A Sketch for Solstice

Last night, after creating a sketch for a notecard for a friend who is having a difficult December, I made a sketch for me, while we were watching that old stop-motion animated show, "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town":

I hadn't planned to create a haiku-like thing, but it emerged;  in case you can't read it, it says, "Winter turns her back / On this foresaken season / Autumn of our woes."  I didn't realize that I had misspelled forsaken until I typed it out just now.  Intriguing! 

I was trying to create some sort of winter fairy-like creature.  As I often did, I drew the creature from the back, which allows me to avoid my lack of skill in sketching faces and hands; I drew the creature in a flowing dress, which allows me to avoid my lack of skill in drawing shoes from the back, and my difficulty with perspective (more specifically how to draw legs and arms in proper proportion to the body).

The gold marker for wings made me think about a star, so I drew one.  I wanted to draw a forest of Christmas trees, but I ran out of room on the page, so one tree would have to do.  I liked the ambiguity of the sketch.  Is that a winter witch or the angel Gabriel or some stray angel who stayed home from choir practice and so could not appear to the shepherds?  Is that the star that guided the Magi?  Are those ornaments on the tree or the red berries that are on some bushes this time of year?

The whole process delighted me and reminded me to return to this sketchbook more often.  I bought it about a year ago, thinking I wanted to create a daybook of sorts, a place to record sketches and haiku-like responses to the day, a place to record inspirations.  As I flipped back through it, and as I've been flipping back through my sketchbook that I use predominantly during my morning meditation time, it's good to remember how many sketches I made.

In the two sketchbooks alone, I made roughly 80 sketches.  I also made some individual sketches, which I then turned into notecards to send to friends.  That's a lot of sketching, and it's taken place in less than 30 minute increments.

When I met the family member of the friend who had a stroke, she said, "I wanted to meet this person who kept sending these delightful cards--you're so talented."

I don't think of myself as talented at sketching--I can't draw humans in a realistic way that would please me, the way I can sketch a tree or a flower.  Maybe I should change that:  I can't quickly draw humans, I can't consistently draw humans.

Let me record this idea, which is not a commitment at this point, but more of an idea that inspires me:  if I did a quick sketch of a human, a daily sketch, would I improve?  Or maybe if I saw my drawings of humans on a more regular basis, maybe I would get more comfortable with the quirky/imperfect way that I do it.

Haunted by Color, Soothed by Stitching

I turned in my last seminary paper on Saturday, and I turned in my last batch of grades a few days before that.  But yesterday, Thursday, was my first truly unscheduled day of this winter break.  On Sunday, I spent a good chunk of the day attending to my preaching job, on Monday I went to Columbia, on Tuesday I came home, and on Wednesday, I had a holiday lunch with the local church quilt group and an evening Zoom session.  At one point, my spouse said, "Did the Little Engine Who Could have a name?  Because you remind me of an Energizer Bunny in the way that you keep going."

It's a mix of metaphors, but I understand what he was saying.  Even when I'm on break, I'm not really on break.  I still have my part-time preaching job, and there are upcoming classes that start on January 7, onground classes where I need to create syllabi still.  And even though I know that I'm done with the fall semester responsibilities, both as teacher and student, I still wake up in the middle of the night feeling fretful.

I still did a bit of chugging along; I wanted to get to Michael's to get new sketchbooks while they were on sale.  So after rounding up the last of the recycling before the arrival of the trash collectors, I headed out to run some errands.  We did a bit of cooking, and then settled in to watch some plays by way of the National Theatre at Home.  I had to subscribe for a class, and we've been enjoying watching good theatre.  Yesterday we watched two plays.

I still felt fidgety, so I pulled out my basket of fabric.  I've been creating a quilt out of scraps of fabric--you may say, "Yes, that's the very nature of quilting, correct?  Scraps of fabric?"  But I began this project by thinking I would put the scraps together in a less organized way.  I thought I could pay no attention to size or color of each scrap and just put them together as I pulled them out of the basket.  Here's what I have so far:

Clearly, I'm not putting this quilt together in the random way I first envisioned.  But I'm having fun assembling my scraps into longer strips.  Here's the one I worked on last night:

And then I did a few quick sketches for notecards that I'm always creating.  You can see one nestled in the cloth:

Today I'll do a bit more writing than yesterday, a bit more shopping than yesterday (4 x the fuel points at Ingles!).  But I plan to keep doing some sewing each day.  It reminds me of this quote that I saw on the wall of the museum on Tuesday:

When We Became Modern

While I was in Columbia for a brief 30 hours, I wanted to get to the Columbia Museum of Art for their special exhibit.

I wasn't sure what to expect--would it be works I've already seen?  Would I discover new artists?  Do I want to discover new artists?

