Category Archives: Melissa’s Musings and Doodlings

Musings, original paintings, and sketches from life as I see it

Vincent Van Gogh

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I’ve always loved Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings and admired his mastery of color and texture, so was thrilled when my father took me to a Van Gogh exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was fabulous seeing so many of his paintings, drawings, and sketches, and I felt I gained a more intimate knowledge of him through studying his drawings and sketches.

When I read Vincent Van Gogh: His Spiritual Vision in Life and Art, by Carol Berry, I found much that inspired me about his art and his life. Early on Vincent became a pastor/evangelist because of his love of and compassion for the poorest people he could find—miners living in darkness and misery. He determined to live with them and as they did, in abject poverty and identifying with them as he ministered to their bodies and souls, caring for the sick and sharing the love of Christ with them, to the great consternation of his family and the religious establishment of the day. From his letters to his brother Theo:

I wish I could get a position there as an evangelist, just as we talked about it, preaching the Gospel to the poor—those who need it most and for whom it is so well meant                                                                                                                              (Laken, on or about November 13 and 15, or 16, 1878; Quoted in Berry, p. 41)

Life has become very dear to me, and I am very glad that I love. My life and my love are one. I tell you that I think it absolutely necessary to believe in God in order to be able to love. What I mean is, to believe in God is to feel that there is a God, not dead or on display, but a God who is alive, who with irresistible force urges us toward an “aimer encore.” (Etten, November 23, 1881; Quoted in Berry, p. 69)

Vincent’s drawings and paintings often feature poor miners and peasants, as he sought to serve them by emphasizing their worth and the value of their labor. He felt that by drawing the poor and destitute in the harsh reality of their existence, rather than by romanticizing their lives, those who were more fortunate would come to love and care for them, loving their neighbor as themselves.

Peasant life is something serious, and I, for one, would blame myself if I didn’t try to make paintings that would give serious things to think about to people who think seriously about art and about life… One must paint the peasants as being himself one of them, as feeling, thinking as they do themselves.
(Nuenen, April 30, 1885; Quoted in Berry, p. 119)

Another aspect of Vincent Van Gogh’s letters and paintings that strikes a chord with me are his thoughts about and depiction of nature.

But in the meantime I’m always fed by nature. I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes in the theme, but in the end I don’t invent the whole content of the painting; on the contrary, I find it all completely there in nature—but it has to be disentangled.  (Arles, on or about October 5, 1888 ; Quoted in Berry, p. 151)

There is at times something indescribable in those aspects—it is as if the whole of nature is speaking—and when one goes home one has the feeling as if one has read a book by Victor Hugo, for example. As for me, I cannot understand that not everybody sees it and feels it. Doesn’t nature or God do it for everyone who has eyes and ears and a heart to understand? It seems to me that a painter is happy, because he lives in harmony with nature, as soon as he can express, to some extent, what he sees. (The Hague, November 26 and 27, 1882; Quoted in Berry, p. 176)

An artist friend of mine who has copied well over 300 of Van Gogh’s paintings plans to paint replicas of all of Van Gogh’s almost 900 paintings, and he has given many as gifts to friends and coworkers. Seeing his work has inspired me to try copying some Van Gogh paintings in order to learn from his style. Here is my copy in gouache of Van Gogh’s “Old Yew Tree”

My goal in studying any artist’s style is not to change my style to be just like theirs, but to learn from them and incorporate into my own style what fits with who I am. This is similar to how I learn from and incorporate lessons from people I respect, whether in the realm of art, or their approach to daily life, or how they live out their faith. As the Apostle Paul said, “Join with others in following my example, brothers, and take note of those who live according to the pattern we gave you.” Philippians 3: 17

Here are a few paintings I have done as I try to figure out what I want to incorporate into my painting style from Van Gogh’s example:

Vassar Farm White Oak- gouache

A to Z April Blogging V

Understanding

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I’ve been enjoying studying Spanish for the past couple of months, and I’m progressing pretty well at the beginner level of the program I’m using. I know a fair number of words now, but when I hear a few sentences of Spanish spoken at a normal speed using those words, I’m completely lost. I understand the meanings of the individual words, but I am nowhere near any real understanding of Spanish, even using simple words. Thinking about that today got me pondering “understanding.” How often do I mistake dictionary definitions for understanding?

