"i always have a pile" -carrie loucks

so its been one month and four days since i last put keys to screen here...an important trip to haiti, a humiliating end to what i believed was a special relationship, a holiday crisis intervention, an earthquake, a difficult journey back to school, a birthday adventure...all things i have managed NOT to write about...and now i sit dwarfed by this pile of words in my head that would have to be sorted and stacked and sealed together with commas and "dot dot dots" to even begin to try to construct my experiences and thoughts here in a way that might be of use for the greater good. maybe it is because i have talked about them too much to no real avail, maybe it is because i have been sitting with my own stuff too long to be motivated to devote any more creative energy to it, maybe i am just lazy...but when i imagine building that tower of words it feels about as useful as stacking up all the bricks that have fallen in haiti during this month that has gone by...they will be all together but still a mess...and still in the way....and nothing new will have been created...but tonight i had new thoughts that i did get excited about exploring...that pile of words just seemed to be in the way, even before i sat down to write...now that i have made a path around it i am going to leave the pile where it lays...for now...you never know...and the birthday adventure is a pretty good story...the birthday miracles just keep comin...thanks for the new shoes state radio :)

as for these new thoughts...

i was sitting in an african dance class...i just realized how backwards that sounds...to be sitting in an african dance class...but i was...just taking a break to witness (and breathe...i am thirty you know now...hehe...and just a little sickly this week)...anyway...there were three men all drumming in a row on nearly identical djembes and i noticed the most interesting thing...
...the youngest and newest member of the group sat with a straight back and played his drum solidly and almost formally, like they were strangers. it seemed each stroke was a risk or an offering to the drum, to see what the drum might do with it..
...on the other end a white haired man played his drum more comfortably, like and old friend. it seemed he wasn't so much playing the drum as the drum and his hands were having a conversation...
...but the man in the center. he didn't play his drum at all...he moved with the drum, and the drum with him, like it was part of his own body. as he played there was so separation between his movements and the movements of the instrument or the sound it made...he was not putting rhythms onto the drum but seemed to move through the drum, drawing out of it a rhythm as naturally as taking a breath..and letting it draw rhythm from him just as easily...
watching these men and dancing to the music they created showed me something beautiful and powerful...there is so much there i won't begin to try just yet...it was a picture so big i am still taking it in...

as if that were not enough...

on the way home i turned up the radio just in time to hear michael stipe singing "its the end of the world as we know it, and i feel fine"...and i had the weirdest reaction...i immediately saw haitians standing all over the capitol and countryside singing this at the top of their lungs...in english...with R.E.M. backing them up...i told you it was weird. it gets better...as they sang i realized that all the crumbled buildings had melted into fresh clay. i had this childlike urge to dig into that clay and help to shape it into something fun and wonderful before it dried in the shapes of the former buildings...
i would be the last person on earth to want to say anything that even hints at diminishing the pain and loss of what is going on in that nation that i love so much...to those people i love so much...so it is with some caution that i say that in that moment i realized that i have more hopeful and excited thoughts than ones of despair or sadness as i thought of my beloved haiti tonight...right now haiti is experienceing devastation and suffering that can never be measured. it will never be the same...in many ways that is heartbreaking. but in others, i feel way more than fine about the idea that things might never be the same. i would be more than fine with an end to power systems based on fear instead of fairness, an end to poverty rooted in poor choices by foreigners made centuries ago, an end to struggles of fellow humans being ignored simply because those humans have nothing we want, an end to cycles repeating because education it unavailable to the next generation. if we are talking about the end of that world, i do feel fine. doors have been opened and systems have been challenged, and the world has been changed because of those 40 unimaginable seconds. i would love to the many evidences we have seen of strength, love, creativity and resilience have wide berth to grow and flourish and become "the norm." and this is not just about haiti. be it earthquakes or recessions...revivals or revolutions....i think things are happening all over right now that might feel like the end of the world as we know it...what if that is the beginning of a world like we never dreamed...these struggles are revealing a goodness that we didn't know or remember...what if there is room being made for more beauty and more harmony and more love than we would have ever anticipated possible in the world as we know it? just. what. if.

