Avant-garde Art by Chloe Reames

My daughters are all extraordinary artists. Each has her own eclectic style. Today I’m focusing on the art of my middle daughter, Chloe, who lives in South Florida. Here are a couple of her pieces. I love the freedom, the way her work draws me back time and time  again. Perhaps I’ll open my own gallery to feature the work of three fine artist sisters…Zoe, Chloe and Caroline Reames….

There is a small and simple house for me. It is waiting for me as I have been waiting for it. Somewhere, there is a gentle place ready to welcome me and my daughters and my pets and pets who don’t have people to love them. I’ve seen it in my heart many times. Only now do I feel close to walking through its warm, bright doors. Where are you, little house? Call to me so loudly I cannot miss finding your face.

Around my little house there will be wild roses, fragrant and sharp-stemmed. There will be great masses of blue hydrangeas sharing space with purple morning-glories, orange marigolds, hot pink zinnias. Most importantly, my little house will have in its yard mimosa trees and gardenia plants EVERYWHERE.

Inside my little house there will be open space, places to breathe, and enough room for every glass, each and every mug, my few plates and bowls, my odd arrangement of utensils in all different sizes, and safe places for my collections of glass pitchers, squat owls and fat, wild pigs. Mostly there will be built-in bookshelves and free-standing bookshelves everywhere for my dear friends, my books.

This house will be a haven and a refuge for my dogs and my cats, and for the dogs and cats who haven’t had a home til they find their way to mine. This house will become a home and a safe place for my daughters to do as they wish…to live in with me, to crash on visits, to drop in when they want a break from their own happy lives.

I will grow lean and accomplished in this house. I will write my books, make love with the words that lean against my heart, the sentences and phrases that wrap themselves bravely around my heart, filling me with a joy that I cannot express in spite of my intimacy with them. My skin will be dark from days in the sun splashed yard of my little home. My eyes will be bright. I will live long and happy in this sweet place that has held its heart and soul in place for me, waiting.

This is my destiny, to sink in, settle strong and wise and happy and to feel God’s peace welling up within me til it spills out all around me and everyone who comes close.

 

Mother of Fairies

I am the mother of three inimitable fairies. As such, it only stands to reason that I would be far different than other, “normal” mothers. I once felt inadequate to the Standard for Mothers, the one I could never quite reach, no matter how many cookies I baked (or burned) or field trips I chaperoned (never enough to meet the quota). As the years drift by, however, I feel uniquely qualified to raise this sweet tribe of three.

I’m not a cook, nor am I great at keeping house. I adore the jumble of mismatched, curious glassware, vintage plates and oddly shaped silverware that grace my humble kitchen. On any given day, opening my cabinets will treat your eyes to unexpected surprises. Nothing matches, but everything goes together quite, happily, well. This is a necessary ingredient for fairy-raising: you must find absolute delight in the bits of life that others mistake for ordinary.

I dance in my little green house. I put records on, love the scratchy sound of the needle on the record, and something wild and weird and wondrous happens in my heart as the music fills the room. I grabbed tiny fairy hands when they were little and twirled round and round with my baby fairies magical years ago, and sometimes, when I am blessed to have them with me, my fairy girls and I still dance together. Blessed Fairy Mother that I am, I also am glad that I know that in their own homes, wherever they are, my fairies dance and sing and make God happy with their honest joy.

I am the Mother of non-human fairies, or NHF, which is fairly common among Fairy Mothers everywhere. These loves of mine come with paws and bristly whiskers and wet tongues and pink noses and the most trusting love in this wide, tilting universe. My NHF climb onto beds with me, lie in my arms or along my back, or, in Fat Ollie’s case, just plop down wherever they can find a suitable spot to wedge themselves. I feed them, play with them, and listen to them when they speak (because, as all good fairy mommas know, NHF have a special language all their own).

My fairies are strong, resilient, compassionate, and kind. Their eyes shine with an inner light that is unmistakably fairy-like. They make magic like their peers make soup or grilled cheese…naturally and easily. They wave their little sparkly wands and heavy hearts become light as air, tears sprinkle into peals of laughter and life becomes intensely sweeter, transformed magically into a place of dreams and fantasies come true, and hopes made strong as tall oaks.

These fairy children did not have a traditional mother, one who cooked pot roast and potatoes or gave sensible talks about growing up to be successful in the corporate world. What they got, instead, was a friend to stand by them, a great champion of their art and their dreamy visions, and a heart that will beat alongside of theirs for eternity. I wasn’t normal, but neither are they, and that is, perhaps, the greatest magic of all.

Naked Dancing: A Review of Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn by Kris Radish

This book is juicy, honest, and provocative. It will maybe not convince you immediately to throw off your shirt and literally dance naked (then again, maybe it will), but it will draw you ever so much closer to opening up to who you (really) are….and to who you have always known yourself to be. I rarely read fiction but I picked this book up and could not, literally, put it down. On page 53, one sentence blazed out at me as if the words printed on the page were typeset in pure, shining gold:

“I never did what I wanted to do.”

I stopped reading, heart caught in my throat, and took out a purple pen and underlined that sentence. Then I read it again and circled it. Then I read it a third time and added wild exclamation points all around it.

This book is about daring, about jumping out, facing forward, standing up, not backing down. This book is about stripping expectations of others and rising proud in your vulnerable, exposed self…til you are the gorgeous human being that you and God intended yourself to be all along.

Well, maybe the author didn’t mean for it to be about God, but all I could hear, reading it through, was the voice of God shouting my name, whispering to me, steady anchoring me to one powerful, undeniable thought: Dare to be naked in your life, whatever that means and whatever that takes.

I remember being at a self-development course one year in a city where bougainvillea bloom riotously and over-ripe mangoes fall on the ground nearly every day, free for the taking. I was searching for myself and I found Her one night at the course, when they dared me to take a risk, push myself beyond my own boundaries. I was dancing with some other women in a room of mostly young, mostly fit, mostly attractive people. Suddenly, I took off my shirt and my bra and I danced, top of me naked, in front of them. This was not easy (I am, after all, neither young nor fit, though I do feel attractive in my own right) but it would have been harder not to do it. That’s how strong the urgent voice within me shouted. I needed to be seen, wanted to be heard, and made a way for that to happen.

This book reminds me of the courage of that South Florida night.

And it reminds me that, every single day, I get to choose to dance or not dance, naked or clothed, my way to the strong, glorious experience of living life to its…er, my…fullest.