– attributed (incorrectly) to Walt Whitman

This is the press of a bashful hand, this the float and odor of hair,
This the touch of my lips to yours, this the murmur of yearning,
This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face,
This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again.

– Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”

Last night I had a dream I was kissing Jason Sudeikis. No, not like that.

It was a stage kiss — or rather, a stage make-out session — on the set of Ted Lasso, and I’d been recruited to stand in temporarily for Ted’s romantic interest while the crew marked out camera angles and lighting cues. Okay, go ahead! some disembodied voice would call out, and Jason Sudeikis and I would start smushing mouths, sometimes accidentally bumping teeth as we tilted our heads this way or that in response to further off-camera instructions. Meanwhile, the unseen crew hovered around us, making equipment adjustments. Sometimes there’d be necking, and I could see the line where Jason’s make-up shaded away to exposed skin, and taste the mildly tangy salt of his sweat. Then some voice would call out, Okay, stop, back to one! and the whole thing would start over again. Lip-smushing, teeth-bumping, make-up and sweat. There was nothing salacious or sexual about it.

Why share this glimpse into my awkward psyche? Yeah, I don’t know. My apologies to Jason Sudeikis. I’m sure you’re a wonderful person who deserves a much more flattering thirst-trap. It’s not you, it’s me. I’m ace. This is the closest I get to a sex dream.

If you ever wondered what it’s like to be asexual in a culture alternately obsessed with and ashamed of sex, this dream might give you some idea. The self-consciousness of performance, the noisy aura of social commentary and expectation like a constant hum overlaying the visceral physicality of other people’s bodies and your own.

And the way performative sexual intimacy can gradually give way to something more comfortable, more tender, given enough time and gentle consideration. Like how in the dream, after a while, the endless repetitions drained the stage kissing of its initial clumsy cringe. And what was left was our professionalism, like an open space, the consensual kindness that people show each other when they’re just trying to get through the day together without doing too much harm… How, eventually, even the bumping teeth and the taste of sweat stopped feeling like an imposition and became something special, almost sweet, intimate without being erotic — a way of knowing another person that the cameras couldn’t capture, something just between us.

Writing and talk do not prove me,
I carry the plenum of proof and everything else in my face,
With the hush of my lips I wholly confound the skeptic.

– Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”

When I was younger, my sexuality was a kind of performative pretense, something I thought people did as an excuse to get closer to each other. Sure, people talked a big game about sexual attraction, but honestly… I thought they were exaggerating, or maybe too immature to realize what they really wanted was something else. Who could seriously enjoy smushing mouths together? Who could settle for bumping genitals and come away feeling satisfied?

Of course, I still wanted to be beautiful and interesting — I wanted people to want to spend time with me, to be curious about me. I wanted to feel special, to be known and accepted for my whole self, living and moving in this odd animal body. And I wanted others to trust me to accept the intimacy of their own animal bodies, too, as something special and worthy of love.

So yeah, I wanted to be sexy. But “sexy” was as much an obstacle as an invitation. Not a blind force I allowed myself to give in to, but something I had to choose, deliberately. Something I had to cultivate through the early, awkward stages until it grew into something deeper, the sweet familiarity of earned intimacy.

My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,
Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me,
I crowd your sleekest and best by simply looking toward you.

– Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”

That’s what my marriage is like. In case you wanted to ask (without sounding impolite), Why the hell would an asexual ever get married? That sweet familiarity, the kind of trust that is transformative.

Asexuality complicates notions of consent. Being ace doesn’t necessarily mean you’re repulsed by sex or that you might not even enjoy it (under the right circumstances), but it does usually mean you’re not enthusiastically seeking it out from others. Mostly, I just don’t care that much about sex, it’s not an important aspect of my self-identity, there are so many other things I’m more interested in and would rather be doing. But I can enjoy how my husband enjoys sex. My love for him is transformative in this way, the way love is often transformative: through my love for another person, I am brought into sympathy with their way of seeing and being in the world. Through loving them, I am better able to love what they love. And the world becomes a bigger, wilder, more beautiful place.

So our marriage is a relationship of gently cultivated trust, the earned intimacy of embracing each other’s whole selves. I might not be a sexual person, but I am deeply romantic — and that’s what our marriage is: romantic. Full of curiosity and creativity, the excitement of discovery, the fun of spending time with each other and working to build an amazing life together. Sometimes people say “marriage is work” like that’s a burden, but when you’re with the right person, even the ordinary, repetitive work of showing up, teeth and make-up and sweat and all, can become a source of tender joy.

I think that’s why I love the television show Ted Lasso. It’s a deeply romantic show, and that romance spills out into the many friendships and other non-sexual relationships it portrays on screen, including the lovely friendship between Ted and Rebecca (and Ted and Roy, and Ted and Coach Beard, etc. etc. etc.). All these characters who are just absolutely in love with each other. For someone who is asexual — whose relationships have never been defined by, nor conscripted by, sexual attraction — it feels profoundly affirming to see romance portrayed as an aspect of friendship. To see intimacy that is not inherently sexual or sexualized, but is nevertheless deeply meaningful and transformative.

Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

– Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”

But it also makes me realize how heartbreakingly lonely I’ve been, especially these last two years as we all stumble our way through this pandemic. Seems like every other week there’s another think-piece in the paper about the mental health crisis in this country, the loneliness epidemic that nobody seems to know how to solve. I don’t know how to solve it, either. They say your 30s are “the decade where friendship goes to die“… and that was even before this slow slide into unending crisis.

If 2020 was the year that the patterns of our systemic neglect for one another were etched with breathless burning fever and made blazingly clear, at least it brought a sense of relief as well — we were no longer alone in our loneliness. But 2021 felt much harder to me, even aside from the exhaustion and uncertainty. I watched as family and friends slowly climbed their way back up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: returned to work and school, ventured back into stores, hair salons, movie theaters, travel, church gatherings, community volunteering, vacation, family holiday celebrations… With each new hesitant step, we assessed the risks we were willing to take and repeated the lessons we’d learned: hold onto what really matters, prioritize the people you love. But by the end of the year, it was also clear: for all my patience and quiet support, nobody had really missed me. Perhaps it would be a long time yet before I was worth the risk…

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

– Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”

What do we do when there are no more safe, open spaces where we might slowly fall in love with the imperfect in each other? The cultural forces that isolate us and drive us apart seem to be so huge and relentless, and the only narrative our society ever seems to offer about what counterforce could possibly conquer them is: overpowering love. Protagonists in television and movies routinely throw their whole lives into disarray when they fall in love — love is the spark, the catalyst, the call to adventure, the one thing worth the risk of opening your heart and changing your life.