The advertising said it would be over 50 works on loan from the Brooklyn Museum.  I have been there once, but I remember it for "The Dinner Party" by Judy Chicago, not for seeing Impressionists.  So, it didn't feel like the once in a lifetime opportunity to see rare works from France.  But still, I'm in a part of the world where it feels like I should seize a chance to see these works while they're close.

So, off I went, and I'm glad I did.  I was only familiar with one work; I gasped when I turned a corner and saw it on the wall, by itself:

But I loved the rest of the exhibit, even if it wasn't familiar.  I took this picture, because I thought it would be fun to try to sketch, this cottage on a hill by the sea:

I took this picture because I wanted to have a meal or tea in a setting like this one:

I took lots of pictures, in part because I liked the work, in part to capture the range of it all, in part because I wondered if I could create something similar.

I also explored the rest of the museum, the second floor.

It was a bit bewildering, with one entrance and various galleries leading to other galleries, and much of the work arranged by theme, with two or three galleries containing art because it was made by people still living.

There were groups of school children, being led through the museum by a guide who asked lots of questions and everyone seemed enthusiastic.  That was delightful.

And then I went back to see the special exhibit one more time.

I am so intrigued by the wide variety of picture frames--not intrigued enough to do research, but still:

I didn't stay long--I was in the museum about an hour.  I was worried about parking.  I fed coins into a meter, but the meter didn't tell me how much time I had.  I think the meters were designed for people paying by smart phone.

I'm glad I went, parking aggravations and all.  The space is wonderful.  When I was in grad school, the museum was much smaller and closer to the USC campus.  I'm glad that the community supports art in this way.

Conversation in Song

Yesterday, I went to visit a friend who had a massive stroke in July.  She's in a skilled nursing unit still, with lots of physical therapy each day.  I knew that she had improved, but I wasn't sure what to expect.

We had a long chat. As we tried to speak in sentences, there was frustration, but we carried on.  She would get a sentence out, but then it was like something got stuck.  Then she gestured at me and looked expectant, which I took to mean, "Tell me about your life."  So I did.

Here's what was interesting. At one point, my friend said, "Sing me a word." Unsure of what to sing, I went back to that old standard from "Sound of Music"--I sang "Doe, a deer"--and my friend picked right up, and we sang the whole thing, word for word, all the way up the musical notes, back to "That will bring us back to doe, doe, doe, doe"--she knew every word.  Not only that, she could sing them, still, perfectly hitting each note.

That seemed to make her happiest, singing together. We tried, "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," but we weren't singing the same version--and then it was like all other Christmas music left my head.

Then we went back to trying to talk in traditional ways.  I do wonder what would have happened if we had tried singing our conversation.  But I'm only just now wondering it.  Something to think about for next time!  I could try singing a conversation in familiar music or just something I make up as I go along.  I'm a drama school kid--I'm game!

I hope our visit wasn't more exhausting for her than happy--but she seemed happy.

I know the brain can heal itself in amazing ways, and I know that she is still doing as much as she can.  I can only imagine how frustrating it is, so many magnitudes larger than my own occasional inability to recall a word or a name.

I need to think about songs we might be able to sing together.  I know she loved Les Mis, but I don't remember much about that musical.  Hmm.  Time to put on my thinking cap.

Writing Goals in the Waning Year

Soon, I hope to return to more regular blogging--this week, in fact.  Over the week-end, I turned in my last papers for seminary classes for fall semester 2024.  My grades are done and turned in.  So far, I have not caught all the colds and viruses that seem to be affecting others.

I not only want to get back to blogging, but also some poetry writing and submitting.  The places where I submit are getting fewer and fewer--submission windows are open and closed more quickly, and there are fees I'm not willing to pay (and more and more journals asking for more and more money).

Let me record some of the poetry ideas I've had.

--I've thought of my series of poems about Noah's wife who has made life changes after the Flood (that flood that required Biblical Noah to build an arc); one of my favorites, "Higher Ground," appeared in Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States, and you can read it in this blog post.  I have also written poems about Cassandra, as a way to talk about climate change, and one of the more recent ones I've written imagines Cassandra living in the mountains.

Revisiting these characters in light of Hurricane Helene seems promising.

--I've also been contemplating my Facebook feed, which is full of people constructing gingerbread houses alongside people rebuilding houses wiped out by Hurricane Helene floodwaters.  My commute to church in Bristol, TN takes me through some severely devastated areas, where nothing is left of homes but rubble, and I can't imagine they will be rebuilt.  It seems there should be a poem there, but I'm not sure I can pull it off.

--I'd also like to get back to a daily practice of shorter poems and observations.  I need to train my attention again.  Happily, I'm teaching literature classes this coming term, which always helps me return to poetry roots.

--I also enjoyed writing for one of my seminary classes--it was mostly memoir, a very short piece.  I'd like to do more of that, more fiction writing.

