Summer Camp Days Ahead

These hot June days take me back through the years to the days of summer camp. My first experience was a YWCA camp on the shores of a Michigan lake. It was all foreign to me; morning reveille, raising the flag and evenings by the campfire, singing songs whose words even now come to mind. Most of all I remember the sensation of walking through woods, the paths banked by ferns with tiny  pine cones crunching under my feet. And the dark, cool inside of the craft cabin, where any imaginable project might rise from the sturdy wooden tables.

In the last several years, there has been a resurgence of summer camps for adults. It's a great idea and our local art center offers day camps for adults. So why not a day camp for cancer patients and their caregivers? Of course!

I've created a 3 day, 2 hours per day Art Camp for Wellness Within, an organization serving cancer patients, their families and caregivers located in Roseville, CA

We will make art that stretches the boundaries of what we think we are capable of, that heals our spirits, and provides a respite from the woes of cancer.

Of course there will be snacks and laughs and lemonade and maybe a little kombucha too. If you know someone in the area who might benefit from this program, please tell them about it. There is no fee for these programs.

In Praise of Detail

Since leaving the university, with more time on my hands, I'm better able to turn my attention to the details of completing a piece; or, as my manager used to say about charting, "complete the circle!"

Previously, finishing a piece of art required working up to, and past, deadlines. Completion, to my mind, includes signing the work on the front, signing, titling and dating it on the back, painting the edges if the work is on a panel, or framing it, and making sure it has a hanging wire. Finally, I photograph the work and enter it into a database. Whew! All the while, I figure out how to spend the least money and still get the most out of my art.

When I ran into deadlines, I rarely had time to check the edge of panels, make sure all the collage pieces were securely glued down or even take into consideration how or where I signed it. All of these were minor details, but omitting them felt like omitting a handshake when I'd just met someone.

What a difference; time and room to consider.... details! After all, many small actions come together to make a greater creation. (As Shakespeare says, "the play's the thing.")

I like this new spaciousness of mind. I wonder how it's going to change my work. As Billy Crystal says in Analyze This, "It's a process." In the meantime, I'm off to pick up my work at the framer's.

Enso: the "O" in Transformation

When we drove up to Enso, a wood shingled yoga studio, my husband, Monty, asked what Enso* meant. I said that I didn't know, but I liked what I saw in front of me: the ocean. Located in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, Enso was sponsoring a yoga workshop.

I'd long wanted to study with the teacher, Bhavani Maki whose home studio is in Hanalei, HI. I liked the care and attention she gave to the poses as well as the spiritual underpinnings of yoga.

When I saw she was teaching a workshop over 4th of July, I leapt and signed up. My goal for the weekend was to test my physical limits and to extend the limits of my patience. (I often appear calm and patient, but people who know me well will tell you that patience is NOT one of my virtues.)

I had little idea of what to expect, other than that Bhavani (who has spent a great deal of time studying Patanjali's Yoga Sutras) was going to be weaving them into the weekend.

My relationship to the practice of yoga is ambivalent. Though I've practiced and taken classes over the years, the minute I'm in a yoga class, I find myself wondering how long until it will be over. Until, that is, I reach that point where my muscles are melting into the poses and I realize how great I feel.

Enso is extremely charming and the beautiful, old building holds a wood stove in front of a wall of windows facing the beach. The thing was, someone had fired up that stove and it was blasting heat. If my goal was to test my physical limits, I had come to the right place! After a strenuous series of poses, I realized that they'd heated the studio in order to warm up our muscles, and I was dripping like a Bikram devotee!

I spent two days, focused on the poses--and making sure I was going to survive. Following each session, Monty and I took long walks on the beach and I wondered what I was doing. Was I getting any joy out of this effort? Was I only panting to keep up? I certainly felt cleansed, but what did it mean?

The wonderful power that it opened in me also reminded me of my intention to stretch my patience. On the third day, the day we were to return home, I awoke in a cloud of gratitude surrounding me.

