This past year, we’ve all had our hands full with frustrations feeling extremes. Some things have been extreme—insurgents storming capitol hill for example. But some frustrations just have become intolerable because of the loss of in person communications. We’ve felt punished for doing what we personally have to do to survive this time. We’ve been actively confronted by our priorities and how we respond to crisis after crisis.
But with the vaccine rolling out—I know a lot of people getting the shots, thank goodness—we can all drop the survival mode that we’ve allowed ourselves to be steered by for the past year. You may not have realized it, but think about when you’ve last been proactive about anything other than setting regulations on an in-person meeting. Maybe this is just me, since I’ve been living with a high-risk person for the whole of quarantine and have only seen my friends outdoors in masked visits. But now, with hope for the future, I can think ahead to plan vacations, events to make up for all the birthdays and celebrations that I’ve missed, and even reintroduce game nights. With all the fun coming up, I don’t want to let slip the personal goals I have in place. For each person, that success and satisfaction may be a different end result, but the means of getting there can be the same. Set goals. Keep reminders to yourself about what you are working toward. Maybe these are little goals, deadlines, or big goals. Since I write constantly, my goals are to keep the novel ideas at the forefront of my mind so that I can easily slip into character when I have spare time to write. So often, I lose so much time trying to realign myself to the goal of the project and feeling overwhelmed, that I lose precious time in attaining. Keep to-do lists for even simple things. This has helped me tremendously. I am a to-do list lover. I would forget every single thing I ever had to do if I didn’t write it down. I personally use post-it notes, white boards (one on my fridge for groceries since I always forget as soon as I’m out of the kitchen and one in my office for work), and an excel document. I have tabs for finances, for family e-mails so I don’t have to spend half an hour digging up everyone’s correct e-mail, for all the online orders and the link/tracking numbers (especially helpful over holidays), for the books I want to read, and for a glimpse at the week and what I have each day. I don’t just schedule things that must get done, I schedule self care as well. Be proactive about what you might need, it has personally saved me stress and anxiety and helped me sleep without lying awake trying to remember what I forgot. Eat healthy. A year ago, I switched to a vegetarian diet, and I feel there are a lot of misconceptions about why I did that. I did it for two main reasons: to help the environment/planet and to be more aware of what I was eating. Being vegetarian has made me be more proactive with what I have in my fridge and what kind of meals I am eating. People have said to me, “I might start eating vegetarian seeing that you lost weight doing it.” Eating vegetarian doesn’t ensure weight loss. It wasn’t about that for me. It made me more mindful about the protein, iron, carbs, and vitamin C that I am eating. It made me more energized to follow through on working out. I also started drinking a lot more water to help my focus, reduce headaches, and stay energized. Being mindful about food and intentional about water can keep you focused and productive. Remember to give grace at failures. I feel that I say this all the time, because I feel that I fail myself all the time, but success isn’t about eliminating failures, it’s about incorporating what you learn from those failures and ignoring the doubts and desires to quit in order to keep applying yourself and achieving. We’ve been so busy making do with what we have, but now we can dream again. We can reach for what we want. Don’t let that hope slip away. Strive to be satisfied following your passions. We’ve got this! I’ve been going a bit stir crazy lately. Sometimes, I let it out by allowing my mind to expand into story or poem, but this morning at home, I found my mind roaming the halls of a place more familiar, a place I’ve been longing to go for the past month and a half, the Art Institute of Chicago.
