The Eight Pillars of Joy

Watercolor sketch of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu from The Book of Joy

Pencil sketch, portraits from the cover of The Book of Joy

Today is the first time in 2017 that I took the time to pick up art materials and make art.  It felt good.  It is a bright, sunny, cold day, and the light was good for painting at my table.

As I look forward to this coming year, I’ve decided to focus on four main art projects/themes/activities for 2017:

1. To continue working on line drawings in pen and ink or pencil.  I have a new book to put these in.  I think I can only get better if I draw a lot.
2. To copy famous art works by master artists from history;  my own version in watercolor;
3. To do more portraits of animals and people; and
4. To take the time to draw or paint the covers of some of the best books I read in 2017.

My first book cover painting and pencil sketch are from The Book of Joy by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

These two wise men spent a week together discussing various aspects of joy and obstacles to feeling joy.  They offer insights into eight “pillars of joy”  — four qualities of the mind and four qualities of the heart:

• perspective
• humility
• humor
• acceptance
• forgiveness
• gratitude
• compassion
• generosity

The facilitator, Douglas Abrams, wove the Dalai Lama’s and Archbishop Tutu’s comments and observations with recent findings from academic and scientific research.  It was interesting to see the overlap.  One researcher, Sonja Lyubomirsky, found the following three factors have the greatest influence on increasing joy and happiness:

• our ability to reframe our situation more positively
• our ability to experience gratitude
• our choice to be kind and generous

Another researcher, Richard Davidson, discovered four independent brain circuits that influence our happiness and well-being:

• the ability to maintain positive states
• the ability to recover from negative states
• the ability to focus the mind and avoid mind wandering
• the ability to be generous

I especially appreciated the discussion about negative thoughts and emotions, like feelings of worthlessness, envy, loneliness, etc.  The Dalai Lama was a strong advocate for building our mental immunity so that we are less susceptible to negative thoughts and feelings.  He believed that preventive measures can be learned and cultivated, things like meditation or keeping a gratitude journal.  Archbishop Tutu, on the other hand, felt that human beings are not always in control of the negative emotions and thoughts that crop up during times of stress.  He believed that because negative thoughts and emotions are inevitable, we should accept that they come and forgive ourselves for having them.  We can learn and grow and develop stress resistance over time after experiencing challenges and situations and people that test us.

Reading The Book of Joy was a perfect way to start the new year.  The two holy men remind us of our common humanity and that we are in this life together.

“. . . ultimately our greatest joy is when we seek to do good for others.”
— Archbishop Desmond Tutu

“Too much self-centered thinking is the source of suffering.  A compassionate concern for others’ well-being is the source of happiness.”
— The Dalai Lama

 

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

My Christmas-season place mats

Now that I’ve no little children in the house, I’ve severely edited my Christmas decorating and obligations.  Still I do cherish and enjoy the few Christmas-y moments I’ve sought out this year, starting with having my red and green log cabin quilted place mats handy for our dining room table this month.  I’ve already written about my single string of outdoor lights over our front door, my makeshift garden trellis tree, my snowflake tree, driving to Bothell to see the Christmas lights at Evergreen Church, and painting a few Christmas cards.  In recent weeks I’ve also enjoyed a Christmas play at the Taproot Theatre and listening to Brad Craft, bookseller, reading aloud Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory” at the University Bookstore.

Still to be enjoyed is a new Christmas book, Family Christmas Treasures, an anthology of stories about Christmas excerpted from literature and color plates of art celebrating Christmas.  I like that there are new-to-me stories, like “The Montreal Aunts” by Maureen Hull as well as some lovely art that I had not seen before.  For example, I really like these two Christmas prints by Andy Warhol:

Poinsettias by Andy Warhol, 1982

Untitled (Fairy and Christmas Ornaments) by Andy Warhol, 1953 – 1955

They inspired me to paint some of my own Christmas ornaments:

Christmas ornaments

 

 

What We Need Is Here

Skagit Valley snow geese

The Wild Geese
by Wendell Berry

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

Flock of snow geese in the Skagit Valley

 

Watercolor painting of Skagit Valley snow geese

Gearing Up for Halloween

Current display at the Greenwood Library

Every year businesses in the Greenwood and Phinney neighborhoods host a daytime trick-or-treat walk, and this year is no exception.  Here is the display advertising the event, complete with a few new crows in witch hats!

