thinking about language

In the art group yesterday, there was a volunteer I haven't worked with. He came with a reputation of being somewhat childlike himself and I groaned inwardly when I saw him. It is the begining of the quarter and its a good idea to introduce myself to the volunteers and explain what our afternoon art group is about. I forgot to do this and instead, I got involved in an elaborate discussion of contemporary politics, the result of being somewhat contrarian myself. The art group got off to slower start than our political discussion and as we wound our way through butterfly windsocks, one of the participants commented that the two butterflies she needed to glue together didn't quite match. "Operator error" I said. ""Or, perhaps different operators" she replied. "Yeah, but it gives them personality" I added. The volunteer broke in: "Who needs personality?" I wondered if this person had any idea of the effect of his words. Next to the grandmother sat her granddaugher who was experiencing the effects of a prolonged siege of cancer. With no eyebrows, no hair, no eyelashes, and missing one limb, she might well be wondering if she still had a personality. After all, these are some of the marks that we unconsciously combine into our understanding of personality. Appearances are unavoidably connected with our understanding of personality. "I've got wild curly hair, I'm intense and sometimes overeffusive I might say about myself." or, "I'm often serious and when you see my eyebrows wiggling up and down, you're going to wonder if I'm not overreacting." With the excuse of picking up a package of oil crayons from my cart, I excused myself and walked into the ChildLife office. After expressing myself with a few choice words, one of the women gently but firmly took me in hand with her words. "You've got to explain to him the importance of language." She explained that he probably wasn't aware of the effects of his words. I heard everything she said, and I listened carefully, but what hooked me in were the words: "the importance of language."

Taking a Chance

One of my big secrets (but only to myself) as I work in the hospital settting is that I, too, have an illness. Migraines. Lots of them. It's taken me many years to admit it. Not complain about it mind you, just admit it and stop keeping the secret from myself. For most of the thirty years I've had them, I've adopted an attitude more like "well, I have them now, but as soon as..." Having tried a number of avenues to cure them; meditation, medication, rest, reflection, pressing on anyway, I decided yesterday to draw a line in the sand. In my backyard, I keep a small, raku-fired ceramic box with a lid. The lid has a wonderful pattern of squares and triangles drawn into it, colored in blacks, viridians and turquoise and all hatched over with the spidery black cracks from the raku firing. I've adopted this box as a place to store small messages to be sent into the ether. The writer Anne Lamott refers to this sort of container as "God's in-box" That's pretty much how I think about it. I'm not sure exactly how this force beyond me receives my slips of paper, but years of placing folded notes into God's box have taught me it works. Why it had never occured to me to put the migraines in, I'll never know. So, when I drew my line, in went the scrap of notepaper with my special word.

I didn't notice anything right away, but today several things are cropping up. I'm writing again, and the lines under my eye are easing. I've given my headaches a name: "Marge"--like Marge Dursely who populates the Harry Potter books; big, overbearing, and awkward, putting her elbows and words into everything. The biggest change I've noticed is kindness. Today, I'm giving Marge a seat at my table.

About a blog

I'm trying out this blog out after thinking about it for many mornings under my bed covers. How do I want to cover my interests? I've spent the last number of years as an artist and an art therapist, but to write about these subjects as if I were an expert strikes me as if I were to build a soapbox and then set it up in the middle of the London town square. Nope. what I really want to do is track the thoughts of my mind on these subjects and indeed, on all the parts of my life that are part of my search for beauty in the ordinary (the ordinary being all of us humans adorned and unadorned as well as our surroundings).

hannah klaus hunter