I looked back over the stretch of years I've spent in the hospital working with children and felt profoundly grateful that UC Davis had provided a home for me the whole time. I felt an acute sense of the time remaining for me there and the preciousness of that time. I need to be awake for it.

And following on that gratitude, another intention presented itself: some part of my core took hold and vowed to become the best artist that I am able to be in whatever years remain for me to create. I'm recovering from a lifetime drawn to comparison. For someone who's spent too much time judging their work against the yardstick of others, it is profound to feel that pull losing its grip. More about that later, but for now, here I sit, drenched in meaning. 

*Enso is the symbol of the empty circle of Zen

*The sutras compose a guide book of classical yoga, written some 1700 years ago by the Indian sage, Patanjali.

Transformation

Just writing the word transformation is magical. I imagine a butterfly making its way out of a wrinkled brown cocoon and beginning to move its wings, fluttering them open, letting the air dry the bits of moisture clinging to those tissue thin filaments. That's me--the butterfly with the tissue thin wings. In a matter of months, I too will be making a transition out of my role as a hospital art therapist, and into that of studio artist.

In my last post "Circle Game," I was circumambulating (playing around) the topic. Until I had made my departure official with my manager, I didn't want to mention it in public. No coming out of the pupa before you're hatched! So, although I waxed eloquent about the ways in which we look forward to events, I didn't say that my return to the studio full time is what I'm looking forward to the most. I think that I will always be an art therapist because I can't separate the act of healing from making art, although, believe me, I've certainly tried. It doesn't work. I'm just very lucky to be able to reset the balance.

Making the Countdown series allows me to process this change and make it explicit. As I create rows of circles, gluing them onto the panels, each circle represents a passing of time; a month, a day, an hour, a minute. Each measures a period of letting go.

And yet, as I make each part, I find that I have to retrace my steps constantly. As I enlarged some of the circles, then discovered that they didn't work, I created more circles, and as I glued them down, I realized I'd forgotten to change the ground beneath them.  I had to take up those circles as well and replace their backgrounds. The whole process is rife with metaphor, as it should be.

I like this challenge. Every time I come up to the studio, I tell myself there are no mistakes and each step forward is the gateway to the one after that. How else can I learn?

Trust the Process

Recently, we had the third meeting of our Young Adult Bereavement Art Group. It's always a bit intimidating, having a group of young souls facing me, their faces carefully blank, but inside, a tangle of  sadness, exhaustion, frustration and hope. The challenge: Somehow we (my co-facilitator and I) have to create a pathway for some of these feelings to find their way out. One of the great tests of teaching is to greet a classroom day after day, seeing the upturned  faces that expect you to offer something that they in turn, can digest. Or not. Perhaps the most difficult challenge is to face apathy.

The main way I know these folks are not apathetic is that they keep coming back, meeting after meeting. Last night, we focused on identifying feelings related to their loss. The group went to work on a "feelings inventory," each one circling the little faces that most closely match their experience.

Next, and this is where my challenge came last night, was to take the most pressing feelings and fill in a body outline with color and symbols, wherever those feelings take hold in their body. I've explained this to groups many times, but somehow, the words I use to explain symbol and metaphor were not there. Only the symbols themselves.

I try to say enough so that their tap is turned on--but not so much that I get in the way of the flow. I hold up examples and talk about butterflies in the stomach and weights on the legs and padlocks on the mouth--and then I stop, almost holding my breath--and wait.

It's slow, they stare at their empty body outlines for a long time, unsure what to do first.  Some of them tentatively begin to outline their bodies in a dark viridian green.

And then it takes hold, carefully and methodically the feelings pour through the markers in streams of red, black, green and orange. Tears are added, broken hearts appear and mouths wide open with shock.

But the greatest change is in the people from whose pens these feelings issue. As we go around the room, one by one each of them shares their map with the group. And the words which come out express relief, calm, contentment, curiosity.

I've heard it a hundred times, but the truth of it does not wear out: "trust the process."