It is the last day of May and my children are scampering through the sprinklers. It is like miracle, to be this lovely and warm so early in the sunny season. It feels as though the whole city is breathing a sigh of relief and sinking back into the lawn furniture, which they’ve only just now got brave enough to pull out from the basement to expose to the elements.

It’s Monkfish Abbey night –which, for those of you reading this post on my Magpie Girl site—is a small house church/spiritual growth community that we’ve hosted for several years now. The RSVP’s for this week have been trickling in and our numbers are teeny tiny. The summer siren song of house guests and outdoor haunts has already begun to lure people away to pursuits that can only be enjoyed a few scant weeks out of the year. As the priestess of all things seasonal, I’m totally fine with these sun-induced absences. There is nothing more important in the Northwest than enjoying the sun while you can. It’s a big part of taking care of your body and your soul while living here in this semi-hospitable climate.

Hosting Monkfish Abbey is always a bit of an uncomfortable jobfor me. At first I called myself a pastor and tried to do churchy things to keep everyone nice and saved/safe. Then I started seeing myself more as a spiritual director and I spent some time teaching people contemplative practices, because that is what my Type A personality needed the most. And as my ordaining mentor always says, “You only preach the sermons you need to hear.” My hope—our hope as founding members—has always been that this would be a teaching-learning community with a lot of equal footing, the sort of place where everybody could play. It’s taken me a long time to let go of old, patriarchal, hierarchical church habits. It’s only very recently that I’ve been acting more like a simple hostess—vesting the space with peace and cleanliness, making sure there’s TP in the bathroom and cutlery on the table. On my best days, this seems as natural to me as breathing. Other times, when I’m worn down it is very very hard. There’s a lot of sweeping involved–sweeping and washing dishes, and emptying ash trays. That probably doesn’t seem like much, but as you know I am sickly, and kind of a whiner. So some weeks, it feels like a lot. But no matter how burned out I am on the prep-and-clean-up, I always get a little lift when everyone is here. I always feel happy that we are not living alone, an isolated family with 2.5 kids in a house that’s made of ticky tacky and they all look just the same. Every Thursday night, when I go to bed, I am grateful.

More and more often other people are making the meals and offering the post-dinner activity, with me offering some small semblance of a ‘spiritual development’ activity just once in every 3 or 4 weeks. It’s pretty far removed from the senior pastor model of church life where the ordained person controls and takes care of nearly everything, their finger in every pie and their signature on every sermon. For most our exisistence as a community I’ve struggled with this lack of active guidance, and I rarely feel satisfied with how well I’m taking care of our little monkish life. There’s a lot of self talk telling me that I’m not doing a good job as a “pastor,” followed by a great deal of guilt that I’ve quite possibly left my real vocation behind at the mothership/motherchurch. Shouldn’t I be consistently offering people some sort of lesson? Shouldn’t I meet with people one-on-one during the week? Shouldn’t we be cracking open the Bible, or at least reading some of the dozens of religious non-fiction books publishers send me throughout the year? Shouldn’t we, you know, pray?

Simultaneous to all this worry is the undeniable compulsion to write, collage, and generally muck about in my studio – basically doing anything but pastoring. It makes me wonder what in the world a person with a master’s in theology is doing crafting zines and knitting rabbits. At the same time, these newfound studio loves are what brings me the most joy. I can’t imagine relegating this artist-work to the sidelines of my living.

When my best self is present–when I am the most centered and most aware– my guiding voice says, “You know, your pastoring self is doing just fine. You shouldn’t be doing any of those religiousy things, not any more than you are anyway. Really. It’s just fine. Go pick up your paintbrush.” It’s a peculiar thing – that all the things I’ve been preaching over the years – ‘everything we do is worship’ and ‘art creates holy space’ and ‘conversation is prayer” —all of these things are actually becoming real, and my very silly self is having a hard time believing it. It’s as though I’d hoped Willy Wonka’s factory was really, and now that I’m in the midst of the multi-colored glory of it all I’m blinking my eyes and waiting for it to disappear.(Go ahead dear, you can even eat the dishes.)

When I stop worrying long enough to ask myself “what’s really gone on this past year at Monkfish?,” I actually get a rather nice answer. We’ve talk about our lives. We’ve wrestle off and on with how to be more giving and more justice seeking. We’ve given money to good causes now and again. We’ve mourn the damage our old faith practices have done to us and others. We’ve gotten angry about stuff. We’ve engaged in our own forms of intercession and hope. We’ve put our toes in the water and to try to find new ways of being and doing and living. All of that seems pretty good really, even if it’s done in a very quiet, very laid back way. It all squares nicely with the way Jesus lived (especially all that wine!); it’s nicely moral, and its not been too damaging with the dogma. Not bad really, for a bunch of renegades and a heterodox pastor.

