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.

* spoiler alert * this book review tells all *

Jesus was not an intellectual. The narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the Reverend John Ames, is. His discourses on things Christian explore the subtleties of grace and love and God’s light, but he himself cannot act to save his godson, the lying, selfish, devious, no-account son of Ames’ best friend the Reverend Boughton. When the prodigal son Jack Boughton returns home to Gilead, Iowa, he receives precisely no help in his attempt at starting a new life. He receives a cold reception, a pointedly critical sermon, unflinching attention to long-held gospel principles and, in the end, one blessing.  

I would not call this Christian behavior.

For the first illegitimate child Jack Boughton abandoned, early in his life, the Reverends Ames and Boughton expended great efforts to assist the mother and child. But for the second illegitimate child, which Jack fathered in mid-life with his black common-law wife—a woman and child he loves and longs to support and live with—nothing. His elderly father cannot be told about the mixed-race couple for fear the news will kill him. He is dying, and in the year 1956 miscegenation is a scandalous thing. The Reverend Ames, also in failing health, does nothing with the knowledge but assess and bury it.

The tastiest bits of the novel involve Ames’ grandfather, an abolitionist preacher who harbored John Brown in his Kansas church and used his ministry to end slavery and save the United States’ soul, violently. Whereas our Reverend Ames refuses to forgive Jack Boughton for abandoning his first child, for squandering fatherhood “as if it were nothing,” and cannot be stirred to assist the older, humbler Jack whose mixed-race family needs a decent place to spend their days together. Jack comes to lay his burden down—could he and his wife and child find a place to live in Gilead? To me that is the central question of this book. But Robinson’s Gilead is a “hill of testimony,” pages and pages of delicate reflection on a spiritual life, so there is no place for Jack.

Jesus spent his ministry with sinners, prostitutes, the poor, the weary and outcasts. John Ames does not even feel the lack of Christlike care offered to Jack Boughton. He uses Jack as a tool for self-examination, a theological sticking point. The only warmly compassionate person portrayed in this novel is Ames’ uneducated wife Lila, who says, “A person can change. Everything can change.”

If religion is not effective in relieving suffering and opening closed doors into grace, why is it worth our attention? For all Ames’ artistry of thought and expression, I would rather have read the life of Ames’ wife. Or his driven grandfather. I’m with the Bible on this one: To him who asks, give.

P.S.
Poking around in the history and life of John Brown, I found he created an anti-slavery group called The League of Gileadites. I doubt this is an accidental link. Brown said at the founding of the League, “Nothing so charmes the American people as personal bravery.” Wikipedia explains that “In the Bible, Mount Gilead was the place where only the bravest of Israelites would gather together to face an invading enemy.” Robinson’s town of Gilead, like the aging failing Ames, is the opposite of this. I hope she intended the irony.

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.

I am flying off to celebrate my mother's 93rd birthday with my family. In her honor, I'm posting the best peanut butter cookie recipe imaginable on this planet, and encouraging everyone to make use of their end-of-season produce in out-of-the-box ways!

*Adapted from "The Whole Jar of Peanut Butter Cookies"

INGREDIENTS

    * 1 cup butter, softened
    * 1 cup white sugar
    * 1 cup packed brown sugar
    * 2 egg
    * 1 egg yolk
    * 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
    * 18 ounces chocolate peanut butter (ground fresh at health food store—it's
            OK to substitute plain old peanut butter, 1/2 crunchy and 1/2 smooth,
            maybe stir in a half cup of cocoa powder to get it chocolatey?!)
    * 2 cups all-purpose flour
    * 1 teaspoon baking soda
    * 1/2 teaspoon salt
    * 1 cup chocolate chips

DIRECTIONS

   1. In a large bowl, cream butter, white sugar, and brown sugar until smooth. Add the eggs, yolks, and vanilla; mix until fluffy. Stir in peanut butter. Sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt; stir into the peanut butter mixture. Finally, stir in the chocolate chips. Refrigerate the dough for at least 2 hours.

   2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease a cookie sheet.

   3. Roll dough into walnut sized balls. Place on the prepared cookie sheet and flatten slightly with a fork dusted with flour. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes in the preheated oven. Cookies should look dry on top. Allow to cool for a few minutes on the cookie sheet before removing to cool completely on a rack. These cookies taste great when slightly undercooked. It is not humanly possible to eat just one.

I served a dinner two nights ago that actually induced nirvana.

I am sharing the recipes here, in hopes some other lucky family wants to taste summer at its finest. Do try to use fresh everything: free range turkey, garden beet greens, ripe raspberries. I even clipped fresh herbs from our garden.

The thing is, I improved a meatball recipe from Joy of Cooking, so I know these Hop Klops also fare well in a fantastic winter soup.

The name, Gutentag Hop Klops, is in honor of Will Ferrell's spunky lederhosen dance in The Producers.

