_ May you live in the flow, however chilly.

_ Shelter from the storms . . .

_ And please buy books, give them away, pass them on and cherish them.

“The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.”
--Dr. Samuel Johnson, Preface to his Dictionary 

My ex-husband gave me this as a card once long ago, and I burst into tears. Here was the secret woman I was not, a woman writing in a room filled with air and light. A woman undistracted. The painter is Vuillard. No painter has loved women and interiors so dearly.

I spent a dozen years with my writer-desires hidden in a tumble of life, like sheets, pulled over me. A potent simple love-filled sleep, and then

once I entered graduate school and started to write in earnest, a darker draining jumble.

I remodeled and walked and sewed and knitted and gardened my way through the birth-pangs of my first novel. It went nowhere in the real world. This longstanding pain remained private. The manuscript, after two years going the rounds with various publishers, collapsed in a closet from exhaustion.

About a decade after receiving that Vuillard card, I visited The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. One painting in particular stopped me. I stood mesmerized by this very small, very intimate portrait called “Woman Sweeping.” I trembled and I wept. I simply could not believe the domestic radiance, the woman and the room warm as velvet. The patterns wrenched me out of my twentieth-century freedoms into the intimacy of belonging somewhere.

This unassuming, glorious 17” x 18” painting is by Edouard Vuillard. Yet again, I didn’t choose Vuillard as a favorite painter. Vuillard chooses me.

He helped me through the brighter years, the green period when landscape design and planting trees and still a bit of sewing for tranquility flung me into the arms of a new novel, a contemporary novel, the novel where perfectionism dropped in a puddle and I wrote like a drunk on fire. Guest House. How fitting that most of

Vuillard’s paintings are interiors. Interlocking interiors which glow with belonging. Belonging is a central theme of Guest House.

And still the story goes. Just last week, I went to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, to see a Post-Impressionist exhibit. I expected to be ravished by some of my old pals, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne. I have to admit I loved Renoir’s “The Dancer” so there was a small contest for my heart—but truly and utterly, Vuillard won the day. And I’m proud to say the painting among his half-dozen paintings which threw me over its shoulder and hauled me into its crazy den was “Profile of a Woman in a Green Hat.”

Can you begin to calculate the impact this 8” x 6” card-sized portrait has in a hushed crowd of reverent onlookers? With a Picasso blaring trumpets at it from across the room? I laughed out loud. I love it dearly. It’s Olive Oyl asking Popeye to can the spinach and give her a kiss.

Simeran Maxwell, of the National Gallery of Australia, says about our Olive: The face is an enigma. The conspicuous brow evokes a variety of responses in the viewer. Is the woman anxious, persecuted or suspicious? Is she shying away from our intrusive gaze, archly teasing us, questioning what we are looking at, or crossly glaring at us?

Simeran, she is saying: I am in my place. Don’t you envy my green lucidity?

Edouard Vuillard lived with and adored his mother for sixty years, his dress-maker mother. He loved his best friend’s wife chastely and was often in their company. The radiance of his heart seems the topic of each painting; love of women and their interiors.

A gal could do worse for a favorite. "I don't paint portraits," Vuillard once said. "I paint people at home." Ah, there’s the attraction. Being at home.

NPR on Vuillard.
The New Yorker on Vuillard.

And for the first time on my blog, here is the man himself . . . stunning.

One of the most profound things you can do on this planet at this time, it seems to me, is to lie down on the earth, belly down—and really that in itself is so good--

lie down and say thank you.

That is it, my challenge. Do it more than once. In different places. Don't put it off. With winter coming, the belly-challenge will be more challenging!

Thank you, Sevier River.

I am rewriting my Utah historical novel, Tributary, for the last time. It will be published late this year. The first draft arrived in 1992. Only now, at age 55, with all of the events that have happened since I began, am I able to give my character Clair the full power and range of her voice.