But what if… What if love isn’t a blind force you give in to, it’s something you have to choose? What happens to a society that only takes love seriously when it has the overwhelming power of sexual attraction, the sudden revelatory surprise of the meet-cute? I mean, when was the last time — be honest — you fell in love with someone you didn’t want to fuck? And what did you do about it? Anything? (Was there even anything you could do that wouldn’t be misunderstood or misconstrued?)

There’s an approach to dream analysis that suggests reading every character in your dream as an aspect of yourself. So if you’re wondering, Why the hell would a happily married, supposedly asexual woman dream about making out with a celebrity? …that’s the best answer I can offer. Tonight, the part of Awkward Optimistic Animal Self will be played by Jason Sudeikis. And I’ll be the stand-in for Love Interest, I guess, doing my best to play the part until true love comes along…

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

– Walt Whitman, from “Song of Myself”

Every year, my family gathers to celebrate the winter solstice, acknowledging the darkest, longest night of the year and celebrating the return of the sun and the lengthening days ahead. During hard times — times of scarcity and anxiety and fear — our instincts as humans are to come together, to hunker down around a fire and tell each other stories and sing songs and share food — all the things we couldn’t do last year and have chosen (out of an abundance of caution) to postpone again this year. Instead, my husband and I will sit awkwardly in front of a computer screen, trying our best to lead a meaningful ritual over Zoom.

Usually in our society, we tend to equate “hard times” with “dark times,” and we seek out light and warmth to help us find comfort and healing — that’s why we put up Christmas lights and shiny decorations, and light candles and yule logs, and sing carols during the darkest, coldest time of the year.

But these past two years, so many of our usual coping mechanisms haven’t been available to us or no longer work. One thing these times have taught us is that when light and warmth are out of balance, taken to an extreme, they themselves can become the source of our struggles and suffering. We’ve lived through wildfires and droughts and extreme heat because of global warming. We’ve coped with a virus sweeping the entire planet that causes a burning fever as one of its main symptoms, and its very name — corona — was chosen because the spikes that protrude from its center resemble the rays of the sun.

So where do we seek healing and renewal when the light and warmth we usually turn to are the very things that are harming us — when gathering together for the holidays and singing songs and sharing food might actually make us sick? Luckily, the Druidic tradition reminds us that health and healing — like justice — is really about seeking out right relationship, finding a shifting balance among the elements that allows us to adapt and respond in diverse ways to restore relationships when they’ve been disrupted.

In the Druidic tradition, darkness is not automatically equated with “bad” or “evil,” and light is not inherently “good.” Both light and dark are needed and bring with them their own unique blessings, as well as dangers, and so we’re always seeking a dynamic balance that ebbs and flows, waxes and wanes with the seasons. It is not only the elements of fire and air that can cleanse and heal. When these are out of balance, we can turn to the heavier, cooler, “darker” elements of water and earth.

Contemplating these themes, I find myself turning again to the Irish goddess Boann, the guardian and embodiment of the River Boyne, one of the three sacred rivers in Ireland.

Boann has a really interesting story about how she became a river goddess. It’s the kind of story that’s easy to interpret in a negative way, but actually provides a great deal of guidance if we’re willing to think more deeply about the symbolism of water and earth.

Here’s how the story goes:

Once there was a secret well known as the Well of Wisdom, and out of this well arose obscure knowledge and occult mysteries of such great power, it was said that no one could peer into its depths without both his eyes bursting in his skull. No one dared to approach this hidden place, except the king and his cup-bearers. But the King’s young wife, the bright maiden Boann, was intensely curious, and so one day she came to the well — not to drink, but to look upon its shimmering waters to see what she could see.

Boann circled the well three times, as only a fool would do. For it was said that one could move neither left nor right around the sacred spot without coming away changed. Still, her eyes followed the dappled light as it fell through the surrounding hazel trees and sparkled on the surface of the water, and with every step that she took, she seemed to arrive some place new. Every angle brought a different half-glimpsed mystery into view. She turned these visions over in her mind, heedless of the rising waters.

Until all at once, three waves rose up against the careless and curious Boann: the first crashed down mangling her foot; the second burst open her full, bright eye; and the third wave left her with one hand maimed. Half-blind, half-lamed, half stripped of strength, the maiden fled in fear and shame. She wandered wild across the land, and yet wherever she went the bright rapid waters of the sacred Well of Wisdom pursued her. Until, finally, she had run as far as she could and the waters chased her all the way to the sea, where at last they overcame her. There, the waters rose and filled her and drowned her.

This is the story of how the River Boyne was formed, and how Boann became a goddess. In most of her other stories, she appears as a mother figure — she gives birth to the god of youth, beauty and love, Aengus Og, and she’s honored as a spiritual mother and leader by the other gods of her tribe. Her name, which means “white cow,” associates her with the abundance and sustenance of the earth, and some suggest that the starry river of the Milky Way is a celestial reflection of her earthly river, the River Boyne, that brings nourishing waters to the land.

So it’s interesting that in this one story she appears as a naive young woman, mortal and susceptible to very human flaws. You could certainly interpret the story as being about how she was punished for her curiosity and arrogance, with the sacred waters first mangling her body and ultimately killing her. But why does a story about one of the most sacred rivers in Ireland, and the transformation of a young woman into a goddess, have such a brutal ending? Our own curiosity and confusion provokes us to look more closely… and we find our first clue in one of the earliest lines of the poem where this tale is told:

One day came fair Boann
to the well, though she was not thirsty,
that she might perceive its power.

Though she was not thirsty. Boann goes to the well, not to drink, but to gaze into its depths. She wants to look into the well to see what she can see.

To the ancient Celts, wells often served as portals of connection to the Otherworld, the world of the gods and the ancestors. Drinking from a sacred well could bring healing and wisdom. But Boann did not want to drink — she wanted to look. This doesn’t just show us how curious she was, but it tells us something very important about her attitude towards the knowledge that she sought, and what kind of knowledge she expected to gain.