This summer we are closing Monkfish – at least at our house—for six weeks. I don’t think we’ve had more than two weeks off in a row since we started in 2003, so I guess it’s time for a sabbatical. When we return, if people return, I’ll continue to “hold space until something good can get born.” (Jen says that, or maybe Anne, or both.)

So, if you’re reading this on the Urban Abbess site, things will be quiet for awhile – maybe for good, as I’m considering rolling all my writing into one site again. Where on sabatical, you see, trusting the Muse and enjoying the sun. This site will stay up for your perusal and my storage purposes. Maybe I’ll see you again in the Fall. Until then, enjoy the sun, be good to each other, and eat lots of watermelon. Namaste, and God(ess) bless!

Much shalom,

Rachelle

Woo Hoo! I just got invited to be on a panel at BlogHer ‘07! Jen and I will be on a panel she suggested entitled: It’s your passion, not your size that matters. (Hmmmmm….that just may be true about more than just blogs…) Oh, but won’t we have fun!

There’s still time to sign up for the great BlogHer gathering in Chicago, July 27th-29th. Why come to BlogHer? Well, to meet friends who up until now have been invisible, to network with other blog based business people, to hone your technical skills at the Deeply Geeky track, to meet great writers, and….oh, I’m sure we can organize a late night nosh chocolates and wine in one of our hotel rooms. See the BlogHer button on the right…go click it!

P.S. Thanks Jen, for suggesting me to the organizers!

Okay, so PMS and migraine hit last week and by Thursday I was cussing under my breath, throwing plates at the anger altar, and wondering WHAT ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE ARE DOING IN MY HOUSE?! It’s been a hard week and week-end with a lot of pain, meds, and foggy headedness. Saturday we spent way too much money going to see Pirates of the Caribean III, which was totally disppointed followed by a long day Sunday doing absolutely nothing — just hanging around the house all the grey day, watching bad television and putting all of our CD’s on my Zune. Today is Memorial Day and a third blessed weekend-day when the sun finally broke though! In spite of the ongoing migraine, I put my dog on his leash and walked to my studio. I was grumpy enough to intentionally avoid the sweet developmentally disabled seniors who live in the group home between my house and my studio (they love Sam, Sam doesn’t love them), but shored-up enough by Paul’s willingness to let me spend most of the day away from the kiddos that I got my butt in gear in time to spend 5 blissful hours snipping and transfering and generally making a wonderful mess at my drafting table. I added several pages to the Summertime zine, including this one which confirms that yes, inspite of PMS and patriarchy, I enjoy being a girl. Hope it brings you a smile today.

P.s. A very BIG thank you to my long suffering spouse for his unwavering belief that I should “get thee to thy studio.” Your right Paul, I always DO feel better after I’ve been in the studio!

Much Love and Whimsy,

Rachelle

In her fabulous initial Zine, Jen Lemen reminded us that it’s a good plan to write a mondo beyond list for the universe to take care of. Here’s my list of stuff that I need less of, but which someone other than me is going to have to manage.

Magpie Girl’s Top Ten List of Things The Universe Needs to Help Me Have Less Of

10. rain
9. religious conflict
8. car alarms
7. people who “come & go”
6. conflicting health advice
5. medications
4. options overload
3. commerical stimulus
2. distractions
1. pain

Magpie Girl’s Top Ten Things I Need Less Of

10. television (thank god for season finales!)
9. purchasing opportunities (more loot = more maintenance)
8. “edu-tainment” (educational activities are still activities)
7. calories
6. emails (but how to keep them from coming so often?)
5. books (and the guilt over having bought them and not read them)
4. home improvement projects (martha stewart be damned!)
3. self imposed obligations
2. creative ideas (derails finishing)
1. regrets (i’m midlife crisis-ing! more on that later…)

Quick! Open the comments windows and write yours down. Your intuition will make sure the right ones get on there…

Ooooo…aren’t they so pretty? I’m having so much fun working on my next Zine! Though the pages might not look like much, it’s a long process as each page is features either watercolors, ink work, or image transfers. For instance, here’s the process for these two simple pages:

-journal for an hour about what you want to say
-edit it down to a pithy little opening salvo
-find a background image — in this case a photograph of handmade soap blocks in sherbert colors
-scan in photograph
-reduce to various sizes and adjust the colors
-cut large sheets of cardstock to zine-appropriate sizes
-use gel medium to transfer the image onto the zine page (spread gel medium. use brayer to remove air bubbles. burnish just the right amount. wait the perfect amount of ’set’ time. gently peel back the image paper. rub off excess paper pulp with your figure pads. repeat when it doesn’t work the first time.)
-pen out what you want to write on scratch pages to get the spacing decent
-look up various and sundry spellings
-resize summer photographs to be the right teeny tine “photo booth” size
-affix photos to zine pages
-hand-write text
-forget to leave enough margins for the binding. begin again at step one.

