The Signs, they are a comin'! Thank you, God!

This morning I woke up full of anxiety and other feelings about several things, but one that popped to the top pretty quickly was my decision to stop tutoring and to devote myself to art full time.  It's such a HUGE decision! 

This is my last week at Trinity.  This morning I got a lump in my throat several times while I was tutoring my students, especially one whom I have been seeing for 3 1/2 years.  I will miss her a lot.  I've built up such a personal relationship with many of these kids.  It'll be hard to let that go.  Hopefully they'll choose to stay in touch, but it's actually the rare student who does so.  I can count them on my thumb actually.  After 23 years of tutoring.

While doing my Morning Pages (see Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way if you don't know what they are) at 5:30 this morning, I allowed my feelings to pour out then eventually allowed some rationality to break in and told God I'm letting go and asked him to take over.  I do believe that when I surrender to the forces that be, my life is 100% better.  I tend to think I'm in charge and can do very well, but again and again I find that I do better if I let go and let God. 

I am feeling so driven to do this work, I no longer have a choice about it.  It was difficult staying focused on Calculus this morning.  It feels like my brain is a dam, holding in information like derivatives, balancing chemical equations, quadratic formulas, metaphors, the Constitution, the difference between ser and estar.  But it is full to overflowing and can't wait to open its gates and let all that extraneous knowledge go! Pfft!  Occasionally I'll worry that I might let in Alzheimers if I don't keep using my brain as actively as I have been these last 20+ years - "use it or lose it" - but I am SO ready to let it go (not my brain - the plethora of high school subject matter, I mean)!  I want to fill my brain with other things, fill my eyes with other images, fill my heart with other thoughts.  It's been wonderful tutoring.  I will grieve the loss of my students and my colleagues, but I am ready to move on.

I had lots of affirmations today that I'm doing the right thing.  My colleagues were uniformly kind and supportive and encouraging.  Then I met with Valley Haggard for lunch.  I was feeling raw as could be, but tried not to show it - who wants to dump the second they see someone?!  But she almost immediately read my mind and said, without any prompting, "You are doing the right thing.  It's perfect.  It's going to turn out great!  It's exactly what you're supposed to be doing."  Of course tears came to my eyes as I thought of the students I'm leaving and as I felt my fear rise to the surface.  But when I focus on my gut, I know I'm doing the right thing.  There just isn't any question there.

Valley and I were meeting to  plan a workshop we'll be offering in February called Body Shop: Exploring our real feelings about our real bodies through drawing and writing.   I love working with Valley!  She and I seem to work well together and came up with a dynamite workshop with joy and enthusiasm.  I'm looking forward to teaching this workshop with her.  If you are interested in taking it, email me at susansingerart@msn.com, and I'll send you more details once we get the flyer made up.  I'll also be posting the flyer here once it's ready.

Valley also agreed to meet with me to help me brainstorm about the book I'm going to write.  I know it's there, ready and waiting, but I don't have a format for it yet.  So much is swirling in my head about it - I need to figure out how to get it down on paper.  She is going to help me figure that out.  I'm a lucky woman.  We'll meet another time to do the same for her and the book that is swirling inside her head.  I feel so blessed to have met her and to be collaborating with her in so many ways!

When I got back to school and checked my email, there was an email from a woman who's the publisher of a small press who might be interested in my book.  She saw my catalog and liked what she saw so is wanting to meet with me to talk about it.  We set up that appointment for Friday.  God is working overtime giving me signs that this is the right thing for me to be doing!  

When I got back from school, there was an enticing pink gift bag hanging on the doorknob.  My dear friend Lynda had brought me a birthday present, a book entitled: True Work: The Sacred Dimension of Earning a Living.  Sounds perfect to me!  I can't wait to dive into it!

As if all that weren't enough, I just took a break for a moment from writing this and got an email from Foundry Gallery in DC saying that my piece Sally kissing Susie got accepted into their show Celebrate Gay Marriage.  Yippee!  The show will be in DC in January.  Details to follow.

It's been a great art day!

Sally kissing Susie

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email with information about a show in DC at the Foundry Gallery called Celebrate Gay Marriage.  As has been the case at other times, I felt a very strong call to enter the show.  But that would necessitate having a piece to submit! 