All over the world, in mythology and folklore and even in our ordinary ways of speaking in our everyday lives, we use a number of different metaphors for knowledge. One common metaphor is “Knowing Is Seeing”. When I say, “We need to take a closer look at this story,” or I ask you, “Now do you see what I mean?” I’m using sight (and light) as a metaphor for understanding. When we get a new idea, we might say it dawned on us, giving us new insights that have opened our eyes.

Do you follow me? That brings us to the second very common metaphor for knowledge: “Learning Is Going On A Journey.” If I’m teaching you something that’s difficult to understand, I might walk you through it step by step so that you don’t get lost as we explore the topic together. As we learn, we might find ourselves expanding our horizons — in fact, we might even stumble onto a whole new way of seeing things — and so we see how these metaphors are related: going on a journey brings new parts of the landscape into view, and with that new view comes further knowledge.

It can be difficult to see how these metaphors help us interpret Boann’s story. But before we move on, there’s one more metaphor we need to consider: “Understanding Is Grasping.” Get it? When we talk about trying to get a handle on a difficult concept, we’re using this metaphor to describe knowledge as a physical object that we can hold in our hands, control and manipulate. The word comprehend itself originally came from Latin, meaning “to grab hold of something, to seize it.” When we analyze something, we say we pick it apart or dissect it — we can then use the new pieces of information we’ve gained to build an argument to support a new theory. Of course, if something is too difficult for us to grasp, we might say it’s gone right over our heads — or maybe it’s just that the information is so new and controversial that it’s still up in the air and hasn’t been settled by the experts yet. Again, notice how this metaphor of grasping relates back to the metaphor of sight — we can turn an idea over in our minds in order to look at it from different angles and maybe get a better perspective.

It is no coincidence that when Boann approaches the sacred Well of Knowledge not to drink but in order to “see its power” — the waters rise up in response and leave her wounded in three very specific ways: they burst open one of her eyes, mangle one of her feet, and maim one of her hands. In other words, the waters from the sacred well challenge and disrupt her usual ways of knowing: she’s unable to see the knowledge that the well offers, she cannot follow where it leads, she cannot grasp the wisdom that flows from it. At least, not completely. There is also a tradition among the ancient Celts that a person seeking knowledge of the Otherworld assumes a special ritual stance: standing on one leg, one hand bound behind their back, and one eye closed — in this way, blind and immobilized in this world, they are able to see, move and reach deeper into the Otherworld beyond.

But the sacred Well of Wisdom is not finished with young Boann yet: she flees from it and the waters pursue her, eventually overwhelming her completely. And that brings us to the final metaphor for knowledge, one that is unlike all the others: “Learning Is Consuming.” In this metaphor, knowledge is something taken into our bodies like food or drink. We might say someone has given us food for thought and that we need to chew on it for a while to fully digest its meaning. (While other ideas we might find difficult to swallow, even if someone tries to sugar-coat them or shove them down our throat.)

In this metaphor, we take wisdom into our own bodies and it transforms us from within, becoming a very part of ourselves. We have a thirst for knowledge that can’t be quenched until we’ve completely immersed ourselves in the topic. In this metaphor, knowledge surrounds us completely and fills us to the brim, but it’s not knowledge we can see — unlike the other metaphors for knowledge, this one rarely combines with “Knowing Is Seeing,” but instead provides an alternative, another kind of bone-deep wisdom.

Boann starts out at the beginning of this story as a young woman in search of a very particular kind of knowledge — but the Well of Wisdom makes an unexpected demand of her. In order to fully embrace her divinity, she must relinquish some control over her old ways of knowing and seeing the world, and she must be willing to accept this other, deeper and more mysterious kind of wisdom. When she does, she herself is transformed into a deity, but she also transforms the landscape around her and her relationship with it.

I find myself thinking a lot about this story of Boann, and how it relates to the difficulties we’ve faced as a society recently. On the one hand, the hard work and dedication of experts and scientists have brought us a great deal of knowledge that has helped us get a handle on the virus and hopefully find a way out of this pandemic — a light at the end of the tunnel. On the other hand, there are many people who are distrustful of these experts, suspicious of what they can’t understand — the virus is invisible and air-borne, it’s up in the air, we cannot hold it in our hands, control it or outrun it. How are we to deal with this strange and dangerous thing? Our best hope is a vaccine that contains a small part of the very thing we’re afraid of — a liquid that we must take into our very bodies, that must do its work in the darkness within us in order to transform us, to teach us and to heal us.

So I think of Boann not just as a protective mother figure, but also as that young woman who was driven by her curiosity and courage to seek out this wisdom and — most importantly — allowed it to transform her. I think of her as a role model and a guide who can offer us hope for the coming year. Her story reminds us that there are many ways to seek knowledge, and we need to remain open to them all if we are to become the best, most holy versions of ourselves. And it is through this relationship with the Waters of Wisdom that we find ourselves not only transformed from within but also connected to others, to the communities and landscapes in which we live.

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Does it mean that the love itself is rock-like: round? heavy? flecked with mica? Or that you love someone the way you love a rock? Or perhaps it means to love the way a rock would love…

In any case, I love rocks like a rock. I love the words and feelings they evoke: hard, rough, worn — words that, when applied to so many other things in life, seem so difficult and undesirable. Stone somehow redeems such words, joining them with others: solid, smooth, tumbled, settled, still and even, sometimes and unexpectedly, soft…

This year has been a rocky year, in many ways. Only looking back do I realize I’ve been painting rocks in one way or another since April. Starting with my archeology-inspired “100 Days of Ruin” watercolor-and-ink series as part of the #100DayProject. And then for a time during the summer, painting on rocks themselves, etching line-and-ring designs in inks of black and glittering gold, and then hiding the painted stones among the ferns and brambles in local parks to be found by dog-walkers and curious kiddies.

When it came time to decide on a theme to explore for the annual 6x6NW Art Show, it was perhaps inevitable that I settle on stone.

Our weekend hikes in Deception Pass State Park this summer reminded me just how glorious pebbled beaches can be. It’s hard for me to visit North Beach without stooping every few feet to marvel at the stunning colors and textures of stone, to wonder at the strange geological forces that could have tossed all those mossy greens and freckled pinks and glowing yellows and muted blues together in a jumble, like some real-life pointillist scene. More than once, I’ve returned home with a backpack that is two- or three- (or ten-) stone heavier than when I left.

