If there's one thing that will make you appreciate a day off, it's working two jobs, six days a week. I think I may have to put my Sunday volunteer activities on hold for the time being, because I've been guarding my Sundays like a fat kid guards chocolate cake. MINE.
Sunday felt endless. It sprawled on for months. Fresh fruit and feline love for breakfast on the upper deck in the magical cool morning sunshine. Eight a.m. is just flawless this time of the year. It feels like when you've been camping -- dirty for days and sleeping on the ground, covered in mud and bugs -- and then you get home, take a hot shower and get in a freshly-made bed. That's what Sunday morning feels like to me.
I even got a nap in. Leisurely afternoon nap in filtered sunlight with a breeze off the water, the buzz of float planes occasionally entering my dreams.
In the later afternoon, we took a delicious open air scooter ride up to the University District. I've spent a chunk of my weekend distributing materials for the PAWSwalk in September -- our annual benefit with dogs and vendors and last year, a monsoon. So I have to go door-to-door, asking people to support us and hang up a poster in their window, or hand out leaflets to people on the street walking dogs, and so on. I had one more location to hit yesterday near the U, and then we spent about an hour milling about the aisles of the art store on 45th. Just walking through there inspires me, gives me so many ideas. They had casting kits where you learn to make a mold and then pour plaster into them. Hands, and a pregnant belly. You could make a cast of your unborn babe! How cool is that?! The rows of pearlescent paints stretched on, their pearly bottles in 150 shades.
I found the large sketch pad and two erasers I was after. My supplies list is now complete. I can begin to draw. Today, after work, I got to Wishville and do my first lesson in the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain book.
I was reading the book yesterday for awhile, the intro and the "what you will learn" portion. While the original edition was published in the sixties, and I'm not sure brain research still supports the whole left brain/right brain school of thought (ha!), she had some very interesting points. She explains the shift in consciousness during creation as moving from left brain to right brain thinking. Supposing that scientists no longer believe that our brain is so neatly divided, with the left part being verbal and the right part being creative, I still relate to the changes she speaks of. She says left brain is reading, and shopping lists, and scheduling. And the right brain is art galleries and painting and making music. If you've ever created anything, even computer code, you know there's this "zone" you get into when you're totally and completely absorbed in it and the rest of the world -- time, space, meals -- falls away. While she calls that right brain thinking, I just call it the zone. And I finally really understood what JC was talking about when she said Morning Pages must be done by hand.
I always described the difference kind of clumsily, saying "it moves a different part of your brain". But I guess that's true. When I'm writing on the computer, typing away madly, I get good ideas and they are well organized and eloquent. But when I write by hand, the words go away, and it's just flowing from my brain onto the page with no filter. And afterward, I feel differently than when I sat down. I feel fresh. I feel like Sunday mornings.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has been hailed by a million people as the resource for learning to draw. She says it's pretty much fool proof, and it's not manual dexterity that makes a good artist, it's being able to see. I am curious to find out new ways of seeing. Being a photographer, I definitely see the world differently than a non-photographer. And right now I see the world as a non-drawer. I wonder what would happen if I combined the seeing of photo with the seeing of drawing? Would my brain implode?
I picked up a couple other books of note. How to Make a Journal of Your Life was quite charming and well-done. It's a tiny little book about keeping a visual journal or a field guide. The guy who wrote it is entertaining, and it makes an inspirational read if you're afraid of drawing. It's filled with his own scribbles and fun interpretations of the world around him, his environment and his children. He's child-like himself. The other one, Everyday Matters, was done by a friend of this guy, who started drawing when his beautiful, Manhattan designer metro-hip wife got hit by a subway and was paralyzed from the waist down. Drawing became his outlet. I enjoyed his book as well because while he's cataloguing his environment, the intention and result are quite different. He draws lots of New York City buildings, some of my favorite drawing subjects. Not NY, just city buildings. Skylines. The book is surprisingly uplifting, and not in a new-age way, but in a normal-person-achieves-elevated-state way. When he left for work one morning, he was this young city kid hipster with his whole martini-riddled life ahead of him, and when he got home, his whole life had ended. The world as he knew it no longer existed. Now it was wheelchairs and physical therapy and wiping someone else's butt. But he managed to keep his head through most of the changes, and started drawing as a release. The book is filled with his actual art, casual and frighteningly human.
Isn't it interesting that when you're a kid, you know damn well you can dance, and sing, and draw and paint. And then you forget. Or you begin to tell yourself that you can't. Does it happen gradually? Or does it happen all at once, during some small soul-crushing moment of rejection? Like most children, my childhood notebooks are filled with tons of colorful drawings of animals and people and the world around me. When did I put the crayon down? Was it a conscious decision? As conscious as the decision to become a journal-keeper?
I used to love babysitting cause I could lay on my stomach in the summer grass and draw fish on the pavement with sidewalk chalk. And five-year-olds are easily impressed, so you feel pretty good about your impromptu art.
This memory just sprang to life as I'm writing -- these two amazing little girls I used to baby-sit -- they were identical twins, six or seven years old, and they were ridiculously creative. They also had their own language and spoke to one another in non-English. Their mom had to ask them to use English sometimes so she would know, because they'd forget and always talk like that. Amazing. So one night, I went over with my acoustic guitar because I had written a cute little song and thought, what a better audience to test it on than two mystical children? So I played and sang it for them, and they were the most responsive audience I've ever been before. They thought I was the best musician ever. I tried to show them a few chords, but their tiny fingers could barely even hold down one string.
A few weeks later, I was scheduled to sit them again, and their mom called me beforehand. She said, "Christina wants to talk to you, she has a request." She put her daughter on the phone and the little girl pleaded with me to bring my guitar so I could sing them some more songs. My eyes well up just remembering this.
I had expended my repertoire of children's songs (including the "Theme from the Little Mermaid" which I learned for them to sing along with me) and they said they didn't care -- sing anything. So I sang the Wallflowers for them, and Crowded House, the Cure, Jayhawks and the Lemonheads. They especially loved "Into Your Arms" and I taught them the chorus so they could sing it with me.
I was terrible. I cannot sing. Neither can I play guitar. I made sounds and strummed, and these two little girls were the biggest fans I would ever have. I pretty much stopped playing soon after that, to any serious degree. I did an open mic coffee shop in New Haven -- Kasbah, I think it was called -- with my friend Amanda singing back-up. I had to play someone else's guitar cause I didn't have mine with me. That was definitely my last public performance. Not that it went badly. I think the anxiety was just too much for me to handle without several drinks in my system.
I gave it up. At 12, the crayolas, at 20, the music. Of course, you'd have to cut off all my fingers and wire my jaw shut to take the writing away from me. So maybe I managed to hang on to a little bit of childhood wonder. I wonder if I can get the other stuff back?
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