new year...old canvases

i could talk about 2009 so many different ways...part of me is astounded that it has been a year since my amazing surprise party 20 days before the big day and the other part of me feels like a lifetime has gone by in these last 365 days...both the not good and good of this year have been pretty heavy and there is just so much there...frankly i am relieved to welcome 2010 if for no other reason than to start fresh and breathe a little...i am actually super psyched to turn 30 oddly enough... something about it just seems like a great idea...i don't think i am very good at being twenty something anymore so i guess it is time...anyway...i feel like a year that has been so much deserves some attention but at the same time i feel a desperate need to look ahead right now and not back...so this is kind of a slippery slope for me...but before i can go forward i did have to go back to that party this time last year...to something about 2009 that is going to be really important in 2010and probably every year after...the night i first put paint to canvas.

god told me to paint around the time he told me about what i could do with dance if i wanted to...and about the time he told me i could go to haiti...i don't have a lot of fears...but blank canvas scared me...or at least intimidated me...
i am the kind of girl who loves to take whatever junk is already laying around and fix up a room but has no ability for interior design when the palette is mine to create...i could color inside or outside the lines with great flare but something about the openness and freedom of new white canvas stopped me short. but the thing in me is a new thing...not like anything i am going to find in the world already...and if i want to see it happen i am going to have to start drawing my own lines to be colored in and around.
and so god said to paint.
that was at the beginning of last year. and some of the beautiful people i am so blessed to know surrounded me one night in early january with supplies, and snacks, and songs, and love and we all embraced the canvas together. we shared palettes and pages and our faces and hair even became each other's canvases before the night was over. it was a glorious introduction to the new thing, this new season, and this new way of life. it has been freeing, it has been messy, and it has forever changed me. it seemed appropriate that i was painting again on that day this year...a much quieter night but as we poured ourselves anew onto last year's canvases a lot came to mind about what painting teaches me everytime i pick up a palet knife...so here is 2009 from the angle of the easel...

anything important to you requires space...there should be spaces in your space for the things you love...spaces to paint...to dance...to play

there are no rules in art...but just like everywhere else...there are consequences

you can go too far...the hardest thing to do is stop painting and let it dry a while but if you don't you end up with busy, blurry, or brown...

you can always paint over it....but you can't take it back...and that isn't the same thing...whether it is hidden completely or becomes part of a new picture you will know what is under there...

if you are afraid to spill you won't paint to the edges...

your favorite jeans can be your paint jeans too...or not...either way is fine

creating paintings is like creating dances...songs...lives...sometimes it is hard to tell what it is going to be until it is done...

you can try to wait to clarify your vision but often if you will just start the vision makes itself real...

art is messy...but the mess is part of the beauty...and the most authentic things in this world both on and off the page are usually more messy than not

as i move into a new year, a new semester, and a new decade of life...i am looking at a lot of fresh spaces waiting for me to bring color to...i am also holding more than one old canvases to be revived with new strokes...

im moving to a new house when i get back to new hampshire and in addition to a great location, and a great roomate, i will have a great space for painting...and i am really looking forward to filling it...and all that could come out of that...

PAINT this year...i dare you!

random firing of neurons...

so i dreamed that my rosetaina was not only alive but so heavy i couldn't pick her up...she was in the hospital as was her daddy played here by snoop dogg (wearing a teameffort service with a smile workshirt) both being treated my jonathan...who was also directing the latest music video of the air instrument bob marley cover band that kervens, peterson, franz and i formed on my first trip to haiti...the video had a free walking theme and the buttons on the camera he used to film the video were also used to manage the care of the patients in the hospital....and then my daddy kept getting in trouble with my mother for catering to the organic food requests of the hospital director who was a red headed murphy brown or chelsea lately...it seemed to change...and that is just the beginning...i really hope i get into psychoanalysis of dreams next semester :)

the bottom of the barrel

so i am still a little hit or miss working with stainless steel cookware - i was raised on cast iron and non-stick oddly enough - and last night i was scrubbing all the seasoning and yumminess that should have been on the chicken i cooked off the bottom of a skillet when i had a flashback to my first day in the feeding program at jubilee. i was with a team of wonderful southern women and we had made our way into the village with 5 gallon buckets of rice and bean sauce, and huge kivet filled with an assortment of plates bowls and spoons. there is a unique math to feeding programs, divide however much food you have as many ways as you want and it will always equal less than the number of mouths at the door. as such, we feed the youngest, the sickest, the ones with the orangest hair first. with the exception of a few, most of the kids do a pretty good job of putting themselves in this order, big brothers feeding younger siblings first or giving their food away to a sicker child all together. anyway, on this day, i was crowd control while the other women served the plates. even after careful counting we still came up several plates short. i had already told these children to come in, that we had food for them! so in desperation i went to the buckets wondering how we could have estimated so poorly. what i found there was oh. so. profound.
the scorched rice.
it had never occurred to these wonderful southern women, even in a dirty shed of a room filled with naked children sitting on the ground eating off dirty plates with their hands, to serve overcooked rice...and i don't mean this to disparage these ladies at all, of course to them what an insult that would be to anyone at their table!
but it gets better...not only are we talking about children who will get one meal a day (hopefully) but in haiti, like in many cultures where they eat a lot of rice, the scorched rice at the bottom of the pot is like licking the bowl, like the middle brownie, the best cut of the meat, the swirl off the ice cream cone...whatever you are into...its the best part. of course the ladies had no way of knowing this, but its the rice haitian kids would fight over in their own homes.

