I've been working with watercolors and feeling my lack of art school training. I had poetry training, and book arts training, but never basic mix-colors-and-materials training. So there were some creative failures this week with ideas about diagrams and plots and colors, which I will share with you when my ego is less challenged.
Instead, let's think about leaves. My daughter painted the leaves, not me, using watercolors and a few sprinkles of salt. We cut the leaves out together, quietly, sometimes quickly. As we worked I thought about why people are compelled to make things, to put paint on paper, to assemble, to create order. Do we actually create? Or are we arranging the things already given in this world?
My daughter is deeply interested in the idea of Lent this year. We are not Catholic, but we are, shall we say, guests in a Catholic community. And it's a good place to be, with strong women, thoughtful children, and people deeply concerned about serving others: all things we like. Not every belief in this community fits our views, nor must it be so: we see it as an opportunity to talk about different ideas as we wrestle with our own sense of the divine. We are, after all, a family made up of a scientist and a writer and curious children: there are bound to be ontological debates.
And so we are keeping a form of Lent at our house. In our family, that means having more time for reflection; working on our ability to serve and help others; developing our spiritual knowledge by reading a variety of texts, from scripture to poetry to commentary; and being kind and patient with one another.
We made a calendar to mark the journey through Lent. It's not our idea. We found it through the Parenting Passageway, and it was an idea from this site. Each day we move our oh-so-elegant pipe-cleaner caterpillar to another leaf on the calendar, Eric Carle style. (I used the beloved push drill to make a hole in each leaf). At the end of the forty days we'll hang watercolor butterflies: a lovely metaphor from the natural world about what we are trying to do in our own life.
This week, as I watch the stunning events unfold in Japan--a catastrophic example from the natural world that offers no room for metaphor, only empathy--our little leafy calendar feels like an exercise in fantasy. Yet I hope and, yes, pray that the terrible situation will get better, that there will be survival and renewal. It will not be a forty days' journey, but it will happen. There are many ways to help make that a reality.
