Sea Glass Lessons

Sea Glass Lesson #1

The Creative Process Through

the Art of Making Sea Glass Jewelry

Sea glass is my latest obsession. Passion is too gentle a word for the relationship I have with sea glass. The way that I love the shapes, colors, flaws and perfections. The pleasure I take in seeking, with an open heart, along the shore, for hidden gems among the rocks. Quiet, with only the sound of the waves beating out a rhythm of comfort ~ alone with my prayers. And though it feels spiritual, it is ME, after all, that I bring to this spiritual adventure, and me is a woman who subscribes to the “if a little is good, more must be better” mantra of living.

In theory, I know there is enough good to go around, (God knows you can’t read a single spiritual book and not be reminded of this principle). In practice, I am going to beaches as often as possible, filling plastic bags like an obsessive lover stealing kisses before parting. There have been moments I’ve recognized as the whispers of addiction. On beaches for example, when my daughter has to use a bathroom so bad she is running back to the car, and I can’t wrench my eyes from the sand, for fear of missing a frosted aqua or pink gem. Some of my sea glass is for my private collection. I have a two inch peach frosted perfume bottle stopper. A marble swirled in black and white. An amethyst bottle top. But much of my collection is now being used for my next creative pursuit ~ sea glass jewelry.

I think what I love most about making the jewelry, besides the tactile satisfaction of running my fingers over the cool, smooth surface of the sea glass and appreciating the colors and shapes, is the way each piece is unique and unrepeatable. For a girl who thinks kaleidoscopes, mosaics, and snowflakes are the epitome of creative truth, each of my sea glass pendants reminds me that creativity is always about change, growth, and surprise.

The reason I love writing and making art is because, finally, finally, I don’t have to stay pinned down in place. I MUST, if I want to be a writer and artist, allow myself to surrender to the flow and be taken to unexplored territory. There is the unexplored artistic territory ~ experimenting with pink wire when before I used only silver, or learning how to swirl beads through loops of wire when before I used to hug the glass. But there is also the unexplored territory of my personal landscape, because I have discovered, that if I am deeply engaged with my art, I am also deeply engaged with myself.

I wrestle, with wire and sea glass, using patience to wedge a small piece snug against a larger one. I use wire to bind them in a way that I hope will give birth to a beautiful pendant with crystals that catch the light as they dance on a coil of silver. On my spiritual journey, I am wrestling, too, with myself, using patience to wedge a small piece of confidence snug against a larger piece of trust. I use faith to bind them in a way that I hope will give birth to a woman more mature spiritually. I may be obsessed, but finally, I am hungry for something that can fill me up.

Here is a picture of a work in progress.…..

Using it as a jumping off point for contemplation and reflection, I wrote the following……

This piece taught me that thin is not always better and prissy is not always perfect. Each time I pick up this piece, I’m closer to taking it apart, even though I love the placement of each crystal, and the cage swirls, if done in heavier wire, would have been perfect. Also, this wire does not respect the glass ~ windshield glass ~ sturdy, practical, safety glass, wrapped in delicate strands of gold.  It’s wrong ~ all wrong. Why is it so hard for me to admit mistakes? Because I have such high hopes for my success? Because I’ve invested time? Because I don’t need any further confirmation that I’m a screw up? I wish to be ~ in spirit ~ like my sea glass jewelry. Intricate and delicate. Curious and intriguing. Playful and happy. Whimsical, colorful, sparkling, and above all…beautiful.

My instinct was to trash this piece, but I think now, it can be salvaged. If I tighten the wire, tweak it a bit, someone will want it. My time and talent will not be trashed. My hard, though imperfect work will enrich someone’s life. Like my mothering. Done imperfectly, but with enough devotion to help produce three fine, human beings. It isn’t my perfectionism that has served me well, it’s my willingness to stay with the task, cleaning up the mistakes as best as possible, resolving to learn from them, doing the best I can with what I have to work with.