I really should know better. Not only because it’s against the law (and ecologically harmful) to remove stones from a protected park area. But also because, no matter how breathtaking they might be on the beach — each pebble glistening in the sun, wet with seawater, wreathed with foam — once you get them home, they always seem to fade to the same dull gray shade.

But I’m an artist now (apparently!) — and what is art even for, if not to capture that fleeting vision of beauty that is so often otherwise elusive? And if my work can celebrate the beauty of stone while also encouraging people to take home a painting (or a picture) instead of a pebble, so much the better!

I even enlisted the help of the elements themselves. Painting with watercolor is not always about controlling every brush stroke with precision; sometimes it’s much more like a cooperative dance with the spontaneous nature of a medium that has a mind of its own. And so, on one trip to Deception Pass, I brought with me two small jars to fill — one with sand, one with sea water. Mingling each of these with my paints during particular stages of the process produced amazing textures evocative of the rocks themselves, as the pigments pushed and pulled against salt and surface tension in unpredictable ways. The resulting paintings are a meeting-of-the-minds, a conversation with sea and stone in a language that we share, one of attention and patience, ebb and flow.

So far in this series, I’ve painted 190 stones this way. (For those who enjoy little factoids: that’s an average of 23-24 pebbles per painting, or 4 pebbles per square inch!)

The first eight pieces in my “Sea & Stone” series will be available for viewing and purchase as part of this year’s 6x6NW Art Show starting Friday, October 2nd. (You can learn more about this annual community exhibition and fundraiser here). Each painting is 6″ x 6″ square — a good, solid, well-grounded format! — and comes mounted on stiff backing board with removable drafting tape. They can be framed as-is or with an acid-free mat, depending on preference. Although I use professional, archival-quality materials for my paintings, watercolor is by nature somewhat more delicate than other mediums; to ensure these pieces last a lifetime, I highly recommend framing behind UV-protective glass for display.

There will most certainly be more paintings to come in this series, as I continue to explore Sea & Stone in different sizes, formats and stylistic approaches. If you want to follow along with me as I continue my like-minded (hard-headed?) conversation with rocks, please follow me on Instagram @alisonleighlilly. For future news about where you can view my art in-person and online — plus updates and coupons for my Etsy shop, where you can purchase prints, cards and original paintings — please sign up for my newsletter below. Thank you for your continuing support!

Celebrate small at Gallery North this month!

I’m so excited to announce that six of my paintings were chosen to be featured in this year’s Small Works Art Show at Gallery North in Edmonds! They’ll be on display all this month, March 1-30, alongside the work of other talented artists working small in every medium, from watercolor to oil, acrylic, pastel and more!

As a watercolor artist, I love working small — it’s an opportunity to slow down and lean in, to dwell in the intimate details of late winter and early spring. I’ve always been fascinated by texture and pattern, the slick surface of wet stone, the tangle of wildflowers flecked with pollen. Giving myself permission to work small also means taking a break from the noise and flash that dominate our media-soaked lives these days. To spend time enjoying the small, simple moments of beauty that I find all around me when I remember to pause and pay attention.

And there’s another benefit to working small — it’s more affordable! Not just for me as an artist, but for you, the art lover, as well! The Small Works Show is a chance to own a work of original art without having to break the bank. Plus, you’re supporting local artists at the same time! What’s not to love?

So make sure to stop by Gallery North this month and celebrate small!

Meet The Artists!

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15% OFF Select Prints This Month!

I’ve added a bunch of new fine art prints to my Etsy store, featuring work from last year’s 6X6NW Art Show! Didn’t have a chance to snag an original? Now you can get a gorgeous fine art print for just a few dollars! And to celebrate the beauty of working small, these 5×5 inch prints will be 15% OFF for the entire month of March! I mean, seriously, what are you waiting for?

More From Me!

I’ve been on the trail of a particularly wily band of colors recently. You might have spotted them in some of your favorite fairytales — tagged and tracked as Z65.1 in the Folk Motif Index: “red as blood, white as snow, black as a raven” (or sometimes a crow).

I recently encountered these three colors while researching the old Irish tale of Deirdre of the Sorrows, possibly the most famous love story in Ireland. Certainly the most tragic. An excellent story to tell around Valentine’s Day, in any case. The story tells of the beautiful young maiden Deirdre, who is cloistered away to be raised exclusively by women, denied the company of any man save the King, her intended future husband. One winter morning, her elderly caretaker is slaughtering a calf when its blood spills out across the snow and a raven swoops down to drink. Upon seeing the grotesque scene, Deirdre says that she “could love a man of these three colors” — red, white and black.

It’s a disturbing vision — one that sets off a series of events that leads first to love, then betrayal and ultimately death. But the question I had was: why these three colors?

These colors appear everywhere. Often in other tales of beauty and longed-for love: Snow White is maybe the most familiar example, but there are also several stories of men whose dreams of red-white-and-black beauty leave them lovesick, and tales of young women who long to be mothers, wishing for a baby of these three colors. In Irish folklore, red and white are particularly associated with the Otherworld — white deer with red ears turn out to be fairy-women; red-eared, white cows and pigs are gifts or stolen goods from the Fairy Realm.

There is a power in these three colors — something that compels us, pulls us in, changes the way we see the world. Some scholars speculate that their impact comes from the visceral symbolism of these colors and their bodily associations: red is the color of our life-blood; white, the color of bone and the brightness of pure light; black is rot, decay and the darkness of death.

The problem with this theory is that this grouping of three colors appears in almost all cultures throughout history and all over the world, but they do not always carry these same associations. In some cultures, the red of this tricolor group is not the pure, bright color of blood, but the brownish-red of tree bark or the orange-red of ripe fruit. White may refer to the color of eggs, rice or curdled milk. Black isn’t necessarily the color of death and burial in lands where the soil is red with clay. Instead, it may be the color of a cloudless sky above the wine-dark sea.