In Walking on Water, Madeleine L’Engle describes how when she read Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, “I was determined to understand it. I read intelligently, with a dictionary beside me, stopping to look up the scientific words which were not familiar to me. And I bogged down. So I put aside the dictionary and read as though I were reading a story, and quickly I got drawn into the book…and understood it far better, at a deeper level, than if I had stuck with the dictionary.” (p. 36)

I’ve been birding for years now and can easily identify most of the common bird species in our area by sight and many of them by their songs. I know some of these species well enough to sketch them without even looking at them. But while I’ve slowed down and been taking retreat time this past week, I’ve been sketching the various Downy Woodpeckers that come to our feeders, and discovering little differences in their plumage, so that now I can distinguish three different females and three different males, each unique. Before, I knew what a Downy Woodpecker was, but now I’m coming to know them as individuals, and I’m guessing that as I observe them further, I’ll discern differences in their behavior. It may not be particularly profound to know individual woodpeckers, but pondering that makes me think of understanding people. Do I content myself with knowing facts about people I “know,” or do I seek to understand them and who they really are?

When I was homeschooling my children, I wanted to teach them French, but wasn’t sure of the best approach, so I called my high school French teacher, Mr. John Creary, for whom I had a great deal of respect and with whom I had stayed in contact. I thought Mr. Creary might suggest either a particular curriculum, or some more general approach to teaching French. Instead, he said, “French is language, and the purpose of language is communication. The most important communication is with God, so make sure you teach your children to know and communicate with God before you teach them French.” How often do I settle for a comfortable level of comprehension, missing deeper understanding that builds relationships with people, and more importantly, with God?

“Give me understanding, that I may live.”
Psalm 119:144

A to Z April Blogging U

Time

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Musings on Time

Twenty-four hours, with bookends of bed
Birth to death an unknown span

How do I use it?
On what do I spend it?
Do I buy it? Can I save it?
Is time a commodity
its value in doing?

What do I spend as I try to buy more,
only to end just where I started?
What do I lose as I spend what I have,
only to find this moment has passed?

Day length and length of days
One is fixed, the other a mystery

A to Z April Blogging T

Stephen

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Wednesday, February 10, 1982 was bitter cold, with a typical Finger Lakes icy wind blowing off Cayuga Lake, numbing my hands and bare legs. I had dressed up for dinner at our favorite nice restaurant, The Boxcar Restaurant. Usually we just went to Joe’s to get chef salads, but every now and then we’d dress up and go to The Boxcar. Dressing up meant a knee length dress of some sort of homespun cotton, very much the style I’d still wear, knee socks, and my thin down jacket that let the wind blow in through every seam. Not adequately warm for that strikingly clear, nearly full moon night with temps hovering near zero and the ever-present wind rushing up from the lake.

I was young and starry-eyed enough to willingly brave the cold when Stephen suggested we walk up to the overlook above my apartment after dinner. Below us Ithaca’s lights spangled the night between where we stood and the darkness of the lake. And then Stephen asked me to marry him, and I said yes. Actually, it wasn’t quite that simple…

When Stephen had called my parents’ home earlier that day to ask my father for my hand in marriage, my father had replied, “You may ask her, but she has to call me before she answers.” My mother later said she’d told my father that requiring me to call before answering was the most bizarre thing she’d ever heard. With a mother’s intuition she had immediately known why Steve was calling, whereas my usually astute father had been taken off guard.

So when Steve had dropped to one knee, taken my numb hands in his warm ones  and asked if I would marry him, he immediately followed his proposal with, “But you can’t answer yet; you need to call your father first.” We hurried to my apartment to find my roommate on the phone, so then ran to a friend’s apartment, where the phone was thankfully available. I called my father, got his blessing (he just wanted to ask me if I was happy), after which we went back out into the clear, cold night, where I said, “Yes!”

These 39 years have held plenty of challenges, some due to our immaturity at the time we  married, some to the normal stresses of raising children, especially while Stephen was still in grad school and we were living in a very cramped, cold, thin-walled apartment (we used to have an inch or more of ice on the inside of the sliding glass door and the bedroom windows), and some due to childhood issues that erupted like a volcano years after we got married.

But now, nearly four decades later, our lives have melded into one life- two lives in one- each richer and more steady than we would be alone, more complete as individuals because of the other, at the same time incomplete without the other. Stephen is my favorite subject to sketch and my favorite person to spend time with.

