A few days ago I pulled a sample of my eight-grade art efforts out of a storage box. I can’t honestly say it shows great artistic promise.
It’s a winter scene, with some pine trees dotted here and there. Puffy clouds billow in a blue sky. A stream starts in a mountain pass and cuts straight down the middle of the painting. It’s those mountains that caused me a whole lot of grief. The memory still makes me wince.
I grew up in Idaho, on the flat, sagebrush-dotted Snake River Plain. My horizons were bounded by mountains eighty miles to the north and thirty miles to the south. In a certain light the jagged lines of the distant ranges took on a purple hue.
Besides, I knew the words to “America the Beautiful”:
Oh, beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountains majesty
I may have taken "Purple mountains majesty" a bit too literally
That’s it. That’s the line. I’d seen them in the distance. When we were told to paint a landscape, I painted those majestic purple mountains.
I’m sure I painted with fervor. I loved that class. Every assignment opened my eyes a little wider, made me see the world around me a little more vividly. Besides, every assignment came back with high marks. Every assignment except the purple mountains.
Maybe the teacher was cranky the day I turned in my landscape. Maybe she’d grown weary of the banal art work she graded year after year.
All I’m sure of is that my painting was among those chosen for a display in the school hall, right by the office. Seeing it there stopped me dead in my tracks.
I don’t remember any of the other art work in that glass-covered case. All I remember is my horror and humiliation, my desire to walk out of that school and never come back.
On a note tacked beside my painting was this note, written large enough for all to see: “There are no purple mountains.” And right beside the message, my grade: D.
I’m still around so obviously the embarrassment didn’t kill me. It did rob my pleasure in the art class. At the end of the school year, I tucked my pastels, charcoals, and watercolors into a drawer.
I left them there for 35 years, until I picked up Hannah Hinchman’s book, A Life in Hand: Creating an Illuminated Journal. She not only transformed my journal keeping into something richer and more interesting. She gave back something I’d lost standing in that school hall.
She returned the joy of creation. She gave back permission to love my crude drawings: the misshapen animals, the wonky perspective, the barely recognizable people. I look back on the journals I filled after reading Hinchman’s book and want to laugh for joy. They are whimsical, story-filled, observant.
I don’t blame that eight-grade teacher, though what she did was wrong. Some internal demon held her hand as she wrote that note and posted it beside my painting. She could not have known the dashed-off note would have the same effect on me as “Just mouth the words” has on thousands of children who grow up not singing.
She did not ruin my life nor rob me of joy. I look back on my years on the planet and embrace it all—heartaches, disappointments, and stupidities right along with celebrations, successes and insights.
But I’m grateful to Hannah Hinchman.
And, just for the record, there are purple mountains.
The mountains beyond Pyramid Lake in Jasper National Park take on a decidedly purplish tone
Cathryn and Robin at trailhead; note worried expression on my face
Steep trail ahead. Small group of hikers: Robin, me, a guide and two young men, all in their twenties, two more men in their late 40s. I was the only woman. Robin and I doubled the average age.
I had figured since we were on a cruise ship sailing the Inside Passage, this particular shore excursion would include plenty of us oldies. Somehow I overlooked the icon that showed this to be on the upper end of the easy-to-extreme scale.
The hike was at a time when Robin (on board as tour director for a group of Australians) could come with me. So I signed up for a two-hour hike on the famous Chilkoot Trail and a float back along the Taiya River.
On the drive to the trailhead, I fretted over how I would keep up. At the start of the trail, I contemplated the steep stretch ahead and wondered how I could gracefully opt out.
Trail crews have made this steep section into a luxurious stairway
Like most personal mountains in life, this one turned out to be a molehill. Steep sections were short. Trail conditions were ideal. The group was congenial and kind. The guide stopped frequently.
The piles of fresh bear scat didn’t worry me. I’d lived around a bear family one summer and knew they preferred to avoid contact with humans.
Recent heavy rains had brought the level of the Taiya River to near flood stage, as you can see in this tributary
By the time we reached the river and the rubber raft, we were a friendly group. So when the skies opened, we all donned the ponchos provided by Chilkat Guides, climbed in the yellow craft, and bobbed cheerfully down the river to the waiting hot chocolate. Water was high, near flood level, but the guide knew where all the boulders and snags [dead trees] were.