Here’s what the piece taught me ~ there’s no shame in outgrowing your previous “best.” I’m learning how to do sea glass wraps, and there is value and joy in the learning. So what if two weeks ago, I was patting myself on the back for how beautiful this piece was, and tonight I see its flaws? The fun is in the maturation of all art ~ even the art of one’s life. Who ever told me I didn’t get to be a beginner? A novice? An understudy? I honor all of my work as the necessary stepping stone to where I am now. I honor all of my life as the necessary stepping stone to who I am now.

I am going to take tools to this piece to tighten and tweak. If it works, and I can salvage it ~ great! If not, I will take it apart and try something new. With each piece I build confidence. Not in my ability to make beautiful pendants, but in my willingness to call myself a working artist. An Experiential Creative. A child at play. A willing conduit for Spirit. My ego wants each piece to be perfection. My soul wants to step into the Mystery with glass, beads, and wire, and be willing to create and accept the results, without judgment.

What this piece has taught me is….not every creation has to be amazing to be satisfying. Not every blog that I write has to be amazing to be satisfying. I can relax into my work, into my life, and feel a contentment that is mine not because I’ve achieved perfection, but because I’ve experienced, for a moment, the pleasure of being fully human.

Here is what the pendant looked like after I went back with a more refined technique.

The differences, to be sure, are subtle. But so are the incremental changes in my spiritual growth. For today, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I gave the best I had to offer.

Check out Writing From the Heart

Nancy Aronie’s workshop was the first writing workshop I went to in 2006 when I first began to write faithfully. I remember the first prompt I wrote to ~ A Time I Wasn’t Invited. I remember that circle of writers who shared their individual stories, written with gut level honesty, with openness and trust. Nancy is genius at creating a safe space for the writer’s voice, and if you like to write, I highly recommend one of her workshops. I’m very happy now to be contributing as one of her regular bloggers on her online writing community. Check out my work, and the work of my online friends.

http://writingfromtheheart.wordpress.com/bloggers-readers-writing/

What Words Can’t Do

They cannot translate the song of a chickadee volleying with the call of a cardinal. They cannot speak birdsong, or jazz, or rock and roll. They are limited, vague tools ~ clumsy even in the poet’s hand for much work. Like trying to pick a lock with a jackhammer. Like trying to do counted cross stitch with a knitting needle. Words, though I love them, are not up to the task of translating the distinct and unique song each of my children plays upon my heart. Three exquisite chimes ~ all pleasing to the ear, but how can I help you to know that unless I can run my fingers across the chimes themselves? Be the wind upon which they play? Can I tell you of purple, pink, orange, blue, if you have not seen them first?
Words are all I have. Were I an artist, I could paint in abstract swirls that which cannot be spoken ~ and you, letting the color dance wash over you ~ would feel it in that place we all share that is deeper than language. Or if I were a musician, who crafted with sound haunting melody, impending danger, falling in love, you would hum with me, note to note. Music is unambiguous. Words are grasping at straws.
Words are Plato’s shadows on the cave. They are the hint of a wisp of a smoke that escapes from the fire, but not the fire itself. Close enough to touch, but not touched. Words cannot be the breeze on your cheek. Words cannot be the color palette of a rainbow. Nor a garden. Nor love. They cannot translate except in metaphor and simile. What is a metaphor but an elegant tool to try to unlock the thing itself? Like a schoolgirl in love. Like a ship without sail. Like a fly buzzing against the pane of glass, I am a poet vainly trying to enter within. Bruised and tired, words are still my passion.

Who Would Ever Know a Rose?

Who would ever know a rose

if she shunned it for its thorns?

Velvet dusk of petals ~

opening lips. An invitation kiss

to fall deeper

under the spell

into the scent

to a heart plump

with promise seeds.

 

Who would ever win a pearl

if she grew weary of plumbing secrets?

Shell protected luminescence

burrowed in moist, warm flesh

quivering with the hope

of being freed.