No problem - I sent an email to a friend of mine who is the go-to person at the Gay Community Center of Richmond and she let folks know I was looking for models.  Within an hour, a woman had written me to offer herself and her wife as models. 

We got together about a week later for a modeling session.  They were wonderful!  They're young and clearly really good together.  They went to Canada and got married about 18 months ago after a several year courtship.  It was lovely seeing them together and getting to know them.  Really nice people.  That's one of the wonderful things about doing this work - I get to meet such cool people who sometimes become dear friends.  I'm definitely in the right line of work!

I took a couple of hundred pictures as they and we tried to figure out good poses and they tried to get comfortable in front of the camera.  It's difficult to pose naked in front of someone you don't know sometimes!  I got some very cool shots.  I'm looking forward to painting several of them, but so far I've only had time to paint one.

I haven't had time to paint or blog much lately - my mom had a knee replacement surgery the 16th so I've been spending a lot of time with her when I'm not working.  It's been very, very busy.  Yesterday though, I had a day when I could be in the studio all day.  Such a luxury!!  I immediately looked at the images of the couple, chose one, cropped it and placed the grid on it, then contacted them to make sure they were OK with it.  Susie is awesome at following through on things and got in touch with me almost right away.  The minute I got off the phone with her, I began preparing the canvas and painting.  It felt so good to be applying paint to canvas again.  I miss it when I don't have time to paint.  And it brings me so much joy when I do.

I sent the entry to the Foundry Gallery today.  I'll post here when I find out whether the piece gets accepted or not.  If it does, the opening will be in DC in January.  Wish me luck!

Nursing my boy!

We moved to Richmond when my son was 4 weeks old.  When my mother came to Ohio to meet her grandson, she happened to mention that if we wanted to live with her while my husband went back to school, that would be OK.  I guess that planted a seed, and we moved in with her the day before Richmond's biggest snowfall of the year (16 inches) and a couple of days before VCU's semester started.  I immediately reached out to try to find friends and community.  I was blessed to find La Leche League, a support group for breastfeeding women and their babies.  I had become an ardent nurser and would pull out my breast whenever and wherever my son needed to nurse.  I think that might have been uncomfortable at times for others, but I was not atuned to their discomfort.  I was atuned to my baby and his needs.  I was also a bit strident about a woman's right to feed her baby in public the way nature intended him to be fed.

My favorite nursing story occurred at the National Gallery in Washington, DC.  My husband and I had driven up there with Andrew to see the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit shortly after she died.  I love her sumptuous paintings of flowers especially.  Her colors and forms are exquisite.  As I was slowly perusing the exhibit, Andrew, who was about a year old at the time, became restless and started indicating that he wanted to nurse.  I cradled him in my arms, pulled up my shirt, began to nurse him, and went on looking at the art.  When I was in front of her gigantic cloud painting, I heard a couple of women beside me speaking in German.  Since I speak fluent German, I perked up - I always love talking to people in other languages!  What they said made my stomach leap - "Schau das mal an, was die Frau da macht!  So eine Frechheit!"  (Look at what that woman is doing!  It's so rude!)  I looked over at them and saw they meant me, so I said, in German, of course, "Naja, dafuer koennen wir alle die Kunst in Ruhe anschauen."  (Yes, well, and because of that we can all look at the art in peace.)  They gawked at me then turned away quickly and made their way out of the gallery as fast as they could.  I felt happy that I'd been able to defend my right to nurse in public. 

It wasn't all that common to nurse in 1987, and there certainly weren't provisions made for it in public places.  There weren't even changing tables in the bathrooms.  I remember changing Andrew's diaper at the table at a restaurant once.  The woman I was with, who had not yet had children, was a bit appalled, but I think it was better than using the bathroom floor - gross! 

Being in La Leche League was one of the best things that could have happened to me.  The women in the group were very conscious parents and thought a lot about the best way to bring up their kids.  It was so helpful to have people to talk to about issues I was having and to find out whether it was something to worry about or not.  It was also quite empowering to learn more about birthing alternatives.  The next time I was pregnant, I made quite a different choice from the one I'd made the first time around...