The outing turned out to be a highlight of our Alaska cruise. I didn’t slow the group down. Robin bought a t-shirt that gives bragging rights to having hiked a small part of a famous trail.
And all that pre-hike worry was exactly what my ex used to call the 75/25 rule: “75% of the things you worry about never happen.”
Only when I looked at this photo on the computer did I notice that one of our young hiking companions was checking to make sure I was OK on this steep section.
When the young woman confided my mother’s sexual prudery, I had no trouble believing her. Sex had always made my mother uncomfortable, or at least talking about it.
I can remember her halting attempts to introduce me to the mysteries of the flesh.
Mostly they were just embarrassing to both of us. Always an intuitive child, I would sense her discomfort and steer onto safer waters.
Those were simpler times. Sex had not yet become the lingua franca of advertising or series television. Today a 15-year-old would never be shocked by this line from Oklahoma: “It’s a scandal. It’s an outrage, how a girl gets a husband these days. If you make one mistake when the moon is bright, then they tie you to a contract so you make it every night.”
I was mortified. Every night? Oh, surely not. Timed for procreation, yes, but purely for pleasure?
The line hit me like a sledge hammer. I was playing in the pit orchestra for a community production of the musical. When the actors began practicing with us, I nearly dropped my violin the first time I heard the words.
As soon as I got home, I wailed, “Mother?!?”
She tried the usual pablum about love between two people, how caring for each other made sex pleasurable, but her embarrassment told another story.
So years later, when the young woman told me Mother was a prude and was keeping her from her beloved Larry, I had no trouble believing her.
Vine Village, where my mother worked for many years.
Mother was working at Vine Village, a farm for adults whose families wanted their special-needs offspring to have as a high a quality of life as possible. Mother taught budgeting, cooking, cleaning, and social skills. She gave residents the kind of love that encouraged them to stretch their limits.
Others taught them how to work in the garden or care for the animals, including an ill-tempered llama who played no favorites. He spit at everyone.
The women for whom she was a kind of house mother adored Mother. So did other staff. She was endlessly patient but also willing to hold people to their highest possible capacities.
One ticklish area was sex. The young women may have been limited intellectually, but their bodies responded with the same ardor as anyone else’s. That made them targets for young men who saw them as easy marks.
Mother persuaded some of them to undergo an operation that would relieve them of the worry of unexpected pregnancy. Others she was able to train in the use of contraceptives. Some got pregnant.
And then there was the young woman who confided Mother’s prudery to me. Larry was the love of her life, she said, but Mother would not allow her to spend the night with him. They were perfectly suited for each other. He was gentle and patient and strong, everything she could hope for in a mate. They wanted to spend their lives together. Mother was being unreasonable. After all, they were both adults.
After an hour’s conversation, she had me convinced. So later that night, after all the women had retired to their rooms, I had a conversation with Mother. I shared the young woman’s story and asked why she wanted to interfere with two young people who sounded capable of making their own decisions.
Mother listened patiently. Then she leveled her best you-had-to-be-there look at me.
She shook her head and said quietly, “Larry is the llama.”
Medicine Song Woman leads me to a meditative state. That’s not easy, with this bouncing-ball mind in my head.
Her music also brings back memories. I’m sitting in centuries-old cathedrals in France. Around me, believers genuflect and finger their rosaries. They repeat incomprehensible lines from a Latin mass.
Glorious music rolls over us, reverberating on the stone walls. Tears roll down my cheeks. I surrender to the mystery.
I’m not Catholic now and wasn’t when I sat in those cathedrals. It was never the content of the service that drew me into the realm of spirit. Recognizable words might have kept me earthbound.
Instead, the music and incense and incantations allowed me to shed the skin of dailyness, the routines of work, shopping, and household chores. They led me to an inner stillness.
Brenda McIntyre, Medicine Song Woman, would call that experience “Sacred Time”, and that’s what her song, “Connection”, gave me today. This time I was sitting at my computer on the tenth floor of a highrise in Kelowna, British Columbia.
