A few weeks ago I wrote about a new adventure inspired by a drawing book:

 
The basic idea of the book was if you want to draw, then start drawing. Take an experimental approach. Be bold and try things. Notice what works and what doesn’t and have fun learning.

It reminded me of Tim Gallwey’s Inner Game approach to life and peak performance. His basic idea is our inner critical voice gets in the way of learning and performance. If we want to improve our skills we need to stop judging harshly and start paying attention to exactly what we’re doing and what the results are. It’s somewhat similar to the NeuroLinguistic Programming idea of

1. Know what you want,
2. Notice exactly what you’re doing,
3. Is what you’re doing getting you closer to what you want?,
4. If not, try something else.

Keen observation is often more helpful than blind striving.

In general I’m more mastery oriented (spending hours and hours learning new skills) instead of achievement oriented, so when I read The Inner Game of Tennis in the mid 1970′s Gallwey’s ideas resonated with me. The approach especially helped when I went back to work after ten years away from physics and computers. Whenever possible I chose challenging problems that I didn’t know the answer to, figuring I’d much rather be scared than bored. So even though there were deadlines attached, I learned to forget about results but instead to be curious about the problems themselves. It meant (1) I didn’t procrastinate to escape feelings of tension, and (2) once I immersed myself in the process and started enjoying the challenge I relaxed enough for the creative part of my brain to start working.

Anyway, that’s what works for me. What works for you?

Откъде да купя икона

 
And it helps to have a guide:
 

 
I bought Drawing for the Artistically Undiscovered years ago, and just looking through it always tickled my funny bone and lifted my spirits. Someday I too wanted to learn to sketch whimsical figures. But until this week I had only done a couple of pages of the exercises. Then I made the commitment and finished every single assignment.

I took the authors’ words to heart:

…you will find yourself frequently unsatisfied with your efforts. Our recommendation? So what. Take a fearless experimental approach. Wield your pen or pencil with spirit and take bold chances. Your successes will shine all the brighter and the rest—nothing but necessary steps to greatness….

Around here we honor mistakes and botched details. Please make many.

Well, yeah. I can do that. So I did.

Two of my favorite exercises were The 3-Headed Red Spotted Gorff and the pigs:
 

 
(The authors provided the legs and body, we filled in the necks and heads.)

The pigs:

 
Not worrying about polishing the finished product was liberating–just go for the general spirit of the subject and move on. I’m hoping to do some quick sketches regularly, and to keep me motivated I’ve gotten more books by Quentin Blake, the illustrator of Drawing for…. Again the idea is to draw boldly and quickly rather than looking for a polished product. I will let you know how it turns out. This week, at least, was a great adventure.

What was your week like? Have you had any adventures lately?

 
Joe was originally going up tomorrow to do more work, but they’re predicting more snow with highs around 20° F. for the next two days. Not exactly building weather. We’re hoping this unusually early cold snap won’t hurt the new concrete. Time will tell.

Andy practiced plowing the road yesterday and will probably plow again tomorrow because it will need it. Winter has come!

What about where you are? Cathy and Evan will be dealing with summer instead of winter, of course.

The weekend was gorgeous and the same is predicted for the first part of the coming week. So Andy is going to phone Steve tomorrow morning to see if (1) we now have the permits, and (2) if they will take advantage of the good weather to get something done on the construction. I will let you know!

In the meantime Andy is cutting down more trees and we’ve been making decisions on the roofing, windows, exterior colors, etc. so some progress is being made.

Thursday morning we talked to the fellow who will probably install our solar cells, if we can afford him. He was very knowledgeable so we’re keeping our fingers crossed. But talking about the grounding system brought up the subject of lightning protection. We only had two instances of damage in the past. In both cases the lightning struck a tree and in one case it fried some of our electrical wires and our generator. In the other case it split a tree and bounced over to the support for one of our beams and knocked off a piece of concrete. We were glad in both cases we weren’t there when it happened.

Now, of course, there are no trees to be struck. The house will be the tallest thing around. Do you think we’re tempting fate? When we decided to rebuild we joked that maybe the gods were trying to tell us something by wiping everything out. If that was true what would be the next message? A big bolt of lightning? It might not be such a joke.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article entitled, I Just Called to Say, Ahem, I, Uhh, Love You. It talks about how hard it is sometimes to tell someone you love and appreciate them. It’s a valid concern. One woman had a friend who went out of his way help her when she moved to town. It wasn’t a romantic relationship, but it moved her deeply. Unfortunately she felt the need to tell him and when she did her eyes teared up and she told him she loved him. He didn’t even acknowledge her feelings and started to distance himself from her. Finally one day when she phoned him he said he was busy and would phone back. That was the last interaction she had with him.

