In which I encounter the Raven

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Sara

Welcome to Week One of my sabbatical. Or week One and One-Eighth, to be exact, but exactitude is over-rated, or will be by the end of Week Sixteen. I was talking with a friend some weeks ago about blogging on this four-month sojourn and she likened it to a treasure-hunt, and occasional blog posts to the coins I might toss out along the way. I like it.

I’ve been in Anchorage these past several days, where a frequent topic of conversation is the weather. As in “You’re from Portland? I bet spring is so much nicer there than it is here. Come later next time.” And “Just wait. In a few days all of these bare trees are going to POP into leaf and blossom.” I don’t mind it the way it is; bare birches and all sorts of trees with barely perceptible buds of promise.

My mother and I came to visit my amazing and fabulous uncle Vic and his lovely wife Jane who is The Greatest Hostess in the world. Vic has just published an autobiography which, as one of the reviewers says, reads like a thriller. It has been wonderful to read his stories, hear his stories, and share space with him and Jane in their house that backs up against these trees. We have been to the Anchorage museum, gone for lovely walks among the birches thick along a snow-melt creek, and eaten lots of great food.

Alaska is an amazing place; whenever I am here it inspires me in a dozen different directions. A highlight of the museum was the Portrait Alaska exhibit of photos by James Clarke Mishler. The range of faces and scenes give a phenomenal, vast picture of what it means to be of this place.

Whenever I am here I wonder: what is my Alaska story? How do I fit into a place like this, that is another world and yet quintessentially American, where my only living blood relative (other than my dear brother) on my father’s side of the family has made his amazing life?

Yesterday at the museum I encountered, again, the Raven, a familiar symbol in native folklore and mythology through the Pacific Northwest. In some native cultures, the Raven is the Creator; the sphere in the Raven’s mouth is the world. In other cultures, the Raven is not the Creator, but the Great Organizer. (I love that!) In some contexts, the Raven is both Creator and Trickster God. (Kinda like the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Jesus, right?) What I didn’t know until I bought a postcard and did some research, was how pervasive the Raven is throughout the world, not only in the Pacific Northwest. I love the postcard because there is the Raven with Edgar Allen Poe, there is the Raven on the sail of a viking ship, there is the Raven on medieval battle flags. And much, much, more (you can look it up).

So, thanks to this 1995 hand-colored linocut by Evon Zerbetz, the Raven became, for me, this week, the connective tissue between my own world and this Alaska world.

Where do you get your ideas?

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Sara

I’ve had an ongoing conversation with myself about “the entrepreneurial spirit.” The question that sparks the conversation is “can it be taught?” Can one impart to another a set of abstract skills that result in successfully implemented new ideas that expand or enhance the mission of an individual or organization? In lieu of actually studying the matter, I simply keep having this conversation with myself.

Most university classes in entrepreneurship are about starting or growing businesses. I’m interested in what the secret is to starting or growing….anything. Because I’ve been accused of being an entrepreneur, I dreamed up some little classes for people who are interested in building their entrepreneurial muscles. Mostly, we sit around and toss ideas back and forth like popcorn down a row of high-schoolers at a Saturday matinee.

The other day I was out for a run and the conversation popped up again: Can the entrepreneurial spirit be taught? What I realized in that conversation with myself is that what I consider entrepreneurship is really just imagination. Other people imagine characters in a novel or scenes to paint. I imagine weird ways for established institutions to do the needful. I find that I do my best imagining in the company of others, building off their ideas while they build off mine. So perhaps entrepreneurship is about having the right conversation partners.

What are your favorite flavor ideas to dream up? Who are your best conversation partners?

What the heck is God up to?

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Sara

I mean, really. What was God thinking about the day this flower came to be? Makes you wonder….Yesterday when my friend and I encountered this flower, which I can only assume is a kind of clematis although I can’t find the variety (anyone?), we imagined God sitting around bored, maybe a little high (on life, of course), picking up shards from a kaleidoscope somebody broke, breathing life into them and turning them into this very public and somehow ridiculously geometric helicopter of a reproductive system.

I define theology as the question What is God up to?

(I owe this definition to Richard A. Norris, 1930-2005, who was an amazing theologian and teacher and who, shockingly, is not listed in Wikipedia. If you look him up on the Amazon website, his books are rather hilariously intermingled with listings of books about Chuck Norris. I’m guessing he would take this as a fitting tribute to our insignificance as humans.)

What is God doing in creation? What is God doing in beauty? What is God up to when we suffer? When we procreate? When we die young, or live longer than it seems like we were ever intended to live? What is God up to in wartime? What the heck is God up to in the churches?

It begins with the questions. With paying attention to the world around us enough to suppose that God is up to something, something that at times delights, at times perplexes, at times infuriates. When we ask someone “What are you up to?” and mean it, we’re in relationship. The more curious we are about the answer, the better the relationship.

What are you up to? What do you think God is up to?

My first book

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Sara

A few people know I’m working on something that most of the time I’m not quite ready to call a book. Everyone who knows that about me (and probably anyone who’s every written a book), knows that I vacillate between excitement and despair about writing my first book at an age that seems to be advancing far more quickly than the number of pages I write. I get morose at times when I regret not writing more, earlier in life. So imagine my joy when my mother sent me, in the mail, preciously wrapped in well-used red tissue paper, my first book.

It’s called “The Art Book.”

