The transition from school year to summer is challenging under the best of circumstances, and this year we’ve slid into summer break with strep and some kind of chest cold. As the days ticked from May into June, and the piles of used Kleenexes grew, nothing I planned to get done before break happened. My brain was too foggy to write, but too agitated to rest. My body was lead-level fatigued. I grew increasingly irritable and panicked, sure that nothing was going to go the way I wanted it to ever again, that all my ideas for essays and artwork would wither and die while my kids whined and refused to play outside, and that the whole summer was going to be plagued by wildfire smoke and societal collapse, so what was the point of anything?
I let myself be grumpy and full of self-pity for a day. Okay, two days.
Then I decided that maybe I was overreacting, just a smidge, and figured that if my usual routine was shot to shit, and my catastrophizing wasn’t helping the situation,* it might be time to try something different. So on Monday, the first official day of summer break, I blew my nose, checked the air quality report (moderate!), and took the kids outside to draw flowers.
I was inspired by this week’s DrawTogether assignment. Couple of things to note here. 1) I love drawing, but I’m not technically that great at it. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t pursue art when I was younger. Could I get better at it if I wanted to? Yes. Do I have the energy/stamina/inclination at this stage of life? No. Also, full disclosure: I almost always draw from reference photos. Back in the day I did a still life or two, but these days two dimensions are about all my brain can handle. I figured I’d probably have an easier time of it if I picked some flowers from the front yard prairie and brought them inside. But our flowers had just started blooming, and I couldn’t bring myself to pick them. Plus I’m not a cut flowers kind of person. Why would I want to bring a bunch of flowers inside to watch them die?** So the kids and I pulled some chairs into the yard and got to work.
Y’all. Drawing real, living, moving in the wind flowers is hard. Especially if you’ve just looked at drawings of Ruth Asawa’s flowers for inspiration. I know I put a link just there, but if you’re about to draw flowers I don’t recommend clicking it, unless you are excellent at contour drawing or have really good self-esteem. I have neither of those attributes, but I do possess a level of don’t-give-a-fuck-ness that works similarly, so here are my prairie flowers.
We spent probably an hour outside drawing flowers. Maybe less. It was hot, and my neck hurt, but we saw a ginormous fuzzy carpenter bee, and a butterfly landed on my hand. And I looked at the prairie, and the flowers in the prairie, with more concentration than I ever have. The kids were quiet, and focused, and so proud of their work (I was, too!). When we finally finished and went back inside, I felt a little better.
“You can't force a plant to bloom,” begins one of Ruth Asawa’s most famous quotes. “It has a cycle. You have to tend it and care for it and wait for the bloom to happen. If you don't take care of it, it dies. The more experiences you have like this, the more you begin to understand your own cycle.”
Drawing flowers gave me enough breathing room to see that this is all part of my cycle. The period of focus, productivity, and creativity; the inevitable intrusion of life; the grasping and scrambling and fear that all is lost; and, finally, the surrender, the acceptance. The patience, the looking, the trying. The beginning again. I want to say hopefully I’ll remember that a little sooner next time, but I probably won’t. So instead I’ll say hopefully I can give myself grace as I navigate the cycle, and keep an eye out for the flowers. Hopefully you can, too.
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There’s a new book out about Ruth Asawa that some friends and I are going to read this summer. Have you read/are you reading it? If you are/want to, let me know and I can start a chat thread for it! I’d also really, really, really love to go to the retrospective at SFMoMA. Have you been? If I don’t make it out there, I at least want to pick up an exhibition catalogue.
How have you been caring for your metaphorical and literal plants lately? Is anything blooming in your life right now? Let us know in the comments! Shared joy (say it with me) is compounded joy.
As always, if this piece spoke to you, please like, comment, and/or re-stack!
*it never does, and yet my poor lizard brain keeps insisting that some day completely spinning out is going to be the exact right thing to do, and I’ll finally be able to triumphantly declare “I told you so!” to the handful of people who survived the catastrophic event that I insisted would be catastrophic.
**I am aware that this is an unpopular opinion.