Love your Mother

And yourself and your kids...

I have been examining, feeling, my mother and stepfather’s lives as I have gone through the remnants of those lives… copious writings, letters, notes, hand-transcribed passages from books, an amazing collection of works of art, an amazing collection of books, beautiful furniture and many other interesting artifacts. An amazing collection of utter trash, mountains of trash.

My stepfather had the habit of writing the letters NG (no good) on things and putting them back in the drawer.

Artist/hoarders, especially multi-media artists, are a variant on plain vanilla hoarders. EVERYTHING is a potential art supply. Every pile of eggshells, feathers, little plastic caps from milk cartons, pistachio shells, metal screens for making textures, every kind of collage paper. I could go on and on.

Thank goddess, finally a couple of my offspring came to help me for a little while, which made all the difference. Offspring make all the difference in so many ways.

Do you have any idea how weird it is to be a mother?

I said to my son, “Do you have any idea how weird it is to be a mother?” How weird it is to have actual human beings come out of your body, who you then spend the better part of your life taking care of, and the rest of your life caring about, and who cause you more joy and pain than anyone else? For whom you will always be an archetype, a mythic creature: a mother. It’s a heavy crown to wear.

Going through someone’s life after they die, in the form of what they wrote, what they made, what they kept, how they managed their life, is a crash course in breaking through the crust of the mother archetype to reach the gooey center of their personhood.

Which (I don’t care who we are taking about) is always going to be messy, inconsistent, incomprehensible, unless you are able to see a big enough picture, and although we will never be able to see a big enough picture with our little myopic souls, all that matters is that we see a big enough picture to feel compassion. Respect, even admiration, is gravy. Love is salt.

Art by Laura K. Popenoe

Life Art

I’m fond of saying that life itself is an art form. What I mean is that what shows on the outside reflects what is going on inside… the process. In the case of my mother, I have experienced extreme cognitive dissonance between my deep appreciation of her work as an artist, both what she made, and her dedication to making it, and how lacking she was for me as a mother, in part because of the above. The question I have been trying to work out all my life is how to balance passionate interior calling with the needs of others. With direct human service.

What are the options? What are the variables? What are the costs?

The price I have to pay for self-compassion is compassion for my mother and father and for everyone else as part of a moving flow of human experience, human awareness.

Having compassion for people who have caused me pain doesn’t negate that pain. It allows me to feel it in a larger context where there is more room for transformation.

This is my little life, with a little time left, I hope, in which to experiment with the experience of being human. I crave the freedom to live in the present.

My life/art form is to live with/through my karma, or whatever you want to call it, and see what I can make of it. See what pain I can ground out, and what love and consciousness I can pass on. Passing on is not quite the right language… It’s more like being an open door that helps others go through into their own world.

Fire and Ice, by Laura K. Popenoe

What to take what to leave

Do we need things to remember people? Or is the remembering inside us? I don’t know. Maybe we do need the things. Things are the stuff of this world. Just like us. Even though I often think I want to let go of things so that it will be easier for me to let go of everything, of life itself, I should just relax. I should enjoy my stuff and my life as much as I can. When it comes down to it, life lets us go, not the other way around.

The great big messy world

I can’t pay attention to politics at the moment. It’s too stupid and boring. Who gets to use what bathroom… oh, please. I wonder if these fools ever laugh at themselves. Probably not.

There may come a time when I will have to become an active part of the resistance.

For now, I want to be part of the resistance, not by engaging in battle, but by using, experiencing and sharing a different context, a bigger context, a context which, without needing to state it overtly, does not “buy” the fear-driven frames used by desperate people. AKA, by making art.

What comes next

I’m lucky that my experience of the last four months has been so beyond my usual boundaries of self that it has opened a door for me into a new phase of life, one that I know I want, even though I can’t quite see what it looks like. I know that it is about being an artist in a way that feels as dedicated to that calling as my mother felt to her calling as an artist. Perhaps at this late stage I can be nurtured by awareness of my mother’s nature and path, though it seemed so unhelpful to me as a child.

I’m already having Big New Thoughts and Ideas about what I want to do. My vision of how to express the cartoon/ story material I’ve been working with—Daisi and Jane—is shifting… alot. More on this soon. For now, I will just say that the heart of what makes something ‘art’ is the movement, the shape-shifting, between form and content. When either one is fixed and immovable, then we have cant and can’t.

Cosmic Quiz

I came across this mailer in my clearing out process. I made it almost 30 years ago. Enjoy!

Best wishes for holidays with the pleasure of connection. It’s not about the turkey and the tree as much as holding together with each other, and with ourselves, in the timeless present, even when suffering in the world casts such a long shadow.