It’s almost as if these colors have a force of their own. They bend our stories and traditions to their own peculiar will, force themselves in where we least expect them. In both Africa and South America, traditional folktales tell of idealized pale-skinned beauties despite the lack of pale-skinned people; in the folklore of Northern Europe, Snow White and her idolized ilk have striking black hair despite fair hair being preferred in most other contexts. It’s as if these three colors refuse to be parted from one another. The red and white of candy canes and Santa Claus’s jolly, fur-lined suit demands to be balanced out by the black boots, the black fireplace soot, the black coal, and Black Friday. Our folk etymologies scramble to compensate: we say we call it Black Friday because it’s when most stores sell enough merchandise to make it “out of the red, back into the black” on the clean white pages of the ledger book — but this isn’t true. People started calling it Black Friday decades before this explanation began to circulate (not to mention, most businesses can’t afford to operate at a loss for eleven months of the year).

It’s starting to happen with Valentine’s Day, too. In the United States, red and white abound in flower shops and grocery stores this time of year, along with the broad continuum of pinks in between. But in Japan and other Asian countries, February 14th is a day especially for women to give “true love” chocolates to their boyfriends and husbands, and “courtesy” chocolates to male friends and co-workers. Starting in the 1970s, a Japanese confectionary company decided to create an “answer day” to Valentine’s Day exactly one month later, on March 14th, and began marketing their marshmallow treats to men to give as reciprocal gifts to their wives and girlfriends in return for the chocolates they’d received the month before. They declared this day “Marshmallow Day,” and its popularity took off. Soon, men were giving not just marshmallows, but also white chocolate and gifts decorated with white wrapping paper. A “rule-of-three” (referred to as sanbai gaeshi, meaning “triple the return”) encouraged men to give gifts worth three times what they had received. Today, people who celebrate this holiday throughout Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and many other Asian countries call it simply, “White Day.”

The red of the rose. The dark of chocolate. The white of marshmallow. Here they are again, the same three colors, that persistent primal bond. Even when we know the origins of the three colors and their associations, their recent history as a marketing strategy — they have a kind of gravity all their own, a weight that lends them an archetypal power.

What I want to know is: why? In cognitive linguistics, we say that word-meanings and conceptual metaphors are “motivated” — that is, they aren’t predictable according to a set of predetermined rules, but there are tendencies and trajectories that can help us explain why certain conceptual metaphors appear and how they evolve. I’m fascinated by what these three colors — red, white and black — might be able to tell us about the way we see the world. And so I return to my research and Deirdre of the Sorrows. Happy Valentine’s Day…?

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Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg found himself in hot water after a rather banal tweet calling for a president “shaped by the American Heartland rather than […] ineffective Washington politics.” Both he and Klobuchar have invoked this folksy phrase to describe their midwestern roots, but this time, the Twitter-verse wasn’t having any of it. Replies and retweets poured in calling out the exclusionary implications of the common phrase. Here are just a sample:

Respectfully, where is the American Heartland located exactly in your mind as you write this tweet? Does it include Compton and other places like it? Because us folks from those places would like a president shaped by our vision too. Serious question. Would love an answer.

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) January 30, 2020

Dear @PeteButtigieg: Define “American Heartland.” Thanks, salamat, An undocumented gay Filipino who lives in the American Heartland of Bay Area, California

— Jose Antonio Vargas (@joseiswriting) January 29, 2020

Heartland is code. And I’m over it. It erases the legitimacy of the experiences and reality of Black mid-Westerners and cloaks white mid-Western communities in a gauzy innocence and authenticity.

— Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sifill_LDF) January 30, 2020

Cracking The Metaphor Code

These responses rightly point out that the phrase “American Heartland” is “code for white.” But from the perspective of someone studying conceptual metaphor and its role in meaning-making, this only leads to further questions. Questions like: why? and how do we know?

How do metaphors prompt for meaning? How do we unpack them? What clues us in to the fact that a phrase might contain more than meets the eye? What is it about the words “American Heartland” that signals its exclusionary nature to someone encountering it for the first time?

Many Americans might not even recognize “American Heartland” as a metaphor. Isn’t it just a colorful nickname, they might object, denoting a particular geographic location and the people who live there? Turns out, the phrase has been a metaphor from the beginning. In his article, Zimmer explains:

The British geographer Halford Mackinder used “The Heartland” to refer to the interior of the interlocking continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, a landmass he called “the World-Island.” Eastern Europe held the key to control of the “Heartland” and in turn the “World-Island,” Mackinder argued in his 1919 book, Democratic Ideals and Reality. As the European powers clashed in World War II, American commentators seized on Mackinder’s model, looking inward to find the equivalent North American “Heartland.”

Dating back only to the mid-20th century, the phrase “American Heartland” was initially an analogy between two landmasses, drawing attention to their roles in the geopolitical order. In this analogy, the “heartland” stood in metonymic relationship with the rest of the continent — a place that was not only of strategic importance, but also a part that could stand in to represent the whole (such as in the saying, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” where “pen” stands for the written word or communication in general and “sword” stands for brute force or violence). Buttigieg makes similar use of metonymy in his tweet, when he refers to “Washington politics.” Here, “Washington” is a metonym for the federal government and its influence, which obviously extends far beyond the city limits of Washington D.C.

As a metaphor, the phrase “American Heartland” was used from the beginning to evoke a complex ambivalence about the role of the midwest in American culture and politics. One writer who helped to popularize the term, Bernard De Voto, used it somewhat unflatteringly, fretting that the protected “Heartland” of America was less engaged in international affairs as those living on the coasts, writing in a 1948 column: “it is so deep in distance and feels so secure that an instinctive disbelief is central in its consciousness.” However, he also praised the “Heartland” for its “potential for comfort, kindliness, fellowship, human sympathy, and hope.”

These positive values of friendliness and comfort are exactly what Buttigieg meant to evoke when he appealed to the “American Heartland,” and it’s a connotation many immediately recognize, while the ambivalence De Voto expressed about the tendency towards ignorance and isolationism is often forgotten by all but history buffs and the woke. Why should this be the case? Understanding the role of embodiment in conceptual metaphors helps to explain.

The Heart Of The Matter: Matters Of The Heart

In order to make sense of this phrase and its changing meaning throughout history, it helps to look at how the word “heart” commonly functions in metaphor. There are several overlapping, interrelated meanings usually evoked by “heart” metaphors, which differ in slight but significant ways.

