My Sacred Life and Committed to Creativity

The last few days have felt like maybe I should just be COMMITTED. Period. I've fallen behind in writing about my Sacred Life and about what I've been doing that's creative, so this is my attempt at a catch-up for everything, bad and good, that's been going on around here.

I'm spending the weekend with just the girls, as Joel has recently been invited to play baseball with a very good traveling team from Visalia--So he and Richard are at a tournament in Santa Maria this weekend. I let the Katie have three girlfriends over to spend Friday night (what was I thinking?!!). Actually they were great, but when they left they were all going to a birthday party to which Katie had not been invited. To Katie's credit, she handled it very well, helping them to make birthday cards out here in the studio, and even helping to wrap the presents, since I said I'd drop the girls off instead of their moms coming to get them and then bringing them back for the party, which was just down the road from us. Incidents like this make me feel very humble and blessed, watching twelve-year-old Katie deal so graciously with something that would be difficult for me at 43...

I've sold two paintings during the last ten days, always exciting to think that someone wants to share my art...

I got an email Friday morning from another artist that threw me for a loop. She explained that she has been using the sea urchins (from Albertus Seba's 'Cabinet of Curiousities') for a long time as trees, and that they were sort of her thing, and she was attached to them, and would I stop using them. I went and looked, and sure enough, she's done LOTS and LOTS of paintings using the sea urchins as trees. So I started to reply, saying 'oh, certainly, I won't use them as I can see you're very attached to them, I can go back to using flowers and decorative papers' and then I thought--wait a minute. She mentions 'artistic integrity' as though I copied her, which I did not. It really bothered me, not only that she would write to me in the first place, but that, just like a 'nice girl,' I would just automatically do as she asked. Now the truth is, I probably won't use them anymore, since after seeing all her many many many paintings using them, I want to use something else. But I am not going to apologize or make promises when I did nothing wrong.

This was an unpleasant experience, but looking at it from a little distance I can see that this is part of my Sacred Life Journey as well. Just as five years ago I could not have stood up to the neighbors about their killer dogs, five years ago I would have apologized just to make someone else happy, even if it wasn't the right thing for me. Am I making sense? I'm growing and stretching a little bit here, I think.

Last night Katie and Jenny and I spent some time all together in Katie's room. Jenny was watching a movie (the kids don't have cable in their rooms, but my sister bought them DVD players, so they each have a small TV), and Katie and I were lying on the bed. We had Jack and Jill, the two little feral kittens we are trying to tame, running around the room with us, and I thought, oh, what a nice moment this is... Again, how blessed I am, how full is my life...

Finally, I think back to earlier this week, when I was woken up by Katie at two o'clock in the morning. "Mom, there's a lunar eclipse tonight! Want to go outside and watch it with me?" Well, no, actually I'm asleep and I'd like to continue sleeping... But, okay. We get a sleeping bag and go and lie in the front yard together, and for a most magical hour we watched the shadow of the earth creep across the face of the moon, snuggled together in the sleeping bag on the grass, cats playing around us and old black dog watching over us. And just before the eclipse was complete, Katie squeezed me and said, "Oh, Mom, we are so lucky."

And I thought, well, yes. We are.