Greasing the Muffin Pan

This morning I made muffins for breakfast. I started with the tried and true basic muffin recipe out of a thirty year old Red Roses cookbook, and improvised from there. 

Rather than two cups of white flour, I switched half a cup of it for whole wheat flour. I threw in about a tablespoon of brewer's yeast, left here by a visiting friend who cooks vegetarian and whole grain foods.  I added chopped walnuts and dried currants to the dry ingredients. I had a small amount of mashed yams leftover from last night's dinner, so I added that, and also a couple of tablespoons of cooked quinoa, also left over from dinner. I mixed them up, popped them in the oven, and there was breakfast. The muffins were delicious. Rob ate five. 

One thing that I do not enjoy doing when making muffins is greasing the muffin pan. I have a lovely stoneware pan, a gift from a friend. It is large and heavy, and when I lift it down from its home in the cupboard above the refrigerator, still in its original box, I always smile and remember my friend who gave it to me. And then I sigh, put a dab of butter on some waxed paper and grease each muffin cup. Maybe the reason I don't like this part is because I always end up with greasy fingers. The butter gets into my skin and under my fingernails, and is hard to wash off. 

It seems to me that many tasks of life have a component in them that is off-putting, unpleasant, or even sometimes severely anxiety-provoking. Sometimes for me, that one component can be not just a little bump in the road, but a brick wall that is hard to get past. 

Greasing the muffin pan is a mild and almost silly example. But the fact is, if I let my aversion to greasing the pan stop me, I would never make homemade muffins. I would lose the satisfaction of making and eating them, and my family would lose the opportunity to enjoy them as well.

Here is another example. I love to ski. Every winter, it gives me great joy to ski as many weekends as I can. The last two winters, we have taken a March ski holiday with dear friends in another province, and we are planning to do the same again this March. Both times, we have had a wonderful week of skiing and spending time with our friends. 

But every morning at the skihill, when I put my ski boots on, my feet hurt. The boots cut off my circulation and squash my insteps down. Sometimes the pain is quite extreme from the pressure on my insteps, and also once I take the boots off to thaw my feet. 

I have good quality, properly fit boots with customized heat moulded inner boots. These are better boots than I ever owned before when I was younger and poorer. But unfortunately for me, I have wide feet, high arches, short strong calves, and poor circulation. I have never found any brand of boot that is actually comfortable. I have learned all kinds of tricks, like making sure my boots are warm before putting them on, wearing thin socks, buckling the boots loosely at the start of the day, and unbuckling them for each ride up the chair. Later in the day, once my body has warmed up to exercise and my feet have adjusted to the boots, the pain is minimal and my feet don't get as cold. 

Still, I know that every ski day, I will have to put up with painful feet and frozen toes for the first three or four runs. Then I'll go into the lodge and weep while defrosting my feet. After that, my feet will be fine for the rest of the day. I refuse to let a little thing like pain stop me from enjoying a wonderful day of skiing.

Here is a work related example. Like many people, I suffer from fear of public speaking. Yet, throughout the different jobs in my career, I regularly have had to speak publicly in a variety of situations. I have led meetings of the senior leaders of a large organization. I have taught small classes and classes of 250. I have been interviewed on television. I have spoken at national and international conferences. I have led a ceremonial event in a darkened theatre that seats 750. 

Every first time that I have had to speak in a new type of situation, I have become highly anxious. I have experienced sweaty palms, the feeling of almost fainting, and the sensation of hearing sound coming out of my mouth but being unable to understand the words that I am saying. I have had wordlessness come over me, when in the middle of a sentence, I suddenly have become frozen, unable to finish the sentence. With everyone's eyes upon me, the silence has seemed to go on and on. 

You would think that having experienced public speaking fright once, I would have avoided that type of situation forever after. But no, I am not that easy on myself. I have made myself do it again, and again, and again, until I have developed ease with that particular situation. And then I have signed myself up for tasks that up the ante, and require me to speak to larger or more critical audiences. 

