20 May 2017
Sewing without a pattern, a night gown I’ve wanted to attempt for months, but kept scaring myself out of trying.
Make art about attempting something you’ve been scared to try.
21 May 2017
Make art about making moments of peace among the tumult.
19 May 2017
Seven years ago today, my oldest son J was in a terrible car accident, his little plastic Saturn sedan t-boned by a brand new Dodge Charger with its all-steel construction.
J, my laughing, charismatic, kind, smart son, only 22 then, was critically injured, with a compression skull fracture, subdural hematoma, subarachnoid hemorrhaging, and four feather bleeds into his beautiful brain. They airlifted him by helicopter from our small town to the major medical facility, MCV, in Richmond, admitting him directly into the neurological ICU. He was conscious the whole time, talking, joking, charming the nurses, complaining that he couldn’t look out the window on his first-ever helicopter ride, even saying things meant to reassure me, his sister, his brother, the friends who stood by us at the hospital. We bedded down in the ICU waiting room, while behind those heavy doors, monitors clicked and hummed, documenting my son’s traumatic brain injury. That was Wednesday.
Early Thursday afternoon, as I stood as J’s bedside, a doctor we hadn’t seen before strode in, his crisp white lab coat flowing behind him. He introduced himself as the head of neurological research, and after a moment, he asked us if we had seen J’s latest CT scan. We hadn’t, so he hurried from the room, telling us he’d be right back. J and I looked at each other, confused, and my son must have seen worry in my eyes, as he patted my hand.
The doctor returned, wheeling in a large piece of equipment, a medical imaging viewer, and positioned it at the end of J’s ICU bed. He turned it on and the image of my son’s skull appeared, stark in the black and whiteness of it all. For a second, we were completely silent. Then the doctor, smiling, began to explain what we were seeing.
What we were seeing was nothing: no bleeding, no bruising, no swelling. The only sign that remained of my son’s injury just 24 hours before was the spiderweb of fractures in the bone, as if a pencil eraser had been pushed into the fragile shell of an egg, a network of bone break just beneath the C-shaped wound on the side of his head. J’s brain looked completely normal, showing not a single other sign of the blow he’d taken the day before in the wreck that had left his little car mangled, left nothing but the driver’s seat intact.
The doctor grinned, saying, “We want to study you, study why and how you healed so quickly.”
That was Thursday. We brought J home midday on Friday. Six weeks later, he was back at work, then back to his last year of college that fall. We talked time and again about his miraculous healing, about why it might have happened.
J, my wise son, said, “Mom, I don’t know why it happened. I just know I got another chance.”
He now calls May 19 his birthday. His Facebook status this morning read, “Today, I am alive.”
Make art about being given another chance.
17 May 2017
I hate grocery shopping. But today while grudging my way through it, I ran into a retired colleague whom I adore and haven’t seen in a while. He made me laugh, like always. And I laughed through the rest of the shopping.
Make art about something good arising from something you usually dread.
18 May 2017
Dreamt I was lighting candles, thousands and thousands of candles, as far as I could see.
Make art about the power small lights.
16 May 2017
No one’s perfect.
Make art about progress versus perfection, about the myth of perfection, about the lessons and the beauty of being flawed.
8 May 2017
End of the semester, so I’ve been drowning in final grading.
Make art about feeling overwhelmed.
9 May 2017
Had some morning company 🙂
Make art about chickens in the road.
10 May 2017
So much rain here lately. Making the local weathermen happy, with their maps and pointers. 🙂
Make art about a weather map.
11 May 2017
My son’s sweetie got a new kitten, Baloo 🙂 Between him and my GrandPerson, our lives are filled with glorious baby things.
Make art about small beauties.
12 May 2017
Hung my sheets out to dry. Love climbing into them after they’ve come in that same day from the line.
Make art about the smell of the sun.
13 May 2017
Today was my daddy’s birthday. He could find the funny in everything, and he loved my mama more than breath. He wrote us letters to tell us kids all the things he loved about our mama.
Make art about how much you love someone.
14 May 2017
Another Mother’s Day, and I can’t help but think of all the women who mother in ways other than the traditionally expected.
Make art about nontraditional nurturing.
15 May 2017
Reading Whitman before bed last night. For Whitman, not only was poetry a kind of democratic action, but democratic action should itself be understood as a kind of poetry.
Make art about democratic action as poetry.
5 May 2017
Make art about what’s carried on the wind.
6 May 2017
Make art about being in the presence of Grace.
7 May 2017
Make art about hypocrisy.
3 May 2017
Every day I sling the door open to my classroom, and enter, looking across the room at those amazing students, and greet them with”Good morning, you beautiful creatures!”
I hadn’t thought much about it, until apparently I missed a day greeting them this way, and I heard about it 🙂 “You didn’t call us beautiful creatures!”
And they are–so beautiful–these young creatures striving, focusing, questioning, and reaching, always reaching, even when they’re not sure yet what it is they’re reaching for. Some stumble, and fall. Some create the wind itself as they move from place to place. Others are much too hard on themselves, harder than we old people could be, harder even than the unbelievable media and family and societal pressure they carry on their young shoulders every day. They are creatures of grace, and incredible endurance, surviving, thriving even. in the mess we’ve left them.
They are dreamfog and summer storm and mountain clay and stardust. They are every road to everywhere, every path woven of hope and young hunger.
They are miraculous, these creatures, these wind dancers and fireaters, carrying their huge hearts out openly before them in their hands, offering them like gifts, like the gifts that they are. ❤
They’re funny, and they’re compassionate, and they’re curious, and wise, so much wiser than they’re given credit for, than they give themselves credit for, and I learn from them every time we’re together in those rooms. Every day they teach me, so I never forget what it is to dream.
Tonight, we shared a meal, and I listened to presentations for projects ranging from the environmental and natural–water quality, animal rescue, waste conversion for fuel–to a cross-section of the humane–programs for kids in poverty, kids with disabilities, for educating kids in technology, free financial services for students and for the poor, projects to help the hungry.
Tonight, I saw the future, y’all 🙂 and no matter how hard it seems right now, that future? It is indeed filled with beautiful, beautiful, beautiful creatures.
Make art about young people, about what we owe them, about what we can learn from them.
1 May 2017
Read a story this morning about lunchrooms shaming poor children.
I cried for an hour. The scars of shame run so deep, follow us into adulthood, undermine the beauty and power of who we are at every turn, if it’s not healed.
“I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.”― Judy Collins
Make art about childhood shame, about seeing that hurt child in your adult eyes, about healing shame.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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