The following sketches were all done from life, most of them while Stephen was reading to me, which he has done nearly every evening for many years. His birthday present to me one year was that he would read a book of my choice to me in the evenings. After some thought I chose The Hobbit, knowing that we would then want to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which we did. By then we were hooked on reading aloud as a companionable way to close our day, and I’m guessing he has since read at least a hundred books of various genres aloud.

A to Z April Blogging S

Retreat

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“You have no events scheduled today.”

When I see that in my Inbox, I feel as though I have been handed a gift. And I have—a gift of time, time to disengage, unwind, rest, play, or read. To walk with Ramble, to sit with Acadia purring on my lap and a cup of tea in my hand, to sketch and write. When that gift is combined with solitude and silence, I begin to find and draw forth the quieter parts of myself, the parts that slip into the background when I live with noise and the busyness of daily life and my inner compulsion to keep constantly connected with the world via the email, texts, and phone calls (thankfully I am only occasionally on social media these days, so that is less of a factor than it used to be).

I’ve set aside a few days as a retreat. While I won’t have complete solitude, much of my time will be alone, and I will see that welcome message in my Inbox each morning, if I look at my email at all. The first day of a retreat is more of a puttering day for me, as I gradually disengage from my usual responsibilities. Even though my calendar may tell me I am unscheduled, my mind takes a bit longer to let go. That’s why I try to set aside three or more days of retreat once or twice a year. So today I puttered around the house and in my garden, my mind gradually slowing down and moving into a more relaxed state.

Tomorrow I expect to be more and less focused. Less focused on “shoulds” and more focused on trees and birds and spring flowers and what they reveal about myself or about God. By day three I am usually more “in the moment” and in a more relaxed attitude of prayer and contemplation than I typically am, better able to let go of the “This is a retreat; I want to make the most of it,” frame of mind and instead just walk through the day appreciating the life I have, in a more natural connection with the quieter parts of who I am and in communion with God.

I generally find that for the first few days of an extended retreat I am withdrawing from people, cherishing the respite I feel from being over-connected and over-committed. After that I begin to look outward again, as my inner being has become rested and refreshed, and I find myself looking forward to connecting. But I’m not there yet, so now, I will step away from my computer and into the peace of my retreat.

I wrote this piece two days ago on the first day of my retreat. Below are my sketches from Days 1 & 2. And now I will once again step away from my computer and return to the refreshing rest of retreat.

Musings after spending several hours sketching an oak tree

 

A to Z April Blogging R

Questions

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Someone recently asked me what I want. That question is so much bigger than it seems at first glance. What would make me happy right now? What would make me happy long-term? What would really be good for me? Or what would help me be good for someone else? Questions always seem to lead not to answers, but to more questions, at least for me.

When my son Jonathan was a child, it seemed he had nothing but questions. When I would clean his room, I’d find numerous tiny scraps of paper torn from the edges of school papers, each scrap with a question scribbled on it. In pencil, of course; ink is too definite. I gave him a small notebook. He filled it with questions. No answers, just page after page of questions.

When Jonathan was younger, the questions were relatively easy to answer: “Why is the sky blue?” “How hot is the sun?” “Why is today Friday?” As he got older the questions became more challenging, and I after a while I began to dread it when he’d come to me and ask, “Mommy, can we talk about questions?” Of course I would say yes, and we would discuss a page or two of his questions. I very rarely had answers that were deeply satisfying, but discussing his questions seemed to help.

I, too, have had both difficult and unanswerable questions. “Why do children get abused?” “How can I deal with the hurt of rejection?” “Why does a good God allow evil in the world?”

Oh, there are answers out there to all these questions, but none of those answers really gets at the deepest level of the questions. A few years ago a wise friend suggested that perhaps I could learn to make friends with unanswered questions, to see them as part of wonder and mystery, of not being God.

The story of Job is one of the “Wisdom Books” of the Bible. Interestingly, it contains more questions than answers. After he lost his children, his health, his wealth, and the respect of his friends, Job flung his very understandable questions at God. In reply he receives not answers, but a barrage of questions. But somehow those questions, all beyond Job’s ability to answer, were the answer he needed, and he responded with, “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things to wonderful for me to know.” (Job 42:3) If the book of Job is indeed a Wisdom book, perhaps there is more wisdom in befriending questions than in demanding answers.

