You Can Wish on Other Things Besides White Horses

“That man is brilliant!”

I wrote that sentence in cursive in my notebook at 6: 15 AM last Sunday. Not a normal time for me to write, or to be awake for that matter, but sometimes I am.

 

I fell asleep the night before to the tune of Austin Kleon’s words ringing in my ears, or wherever written words ring. Behind eyeballs? 

Kleon wrote the book, Steal Like an Artist, and says he hopes people steal from him. And it’s hard not to, for almost all of his sentences make good Quotes. Thanks for the permission, Kleon.

But I’m not reading Steal Like an Artist right now. I am reading Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad.

I’m writing cursive—how can a person form all those a-e-i-o-and u’s by printing each letter? It takes too much time.  (Did they stop teaching cursive in schools to force kids to a keyboard? Oh, oh, I’m getting cynical.) And I’ve read that writing cursive can make a person more creative. However, I compose on the keyboard most of the time; I like to encourage cursive and remind myself to use it once in a while. 

 

“Plenty of great art,” wrote Kleon, “is made by jerks, creeps, assholes, vampires, perverts, and worse. And all of them left a trail of victims in their wake." He calls these people “Art Monsters.”

“It’s painful to grapple with Art Monsters, with the idea that people who are reprehensible in their personal lives can produce good work.”—Aston Kleon.

“Art is supposed to make our lives better. If art is adding misery to the world—better to walk away and do something else.”—Kleon. (See why I love this man?)

“Great artists help people look at their lives with fresh eyes. And a sense of possibility.”

“If people read your work and as a result choose life, you are doing a good job.”—Sarah Manguso.

“Art is the highest form of hope.” —Gerhard Richer.

“Hope is not knowing how things will turn out—it is moving forward in the face of uncertainty.”

“To change your mind is to do some real thinking, and thinking requires an environment in which you can try out all sorts of ideas and not be judged for having them.

When you reach for your phone immediately upon awakening in the mornings, you are inviting anxiety and chaos into your life. You are also saying Goodbye to a fertile moment in your life as a creative person.”

See how I can't help quoting? 

 

I consider myself a creative person, for I spend hours in my office making stuff up. 

Another quote. this time from Kurt Vonnegut, “Practicing your art no matter how well or badly it is, is a way to make your soul grow.” 

That's what’s what we are here for, isn’t it?

 

It’s the remorse or bitterness of yesterday, or the bitterness or dread of the future, that breaks us down. Today we can handle.

Imagine it’s Groundhog Day. (The movie.) It’s now, now, now, and now.

And remember if your art is ruining anyone’s life, including your own, it’s not worth making.”—Austen Kleon.

 

 

“One white foot, keep them to the end.”

You can wish on other things besides white horses.

I cleaned the garage yesterday and found this picture in a little folder. 

I almost swept it up, but when I retrieved it and opened the folder, I found this picture. It gave me a heart thump. It is a picture of my little Mustang Sierra on the day I bought her in Burns Oregon.

She was only five and one-half months old. She wasn’t culled for auction, as they auctioned the foals at six months. I asked if I could buy her. The BLM man was happy to sell her to me. He said she would have better feed with me, and she was almost six months old anyway.

She was a mustang rounded up from the wild, and her mother had to make that roundup run pregnant, so Sierra was born in the pasture on the BLM property. Notice she has one white foot. An old horse saying says: “One white foot, keep them to the end.”

 Sierra as a grown-up lady of two.

I didn’t keep her to the end, but I had the honor of her presence for six years. 

It makes me sad that I didn't keep her to the end, but thinking back, I think it was for the best. My daughter had two horses, and I had two horses. In 2009, times were tough, and we decided to sell our property and move to Hawaii. Scott Beckstead, who then worked for the Humane Society, found a lady with 60 acres who would take them, so we gave our horses away. (Now Beckstead serves as the Equine Director of the Wild Horse Sanctuary and frequently goes to Washington as an advocate and Lawyer for the Wild Horses, and all things wild, really. Obviously, he is one of my heroes.)

I couldn’t keep Sierra as an alone horse; she wanted to be with the gang. She might have preferred horses over me, but we were good friends. She was a character, so curious, sweet and loving, and had strong Mustang feet, kept perfectly filed by running on the emery board of our gravel drive. I would turn her and Velvet, my Quarter horse, loose, and they would frolic and cavort, roll in the Oregon red dirt, and then settle down to graze on the grass that grew around the house. 

We lived in the forest, so no cars went by. Our long gravel road to the house kept them isolated. I rode Sierra briefly. I was the first person on her, the only person except for one foray in an arena by another woman, and she never bucked with me. I conditioned her with a saddle and a bag of grain on her back. She chewed on the truck, though. For years after, people would ask me what happened to the truck; the hood looked like a monster had clawed it.

I was lucky to have had her for six years.

Babes in the Woods

My dog, my walking stick, my grandson, my favorite picture of him on his folks’ forested property. That green is so fresh and beautiful it makes me gasp every time I look at it. The grandson turned 21 yesterday, the land is as old as the last lava flow, and I’m just a kid.

I have another grandson, a younger one, a would-be novelist. As he strode through the house the other day, I said, “Tell me about writing.”

“It’s to learn,” he said.

Hey, that’s brilliant.

“It isn’t to impart knowledge, then?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said.

Well, well, I learned that from the brilliant writing coach Natalie Goldberg, who said some 39 years ago in Writing Down the Bones that writing is a therapeutic experience.  One might think I would be healed from all cynicism by now, but this morning I hit some on the way to this page. DON’T DO THAT.

Unfortunately, I let headlines appear on my computer. From only a glance, something caught my eye—and I wondered, “How come we the people allow dictators to start wars for us, and then, once they are in office, it’s harder to dislodge them than it is to pry a fossilized trilobite from a boulder?”

And then—look there, we have babes in the woods, and my daughter snapped this one. “Fearless little deer.” She called it and said that he just kept getting closer and closer to her.

I remember my husband’s father, a hunter, trying to get a picture of a deer in the forest; we would look at the picture, and all we could see were trees and a thicket. “Where’s the deer?” we would ask.

Do the deer know the difference between a safe person and a dangerous one?

Do we?

Don’t let the beauty go away.

Let’s not allow our hearts to become hardened.

In the preface to the thirtieth edition of her book, Natalie describes reading to a class of third-graders. After reading a lengthy lament for all the people she had known, loved, and lost, she said she couldn’t come up with a title. Finally, one 9-year-old boy raised his hand. “How about,” he said, “The World Comes to Me.”

“Where did you get that?” Goldberg said as she almost fell backward.

He held up his palms, shook his head, and said, “Just thought it might work.”