I am not trying to torture myself. I am not trying to purposely seek out public speaking situations. It's just that if I am going to be able to my job well, I have to take the public speaking part of it in stride. As my career has progressed, the level of public speaking required also has risen. If I had taken the easy way out, I would never have learned to how to manage in public speaking situations, and I would not have learned to cope with the anxiety. The focus isn't me, but rather the instruction, the presentation, the interview, the meeting agenda, and the celebration. 

So, I guess the point I am making, which isn't especially profound, is that we grow when we don't let ourselves take the easy way out. This is the case in creative endeavours, like oil painting or writing a novel, and at work, and also in the little everyday things of life, like making muffins. 

 

Karen Margulis, Pastel Painter

Tonight, I would like to feature the work of an amazing artist, Karen Margulis. She works in pastel, and has a fabulous sense of colour and design.

Ribbon of Blue

The painting above is titled Ribbon of Blue. It is available for purchase on her Website and also can be viewed on her blog.

I really like this painting because in this composition, the blue zigzag of water draws the eye right into the space. As well, she has used colour to provide dramatic contrast and yet at the same time to develop the image as a unified whole. Finally, I like the way that she has not overworked the painting, but has left areas that are suggestive or somewhat unresolved. This adds interest and keeps me looking at the painting for a long time. An example of this are the marks just above the line of the horizon. My eyes keep going there as I try to understand if I am seeing clouds, or birds, or smoke, or perhaps the suggestion of far away hills.

As well as being a marvellous artist, Karen writes thoughtful posts on techniques and her artistic practice. For example, in recent posts, she has talked about strategies she uses to give herself permission. One such strategy is finding ways to give oneself permission to stop working on a picture before it loses its freshness and becomes overworked. Another strategy is to use poor photos as references, which is more likely to result in colour improvisation and greater looseness, rather than rigid copying of what appears in the photograph. 

I have added a link to her blog to my blog roll. Follow it or any of the links above to enjoy more of her work. 

A Writing Life, Deferred

What is special about October 31? Well, Halloween, of course -- but what else?

October 31st is the day before November 1st, and November 1st is the first day of the month of NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, a month when writers across the globe form a mutual support group to cheer each other on in each one's individual quest to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. 

On Halloween night, I read a fellow writer's social media post about her writing plan for her novel this year. Then I signed onto the NaNoWriMo website, miraculously remembering my user name and password from several years ago when I last participated. I'm still listed there, though my webpage is blank, my past years' records wiped away. I cruised the forums a little, nostalgically. Then I logged off and spent this whole weekend not writing. 

It's not that I had other pressing things I needed to do this weekend, just laundry, groceries, and a few errands. I spent half the day on Saturday in my pyjamas on the couch. I read a whole novel, a journalist's series on the contemporary challenges of finding work, and browsed through quite a few pages of Kathi Weeks's scholarly book, The Problem With Work (2011).

Frequently over these two days, the thought that NaNoWriMo had started popped into my head, and I fought the urge to run to my computer and write. I felt sad that I was not participating this year, again. 

But there simply is no point. I cannot do my job and be a committed writer too, not both at the same time. My job has been chewing up 12 hours a day, Monday to Friday, and lately it has gobbled up part of each weekend as well. When I come home at the end of the day, I am tired and hungry, and many days I have no words left in my head. Just as often, the work scenarios are still racing through my mind most of the evening leaving little space for anything else. 

In the evenings, I fit in some exercise, time with Rob, phone calls to kids and friends, some daily home tasks like paying the bills or sewing on buttons. By Friday, I am in a haze of exhaustion, and barely able to hold a conversation, never mind write. 

This weekend, true enough, I could have spent some hours writing. But then I would have had to put it aside until next weekend (if I was lucky), or maybe several weekends hence. It is hard to write with continuity and passion in the little dribs and drabs of time that I have.

I have participated in NaNoWriMo before in the hours between and around work. But work then, although busy, did not demand so many hours or spend me as thoroughly as my current job does. Also, I had to absent myself from everything else for the month of November, which I did willingly in the past. But now, there is less and less of a life outside of work, as work has grown to take up more and more of my time and energy. 

This is quite the Faustian bargain -- this job OR a life. The life that is left over after work is a skinny little thing with no room for the writing life.

