After 30 Years I planted California Poppies

 

California Poppies in Washington

Hi friends! I hope this post finds you all very well and enjoying success in your lives.

It's been some time since my last post so I thought I'd start off easy. I bring you flowers. The iconic California Poppy, a botanic reminder of my time in the Golden State (1983-1994). I planted cal poppies this summer, and it's the first time I have ever had any success with them in 30 years here. I've tried seeds wild sewn, and also seeds in trays, started indoors. This year I bought two pots of starts from Sunseed Farm and despite making them hold in their pots for much longer than they might have liked, the plant took off once it was in the ground. It is literally in the hottest, driest, deadest soil in my yard. The poppies are thriving. 

The poppies have me thinking about my time in Los Angeles and the yards and gardens I had, and the gardens I visited during my decade there. Recently I decided I'm giving myself 10 years to turn this garden into something interesting. A garden is never finished I would say, it is always in need of care. The garden I am planning currently is developing and I am trying to approach it with intention and methodology, with sensitivity to native species and culture, while respecting and nurturing the land. And it must be a garden that can withstand climate change!

I just finished reading Rebecca Solnit's "Orwell's Roses" so I'm little inspired by flowers and what they mean. Earlier this year I read two books on history of art that focused solely on women. Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin, and Katy Hessel's The Story of Art Without Men. This has been my research recently, to identify female artists to look up to, especially Canadian ones. I'm embarrassed by how few I know but I am equally pleased by who I am finding. Rebecca Belmore's work falls into that category. 

Garden Plan 2022

The biggest thing my yard, garden, property gives me, is a place of calm and meditation, the place I do my work. I am not interested in or can I even imagine a finished thing down to every plant. Like many things I am letting the whole thing evolve as it should. I'm establishing more interesting lines of sight from key spots on the property, the view from the place you first enter the clearing and the view from the living room west into the forest which currently contains too many obstacles for my liking. The years I spent living and working  here have informed what I want to look at, how the place might look and feel. I have different concerns now than I did 30 years ago when I first began.

The orange yellow poppy is warm and bold, with its impossibly delicate stem and flashy head, it survives at the roadside, and the seaside in wind that batters it, sun that feeds it. It is not a passive flower either, closing its petals to survive cooler nights. Succulent looking, its exquisite stem structure  suggests serpentine ironwork, as it stretches across the ground. 

Dad at home

My sister planted fantastic orange Marigolds along the strip of wall between dad's house and the next house. The Marigolds are huge and frothy growing in amongst strawberries, some decorative grass, Heather and this and that, that my sister pulled from here and there. It's part of the process of being at his house with him as his companions and caregivers. It's something I am incredibly proud to be able to be involved in. He is aging at home and doing very well with our gentle support. I just spent two days with him. We walk around his neighborhood, I point out plants and flowers as we go, we casually monitor progress of all that grows near our path.

Goodbye Dooce

My Drawing of Heather Brooke Hamilton, aka Heather B. Armstrong, aka dooce.com (original photo from the internet)

July 19, 1975 - May 9, 2023

I watched the video of Heather Armstrong's memorial today. Not all 3 hours but much of it. 

When I started this blog in 2007 it was because people like her existed. She was blazing a trail that we had not quite seen before, she turned her blogging into a social media business. She created her own celebrity. I have followed her over the years with interest and despair at times. I have watched others swoon over her as they try to make their own way as social media mavens. Even as I saw her succeed I wondered about the impact of the activity on her. She had grown thin, visibly drawn. I read the comments on her instagram, they were brutal. Really for no reason, but that friction seems to compel many things. Interestingly in the final montage of photos of her from the past 5 yrs or so she is never without her phone. In the end her partner Pete Ashdown confirmed that it took a terrible toll on her.

When I heard she had died of suicide I felt shocked but maybe not surprised. I wanted to acknowledge her here with a drawing and a tip of the cap to her. She lived well, worked hard, was unapologetic and was the absolute queen of the selfie. She struggled and suffered with depression, mental illness and the big one, alcoholism. I looked at a few of her last posts, she had been sharing her drawings, feeling good about sobriety. It's all laid out there.

We became sober about the same time it turns out. In October of this year it will be 3 years for me. I make no predictions or conclusions. Goodbye Dooce.

The digital and the real

 

This is what a digital conversation with my husband looks like these days. In adjacent countries we open up private portals in our living rooms and have something that resembles a conversation. While these calls can feel surreal I am grateful I have them. At this time last year I did not have internet stable enough to have a predictable video call. When COVID hit and everyone was working from home, suddenly the video call became a necessity. I would regularly drive a few miles from my house to a nearby cell tower to participate in online meetings with clients. I didn't make a big thing about the fact I was in my car I just carried on. Everyone expects you to have the internet if you are in business, hell if you are alive. My lack of internet was a point of shame at times, a badge of courage at others.