Brenda is part of my growing community of online friends, people I’ve met through Twitter and Facebook. When I see interesting Tweets, I look for the person’s Web site. That’s how I know Brenda’s healing gifts did not come easily.
On her Web site she writes openly of growing “from depressed child to traumatized teen to abused young mom.” She was a lonely child, rejected by her peers because of her gift of extrasensory perception. Her adoptive mother committed suicide when Brenda was 15. A short time later her father died of a heart attack.
She moved to Toronto, became a single mom, and started a successful recording career. That was the public life. Her personal life was marred by abuse and the onset of chronic health conditions.
A few years in a Native healing lodge helped her release childhood trauma and reclaim her voice and spirit. Still, she writes that in winter 2007 “everything good seemed to end for me”. Hitting rock bottom in spring 2008, she cried out, “What am I supposed to do?!”
The answer she received set her on the healing path she walks today. This is one very special woman.
I’ve listened to several of her songs, watched half a dozen of her videos, and right now I’m feeling blessed to have met this deep-spirited woman.
For a sample of her inspirational work, watch “Visioning” below or any of the other videos on her YouTube channel.
It was deep winter 1995 the night the truck broke down on a dark and lonely mountain pass. The temperature was low enough to freeze uncovered skin. In the back of our 1967 Ford one-ton were two Belted Galloway cows and four Shetland sheep.
We were driving without stop to transport these animals from their home in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, to ours near Williams Lake, British Columbia. All went well until we neared a pass on the Yellowhead Highway west of Jasper. It was 10 p.m. when two tires blew. We were an hour and a half from the nearest garage in Valemount, and the temperature was -20 C.
This Shetland ram was one of the animals in the truck that broke down.
We put on our emergency flashers and prepared to flag down help. The first vehicle to approach up the long, snowy hill was a Yanke truck, which pulled over immediately.
The driver took me into Valemont while my husband waited with the animals. He pulled into an all-night coffeeshop and began making calls.
The town’s only mechanic was out on a job. The young Yanke driver located him and asked him to come pick me up. I assured the driver I’d be fine until the mechanic came, but he refused to leave me until he was sure I was taken care of. That proved to be several hours.
We chatted amiably and drank coffee. I was warm and knew help was on the way but worried about my husband, waiting in the cold with a load of livestock.
The Yanke driver kept going out to his truck. I figured he was keeping a dispatcher updated on his long wait, but I was wrong. He was radioing trucks traveling the Yellowhead Highway, asking them to check on a 1967 Ford and its cold driver.
In the years after this incident, the Belted Galloways gifted us with beautiful calves
My husband was mystified by the trucks that kept flashing their lights as they passed him by. Much later he learned they were just making sure he was OK and letting him know he wasn’t forgotten.
It was nearly 1:30 a.m. by the time the mechanic arrived at the restaurant, and the Yanke driver resumed his run. An hour later we had loaner tires. We drove into Valemont, fed and watered the animals, and found a motel still open. After a few hours of sleep, we bought new tires and headed home.
The animals came through the ordeal just fine. So did we, thanks to a young Yanke truck driver his kindness to strangers.
I can't see this logo without sending a silent thanks to the young driver who took such good care of us.
I think about that young man whenever I see a truck with the big Yanke logo on its side. There are a lot of stereotypes about truck drivers and plenty of warnings about accepting rides from strangers. I would have missed a memorable experience and a good story had I paid attention to them instead of to that internal voice that said, “This is a good man.”
OK, so I confess to having teetered on a narrow fence in contemplating the law of attraction, the power of intention, and so many of what seem facile answers to life’s complex questions.
I still think there are times when self-professed gurus lead us by the nose along a path that’s popular but not well understood. There are so many people spouting off about visualizing a huge house (anyone heard of carbon footprints?), a sporty car (this is a meaningful goal?), luxurious vacations (where you don’t have to mingle with Those People), six-figure incomes (anyone care about inequities and injustices?). Sometimes makes me want to gag.
But we all have our priorities, and even though none of the above are high on my list, I have some. World peace. Children who are safe, loved, confident. Awareness that our fellow creatures – animal as well as human – are to be respected and admired, not exploited. An environment that is cherished. And on it goes…
I’ve read The Secret, The Field and a whole lot of other books. I’ve pondered and questioned and wondered. I see my own life taking shape in a way that is deeply satisfying and joyous. My partner and I don’t have a lot of money, but we are incredibly blessed. We have the life we want, and we have it together.
