Recent Drawings and Watercolors

Well, I certainly haven't been writing here much, but I've been busy with book projects, the start of choir season, preparing for a wedding of dear young friends in Vermont this coming weekend, having guests and seeing friends as summer winds down into fall. Our weather has been pretty much gorgeous here in Montreal, still warm enough for t-shirts and sandals, so it doesn't really feel like fall yet except, of course, it is. The evidence is in the hint of color in the trees, a few fallen leaves, the markets overflowing with cabbages and cauliflower, apples and late berries, the last of the sweet corn, colored squashes, baskets of tomatoes, armfuls of basil. In the evenings I've been drawing, and as usual some sort of flowers or plants tend to make their way onto the page. In my community garden there's not much left in bloom except some beautiful Japanese wind anemones, which look so pretty with the magenta flowers of cosmos.

I just haven't had the kind of quiet time lately that's necessary for writing, and I'm not sure when it will open up, or what form it needs to take, but I feel an increasing need for that to happen. I'm considering what I want to do with Phoenicia in 2017, and with my own projects that have been on the back burner for too long. A recent birthday has also figured in this equation, reminding me that time does not hold still. I need to reassess priorities and make more room for the things I really want to do.

But what exactly are they? Why, I wonder, is it sometimes so hard to figure out what we really want, even when we have the freedom to make those choices? Why is it so difficult to balance our own needs with those of others, and with the many responsibilities and genuine joys in our lives that often compete with each other for attention? 

 

I've always loved to cook, for instance, but I've noticed that when I stay at the studio until 5 or 6 and then go home to prepare a meal in a short amount of time, I don't enjoy it nearly as much and even resent it, because I haven't had any time to unwind or rest before starting yet another task. When I go home earlier, with some time perhaps to stop at the markets for special provisions, or sit down with a recipe book and try something new, it's a pleasure and I enjoy it. But, of course, that takes time away from the studio. And so it goes...There's no right answer, but when I feel that tightness that signals resentment and too-muchness, or I feel a longing because I've been away from something I love for too long, it's time to pay attention and make some changes.

Women, in particular, seem afflicted with this problem, as I've written here before, but I'm surprised that it persists so long in our lives. That means it's ingrained; I was taught by my mother that being selfish was just about the worst thing imaginable. Christian and Buddhist philosophies piled on top of that, and as a result no amount of feminism or rational intellectualism have ever managed to completely rid me of guilt when I choose myself over the needs of others. And I bet it's the same for many of you. Looking back from later adulthood, now, I do think that being kind is just about the most important thing, but not through sacrificing or suppressing one's own needs or happiness. I've been fortunate to have more freedom than most women to develop my own sense of self, and to have a partner who encouraged that, but the external and internal pressure to give away my time to others has always been enormous. On the other hand, there is a balance for me between solitary pursuits that may be personally rewarding, and being in relationship and community: I need other people, and I love other people, and genuinely want to be of use in the world. So the dance continues, and we adjust our steps...where do you find your own answers to these questions?

Comments

[maria]

I spent many years trying to find the answers -- or, rather that clear and straight balancing beam that cuts through the "too-muchness" but was never successful. I am beginning to realize that "the" or even "an" answer is not the solution. Instead, as you point to it yourself, it's in the dance, in our steps that sometimes falter, making us lean too much this way or that.

[Andrea Murphy]

Beth, I really love the first watercolour. Simply delicious! What are the yellow things in the bowl?

As for the rest, I think maybe one never works that all out. But it's easier now for me to say "I just don't have it in me" and feel more matter-of-fact about it, rather than guilty.