The promise of better internet has been hovering around us for a few years. Better cell service helped for a long time and the fact that I could not stream media was actually ok with me. I got a lot of work done instead of looking at inane videos online. I read more during that time and of course I used the internet but in a very deliberate way. I handled my phone much less. I was more focused.

But the internet caught up with me and so too has the anxiety about it. In March this year we got DSL service via the existing phone lines. This work is part of an initiative to provide internet access to everyone in remote areas of the US. I am literally at the farthest point on my road that the signal can reach. Neighbors to the north still rely on satellite service. Being presented with the entirety of the internet to stream in my home was amazing but now 8 months in I am beginning to feel the old malaise returning. Time vanishes into screens. The light of the screen replacing the sun for our attention and I know it's time to turn away.

My husband joked when we first met 20 years ago that our relationship was perfect in every way except for my home internet. Now of course, he'd like a bit more bandwidth. 

COVID-19 Report

Where I will be for the duration.

And then everything changed as the wave of virus swept over the land.

But you have to get up everyday. So I have been doing that and I have even been trying to work but I have also been watching my body respond to the stress of the unknowingness of this event. I have been cleaning, organizing, moving my things around. Thinking about getting things taken care of in the event I do become ill. The US/Canada border is closed so there goes my love life. The closure is presenting an interesting forced retreat on both my husband and me. I'm philosophical. We have been here before. Once for 6 months he was away, and we survived that. We're adults after all not hysterical children. The truth is I only go out about twice a week under normal conditions. When gas was up around 4 bucks a gallon I limited the 40 mile roundtrip to town to about once a week. I don't feel like I am missing much, hermitess that I am. The worst part is all the nervous energy and where to put it. The library is closed. My brain is splintered. I try to maintain a normal routine but I am noticing how little urgency I feel to work. I go back and forth from feeling inspired to just feeling as lazy as all get out. What has honestly changed for us? We are slightly more trapped than normal and now with fewer retail opportunities. I wish I had more food on hand but I also like the potential for pandemic weight loss. Occasionally the thought of escape comes to mind as if I had that ability and the reality hits that this thing is everywhere, there is no escape. Makes me think of a few dreams I've had where I am somewhere distant and unfamiliar and I can feel the pull to return to what is familiar even though the effort to get to this new location was difficult and time consuming. I am here. I am waiting for this thing to pass and I am trying to keep my mind in a happy free space where I can think about and do the things I want to. I'm lucky, so very lucky to have my home to shelter in place in. It's spring and I can't help but be outside to catch the show. Yesterday we had thunder, today there are violets. The news is complex and will likely get worse. In this moment I feel fine.

Here's something I worked on while we were locked down.

January 2020

I have been out of touch, and a bit off balance because of it. January is always a slow work month. The weather has been bad, my husband and dog both got sick. There was flooding eventually and a record number of consecutive days of precipitation. Rather than gnash my teeth or worse, I have been flirting with moderation, reading a lot, dreaming, and I launched a new website for my design business. Here’s what I have been reading and reacting to in the world. My lovely sister gave me the book, “Year of the Monkey” by Patti Smith, for Christmas. I have never been a Patti Smith devotee, I am not a detractor either, I had never really thought very much about her before 2016. I knew about Maplethorpe, I knew about her music a bit. I think the role she played for many young female American artists was for me filled by Canadian Joni Mitchell. I know a few of Patti’s songs and I was very interested in her performance of a song by Bob Dylan during his Nobel Prize ceremony. She was overcome and stumbled a bit, and had to stop singing. She writes about it later and I think it was that writing that I first connected with her as an artist. I mean who wouldn’t be overwhelmed singing a song by a legend, in front of an audience filled with cultural dignitaries and such. Who wouldn’t become hyper aware and lost. I read a bit about her then, she seemed very down to earth which maybe surprised me. So I was pleased to receive the book. It’s light reading, small format, some photos, a rambling travelogue look at an artist making sense of her life. Familiar territory to me. I then immediately read from the “Why I Write” series from Yale University, an essay called “Devotion”. This is a great reminder that the muse cannot be sanctioned into work. So she generated some spark as she does reading and visiting the graves of artists. A strange story arrives inside her in place of the essay she thinks she’s trying to imagine, and she writes it all down, and continues on with her life of visiting the sites of some really interesting humans, and recording her thoughts about her surroundings and feelings. “Devotion” ends with her having a sleepover with Camus’ daughter! What a great gig! So I applaud her for that. She is active in her practice. She does drop a ton of literary names which was annoying at first, and what her writing lacks in interest she more than makes up for with her openness about sharing her experiences with us. The travelogue is an interesting book form and in this case, art form. Books have been important to her and she reminds us of that again and again.  My next books are by my recent favorite Scottish author Ali Smith. I discovered her quite by accident a few years ago in my local library, a fact that I think would please her. As I am writing this I have now read "Autumn" and "Winter" of the seasonal series. Spring is up next, Summer not yet published. She must be flying, working on number four. The subject matter Brexit is current and so its character is developing further. Now Trump has been acquitted! 

