as much as possible, all a little difficult to do when one’s thoughts are wrapped up in an endless loop of what if I do thus and such? or what if I do this instead??

 

But I know enough about myself to understand at least part of why I’m indecisive.  I’m moody.  I know full well that if I plan something in advance, I could easily not want to do it when the time comes.  I’d like to be sure that I will still love the idea when the time comes. This requires seeing into the future, which I obviously cannot do, so I consider very carefully all of the possible ways a thing could go–a pure waste of time.  Even knowing how utterly delicious it feels to have made a decision, I seem unable to make one without the struggle.

 

Ultimately what I need, I believe, is to first, accept this about myself and not agonize over it. I am fairly certain that absolving myself and allowing things to unfold is my best answer. It is the incessant thinking and perseverating that is the true waste of energy.  I need to allow myself to stop thinking–and just wait.  The answer almost always comes, not as a result of all this crazy thinking, but just from some shift that happens, almost outside of myself–definitely outside of my over-active mind.  I happen upon a quote or a photograph or a song, maybe without even registering it consciously, there’s a softening within me and the decision slips comfortably into place. The aha! was there all along.  It was right there in my heart.  And I was looking for it in my cluttered up brain.

 

 

 

And now it would appear that I haven’t had any thoughts in nearly 3 years.  Not true!  I apologize for my erratic posting.  But I have made a vow to post here at least once a week.

I am taking an online art class with an artist I admire–Carla Sonheim.  I own two of her books and have previously taken two of her short classes.  This one is a year-long class, titled “Y Is For Yellow.”  The stated goal for us in the class is to create a body of work.  Lessons appear online every two weeks and each one focuses on a letter of the alphabet.  Carla emphasizes non-judgmental drawing and teaches some interesting and fun mixed media techniques.  But there is the body of work.  She has asked us not to think about that just yet, but of course I perseverate on it.

At first and right away, I thought my body of work would be pen and ink drawings of dogs, to go into my upcoming book of dog poems.  This seemed very timely.  Then, during D week, ducks began to appeal.  Ducks in boots, wearing hats, carrying umbrellas, going about their quotidian existence in a duckily human way.  Then, during E week, elephants!  I love elephants!  Who doesn’t love elephants?

I am an indecisive person by nature.  I have many ideas and plans, and I tend to get very excited about one thing or another, at least briefly.  But essentially I am indecisive.  Right now Carla has asked us to rest and not bother about the body of work.  She says that during a rest period, often comes the “aha!” moment.  So last week a friend stopped me in the street to give me a red felted wool hat that she’d made for my Jizo.  A Jizo is a Buddhist Bodhisattva who serves as guardian of children and travelers, including those who are traveling from this world to the next.  They are often pictured wearing red caps or bibs, though we (my friend and I) cannot find out why the color red.  You can Google images of Jizo and find many wonderful photos.  My own Jizo is one that I found in a shop in Berkeley CA and I bought it because I loved its sweet face.  And at one time I had considered making a series of Jizos.

Aha!  My friend shows up at just this moment in time with a reminder of my earlier plan.  This seems providential, does it not?  I need a body of work and here comes Jizo once again.  Well, for a few days I did feel that this was my aha.  But then.  What about dogs?  Or elephants?  Or . . . ?

I’ll keep you posted.

I was in a pretty dark place yesterday.  I suppose several things that had been stewing came together to get me there, not the least of which was my own mangled thinking.  I’ve recently quit doing outdoor shows, which decision makes me very happy but also means that I have way more down time.  I fill orders as they come in.  I’m not leaving town off and on for another and another show, riding that high of people’s lovely comments until Monday evening.

I’ve basically finished the writing on a collaborative project I’m doing.  I have no big plans at the moment, nothing in particular that I’m working toward, that lights me up.  A new venture did not pan out.  Normally, I have things I’m reaching for, projects, plans–but not so much lately.

I’ve felt very satisfied with my singleness for a nice long while.  Recently, though, I’ve felt a few little inklings, that it might be nice to have that intimacy, that singular connection with someone.  I will say definitely “few” and definitely “little” but still, that’s a recent change.

Then there was that dental appointment.  Always significant; always shakes a person up.

So I started wondering just what I’ll do with the last quarter of my life, whether I’ll do it alone and yesterday I even thought that it might be more time than I really need.  This was an unwelcome state of affairs, to be sure.  And then something great happened.

I watched one of Oprah’s “Super Soul Sunday” segments that I’d taped.  She was interviewing Wayne Dyer.  I’d never heard him speak before, never read his books.  He said the words, “I am love.”  He said that at 71, he feels he has a lot to teach and learn and he wants to love as many people as much as he can.  “I am love.  I am happiness.  I am perfect health.”  All of those things.  It is beautiful wording.  It’s not, “I am loved” or “I am loving.”  It’s “I am love.”  “I AM” as in God.  Christians and Jews believe that God revealed himself saying, “I am who I am,” or “I am that I am,” i.e., the mystery, the One who is always there.

Well, I was in the right place at the right time and that just hit me perfectly.  I went to bed repeating that in my head and woke up with it serenading my brain.  Love is what I am.  And I am LOVE.