Julie Quiring's Open Salon Blog

The Art of Paper: Making Beauty in the Desert

Fri, 6 Aug 2010 10:08:08 -0400

I have come to Ghost Ranch in the high desert of New Mexico for a week-long workshop given by Laurie Doctor, a bookmaker, calligrapher, artist and writer. It is May, and a relief to be out of the Pacific Northwest, where the natural world is orgiastic with growth. Its forward motion is relentless and exuberant, as if everything ends in an exclamation mark. I've had enough of growth lately - for one week, growth and I are on a break. We can sleep with other people.

The desert is perfect. Signs of life are spare, judicious. It has been a long time since it rained.

Each day, we gather in a large room fragrant with green tea and something I learn is kombucha. Cafeteria-style tables are arranged end to end, art supplies scattered like broadcast seeds, dappled in sunlight from high windows. Today, we begin with an obscure Tom Waits recording, his repetitious droning an apt accompaniment to the morning’s assignment: twenty minutes of drawing short lines, keeping our full attention at the exact place where brush meets paper. The room becomes still as night.

Next, we make something called paste paper. The paste is made with boiled flour and water and mixed with acrylic paint. We brush it on heavy, slightly textured paper, using our fingers and any implement we can contrive or employ to create line and texture. I love how it feels to run my fingers through the soft, still-warm substance; a river of fire flows across the page. I think of Van Gogh, writing to his brother. Theo, send more yellow. The finished papers create a line of color and form that weaves around the room like flat, multicolored beads threaded end to end.

On a table, there are photocopied sheets of paper with mysterious strokes and dots, flourishes and symbols. Laurie explains that these are ancient alphabets, and we are to choose one to write in for the week. It is a strange concept, but it is not difficult to choose; there is one I immediately like more than the rest. I begin to copy the symbols, grouping them in an approximation of words based purely on aesthetics. I feel as though I am communicating with the gods. Or at least really old cave-people.

Each night, I place sweatpants and sweatshirt at the foot of my bed, and each morning I pull them on, push bare feet into untied shoes and step out the door, just in time. Silhouettes become bushes with leaves and branches; black melts into infinite combinations of red and yellow. I am transfixed by the desert at dawn.

All day, we create. We tear our paste papers into pieces; we stitch across them with glinting metallic thread; we accessorize them with beads. I write lines of poems and quotes in the language I understand, and draw symbols in the language I don’t, following a sunflower wave of paste. Using Sumi ink on rice paper, we make prayer flags, communicating in our secret language. We drape them over prickly bushes, where they flap in the wind, trapped and free at the same time.

Although it is a group of women, I don’t talk about my life. I don’t enumerate my favorite grievances or confess my sins. For one week, I am not the doer or the done-to, the victim or the perpetrator, the arsonist or the noble keeper of the flame. I sleep through the night for the first time in years.

Near the end of the week, we choose one of our paste papers to create an accordion book with a series of pockets - one for each day of the workshop. It is a tricky thing to get right, and I crease each fold with a sheath of bone. We put bits of our daily creations in each pocket.

Returning home, I immediately buy rough paper, black, white, blue, yellow and red acrylic paint and gold metallic ink and thread. I recall quotes and beloved lines of poems, as if remembering my dreams.

The workshop was 13 years ago, and I still make paste papers every once in awhile, running my hands through the thick, warm goo, spreading them to dry on the kitchen table and eventually tearing them up for cards and bookmarks and decorations on brown paper wrapping, words riding bareback on ridges of paint. About once a year, I take my accordion book off the dresser, dust it off, and put it back, carefully arranging the folds. It reminds me of the desert, of the way light follows darkness and how, sometimes, life offers up exactly what we need.

Catalogs are Messing with my Mind

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:07:23 -0400

In the mailbox, there is a catalog featuring freakishly well-proportioned young women in merino, silk and cashmere. I decide to look through it as a way to unwind from work, and by the time I have scanned the last page I am ready to place my order for everything it has to offer: silk, merino, cashmere, a new career with a stratospheric salary and, by the looks of the scene on page 6, a sexual encounter in the desert, with props.

In a drawer, a lace-trimmed camisole purchased optimistically in May remains unworn. My upper arm definition departed without saying goodbye, and tank tops that used to make me feel sexy are now just something to wear when it’s hot. Another one of life’s minor losses, and I think of that line in Fleur Adcock’s poem, Weathering:

Well, that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young forever, to pass.

And then I see the catalog with the walker on the front.

