It’s been a rough few months here in the valley. As our older cat family members are showing the signs of age we are starting to lose them more quickly.
It’s impossible to deny that these emotions, empty spaces and adjustments have made a significant impact on my work.
I want to have a clean slate when I enter my studio, but lately it’s just not possible.
Everything creeps in. From the personal to the political and world view and the overwhelming sense of doom we feel at the possible loss of our nation.
I walk through my house, stepping around the empty spaces, listening for a sound, a familiar voice. Remembering everything.
Today we said goodbye to a young kitty we rescued on Saturday. He was spritely and sweet, but noticeably damaged. He had been someones baby once. Having been neutered and completely at home around humans. Lifesaving efforts from a team of dedicated veterinary care givers could not save him in the end.
In the last minutes I named him Bennie. He will be laid to rest with our other fur babies. With full honors, a little trooper who wanted to be alive, but just could not get past that last hurdle.
Life can really suck sometimes. But I wonder what mine would look like if I had not made the decision long ago to be a helper. Over the last forty years we have taken in at least seventy cats, a couple of birds, two ducks and a dog. Many have had special needs, with us for short periods of time, while other have been with us for years. Anniebelle our sweet little orange fluff ball lived to be 23 years old. Beanie, my soul mate and constant companion, passed just shy of his seventeenth birthday.
As I sit writing today, I am feeling a small sense of relief, as our remaining family of rescues are in reasonably good health.
I will be on my way to work soon, entering my space with a ton of baggage. Taking some time to shake it all off, listen to Fresh Air on the radio, lay out my palette, mix my paint and make some marks on a piece of cloth stapled to a wall. Wanting things to not be what they are and also not wanting to gloss over them with frilly squiggles and meaningless abstraction. I hate meaningless abstraction. As an artist I need more, I demand more.. of myself and my audience.
There are too many women in the arts who want things to just be pretty for the sake of prettiness. They do not want to think about depth or context. They do not want their hard edges to show. But I like my hard edges, all of my edges are hard and tangled and filled with questions and outrage and a longing for some kind of justice in this world. Which brings me back to little Bennie. How did you end up on the streets, you were a sweet, loving boy. What happened to your people, your home, your safe place.
The same could be said about the countless Bennies, who find themselves in dire straits in our country. Alone, in a strange place, away from their people and hunted. Mistreated and denied their dignity.
For whatever lesson these past few days have taught me, I do hope that as hard as my edges are, I never second guess my instinct to be the helper. That my heart is never beyond hope and that compassion always wins out, no matter what.