And it's not just me being overly dramatic, or poor at managing my time. In the macho culture of this type of organization, you have to suck it up and work, work, work, all the time. Or you leave, or get pushed out.

A couple of days ago, I was reminiscing with a colleague about a big collaborative writing project on identity that I was engaged in several years ago. I could hear myself enthusiastically describing that project and how interesting it was. I loved doing that kind of writing and work, and I suddenly realized how much I missed it. 

I have not completely stepped away from writing. This blog is my primary writing practice now. I do some writing at work, but mostly of an interactive, functional type (e.g., email, brief reports). Sometimes (rarely), I write a poem. I still think about the nuts and bolts of writing, especially when I am reading a well-written novel or blogs on writing, and sometimes I still daydream about my stories in progress, or ones that I might write someday. 

Right now, I am pinning my hopes on retirement. I have not ceased to be a writer. I just will be going about it in sequence rather than in parallel in the current and upcoming stages of my life.

Methane Swamp

I have just started a new painting. I call this one Methane Swamp. 

Last year at Thanksgiving, Rob and I were on our own, so we decided to go camping. We have a truck and camper. It is a new, quite comfortable three-season camper. It has a slide, so it is roomy, and the kitchen is far more functional than in most campers. 

Canadian Thanksgiving is in early October, so although the evenings are chilly, the weather is still fine for camping. We went to the mountains, and camped at a lovely place called Mill Creek. Although it is clearly a favourite place for random campers during the summer, judging by the large number of fire pits, areas of trampled grass, and abandoned beer cans, in October we had the place all to ourselves.

We arrived Saturday evening when it was already getting dark. We spent the next day hiking along the creek. That evening, I cooked Thanksgiving dinner in the camper. We had Cornish game hens stuffed with rice and cranberries, veggies, salad, dinner rolls, and wine. It tasted wonderful! It was the first time I had ever used the camper's oven, and it worked just fine. I didn't attempt pumpkin pie, however. Maybe next time. 

On Monday morning, we hiked around the area a bit more. We discovered that we were near a series of interconnected swamps. A trail cut along the hillside above the swamps. I scrambled down the steep hillside to get down to the pools and stream. 

The area was visually interesting. Dead white trees poked up out of the water at various angles. The water was shadowy blue and black. There were hummocks of yellow grass, and red oxide mud along the shoreline. We observed that methane gas was bubbling up from the mud on the pond bottom. The place had a mysterious, almost ominous feeling to it. I took many photos, knowing that I wanted to paint the scene, but not having time that morning to paint on location. 

It is a year later, and I have finally gotten around to uploading the photos off my camera onto the computer. I looked at my methane swamp photos and was disappointed. They were dark, and too busy. They did not represent well what intrigued my eyes when we were there. 

I finally decided on one particular picture to use as a reference photo and printed it out. After considering it further, I chose to focus on the top right hand corner of the photo. I took a ruler and (cleverly) marked out a rectangle the same dimensions as my canvas. This solved a problem that I often have when using a reference photo: the photo is seldom exactly the same dimensions as my canvas, and that makes it hard to get the drawing right. 

I am working on a smaller canvas than usual - 14 x 18 inches. I just finished a larger painting with quite a bit of detail, and it took me a long time to complete it. So this time I wanted to work fast and loose, and finish quickly. 

I drew the main shapes in, placing them carefully, but not putting in any detail. Then I painted in the white dead trees and their reflections, just roughly, and the yellow grasses along he shore. That was as far as I got the first evening. Tonight it took me about two hours to block in the trees, and some of the reflections in the water. 

As always, I am struggling to get the dark values dark enough. Also, this picture has lots of green in it. Green is my nemesis. I usually try to avoid using a lot of green as I find it hard to represent green the way I see it. But, in landscape art, it is not that easy to stay away from green! 

The image is quite complex. So far, I am having fun with it. 

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

I was speaking with my son recently about this question. He is just about to finish his schooling, racing through the readings and assignments of his final year. University has been his life for nearly four years, and now he is on the threshold of something else. But he doesn't know what that something else is. He is mentally trying out the possibilities of different career paths. It is hard to visualize the unknown.

