It makes me crazy to see pictures of refugees and hear Dick Cheney defend our invasion of Iraq. Here is a drawing I did in 2007, and a poem I did a few days ago. I wish I wasn't making art about the same thing. 

The Anger of Mothers

The anger and 
The sadness 
of a mother before an anonymous gravestone:

Under a warm full moon 
Another floating face,  
Another name unknown.
Another stranger who will never breathe, “Yes, let’s go.” 

She knows the hot drum beat.
She knows somewhere, right now, a soldier goes into the wilds of war
eager and excited 
immortal until blown away
as though there never were graves for unsung dust. 

Beneath the trees
she feels the bleakness of knowing some mother’s child is dying
name erased 
their memory no heavier than a floating kite string.

Looking out upon the crisp white headstones 
she sees a row of death
and another and another and another. 

She looks down, remembering: 

After all the car seats facing backward,
the healthy snacks and looking-both-ways;
after all the bike helmets and dentist visits,
the late night watch over fevers and croup;

A child went blindly into war’s alley.

She knows politicians have the gift of tongues.
They know how to sell a victorious ending for anything. 
They know youth hurts: they capitalize on their pain.
They know youth says, “I want;” they promise they will. 
They know youth must; their greed brays “onward, onward.”

Youth’s desire for a bigger life makes them prey; 
The robber barons of war feed on their salt and blood.

Men of greed swindle, bully or blackmail by
Preaching the true Hero’s Journey is war with The Other. 
There has to be an Other. Any Other will do. 

You want to be the hero of your own story so you listen.
Their refined pitch has clever, taunting words. 
Your expectant eyes can’t foresee the future;
 your heart quickens to their beat.

Your death is their victory. 

While sitting on a plane, bored, I started tearing up the inflight magazine to make poems. It was so much fun I've continued. I do short poems on my 3"x5" daily journal cards, as above. Here are a few more:

When I am too scared to do something and I find a friend who has similar feelings, I sometimes ask if they would like to connect so we can journey together. If they say, "Yes," then we do three things:
We each set a goal, and put dates for when we want to reach it.
I set up a blog.
We begin writing what happens to us as we move toward our goal.

It is that simple. And that hard.
Fears arise immediately. "Oh yeah, I know you," I think, as my critic begins yammering away on my shoulder.

Then what? A bit of self-sabotage ("Oh sure I'll organize the annual blahdeblah show, and do all the invitations, and the food and set up the tables and..")

Fortunately I wake up in time to stop myself and re-commit to what I have promised my friend. I won't martyr myself with organizing, I have work to do. And I am going to track it.

In the blog we record our thoughts, setbacks, and triumphs. Weeks go by and we are doing what we said we would, with lots of sidetracking and hesitation, feints and follies. But the blog keeps reminding us that we set a goal, and someone else cares if we get there. I was reminded of this the other day when I saw three women walking in the park, their arms swinging and their animated conversation carrying across a wide swath of lawn. It is so much easier for me to take walks if I have promised a friend I'll go with them. What is true of walking is true of art projects: it is easier to venture forth with a friend.

Making a promise means being accountable, and supportive. The premise of the blog is to share what gets in the way of working. There is no shame in writing that I didn't sign up for a life drawing class as I thought I would, or I won't make my April 10 deadline, or I took a nap instead of working. My goal is to stay in the game and anything that keeps me there furthers my cause. The point is as much to track and share my progress, and learn how I work, as it is to get to my specific goal. It is to have compassion for myself as I slip and slide toward home base, and extend that to others.

Working is messy. I almost never set a goal and move toward it without revisions, setbacks, major overhauls, losing courage, abandoning ship, having late night panic attacks, or being crippled by doubts and self criticism. It helps so much to write about them to a loving friend. Often that is all that I need to get back in the game, but it never hurts to read my friend's comments of concern and support, even if they comes weeks after my troubles. Over time I've been able to incorporate some of the love I feel, and I can speak to myself in the language of a caring friend: "You're doing great Jill. Keep on going."