I am dismayed that the circling vultures of capitalism have noted my recent joint replacement. Still, I can’t help noticing that it’s a hell of a walker. A Ferrari. If I needed a walker instead of having just gotten rid of one, I might cut this out and put it up on my fridge in the hopes that someone would buy it for me for Christmas. This is a walker you don’t just run out and buy, it’s a walker you save up for. Its color is the lips of movie stars; its brakes suggest the tour de France, although the basket detracts somewhat from the concept of speed. There are gizmos on the sides like the ones used to adjust the seats of Land Rovers.

The catalog is Make Life Easier, and it tries to live up to the name with products like the Lift & Sift Cat Litter System, Front Pocket Wallet, (Divest an otherwise sleek fellow of the bump on his rump!) and a set of adjustable extenders that attach onto the waistband of your pants to give you an extra 1/2 to 2 inches when needed. Why aren’t these sold at Nordstrom? Page 9 has a phone with buttons so large your next door neighbor could see who you were calling, which is actually good to know - my back-up plan was to hold the bottoms of old wine bottles to my eyes. Somewhat oddly, Page 15 displays a stainless steel tool kit for removing blackheads and whiteheads, with eight separate attachments. I wonder if this is meant as a gift idea for the grandkids, or whether blemishes plague the elderly, which would be extremely unfair.

I feel like someone is spying on me, because they are. I feel like I have entered a new stage of life, because I have. Outside, a crow sits on a telephone wire, unconcerned.

Ruminations on a Salad

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 11:07:23 -0400

It looks like an oil painting: sunset-pink radishes, chunky tomatoes, carrots peeking out like old coins. Woven throughout are brushstrokes of green – a meadow, perhaps, or forest floor.

I chew like an aspiring Buddhist, giving the experience my full attention. Something bitter, something spicy and something that tastes like the side of the road. Ahhh. Eating weeds makes me feel virtuous.

I love subscribing to a weekly vegetable delivery from a local farm. When I pay my invoice for the homemade bread and eggs - available as extras - or bite down on something I'll never see in the produce section of the grocery store, I feel certain I am a force for good in the world. It's not just because the vegetables are fresh and interesting and it’s a good thing to do for the local economy, or the value of supporting sustainable agriculture. Those are great reasons, but they do not explain why I glow over each bite. In contrast, I feel quite ho-hum about recycling, and it took me years to remember to bring my own bag to the store.

My parents went organic before it was fashionable – while other kids ate Sloppy Joes in the school cafeteria or opened their lunchboxes to Wonder Bread and Kraft Singles, I bit into a sandwich made with whole wheat bread baked in coffee cans, using wheat we’d ground ourselves, spread with peanut butter so natural you had to get up twenty minutes early to stir it. Mom and Dad were extremely proud of what we ate. We never had much money, but they always said the one thing they would never scrimp on was food. So even though I longed for soda pop and junk food as much as any child, I had the sense that quality food was important, like telling the truth and not calling black people niggers.

My father descends from German Mennonites who immigrated to the United States from Russia. He was two years old in 1934 when his parents joined the desperate migration from Oklahoma to California’s San Joaquin Valley, where my grandparents became tenant farmers. The farming gene lay dormant in him until he was well into his thirties, when it got together with the hermit gene and the get-away-from-your-family-and-in-laws gene to compel him to purchase two tipis and 20 acres in the British Columbia wilderness. In preparation, Mom read us Black Elk Speaks and, just for good measure, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. From these we understood we were supposed to have a deep reverence for The Land and also not expect to be allowed to just sit around and play jacks.

At 13, I would have been more excited by a high-rise apartment with a balcony and a clothing allowance, but I discovered that I enjoyed splitting logs, with the physical effort, the smell of sap and the immediate gratification of a growing pile of firewood. I liked milking our two goats, leaning my head against their warm sides and murmuring soothingly while the milk streamed into the pail. Hauling water from the creek was okay, because I could daydream and stop and rest as often as I wanted – no one was timing how long I was gone. But capital R reverence eluded me and I loathed being assigned to the garden - a monotonous job with dubious rewards. I liked iceberg lettuce, with its watery crunchiness, and ranch dressing from a bottle. And stores. I liked stores.

Still, the romantic image of attractive young couples working the land was irresistible. We were surrounded by them: buff young men in cut-off jeans and glowing women in braids, accessorized with shovels and compost buckets. I watched them swimming naked in the pond, oozing sex and confidence.

