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My practice: go outside and draw something I see every day. I’m not being purist; if it’s pouring, or I wait too long and it’s dark, I draw inside, and in a pinch, from a photo I’ve taken. It has been a very rainy start to the year, and once I sat in our enclosed entryway while the rain fell on the poppy leaves just outside.
After the first day, I have drawn with a gel ink pen. I might return to graphite pencil at some point, but right now, given my tendency to get fiddly, I’m enjoying the constraint of having only black to work with. These are all 5″×8″ or smaller, the size of my current sketchbook.
Several years ago, inspired by my friend Janet and her daily butterfly practice, I drew a leaf of a California tree every day for the entire year, mostly from photos. I really enjoyed it and stuck with it, which is rare for me for a daily practice. So I am doing something similar this year, combining two spiritual practices: I will go outside and draw something I see there.
I’m not going to be a purist about it; if it’s pouring rain, I’ll draw indoors (ideally, drawing something outside from indoors). I thought I might have to do that today, but the rain let up and I went out to our back garden and drew a fern there. I’ll post my drawings now and then with the tag, “Drawing outside every day.”
Getting outdoors and making art are also both good for my mental health, even if I only do them for a few minutes. I’m prone to anxiety, and various studies show that spending time outdoors and drawing both reduce anxiety–certainly for people like me, who enjoy them. I don’t need to go to a big natural expanse, though I am very much looking forward to pulling over now and then on my commute through Marin and Sonoma Counties and drawing some of the more scenic stretches. Even spending attentive time with a weed growing through a crack in the sidewalk is an experience of awe and beauty.
Why I carry my sketchbook and notebook with me. When our feet get tired and it’s time to sit and rest, I can write or draw, which makes the extra several ounces in my backpack very worthwhile. Yesterday, when the heat and elevation forced a rest, this nopal cactus across the street from the Santo Domingo church caught my eye.
I think I’ve probably adjusted to the elevation now. I used to dream of going to Macchu Pichu, but I don’t know if I could now. A jump from sea level to a mere 5,800 feet–Oaxaca’s elevation–takes me a couple of days. As with so many things, sufficient water and sleep help a lot.
We are on a week’s vacation in Mendocino, where I have never been before. I’ve seen lots of stunning photos of the stunning coast hereabouts, and now I have seen for myself how beautiful it is and have taken my own.
Tomorrow we’ll go to MacKerricher State Park and actually get down to the beach to explore some tide pools. Thus far, we have viewed, heard, and smelled the ocean from the tops of the cliffs.
Yesterday we walked out to the lighthouse on Point Cabrillo. I used to fantasize about living alone in a remote and beautiful place, and lighthouses seemed particularly appealing. I would actually find such a life very lonely; I like living with other people. But someone could sell me on a short retreat in a lighthouse, for sure. Preferably with a few resident cats, and actual lighthouse-keeper duties to fulfill.
I love the shapes trees take under the pressure of the wind off the ocean–hence this drawing of the trees beside the historic house of one of the lighthouse-keepers. One can stay in it as a vacation rental. Not, alas, in the lighthouse itself.
During today’s exploration of the botanical garden, I thought I might like to draw the branches of this tree (bush?) sometime.
Today began with a solo hike through a redwoods forest down to the waterfall in Russian Gulch State Park, and so it is ending with an early bedtime and pleasantly tired legs. One of the attractions of the cottage we’re staying in is its proximity to the waterfall. It’s a lovely place, built by one of our hosts and full of pieces made by the other, who is a ceramic artist. Mookie says her bed is actually quite comfortable. It doesn’t spontaneously fold up and turn her into a taco.
All in my 5×7 sketchbook in graphite.
I have been listening to people’s stories from Israel and Palestine (This American Life has had several lately) and looking at photos of the devastation. In one photo, the figure of a man standing in a doorway of a shattered building (his home?) seems so small, but also immovable in both dignity and grief. I was hearing the same in the stories, all the stories. I kept coming back to that photo until I realized that he was the person I needed to draw.
The drawing is conté crayon, about 4″ x 3″. The photo is below. I have seen it with various captions on different websites, usually with some editorial slant, but all agree that the photo is of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, and shows the result of an airstrike by the Israel Defense Force on December 6, 2023.
What I’ve been drawing for the past two weeks. One small sketchbook page of pencil and marker doesn’t seem like much, but I’ve been doing it every day–sometimes for a long stretch, sometimes for only five or 10 minutes–and making art a steady part of my life even as job, family, and household fill my time, is an effort and an anchor.
