On Writing...Other People's Words

Transcribing a passage is a meditation, sort of, but also it's a tribute, a salute, a thank you to the author. It's a chance to stop and study the lines and passages I'm enamored with more deeply:  I paint someone else's words with an old-fashioned pen dipped in ink or a paintbrush, whatever it takes and transport. Looking for flourish, which may or may not make a particular word come true, more-so if the color changes from olive green to violet within the same signifier, is a freeing form of love I think, and as close to reverence for me as it gets without a big swath of nature being involved. It's so many things--mostly, I'm drawn to writing excerpts about loss and failure and trying and resurrection and connecting them to a bigger part of me, the bigger world..I am a slow learner and comebacks are never without the weight of what we come back from. 

This funny little stanza resonates so much with me that I've transcribed it around my birthday for the past seven years. It reminds me of our human-ness and that, within our failings, beyond our failures is another chance and there is beauty within fortitude from which our successes are informed. Life is an ocean waving, and a beehive of fancy work to do and un-do. The visceral idea of creating something new, crafting a new chapter and finding, within whatever chance was lost, whatever bitterness perceived, the sweet, is finally all we can do to get back to grace...my birthday came and I've been re-writing. 

So I decided, because someone on instagram, messaged me to purchase the one I had posted, to create this lovely resonant little stanza individually for people, handwriting them to order and selling them for pretty cheap to support my habit of painting (and transcribing words that other people have written). If you want one, made just for you and packaged real pretty the way I've been practicing packaging for yearzez, click here to find out more.

"Butterflies are Easy, Fly Away..."

This morning I was talking to a friend on the phone while: pilling the cat, taping up packages that needed mailing out for my day job, Bonbon Oiseau and making a face on my toast with banana slices. Anyway, she had a big decision to make and so, we discussed making decisions, the nuances of deciding the pros and cons of a thing and what it means to actually follow your gut. 

Flutterbye Studies by Deborah Stein/Bonbon Oiseau.

I started to think more about it and realized this is the problem: sometimes when faced with life's bigger decisions, it's easy to glaze over in fear, hearing a background voice that's not even yours telling you to play it safe, that you can't, you won't or you shouldn't do it because (insert a million reasons why here, in these parentheses, but now ask yourself if it has more to do with pleasing that voice or what you actually really want).

Giving in to those voices is awful because those voices don't just chip away at your soul, the part that's right in front of your eyes creating blind spots and discontent, but they keep you in your seemingly safe warm cocoon. AND staying in your safe warm cocoon is figuratively (my new antidote to the colloquial literally) the kiss of death, the enemy of adventure. That voice is a cocoon KILLER, and that's the part that quivery fearful voice never tells you. When the cocoon never grows, our butterfly never emerges! There are a million things that can happen to that beautiful butterfly and all the work it must do to survive and stay gorgeous but first it has to have a chance to spread it's wings and enjoy a little sunshine! To fly and be beautiful and give happiness to humans and each other and slurp delicious nectar etc..... I've never heard a butterfly say, " hey you know, dumb choice, I should have just stayed in my cocoon." Not once. 

Flutterbye Studies by Deborah Stein/Bonbon Oiseau.

So here's a handy tool for decision making: ask yourself if you're making decisions based on someone else's voice bossing you around OR whether your heart is in it, whether it's a risk that's worth your investment of time or money or love or pain or all or some of the above, but mostly whether YOU WANT to do it. Your gut is easier to get to if you ask yourself who's voice you're listening to. You are not your parents or your ex or your brother or sister or whoever that voice belongs to that ISN'T YOU. They might not have meant to kill your cocoon but if you suspect that's what's happening, it is. NOW YOU'RE FREE! BE THE BUTTERFLY!

xoxoxoxoxo, Deb

Flutterbye Studies by Deborah Stein/Bonbon Oiseau.

(DISCLAIMER: This is not real science...or is it?)

Sometimes the Most Awesome Thing Is to Push Through, Sometimes It's Not

A lot of people love to call life a journey but I like to call it an adventure. Because adventure sounds more exciting than a journey which could be exciting if you were going the "center of the earth" but otherwise, "journey" is in a language I don't speak really. If it's an adventure then it's ok to be scared and feel all the feelings. It gets more Indiana Jones and if that's the case, I get to be a beautiful Egyptologist. Anyway, whatever you call the passage of time that makes up the continuum of the thing we call our lives, I don't like the idea that the adventure-journey is a short one, no matter how much time stands still sometimes.