I first came across a small edition of hers called “Artful” and devoured it. It was one of those books that contains an answer to a question you’ve been trying to formulate. Completely impossible to describe, informative. Which is an apt word because her play with the novel form is unique and she has tremendous curiosity about language which is inspiring. Her subjects often involve art and thought. Her writing also contains elements of the surreal which coexist easily with the real. Hallucinations, dreams, all play a roll and time shifts all around it like a serpent.

A college friend shared this online recently. 'The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.'
—W.B. Yeats I haven't read much Yeats but I seek that sharpness. I try to thin myself out when I am out in the world, in order to mesh more with those magic things. Ali Smith and Patti Smith both access those magic things in their writing. 

Also read a terrific article in Geist magazine about Yoko Ono, written by Connie Kuhns. Talk about your feminist artist maverick role model. She's been to hell and back but she has kept on, and her vision and voice are so clear. She arrived on the scene early and was quite misunderstood as an artist. She was no pop music singer but she became a pop culture icon. An early multimedia artist, using film and installations, happenings, art as live event. She was a boundary pusher. She also got a ton of push back but she has prevailed with a message of peace and curiosity. She may be my new feminist crush.

Come to be with Me

It was less of a plague, more like mild nausea
the frogs started appearing after the rain
One came in and hid itself from me
I kept the lemon tree wet for it
this visitor from another world
Come to be with me
Every evening it sang its song, slowly drawing me
closer and closer to it until finally it revealed itself to me
I cupped my hands around its body barely holding it
Its wet skin anointing the palms of my hands
Did it worry it would never leave my kitchen, did I
or did it give it no thought at all
and instead got to work wowing me
with it's impressively loud creaking tenor
Singing me toward freedom

R. Moore




Thanks to writer Maria McLeod for encouragement.

Transitional

Cha cha changes. Summer is waning away so soon. I'm just working doggedly for clients and myself, enjoying the pace of my various activities. Working on the property and thinking, ever thinking. I walked down into the little hollow where the barn is, the other night after sunset, and took these pictures of the sky through the trees. The light felt like that of murky dreams and faint memories of summer places. Small valleys, fields surrounded by trees, shorelines, dirt pathways, and damp sheets.

August. Softly dies earlier material. Drought that is natural. The ground and trees are drier now and for the first time I saw a news story illustrated with a map of the earth showing the places where water supply is becoming a real problem. I feel the imbalance but I forge on, looking for sparks of inspiration.

At college in the mid 80's I remember thinking that the whole nukes fear message in the media blinded us to many other things that were going on at the time. Chief among them the pollution created by our own appetite for cheap goods. We caused environmental degradation, resource mismanagement, institutional racism. And now we're running out of fresh water.

When I sat to write this this morning I was not sure where I was headed with it. It's always surprising what trickles out in the moment my hands hit the keyboard. I am slowly gaining greater connection to what I am making, saying, conveying, dealing with, whatever. And as always it's good to just show up everyday and see what unfolds. That's what I look forward to, the unfolding of my one unique life.

Flag waving

My thoughts on Patriotism

Summer has arrived. It is the season of patriotism and I am again reminded how I am two things, Canadian by birth, American by residency. I feel like both and I feel like neither. This is something I think about often, what am I tied to? Where do my loyalties lie? I think the answer is; in the land. My loyalty is to the land I am on and to the region I am in, regardless of which side of the border I find myself on. My Canadian husband was with us at home in the U.S. on Canada day and we shot off American fireworks on my rural property. My daughter has recently obtained her Canadian citizenship so it was her first official Canada day as one of us. That was Monday. Thursday was July 4th and the fireworks were all gone. My daughter made pickled beets and I laid on the couch marveling at her. When my daughter was young she always spent the holiday with her American father so I was generally on my own. It was often just another semi-gray early summer day in the Pacific Northwest. It felt weird that we had no familiar thing to do together and that because of the crazy political climate we are in as Americans currently it's hard to to drop the knives and join our voices in song. Doing so feels so trite, all the quotes about liberty and images of waving flags on social media, not to mention the blue glitter eye shadow and color coordinated outfits. I watched this flag flapping in the breeze on my walk today. I stood under it for awhile and then made this video of it's shadow.

Some things that are inspiring me right now are:
Artist Heidi Gustafson's Almanac of Divination

T'ang Boogie is probably the first "film d'artiste" created by a modern Chinese painter with his own works. In 1973, with the help of film maker Tom Tam, T'ang Haywen gives life to the random paths of ink on paper.

Netherlands artist Diana Scherer seen here on IG