When I was a child, I always felt stumped when adults asked me the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" (I think maybe the adults of my childhood were not very good at conversing with children, because they seemed to always ask this, or, "What grade are you in?" Or, if they were men, jokingly, "Who's your boyfriend?").

My typical answer to the what to be question was, "Anything except a secretary, nurse, or teacher." Those were the three career paths considered suitable for a girl back in those days, so, of course, I was quite certain that I would not pursue any of them.

But I did wonder what my path through the world of work would be. When I was quite young, I decided that I might like to be an artist, a writer, or a queen. I didn't tell anyone, because even then I knew that aspiring to be an artist or a writer was somehow not okay. It was fanciful rather than practical. It seemed a bit arrogant to even dare to dream that I could become a writer or an artist. Many years later when I confided these two possibilities to a best friend, she said that I could be an artist we grew up, and she would be a writer. (Apparently we couldn't both be writers.)

I never told anyone about wanting to be a queen. I knew people certainly would make fun of that.

Of course, I knew I could never be a real queen. I was growing up in the sticks of northern Canada. My family was not royalty. And even as a small child, I knew that I would not enjoy all the publicity and public obligations expected of the Queen.

Looking back, I think what being a queen meant to me was leadership. At that time, aside from the Queen of England (and Canada), and my school principal who was a woman, there were few examples for me to see of women in leadership positions.

Even if I had had the words for it, I still don't think I would have told anyone that I hoped to pursue a leadership role in whatever career I chose. Leadership -- being the boss, the chair, the vice-president -- wasn't seen as an appropriate aspiration for a girl. And it still isn't, for the most part, although few people will come right out and say it.

Little girls who try to lead are taunted as being "too bossy."

Lots of research out there shows that most women still hit a glass ceiling in their career trajectory. When successful women are interviewed, the majority of them say that they kind of stumbled into leadership; it hadn't really been their plan. The research also shows that female leaders, more than their male counterparts, secretly suffer from the self-perception that they are imposters in their role.

So, now as I approach senior citizenhood, I can report that I did become an artist, a writer, and a queen. it was a strange zig-zagging path, and I did a variety of kinds of work along the way. My art, unfortunately, has been done alongside a busy career, which means that I do not have very much time for it. Writing is something that I have done both as an integral part of my career, and alongside my paid work. And I have been in managerial and leadership roles in my career for more than a decade.

So, the point of this story is: Listen to the little kid in your head, that child you once were. He or she might know more than you would have expected. Also, I think this story is about having the courage to dream. It's your life to make of it what you will.

En Plein Air

I just spent a spectacular sunny September weekend at Police Outpost Park, on the border of Alberta and Montana. On Saturday afternoon, I hiked to a viewpoint along the trail and painted on location. I had to carry my gear about a kilometre. I started out at 3:00, and was back at our campsite by 8:00 when the sun went down. So after subtracting the time taken for hiking, and setting up and taking down, I think I spent about 4 hours drawing and then painting. I completed a 14x18 en plein air painting.

This was my setup. I had remembered this handy little bench along the trail from previous hikes.

This was the scene that I painted. I was looking out over fields and an pond towards Chief Mountain. The autumn colours were brilliant. This photo does not represent the colours well as I was looking towards the sun. The mountain was just a hazy silhouette against the bright sky. The sun passed across the sky to the right and was setting over the mountains in the west by the time I finished the painting.

This photo shows the painting just after I had blocked in the main shapes and colour areas. I was painting on a birch panel with oils. I usually paint on stretched canvas or linen, and I found it hard to work on the panel. It seemed to suck up the moisture of the paint too much. When I began laying on the pale blue wash for the sky, the thinned paint went blotchy, so I ended up blocking in with much thicker paint than usual. Also, when I used unthinned paint, my brush became dry after a short stroke. So I struggled with the consistency or viscosity of the paint throughout this experience. 

