Woman With Heart

In 2007, I bought Joni Mitchell's CD called "Shine." That was a bleak year for me, and the CD brought me some light and some perspective on darkness. It was released in September, just after R had a brainstem stroke which left him in a coma for two weeks at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, California. I would have heard about "Shine" after returning home from a yoga teacher training intensive in Eastern Washington that convinced me that I did not want to become a yoga teacher. I did not yet know that R had the stroke and didn't learn of his stroke until the last day of the year when his sister sent me a Christmas card. It is occurring to me that I may have stopped listening to "Shine" after R died the following April.



Listen to Joni:

Holy Earth

How can we heal you?

We cover you like a blight...

Strange birds of appetite...

If I had a heart I'd cry

Today I pulled "Shine" down from my small hard-to-reach up-near-the-ceiling shelf of CDs that I have kept but do not listen to very often. The CDs are more or less in chronological order, beginning with some early rock 'n' roll and ending with a 3-disk set called "Autoharp Legacy" (scroll down). Although that CD is from 2002, my recent interest in the autoharp places it there in my sense of history.

A few months ago, I put all my Bob Dylan CDs in a box which is now in the small storage closet in my hallway. They have been easily accessible to me for as long as I have had them, but I have not had any desire to listen to them, except occasionally in my car. As a long-time listener of Bob Dylan, I also have another box filled with his music on tape, and a shelf containing all his vinyl albums previous to the years when music began to be put on tape. Although I am still stopped in my footsteps and find myself close to tears when I hear Bob Dylan's voice as I did in the Bellingham Community Co-op grocery store a few days ago, and am moved to the core as I have been since I was 13 years old, something told me to put his CDs away and be open to hearing another voice. It's been very quiet here for some time anyway. Beginning in spring, when I can open my windows, I listen to the sound of birds. If I want to hear music, I sit down with my autoharp, dulcimers, and ukulele. It has been silent during the time that I have been making the first eleven mandalas, which was last September after most of the birds were gone.

A few days ago while checking for updates on Joni Mitchell's health, I discovered that on November 17, 2014, she released a 4-disk collection of CDs titled "Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced." Because I am living on my dwindling savings, I went to our local public library's website to see if they had a copy. I've been listening to the library copy ever since. It's a work of art. Hers is the voice I want to listen to while I am drawing and when I weave on my inkle loom sometime in the future or when I just want to hear the voice of a complex creative woman with heart.

It appears that I may be employed for 20-28 hours a week as a medical transcriptionist and editor sometime soon, working from my home. This is the first June in years that I haven't suffered from situational depression, and I am hopeful that I will be able to keep working as a transcriptionist for the rest of my life. That job will provide me with a modest income that will allow me to continue buying food, paying my bills, buying paper and colored pencils for drawing, buying strings for my musical instruments, buying yarn for weaving and other necessities of life.

I don't take anything for granted anymore and am grateful to have found Joni Mitchell and her fierceness and gentleness and her music and her art work once again.

Rainy day series, part 1

"One of the attractions of being in the Northwest is the rain.  If I don't feel good or I don't feel creative, if I can get near the water something might start to happen." (Dale Chihuly)

"Boy Riding Home Before Dawn"

Not all, but some of the drawings and paintings I have done are an attempt to describe what Virginia Woolf called "moments of being." "Boy Riding Home Before Dawn" was a moment imagined, continuing a story Richard told to me in 2001. Not the beginning of an endless happiness but happiness nonetheless.

The image was drawn in January of 2008, three months before Richard died. If you are a long-time reader at this blog, you've heard this story before, but I need to tell it again because it has a lesson for me today.

Richard's story was that late one night he went out walking down the hill in the direction of the ocean in Half Moon Bay, California. Before he reached the ocean, he noticed a horse standing in a pasture. After talking to the horse, he climbed over the fence and slowly and quietly approached the horse. He stood there talking to the horse at length, gaining its trust, and finally asked the horse if it would be okay for him to climb onto its back. The horse allowed him to do that. He told me that he took off his belt and was able to use it as a makeshift bridle.

At that point in his story he stopped to explain to me that although he had not known how to ride a horse at the time we went riding together in 1970 (in the first few months after he returned from Vietnam), he had learned later. At the time when we had rented the two horses and had ridden on the bluffs at Half Moon Bay, I had about four years of experience riding horses.

Continuing with his story, he told me that he rode the horse around the pasture for a little while and then opened the gate to the pasture and rode out into the night. He said that they went through the neighborhoods, out along the bluffs and then down to the long sandy beach. He said that they wandered for a good part of that night, and then they returned to the pasture, where he left the horse and went home and went to sleep.

He ended the story by saying, "When I went back the next day to see the horse, it was gone. I never saw the horse again. It was a magical night."

In the first days of January 2008, remembering Richard's story, I pictured that magical horse coming to him at night, coming to the bed where, depressed and anxious, he tried to sleep in the stroke rehabilitation unit at the V.A. hospital in Palo Alto. Richard was blind in one eye, unable to speak, breathing with the help of a tracheostomy tube, having difficulty swallowing and requiring tube feeding, and only able to walk with great effort. I pictured the horse talking to Richard, asking him if he would like to leave the hospital for a night ride. When Richard said, "Yes," the horse lowered itself down so that Richard could pull himself over onto its back. Once Richard was on the horse's back, he found that he had the energy he had had as a boy and that he was no longer in the hospital room but out on the hospital grounds. By the light of the full moon, he and the horse went out to the coast. They returned before dawn. Richard felt a peace of mind and heart that he had not felt since he was a boy. He asked for an easel and began to paint again.

When I woke up this morning, I was feeling depressed, still a little headachy and congested from a cold, wondering why, whenever I want to paint, there is some seemingly insurmountable obstacle. Mulling that over, I suddenly remembered the above scene from "The Hours," a movie that was released on Christmas Day in 2002, at a time when I thought I might never see Richard again or paint again. That movie put things in perspective for me.

I've been working on this post since about 7 a.m. It's 9:30 now. This is where my creative energy went this morning. So be it.