home-view: a cyberporch companion: How Come?

Fluffmudget and Floyd share a little house I bought and positioned for them atop the heat pump. From there, I reason, they have a guard-tower view of the mousey side of the house thus discouraging any rodents intent on home invasion and saving those rodents from a more lingering death by De-Con. I’m compassionate that way.

Lately, however, Fluff’s taken to having her post-prandial nap with her back stuffed out the door of her house. The mice parade by unmolested. And I feel personally responsible.

On January 10th it was very cold and still, there she was, chilling her winter coat in the rain. Why would she do that? Perhaps she was having a hot flash. She is 14 years old. That’s, what, 74 cat years? Well, really!

But I can only make up stories about what I’m seeing. I can’t know. Fluff and I have a language gap and cognitive limitations. She’s smarter but I’m the one who tells our stories.

People make art in the absence of fact. We all do it. We also make nothing but art in the presence of facts. When we open our mouths, or pick up a tool, the only thing that CAN come out is art. From an incalculable array of limitations and partially understood events we select what we will bring forth. It’s always art. Even a Ph.D. thesis. Even the best designed scientific experiment. Even your daily ‘to do’ list. They are art and can never be anything else.

It’s all relative, it’s all subjective, it all fails as fact because it is not all the facts. And no matter what our intention, or where we are pointing our finger, it’s all always about us.

Could that cat be mooning me?

Well, okay, that story won’t fly. I am not that important to Fluff in this moment of time. Besides, she has much more effective ways of expressing disdain. I flash to her behavior yesterday where upon examining the contents of her breakfast bowl, no canned meat, she walked directly away from me with her tail held up like baton, like a curser, like an exclamation point.

I get it. I really think I do. Of course when my old lab, Dina, began surreptitiously burying her chow in the flower bed, mouthful by mouthful, hauling it slowly across the porch and shoving it into a hole she’d made, I thought she was just sick-to-death of Purina when, in fact, she was just sick to death. I’m so sad remembering how casually I wondered about the dirt on her nose those last few months. Instead of investigation I just told myself stories. When she died I told myself other stories; like that she had just been too good-hearted to risk hurting my feelings with an untouched dinner. Again, I don’t know. She was an extraordinarily prescient and kind dog. My point is that whether I had investigated or not I’d never have known the full story of Dina’s reality.

I got the following inquiry from a reader a year ago: “Your blog is very self-revealing. How come?” I responded to this person who so generously gave me feed-back.

I wrote, “That’s an excellent question. When I know the answer I’ll post it.”

It’s been a year since my last entry though I’ve lived with that question in the back of my mind as events have unfolded. Serious illness, the near loss of an adult child and a bio-hazard that left me homeless over five months have been distractions but still, all the while, I’ve been thinking about self-revelation and life commentary, art and story. I’ve been thinking about compassion and accountability.

It feels like love of life, this desire to use what I am, what I notice and what I can never know, to tell a story. It feels like the desire for communion with my tribe, wherever they are. It is an expression. It is human. I hope it is never hurtful. I aim for art.

As an untrained artist I made my living for 30 years. I never called myself an artist but others called me that.

You see things. You see a bit of how things are and you want to demonstrate your vision of the underlying connectedness that you sense. If you are being commissioned you usually have to incorporate what’s in your client’s head and wallet as well. Okay, that was a challenge. Maybe it was art, in its fashion, what I did.

The story teller or artist is at the center of what they see. It can not be otherwise. My ‘art;’ those thirty years, was fussy, tight, pretty and full of longing to be more than it was. The ‘more’ kept leaking out in little tributaries. It showed me where I needed to go.

It is in relationship that I have to look for my stories and it is in my stories that I look for clues about how to be a faithful and compassionate storyteller. That begins with my relationship with myself but it is about everything. I hope it is not too fussy, tight and pretty. I’m aiming for something closer to compost and the kind of energy you find there.

The practice of relationship or story is only as effective as it is honest. Never honest enough we plug on with our limitations and that leaves all our stories and relationships full of mystery and error. Yet still, through those practices we are enhanced. We find that we are not exactly alone. Both less and more special than we thought.

Everyone I’ve ever loved, I’ve loved for their struggles, not their perfection. And I’ve been pretty up-front about my own struggles and lack of perfection. I see no reason to stop now.

Let there be no unseemly displays. Let there by no unkindness. But light, we need light. The concepts of home, communion and simplicity continue to come up for me and are difficult to explore. The way toward veracity is not as the crow flies and I don’t see how to do it at all without transparency. The inherent risk in first person story is that it will come back to hit us in the face with a scary value added; more revelation than we intended. But putting it out there is how we get to better art. It’s how we get to being a better person.

Love much. Create. Give the world a lot to forgive you for. Things we make secretly and in the dark may be unforgiveable, they won’t accrue interest and they may stink. Jesus said it all the time. "Don't hide your light under a bushel unless you're stalking your dinner." (from the Fluff Edition of the New Testament. Matthew 5:15) Stir the compost. Give it light and air. Something good will grow.

So I show the wart. Wrestle with how it fits the whole gorgeous horrifying picture. Fail without shame. If the mark is missed, recalibrate, get better lighting, take another shot. Don’t look back. Always be looking for a better way of making it happen but do make it happen.