A page from Jonathan’s Question Book

A to Z April Blogging Q

Pause…

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I’ve had a really hard time deciding what to write about for P. Not because of a paucity of good words beginning with P, but because of a plethora of possibilities parading through my head. All day yesterday, and then last night, after I went to bed worn out from a few very stressful days with serious parental health problems, my mind promptly perked up, with P words racing nonstop through my thoughts. I finally fell asleep and dreamed about choosing a word to focus on, and woke up with more words pouring through my mind. I pursued several potential paths, then finally decided I needed to proclaim a PAUSE…

And that is what I did. I went out and planted pansies (oh dear, more P’s), and that partially cleared my head. I realized that whenever I have a stressful few days, even when I have had the margin I wrote about a few days ago, my mind does tend to get going and it acts like a runaway horse (or should I say pony) and will not slow down. I sleep poorly, I wake up groggy but wired, and my thoughts revert at the drop of a hat to whatever my mind has latched onto. Perseverance is good, but perseveration is exhausting.

I really do need to pause, but it seems I can’t simply do a passive pause, because my thoughts snap back to their previous focus like a rubber band that’s been stretched and released. Hence my decision to get out in the fresh air, take a walk with Ramble, sketch a tree, and do some gardening. As I ponder this problem, I recognize that, though the subject differs, this is perhaps one of the more important skills I need to develop– the ability to pause my mind. I don’t know if everyone’s mind gets stuck in a permanent loop like this, but looking back, I can see that this has been my response to stress for as long as I can remember, even when I was a child.

And that makes me think that while calling a pause is a good start, I probably need to address the root of the problem, which is how I respond to stress. I suspect that this is actually a form of worrying, even though I am not specifically worrying about the issue at hand. I am going to try a three-pronged approach to Pausing:

  • Redirect my mind– Go for a walk, sketch, read.
  • Remind myself of truth– I am not God. I’m responsible for my actions but not for outcomes.
  • Receive God’s peace– “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” John 14:27

As I look ahead to tomorrow, I am thankful that there are not as many Q words!

And now I need to click “Publish”…

A to Z April Blogging P

Oaks of Righteousness

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They will be called oaks of righteousness,
    a planting of the Lord
    for the display of his splendor.
Isaiah 61:3

I draw trees, or perhaps it is rather that trees draw me.  The personalities of oak trees in particular capture my attention, and I love to observe (that’s another of my favorite “O” words), study, and sketch them whenever I can. There are so many varieties and shapes of oaks, but they all speak to me of stability, strength, and perseverance. When I sit sketching or simply studying an oak, I see the ways it has stood firm through assaults of weather, disease, loss of limbs, and insidious attacks by insects, yet still it stands with branches lifted skyward- a display of God’s splendor visible in his creation. 

Our land is wooded, with many trees of various species, but when we moved here 34 years ago, there were no oaks. Our first fall here, we went hiking with our sons, then one and two years old. When we came home, their pockets were bulging with acorns, and, after the boys had played with them for a while, I tossed the acorns into our unmown field area. Apparently the deer and mice missed one acorn.

That acorn, so little it easily fit in my toddler’s hand, has grown into an oak tree that towers far taller than that boy, now a man of over six feet. My sons and the oak are now in their thirties, well-rooted, strong, and thriving. The oak lifts its upper limbs higher than our house, providing perches for finches, woodpeckers, warblers, orioles, robins, hawks, and more, and it grows its lower limbs downward to provide shelter for small creatures and once even a newborn fawn in the haven of its tangled and spreading branches.

I wasn’t familiar with Isaiah’s words about oaks of righteousness displaying God’s splendor until I was writing this piece, but I will always think of that when I sketch them in the future. And now I wonder what maples, ashes, cedars, dogwoods, and other trees are saying. I will be observing them closely to see what words of wisdom they have for me!

Lower limbs of the oak that grew up with my sons
Bedford Oak– over 500 years old
Holy Cross Monastery Oak- over 300 years old
Oak I sketched in the rain yesterday, hence the ink smudges
Sketching the Angel Oak in South Carolina with two of my grandchildren

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
    because the Lord has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
    to proclaim freedom for the captives
    and release from darkness for the prisoners,
 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
    and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
    and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
    instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
    instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
    instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
    a planting of the Lord
    for the display of his splendor.
                                  Isaiah 61:1-3

A to Z April Blogging O

Now

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Now

The past is but a memory
that drips through my fingers
like oil when I try to hold it,
leaving no substance
but a greasy residue
that is hard to wash off.

