Shorter Posts

After the fall, after you slam onto the cement and sit in shock, immobile, how awful is the damage? Any bones poking through the skin? Any bleeding? Other than your pelvis and a bump on your head from the ladder, is there any other pain? Can you wiggle your toes? Do you call an ambulance first or your wife? Where is your cell phone?

Multiple fractures of the pelvis, too many for surgery. After four days in a trauma ward, an ambulance transfers you to a rehab facility. The physical therapist examines your chart. “Seven fractures of your pelvis,” she says, “including Lumbar L5, Pubic Ramus Rt., Interior and Superior, etc. You sir, are my broken man.”

Not since you were an infant have you been so helpless. You cannot sit up, let alone stand up, or walk. You cannot dress yourself or go to the bathroom by yourself. During the following weeks you learn the names of your drugs: Tamsulosin, Apixaban, Mehocarbamol, Melatonin, plus Oxycodone HC1, and Lidocane Patches for the constant pain.

The marionette. Where did it come from? Already here when you arrived? Does anyone other than you even see it? Yesterday one of the nurses glanced in its direction, stared, shrugged, then continued making beds. For the most part it remains silent except, in the middle of the night, it emits faint sounds of a harpsichord.

Then this morning, in the dark, a little wooden hand raises your chin from the pillow. A whisper: “The Sun is coming! Melting snow will nourish the oak tree and turn the gray world into green. You will walk out of this place. You will dance again.”

Then: “Take me with you! Don’t leave me alone!”

In creating this post, my intention had been to show, as I had promised in an earlier post, images of Saints on a Bridge. Well, that changed. On a recent visit to my local market, I noticed a single flower alone and forlorn alongside a display of a dozen fresh bouquets. It was a paperwhite, a leftover from the Christmas holidays. Flowers don’t speak English, of course, but the feeling I got from this one was, “please take me to your studio and draw me before I die.” So I did; here is the sketch.

A surprising thing that often happens when I’m working/playing is a kind of inversion: I draw a tree or a person or a flower and in return, it seems to draw me. In this sketch, I began drawing stems and blossoms, but as I listened, I gradually shifted focus to the bulb and the roots. Why, I don’t know, I was just letting myself be guided. I’d like to say, “I thought such and such,“ but these aren’t thoughts; they’re more like insights or imaginings: “A flower has no purpose other than to be itself, a flower. To exist with its fragrant petals for its own sake, for it’s own short life. This sketch is like that. It has no purpose other than to be what it is, a kind of “paying attention.” It will not appear later in a painting. It’s just the record of a man with a pencil and some colors observing something that interests him.”

What I learned from the flower is this: “I need three things to live: sunlight, water and dirt. I rise out of darkness and dirt, just like you humans. You expect enlightenment and illumination to descend to you from above like the Holy Ghost, but it also arises, like me, from below.”

Next: Saints on a Bridge

“For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”
Mary Oliver

When I return to the USA after spending time elsewhere, I’m often asked questions like: “Iceland, that must be a really different world! Do you get culture shock when you go there?” Well yes, it’s a different world. But the biggest culture shock usually hits when I return home.

When I recently came back to California after many weeks of living in Spain, the difference between Europe and here that struck me most was the American obsession with “winning.” Perhaps because it’s November, I thought. Somebody won the World Series, the elections are over, and now football commands attention. All opponents have been, or were being turned into, “losers.” Is there an insult more dreaded in our culture than “loser”?

So why, I wondered, did thoughts of winning and losing occur to me when I happened to be drawing flowers? I had bought them at a local market because their tall, slender shapes resembled trees. Also, I could see the roots! But they grew quickly and soon the stems would not support the weight of the flowers. Could I finish drawing before they began to droop?

How to pay homage to little, evanescent trees, to draw them accurately, not run a race with them? To pay attention is to search: Erasures, hesitations, mistakes are all part of the process. In this case, I “lost” the drawing. It’s only an echo. So here is the result of the process, the loss. The misdirections, uncertainties are all here, just as I made them.

And yet, the world is still full of doorways to temples, even ephemeral flowers that briefly resembled trees.