Having been a physics major, I mostly worked with guys professionally. My preference is to feel close to people and to show my affection, but most people don’t feel that way… I’ve sometimes had to be creative to respect all of our needs and feelings. Last summer a colleague of mine was back in town for a visit. We had both belonged to a group disbanded 20 years ago, but the morale in that group had been so strong that we used his visit as a chance to have a reunion. My colleague was responsible for my getting the job in the first place, and I’ve always had warm feelings towards him, not just for that but for who he was. Hmm. I would probably never see him again so this would be my last chance. Should I tell him or not? He would probably feel uncomfortable but I would regret it if I never said anything. So what the heck. I told him briefly and he did feel embarrassed. Then I gave him a quick hug and said, “I love you, Tom!” and added, “Enough of this mushy stuff. I just needed to tell you. It’s done now.” He laughed and said, “Whew! Thank goodness. I couldn’t take much more of that.”

Thinking of this topic has raised all sorts of other memories, way too many for one post. Does the topic resonate with/stir up any memories in you?

comics.com/Duncan

But if you’re a loving and responsible caregiver they are a major commitment:

comics.com/Duncan

 
My daughter gets up at 5:30 on workdays to walk Sammy and Banshee. Her husband walks them again in the evening and they pay someone to take them out in the middle of the day. Then there are the costs of veterinarians, dog care if they go on a trip without their four-legged family members, their new car, etc.

Are Sammy and Banshee worth it? How could you doubt it? Still, there are moments…

As I’ve mentioned before the four of them drive from the Chicago area to Ann Arbor, Michigan every time there’s a home football game at the University of Michigan. Torben’s family lives in Ann Arbor and they’re all football fans. So a couple of weeks ago they left at 4:30 in the morning to get there in plenty of time for the game. Needless to say they were exhausted that night and went to bed early. Then around 3:45 a.m. Sammy gently woke Kaitlin up by touching her face with his nose. When she woke up enough to figure out where she was, Banshee started vomiting. Presumably Sammy was trying to tell Kaitlin his sister was sick.

So Kaitlin and Torben went into action. He took the dogs outside, in case Banshee had to vomit more, while Kaitlin started cleaning up the mess. Unfortunately in the confusion they forgot to check the yard for skunks. Sammy tangled with one last year so they usually try to be careful it doesn’t happen again. Sure enough, there was a skunk, Sammy chased it, and he got sprayed once again. (He’s a sweet dog but not a fast learner.)

Torben grabbed him by the collar and rushed him into the bathroom so Sammy couldn’t contaminate any porous, nonwashable surface, and Torben and Kaitlin scrubbed Sammy good with their deskunking cleaner…which they were careful to have on hand. It took a while but they eventually could go back to bed and get a bit more sleep.

They woke up to a horrible stench, of course, made worse by the fact that Sammy had been like Duncan in the cartoon above. He had crawled onto the bed between them. That is never allowed, but presumably he needed some reassuring closeness after his ordeal. They were not pleased. Even if the dogs were allowed on the bed, that was not the time. Sometimes you don’t want them to snuggle.

I recently read Peter Mayle’s Encore Provence, and I loved his reason for not having a garden:

It would be fighting nature, and nature always wins. It has more stamina and it never stops for lunch.

Peter Mayle is a wise man. His quote reminds me of a friend of mine who said one spring:

I love this time of year! The new plants are spouting and growing…before they get eaten by the deer and beaten down by the hail.

And that was down here in town, where the elevation is only 7200 feet.

So I suppose some people would call our garden in the woods, at an elevation of 8800 feet, an exercise in foolishness. The picture above shows me walking down the path to the garden. The figures slightly to the left of center are Kaitlin and (probably) Andy looking at the garden.

 

In fact, it was a fun adventure and we were successful for a while. We carefully hauled down sacks and sacks of sterilized manure each year and rototilled them into the soil. And we did produce some lush cold-weather crops…crops that needed more warmth didn’t do as well. We harvested most of our tomatoes after the first snow flurries, while they were still green.

Unfortunately just growing crops isn’t enough.

Animals Don’t Understand Sharing
There are a lot more animals than humans up there. Now we didn’t mind sharing. We thought it was cute when we saw a pile of pea pods, neatly stripped of the peas, under the leafy protection of Kaitlin’s pumpkin plant. We didn’t even mind the ground squirrel chattering at us when we stayed in “his” garden too long. But he eventually ignored us and came in to harvest even though we were there. (We tried two different fences, but they couldn’t keep him out.) It did bother us when we were admiring our handiwork and saw a wheat stalk topple over in front of our eyes, And the last straw was when we watched a bean plant disappear into the soil, to be replaced by a gopher hole.

Andy’s solution was to set traps and kill the animals, but I didn’t care about the produce as much as watching the plants grow. And killing animals does not make my little corner of the world a friendlier place.

The Greenhouse

 

 

Andy had always dreamed of having a greenhouse, so we decided to spend the money and have one built. The garden was about 30 feet by 50 feet, and the greenhouse is 25 feet by 75 feet… big enough to do some good.

