TIL that Georgia O’Keefe sewed, courtesy of thisNew Yorker article about an exhibition on her style at the Brooklyn Museum:
“O’Keeffe was an expert seamstress who made her own clothes and altered or otherwise preserved them herself; she kept some of her dresses for as long as sixty years.”
“O’Keeffe once said that her penchant for black was not a preference but a practicality: if she started picking out colors for dresses, she would have no time for painting.”
“In New Mexico…she wore denim and painted the landscapes, writing to tell Murdock Pemberton, the art critic for The New Yorker, that she loved to wear a shirt he had given her paired with bluejeans: ‘I rather think they are our only national costumes,’ she said.”
This week’s reminder to resist your usual thought patterns and knee-jerk angry reactions comes from David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech to Kenyon College.
But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.
Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.
“There are other options.” Sometimes all you have to do is choose the other thing–compassion, kindness, gratitude.
It’s not formatted like it belongs on Pinterest, but I thought this quote was a good one in case anyone needs a little nudge to “resist business as usual.”
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, a chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”
W. H. Murray in The Scottish Himalaya Expedition, 1951
[You often see this ending with a Goethe quote and/or the whole thing attributed to Goethe–but today I learned that’s not correct (and that there’s a Goethe Society of North America). The more you know!]
1. Between the macro anxiety (our country) and the micro (my car got dinged in a parking lot this week), it’s been hard to stay in the present and not spin out about the future or think about how I could have done things differently. So this is a useful quote to revisit–not a Zen saying, but Terry Pratchett:
Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.
“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (from Strength To Love)
There is so much to worry about. (Today’s list: Aleppo, climate change, animals in shelters, people without heat, Aleppo.) When things get out of hand in my brain, I turn to Carl Sagan.
I was going to pull a couple sentences from his famous “Pale Blue Dot” chapter of Cosmos but it is all so good. Here he is reading it for extra comfort. Text below, with highlights added for my own emphasis. Perspective helps. A little.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
Anyone else feeling the crunch? Clients rushing to spend their 2016 budgets, presents to wrap, January 20th creeping closer every day… no wonder I just want to knit.
“Now, let us all take a deep breath and forge on into the future; knitting at the ready.”
From Mary Oliver’s new book Upstream. (This was from her Faceboko page; I don’t own the book. Yet.) As we slide into the darkest part of the year, keep hoping. Keep fighting.