[Roderick Robinson]

Nothing more selfish than writing. Just imagine what it looks like from the outside: the Selfish One becomes incommunicado regularly, and for long periods, and these days one needs a machine to verify whether anything at all happened during these absences. The Selfish One's conversational range shrinks and frequently becomes self-referential ("As I say in my current book...") and/or retreats into literary technicalities ("Did you know the difference between refute and rebut...?"). During increasingly rare time spent with others, usually reduced to watching telly, it becomes obvious the Selfish One's mind is on other things. During this telly-watching time the Selfish One will occasionally emerge from his coma and angrily denounce someone on the screen for some harmless syntactical solecism. At intervals of a couple of months the Selfish One will claim to be suffering from "block", a mysterious ailment without symptoms and any known cure, and will demand to be treated like an aged but extremely wealthy relative, now on his last legs, and much concerned with deciding who will be his legatees.

You're well out of it Beth. Have an extra martini when you get back, warm up a bought-in lasagne in its pathetic foil tray, and over the subsequent dinner insist that J "understands" you. Plan a vacation in Disneyland and raise the possibility that it's time to get rid of the family Volvo and acquire a second-hand 1960s Detroit gas-guzzler as an act of solidarity with the past. There are all sorts of alternative life-styles out there, je t'assure.

[Hattie]

I really love your drawings, Beth, especially the ones you've been doing lately.

[Marly Youmans]

Oh, I like the new watercolors....

I have had the great good luck of a husband who cooks well and likes to do it. I cook dinner rarely, mostly when he is away. I can hardly say what a great gift that is over many years, especially for a busy mother.

Balancing three children's needs with my work has been trickier, and still is. I find that if I yield to their various needs without any annoyance on my part, I somehow can find the corners of time to do my own work, even if it is not at the hammer-and-tongs rate my obsessive nature would prefer. It works out. Same with helping others.

All the arts are meant to be gifts to someone else--to more than one someone else--in the end, writing may be, as RR says (in his tongue-in-cheek, amusing way), selfish, at least in affect. But in the ideal, it is not so in effect. So I don't worry about that aspect of the arts too much. Talents are made to be used, not buried in the ground.

Perhaps those of us who care about them need to contemplate other parts of religious teachings when they seem to us to set up bars against free creation. Certainly the Bible is obsessed with a creator and a creation, and is made of tales and poems that often include God's injunctions to beautify the temple or tent or breast-plate, etc. It is full of references to the beauties of the world and their singular importance-lilies and foxes, mountains and seas and the creatures who live in them. It's also quite capable of praising a generous and "selfish" wastefulness, as in the nard and broken alabaster jar. These things, too, have something to say about beauty and human creativity.

[Rachel Barenblat]

I don't have good answers to these questions, but I am here to say that the questions are live for me too.

[Rachel Barenblat]

Oh, and I love these watercolors. The plums and the cosmos!

[Huw]

I always think that if I knew what I really wanted the rest would fall into place, and that not knowing is the problem. Not sure how true that is.

I'm reading Virginia Woolf's diaries this year and she struggles with exactly your questions.

The second watercolour is lovely, Beth, and aren't plums wonderful? My favourite fruit of the year.

[Natalie]

I suppose one reason I chose to live alone is that I can be as 'selfish' as I want with my time, as absorbed as I want to be with whatever is absorbing me, and no need for apologies or excuses. However I was also exceptionally lucky when married to have a husband who was supportive and didn't mind my 'absences' whether literal or metaphorical, and I didn't have children so that lets me off the hook too. Anyway I think it's more to do with individual character. A person (not me) who is driven, obsessed with an inner creative demon (or daemon) will pursue it regardless of whether this pursuit will damage their rapport with others; they will not think of themselves as selfish, the concept won't arise. Countless examples (not all of them male) among artists, writers etc. Maybe they weren't/aren't nice people and maybe they didn't have happy families, but.....

[Roderick Robinson]

I do hope everyone realises that the gloomy, self-centred, bowl-of-laughs portrayed in my comment was me and none other. That I wasn't casting nasturtiums.

[Beth]

I think it was clear who was writing, Robbie! But cheer up, and toss all the nasturtiums you want - I happen to like them, both in my vases and my salads!