The mind is so complex, that I don’t think I could have done this in my head if I had not just hung up the Wyeth paintings or had my eye turned by all the ship and boat paintings or pictures I have in my collection (collection being a fluid word for my intimate collection of memories through art pieces whether paintings, camera’s, or other select items). It started with the hope for a poem. I wrote the words art museum, knowing that the scrolling through social media was not near enough art and inspiration for me. I even had sunflowers in a vase sparking the burning in my brain of the poor unadmired in his time artist who once had to use his painting as a covering for a chicken coop. Then suddenly, from the first line my pen touched to the page, if I were in the art museum, I was whisked off. (I’ve been watching Doctor Who lately, so I can only say it’s rather like stepping into the big blue box for the umpteenth time and still in awe of the splendor.) But even there, sat on my bed with books in front of me and a pen in my hand, my eyes were not seeing any of that, only tracing the halls of every single section of the art museum with individual paintings suddenly taking up the whole of the mind, rather the way you click to enlarge something on the screen. I could see it all, see each painting, sculpture, instillation from the many places I stood. I’m not sure how everyone’s mind works, but I feel so blessed to have been able to study the paintings so often that I could recall them so vividly both the frame, the painting, the texture, and their placement in the grand scheme of the museum layout. Although, the names of so many are lost on me. It’s funny, because all of that so often lies dormant in the mind until something sparks it and all of a sudden a whole creation full of creations expands in the mind. And sure, I started to get some pieces from The Mary Stewart Gardner (paintings of Florence) or the Rijkmuseum confused (the illustrious ship painting that, oh, see now I can’t remember his name, the man who was both accepted at the Salon while also being a part of the impressionists exhibition with the red hair, Manet, that was it, did). But I recognized that I had seen those in other places and put them back to where they belonged in the mind. Even when watching the latest season of Bojack, I was that person going Hey, hold on, those art pieces are actually from the subsequent rooms, which of course made my brother groan and call me a nerd—a name badge I wear with pride. But how much of the mind is so often dormant. How much of the mind can see beyond the scope of the immediate to the stores of majestic beauty. I think for me, I am a visual thinker and have a visual memory, so it’s easy for me to pull up images. This is probably why I am a photographer. It may also be why I get lost in books sometimes to my own focal sight and can miss some details in reading. But I think this also just shows how powerful art can be. How the greatness can linger in the mind and be a luxury as well as escape. So I hope you are all able to find visual escapes during the redundancies of view in quarantine. And I hope when things open back up, you are able to visit every singe beautiful place you can to keep it in your heart and head for moments like these when we can be so grateful we have something to fill our space to reflect. Even having been to the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Academia Galleria, the National Gallery in London, the Van Gogh Museum, and countless others, I must admit that the Art Institute of Chicago is, and will always be, my favorite art museum. In partial because of the wondrous collection they have, but probably more so because of my ability to go so often, I can recall so much of the individual art pieces that reside there. Here’s the poem that led my walk through of the museum. How many artworks appear in your mind? if I were in the art museum and all of time transfixed, and the blue guitar strummed a sad song unsatisfied with the pink pop of the electric chair and the impression of sunrise over the city dropped my mouth more than the girl in the bath, and the ghost sheet of a piano made a new sound, eerie as the doorknob behind Dorian Gray, & the night hawk screeches a yellow light, igniting the greyed rainbow so the dogs on hunt could blur like the billowing smoke from king’s cross so the girl washing her feet knew to run to seclusion from the populous Sunday in the park away from the stilled life of the butcher shop with the head of John the Baptist on silver plate, and the study of the skull could pull the mind from ruin, those large arches passed by with volute kraters for the greater spring than the nymphs could bring along the lantern lit dock, and the girls with oranges can share the sweet color with the fish tank, a new instillation like the prayers on the red carpet prayers not to Zeus the swan or Buddha in ohm but to inspiration miniature room previews all crystal and thorns born anew, burn to nail to the wood and find the good in the desert scape, then the mind could unwind in colors as emotional as the wind, and all the soul could find its whole reflected deep within. I hope you visualized some Dali, Hopper, Magritte, Cezanne, Degas, Monet, Van Gogh, Seurat, Koons, Picasso, Warhol, Richter, Pollock, and more. And I hope when this is all over you are able to go see them in person. Lately, I feel I’ve been wandering about with a bad map. These quarantimes are difficult for everyone and everyone reacts differently, and here’s a little anecdote from my past weekend.