At 21, I married a man who loved to spend all his free time growing things. We had a fantastic vegetable garden and beautiful landscaping, and in my memory, the moments we were most connected were the ones spent standing outdoors, surveying our land and planning what we would do next. I still didn’t enjoy gardening, we didn’t work well together and I would have preferred to spend my time pursuing other activities. But when we stood in the waning light, envisioning our modern homestead-slash-Sunset Magazine photo op, I was intoxicated with this fictional version of myself, so integral to the belief in our happiness.

Our demise began in earnest when we moved to 10 acres with no plantings of any kind. There was not even a sad rhododendron by the front door, and in Washington even the homeless have rhododendrons. Worse, it was November. One day, I stood peering into the drizzle, trying to locate the person who, just a few months before, had seen the mud and blackberries as an invitation to cultivation. Instead, as I contemplated spending years clearing, fencing, digging, planting, pruning and otherwise investing my free time and disposable income working the land, a tourniquet began to contract around my chest.

I look back on my vision of perfect young homesteaders the way I look back on wanting to be a famous ballerina when I was 8. I was in love with the image of myself, not the hours of pointing my toes. The handsome, curly-haired young man and radiant, bandana-wearing young woman who drop off my weekly delivery are like a treasured photograph, reminding me of the power of youthful imagination and the raw, tender metamorphosis from the person we try to be to the person we are meant to become.

Today, spearing the last three leaves of my imperfectly washed salad, I feel a deep appreciation for my hard-working-peasant turned back-to-the-land heritage, and I thank my parents for teaching me that good food is, indeed, important.

Life Rules: 3 Meditations on Desire

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 21:06:04 -0400

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
through the desert for a hundred miles, repenting.
You only have to let the small animal of your body love what it loves. {...} Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese"

Mary Oliver’s famous poem has been going through your head this week, the small, heretical “only” haunting you from its perch, calling like an owl in the deepest hours of the night.

For as long as you can remember, you have distrusted your desires. The fruit of highly principled, nonconformist loins, you were ashamed by your wish to fit in with your peers, the tingling sensation that traveled through your body in response the vibrant pulse of the city, and your longing for the secret, unnamed power bestowed by garter belts and fishnet stockings. You were only 8, years from breasts and boys and sexual desire, but you knew it was wrong to prefer a crowded street to a silent forest, go-go boots to lug soles and 16oz denim.

And so it became clear that just because you wanted something did not mean you should want it; just because you felt something did not mean you should feel it. Just because you preferred something did not mean your preference should be taken seriously.

You only have to let the small animal of your body love what it loves.

When you first read the poem, in your 30’s, the line made you angry. “Oh, really?" you thought sarcastically, "Just let your body love what it loves? Yeah, right. That’ll work out well.” The line seemed cruel in its simplicity, so at odds with your life.

Now, you hear the same words as an urgent dispatch to pay attention to the way your loves, desires and preferences reveal what gives your life meaning and happiness. They are a personal, red phone emergency call to take your self seriously, before it is too late.

You only have to let the small animal of your body love what it loves.

You get to that line in the poem and pause, unable to continue. You drag yourself back from the edge of an abyss of regret that it has taken you so long to understand. No. You will not go down. Instead, you become very still. In the backyard, a mother deer and her two still-spotted fawns are grazing.

I want to be nice. I have the requisite traits: I’m generally accommodating and easygoing, I get pleasure from making people happy and I want them to think well of me. (If they don’t, I assume it is my fault, although this hardly ever happens because I am, well, nice.)

There is nothing wrong with this, except when it is given top priority and enlisted in the habitual subjugation of my own desires. In my first marriage, I spent 16 years accommodating the rock formations of my husband’s preferences like a finalist in a Twister tournament. I was divorced for years before I realized my contortions had about as much effect as pouring the Pacific Ocean into a colander. Some people’s container cannot be filled; consistent dampness is the best you can hope for.

When my daughters took turns being mean-spirited, scary-drug-experimenting teenagers, I spent nearly a decade earnestly auditioning for Nice, Reasonable and Very Understanding Parent of All Time (NRVUPAT). The main thing I learned from this was that it is a difficult award to win without someone ending up incarcerated.

Because I doubt the justifiability of my wishes, I am most comfortable making a request from a position of unassailable moral high ground. At one point, with two children under the age of 4, I was sleep deprived to the point of desperation. My husband was oblivious, carrying on with whatever projects he wanted to accomplish each weekend. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I asked that he look after the children for a couple of hours because That’s What Good Fathers Do, rather than because I was about to have a nervous breakdown. While this is arguably a true statement, it would have been better to state my own need. Also probably less annoying.