The future is a dream
yet to be realized.
I cannot grasp it either,
anymore than I can
the morning mist that rises
in today’s sun and vanishes.

Now is all I truly have,
and yet I have it
not so much as it has me.
I cannot hold it here,
as it slides from future dream
through this moment and
into past as memory.

So how shall I now live?
I will look into this present moment
and search for what it holds
for me of life, of hope,
of a reality that exists behind the past,
beyond the future, and
solidly beneath this Now.
I shall Be and enter into life.

A to Z April Blogging N

Mammalian Meat Allergy and Margin

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“Maybe it’s time to redefine 100%.”

My friend Sally said that in the fall of 2010 when I told her I was back to normal after my concussion nine months earlier, but that as soon as I did too much I would completely crash. No warning signs of increasing fatigue or feeling like I was a bit stressed and should take a break. I would go in a matter of minutes from 100% to physically exhausted, emotionally drained, and unable to get words out coherently. It was frustrating, as I was eager to resume normal life with my usual activities and responsibilities after months of recovery.

And then Sally suggested rethinking my whole way of approaching life. That wasn’t what I had had in mind; I was of the mindset that pushing myself would help me get better, like exercising a muscle to strengthen it. That clearly wasn’t working, though, and eleven years later, it still isn’t the best approach for me. Oh, there are times I can and do push myself when there’s a need, such as with family emergencies, but I found that when I pushed myself, I needed to take little breaks whenever I could and then a longer downtime once the situation was resolved. I learned to schedule margin into my days and weeks—unscheduled time that could be a buffer when there were extenuating circumstances and that would provide a healthy rhythm of rest and work for ordinary times.

Redefining 100% by adding margin led to a different way of living, and I found I loved it!  Previously I had occupied my time with “useful” work of some sort. After my discussion with Sally, instead of packing my schedule with good and useful activities, I became more thoughtful about what I committed to and started scheduling a weekly “Quiet Day,” when I would journal, read, sketch, and sometimes hike. After some adjustment I ended up being grateful for the concussion as an odd sort of gift and was glad for the way it had changed my life.

Then last summer I was diagnosed Mammalian Meat Allergy or Alpha-gal Syndrome (AGS). I had wondered for several years why I’d sometimes wake up with hives, or why I’d frequently be inexplicably nauseous or dizzy. After a few anaphylactic reactions, I went to the doctor and tested positive for AGS, which is a tick-induced allergy to galactose-ά-1,3-galactose, a sugar found in all mammals except humans and some primates (so I suppose I could eat monkey meat-ick!). At first I was mostly relieved to know what was causing my symptoms, and since I prefer poultry and fish anyway, I figured it would be easy to manage this allergy by simply avoiding beef, lamb, and pork. Wrong!

I was amazed at how many medications, supplements, soaps, and other products contain substances made from mammalian sources. Even worse, it turns out many people with AGS react strongly to cross-contamination (think my grandmother’s wonderful cast iron frying pans that once had been used for hamburgers) and to meat cooking fumes (uh oh, the neighbor’s BBQ), and I seem to be in that category.

Suddenly my life has become significantly more constricted. I carry an Epi-pen and Benadryl wherever I go, even for a walk, in case someone is grilling burgers. Eating out isn’t an option, and I’ve mostly been home for fear of reacting to someone’s perfume (apparently some perfumes either contain a mammalian substance or cross-react somehow). Stephen has taken over the grocery shopping and other errands, at least until my system stabilizes and becomes less reactive. It’s been hard and frightening.

In the past few days, though, I’ve realized that while there are challenges, I’m already experiencing some gifts of this diagnosis. Because I’m not running errands or going many places, I have much more margin. This has given me the time and mental focus to write regularly, something I had wanted to do for a long time, and that I hope to continue after this April A to Z blogging challenge is past. I’m painting more, and I’m writing more letters (yes, even snail mail letters and cards). I’m reading a great variety of books and significantly more in the Bible. I’m exercising my brain with chess lessons and studying Spanish and loving it. I’m more at ease and better able to relax and enjoy tea with Stephen before work and when he breaks for lunch.

I still can’t quite say that I am grateful for this Mammal Meat Allergy, but, as with the concussion, I am confident that God will use it for good in my life. I’m thankful for the margin it has given me, and I’m looking forward to see how I will grow in this gift of time.

A to Z April Blogging M

This cow is safe; I won’t be eating her!