 

Every gift comes bearing grief

in direct proportion to its worth.

 

The daughter burrows,

claiming as her own

the chambers of your heart ~

riding like a surfer

the waves of each intake

and outtake of your breath.

Until with mastery

prepared for solo flight,

with no regret,

she’ll say good-bye.

 

Every gift comes bearing grief

but oh the joy of bittersweet

to know you’ve lived

with open palms

the finest prayer allowed us here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking for More Flow

Looking for More Flow

 

I’m looking for more flow.  In my hair and in my life.  In the spirit of autumnal renewal, when women realize they need a new haircut, a new wardrobe, a new home, or at the very least, new organizing Tupperware, I decided to let my hairdresser do something different last week.

Different is not usually what I allow her to do.  Usually, I say something like this.  “Cut the back two inches down my neck.  You know how I like the bangs, shorter in the middle, longer on the sides.  Hair no longer than three inch layers all around, angled around my cheekbones, and no longer than my chin.  There, now go have fun with that artistic license I’ve left you.”

And she, sweet as can be for five years, always, gives me exactly what I want.  Then I go home, and rewash and blow it dry, to get more of exactly what I want.

But this week, I was feeling reckless and tired of wearing a hairstyle that didn’t blow in the breeze.  On the Yoga mat, I had noticed how good I was at holding on to a pose, and how bad I was at flowing into a pose.  I have a friend, who annoys the hell out of me, when she says, “how we do one thing, is how we do everything.”  Helpful advice to me, a self admitted spiritual seeker.  But like all truths that ring with the sweet notes of chalk squeaking across a blackboard, I couldn’t stop noticing how I do everything.

Like my hair. Foamed with mousse.  Blown dry with precision on a round wire brush.  Hair sprayed with extra “hold that style into the next millennium” spray.  I finish with  hairspray to the ends of my fingertips, and come up from underneath my bangs to get that just right air tousled look.  When I am done, my hairstyle looks perfect and chic, or like a helmet, depending upon whether you are asking me or my daughter.  I feel safe and protected ~ from the wind, from the rain, from flying objects at my head.

But recently, the “how you do one thing is how you do everything” mantra was dancing through my day, when I realized that the way I approach my hair ritual is a metaphor for my life.  I use resolve, care, discipline and force of will to get what I need to feel safe at all costs.  Safe from a bad hair day.  Safe from looking in the mirror and being surprised by unruly locks. My hair was only one example of the way I micro manage everything in my life.  I like to control surprises the way air traffic controllers do.  Zero tolerance.

So this week, I went to the hairdresser, saw her swinging, kicky hair, that moved when she did, and told her I wanted that haircut.  The kind where the long side bangs occasionally fall into your eyes, and you have to brush them behind your ear.  A flippant, breezy, I don’t need styling products kind of do…because I’m all about the flow.  “Well” she said, “we can definitely do that.  It is all in how you cut it.  We’ll have to grow your sides out a little, just down to here, and then I will texturize it.  All I do is blow dry my bangs, and turn my head upside down and dry, and I’m done!”

Perfect.  The new me would have hair that wasn’t afraid of the wind.  I would get dangling earrings to go with my natural haircut.  My hair and I would announce to the world, that I knew how to go with the flow and let go of perfect.  I knew how to shrug my shoulders and accept that I have baby fine strands of hair, stick straight, except for the coarse, shiny grays that like to stand on end.  Why, not only would I be casual about my hair, but I would Let Go and Let God have a go at my finances, my relationships, my make-up drawer.

The new me is looking an awful lot these days like the old me, except with a bad haircut.  I can’t put down the can of mousse.  I cheat, and roll the ends of my hair on the round brush to force a flip.  I shake my head and try to spray at the same time, to capture a windblown, “who cares about my hair anyway” look.  A week into the new me this much is clear.  All I’m doing is flowing from one bad hair day into another.