I know there are simpler ways to make zines. Ways that involve only a computer and a xerox machine at Kinkos. But I just can’t help it. I love the handmade-ness of it all. I’ve put at least 24 hours into this already and I’m only on page six! Paul says I can spend one day of the three day weekend at my studio, so I’m hoping to have them ready by the end of the weekend for June orders. Now all I need is a name…hmmmmm….

I have to use white out on my calendar. This is not my work calendar or anything, it’s just our family calendar—like the one your mom hung in the kitchen to keep track of the soccer games and such. Ours was hung on the side of the refridgerator, right next to the door from the garage. Many were the times I would come into the kitchen to find my mother speaking tersely to one of us, usually my brother, when a scheduling conflict arose. “This. Was. Not. On. The. Calendar.”

I have always had a thing for calendars. Its comforting to me to come to a clean page at the beginning of the month and fill in a few activities on those little boxes. It fels orderly, manageable. With the advance of time and technology my calendars got an upgrade. There were computer-generated weekly schedules and palm pilots that warned me when someone’s birthday was coming up. These magic electric things could change font colors, flash reminders, and–wonders of all wonders—sync.

Then, I quit my day job. I blissfully relegated my PDA to the back of the junk drawer. No more meetings! No more babysitter juggling! No more multi-tasking! I could downsize to an Ann Taintor calendar. Life would be SO MUCH simpler.

Maybe I should have actually read the caustically funny barbs on the Anne Taintor calendar, because the whole “life is simpler” stay at home mom thing doesn’t really exist. Not then. Not now. Almost as soon as I tacked up my quaint little paper calendar, reality hit. Followed by white out. There is so much stuff on my calendar, and it changes SO OFTEN that I can’t fit all the stuff into those moderate sized squares. I have to scratch things, shove stuff into the margins, and add little extras on with florescent post-it notes. And of this calendarizing doesn’t even begin to reflect all the stuff I really do in a day…”grocery shopping” isn’t up there for instance, or “bill paying,” or “dish washing.” You get the idea.

Recently a friend suggested I solve the problem by getting a bigger calendar. Maybe one of those desk-sized calendars or a big soccer-mom style dry erase board? This does not seem like a good idea. Bigger calendar = more space to schedule stuff = more white out.

Instead, I think I’ll downsize. Yes, gentle readers, “Do Less” is my new motto. Doing less will help my kids be less stressed. It will help my brain stay out of the theta state where all the intake nerves are firing at the same time. And it will help me live counter-culturally to my experience-obsessed cohorts who seem to think their kids will end up living out of a grocery cart if they don’t have some sort of after school activity everyday of the week and twice on Sundays.

“Do Less”

It sounds nice, doesn’t it?

How about it? Wanna try? What are some of the things you need to do less of?

There is no scheduling task as hard as protecting your writing time.

This is a universal truth. You go to bed on Sunday night thinking, I’m going to have so much time to write this week! But when Monday morning arrives you realize—between the dentist appointments; and the days school gets out early; and the classroom volunteering; and the taking of the ridiculously chi-chi dog to the groomers—there’s one 2 hour block available for actually working. See it? You have to kind of squint a little and look…right…there! It’s that tiny gap between babysitting the neighbor’s kids and making dinner for 12. Two tiny hours. About six pages worth, if you’ve got your groove on. Which you probably won’t, because you haven’t picked up the piece you’re working on for a week or two and it will take half that time just to get your mind back in the game.

I moaned about this to my writers group on Monday and everyone agreed. Protecting your writing time is a bitch.

I know some people who write in the wee hours of the morning, and others who stay up half the night. I know some who bow out of family stuff on the weekends to get some work done, and others who have to resort to sitting the kids in front of the boob tube in order to meet their publishing deadlines. No matter how you slice it, it’s hard. There are sacrifices. And it’s very easy to fall into a cycle of constantly worrying whether you are using your time wisely and justly. It’s a big energy-suck, which ironically, makes it all the harder to do your artistic thang.

So here’s what I think, let share our ideas with each other. What does your working life look like as an artist. How do you find, make, or protect your artistic time? I’ll give you my method, and you let me in on yours. I am confidnet that between our creative bass ass selves we can make this art thing happen!

Magpie Girl’s Tips to protecting your Art time

1) Make a list of the non-negotiables. This helps you worry less that your aren’t doing your fair-share in life. Go ahead, write them down. Now, cross of about a third of them because you probably just think they are non-negotiables. Go on. Be bitchy and way less helpful that you usually are. Mine include getting enough sleep; exercising every day; preparing for monkfish abbey once a week; cuddling with the kids in the morning; hanging out with our household after dinner (most nights); grocery shopping; cooking 2-3 real meals a week, and doing the household bookkeeping. That’s it. Eight things that are absolutely my responsibility.