Library staff who are scheduled to work that day are welcome to dress up in costume.  I’ve always had lukewarm feelings about Halloween and never felt very comfortable dressing in a costume.  Maybe one’s feelings about this holiday are formed during childhood, and we never went trick-or-treating when we were kids.  My parents held the view that this activity was akin to begging and therefore shameful (?!?) in some way.  My mother would buy candy bars to give to us on Halloween so we wouldn’t feel deprived!

I don’t hold the same views as my parents did, and I enjoy seeing how excited kids become when dressed up and given candy treats.  It’s a festive occasion.  I still do not like to dress up in costumes — too exhibitionist for me.  Perhaps I should stretch myself and move out of my comfort zone.  But I don’t think so.

Happy Halloween!

Something to Crow about at the Greenwood Library

New October display at the Greenwood Library

The new October display is up at the Greenwood Library.  I scanned my crow paintings and used them to decorate the bulletin board and surrounds for the interior book drops:

Book drop surrounds

 

Painting Crows

Recent watercolor paintings of crows

“All that is wild, is winged.”
— Jay Griffiths

I’ve been painting crows in preparation for some October displays at the library where I work.  I have plenty of models — I bet I see at least one crow every time I step outside.  With my hearing loss, I no longer hear the high-pitched tweets of many songbirds, but I still hear the raucous call of cawing crows.  I’m thankful for that!

They are ubiquitous, as noted in the following poem.  I love how Mary Oliver calls them the “deep muscle of the world.”

Crows
by Mary Oliver

From a single grain they have multiplied.
When you look in the eyes of one
you have seen them all.

At the edges of highways
they pick at limp things.
They are anything but refined.

Or they fly out over the corn
like pellets of black fire,
like overlords.

Crow is crow, you say.
What else is there to say?
Drive down any road,

take a train or an airplane
across the world, leave
your old life behind,

die and be born again —
wherever you arrive
they’ll be there first,

glossy and rowdy
and indistinguishable.
The deep muscle of the world.

 

Fading Hydrangeas

Hydrangeas are maybe my favorite flower.  I love their colors, a changing palette — they age so beautifully.  And I love their round shape.  Even this late in the season, I see hydrangeas as fresh as the one above, which I photographed at the ocean in Bandon, Oregon.  But more common are those that are past their peak, fading, fading.

Painting hydrangeas

Watercolor sketch of hydrangeas

 

 

Quintessential Minnesota

These things are emblematic of “Minnesota” to me:

• Stands of white-trunked birch trees
• The haunting calls of loons on the lakes
• The whine of mosquitos in my ears
• The raised welts on my skin from mosquito and other bug bites
• The humidity
• The sound of wavelets lapping on the dock
• The sustained low rumble of thunder, like God’s stomach growling
• The play of clouds across spacious skies
• Rusty cars (even though there are far fewer rusty carts now compared to when I was growing up there)

Rusty truck

You Can Go Home Again: Returning to the Family Farm after My Father’s Death

The old red barn on the farm where I grew up

As long as it stands, the old red barn will be the anchor on our Minnesota family farm.  My recent visit was the first time I had returned since my father died more than two years ago.  Now the land has been split into two parts, owned by my youngest and oldest brothers.  The old square farmhouse with peeling white paint has been torn down and in its place is a beautiful new home with lots of windows looking out on the land, spiffy modern appliances, and even air conditioning.