This summer, my adventure toward working on art again allowed me to explore corners of my brain I had forgotten existed, parts I hadn't ventured to when I was calling myself a "designer". The process made days seem long and exciting and opened up constant doors to new ideas, new ways of working, new people and conversations, old friends and conversations. I let myself do that. I allowed myself this turn in my life-adventure.

But then I got sick in the middle of that. Sick, like going to a string of doctors sick, oncologist-visit sick, talk of major surgery sick. 

When life was standing still like that, when I thought about, "WTF? Now it's me facing this cliff," when I was thinking of all the ideas I hadn't thought yet, and the work I hadn't yet made, the friends, the family, the me I was too hard on, when I was navigating through fatigue and pain and frustration at doctors, at insurance companies, at myself, I questioned everything, and I fixated the most on what I might do if it turned out I wasn't going to die or have to live the next few months in radiology and chemotherapy and all the difficult things of a life-adventure with cancer. I thought, if this isn't death coming at me, if I can get through this and be well, I will live my fucking life every day and not hold back. I will be there for other people. I will do whatever's funner.  I wasn't feeling strong (like when you hear about how strong someone is when they're fighting for their lives) but strength is sometimes an after-image.

Then, a second opinion in September and SA-NAP- I (probably) didn't have cancer(!) and the surgery was simple(!) and maybe I might have to come back to the doctor a little more often (ok that kind of sucks) but suddenly that moment unfolded like a red carpet, the sky brightening after a rain, the clock was no longer stuck, the crowd (in my mind) went wild! I felt the universe, I felt everyone who had been sick before, everyone who had worried for themselves, "what is death like?", and the saddened people they might leave behind. It felt like I had been taken and held hostage in a hostile country, there just long enough to glimpse how hard it was about to get but luckily got to go home. That feeling came with a mix of relief and guilt. And the loudest part of me yelled something like: AFTER WE TAKE CARE OF THE REST OF THIS THING, THE NEXT PART OF THIS ADVENTURE IS GOING TO GET REALLY GOOD!

One of the things that bothered me was not coming to this space, One Awesome Thing, the project I was most excited by and enamored with. I wanted to write, but I had just about enough energy for making paintings and thinking about my family and, uhhhh, that's it. I kept asking myself, "What's the one Awesome thing you can do right now Deb?" and the answer was usually, "Just take care of what's most important now" and "feel the feelings you feel like waves washing over you", and "Just lie down if you need to" and "by any means necessary,  do everything you need to do to kick this part of the adventure in it's nuts."

My substitute for writing to you here was to search for the most awesome things to post on our One Awesome Thing Facebook page. To create artworks and curate on the One Awesome Thing Instagram page and record my favorite images on my Bonbon Oiseau Instagram page. That has been a constant and has helped me to discover and think about so many new things, many of which I wrote down, painted, visited. All the same adventure, different pages, same me. I am now vowing to return here regularly in the New Year with all kinds of fun stuff, good stuff, stuff in my language, hopefully yours. If you find this somehow in the vast and wild unknown that is the www,  sign up for the newsletter and get alerts when new posts happen. Write to me with ideas of what you'd like to see, but for now how are you?

TGIOATF! It's Your One Awesome Thing Friday Project!

I just came back from a pretty rad self-imposed retreat in New Mexico USA. Spending time to think, create, work, let myself be free to do whatever I want to do with my work, opened up a door I felt really honored to walk into. It was something I had always wanted to do and so this year in January, I wrote it down on one of my New Year's Resolutions lists: "I want to do an artists residency/retreat". It was really hard to admit for some reason, that this is what I wanted, because I work from home, I don't have kids and I guess I was ashamed since I presume that people think I can do whatever I want all the time, whenever I want.*  Anyway, working from home has it's difficulties and distractions and life gets lifey and work gets worky and in the way sometimes of beginning something new. Yet, I had written down this artist residency idea and on that long list, it stood out to me, glaring the brightest, shouting the loudest.

I loved those words, that idea. I wasn't sure it would be the most awesome thing for me to pick up and change course from the way I normally do things so I talked with my friends about it. They wholeheartedly encouraged me to do it! I spoke with my husband about it. He said he wanted to help me make it happen! Once I put out there, it became real and once it became real, I was researching where to do it, when to go and then I was packing my bags, my art supplies and my dog and there I was, I was doing it. I was believing I could do it. And now that I've done it, I'm actually going back to do it again. (SKIP BELOW THESE AWESOME PHOTOS OF MY AFOREMENTIONED RETREAT TO GET TO THE PROJECT!)

RIGHHHHT?