* * * * * My dad and I ran off from the confinement of staying inside during quarantine to go camping and hiking—as safely as possible. I’m even proud to announce that I got a zit from wearing my mask so often. Isn’t responsibility attractive! We had some maps, but there was no one at any of the stations to talk to or get the layout of the land from, so we kind of just took it head on without doing tons of research. We started up to the bluff and used what we knew from the map to checkmark all the things we were supposed to see, with one exception: Balanced Rock. We’d tried to find it, but on the map, it only showed that Balanced Rock was a 0.4 mile trail. It did not have a dot showing where the rock was. So my dad and I looped about to go back and try to find it, assuming it would be right there the same as all the other key rock formations were. This was our first day there and we’d both already worked all morning, driven 3 hours, and set up the tent, so we were pretty exhausted. We found the map that showed where the balanced rock trail started up again and realized it went straight down. We started going down and about 0.1 miles down, we both looked back with my mother’s words echoing in my head, “What goes down must come back up.” I shook my head exasperated at the idea of climbing back up. The downward path got steeper and steeper with no signs or any notes of how far down the Balanced Rock was. The path was basically a bunch of steep stairs cut into a quartz field, and my dad and I are two of the clumsiest people I know, so we were both being extra careful. In fact, we were being so careful and trying to conserve energy to take the treacherous stairs back up, that we didn’t even find the balanced rock. We had completely missed it. Twice. Not only that, with the steeper the stairs and the more exhausted we were, I didn’t even enjoy the hike down only fearing trying to get back up. Luckily at the bottom, there was a connection to some train tracks that we traversed instead of trying to get back up the sheer cliffside, shaking our heads at our inability to find the rock. It became a joke over the next 24 hours. “There is no balance rock. It’s a lie. It’s something they put on the maps to trick tourists.” We laughed it off, but we were still determined to see it. The last morning there, we decided to take another go at it. We climbed up the cliffside, walked to the top stopping and enjoying more now that we knew the route. Then we reached the breakaway of the Balanced Rock Trail. This time, it was different, we knew what to expect, we knew to go slow since it had rained the night before, and we knew to vigilantly seek out this rock. We asked (from a safe distance) a few people on the trail if they had found it, and eureka! a couple said they saw it right on the edge of the cliffside. We looked to where they pointed, and saw nothing. We tried to pretend some of the rocks were what we had in the pictures, but we didn’t really convince ourselves. We begrudgingly continued down taking caution at every step nearly giving up, when the corner of my eye caught a bright light. There in a halo of the sun was the rock we were looking for all this time. It was there, way off to the side looking like an arrow piercing the Earth, and there were absolutely no signs pointing it out to any passersby. We were ecstatic and relieved having finally found it before we had to head home. My dad and I clambered around the rocks and found a path to get closer, also pointing the rock out to people in the area so they did not have to come back the way we did. Then exalting in our success, we climbed down the rest of the way to loop the rest of the lake. * * * * * With quarantine, I feel like I did the first time walking down the cliffside, not knowing where the bottom was, what I was looking for, or where I would end up. Without knowing an inkling of when this will be over, the journey feels grueling and arduous for no cause. Especially seeing people getting together and ignoring common courtesy mandates, it can feel so draining to keep putting the effort in to be safe which is often for other people in your house or family and not even for yourself. There’s no official map to how to deal, only the basic outline of the path that many people are ignoring. I really do hope we find the halo of light that announces something worth seeking in this time and that we carry what we learned over to provide a better map and path for the future, because when I was hiking the same trail the second time, it didn’t feel grueling, it felt important, there was time to stop and enjoy the surroundings while feeling safe even on precarious rocks and steps. I hope you can focus on the glow of attaining balance in little victories and little assurances the way I'm trying to remind myself to focus on the little things and not be overwhelmed. I feel like this rock wearing down near the bottom and still trying to balance while plagued with constant feelings of helplessness with all that's going on in the world. Remember, wearing a mask is doing something helpful. Keeping distance is doing something helpful. Keeping in touch virtually is doing something helpful. Be helpful, in a world that can often overwhelm and make you feel helpless. Be the person to point to the little victory and say, “Don’t miss that! That’s what you’re looking for right over there a bit off the main stream of all that’s going on during this time.” Stay safe out there. Stay helpful. Stay balanced. —Cor |
AuthorCorrie Thompson is a writer, blogger, avid reader, and photographer. Follow her poetry on instagram: @mis.underwood Archives
July 2023
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