Reawaken, repair, and renew - Rise and Shine Benedict Stone

Awakening Stones - art journal page
collage

Sometimes we find ourselves weighted down by the burdens of life, or even the secrets that we hold within our hearts. Our hearts themselves may feel like they have been turned to stone. Benedict Stone, the title character of Phaedra Patrick's newest novel, is such a man. Benedict is a man who is currently separated from his wife, scarcely eking out a living with his small jewelry shop having lost his creative spark years ago, when the sixteen year old daughter of his estranged brother shows up on his doorstep. 

Gemma has secrets and burdens of her own. Like all teenagers, she is struggling to finding her own place and passion within the world. She has traveled to England from the US in search of answers. Her hope is to learn more about the bag of gemstones her father received from his dead parents, and why he hasn't invited her uncle to be a part of their lives. 

It's Gemma that spurs Benedict to face his past, beginning with opening the trunk in the attic containing his parents' gemstone journal, tools, designs, and some of his own early work. Together they read the journal passages, written by Gemma's grandfather, about gemstone properties, "Peridot - A rich green stone, sometimes called chrysolite, peridot is widely known as the birthstone for August. It can be found in volcanic landscapes. It was used in ancient times to ward off evil spirits. It can assist us to recognize negative patterns in our lives, override unwanted thought patterns, help let go of the past and ease fear and anxiety. It can lessen stress, anger, and jealousy in relationships, and also help us to find what is lost.." (p.76-77) Before long they are dispensing gemstones to the members of the village based on their needs. Benedict finds himself inspired to work on new designs which renews his creativity and even gives him the confidence to fight for his marriage. But those hidden secrets come back to bite them in the butt. I'll let you read the outcome. 

Family secrets are painful and soul destroying. What we hide from our spouses, our children, our parents, or our siblings breeds distrust and fear and nothing good can come of it. There are even our failed attempts to hide our own secrets from ourselves allowing our souls to slowly wither, ruining our relationships, stymying our creativity, and preventing us from living our lives fully. 

I chose the peridot quote above since it is my birthstone, but also because of the properties that Patrick ascribed to it (see her author's note). Right now in my life I am working to overcome the old negative thought patterns, based on old family issues, that I have allowed to hold me back. We can find ourselves trapped in negative or fearful thought patterns and it seems we can't out run them. I now know that there is a way out. It takes courage and hard work to make changes that bring you to a new place in life. After ten years at a very stressful job, I prayed for a solution and it came in the form of a new job. Now I'm battling the anxiety that comes with starting all over, but it's been a good thing and I am so grateful to be able to renew my life, find ways to express my own creativity, and to repair the damage to my soul. This whole summer has been about finding my voice and using it. 

Transplanting - The Little French Bistro

Transplanting - Art journal
mixed media

If you are a gardner like me, you know that every once in a while you must pull up a plant and move it. Early in my gardening career I needed to learn how to pair a plant with its sun needs. Sure the nursery is kind enough to give you a plant stake in the pot to help with placement but what do they really mean by part sun/part shade or full sun. Is that spot in your yard which gets some shade really partial shade or not? It is only by getting to know your yard do you discover how to nurture your garden. Kind of like your own soul.

But things change, nothing stays the same and that is true of your garden and soul. Trees grow and cast new patterns of shade. Soil needs to be amended. Plants grow larger and need to be pruned and moved about. The same happens to us, we change, we grow, we stagnate, we allow fear to overwhelm us, and the next thing - if we are lucky enough - we find ourselves desperate for change, and that's where Marianne of Nina George's The Little French Bistro finds herself.

Marianne is a sixty year old, German woman who finds herself in Paris the famous place of light, love, art, food and she is desperate to rid herself of her husband and her old way of life - desperate enough to throw herself off a bridge and into the Seine hoping to end her misery. She is furious when a homeless man witnesses her suicide attempt and jumps in to save her. A night in a psychiatric hospital, one counseling session with a doctor, finds Marianne stealing a painted tile from a nurse's desk, on which is depicted a scene of a French port where she has decided to travel in order to end her life. SPOILER ALERT - She doesn't succeed.

Marianne, however, does succeed in finding herself. The lesson here is that we can begin the search for our inner beauty, for our passion in life through work that brings joy, we can make like minded friends, we can find love and sexuality, at any time whether it be our twenties, forties, or sixties. It's never too late. Better yet it is important to start sooner rather than later. The pull of our old ways of thinking, that miserable stinking thinking, is strong. Even Marianne is fooled and trapped by it when her husband comes to find her. Luckily her internal sense that her soul is dying in this man's presence and that she doesn't want to experience that for a day longer sends her fleeing from him once more.