My proposal for your Friday/Weekend One Awesome Thing Project: Special Summer Solstice Edition(!) is pretty simple but can be pretty extraordinary: THINK ABOUT SOMETHING YOU WANT TO DO AND WRITE IT DOWN. Draw it, write it in cursive with a feather, or just use the first writing instrument on your desk--use all of the above but think about it. Write it down. That's it. 

"But how can that be IT?" you ask. I'm gonna tell you, right  here, right now: Sometimes writing something down gives it DIGNITY. If it can give your every-day run-of-the-mill to-do list the energy it needs to get those things done,  it will give the thing you want, whatever that thing is, the energy to come to you and you to it in a similar way. You might sit there for a while looking out the window, tapping your pencil. You might say it out loud a few times, "WHAT do I want, hmmmm...what DO I want???". You might hesitate to write anything at all, but just start writing like no one's gonna see it. Only you. Write it all down. Who cares if it sounds stupid. Erase things that you don't like. Circle things you do like. Then sit on it until next week, pick it up and see what comes at you the loudest. Maybe it's one thing or maybe it's all of the things. Maybe you want o run it by your board of trusted Life Advisors. Maybe you don't want to tell anyone. Whatever happens, I'm excited for you!

oxo, Bonbon  

This example is not necessarily the WANTS of the management.

*This was before I started my One Awesome Thing campaign, doing my best to eradicate shame, one shameful feeling at a time! 

Courage v. Fear and Regret: Discuss

Some people have more fear than others. It doesn't make them, you, me, us, weaker. It just makes them, you, me, us human-er. BUTTTTT...

Some elements of fear need to be faced and asked straightaway, "WHAT ARE YOU MOTHER F*CKER?" and "WHY ARE YOU HERE AGAIN?" You'll know the answer when you're ready to answer honestly.  The very deepest fears, the ones that involve very lifey stuff:  that you're unhappy in a relationship, in a job, in a situation you find yourself in over and over again, telling yourself you can't do something, finding yourself alone, whatever it is, the recognition comes to you when you know you've had all you can take. Finding your courage to examine all of that is part of the fear. You know change or a new chapter will take work and you're already fear exhausted aka FEARZAUSTED! Different kinds of fear require different sets of life skills and we're all brought up to control and face our fears in different ways. Some fears, we fear, can't be changed so we've tamped them down with denial (everything is fine!) and all kinds of other survival modes (Ten more beers, Beer Maestro!) and after the hangover subsides, it's easy to let regret take over ("It's all my fault..." or react with anger ("oh yeah, well screw that shizz!"). It's part of the grieving process but some of this doesn't always come from us, it's another voice in there that tells us to keep being afraid, keep denying, keep drinking or working or whatever makes the AFRAID feel easier. BUT, something gets lost in all of that...it's never easy to live in that state of fear and it's never more comfortable to be unhappy or manipulated or diminish how you feel, or wake up feeling further away from your feelings than ever, no matter whose voice is doing the telling of the way you really feel. 

Regret is the enemy of courage. It only means anything if you have truly done something you're not proud of and it takes courage to even admit that. 

IF YOU COULD CHANGE the thing you're afraid of, not succumb to it, ride it like a wave, you could surf it out or it could drown you straightaway. If you can ride the bull, face the dragon, climb the mountain, how would you do it? What is the step you will use to get there to ride, face or scale? Knowing the One Awesome Thing you can do in this moment is to know it's ok to face that fear, recognize your feelings, start that conversation, rewrite that resume, pull out from something muddled and complicated and just not quite right, because it will be one helluva ride either way. The answer will come from you and it will be clear, it's a question for the very moment you need to work through your deepest fear and only you know the true answer to "What's the One Awesome thing I can do RIGHT NOW?" If you go for it or not, more often than not, choosing the fire we need to walk into is better than the fire we're standing in. Trust your guides, your inner star, your One Awesome Thing!

If you think for a minute it's your fault, you're wrong. It just wasn't your time to recognize how courageous you really are. Fortitude has many faces.

oxo, Bonbon

New Thing on One Awesome Thing!

Friday is One Awesome Thing Thing Day.

The Royal We here at One Awesome thing has anointed Friday the new One Awesome Thing Thing Day, sort of like a simple little project within this project for you for your weekend meant for you to have fun with, think about, play around or tamper with.  (JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE LAST PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON'T WANT TO READ ALL THIS SEGUE STUFF IN BETWEEN...BUT IT'S PRETTY GOOD SO...) 