But there are things we still want. We want to be able to see loved ones more easily, though they’re scattered around the world. We want to feel a bit more financially secure.
And that brings me to this TED video. This isn’t some law-of-attraction guru. This is a scientist excited about research that shows how powerful our minds are, how much of our world we can shape with our thoughts. She enlists the aid of a colleague who straps on a pretty inexpensive device and then manipulates images on a computer – purely with his mind. She shows a wheelchair-bound man who uses facial expressions to move his chair.
I’m open-mouthed and enthralled. And I’m grateful to TED for nudging me to give yet more thought to this mass of grey matter in my head, to its wonder and potential and mystery.
I’m not ready to say to my friends with cancer, MS, and other debilitating health issues, “You brought it on yourself.” I’ll never go there. Life’s hard enough. Besides, what if what I want to bring in my life means trouble for you?
But once again I’m nudged to think about my own life and what I might do with deep intention and attention.
Derek Sivers is a man to watch. He is a seemingly endless source of interesting, quirky, creative ideas.
In this three-minute TED video, he explores leadership and what it takes to start a movement. His take on it may surprise you. It might even encourage you to jump on board next time you see something interesting happening.
Hint: Leadership takes two.
Check out more of Derek Sivers’s creative ideas on his blog.
The miracle of our bodies…ah, yes, so often unpraised, even despised. The mirror gives back our uniqueness, but we ache for the lithe, shapely model of impossible thinness, for some idealized image of beauty.
The scrutiny of our own minds doesn’t stop at the body, of course. It extends to our very being, our worth as human beings living on this extraordinary planet, the importance of the contribution only we can make.
Poet Marty McConnell challenges self-loathing and uncertainty with her powerful performance of “Instructions For A Body”.
The whole poem rings like a clarion call, right up to the final words: “Give thanks or go home a waste of spark….Do not let this universe regret you.”
The old man was one seat away from me in the airport. At his side was a battered violin case.
“Do you play violin or fiddle” I asked.
“Both,” he said. “I entertained the troops with it back in World War II.”
We had time, and he had a story. He was a young Canadian soldier, stationed in Brighton. He walked into the pawn shop on a lark. “How much for the violin?” he asked.
The shop owner wanted 25 pounds. He didn’t have it.
Playing the Violin, courtesy of Photos8.com
A soldier’s pay was $1.25 a day. In those days the pound was worth five Canadian dollars. He couldn’t save enough to buy the violin, not in the time he’d be in Brighton.
“It took me three weeks to talk her down.”
He finally figured out the magic words: “I want the violin to entertain the troops.”
Her husband was a soldier. Maybe the young Canadian would lift his spirits one day. “Fifteen pounds,” she said, and the soldier walked out with the violin.
He was shipped off to battle. He’d tuck the violin in the storage compartment of the tank. Unless they were under fire, he would pull it out at every stop. He played for the troops. He played for civilians. He played for the life back home and for the peace he wished for the war-torn lands.
Fifty years later the memories were still fresh. “Do you want to hear a song?” he asked.
I nodded, and he took out his violin. It still bore the tassle from which it had hung on the pawn shop wall.
There in the crowded, airport waiting room he played “Lily Marlene” and “White Cliffs of Dover”, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”. He played his memories of blood and horror, of ragged dreams and eventual homecoming.
After half a dozen songs, he lowered the violin. There was a smattering of polite applause. The man was no great talent, but his music was true and clear and took him back to battlefields, frightened civilians, and fallen comrades.
As he returned the scratched violin to its battered case, I asked if he felt the violin had brought him luck.
“Yes, and it brought luck to the troops and townspeople I played for.”
In war-torn Europe he played music for the ear and for the soul. It was a small gesture of normalcy, of pleasure in a time of war.
The violinist was a small man, perhaps five feet tall, thin, grey-haired, dressed in black. But his heart was large, and he shared a piece of it as we all waited for our flights to be called.
"Women can catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend.” Carolyn Heilbrun, The Last Gift of Time
