Step Step Swat

I tend to need some type of daily walk, much like a dog, to feel complete. It doesn't matter if it is around town, in the woods, along a dusty back road - just put me on a path and let me go. Without it, I feel antsy and caged in, wandering around the house or work not able to focus on one particular task at hand. My dog is a good excuse to find a way to fit it in each day, though really it is almost a meditative practice for me. I like to look at the businesses or wide expanses of fields, notice overgrown weeds or feel the cool forest air on my skin. It is true, however, that some walks are far better than others. The hike that I was fortunate to take yesterday fell into this category of "better."

It is a path that follows a creek offshoot of a larger river. The river itself is pock marked with signs that warn of DANGER and things about rising waters and strong currents and sirens, but the creek is a small trickle of a thing, broken up by bitty waterfalls and little wading pools. It is simply idyllic. After a first try at navigating this portion of the trail, stumbling along a sort of beach with sucking mud and spider lairs, we finally found the well-trodden path through the woods. Different from most other trails I am used to, this one had surprising flora like bamboo patches, purple hydrangeas, jungle-like palms and vines. It also had gnats. LOTS of gnats. I developed a pattern to my walking: step, step, swat, step, step, swat. There was something satisfying about the amount of bugs I was able to make contact with on my forearms that merely brushed them away from my face for the length of two steps. My sweet little old lady Mennonite friend would likely see this as a good way of incorporating arm exercise into the overall leg and cardio workout. She is ever-positive.

There was no real destination in mind except the waterfalls that happened to be along the way. It was too cold to actually get up close and personal with them, but we did wind up splashing a bit in the shallower water. The rocks were mostly covered with scrubby moss, and they bordered each pool as if they had been perfectly designed lagoons. They clouds eventually gave way to a few moments of sun, and the light that came through the canopy of trees was warm and made the whole landscape into a speckled piece of heaven. It got me to wondering if there are bugs in the afterlife. If there are, I hope they are the more fun ones, like butterflies and inchworms. And those little water skimmers.

Just next to one of the wading pools was a bounty of berries. We were fooling around, posing for pictures, and when I looked off into the distance for one shot, I exclaimed at the spray of raspberries just ten feet away. We raced to the bush, each of us claiming all of the berries for ourselves, and proceeded to eat handfuls of them. I picked them off one by one. I filled up my palm with little mounds of them. I must have eaten ten dollars worth of raspberries that were free for the taking in this little wonderland. I hadn't thought that I could ever have enough berries, but when my mouth started to pucker, I knew that was my saturation point. It reminded me of a poem:

Millions of Strawberries

Genevieve Tagged

 

Marcia and I went over the curve,
Eating our way down
Jewels of strawberries we didn't deserve,
Eating our way down.
Till our hands were sticky, and our lips painted,
And over us the hot day fainted,
And we saw snakes,
And got scratched, and a lust overcame us for the red
unmatched
Small buds of berries, till we lay down--
Eating out way down-- and rolled in the berries like two
little dogs
Rolled
In the late gold
And gnats hummed
And it was cold
And home we went, home without a berry,
Painted red and brown
Eating out way down.

It was a tiring, wonderful day.

I Like To Move It Move It

There is something to be said for that desire to go out into the woods and just walk. Bill Bryson articulates the simple strength of this desire in A Walk In The Woods, which I am currently reading and loving. He has both inspiring and hilarious moments as he hikes the Appalachian Trail with his pudgy, whining trailmate and a host of other characters that find themselves alone in the woods together. But take away the waterproof equipment, the fancy foldable cookware, and there you have a person plodding along a beaten path, either on a linear trajectory or my favorite, a loop trail.

It doesn't seem to make sense. Why especially pick a loop trail that will take you in a circle and drop you right where you started a few miles before? Usually we travel to go somewhere, not simply to travel. But hiking is its own purpose. As soon as I get into the thick of the woods and feel the cool air with a hint of forest floor moisture, I'm sold. I don't even spend that much time looking around so much as getting fleeting glimpses of the light through the leaves, fallen branches, some rustling undergrowth. The majority of the time I have my eyes on the path in front of me, navigating around tree roots and jutting rocks. I believe that we house vestigial traces of our nomadic ancestors inside these modern bodies, and that feeling of traveling a winding path, staring up at the stars, and making a fire satisfy something deeply.

On Meditation and Mandalas

     I’ve recently (to my great surprise) attempted to replace my nightly ritual of falling asleep to some DVD (Northern Exposure right now…the Alaskan chill is so tempting in this heat) with meditation. That is, if you can call two nights in a row a trend. I started to meditate again in hopes of feeling better connected to my little inner world and giving myself better guidance for my artwork. Different artists work in various ways – some have a solid direction that I envy, others move seamlessly from one connected idea to another with full bodies of work in between, and others are a little more distractible. Like me. I see something I like, feel inspired by a bit of grass in my yard, learn a new technique and I’m off and running like a raccoon after something shiny. In art school, they will tell you that you need to have a style and a theme to your work. It makes sense. Set yourself apart. Say something cohesive. I’ve always struggled with this bit. I make one version of something and feel like if I make another I will slip into robotic catatonics. Actually, that would be a great band name. But I digress. Even my blog posts do not have much of a connective thread. “Hey guys, ice cream! Hey guys, art! Hey guys, dogs!” The theme is perhaps, Things I Like. I’m most interested in my own work when I can keep it fresh, so my goal recently has been to find this freshness within a common theme. It’s like slowly disciplining my mind and hands to stay together. And I think it’s working. The show I have coming up is definitely incentive to keep it together.

     Often I will cycle back to earlier ideas with new information or techniques to allow them to come to a more successful realization. With this recent meditation, I have been interested in going back to making mandalas. When I attempted them before, I found that I couldn’t effectively translate them into something I felt excited about. I was making small watercolors of them that didn’t fit the bill. Now I am working them into pottery. It gels with what I want my ceramics to say – and now that I know several techniques of inscribing thin, controlled lines onto my pieces, I’ve been able to get it to all work.

     Mandalas have been part of various cultures in some form or another – Native Americans used them for healing properties, we can see them in stained glass rose windows in cathedrals, and they are most commonly known for their part in Buddhist and Hindu spiritual practices. It is seen as representing the universe from a design perspective. Mandala creation is touted for centering the mind as a meditative technique in itself. I find that as I make them, the structure of the circle and symmetry allows me to let go and be surprised in the end by what I’ve just drawn. The overall look reminds me of those wonderful, colorful, and expensive kaleidoscopes I would slowly turn while I watched the tiny world inside flip into new patterns. Places that had these were always filled with glass objects and glass shelves and I walked with my hands pressed close to my sides, feeling like at any moment I would lose control of my body and it would stumble into everything all at once. Again, I digress.

     Mandalas also just happen to fit pretty perfectly onto the face of a plate. I’ve found that the best way to get the design into the clay is by starting with a drawing of the mandala, then tracing over it in your basic washable crayola marker. Then, on the flat template of the plate, press the mandala drawing onto the moist clay, rub, and peel away to see the design transferred. Mold the plate into the desired  shape and allow to dry to a hard leather hard. Carve away the lines and fill them with colored slip or underglaze, mishima style. Wipe away the excess color after it too has dried, and reveal your final pattern! I still have yet to decide how to best finish it with glaze…not sure if I should use various underglazes for each separate shape or cover with one transparent glaze that will let the lines show through. Tests to come.

So, how do you center yourself?