“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.