Hollyhock Summer
remembering the brain is not separate from the body
I can’t believe it's only been three weeks since we landed in The Netherlands, and I wrote about being jet lagged. Those three weeks felt like months, and amazingly, in between then and now, I forgot how jet lag makes my body feel like a piece of chewed up gum laying in the sun; like someone took a scrub brush to my brain; like the chemical burn of strychnine at the end of an acid trip.
Once again, jet lag has brought on a Crohn’s flare. I wonder if that is the new normal. I also wonder at how my brain pushed aside the experience of jet lag, and my body had to remind my brain that forgetfulness may be a great coping technique, but there’s no way around the fact that the brain is the body, and the body is pissed off by yet another plane ride across several time zones.
I’ve been up since 3am. At 5:30, I got up and spent two hours in the garden, watering and cutting back a bit of the wildness that took over while we were gone. Last year, I planted hollyhock seeds along the garden-facing window of my studio, but they never came up. I assumed a bird ate the seeds, but this spring, there they were, wide leaves waving hello every time I stepped into the garden.
Before we left for Lochem, the hollyhocks were growing tightly packed geometric spirals of green buds. I had no idea what color they’d be and worried I’d miss out on their blossoms, but here they are, darkest purple and heavy with pollen. This morning while watering them, a hummingbird grazed the side of my face on its way to a blossom.
While we were emptying out Yme’s father’s apartment, I set aside art supplies that he can no longer use–chalky pencils, watercolor paper, charcoal and graphite, erasers, sharpeners, oil pastels. I’ve spent today experimenting with this treasure trove of color and texture. It feels good that these well-loved tools live on in my untrained (but enthusiastic) hands.
This morning, laying in bed and wishing I was asleep, I thought about the personal oracle deck cards I want to make. Every image was of a body of water–the rivers and lakes and seas I’ve swum, the birth tub where I pushed my youngest son into the world, bathtubs I’ve loved, my mother’s womb. By the time I got out of bed, my thinking about the oracle deck had transitioned from playful experimentations into a consumable product. Who was the audience, I wondered? How do I make the personal universal, I wondered? My middle-of-the-night mulling took all the joy out of playing with the art supplies I’d brought home.
This morning, Yme walked through the dining room and asked if I was having fun drawing. Not yet, I said. I couldn’t stop imagining that I was drawing for some invisible, discerning audience that would (or would not) enjoy consuming whatever end product I came up with. Competing desires to play and produce kept tripping over one another. I was surprised at how hard it was to just let go and have fun, which is ironic because I was working with a memory of a time I let myself get carried away by a current in the Yakima River.
My brain was in the way of my body (again). My brain had forgotten (again) that it is, in fact, my body. So often it feels separate from the parts of me that sink into embodied creative practice (or jet lag). It took about an hour for me to slip into flow and enjoy the process of drawing and cutting and smearing oil pastels over the words I’d written.
I started out focusing on words, writing them over and over in pencil, erasing mess-ups, culling and trimming. Eventually the wordy part of my brain let the image-and-color-focused part of my brain take over. When that happened, I stopped caring about what shit looked like or how each memory/image would fit into a larger body of oracle cards. I was finally having fun.
It turns out the hollyhocks growing by the studio are black hollyhocks, the rarest of hollyhock colors. The internet brain tells me they are associated with mystery and mysticism and are a favorite with witches, who use it in abundance spells and Lammas rituals to celebrate the first harvest of summer.
I want this summer to be a hollyhock summer. I want to slip into the current of joyful practice and let it take me where it wants. I want to immerse myself in the mystery of making without focusing on what that making might become. What if my audience is the hummingbirds and squirrels who are too busy living their lives to notice (or care) what I’m doing. Which is to say, what if my audience is not an audience at all but a feeling, and that feeling is called fun.
Card # 3: Yakima River
Memory:
The water numbs
my body, fluid.
I let the current
carry me.
I let the current
decide where we’ll go
until I’m ready
to fight my way
towards the shallows,
dig my feet and hands into silt and rocks,
crawl until the current lets go,
and I can walk, off-balance
waterlogged
and
vibrant
This card is a reminder that losing my balance can help me find firm footing. It asks me to think about how and when I get swept up. It is a card that encourages me to loosen control, to get carried away, and to pay attention to when it is time to to find my way back to my own center of gravity.
Workshop Reminder
There is still time to register for our Build a Personal Oracle Deck virtual workshop that starts this Wednesday, July 16th. You can register through Sunday, July 20th (and start the workshop with the 2nd meeting).