2) Put those non-negotiables on a schedule and see what time you have left. Try not to cry. It will be enough. At least, it will be enough for now. Small beginnings are good.

3) Protect that time like a banshee. This my friends, is the hard part. After I slot in the must-do’s I end up with 9hrs a week of workable time. 9hrs. It’s not even a .25 equivalent! If I am realistically going to get anything done as an artist, I have to honor that time, no matter what. For me this means only booking appointments on my one “family task” day a week; saying no to school volunteering except for one field trip per kid per year; only emailing 15 minutes each evening; avoiding the internet; and getting my family to help with the household tasks.

4) Enlist and Reinforce. Show your new schedule to your family, post it next to your calendar, tape it into the front of your notebooks, and write it out once a day for two weeks— whatever it takes to solidify your boundaries. Then keep going back to it until protecting those nine hours (or whatever) becomes a habit—as customary to you as going to church on Sunday, or watching Grey’s Anatomy on Thursdays, or whatever. Keep practicing until it is part of your rhythm.

That’s what works – most of the time—for me. How about you? What tips do you have for protecting your artist life?

Much love to all you greenies out there who played along with April’s habitude. Sadly, I did not reduce my gas consumption one iota, even though I walked more places than ever, bunched together my car-required errands, and let a lot of stuff go undone rather than use the car to do it. How is that possible???

I did walk away from the reduce-your-gas habitude much more enamored with walking places than ever before. I took the “should I drive, or walk” option complete off my plate. If it’s walkable, it gets walked. And with Spring here, what’s not to love about that?

I live in a pretty walkable neighborhood, so none of my outings take more than 15mintues to walk each way. I’d like to up my exercise ante a bit, so my May habitude is to walk at least 30 minutes a day, in addition to my regular walk-to-work-and-the-grocer routine. Thankfully I have both a lovely three-mile urban lake loop nearby and a treadmill in the basement with a steady supply of favorite TV shows on netflix. (Current obsession: Grey’s Anatomy season two.) So I can easily get my 30 minutes in rain or shine.

Anyone else want to commit to a simple exercise goal for May?

P.s. Congratulation to Karla who got the cloth shopping bag for being the first person to sign on to Love Your Mother last month! I’d also like to send a bag to Aola for consistently chiming in with great greener ideas. Aola, shoot me an email with your snail mail. (moi at magpie-girl dot com.)Your package is waiting for you on my desk. Much love!

On how pain shapes an artist.

I have two friends who are women, and artists, and who live with pretty serious bipolar disorders. We often talk together about how similar their illness and my illness are.

When we are sick, it feels as though we are staving off depression with one hand, wielding a sword which is overly large and quickly grows too heavy. Our work stops, because what we were working at had a joy in it we can no longer access. Or it begins again, filled with sorrow and melancholy and creeping along in progress at a glacial pace because our health allows us to work in only the smallest of bursts.

When we are well, the repressed tidal wave of creative energy that is unloosed threatens to drown us in its enthusiasm and power. For my friends, the mania of the bipolar highs can be quite disturbing, even frightening. I have a similar experience when the pain finally abates–for a day or for a season–and all the pent up creativity comes spilling out in a rush of ideas and inspirations. It’s not frightening, but it is overpowering. When a particularly bad streak of migraines passes, I am overly energetic, ridiculously optimistic. I buy supplies for projects I shouldn’t start because I got sick mid-process on the last round of ideas and haven’t yet finished those. I lose sleep, pacing the house at night awake with ideas – and consequently worrying that the lack of sleep will in turn trigger more migraines. I flit from project to project without finishing much.

Up until recently I’ve tried to tame that feast-or-famine cycle, especially the rush of creative ideas. I’ve tried to be a disciplined person, to put my nose to the grind stone, and finish what I’ve started. But now, I’m wondering, maybe I should just embrace the flibbertigibbet that emerges when the pain subsides. Maybe I should allow myself to get distracted by sparkly things. Maybe there’s fruit there. Maybe there’s finishing, or finishing enough for today. Maybe the artist that is being carved out by my pain doesn’t have to be so focused, so well honed. Maybe she can have her fingers in a half-a-dozen pies and still be real, be serious, be authentically an artist. Maybe she can sell vintage clothes because they are one of a kind, beautiful and made by hand, not in sweatshops. Maybe she can string prayer beads and write new rites. Maybe she can try her hand at writing a book, and learn to put together presentation packages with her agent. Maybe she can collage notebooks and make shrines and knit up cute and fuzzy bunnies. Maybe she can. Maybe she can.