lately i feel like i have been scraping the bottom of the bucket in a lot of areas of my life. this moment at the sink reminded me of the lesson i learned watching kids devour burnt rice. it may feel like i've barely got anything left, and like what i have managed to scrape up is too ruined or embarrassing to offer. but beyond it being better than nothing...it might be just what someone is hoping for.

crawling is hard

last spring i met a girl who should have been learning to run. instead she could barely sit herself up, gravity dragging her slight frame towards the earth...her bones bearing the weight of an unknowable amount of pain. she wanted to be held all the time...and to leave her in a crib was an unbearably pitiful undertaking. but we knew to cradle her constantly would aid the weakness in her who would welcome the death that hovered around her...so we urged her ever so gently to move, to reach, to crawl...the first time i actually forced myself to walk away from the tiny pleadings that would have come forth as wailing from a different mouth...something extraordinary happened. i was called in to see what my baby "had done". i expected a mess by a healthier toddler in the house but instead i found my new little love making her way up the three stairs into the hall that lead to my room...she had crawled almost 50 feet already.

and do you know what i did?

i clapped, and went for my camera, and danced and celebrated.
but she didn't want pictures or applause, she wanted me to pick her up.
she had made all this effort to beg for what she needed and i stood there and clapped and snapped digital pictures. what a fool i was. how rejected and humiliated she must have felt in those precious moments that i took to honor the moment for myself or at least in MY way instead of for her only. i will never forget what it felt like to pick her up and sit holding her on those stairs. i will never look at that photo without some bittersweetness that it exists. i will also never forget what it felt like later to get on the floor and crawl every day so that she would crawl with me.

let me just say there is a reason we learn how to walk.

crawling is hard.

not just that, it is limiting. it keeps us low and vulnerable. exposed and defenseless. it is awkward and humbling. crawling is hard. it is all these things that motivate us to conquer the precarious idea of balancing on two legs and moving freely about the planet. walking may be scary but it is a change of pace and persective that crawling teaches us to value immensely.

during an exercise in authentic movement for class i found myself on the floor crawling. i haven't done that since before rosetaina died in july. the flood of tears and ache that always seem to be poised like a wave about to crash do just that, pressing my face to the wooden floor. it was here that i first imagined what it would feel like if someone had chosen to mark this moment with a picture instead of an embrace. it was here i finally embraced not just the diligence but the humility and desperation of her efforts that day.

and here that i embraced that of my own efforts of late.

i have let life knock me down and i can't seem to get back up. all i can really do is crawl.

and crawling is hard.

sand and stars and parachutes

everyone should get the chance to run down the beach at midnight with cold sand between their toes and a sea of stars above them swallowing up the sound of the waves floating a huge parachute behind them on the wind like a cape...like a train...like wings. its magical.

p.s. hiding under the parachute and fooling passersby into thinking you are a big rock is pretty fun too.

keeping up

so i live on the side of a small mountain/large hill....i don't know...its made of rock and you can't drive over it...being from ga i don't really have the skill to classify such things well yet...anyway...at some point when luke (my giant moose of a dog) and i are walking the trails in the woods he always gets really far ahead of me and i lose sight of him...once i start to turn around and head back i always whistle and call for him and try to get him to come "get with the program" ....and every single time as i walk back wondering when he is going to catch up he inevitably pops up in front of me somehow...he has been following alongside me the whole time, just off the trail where i wasn't aware of him...but when i call for him he always comes, even if it means he has to backtrack...and even though HE was not the one who was "off track"...and he will stay right with me until he senses that i am not really concerned anymore and then he will head back to traveling his way...hoping i will follow for the adventure but if i just stick to the trail he keeps up with me in his own way until i am looking for him again....
tell me there isn't a sermon in that.