Richard Thompson was describing how he tries to keep his technique and musical imagination fresh, and repeated a saying I’ve never heard before:  You should copy everyone except yourself.

And I was recently told that I wasn’t catching on to something fast enough, and even though it hurt and I think that person was wrong – it’s completely true that I get the same things wrong over and over and over again.  Even though I am decently smart, I am not a very fast learner.

I can’t help it.  Every time I pick up my instrument – a 3 lb. black box with glass on one side, light sensitive media on the other and a tiny hole in between – the same question clenches my diaphragm and squeezes my eyes almost shut.  The question is something like, “If it isn’t beautiful, what did I do wrong?”

I had something I wanted to write about, but now I forget.  So here is some minor contents of my mind, as of yesterday.

I am listening to “This Year’s Model” while I drive.  Lipstick Vogue, Lip Service, the thoroughly creepy (I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea – arch lyrics, festooned with Steve Neive’s electric organ (that sounds funny), riding the focussed mania of Pete Thomas’s drums – occupy territory I need to visit, whether anyone else knows or remembers or sees how deep a part of me it is.  “Pete Thomas is the best rock drummer alive.”  That’s what Tom Waits said, so who can argue.

The back forty of the Urgent Care near my house abuts an embankment.  I can drive right up and park my car, and watch the gold finches tear thistle seeds apart while I get out the camera and wonder, yet again, what the hell I am doing.  It’s kind of a dream come true.

Whenever I start to write, the voice in my head typically offers answers to a list of self-concerned questions that – in all likelihood – no one else is asking about me.  Which is to say, I am fascinating to my own mind.  Every so often, that monologue may lead somewhere interesting for you, too – but it’s kind of a crap shoot.

So I will just say this – we are having a proper mid-western summer for once.  The rain is falling like it should.  The green is  living up to the task at hand – filling up, expanding, unstoppable.  In the sun and in the rain, shelter is everywhere.

I like the no-man’s land.  That’s the Chicago in me.  Once, a long, long time ago, a friend and I were walking from one loud, beery nightclub to the next, in the quiet of 1 a.m., the creamsicle glow of the streetlights washing the darkness out of the leaves overhead.  It was right around his birthday – late June.  Anyway, we reached the street where the club was, when there on the curb we saw an old office chair – cracked leather seat, wooden arms, swivel and rock mechanism intact.  Pretty much the exact chair from Bailey Building and Loan.

The curb is no-man’s land, and 1 a.m. is a pretty good sign that no one wants whatever is on the curb.  We carried it back to my car – maybe 2 miles – then somehow wedged it into my 1979 Honda Civic and took it home.

So you see – chairs or photographs?   There’s really no difference at all.

Remember when you were little, and you could find everything your imagination needed in the backyard?  And the more familiar the game – army men, fairy land, or swingset – the better?  Did you get bored because you fenced with sticks yesterday, or tied your nightgown into magic cape the last time?  And didn’t you learn so many things in the backyard – to make water fly from the hose in dazzling rainbow arcs, to lie still so you could watch the clouds moving and reforming, and to fight, if need be, for your share of time on the swings?  The biggest world you could create, all so close to home – where popsicles are in the freezer just a few yards away, and the kitchen floor feels so smooth and cool on your bare feet after running up gritty concrete steps.

So if I keep making the same image, full of dark spaces where imagination can do its work – what better way could there be to find the world within?

“Against life’s worst onslaughts, nothing avails, not even art.  Especially not art.” – John Banville

When I took my field trip to Library Pond to get away from some bad news – (not so bad as to qualify for life’s worst onslaughts, so don’t worry) – I was nursing the hope that my raw feelings would reveal something out in the world which might be invisible otherwise.  It was pretty ballsy of me to imagine that such transcendent magic – rare as the philosopher’s stone – would visit me at all, never mind turning up behind the public library in Verona, WI.  Couldn’t it be enough just to take a nice walk and distract myself with bird-song and mosquito bites?

It is dawning on me – in my dimly lit, self-involved consciousness – that to see something new means letting my visual world fall apart.  No matter how intently I look outside myself, that vital inner gesture cannot be found until I make it.  Fearful though I am, what choice is there but to let this disloyal hunger erode my thinking and arranging down to its quicksilver foundation?   And to keep hope – keep crazy-in-love-hope – that through the fallen-apart places, where nothing avails, beautiful may enter in.

Library Pond was covered with snow the last time I visited, and I miss it.  Inserted between 2 roads, a soccer field and a parking lot, it is the tamest wilderness imaginable.  The bunnies and robins find the flat, mown paths as handy as the runners and bikers and slow-poke walkers.  Grackles and barn swallows criss-cross the skyway over the water, feasting on mosquitos as they go.  There is enough silence for tree frogs to hear themselves think and for me to briefly find a meandering state of mind.  And yesterday I needed very much to not go anywhere.

The pond was milky with clouds and silt, but the air was fresh and sweet.  Wild grapes crawled through the viburnums, dragging low-hanging branches towards their hungry vines; raspberry canes tugged at my sleeves with their thorns.  Everywhere I looked, emerald leaves faced the late afternoon sun, unflinching as it poured through them, extracting life from light.

I always see something at Library Pond.

Making an picture of myself I can stand to look at is daunting.  The thickness of my waist, protruding softness of my front, and sparse strands of grey hair retreating from my forehead are tangible evidence that twenty years of living with early menopause has never, for one moment, grown less painful.  Yet every year, I find myself drawn to some leafy place where it seems possible to simultaneously emerge and disappear into something mundane and lovely, and I long to find evidence of my self in that place.  Foliage and inflorescence distract me from my disfigured internal image, while a few feet away the camera sees a world that is as different from my inner reality as it can be.  It is still hard to let go of what I wish I could see – a self arrived at by a less barren, lonely route, whose time among the potent and the green hadn’t ended so long ago.  A wish that I could show you something that would dissolve the barricade between you and me.   Those moments are so rare.

For the sake of argument, let’s call these chickens Henny and Penny.  They currently lay eggs for Madison Christian Community church over here in my new neighborhood.   Henny and Penny were having a late afternoon snooze in their chicken condo when I crept up the driveway to steal some pictures of the blue-whatever-they-are currently blooming along Old Sauk Road.  From the security of their coop, they have a very nice view of the prairie restoration surrounding the unremarkable church building, where who-knows how many song birds, and a serious flock of gold finches (that much I know) live a freer, but more precarious life.

While a polite sign asked me not to take any eggs unless I was a member of the church, it didn’t say anything about taking pictures of the girls.  And clearly, Henny and Penny didn’t mind at all.

Air conditioning has been on my mind a lot lately – because I am living in it almost constantly, and I hate it.  Well, I guess I don’t exactly hate it, but I do have a tendency to turn it OFF whenever possible.  Others suffer greatly without a constant drool of frigid air, though and I don’t want that, so I sit on the patio or put on more clothes if I have to be inside.

Turning our world ever so slightly nearer to the sun switches on a deeply ancient Self.  Every creature is busy living right now – fuelling and courting and nursing.  I want to yield, not endure or fight or try to change the sweating air to something better.  And while I am glad to lower the temperature of my car from 400 degrees (or whatever it is at the end of the day when I drive home), I am most glad for the moment when I turn off the man made air, and my windows open, and Summer finally breathes me in.