And when I feel scared? I try to make it virtue. If I'm not scaring myself I'm not challenging myself. I like the territory where what-I-know meets what-is-too-hard. Borderlands have the richest life: the places where forest meets meadow, or salt-water meets fresh water, are teeming with creative diversity. This is the sweet spot of growth. But it can also be a see-saw of confidence and fear.  Reading old blog posts reminds me that I struggled before and made it through; often a particularly desperate time is followed by a huge outpouring of work.

There are other benefits to sharing my process. Acknowledging vulnerabilities deepens friendship. When I confess my doubts, stumbles, backtracking and failures my friends seem pleased to tell me what I've been doing right, and point out how I'm forging ahead. Our friends often see us in a brighter light than we see ourselves. My friend Wendy isn't carrying around the little critic that sits on my shoulder: she is much kinder. She looks at what I'm doing and reflects back to me how much I've done, or grown, or how brave I am. I do the same for her, because I can see the bigger picture of how she is growing into herself and into her power. Two scared people can give each other courage, egg each other on, and make it to their goals.

Blogging scares me. When I grew up there was only one kind of mail, the kind carried by a letter carrier. I would write a letter to my grandmother across the country, she would read it, she would write me back months later. Mail wasn't instant, like a phone call, and it usually wasn't seen by anyone except the addressee. The whole idea of publishing something many people can see, across the globe, feels uncontrolled. Strange. Scary. I'm out of my depth.

And yet, there is an irresistible tug to create something that will have a larger audience than one person. And to get feedback from people who have different points of view. There is the possibility of new connections: what would it be like to find friends who want to share a conversation online? These thoughts have been nudging me to begin blogging.

As an artist and a teacher I have developed numerous ways to inspire myself and my students. I even began a book about how to keep going as an artists called, "101 Ways to Make Art."  The book records ways I hit snags but kept going, because art is all about that. To be an artist you have to keep on keepin' on. In the book "Art and Fear" the authors David Bayles and Ted Orland say, "Quitting is fundamentally different from stopping. The latter happens all the time. Quitting happens once. Quitting means not starting again - and art is all about starting again."

I knew this, but one time it failed me for so long that I wondered if I would ever work again. My disinterest and fundamental malaise was so deep, and my despair so total, that I stopped working for longer than a normal fallow period. None of my carefully crafted ideas worked.

In my search for a way out of the doldrums I read Barbara Sher's book "Wishcraft" and one phrase struck me: "Stay beneath the radar of your resistance." Making something big could make it impossible - setting up complex structures and proscribing routines could, like many abandoned New Year's resolutions, wake up the dragon of resistance. The way to avoid this was to do the smallest possible thing I could in the direction I wanted to go. It meant finding what seemed inconsequential enough that my resistance stayed asleep.

I decided I would do something to one index card a day. When we lived in the mountains we sometimes kept a drip going to keep our water lines from freezing: this was like that - a constant tiny bit that kept the stream of creation going, so small that my resistance wouldn't notice. I cut up watercolor paper into 3" x 5" index cards and began, staying as simple as possible: a brush stroke, a word, gluing on a stamp or wine label.

Pretty soon I was lying in bed in the morning thinking about what I would put on the card. Then I decided this was a journal, and I should give it to my kids, and since I have 3 kids I should make 3 cards a day. The size was small enough so I always had them with me: in my purse, my backpack, my pockets. I drew while standing in line at the bank, at bus stops, in airplanes. I began to collect ephemera from daily life and glue it on the cards. The drip became a flow.

What I discovered is that even the smallest amount of involvement can increase more readily than something that has been abandoned. When you keep alive a "chispas," a spark, you can always blow it into flame. But if you abandon your hearth entirely it takes a great act of will to get a fire going. If you like the water metaphor better, keeping the dripdripdrip going meant I could turn on the faucet anytime. If I had let the pipes freeze, it would take a huge amount of effort to get water flowing again. 

I now have thousands of these cards. They are a testing ground for new ideas, a place to record thoughts, a palette of new processes, a scrapbook of ephemera, and a record of my life. I have shown pieces to prospective clients, given lectures with them as the primary visual, and amazed students with the simplicity of my traveling art card set-up. I have a plan to connect them into a huge wall of cards - on one side they will form a painting (like a photo mosaic): the other side will be random. And though I have not done them every day, in ten years I haven't had a period when I couldn't do anything: I always have the cards.