I am not a sentimental person, so I had no qualms about seeing the new house, and I looked forward with eager anticipation to the changes and improvements that my brother and his wife made to my old childhood stomping grounds. I was not disappointed.  At first I was just a tiny bit disoriented because the new house — while sited in the same spot as our old one — has a larger footprint and extends farther to the west.  It took me a minute to figure out where the old smokehouse had stood, to identify the stump of what had been the tree with the tire swing,  and to recognize the trees still standing next to the garage.  (The old garage has also been replaced by a new, larger one.)  Other trees have grown even taller than my memory of them.  But once I was reoriented, everything felt familiar and comfortable and welcoming.  I realized that, for me, the farm was not the physical buildings, but rather the land, the landscape and its seasonal changes, family ties and memories, and the rhythm of daily farm life.  Those things endure and I love them just as much now.  My visit was a homecoming.

Old barn and new garage

“The eye for beauty is the eye for love.”
— Paul Gruchow, Journal of a Prairie Year

Once again I was struck by the beauty of my childhood home ground.

Fields and woods

“The landscape seemed increasingly to be a succession of lines — the line of hills, the line of trees, the line of reeds, the line of cattails, the line of water  . . .”
— Paul Gruchow, Journal of a Prairie Year

One view to the east

 

One view to the south, with woods and wildflower patch

“Our language does not distinguish green from green.  It is one of the ways in which we have declared ourselves to be apart from nature.  In nature, there is nothing so impoverished of distinction as simply the color green.  There are greens as there are grains of sand, an infinitude of shades and gradations of shades, of intensities and brilliancies.  Even one green is not the same green.  There is the green of dawn, of high noon, of dusk.  There is the green of young life, of maturity, of old age.  There is the green of new rain and of long drought.  There is the green of vigor, the green of sickness, the green of death.  One could devote one’s life to a study of the distinctions in the color green and not yet have learned all there is to know.  There is a language in it, a poetry, a music.  We have not stopped long enough to hear it.”
— Paul Gruchow, Journal of a Prairie Year

Farm fresh eggs

My brother and his wife are bringing new life to the farm with animals — chickens, dogs, barn cats, pigs, and they rent the pasture to another farmer for grazing cows.  While the scale is more of a hobby farm, the animal husbandry and stewardship of the land is as hands on as the farming of years past.  Butchering six chickens brought back old memories.  I learned that a farm skill like butchering chickens is like riding a bike — you never forget how to do it!  Farm-to-table meals are not the rare thing they are in the city!

My brother raises Buff Orpington chickens for meat, and the few hens lay eggs

 

Watercolor sketch of chickens

 

Butchering chickens using a chicken plucker to remove the larger feathers.

 

Chicken on the spit

 

Cow in the rented pasture. The red ear tags help to repel flies.

 

Pigs raised for pork

My sister-in-law titled this watercolor sketch “Bacon 2017”

In my Dad’s final years, as he grew frailer, he resisted change.  Many things were falling into decrepitude, but changes were deferred for as long as possible so that my father could be in familiar surroundings.  Now that he is gone, it is rejuvenating to see my brother’s and his wife’s efforts to remake the farm into a dream home for their own lives.  It seems only right to me that they move the farm into modern times.  Time to create new memories in this deeply rooted place!

Watercolor sketch of one of the old oak trees on the farm

 

Watercolor sketch of zinnias in the front garden bed

 

 

 

The North Shore of Lake Superior: Split Rock Lighthouse

Split Rock Lighthouse State Park along Lake Superior

One of my favorite places along the North Shore is Split Rock Lighthouse State Park.  This place is often featured on Minnesota calendars.  Our visit was enhanced by the amazingly dramatic clouds over Lake Superior.  Rain showers threatened, but held off while we walked the trails in this park.

As you view these pictures, I think you will agree with the sentiment in this quote by Minnesota author Paul Gruchow:  “All the prairie world is in summer but a screen to show off the glorious sky.”

Quintessential North Shore scenery

Clouds over Lake Superior

 

From the shore at Split Rock Lighthouse State Park

Craggy, rocky shoreline

Split Rock Lighthouse

Lighthouse keepers’ quarters

The skies grew darker

Sheets of rain falling in the distance

Split Rock Lighthouse

And here are two more pages from my Minnesota travel journal: