Plants, pajamas, pandemic

I was supposed to go to Oaxaca for a painting workshop this month. That didn't happen. But I kinda brought Oaxaca to me by re-inventing my balcony. Plant stand, rug, plants--check. Soon there will be a bench and an umbrella. This quarantine would be so much worse without ordering stuff on the internet.

 

This giant mess happened first though. Right in the middle of my kitchen. Yes, hi, it's me. I have not been kidnapped and replaced by an impostor. This is the first time I've attempted a gardening project without a proper outdoor space to work in. Even in my 400 sq. foot apartment in L.A. I had access to a hose because I was on the first floor. Here, I potted everything on the kitchen island, feeling like there would be a stern knock at the door and I would be arrested.  

So that mess got cleaned up and everything was wiped down and sanitized. Today I decided I would make a new mess...collage because I took a very brief online class last week about inspiration for collage and photomontage, and we are checking back in with our work tomorrow. I made the paper below that I collaged on a few months ago, and also did the letter press on it in the same workshop. Now it's a collage. I was able to use some of my marbled paper as well.

I'm working on a second collage too. It's inspired by a line I read, "You break the secret or the secret breaks you." I was really happy about having the blue door in my collage pile, but now I'm thinking it doesn't belong. Maybe it's all about the tree.
The trees are leafing out here. I've been trying to force myself outside since Sunday, and I haven't made it yet. In fact, it's almost 5 pm, and I'm still in my pajamas. This is a new thing. I've been showering and dressing everyday--wearing favorite earrings and a necklaces like life is normal. But maybe not getting dressed is normal now. How about you? Do you wear your pajamas all day? What are you doing to keep from weeping? Are you making things? Writing?  Baking? Are you feeling healthy?

How are you? Tell me, I want to know.

The ghost of my walking self

Every day I say I'm going to go outside and go for a walk. But I don't. I have a package I want to take to the post office. It's a handmade journal I made for an artist's residency friend who sent me a handwoven cashmere scarf.

Me not going out, but wearing the beautiful scarf. I haven't worn shoes in forever.

A few weeks ago I was walking over three miles (unless the windchill was below 10 degrees) to my papermaking internship. When I was taking care of my mom a few years ago I walked on the beach every morning for at least 90 minutes. In my college years I walked in the woods almost every day. When I lived in New York, I thought nothing of walking 50 or 60 blocks. In my married years I walked the street to street staircases all over the hillsides of Silver Lake. I walked almost every street of Sierra Madre and South Pasadena. Walking is thinking. Walking is figuring things out. Walking is thanking the birds and the trees.

Maybe I'm someone else now. Someone who doesn't like to walk.

When I was 19, I had a very serious back surgery to correct a curvature in my spine. I spent a month in the hospital, 300 miles from home. My mother was with me, but I couldn't see my dad or my siblings or my friends. I couldn't walk the halls of the hospital. I couldn't even lift my head to look out the window. When I got out, I was encased in a plaster cast from my chin to my hips for ten months--its own form of social distancing. That was hard at the time. It was so long ago I don't know how to compare it to now. But there's a connection. I'm not in a body cast. I'm encased in a condo.

I complained a lot to my daughter M while talking on the phone today. What a terrible time to move to a condo in the city, my investments oh dear oh dear, traveling damn it--when can I travel?/can I afford to travel? Blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile there are so many people with much bigger problems. 

So here I am inside, dreaming of flowers that I will plant on my balcony when my new plant stand comes. I'm listening to every song John Prine ever recorded--a few each morning. I'm making hand bound journals with my handmade and hand marbled paper--some tiny and some large.

I bought a paper guillotine. It doesn't fit in any cabinet or drawer, so it lives under the armoire in my bedroom. Today I ordered a screw punch. No, that's not a cocktail.

 I think I'll survive. But today I thought I might be getting sick. I was terrified. How are you? Tell me, please. I want to know. 

This world

The moon still rises and sets in this topsy turvy tragic world.

The city still takes my breath away though there's absolutely nothing to do besides walk and dodge other humans.

The abandoned flour mill just down the block seems like a metaphor for everything now.

The Guthrie Theater has cancelled the rest of its season. For a week or so the sign in the lobby read, "This building is closed today." Now that sign is gone, and the doors are plastered with dire notices.

The city is all lit up. The marquee above the Guthrie says "Promise this world your love." Is that a line from a play? I don't remember.

Who's Zoomin' Who?

Visiting Dan in 2014

I feel stunned most of the time. Loved ones on the front lines. Me here, sometimes feeling I'm barely earning my right to breathe our virus tinged air.

I am, without a doubt, an introvert. I was never so exhausted as when I was teaching English. I was in my 30s then, and the constant talking, explaining, teaching destroyed every ounce of energy every single day. This is my way of saying that, in some ways, my life is unchanged, that I'm fine with lock-down. I could tell you too, that my life has been turned upside down. Both are true.

I have made a schedule for my self, a routine, a checklist. It's a lifeboat. An anchor.

Here's a photo of my old neighborhood in California with a cloud shaped like an exclamation point

I read the news, do a t'ai chi chih practice, yoga (unless it's a day off to rest my wrists.) I write, read, practice drawing with the lessons in "Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain." There are bookbinding projects. I do Duolingo French lessons. Yesterday I found the juggling balls and added juggling. I could juggle well enough in the summer of 1975 that I did it day after day in a commedia dell'arte. 

I sit in my big chair by the window in my bedroom and let memories roll by like clouds.
Memories of hospital rooms, being masked and gowned, visiting Dan whose white count and platelet numbers were all wrong time after time in the months before he died.
Visiting my mother from the hallway when I was 18, and she was in the hospital recovering/not recovering from surgery with pneumonia and a staph infection.
I remember my own bleary hospital time, her at my bedside every day during a long Minnesota January. I remember the sirens the day the poet John Berryman jumped off the Washington Avenue Bridge. Something's going on out there she said, standing by the window in her high heels, me flat on my back. lashed to the bed, in traction.
The thing is, everything is worse than all that now.

But my god, there are ridiculously funny things on the internet. I was laughing almost unable to stop at midnight last night. There's amazing writing and art. I'm talking to friends almost every day. Zooming them. Remember that Aretha Franklin song from the 80's? Who's Zoomin' Who? I just might zoom everyone I know.

Gratitude to all my yoga and T'ai chi chih teachers/Coronaville/Day 10

My yoga and t'ai chi chih studio

These two regular practices have been part of my life for some time. This routine has never been more important to me. What's getting you through?

New pandemic paranoia: Panting joggers, runners, and bicyclists who speed by me with huffing and puffing (droplets?) as they pass. Walkers seem to be much more respectful of the 6-feet rule. I wish we could all have masks. I'm working on a less-traveled route.

New favorite pandemic amusement: Kitchen island ping-pong. Unfortunately, the net and the paddles are nowhere to be found. Yesterday a friend and I tried wooden spoons as paddles, then rubber spatulas. Ultimately we settled on the metal pancake-flipping type spatulas. Without a net. The laughing was an immune booster for sure.

I counted steps on the most circuitous route possible through my condo, including bathrooms and closets. 300-- If I go around the dining room table and the kitchen island four times. How many times a day can I do that? How many steps can you walk through your space?

I am a student of the book arts, and yesterday I worked on my first small drum-leaf bound book with content. Here are the first three pages. If I never get my full-length memoir out into the world, there's this.

And I also worked on this zine about seasonal depression. It kinda translates to a pandemic lockdown, I think. It's hard to read because of the way it needs to be laid out, but you get the idea. All the marbled paper snips were marbled by me. It's pasted up the old-fashioned way rather than designed on a computer. Because paper.

Start on the bottom left, then move to the bottom right and work your way up and around.

Orange really is the most amazing color. What's your happy color?

Gratitude once again to all health care workers, and to the groceries clerks, delivery people,   

law enforcement personnel, and everyone who is working. 

xo

Leaving Coronaville/Day 3

I am most definitely not in my pajamas as I write this. I think I'm putting this selfie up to remind myself NOT to get into my pajamas. Not during the day, I mean. Back when this place was called Pillville--and even way back when it was called Divorceville/Margaritaville there was a whole lot of pajama wearing going on. I recall a particular evening when, as my mom sat at the dining room table with her martini, I bought three pairs of my favorite brand of p.j.s online. Dan had already died by then, and I thought maybe I could just pretty much live in pajamas.

So far the year 2020, my self-proclaimed great year of travel, has seen three cancelled trips. Other than that, I'm doing what I do. Writing, learning to make art (totally from the confines of home now that all my book arts classes are cancelled. )

On my to do list:

Subscribe to the two local small theatre companies that I adore.

Give to a food pantry.

Establish a routine and really let it do the good things that routines do.

Favorite thing to do during a pandemic: Shower.

Pandemic goal: Learn to draw.

first drawings

I think I'm going to use my last handmade book (Japanese stab binding) as a sketch book.

Gratitude to all governors, mayors, health care workers of all kinds, grocery clerks, first responders. 

So, how are you doing today?  I'd love to hear.