The walls are cinderblock and the roof glass. The left wall in the picture of the inside is about 7 feet high, the one on the right 9 feet high.

The second snapshot shows how the higher wall is nestled into the slope of the land to conserve heat.

We asked the contractor to save all the precious soil we had laboriously built up, but he forgot. It ended up buried under the concrete porch. So we built up more soil by growing “green manure”, crops that nurture the soil when rototilled in. It didn’t take long before we producing good crops again.

We had several years of bountiful harvests before the drought hit and our well couldn’t produce enough water for the plants. My husband has great hopes that the drought will eventually end, but I’m relaxed either way. I’m glad we did it, but I’m happy to move on.

A Waste of Time?
Was our garden in the woods a waste of time and money? Were we foolish to do it? Not in my book. For me growing a garden is like raising a child, I do it for the joy of being involved and watching things grow. I do it for the process, not for the end result. When we bought the land we knew it could be devastated by forest fires at any time. The fact is, we’re been lucky to have had that many good years up there. We managed to have some good harvests, but even more important we had a great shared adventure and have years of precious memories.

What About You?
Have you ever done something that other people might have thought foolish or that didn’t turn out the way you had hoped? How do you feel about it? Are you more focused on productivity and achievement than in enjoying the adventure of life? Do you think the two approaches are incompatible?

You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.
–Robin Williams

I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality….
–Joseph Campbell in “The Power of Myth”

It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy…let’s go exploring!
–Calvin to Hobbes

I hesitate to tell you how long I spent taking the above picture for last week’s post. I had the post written by a reasonable hour, and it could have been a nice conclusion to a productive day. All I needed was a simple illustration for the text.

Instead I took picture after picture, varying the lighting, pose and camera angle. From time to time I downloaded the pictures to my computer and noticed what resonated and what didn’t. When I first started getting involved, the “rational” part of my mind said, “This is crazy. The picture you have is plenty good enough. Just let it go and get a good night’s sleep.” And a soft inner voice replied, “Yes, what you say makes sense. It is crazy. I’m doing it anyway, and you can’t stop me.” Once I get in that situation I don’t fight myself. I open myself to the experience.

I ended up going to bed about 3 a.m.

Was that really the best use of my time? When babies lie in their crib experimenting with making sounds, is that a waste of their time? Or when they start exploring their hands and feet, being completely open to the miracle of movement, is that a waste of time? I think not. And I believe that feeling of fascination and discovery shouldn’t be reserved for children. I personally regard that state as sacred space, when one forgets about time and is completely immersed in the present moment. So what if I got to bed late and slept in the next morning? It was a small price to pay for feeding my soul. Sure it was crazy, and I agree with Robin Williams, we’re only given a little spark of madness. We mustn’t lose it.

What about you? Do you have a spark of madness that makes you feel more alive, that lets you slip into sacred space? Please share your thoughts and experience in the comments section.

Thanks to bikehikebabe, David, Daz and Shilpan for commenting on last week’s post.

 
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
—Heraclitus

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
—Ernest Hemingway

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. That’s my favorite mantra when I try something new. It quiets my inner critic and gives me the freedom to experiment and learn new things without worrying about being judged.

For instance, when I first started writing an inner voice would say, “What makes you think you can write? Why would anyone want to read anything of yours?” The only solution for me was to get my ego out of the way and write in the spirit of sharing. It doesn’t matter if my writing is “good” or “bad”. The important question is, “Is it honest?” Does it accurately express one person’s way of experiencing the world? Maybe some people will be judgmental, but that’s not my problem. My job is simply to play my part well…to immerse myself in the process and leave the rest to the gods.

It reminds me of a child going with his mother to meet the teacher he would be having in his new school. During the visit he looked at the pictures on the walls and asked, “Who painted all those ugly pictures?” His mother was horrified at his rudeness and was going to intervene, but the teacher just answered, “Johnny, in this class people don’t have to paint pretty pictures, they can paint anything they want.” Johnny visibly relaxed…this school was going to be a safe place.

 
 
Sheree K. Creative Commons license.

That feeling of safety is so important to learning. That’s one reason therapy reading dogs work so well in schools. The dogs are nonjudgmental and the children feel safe with them. Reading aloud is something to be shared with an interested listener rather than a chore, and the children look forward to doing it.

Children have to rely on adults to give them a safe learning environment, but as adults we can provide it for ourselves. So I no longer worry when my inner critic sneers, “What do you think you’re doing? What makes you think you can write? No one is interested in what you have to say!” I simply answer, “Yeah, sure. You’re probably right. And it doesn’t matter. I’m writing anyway, and you can’t stop me.”

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. And for me there are few things more important than writing.

So, that’s what I care about, and that’s what works for me. What about you? What do you care about…care about so much that you’ll do it no matter what other people might think? Please share your thoughts and experience in the comments section.

Thanks to Shamelle, Daz, Jenny, Paul, Noa, Bruce and Liara for commenting on last week’s post.