s.m.ART

My usual dark humor, in the newest T-shirt in the smARTypants line.

I had it in my head to take a walk today. I whistled up the dog and put a leash on him and off we went into the butter yellow morning, the dog’s rust-colored tail wagging happily, as evenly as a metronome. His ears pricked with curiosity; we don’t usually walk, of a morning. This is new.

Going up we walked along the street, but going back I chose a gravel alley on which I’d never before been. How odd, but I was reared here and never walked down this particular lane. I didn’t because I had no reason to; I don’t go places without being called there first.  Yet I had no reason today, either.

You see things down the back alleys of places, juxtapositions of the prosaic and poetic: abandoned toys, cars on blocks, profuse explosions of flowers and overgrown, untended hedges. Open garages with tool shelves filed as orderly as a wife’s spice rack, bicycles leaned against fences, trash cans with dented lids tilting off like rakish berets.

I’d had breakfast, it wasn’t that hot out; no reason to perspire so heavily or feel so empty and faint, but three-quarters of the way home I felt my legs flex weak like rubber. I stopped by a cluster of large, large pine trees and breathed deep the iced-tea shade of their low, long, outstretching arms, eyed their dropped-needle silt floors, longed to be a child again, to crawl under the branches and sit cross-legged, plucking mushrooms off their stalks, hiding from the Indians.

But I am thirty-nine, and surely a grown woman, too old to be sitting under pine trees, and on someone else’s property, to boot.

People would think me crazy.

And yet, my stomach lurched in an unpleasant way, wringing in a warning way that promised revolt if not assuaged soon.

The clipped twigs of a flowering shrub, ungathered, fell in a trampled circle in another yard, its caretaker too busy or distracted to scoop up the leavings and cart them away. I stooped to pick up a clipping swiftly, between the thumb and forefinger, a little cluster of oyster-white bells without tongues, their songs hushed ever after, but still I want to take them with me.

So it is with childhood, and songs that can not be sung, later, when one has become too old to sing them, too old to hide in the confiding forest of pine tree arms, and know, from the ground, the lovely dapple of sunlight through firs and wood, in those rare moments where you are utterly concealed and no one knows who or where you are, save for the birds, and they may be singing, but not of you;

only to you, with you, following the melody one hears only in the heart, and nothing outside can follow.

I’ve been keeping a copy of Rumi: The Book of Love under my pillow at night. Rumi’s work is not what I thought it would be, from the surface. I can only read a few verses at a time, and then I have to think about them carefully.

I have a great many things I want to say. Yet as soon as I start to tell them, the words dissolve in my mouth. Thoughts are seeds. Sometimes the seeds alone are enough.

I believe everything in the world that is good began first as intent.

But these are cryptic platitudes.

I’ve been hating the side of myself that is drawn to create, right now, because if I’m working I have to put my whole self into it not just a little bit; and when I put it out there for others to see, it’s not just my work I’m revealing, it’s me.

So there is that very real risk of rejection, and if it is rejected it’s just my work; but for me, the rejection is of me.

And if I let it get to me, I can feel so overwhelmed at the thought of what I’m risking by making myself vulnerable in this way, that I get sick. My stomach turns sour and twists into knots and the nausea is so intense it’s like being pregnant all over again. Every sight and smell nauseates me. There’s no running from it.

Then I get to thinking I’m in the completely worst profession I could have chosen for myself; that I ought to have been something I could completely detach and remove from, hiding behind numbers or files, or lurking shadowed halls as a robed, faceless acolyte.

“So why do it,” my mother asked this morning when I said this to her.

Why? Because I must, in the same way an amphibian must return to water after an extended period of time. It needs the water to go on living.

If I’m not creating, if I’m not in the water, I’m not living.

But I remember the first time I ever had this strong, wholly nauseating anxiety. I was 14 and it was the night before I was supposed to start high school. I had so much trepidation: I wanted to be good at this, not get lost, make good grades, take my best shot at it.

The more I thought about it the more my stomach balled up into a fist and the only relief I knew was to throw up. I didn’t have to make myself try. I was already so nauseated and distressed that it just happened, every time I lifted my head from the floor.

After I threw up, I felt better. For a little bit. I would lie there on the bathroom floor with my cheek against the cold nubby carpet and, for fifteen minutes or so, float in a blank, grateful lull of nothingness.

Then the thoughts would begin scribbling furiously on the slate and I’d have to purge them again to get back to the lull.

This would go on until I passed out from exhaustion.

I didn’t know about sedatives, or anti-anxiety medications, or any other such thing. I just knew that when I got anxious and my stomach turned sour, throwing up would make it better. It certainly started my anorexia. And it’s what I got hospitalized many times for, in college. They’d have to start an IV line and set me to right before I could go ahead and get on with it — with my critiques or my finals or whatever else it was I had looming just ahead.

I just came through a bout of this severe anxiety. It started Sunday, on Mother’s Day, and went right on through till now, the middle of the week. It’s hard to explain, because viral gastritis is one thing and stress-induced gastritis is another.

Fighting with your mind is not easy.

And because of that I think anxiety, like any other pain, is easier dealt with if you can head it off at the pass, rather than catch it midstream and then try to numb it away. It’s been so long since I’ve really had a bout of nervous stomach that I actually didn’t recognize it for what it was until it was almost over. I really just thought I had a virus.

What is the trigger?

I don’t know.

Really, I honestly don’t know, because by and large everything is going extraordinarily well. But, if memory serves, that can be a trigger, too. It’s going too well. Something’s going to happen and it’s going to be taken away; surely.

It’s been 25 years I’ve wrestled this silent fear. I’ve gone whole years without throwing up to assuage it; then again, I’ve gone whole years without drawing or painting, too, and those two do coincide. When I’m not creating, I’m not vulnerable. Hence the rub.

My friends and family are very supportive when I go through one of these bouts, and they do tend to happen after I’ve just finished a project. They say:

1. Everyone loves what you do.
2. You’re very talented.

And I say, “Not everyone.”

And they say, “The people who don’t love your work; don’t matter.”

Then I sigh and say, “I know.”

I know they’re right.

I only mention it because sometimes people say they wish they could draw like I did, or play the piano, or do anything that I do that they like. My little brother used to shrug with resignation when I tried to teach him the things I knew about music and art: “You can already do everything; why should I try?” he’d say, and it wrenched my heart.

Because, I always wanted to say, I can’t do everything, and even if I could, it would only be everything in my way; the world needs more perspectacles, not just one, or mine.

There is a flip side to having a skill in something, sometimes.

The more people find out what I can do and how I do it, the more the anxiety can intensify. You could even say I’m a little afraid of success, because it wasn’t exactly an ambition. I just wanted to work in my little studio, and do the work I love best, painting and sculpting. I wasn’t ready for people to come up to me on the street and talk to me about it, or acknowledge me publicly.

You have to practically beat me about the head to get me to sign one of my pieces as it is. (I’m inclined to sign it on the back, if anywhere). My signature isn’t important to me. You can connect with me without knowing who I am. I don’t mind.

But you can’t do the work without getting paid for it else the work is going to be scarce and far between. And if you want to get paid for it you have to put yourself out there. You have to be the amphibian, and go on land from time to time.

And so I continue to work through it, and in a few weeks there will be another show, and I will continue, continue, always continue, because I am the amphibian, and I must.

The petals that fall from the dogwood trees are heart-shaped:

And the lawn is awash with them.