[30 of 100] Struggling
I am having an irrationally strong response today to the fact that I neither wrote my 100 words or engaged in my Winter Feast practice yesterday. I am also struggling with putting the last pieces of my chapter draft into anything like a coherent form. My jaw is tight from trying to force myself to concentrate. Taken all together, it feels in my darker moments like a failure to uphold my commitments to these daily and incremental practices. And then I remember that today I made it to my morning meeting on time. I shoveled the walk, shoveled out our upstairs neighbor's car, even shoveled the sidewalk for the empty lot next door. I sent out CVs to two potential teaching positions for next fall. I helped a friend by listening. I put away some of the detritus from our trip. And even if I'm struggling, I did write about 3 new pages today and that those three pages count. Today was not a failure by any stretch of the imagination. I am here now, writing this. When I am done writing I will go and make kala and draw some tarot cards for the day. I will have some good new pages to share with my dissertation group this week. I will watch our new president get sworn in tomorrow, while I sit with friends in a warm room and know that I'm not the only one there feeling grateful that I will no longer feel the need to turn off the radio every time the president's voice comes on. I am still learning to hold myself more gently, to let both my failures and my successes have their moment and then pass on, so that I can come to the next moment and be there fully. I think I will always be learning this lesson--there are worse ones to have to repeat.
Yesterday Tish and I spent our day in the MOMA, in quiet and peaceful company with each other, punctuated by sharp bursts of excitement and intensity when we saw an artwork that particularly moved or inspired us. I started to really appreciate Jasper Johns for the first time as we wandered through a retrospective of his work that showed his experimentation with certain central themes throughout many of his prints. My favorite series of his was in the last room, an untitled series of 13 prints in which the themes are repeated and shifted. One alone might be visually interesting, but it is the transformation between the pieces, the altered perspective from each to each, that makes them so stunning and exciting. They almost defy description, each one consists of small rectangular compartments along the top and the left edge, with a larger more open space in the center/right, across which a long arc sweeps from bottom left corner to top. In the smaller compartments we see a Victorian family portrait, a stylized wolf figure, a spiral galaxy, the stripes of a flag, and along the bottom, tiny stick figures, like in petroglyphs. Despite the repetition of these formal and clearly repeated elements, the prints are remarkably, startingly different from one another, comparing one to another is almost like comparing Julie Andrew's performance of "My Favorite Things" to John Coltrane's "Giant Steps." You know they start from the same place, but where they end up is so very different.
In another room, we saw the large purple felt "womb" that Hill Jephson Robb created for the infant daughter his sister left behind when she died of cancer. As an object it was completely unremarkable, save for its color, but as an idea, it moved me deeply.
There was also an Annette Messager piece called "My Vows" that I was particularly in love with. It consisted of hundreds of small (probably 3" by 2" on average) photographs in black and white, enclosed in tiny black frames. Each photograph (and a few frames of hand-written words) hung from strings of various lengths, put at different heights so that the whole thing created a circle a little bigger than a person, images physically overlapping and layering each other. The photographs were close-ups of people's body parts, men and women, young and old--tongues, eyes, pubis, breast, legs, feet, hair, ears, hands, teeth...and looking at it I thought of what it meant to claim the piece as one's vows and felt a deep satisfaction at the loving embrace of the physical, the spatial, the bodily that I saw there.
Yesterday Tish and I spent our day in the MOMA, in quiet and peaceful company with each other, punctuated by sharp bursts of excitement and intensity when we saw an artwork that particularly moved or inspired us. I started to really appreciate Jasper Johns for the first time as we wandered through a retrospective of his work that showed his experimentation with certain central themes throughout many of his prints. My favorite series of his was in the last room, an untitled series of 13 prints in which the themes are repeated and shifted. One alone might be visually interesting, but it is the transformation between the pieces, the altered perspective from each to each, that makes them so stunning and exciting. They almost defy description, each one consists of small rectangular compartments along the top and the left edge, with a larger more open space in the center/right, across which a long arc sweeps from bottom left corner to top. In the smaller compartments we see a Victorian family portrait, a stylized wolf figure, a spiral galaxy, the stripes of a flag, and along the bottom, tiny stick figures, like in petroglyphs. Despite the repetition of these formal and clearly repeated elements, the prints are remarkably, startingly different from one another, comparing one to another is almost like comparing Julie Andrew's performance of "My Favorite Things" to John Coltrane's "Giant Steps." You know they start from the same place, but where they end up is so very different.
In another room, we saw the large purple felt "womb" that Hill Jephson Robb created for the infant daughter his sister left behind when she died of cancer. As an object it was completely unremarkable, save for its color, but as an idea, it moved me deeply.
There was also an Annette Messager piece called "My Vows" that I was particularly in love with. It consisted of hundreds of small (probably 3" by 2" on average) photographs in black and white, enclosed in tiny black frames. Each photograph (and a few frames of hand-written words) hung from strings of various lengths, put at different heights so that the whole thing created a circle a little bigger than a person, images physically overlapping and layering each other. The photographs were close-ups of people's body parts, men and women, young and old--tongues, eyes, pubis, breast, legs, feet, hair, ears, hands, teeth...and looking at it I thought of what it meant to claim the piece as one's vows and felt a deep satisfaction at the loving embrace of the physical, the spatial, the bodily that I saw there.