Also, there’s a story with this one. The image came into my mind of dark, receding layers of concentric and overlapping circles, and some brighter rings in the foreground. As is often the case, I had no idea why, or what it might come to mean, but I was intrigued. “Huh,” I thought. “I’ll have to draw that one of these days,” and I went on with whatever I was doing.
Well, I had just given a sermon on the difference between our popular conception of some people’s being geniuses and the much more liberating, fruit-bearing idea of occasionally having a genius, like a spirit that visits. Elizabeth Gilbert writes about this in her book Big Magic, and as soon as I read it I was captivated, or rather, freed, by it. In the sermon, I talked about ways we might invite a genius to visit us, and keep it around when it does, and the most important one was to heed what it says.
So I heard myself not-heeding. Telling the genius this wasn’t a very convenient time. And it wasn’t because I was performing open-heart surgery or driving to an urgent appointment. I just didn’t feel like sitting down and making art. All the little habits of fear and hesitation had me shooing the genius out the door. But thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert, and giving the sermon, and having so many people respond to it, this time I noticed myself saying no and how diametrically that contradicted the advice I had just given. I pushed aside my shabby excuses, got a compass out of the “Sharp things!” drawer in the art room, and tried to put on paper what the genius had shown me in my mind.
Until I said “Maybe later” to the genius, and heard myself saying it, and heard the contradiction, I didn’t realize how habitually I say “Not now.” How I am, in fact, in the habit of saying “no” rather than “yes” to the genii who, by my great good fortune, knock on my door pretty often. I am really excited to discover what might happen when I start to welcome them in.
The Judaism I was taught regards trees as a particularly beautiful and sacred part of creation. It is a mitzvah to plant them. Given their slow growth and long lifespans, they are a gift to the future. Humans’ nurturing of trees symbolizes the very essence of ethical living: to think beyond oneself and take actions that may benefit oneself only minimally, but will greatly benefit others, as an oft-retold Talmudic tale relates.
My own tender love for trees came up hard against a fact that, may I be forgiven, I did not know until this newest stage of the bitter war between Israel and the Palestinian people, even though it has been reported in the news over many years. This fact: that the government of Israel has destroyed hundreds of thousands of trees on Palestinian land, and protected Jewish “settlers” as they have destroyed thousands more, dating back at least to 1967, the Six-Day War, and with the destruction (with or without the IDF’s support) if anything only worsening over the past few months. This piece stems from my grief and alienation, which have intensified over the years, took a sharp turn upwards with Israel’s brutal conduct of this war, and are crystallized in the assault on Palestinian trees. To destroy trees in order to attack people is thoroughly despicable. It bears no resemblance to the Judaism I was taught, but of course, the government of Israel has long been out of step with what I love and respect about Judaism.
The beautiful vision of the latter appears here on the left panel, with a phrase from Psalm 96 in Hebrew and English, “y’ranenu kal atzei ya-ar,” “all the trees of the forest will rejoice,” framing a thriving olive tree. Around it are (clockwise from upper right) a dove, hands planting a seedling, an insect that lives symbiotically in olive bark, a birds’ nest, shovels, and a lizard that makes its home in olive trees. (I provide this guidance in recognition that my paper-cutting skills are not quite up to my artistic vision, LOL.) On the right side of the diptych, another of the central ethical teachings of Judaism, “ba’al tashchit,” “do not destroy,” frames a dead olive tree. Around the edge are (clockwise from upper right) a bulldozer sprocket, flames and a tear gas canister, a bulldozer blade, emptiness, axes, and a punching fist.
The nice thing about having my sketchbook with me everywhere is that when we’re waiting for the food to arrive at a restaurant, I can draw what’s on the table. When we were in Solvang, we went to dinner at a place that had these nice oil lamps on the tables, with their irresistible patterns of shadow and light.
California’s oak trees always say “draw me,” and I am usually too intimidated to heed them. I like this drawing, though. It’s an exercise in not being too specific–just following the general patterns of the tree. That’s really difficult for me for a variety of reasons. I don’t know if I’ll finish it, but I’ve returned to it for the past few days, having gotten a start on it at the winery where it grows while we were still in SoCal.
We went south for a few days after Christmas to meet up with friends and hike in the beautiful Santa Ynez Mountains. The route took us down through the Salinas Valley. At one point a patch of sun on the otherwise clouded hills was so striking that I considered stopping to take a picture, or asking Joy to take one out the window as I drove, because I knew I’d want to draw it later. The moment passed, unrecorded except in my mind, and when we got to our destination, I went looking on the internet for a reference photo. I really wanted it to be of these same hills. Nothing quite captured the quiet drama of that illumination–moral: take the photo when it strikes you–but this one was pretty. Thank you, Shutterstock (photo 1055815059).
Sermons in Stones 
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