What is it in my life that makes me feel dead inside? For that is a clear sign that life needs changing. And like a plant or a Marianne (I spell my name with a y by the way - coincidence? I wonder.), I can be transplanted. Dig one's self up out of the soil carefully not to damage roots, shake free those roots so that they will be free to absorb water and nutrients from its new location. Perhaps there is some pruning to be done to encourage new growth. Maybe some extra babying with frequent waterings and a shot of good fertilizer. Then that plant or person can stretch out their roots and become a new member of the garden community, playing a key role that can only be filled by them.

Picking a book because of its cover

Artist Paintbox
from a visit to an open studio

There's a reason for cover art and that's to entice us to pick the book up and give it a closer look. How did they do it in the old days when all the books were bound in leather with gold tooling on the spine one looking pretty much like every other one? I imagine the quintessential Englishmen's library as featured in movies and design magazines.  I love strolling among the shelves looking for something that peaks my interest.

There are other methods to searching cover art for inspiration like flipping through BookPage: America's Book Review so thoughtfully left in the teacher's workspace by our wonderful school librarian. Her ploy is to get teachers to help with providing suggestions for the school catalogue, but I use it for my personal reading gain. There it was on the page, a cover featuring an open watercolor palette and brush, Julia Glass's A House Among the Trees.

Mort Lear, famous illustrator and children's book author, has foolishly, especially at his advancing age, climbed up onto the roof to clean away some debris left by a storm, only to fall to his death. His long time, live-in personal assistant Tomasina (Tommy) Daulair has inherited the house along with the responsibility of managing his literary/artistic estate. Enter a small cast of characters whose lives have been touch some way or another by Mort and his artwork. There is Meredith a museum curator to whom Mort as promised to donate a large portion of his work upon his death; Franklin his lawyer; Nick the actor who is to play Mort in a biopic movie; and Dani, Tommy's younger brother, who unwittingly served as the model for Mort's breakout work. It is through these people that we learn about Mort's character and his past. He presented a different face to each of them as he worked hard to hide his real self.

Mort, like many, suffered a trauma in his childhood which he never spoke about and kept hidden. The keeping of secrets leads one to develop mechanisms to protect the self, and prevent the rest of the world from knowing the truth. We are afraid that the world will not understand. They will judge us harshly regardless of the fact that we are a victim and not the perpetrator. As a result we become stunted. It is only by Mort's death and the coming together of this small group of characters that we can come to know the real Mort, and the truth is the real Mort lost out on a lot of life by holding onto his secrets. Finding the courage to voice our secrets allows us to be freed of them thereby giving us the opportunity to use all the energy that was dissipated in keeping those secrets and channel it into living more fully.

Reading to see the other side of life - Domestic Violets

Flower Family - acrylic paint, magazine
scraps, vintage card and children's book
scraps, and a piece of Wordsworth. 

Reading is one of those ways that we escape from our lives and look to learn about how the other half lives. If we are poor we dream of being rich; live in a city read about village life; and if we are female to understand how men think. We humans use language to convey our thoughts, but does what I see on the page and comprehend the same as what you see? For an excellent explanation about vision and the concept of qualia, watch this Vsauce Video.

I had been in a bit of a rut reading books about women who woke up one day and found that they were pursuing the wrong career, in the wrong relationship, or challenged by some major loss - loved one's death, job termination, etc. I was most likely drawn to those books because I was wondering about my own life and the path that I was on. Lo and behold I found Matthew Norman's Domestic Violets, the story of thirty-five year old Tom Violet - corporate flunky, husband, father, and son.  He and his wife have hit a rough patch in their marriage and both of them end up being attracted to other people. He works for one of the nebulous corporations that don't seem to do anything important but must keep the profits rolling in, he's attracted to his younger co-worker and in combat with a rule following competitor for the next big promotion. Tom dreams of becoming a major author, but he has one major stumbling block - his father - famed author Curtis Violet who has just won the Pulitzer.

Tom has written a novel, but he submits it to his friend a literary agent under a nom de plume, "A family can only support one writer, right?" (p. 157) Tom's belief in this statement prevents him from finding his own voice (my reoccurring theme this summer), from separating himself from who his father is. Turns out Tom discovers that he is more like his father than he would like to be, and finds out that his father isn't so bad after all, "Being your father has always been one of his favorite things to be. He was afraid to admit that when he was younger." (p. 259) Of course isn't that one of our biggest challenges in life - finding our own voice, but learning that it has been shaped by who our parents are. Nature and nurture play a key role in who we become and no matter how much we want to deny it in the end it is always there.

I never thought I would be an artist. In fact, I resist calling myself that mostly because don't you have to sell your work or be recognized by the establishment to use that title? No, you don't. I've come to realize, that if I make art, I must be an artist. My mother is an accomplished artist, and growing up I too had the strange notion that there could only be one artist in the family. Now I know that belief is just not true.