--In short, I want to get back to the writing that feeds my soul, even if it never gets published, never leads to larger work.  I've been doing a lot of seminary writing, which feeds my soul in a different way, and so much grading, which doesn't feed my soul at all.  It's time to remember the reasons I wanted a teaching job in a 4 year, liberal arts school--time to read and write.

The Feast Day of Santa Lucia

Today is the feast day of Santa Lucia, a woman in 4th century Rome during a time of horrible persecution of Christians and much of the rest of the population, and she was martyred.  The reasons for her martyrdom vary:   Did she really gouge out her eyes because a suitor commented on their beauty? Did she die because she had promised her virginity to Christ? Was she killed because the evil emperor had ordered her to be taken to a brothel because she was giving away the family wealth? Was she killed because a rejected suitor outed her for being a Christian?  We don’t really know.  

She is most often pictured with a crown of candles on her head, and tradition says that she wore a candle crown into the catacombs when she took provisions to the Christians hiding there.  With a candle crown, she freed up a hand to carry more supplies.  I love this idea, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that it isn't true.

Truth often doesn't matter with these popular saints like Lucia, Nicholas, and Valentine.  We love the traditions, and that means we often know more about the traditions than we do about the saints behind them, if we know anything at all about the saints behind these popular days.

This feast day still seems relevant for two reasons.  First, Lucia shows us the struggle that women face in daily existence in a patriarchal culture, the culture that most of us still must endure.  It’s worth remembering that many women in many countries today don’t have any more control over their bodies or their destinies than these long-ago virgin saints did. In this time of Advent waiting, we can remember that God chose to come to a virgin mother who lived in a culture that wasn’t much different than Santa Lucia’s culture: highly stratified, with power concentrated at the top, power in the hands of white men, which made life exceeding different for everyone who wasn't a powerful, wealthy, white man. It's a society that sounds familiar, doesn't it?

On this feast day of Santa Lucia, we can spend some time thinking about women, about repression, about what it means to control our destiny.  We can think about how to spread freedom.

It's also an important feast day because of the time of year when we celebrate.  Even though we're still in the season of late autumn, in terms of how much sunlight we get, those of us in the northern hemisphere are in the darkest time of the year.  It's great to have a festival that celebrates the comforts of this time of year:  candles and baked goods and hot beverages.

I love our various festivals to get us through the dark of winter. In these colder, darker days, I wish that the early church fathers had put Christmas further into winter, so that we can have more weeks of twinkly lights and candles to enjoy. Christmas in February makes more sense to me, even though I understand how Christmas ended up near the Winter Solstice.

I always thought that if I had a more flexible schedule, I'd spend December 13 making special breads, but that will have to wait.  My schedule is flexible, but much of today and tomorrow will be spent working on my final papers/presentations for three seminary classes.  

You could do baking though! If you’d like to try, this blog post will guide you through it. If you’re the type who needs pictures, it’s got a link to a blog post with pictures.  Enjoy.

Fall Teaching Tasks Complete, but Writing Yet to Do

I have posted my last set of grades.  I am not done with all of the work from Fall semester, but all my grading is done:  5 Spartanburg Methodist College classes and 4 online classes for Broward College.  For the online classes, I don't have to do some of the more time consuming work:  the curriculum is created and standard for online classes, and the course shell is the same from term to term--in many ways, I am the grader and the person who answers questions and encourages and sends reminders.  Still, it takes time, and it takes up a lot of space in my head at certain points of the term, like the end. 

Tuesday I uploaded all of the components of the final project for my Preaching class: Race, Gender, and the Religious Imagination.  I had to write an academic paper, then I had to create an event that would address some of the material the paper revealed, and I had to create/preach/record a sermon that I would preach for the event, along with a sermon manuscript.  It was one of the more complicated final projects, with lots of parts.

I still have three papers to write, but they feel doable:  one is due on Friday, one on Saturday, and one on Sunday.  The end is in sight!  I want to get as much done Thursday as possible.  My spouse has been fighting off a cold, and I worry that I'll wake up sick.

I thought I would get more done yesterday, but after getting up early to get grading done and get the Rogue in for new tires, I was tired by afternoon.  I took a nap and then got up to finish the gingerbread in the late afternoon.  I started the recipe in the morning, but the dough needs time to chill.  They were wonderful fresh out of the oven, but this morning, they are a bit crisper around the edges than I'd like.

As I look at my history in gingerbread, I am realizing that this is one cookie that almost never turns out the way I want:  soft on the inside, but with some resistance (but not overly crispness) on the outside.  It's usually a delicious cookie, if I didn't have my preconceived idea of what it should feel like when I bite into it.  And yes, I do see the life lesson there.

Let me bring this blog post to a close and actually post it.  I first started writing it yesterday and got sidetracked by the day's tasks.  And then let me get to my seminary writing.