The first of these is The Heart As The Center. This location-based metaphor rests on the fact that the physical heart is located in the (approximate) center of the body — this is true not just for all human beings, but indeed for most non-human animals as well. Reinforcing this conceptual metaphor is a related one: Important Is Central. Because of our binocular vision, human beings tend to focus our eyes so that important stimuli or stimuli that demand our attention are centered in our visual field, giving rise to this primary embodied metaphor. These two anatomical facts — the central position of the heart and the nature of our visual field — reinforce each other, so that we also often make use of the metaphor: What Is Important Is The Heart (which it is: a vital organ, which happens to be centrally located and which needs to function properly in order for us to stay alive).

You can find this conflation of location and importance in many heart-based metaphors. When we head into the “heart of the city,” we aren’t just going into the physical center of the city, but its sociopolitical center — the place where its most important cultural and political spaces are located and its most identity-defining activities and events occur. When we get to the “heart of the matter,” we aren’t just talking about what’s most important — we’re penetrating to the “central point” (rather than getting “side-tracked” by “tangents” that are “besides the point,” in other words, getting “lost in the weeds” because we’re “way out in left field”). These last few examples of the Important Is Central metaphor show how easy it is to mix-and-match different variations or extensions when they all share the same underlying primary metaphor. This will be important later, so let’s “put a pin in it” for now.

The other “heart”-metaphor we need to examine for this discussion is less universal, more culturally-specific, but still immensely powerful: The Heart As The Source Of Love. Go into any grocery store in early February and the association of love with the heart is inescapable — heart-shaped boxes of chocolate, heart-shaped balloons, teddy bears hugging plush hearts embroidered with the words “I Love You,” and many other romantic gifts proliferate as Valentine’s Day approaches. Of course, these Valentine hearts are not really hearts in the anatomical sense, but stylized icons that represent the heart as the source of emotions, especially love and affection (and the grief of “heartbreak”). This symbolic representation of the heart dates back in Western culture to the early 14th century and appears in paintings and illuminated manuscripts depicting burning hearts, shining hearts, crowned hearts and hearts clasped in the hands of a devotee as an offering to the object of their devotion.

This connection of the heart to love and emotion is culturally-specific rather than universal (some cultures locate emotions in other parts of the body, such as the head, stomach or liver). However, like the primary metaphors we saw above, the Heart As Source Of Love metaphor also has its roots in a common embodied experience. Though the personal and social nature of love consists of many complex, interconnected and even numinous experiences (and modern science tells us much of what we experience as love consists of chemicals in our brains), research suggests that we consistently feel love and other strong positive emotions as located in our chests and torso — that is, in and around our hearts. Our breath quickens and our heart beats faster; we feel warmed, energized; we may even feel a sensation of expansion or opening in our chest, or alternately, a pressure or tightening associated with nervousness or anticipation.

The heart as a metaphor for love and emotion isn’t limited to iconography, but appears everywhere in the English language. We can “speak from the heart,” “wear our heart on our sleeve” or “pour our heart out” to someone we trust, but if they don’t reciprocate we may accuse them of having “a heart of stone.” We caution our friend not to “give their heart away” or they may “get their heart broken.” About our true love, we might say that “our hearts beat as one,” a combination of this metaphor and the metaphor Love Is Unity. When we love someone “with all our heart,” we combine the metaphor with a metonymy in which “heart” stands for our whole self. We say that “home is where the heart is.” In fact, long before its 20th-century association with geopolitics, the term “heartland” itself traces back to a 17th century poetic concept that originally meant “a place where love resides.”

In these last two examples of home and heartland, it’s especially important to note how the Heart As Source Of Love and the Heart As Center metaphors subtly combine to reinforce each other. While we may travel far and wide, “home” as “the place where love resides” remains at the emotional center of our lives. Although not as universal as the Important Is Central metaphor, these loving heart metaphors carry a great deal of evocative power. Recent studies into embodied metaphor suggest that we experience metaphors as more salient and memorable when they are emotionally evocative; when they are “activated,” we feel them physically in our own bodies as if we were having the described experience all over again. Perhaps because of this bodily intimacy of emotionally evocative language, the use of such metaphors also leads us to perceive a greater intimacy between the speaker/writer and their audience.

All of these overlapping and mutually reinforcing associations help to explain why the term “American Heartland” continues to provoke powerful connotations of warmth, friendliness and comfort even when it is used primarily to refer to a geopolitical location. It also gives us some insight into why presidential candidates for the past century have “courted” the “American Heartland,” using this language to evoke a sense of caring and intimacy that they hope will win over voters “heart and soul” — and why this strategy, and this language, continues to be effective for so many.

Code For White: A History

None of the metaphors we’ve examined so far, however, explain why “American Heartland” is code for “white.” And here, we come back to the central and perhaps most intractable challenge of unpacking and understanding culturally-specific metaphors.

When Buttigieg is called out for his “heartland” euphemism, it’s fairly straightforward to understand why places like Compton and the Bay Area are excluded by the term — these cities on the coast of California are not only racially and ethnically more diverse compared to the midwest, but they exist on the physical “edge” of the continent, not at its center. It’s more difficult to explain why the term “American Heartland” also works to obscure the experiences of rural black communities in the midwest itself, not to mention racially diverse urban centers like Chicago and St. Louis — why its “cloak of gauzy innocence and authenticity” only seems to cover white people.

The answer is as depressing as it is straightforward: racism. America’s long history of racial discrimination has for centuries defined who counts as fully human, and who does not. Racist stereotypes of people of color portray them as lacking the same range of emotional and intellectual experiences as white people, denying them the complex interior lives that are an essential aspect of our shared humanity. To be black, according to white supremacy, is to lack a central aspect of humanity — to be, in a metaphorical and metonymic sense, “heartless.” (I won’t list any specific examples of this metaphor here because they are too ugly and cruel to bear repeating; I leave it to the reader to think of their own.) To be “heartless” automatically excludes you from being a part of the “heartland,” no matter where you happen to live.

The racist implication of the “American Heartland” metaphor is a difficult one to parse unless you understand the history of racism in the United States and the metaphors that have been invoked to justify it. It is these highly specific cultural assumptions and associations that can render certain metaphors almost invisible to an outside observe or someone encountering a metaphor for the first time. Most of us are familiar with the common embodied sensations and experiences that give rise to primary metaphors such as Important Is Central and The Heart As Center, allowing us to re-construct possible meanings even if a particular extension or variation of these metaphors is new to us.