The most recent and remarkable life event came three weeks ago when I accompanied a Shoshoni healer, Rose Soaring WhiteEagle, to the Washakie graveyard thirty-five miles north of Brigham City. Rose was born in Brigham as were both of my parents, and all of my Mormon ancestors who displaced the Shoshoni from their lands. Tributary is set largely in Brigham City and northern Utah.

Traveling with Rose in this deeply loved land, boundaries dissolved. She and I blessed the graves, marked and unmarked, of her ancestors at Washakie. I sang a lullaby in Shoshoni to the twenty children buried there. Animals and spirits guided us, because we asked them to. No act was taken without first asking.

This generosity is the generosity of the land.

This way of living counteracts a separate self.

Spirits in these latter days, and the healing has begun.

Nothing dislocates the apple cart of order, spills humdrum on its ear quite like a fine art museum.

The Denver Art Museum has dedicated much of its real estate this summer to mud.

Their Marvelous Mud: Clay Around the World show has something for literally everyone.




Pubic covers made of clay were fashion-forward in the ancient pre-Columbian Marajó culture in northern Brazil.

Bikini bottoms in 600 A.D.!

Clay foxes had a field day at a gleaming red café.

Two Cubans dreamed up a permanent getaway vehicle.

And this stunning mother of four,

made of straw-stuffed erosion control tubes smoothed with Colorado adobe, is still in progress.

You can see Roxanne Swentzell complete the 10’ tall sculpture “Mud Woman Rolls On” in the coming weeks. (Call the museum for days and times.)

This sculpture stopped everyone in their tracks. The artist says of it: "The special thing about this sculpture is it is going to be made of unfired mud. She will have her babies who are all of us. We are of the earth."

Aside from her gracious proportions, Mud Woman's hair is fantastic, you simply have to see it in person. It's like Tina Turner meditating in public, with kids.

Denver’s psychotic art plaza actually holds wonderful art within. Just don’t try to harmonize the cacophony of architectural styles as you approach.

If you’re looking for traditional art, well, just take another glance at the building. And be prepared for wonders unimagined.

My former cat Pete, now living on sixty acres of upland valley paradise, seemed always to get it right: play with abandon, climb any trees willing, keep neurotics at bay (oh, what an arsenal of weapons Pete had for keeping clear boundaries), lose toes, lose fights, win dominance in your own pacific home. For all his crusty bossy masculine ways, Pete was a full-on lover.

When I moved to Boulder and could not take a cat, didn’t the person coming to buy my loveseat scoop him up and say she knew the perfect home, with cows and kids and roadless horizons where he could hunt outdoors all day? Pete adopted me in the country, and to the country he returned.

Now, I live in high-density housing, where you could toss four different neighbors hot dog buns off the back deck if they called for ‘em. We are packed in tight. Rather than stay inside or drive to a park, I looked out all my windows and called up beauty. Wherefore art thou? I asked, from the balcony. I am astonished to report that even in a backyard skinny as two beans laid like an L, beauty came.

First, you trim the lilacs struggling in too much shade. You transplant strawberries and a shade-bound climbing rose against a sunny fence. Cover them with shade-giving cardboard for three weeks until new leaves emerge, and they sparkle. Cut curving bed lines and whack out sod, an hour or two each morning. Hang a bird feeder. Sink a used post to support the new grape vine.

Use the gravel under the deck to start a pathway. Make borders with hand-sized rocks. Move the hummingbird feeder three times, without luck, till you tie on a lucid red ribbon, then watch from the balcony as the lightning birds feed.

When you love your soil, love your views, love your neighbors’ sumac trees’ exotic foliage, dream of eggplants warm with sun, dream of iris, dream of songbirds, you are Pete, who grabs every moment out of doors and shakes it, until all the good falls out.

If you are too young yet to love gardens, grow old.

We’ve been conditioned to believe freedom comes after winning a battle (NOW I’M FREE), even if it’s a battle for a parking spot on a crowded city street. But the amped-up mindset needed to compete stays after the contest is over, and then where are we?

Amped.

You may call it revved or pumped. Your parents called it “acting out.”