1 lb.     ground light turkey
1 ½       English muffins, rubbed together/shredded into light bread crumbs
1 stalk  celery, diced
1/3 c.   parsley, chopped
1 T       lemon zest, approx. 2/3 large lemon
            juice from ½ lemon
1/8 c.   katsup
1/8 c.   yellow mustard
¼ c.      onion, diced
dash     salt and pepper
1          egg

Mix together lightly with hands. Roll into 2” balls. Place on greased baking pans. Bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes.

2 bunches beet greens, stems removed — boil two minutes in a large pot of water.

Saute in a pan:
2 T olive oil
2 cloves garlic, pressed
Sprinkle of chili pepper flakes

Add drained, chopped beet greens to garlic and flakes. Saute one minute.

(Meanwhile, boil the beets for half an hour in just enough water to cover. Cool and then peel them by squeezing off the skins. Serve the following day, sliced thin and chilled.)

1.5 c.     cooked quinoa
1/8 c.    Paul Newman's Raspberry Vinaigrette Dressing
15         raspberries, torn to bits
1           Gala apple, chopped
             salt to taste
Combine all and serve chilled.

Not to make anyone jealous, but we finished the meal with . . . no, no, desserts are for another blog.

Happy glorious slow end of summer to us all!

We are seeing the end of patriarchy. It has taken itself to its preposterous cruel end. The insanity you move through that is called contemporary history, these current events that pile on suffering and seem so incontestable, or contestable but unstoppable, are the ruin of a ruinous social system. Does knowing this give any cause for comfort?

Understanding phenomena while you’re in the midst of them does offer strength and detachment. Just enough detachment to know that your values and actions—unlike the global aggressive, destructive, acquisitive swarm—are not prey to the swarm. When the only real freedom is personal, take it. Stand different. Witness your direct line with good. Adore the world still sending its beauty up through you. Reframe the so-called debate of living.

The Navaho call it “The Beauty Way.” Bill Cunningham, eccentric street fashion photographer in New York says: “He who seeks beauty will find it.”

If every one of us fell to the earth in gratitude each day would we be so odd, really?

What if you listened to dirt for one minute, every day? When was the last time you smelled soil? Get on your belly, it’s your inheritance, your support, our own kingdom come.

Society is largely lunatic. Individual wisdom arises continuously. Every one of us can put down the gun.

P.S. The idea of the end of patriarchy was planted in my brain by Paul B. Ferrell, a behavioral economics columnist for Market Watch/Wall Street Journal, who writes:
It is clear that patriarchy — male dominance of world culture, politics and economics throughout history — has failed, bringing the world to the brink of total destruction. Why do male leaders fail? Jeremy Grantham’s firm GMO manages $108 billion. He predicted the 2008 meltdown and now warns: Male leaders are emotional, “impatient ... management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget.” Leadership “requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained.” Yet “we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers,” which guarantees that “every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always to miss it . . . ”

In the coming post-capitalism America, Grantham’s research suggests that women leaders will naturally emerge not just because the male brain is a short-term saboteur. The bigger reason is that women’s brains have evolved naturally as superior long-term thinkers. Brain researchers tell us 75% of men are short-term left-brain thinkers, while 75% of women tend to have strong right-brain traits as forward-thinkers, more aware of the future, the big picture, with a sense of future consequences, peacemakers rather than gamer-players.

P.P.S. I know it is "stand differently," but standing alone is awkward, so the grammatical oddness seems right.

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.

What was great about this summer? I stumbled on a few fine reads, herewith shared.

Lilies of the Field—William E. Barrett

Bold simple tale of a man who finds his calling with a flock of German nuns.

The Wild Birds—Wendell Berry

Strikingly true agrarian views of life, delivered by the lawyer of a rural town in Kentucky.

Stargirl—Jerry Spinelli

Ever want to be a free spirit? Remember anyone in high school who ever dared? Stargirl shows you how.

The Beast in the Jungle—Henry James

You may think nothing happens in this novella, until the work explodes inside you the next day.


Cranford—Elizabeth Gaskell

Doilies and tea in a small English town, simpler days and ways. I confess, I enjoyed the BBC series more than the book. (Dame Judi Dench always delivers!) The dramatic ardency of Gaskell’s novel North and South gives way to gentle portraits of country women at home and in company.

IBS Cookbook—Heather Van Vorous

This woman knows great food. Amazing fallen chocolate soufflé with raspberry sauce. Scrumptious orange flower bread. Zesty fresh mango salsa on grilled shrimp. Delectable roasted cauliflower soup. I cook from this book all of the time for guests, who never guess the dishes are low fat. Unless the recipe says it’s from Van Vorous’ mother or grandmother, it will likely be delicious. Van Vorous' recipes are pure food love.

Tattoos on the Heart—Father Gregory Boyle

An oasis of human caring, Boyle works with fatherless young men in East L.A. To quote a friend, Father Boyle “is a fascinating human being, doing more positive good than all the government agencies combined." Bask in compassion. Read his book.

And treat yourself to another compassionate hard-working man, Sydney Poitier in Lilies of the Field. The first words from the Mother's mouth when he hops out of his dusty car,