History, on the other hand, is not something we can directly experience for ourselves in our own bodies. We must learn about it through the stories that our community tells about itself and the metaphorical associations that are invoked in that retelling. Such historically-rooted metaphors are often unspoken, unacknowledged and obscure, reinforced through repeated association rather than explicitly stated. These culturally-specific metaphors can be easy to recognize in an ancient text, for instance, when we come across a strange or idiosyncratic phrase that we’re unable to render meaningful because a key piece of historical or cultural context has been lost. (Another example: I often hear Boomers bemoan the fact that kids these days don’t know what it means to “dial a number” because they’ve never encountered an old-fashioned rotary phone. This is a stupid example, but it illustrates the point that some metaphors are based on specific cultural or historical contexts that may, over time, be lost.)

The relative invisibility of racist metaphors gives plausible deniability to people who want to reject their implications. It allows white people to insist that the “American Heartland” carries no such racial overtones, that it’s only a coincidence that the midwest is associated with these folksy values, which stand in metonymically for “American values” more generally. It’s what leads white Iowa caucus-goers to celebrate being “at the center of the universe” and to insist that, despite Iowa being 90% white, Iowans are “diverse in their hearts.”

The good news (and the irony) is that the racist implications of the term “American Heartland” are not “baked in” to the metaphor itself, but result from a toxic combination with other damaging metaphors that have been reinforced by white supremacy throughout history. As we have seen, the primary conceptual metaphors that inform our understanding of the “heartland” have little to do with race or ethnicity; rather, they are much more universal, rooted in shared human experiences of emotion and location that are accessible to everyone. The same loose association that allows for plausible deniability also means that it is possible to call out and reject the racist history of the term while preserving and extending its more universal meaning. The more progress we make in rejecting and dismantling the racist metaphors that underlie a racist interpretation of the “American Heartland,” the more likely it is that future generations encountering the metaphor for the first time will have less reason to assume that it excludes or obscures the experiences and perspectives of people of color.

But before we end on too cheery a note, let me sound a note of caution. Zimmer concludes his article saying, “We’d be better off returning to the original meaning of heartland as ‘a place where love resides’—which can, of course, be anywhere you find it.” Not so fast! Though this might be technically true, the nature of the primary metaphors in this phrase also make it highly unlikely that people will give up on the conflation of location and importance that we find in many loving-heart metaphors. There will probably always be a powerful temptation to conceptualize the “heartland” as being centrally-located, whether symbolically or literally, or both. So long as the midwestern U.S. remains racially and ethnically less diverse than the coasts, this emphasis on its importance will tend to reinforce white supremacy.

For now, then, we’d be better off following Lakoff’s advice in Don’t Think Of An Elephant, where he points out that metaphors often reinforce concepts and associations even if we invoke them in order to denounce them. Rather than trying to force a top-down change in the phrase’s meaning, a better strategy is to continue to call out politicians and political analysts who use it, and to refrain from using it ourselves. Before the “American Heartland” can be freed from its racist baggage and rehabilitated, we have a lot of work still to do.

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And so, “Forever Maiden: Wild Dirt-Worship in the Digital Age” was born.

I want to take a moment here to say that these last eight years working with Anne have been awesome! Sure, in my last post I vented some frustration about the state of the publishing industry these days — but Anne shines out as an example of what excellent editorship looks like. She has always been both an advocate and adviser for my work. She is tireless in her devotion to the magazines she edits and to the Pagan community in general. (And believe me, I haven’t always been an easy writer to work with; I can be too verbose, too intricately poetic if a fey mood takes me, and I don’t envy the copyeditors who’ve had to slim down my prose to fit on the printed page and find pull-quotes that don’t make me sound like a madwoman.)

But what’s with the retrospective, you ask? Well… my time as a columnist for SageWoman is nearing its end. Though still not a “real mom,” even I can’t pretend I’m the dizzy-eyed youth I used to be. And if the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that one mark of maturity is knowing when to step aside and make room for other voices to be heard. (OK, Boomers?) Eight years is a good run! I’ve spent those years using my column to deconstruct gender essentialism, confront rape culture, examine our cultural notions of beauty and belonging, and revisit childhood memories with a questioning (and hopefully more woke) mind.

My final pieces for SageWoman will be in this same vein — circling curiously around what it means to seek a sense of closure that locates us firmly in the larger more-than-human community.

My penultimate column is out now in the latest issue, SageWoman Magazine #95: Blessings of Air. (As always, this issue is beautiful and bursting with lots of insight from fellow writers and artists, so be sure to pick up a copy for yourself!) Here’s a sneak peek of my piece “Cowbird/Changeling” (pdf download):

Mostly you only hear how awful cowbirds are. You don’t hear much about their service to the bison, the careful balance of their hollow bones, their wandering souls. In a country that supposedly prides itself on cowboy individualism, it’s strange how much we hate the cowbird. As if there were only one rule for birds we expect them all to follow.

Excerpt from “Cowbird/Changeling,” SageWoman Magazine #95

So how does a cowbird learn to be a cowbird? This fascinating article from the Audubon Society shares the latest research:

“When I saw them do it, I was just shocked. You’re gonna leave in the middle of the night to go somewhere you’ve never been?” Louder says. […] “These guys are really cool. They have these crazy behaviors and what they’re doing is really complex,” he says. “If this was easy, everybody would do it.”

And for some light-hearted fun, Jeff just sent me this silly-yet-educational “What Bird Are You Most Like?” quiz from Cornell Bird Lab. (The cowbird isn’t one of the options, sadly.)

I got Raven: “Extremely intelligent and sociable, you love practical jokes and figuring out tricky situations. You’re devoted to family and friends, playful, acrobatic, and hardy. Even those who don’t like you can’t help but respect your many talents.” Ha!

What bird are you?

There’s so much I want to tell you — but how?

After almost fifteen years of blogging (which is to say, writing for free), I looked up one morning a few years back to find myself suddenly in a post-personal-blog world. Writers were flocking to aggregate sites (which still paid almost nothing), glomming together into collectives (back in my college days, we printed the stuff on photocopiers, called them “zines” and didn’t kid ourselves), squeezing 500-word clickbait listicles into the space between ads. The internet was maybe never the best place for the kind of writing I like to do, but recently it’s become downright depressing, even hostile. Why spend a week — or a month, or longer — working on a blog post that laid bare my soul and prodded curiously at the boundaries of knowledge, if all anyone would ever see was the headline and 20-word blurb on Facebook?