The trouble is, acting out leads to the belief that we’re getting somewhere, when what we’re usually getting is more stuck. In anger, force, will, self-defense, desire, stress and more desire.


Reacting is goal-oriented. Reacting to the door-to-door solicitor with a growl and a slammed door means you did rid yourself of the intrusion but you also gained a gut-load of anger, and guess which one lasts longer? I speak from many slammed doors.

I have no silver bullet or five-part course on chillin’. I’m hoping to raise a little flag on a slender pole in the midst of the push-pull American feedlot frenzy to say: don’t ruin your health or our society in the name of winning. You do not have to be a heifer behind anybody’s bars.

Freedom feels nice. (Reactivity does not. It’s sort of itchy and hot and snowballing, and the contradictions are part of the whole seductive deal.)

Freedom is subtle, and not so highfalutin. Try casting no blame while holding your place. Retract the claws you want to sink into anything, issues as well as political systems as well as people. Remember your aunt or uncle or friend who had such a level head and an open mind? How you loved being around them? Be them.

Freedom has to start somewhere. We can all lower our psychic cholesterol.

“Instead of allowing ourselves to be led and trapped by our feelings,” Tibetan teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche once said, “we should let them disappear as soon as they form, like letters drawn on water with a finger.”

“There are love dogs no one knows the names of. Give your life to be one of them.”  --Rumi


"Everybody at the speed of light tends to become a nobody."

--Marshall McLuhan

What if the key to suffering is being a somebody. What if you planted a hundred trees, little trees or even seedlings or even just tree seeds, in the night while no one was watching? In a hundred years, the leaf canopy would spread and you would be…

Imagine yourself gone and the results of your deeds outlasting you.

The deed is the thing. The deed remains in the stream of things.

It is the same with people. Your impact on them outlasts your own small sacred shot at life. Or scared shot. Or scarred shot. You know how deep an impact difficult, demanding, dramatic people have on you. Their contractions lodge inside you. We suffer in order to realize that that contraction does not adequately describe reality. Does not do her justice. Cannot cover the beautiful, frightening, amazing bases.

And so we must open and perish.

Transparency is all the rage right now. Transparency means see through. Transparency, according to Wikipedia, “implies openness, communication, and accountability.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we lived transparent lives? Woke up and went through each day openly responding to situations, speaking clearly, and taking the blame? Gave away all the credit. Waited without claiming results. That is traveling light.

We are traveling light. Light bent interestingly backwards to show the world itself. Neitzsche says, “We have art so that we are not destroyed by the truth.” I wonder if art leads us to that destruction with a tender hand? “Let go of the earth, white hand,” the poet Richard Schramm writes. “With nothing below, we are rooted in silence, waiting.”

That is our work. To let go. To wait and see. To travel light, with some singing and head scratching along the way. Light travels. Is it so terrifying, knowing actions outlive forms?

You can't keep a good thing down.

It's nature's way. This tree, having endured heaven knows what death-dealing impact, sprang to life this spring, as trembly green and fragrant as all its compadres on the creek trail by the peacock farm at Greenbelt Meadows, near my home.

Ah, greenbelt. Ah, meadows. Ah, forming oneself around and with and through the blows dealt in the course of growing up. That is why I love trees: they don't mask their injuries, they capitalize on them, when they can.

My novel Tributary, the one that took twelve years and nearly a hundred drafts to complete, the one based on my Mormon pioneer ancestors, the one that's been sitting in a closet for six years recovering from the blow of non-interest by the publishing world, just sent trembly green and fragrant leaves out to dapple my trail. It has a publisher. Torrey House Press will print Tributary by Christmas.

Which makes me mighty glad.

Newsweek says this is The Mormon Moment. The Mormon Moment apparently extends to the literary world, as well. Stay tuned, as I'll be updating my website this summer—with photos and excerpts and such from Tributary—in preparation for the holiday launch.

Take heart. If you live through the heart-stopping difficulties, they can form and strengthen and even liberate you.

Life needs your sap, your dappling of the path, your instincts, your particular expression of this momentary joy.