III

In which I have an argument with myself, and win.

Do not ask for help. Do not inconvenience anyone. It is always better to do everything yourself.

Giving and receiving is what makes us part of the human community. It’s wrong to always position yourself so that you are the giver. Receiving requires humility – an excellent experience for grandiose, "oh-no-I'm-fine" types. Not mentioning any names.

You are a better person if you like to farm, work the land, or at least grow some edible stuff.

At this very moment, there are two people weeding, raking and mulching my yard, and since they are not related to me, I am going to give them money. I allowed myself to hire them because I am incapacitated for the summer. The truth, however, is that I don’t enjoy gardening. I find it screamingly tedious. To review: two very nice people are earning money, and later I get to sit on my porch with a glass of wine and enjoy the result. What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing.

You are a better person if you make your own birthday cards.

I like making cards, but I don’t always feel like it. Sometimes I just want to go to the store and pick one out. But then I feel I am being lazy and letting everyone down, starting with myself. I would like to think I am better than this. But then, I would also like to think my ass isn’t sagging. Get over it.

Morally and spiritually evolved people let their hair go gray.

I was gray, and then I colored my hair, only to be told by a number of friends – all of whom color their hair - that they were disappointed in me. Apparently I was a role model for bravely letting one’s self go. To which I respond: be your own damned role model.

All clothing must be practical, or you are being frivolous and shallow. Your one pair of shoes should be suitable for backpacking. Everything should have pockets large enough to hold a small emergency kit.

You only have to let the small animal of your body love what it loves.

A 67.2% Chance of Happiness

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:06:16 -0400

When the nurse came to start my blood transfusion, she handed me a piece of paper to sign. It had a lot of words on it, and I told her I couldn’t read them without my glasses.

“Oh, it’s like everything else you sign in here,” she said in the cheerful, comforting, matter of fact manner perfected by the English. “It will probably be fine, but you might die.” I smiled, and picked up the pen. I needed the blood.

I like to be informed. I want the mechanic who works on my car to explain what is wrong and what he is going to do about it, I will raptly listen to a plumber outline the necessity of directional tees and banded lifts and I once answered the phone before 8:00 in the morning to further my education regarding the appropriate ratio of mulch to manure to spread on my garden beds. I don't even talk to my children before 8:00.

So naturally, when I needed a physician, I chose an explainer. At our first meeting, he walked me through my diagnosis and options with impressive detail, and I still went home and spent the night on line reading everything I could find.

But during my pre-op appointment, a week before surgery, I discovered a whole new world of information: statistics regarding what could go wrong. To name just a few, I had a .2% chance of developing a blood clot, a 3% chance of the surgery failing to cure my pain, a .5% chance of needing a blood transfusion, a 1% chance of developing an infection and a .2% chance of dying or having a brain seizure from the anesthetic.

These numbers are made up, because I didn't retain them. Although impressive in sheer quantity, they didn’t really faze me. I had decided to go through with it for the same reason I board airplanes. I want to go places on the other side of oceans.

As it turned out, the only statistic I was on the unfortunate end of was the blood transfusion. But ever since that afternoon, listening to the numbers roll off his tongue, I have been thinking about risk, and the way we are all in danger of dying from the moment we are born.

When I get in my car to drive to Seattle, a distance of about 30 miles, I might have, say, a .7% chance of getting in an accident and a .01% chance of it being fatal. When I eat my salmon, I might have a .2% chance of choking on a bone. When I stand on a step-stool to change a light bulb, there is probably a .08% chance of my stepping off and spraining my ankle.

When you have surgery, you have to sign quite a few pieces of paper acknowledging the possibility of unintended consequences. The act of doing this forced me, at least for a moment, to formally agree to the deal we are all born into: bad things can happen at any time.

One morning, when I was pregnant with my second child, I had a thought that literally took my breath away. I was going to bring another being into the world whose wellbeing I would be tied to for the rest of my life. There would be two people walking around with the possibility of causing me a devastation so terrifying I had to sit down at the thought. You don’t know that when you get pregnant with your first - if you think about risk at all, it is the finite risk of complications during pregnancy, or birth anomalies. You don’t see the desert of danger stretching out before you, shimmering into an invisible horizon.

Mostly, I have lived with the things I fear most by veering between denial and anxiety. But after signing all those official documents giving people permission to do things that might cause me harm, I feel less frightened by the ever-present possibility of pain and sorrow. I’ve taken down a few trees and made a small clearing, because camouflage doesn’t offer any protection. I might as well stand in the center of my life.