The truth is that this change wasn’t all that sudden, and in hindsight (welcome to 2020) not even that surprising. Whenever new technology suddenly blasts apart the barriers to entry that last generation’s gatekeepers had been so meticulously guarding, you get chaos. And chaos breeds, alongside those clever twins of creativity and courage, their belligerent kid-brother: superstition. Superstition perpetuates old biases in new forms. And so, even before the personal blog began to evolve into a kind of mini-magazine format, there’d been plenty of well-meaning (and completely baseless) advice about how to take advantage of new media to get your work and your name out in front of potential readers, how to present yourself with professionalism and polish, how to either avoid or capitalize on controversial political opinions in order to build an audience. How to develop your personal brand.

Brand — you know, the thing they do to cattle. The hot poker. The scar tissue.

I’ve read it all. I’ve tried a lot of it. And let me tell you: if there’s one thing worse than writing your heart out for nothing, it’s writing for free as if you were a paid shill. Gutting your work of its heart and other internal organs just to make it slim enough to fit the dead-inside standard. To prove to potential publishers that you’re ready and willing to dance for loose change, that you already know all the soul-crushing steps.

Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. (Hey, it’s the internet, what do you expect?) It’s not fair to paint all publishers with such a harsh brush. But it is true that the publishing industry has undergone a massive shift in the past decade, and yellow journalism (or this generation’s version: “fake news”) has drowned out too many important voices, sunk a lot of otherwise sea-worthy ships. No less than writers, I think editors and publishers have been lost in the chaotic storm of new media — saying they want quality writing (and probably really meaning it), but unwilling to trust the market forces to bear up under the weight of such work.

We’re here at that 500-word limit, so let me get to the point: I have so much to tell you, dear reader! But how? I just don’t know what to do anymore. I took three years off from blogging to get my head together. During that time, I’ve worked on a book project that has me buzzing with excitement — but at a loss for words. Do I share this work with you here on this blog, for free, knowing that the social media algorithms might squash it anyway and editors decline it for being “previously published”? Do I hold my tongue and work silently on my someday-masterpiece, pushing through the isolation knowing how publishers get squirrelly about writers who don’t have at least some online presence?

Looking for answers to these types of questions, recently I joined a local writers group. After years of being told by editors and fellow bloggers that readers wouldn’t be interested in anything too long or too smart or too different, I met people who encouraged us to trust our readers. (I also met a writer who fondly recalled, back in the 80s, getting paid $1,200 per article. $1,200! Per article! That afternoon, my husband took me out to lunch and sat with me while I ugly-cried into my burrito right there in the restaurant.) It was like finally realizing that I’ve been stuck for years in a shitty, abusive relationship… and I could decide to just leave.

I want readers I can trust. Not readers who see this blog as something to consume or criticize, to retweet or hate-share, to meme to death. What I want, more than anything, is a place to have a conversation. A way to think in public. They say (those advice gurus) that fans love an inside view of “The Process” — but my process is messy and sweaty and red-in-the-face from hard work. My process is not a publicity stunt or performance art. It’s not a brand you can wear on a tee-shirt to proclaim your allegiance or your self-identity. It’s my identity, in medias res. It’s the candid photograph of me caught with my mouth half-open and my eyes half-closed, trying to say something that matters. Not something you’d want to share, except with a reader you can trust.

You, dear reader, are you still there? Are you still listening?

Finally! After much ado and work and waiting, my watercolor greeting cards for this winter holiday season are now available for purchase! Each of these cards features a fine art print of one of my original watercolor paintings — and they’re blank on the inside, so you can add your own message for that special someone!

This series began with childhood memories of chilly winter nights. As a kid, I remember how the cold seemed to contract around you, drawing you closer to loved ones, making your world seem small enough to hold in the palm of your hand… There was a comfort in having nowhere to go and nothing to do, but also a restlessness and excitement to know that outside, a winter storm was raging.

Within the encircling space of the snow globe, I wanted to capture that feeling of being nestled snug and safe at home — surrounded by the love of family and warmed by the glow of the hearth that makes even the darkest winter seem cheerful and colorful. And yet, knowing that just beyond the frosted windows, like a landscape etched in ink, the snowy night spilled out in all directions in stark contrasts of black and white and swirling drifts of snow.

Each scene in this series of six landscapes is inspired by a memory of winter. Some are drawn from my childhood growing up among the rolling hills and farmlands of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Some are inspired by the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, where the snow-topped Olympic and Cascade Mountain ranges edge the eastern and western horizons, creating their own kind of circle of belonging.

In the spirit of childhood playfulness — and because I just loved doing the sketches for this series so much! — I’m also making a limited number of black-and-white ink versions of these scenes available in my shop for you to color and decorate any way you wish! Make them your own with colored pencils, crayons or markers — or send them as-is for a striking statement of simple elegance.

I’m so excited to announce the launch of my new Etsy Shop! It’s already all stocked up with a bunch of gorgeous greeting cards featuring fine art prints of some of my favorite paintings from the past couple years.

I’m especially thrilled to be able to offer this set of cards from my “Birches at Sunrise on the Winter Solstice” series. I first created this series during the 2018 holiday season as gifts for family and friends. While most winter holiday cards feature red-and-green color schemes or nighttime scenes, I wanted to create something that spoke to the sense of nascent hope and expectation that’s so magical about this time of year.

Birches have long been a symbol of new beginnings — they’re a pioneer species, one of the first to regrow in an area after a natural disaster, and their bark contains oils that make it especially good for kindling life-giving fires in the hearth (and heart) during the coldest, darkest months of the year. Birches seemed like the perfect subject for a series of paintings about rebirth and the celebration of life in the midst of difficult times.

When I sent out my homemade watercolor cards that year, I was just overwhelmed by the reception! People loved them! For the first time, I wondered if maybe folks beyond my little circle of loved ones might enjoy my paintings as well.

And so, my journey as an actual-honest-to-goodness-artist began…. Who knew these birches would spark such exciting new beginnings!