“I don’t think this new haircut is working out” I say to a friend, in part to let her know that I know my hair is looking horrid.  “Why?  You don’t like it?” she says.  “Like it?” I think.  How could I, a woman of my taste, possibly like this?”  Does it look fine to her?  This worries me.  Does she not see the marked difference between how gorgeous I looked a month ago, and how unkempt I look now?  Are my beauty rituals wasted on friends and loved ones who can not distinguish between finely coiffed and frankly crappy?

I don’t want to give up on the shapeless, yet flowing hair too soon.  For one thing, it would be great to be free of the perpetual sticky coating on the bathroom tiles from hairspray.  Great to discover, that maybe I don’t have to hold on with a death grip to the way it’s always been.  Not my hair.  Not my body.  Not my usual response to life.  Maybe I will learn to flow with the best of them.  Ghandi.  Mother Theresa.  The Buddha.  Or maybe I’ll just get a haircut.

 

When a Collaborative Isn’t

For many months now, I have been working on a collaborative book, a collection of personal essays, with a group of other writers, with the intention of putting together a compelling argument for why writing is central to who we are as women, and how we navigate the ebbs and flows in our lives. A collection that was fearless in its willingness to stand in our Voices. Also, an invitation, we might have hoped, for other women to own all the parts of their stories that make them who they are.

Well, the collaborative has fallen apart…and I’m left today with an energy that feels like a deflated balloon that went from buoyant, to buzzing around the room angrily while losing lift, to laying limp, soggy, and shriveled on the carpet. How to regroup, when I feel exhausted, angry, and defeated? Everyone else in the group appears to be moving on, but this is so like me. Always just a little behind in the processing of feelings. Just now feeling, “Oh, I have been affected. I am hurt.”

Julia Cameron might call this a “Creative U-turn. I do feel like I am at a crossroads. Will I take my chapters, some of which I am quite proud of, and look for places to submit them? Will I sigh and decide that I was never meant to be published and go back to writing for myself, family and friends? Will I remember how good it felt to work to deadline on a project that stretched me as a writer; and decide that tagging on to other peoples’ agendas isn’t necessary? Because this wasn’t my idea originally ~ but it sounded like a good one, and it was a reason to write. And it wasn’t my deadline, or my agent ~ but it sounded like a way to write and have my writing seen. And we all threw out prompts, and like an exuberant puppy, I wrote to all of them, but I didn’t clarify my vision for the book, until it was all finished, and I realized we hadn’t written one. It is not the first time in my life I looked to others to take the lead.

I’m in that uncomfortable place where I don’t know what is next. I have no chapters to polish, no book proposal to write. One of my classes is coming to an end, and I don’t know how I want my workshops to proceed. I do know this. I love to write. I write for my life ~ to unravel it, understand it, honor it. That is not a collaborative effort ~ but a singular endeavor. That I can and must do alone.

A Kind of Despair

 

A Kind of Despair

Kathy MacDonald

I am surfing online
When I’m sideswiped by
A poetry forum board.

Poems
with titles like
“I see God Standing in Stout Grove”
and
“The Man Next Door According to His Pockets.”

Critiques
with comments like
“this poem makes its inquiry via complicated linguistic turns”
and
“to invoke the ghost of Ginsberg is to invite a perilous comparison”.

A kind of despair washes over me.
I, who write poems with titles like
“As If”
and
“Snapshots”
will never be among the chosen.

It hurts to swim through all these stanzas.

So I stop.
And write a poem.

The only answer I have found
to despair.

 

 

Sea Glass Thoughts

Sea Glass Thoughts

Yellow and pink sea glass shards. Not pure sea glass, not quite frosted smooth enough – but beautiful to me. Their undersides reveal them to have been plates at one time – I imagine candy dishes. Filled with bonbons. Sitting on a side table of a grandmother, who waits for her grandchildren to come visit. Love laid out in a candy dish. An offering of sweetness, from her to them, without a word.

