Ways that I Think About My Environment

So, it's either today or tomorrow that is "Blog Action Day."

This reminds me of something I've been meaning to write about. Over the weekend, we went to an art festival, where my mother struck up a conversation with an artist who had rendered places traveled in mixed media paintings.

She talked about the process by which she took photographs of places she'd been (on her international travels), transformed them into black and white images, attached them to some kind of masonry, and then painted and waxed the surrounding stone with "lots and lots of layers of paint and wax." Curious, I asked what the material was that covered the lower half of one of her pieces. In a practiced, sing song voice, she told us that she'd used grass from her own yard, covered with wax, "and lots and lots of layers of paint."

It was at that moment that I uttered a mental scream of anguish. "Grass from your own yard?"

If this was not the quintessential metaphor for a bourgeosie upper middle class woman turned artist, I don't know what it is. Her essentialized images of the "the Orient" and French city scapes, surrounded by globs and globs of pretty paint and "grounded" by clippings from her lawn. Of course, there were no actual people represented in her artwork--really, I can see how that might be aesthetically problematic.

My only question is whether she gathered the clippings herself, with a pair of scissors, or whether she had to leave specific instructions for her under-the-table gardner.

Blech.

Yes, it's one of those days. I wish Forest Gump was here so I could clasp his hands, kneel in a corn field, my eyes squeezed shut as I utter those famous words: "Dear God, make me a bird. So I could fly away. Far far away from here. Dear God, make me a bird. So I could fly away. Far Far away from here."

And haven't we all felt like that? Yes, yes we have. I'm not the first to cite this idea in a blog and I'm sure I won't be the last.

And now, to the other end of the pendulum. Things really aren't that bad. It's a fall day in October, cold enough here in the South so that the leaves have a little color. Cold enough that my toes and fingers are a little tingly. From a mile or two away, sounds from the highway drift by. The cardinal living in the tree behind our townhouse looks at me with his shiny black eye, admonishing me to get back to work. And if that woman wanted to do her part to support sustainable environments by using grass clippings from her yard--more power to her. Right? If I got to know her, I'd probably find she's a very nice person who is, at this very moment, sitting on real patio furniture on her deck, instead of a teensy yellow folding chair that she bought for her daughter at Big Lots.

Finally! The truth comes out. The source of my hateration is that age old sin--jealousy.

(Sigh). Damn it.