This is a book about art that isn’t done in pen or pencil.

I really hated to draw back then. Still do. Odd that nearly two decades before stumbling upon the Jesus story, despite my family’s best efforts to protect me from such things, I figured out some way to fashion a cross. Hmm.

“Another is tye-dye”

Tie-dye was big then, publication date circa 1967. We lived in Greenwich Village across the street from a designer tie-dye shop that custom-dyed clothes out of silk, satin, and velvet. Remember the purple tie-dye pantsuit Janis Joplin wore on the Dick Cavett show? (Of course you do, right?) I helped stir it around in a boiling pot of purple dye when I was about nine.

Paper Flowers

I could’ve made paper flowers out of tissue paper all day long if anyone would let me.

And photographs….Don’t you wish you had a shirt like that?

What about your first book? Have you written it yet? Do tell.

What’s new?

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Sara

When my son was five, our family traveled around the United Kingdom for five weeks. I went on a knitting frenzy, wanting to find locally-spun yarn on each of the British Isles. I knit in the car, knit in every one of our B&Bs before breakfast and after supper, knit in pubs. Nathan desperately wanted me to teach him to knit. In a busy, crowded yarn shop in Oban, Scotland I picked up some child-sized needles and we sat down before dinner that night to have our first lesson. He sat patient and wide-eyed while I cast on enough for a little square, maybe 16 stitches. Soon he became distracted and I could tell he was fast losing interest.

“Don’t you want to learn to knit?” I asked.

“Yes. But I don’t want to make a square, Mommy. I want to make a sweater.”

Learning new things is hard. Really hard. It’s one thing to learn the correct pronunciation of someone’s name or where to find a great new restaurant or even how to use WordPress. It’s another thing to learn to make a sweater from nothing, to learn a language, to learn a whole….thing. To stick with it through thick and thin, through the rush of fantasy and the sludge of reality.

I’m trying to learn some new things. Not a new language, exactly, but kind of. And we all know that learning a language gets harder the older we get. A friend writes beautifully about the power of words, the cozy fabric we wordy types weave for ourselves and wrap around our shoulders to comfort us and warm us. The words we cook up into a hearty stew, stirring together flavors, textures, and smells mixing like so many metaphors. Lovely, right? Now, imagine doing it in Chinese. Or Sanskrit. Or taking Intro to Anatomy at the age of 53. Or deciding to become a barista so you can make beautiful pictures in latte foam and learn that all that is actually about something entirely different: physics (that class you never took) and chemistry (that one you barely passed).

Sometimes I’m not so sure my menopausal 50-something brain can handle learning a whole lot of new things. Certainly not happily. Certainly not with the kind of comfort of dipping into a delicious new poet or a book recommended by a trusted friend. It’s a stretch, and who wants to stretch? Not I, said the Little Red Hen.

What about you? What are you learning? Where are you stretching?

Wish I’d said that!

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Sara

This morning my dear brother, who lives on the other side of the world where they do things differently, sent me this piece from the New York Times. I can’t imagine why it made him think of me! It’s worth reading. Really. Even if you’re too busy. I tend to alternately rail against what the author calls “the busy trap,” and fall into it at the same time.

A few years ago I found a way to cure myself of saying I was too busy. I imagined how it would sound to someone who asked how I was doing or what I’d been up to, if I substituted the word important for busy. “I couldn’t possibly hang out with you on Saturday, I’m too important.” Or: “Things are going well, but I’m just so important!” See what I mean?

I am daily becoming a fan of leisure. I still fail at sitting around and truly slowing down, but I’ve gotten pretty good at scheduling non-work activities that thrill me rather than grill me. And sometimes I even chill.

Where are you on the busy-chill spectrum?

Is social media “the madness of art”?

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Sara

Recently I came across that irresistibly quotable quote from Henry James’ 1893 short story, The Middle Years:

We work in the dark–we do what we can–we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

The setting for my being held, once again, by these words was a 2008 speech by Cynthia Ozick about “ghost writers.” For her, the “madness of art” is not, actually, in the art, but in all the things we do to escape it. “Art turns mad in pursuit of the false face of wishful distraction,” Ozick says. Boy, howdy.

Perhaps as a defense of my recent rash decision to deactivate my facebook account, “the false face of wishful distraction” resonates. I got off facebook for three reasons:

I became personally aware of the passive-aggressive nature of indirect communication through updating one’s status, and decided that if someone wanted me to know what they were feeling or doing, they needed to pick up the phone or send me a note.
The general time-sink that is facebook. What would that last hour before bedtime be like if I wasn’t zoning out in front of the screen checking up on everybody else’s day? (Answer: Great!)
All the ego stuff….was I getting enough friends, enough likes, enough positive attention to earn my place in the social media world?

Around the time that I was admitting all this to myself, I came across a generous column on The Attic’s Ask Miss Lit page, responding to a writer’s complaint that social media was taking over her life. (I don’t know why I think the writer is a her, but I just do.) Wise Miss Lit pointed out that there are many great writers out there who have no facebook friends, no personal website, no blog, no nothing. They just write. (Cynthia Ozick doesn’t even have her own website. Imagine!) And neither do most clergy, painters, poets, doctors, or teachers.

What if work – be it making art or teaching or gardening or mothering or writing – is what is sane in the world, and all those things we say will help us work, but are actually things we do to avoid work…what if that way madness lies?

The [Not] Daily Cup