I had prepared the panel with two coats of shellac, followed by a ground of white alkyd paint. I have been told that artists do not use shellac anymore as a base on panels - that it is an old-fashioned approach - but that is how I was taught to do it many years ago. I would like to hear advice from others on how you prepare panels for oil painting. No doubt, the wind and sun also contributed to the problems with paint consistency.

Anyways, I had great fun painting this scene. Most of the time I paint indoors. I had really been wanting to get out on location and paint. My excuse was that I couldn't find my old telescoping portable easel. I painted one panel outside last summer by setting up a table, and propping my panel against a box on the table. That didn't work well once the wind came up! I finally went a bought a new lightweight easel, and this was my first time using it. 

Here is the final painting. I took the photo with my phone, so the colours are not very accurate. 

The Misery Lens

We've all been there at one time or another. It is that terrible place of mind where you become trapped inside a sandstorm of raging hurt or anger, or maybe inside the frozen grey ice of resentment and alienation. You look out at those who have wronged you through a lens of misery, and everything you see appears ugly, ill-fitting, and as miserable as you feel. In fact, the misery is more than a lens on the eyes. It is a stench that envelopes you and taints everything that you come near.

Your body and mind go with your emotions to that unpleasant place and they all end up swirling around together. Your teeth are clenched, jaw aching, and no matter how many times you notice them and open your mouth and try to relax your face, a few minutes later the teeth are clenched again. Your neck and upper back are so tight that they are going into spasms, and you have a persistent headache that ranges from a dull ache to blinding pain. You lose faith in your ability to do basic simple things, like say hello to people, or do a familiar task.

And all the while the squirrel in the brain is on a frantic treadmill, trying to analyze the crisis you find yourself in. You lay out the facts and possible interpretations over and over again. There is an occasional insight or moment of clarity, and then you plunge into another round of rehashing the newly aligned facts, and you plot and compare courses of action. You can't step away from it. The internal conversation distracts you from everything else, and keeps you awake at night. You become exhausted.

You didn't get stuck behind the misery lens randomly. Some situation drew you into the internal storm. The situation was so terrible, so critical, that your very survival felt threatened. You failed a course. You were physically, sexually, or emotionally abused. Your spouse left you or threatened to leave you. Your boss or teacher humiliated you in front of others. Someone cheated you or mocked you behind your back and you found out. Someone close to you died. You made a serious error at work that hurt someone or caused a project to fail. You reached age fifty, still single and childless, and wondered about your own worth. You got cancer. 

The stew of emotions, thoughts and physical reactions are by-products of the struggle to cope with a threatening situation. But they are so all-encompassing that they throw up a smokescreen, a grey lens that distorts perception. But in the middle of it, the perceptions don't seem distorted; they seem real, true, and very intense. I know this because this has happened to me more than once. In retrospect, it is really easy to notice that the angry blaming thoughts and hurt feelings were leading me to conclusions that, afterwards, seemed somewhat twisted, or even ludicrous. But in the middle of it, that clarity and distance is hard to achieve.

Here are some ways through it that have worked for me. I remind myself that it is a process or coping phase and it will pass. I will get through it. Usually I come out the other end with a plan. 

I do things that help me step away from my obsessive brooding thoughts and feelings - things that quiet the brain. For me what works well are: getting out into nature; exercise; journalling; talking to a trusted friend or family member (I have to ignore the voice in my head that tries to dissuade me by saying that no one understands or wants to listen); counselling; painting; cooking; yoga; skiing; reading an interesting upbeat book; physical closeness with a loved one; engaging with others and focusing on them, not me; and listening to speakers on positive themes such as creativity and leadership (e.g., TED talks). 

Ultimately what pulls me out of the bog of misery it is figuring out what steps I need to take to address the problem that I am facing, and then actually taking action. Maybe it involves finding the courage to confront someone, or to do a task that I am afraid of, or to own up to my mistake. Maybe it means recognizing that a certain problem is not something that I can or ought to deal with, and giving myself permission to step away from it. Sometimes it involves finding little moments of peace and joy to help me get through each day while I wait for time to do its healing work. 

There always is a solution, but it is seldom obvious through the misery lens. Typically, once the misery lens falls away from my eyes, I can hardly remember what I was so riled up about and why it seemed so very important.