Fingerprints

Oprah always asks, What's one thing you know for sure?

What I know, as said once before, is that "No one can tell you your fingerprints are made wrong."
But what I meant was - You are unique in all of time. No one will ever have your same voice-print, fingerprint, DNA, brainwave patterns, or heart.

When you make a work of art, or a poem, it has never been seen before. It is something new under the sun.

No one can say you, or your art, is made wrong. (If they do, here is a handy retort: Up Yours. Feel free to use it often as may be necessary.)

So, what is one thing YOU know for sure?

Writing as an Art Form

Walk to the park and stand under a tree. The wind will come. When the sound of the wind in the leaves obscures the whine of traffic on the freeway, you will know bliss.

When we write, we distill to essence what we have received from nature, from experience, the sweetest and most bitter times of our lives.

When our writing takes the reader to that place where the sound of words obscures the noise of society and worry, they will know bliss.

In this way is our writing a sacred practice and an art.

I Awakened

When I dream you, I dream you whole

I dream that out of wholeness, you create.

We have been artists attempting to heal by making art...

Is it possible instead to be a whole person creating art (or merely living life) rather than putting on art the burden to heal us?

Following O'Keeffe

My Grandmother decided to take up painting at 70. She signed up for a watercolor workshop. On the second day, she wasn't feeling well, so she sent me. I was seventeen. I had always drawn, but never painted. I learned to paint snow - cabins, fences, and trees in the snow. I learned to paint shadows.

Later, I took another class, in the evening, at the firehouse. (This was during the one year we lived in Kansas, in the same small town as the grandmother and aunts - wonderful, vibrant, funny, sisters. It would have been good for me had I not been completely preoccupied by teenage angst.)

In the second class, I painted with acrylics, copying a photo in a travel magazine - the gold sun sinking into brackish marshland beneath a yellow sky.

Aunt Alice asked if she could hang it in her gallery. I said sure. A few days later she handed me forty bucks. A man had begged her to sell it and she did. I had not given her permission to sell it. It was my first betrayal in the art world. But I didn't say anything. I had already learned it was useless to try to communicate with adults.

So over the years I would paint these small scenes, but only if someone had a birthday, only as gifts. And by the time I envisioned my new life, of following O'Keeffe to New Mexico I wasn't painting at all.

The O'Keeffe Effect

Beauty is like medicine to the heart. Art is a flower planted in the soul.

When my soul came back into my self, I began keeping a journal again. In it, I wrote a vision for my life.

Right before I left Colorado, I'd read an article about the legendary artist, Georgia O'Keeffe. It captured my imagination - her solitary loveliness, her fierce aesthetic, her independence.

She inspired my vision. Someday I would live in an adobe house in New Mexico. And I would be a painter.