Love offerings everywhere; and me unable to hold them all. I think that is why I cried when I was on the island, where I found these two pieces, pink and yellow. Rare colors, but not on this beach. Not on this beach where my eyes could not miss the treasure. Had I brought buckets, I could not have emptied the sands of its sea glass treasures. It felt like too much; I felt like a child dropped in the middle of Disney World with no restrictions. Why did I feel a rising anxiety, after I felt excited and happy?

I wouldn’t make the right choices. I would miss a spectacular something that was right there at my finger tips. Whatever I chose, they would not be the best ones. Even if somebody offered me my heart’s desire, I wouldn’t be wise enough, or smart enough, or have enough vision, to reach out and grab it. Instead, I would remain blind to it. Leave it on the beach for someone else to find and take it. I would lose, forever, my one chance at happiness.

My meditation practice teaches me to be aware of those feelings, to let them flow through me, bringing my attention to them. The discomfort. The sadness. The confusion. Waiting to see if they had anything to show me.

And this is what I learned on that day. I bring myself to any experience. When I took a breath, asked God to help me choose, trusted that whatever I filled my pockets with would be enough ~ it was.

I see now, that had I left that day with only these two pieces, yellow and pink, it would have been enough. Enough because I saw and appreciated them. Because I imagined a story for them. Because I cared enough to pick them out of the sand and rocks. This addict is finally understanding, in every moment, in every breath, life offers itself like the sea glass on a beach. No hurries. No worries. An abundance of blessings designed to build my trust. I need never feel empty again. When yellow and pink glass from broken plates, makes me happy, surely the happiness rests inside of me, not outside?

I know most of us, right now, no matter what is happening in our lives, have more blessings than buckets to hold them. A grateful heart is what opens our eyes to the treasure lying at our feet.

What I Didn’t Tell You Then

I wrote this piece in response to a Nancy Slonim-Aronie “Writing From the Heart” prompt, and read it on her radio show (Lime Radio). My daughter doesn’t always love to be the subject of my work, but I am hoping that someday, when she struggles with her own daughter, she will know I understand, in the way I now understand my own mother’s faithfulness to the calling.

What I Didn’t Tell You Then

What I didn’t tell you then, Maggie, when you asked me, “Did you ever even want to BE a mother?” when I wouldn’t drive you to a friend’s house, was this….only every day of my life for the last twenty-seven years. Actually, maybe longer than that. Maybe back when I was a child, and I watched a baby cousin sleeping, like a doll, in a make-shift cradle – a bureau drawer emptied out and placed on the floor. The baby desire started early and fierce in me. At twenty-two, I already hungered to begin, and feared that, if I was unable to get pregnant, my heart would break. I ached to get started. Your father knew we should wait, buy a house, save from our two paychecks.

Our first Christmas in that white cape house, he gave me a gift of a mint green baby sweater and hat, for the baby he promised we would have. A promise and a balm to soothe. I cried. It was the sweetest present I had ever received, until I held your brother Matthew, one month old, in a red Santa suit, the following Christmas.

What I didn’t tell you then was this Maggie. My entire life has willingly, passionately, whole-heartedly been devoted to being a mother. If I didn’t say that, when you spat out your adolescent accusation – it was only that the sting of your doubt silenced me for a bit. But now, to answer your question – did I ever even want to be a mother? Only with every cell of my being for as long as I can remember. Even on days like this.

 

White Simplicity ~ A Winter’s Poem

White Simplicity

After prayer, candlelight and tears

I pick up my pen

to begin again this business of being fully human,

indentured servant that I am.

No option for parole.

My Jailer this day feels cruel,

except for the gift of snow spilling from the sky

onto the bare branches of trees

and grass

covering everything with white simplicity.

And if I have no answers

to my God’s complexity

I have this hope.

To be blanketed, for a morning

in His peace

where all questions can be put to sleep

in white simplicity.