I had just come in from a Sunday-night run - my best yet since giving birth to our second child about 9 months ago, spurred on by the need to outrun the mosquitoes dive-bombing into my flailing arms and legs. If you're like me you need some motivation to pick up the pace, and preserving my lifeblood is motivation enough for me.
Also if you're like me, you don't notice the things on your walls/shelves/tables much after they have been there for a week or so. It all just blends in, looks OK (or not), gathers dust and eventually gets boring. It takes a friend with an eye for design or a move or a fit of cleaning (those do come on me once in awhile) to get me thinking about moving furniture or decorative things around.
My gaze fell on this little mixed-media piece of artwork on our shelf . Anyone who has been to one of our homes over the past six years has seen it. I do not claim to be a fine artist; I always floundered terribly in art class. (Except for my grade 9 art teacher Mr. Debakker who tried to convince me I can do art. He was one of those unconventional, earring-wearing, smoking-during-the-break, soccer-coaching teachers who "got" you. The kind you see in movies standing on desks and taking time for the kid whom no one else sees potential in.) My sister Nancy is an amazing artist (and a lefty, of course). When we visited her in Vancouver over Christmas back in 2007 she tried to gently nudge along the quivering sapling of my creativity by spending an evening creating a mixed media canvas with me. It was somewhere between really fun and pulling teeth. A little of both.
I was a kid with a big imagination (we spent 80% of our childhood dressed up in "olden-days" clothes, shawls, bonnets and long skirts my mom had sewn; I often wished I had been born circa 1816) who loved to write. I wrote reams and reams of stories throughout my childhood, some of which I find to be pretty good when I dig through my old boxes at my parents' farm. But I was always somewhat terrifed of art class. I spoke the words "I can't do it" or "I am not good at art" over my life for as long as I can remember. I shoved my creativity in a box. When I left home at 18 for university, I got too busy with assignments, piles of reading for classes and stalking boys around RJ and Burwash Dining Hall. I stopped writing stories. An angst-filled journal (or ten), but no more "creative writing."
I didn't trust my own ability to create something as we stared at the blank canvas. So Nan lovingly gave my a few tips and starting points, helped me craft some ideas about what is important to me. I was pretty pleased with how the mixed media canvas turned out (hence bringing it back in my suitcase over the 8000+ kilometres that separate us). For the uninitiated, mixed media combines things like paint, gesso, scraps of paper, ink. My sister's trademark is coffee grounds. Yes, there are some coffee grounds there too, to the absolute delight and fascination of my husband.
On the canvas are a few words: "to write" scrawled in my own penmanship and the imprint of the word "open". There is a bright, yellow object which was supposed to represent hope, the reawakening of dreams after a very dark period of depression that clouded my first year and a half in Germany. I was open for new experiences, I was hoping to renew my love of writing creatively. There are also fragments of text from some old German book my sister had (from who knows where). I identified with the language of my newly adopted country and of my husband, and thus painstakingly cut out a few words from various pages with an exacto knife. Put together they read "eine Frau und ein Baby" "Das ist das Allerschönste auf Erden" [a woman and a baby...that is the most beautiful thing on earth]. And farther to the right "Ich bin froh... daß ich...Bücher schreibe." [I am happy that I write books]
Looking up at this personal piece of artwork while sweating through my crunches, I couldn't help but smile. Smile with thankfulness because all the dreams of that young woman back in 2007 are coming true. That girl seems so much younger, less experienced, less sure of who she is and what she wants. I am 31 now and I am happy to be, chuis bien dans ma peau as we say in Québec [I feel good in my skin]. My thirties have proven, so far, to be calmer and more confident after all the drama of my 20s.
Back then, the idea of having a child was slowly growing on me, I was becoming "open" for it. Now I have two gorgeous children who make my life so much richer. Holding my babes in my arms, smelling his hair or kissing her bald baby head - it truly is the most beautiful thing.
In 2007 I had no idea where to go career-wise. I was teaching ESL to get by while my husband was in university. Since then I have stumbled into a career as an academic - and I love it. I get to read books for a living and write about them; study, research, teach, and learn. And I am starting to write again (beyond the Ph.D. thesis and sundry academic papers).
My pastor asked me to help gather the writers within our church. Giving me her encouragement and a platform, a field in which to fertilize the seedling of my creative talent. A big, open, expansive field in the sunshine where all kinds of seeds can be planted, where all of our sprouts can grow up together into an abundant crop. Every day I am discovering another hidden poet or journaller among us; the chef who writes poetry on his breaks, the teenage-girl who writes the beautiful letters. They're all welcome in this field. We can pull out the weeds around each other, make way for the healing rains and let the wind of creativity shake our branches. As our roots plunge down deeper and our stems get stronger, we'll start to bear fruit. And we'll fill a feasting table with the fruits of our creativity, right in the middle of this field, a heavy-laden table for others to sit down and partake.