In conceiving this bright idea (say it like "any more bright ideas Ferris?"), I thought about how much I loved doing projects as a kid. Or the IDEA of being part of a project. Par example, I couldn't wait for the "Reading is Fundamental" Summer Reading Club at our town's library.  All I wanted was to get to the top of that illustrated tree poster with stickers of all the Judy Blume books I read. The poster was behind the librarians chair, all fluorescent lit and glowy and all I wanted was the glory of seeing my name up there proud and literate (and obsessed with reading Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry twice in a row). Then there was the Dynomite Arts & Crafts Club, in which the only two members were me and Lisa Castronovo. The goal to do every craft in every adult arts & crafts book we could find proved difficult for an 8 year old and her 10 year old neighbor who wasn't really interested in arts & crafts, yet we always threw googly eyes, glitter or pompons at the problem when we weren't making watercolor Rorschach butterflies and interpreting each other's dreams. It was the summer I never saw the last letter "a" in the word "material" and pronounced it "matteral" for roughly two years.

Later, in faux-grad school I realized I could propose my own projects and talked some granters into granting me a grant and so I went to India and sat around with toymakers and painters for about a year and documented them with a camera and the ways they were passing on their traditional art techniques and knowledge--including business skill and acumen or lack thereof-- from parent to child. I used a lot of sign language, held a lot of kohl-eyed babies, visited crooked sellers in the bazaar, sat on the floor in 100F heat for hours as they monotonously painted the same eyes on the same wooden Krishna dolls, I made paint with real laquer, I watched as they plucked the tail hair of a pet squirrel, tied it onto a piece of straw from a broom and used it as one of the finest paintbrushes I've ever used. Mostly, I learned a lot about myself and how I could live on virtually nothing if I needed too.  I came back to the states and dropped out of Grad School and tried to just make art. These PROJECT-HEAVY experiences were so transformative that I held them up as models when later into adulthood, my artist's block-block got too dark-dark so I decided I should create my own personal research project/arsenal of knowledge again and so created "My Month of Italian Futurism" in which I furthered my thesis that fascists loved Block Letters. There was also my "Spring of Cannibalism" in the early aughts, where-in I read every book I could find about Michael D. Rockefeller and went often to the Oceanic Wing at the Met which revealed only that cannibals were great at art and making canoes and also art-canoes.  And now this One Awesome Thing Project after many years of projects in between, some of which failed such as the Almost Drive My Husband Away Project and The Baby-Project and the Making Everyone Else Happy Project and the Who I am and Why Are Things the Way They Are(?) Project...some of which were successful--the Bonbon Oiseau Project and the Live in The Moment Project and the Being Married to the Best Man on Earth Project. From Pain and Projects comes Wisdom I think, but it's never-ending. And that's the good part. So before I get to the meat here, which is the new project within this project itself, I'd need to proclaim here that I am PROJECT oriented, PROJECT driven, PROJECT POSITIVE. I enjoy a challenge, I want to learn, I want to question, I want to try any little thing to wake me up out of today's normalcy. If it helps me to see things in such a new way that the me I was yesterday becomes a sort of new, fresh revived version of me, a makeover of the very best kind, then sign me up no  matter how rough. It's the Life Project I've been waiting for. It may seem exhausting but trust me on this, it's like being shot out of a velvet cannon into a  pool of warm jello (not original--credit goes to husband who says crap like this ALL THE TIME). Very in the moment. Join me Awesome friends? (Jump to below the photo-proof that I held a lot of babies in India and got peed on more than a few times...there's a metaphor in that statement somewhere, prizes for those who find it---->)

SO HERE'S TODAY'S ONE AWESOME THING FIRST FRIDAY THING-(work on it over the weekend!): Write TWO quick notes to TWO people, anyone to whom you are thankful. Remember something they did for you or something you learned from them and let them know how much you appreciate what they did or gave or are. Go deep if you want. Remember one thing in particular or a whole way they were with you that changed something in you, eventually or right away and for the better.  (TWO Hints: your thank you's could be to someone you really don't like, anyone dead or alive, someone you really don't know or someone you know very well...it could be to someone you really do like, to someone you love or to an enemy you've never forgiven. Could be to someone you just met who may have recommended a really good movie that changed your life, even just a little... Write a little or a lot. Spend the weekend with it or don't overthink it--write it or don't write it, talk about it with someone else, let it roll around in that noggin or just let it flow baby. Share with us next week if you want on Our One Awesome Thing Facebook Page, or our Instagram or the Tweeterz. 

Have an awesome weekend, Deb oxo