About pacienciapaciencia

For seven years, I have taught science in inner city schools. Four Mays ago, I quit my job, sold most of my possessions and moved to Downeast Maine. Originally from England, I have lived in Texas, Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania and Maine. I love listening to music, taking photographs and cooking for friends and family. I also custom design and fabricate silver, gold, bronze and copper jewelry. Recently, I moved back to Texas after realizing that the snow and darkness of Maine winters were not for me! Now I plan to be a snowbird of a sort: spending the school year in Texas, teaching at a public girls school in South Austin, and summers in Maine. Recently, I purchased an old farm on 5 acres in Elgin, Texas. Could I be so lucky? Thanks for accompanying me on this meandering journey in the blog-o-sphere.

A Time to Keep

Posted on November 5, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

“Life isn’t long enough to do all you could accomplish. And what a privilege even to be alive. In spite of all the pollutions and horrors, how beautiful this world is. Supposing you only saw the stars once every year. Think what you would think. The wonder of it!”

Tasha Tudor

I was just on the top of Flying Mountain with a friend, staring down at Somes Sound and out over the sea to islands beyond. Staring up and out at clouds, one could see layer upon layer of water vapor stretching out to infinity in colours of blue, white, grey, gold, and lavender. The wind blew up the sides of the mountain, pulling copper-colored oak leaves off the trees and buffeting them up and over the granite ledge, up and over our heads as we watched them float. Sitting and staring out at the water below hurtling by as the wind pulled the surface into peaked waves, while, as we sat in a patch of sunshine, everything was warm and almost still.

Being very lucky, I have spent a portion of almost every day lately being a Flaneur, or visual explorer of my new home, this beautiful island of Mount Desert. Another friend told me, a few days ago over dinner, that I was personifying the spirit of writers and artists from Paris from earlier in the century by spending so much time just walking and looking. Imagine my delight in reading about the Flaneur and discovering that photography is also an integral part of the leisure of walking with the intent to observe and note one’s surroundings. To be sure, part of the meditation of walking, of perambulation, is the keen sense of observation, of noticing as many birds, leaves, trees, rocks, etc. as possible and recording them in your brain for the mere moment you catch them. In that moment of saying: I see that crow as it sits on the branch, you forge a small memory and are present in that moment, with that crow and that branch on that day. While yes, the moments are fleeting, the process is deep and valuable.

I have now lived in my little house that floats above the street for exactly two weeks. It feels like I am just now settling in, although I am still thrown off by the furniture of someone else. I am used to a house that is wholly mine, wholly created by my desire to find weird old things, furniture that is comfortable and interesting to sit on, with my pictures on the walls. Here, I have some elements of me but they are on or about someone else’s things. So, it is a transitional place.

I am struggling with all the transitions, all the newness of the present time, but know that it is fleeting and dynamic as is everything else. I know now to forgive myself when I feel lonely or out of place, as that is just part of the process of adjusting to a new town and new people and, ultimately, a new me. A new you is a scary prospect, especially when there is such a personal dedication to that idea.

Sometimes, I feel very alone, and that aloneness I think is scarier because I don’t intend to change it for a while. This choice, this time living here, is about finding myself in the sea of life. About cultivating and creating a life dedicated to artworks and quiet time and time in the woods and by the sea. It sounds simplistic because it is simple: that is the idea. The simplicity of sitting on a picnic table by Somes Sound and then going to the studio to make a pendant inspired by the way the light looks sparkling on the water; that is what this time is about.

A friend told me last night that it is amazing that I got what I want, a place and time to be creative all the time, and that I am enjoying it and doing it. Be careful what you wish for, I always say, because you almost always get it. I wished for this life, and now that I have it, I am spooked by it sometimes. I am spooked by the peace around me, by the niceness of strangers, by the love I feel for this small town, by the love I feel for cooking, for writing, for metalsmithing and knitting and walking and driving around. I have no idea how to cultivate this life for the long term, but have to trust that I will be able to somehow.

I have been looking into the lives of other strange girls, like Vali Myers and Tasha Tudor, and wondering where they harnessed the bravery from that let them lead their lives the way that they did. Did they just find it one night, late, alone in bed or on the porch? Did it come to them early in the morning over coffee or at the kitchen table? Where does the confidence in a sense of self come from? Maybe you just keep going, one foot in front of the other and not worry too much?

Worry is one of my guardian spirits: she is always there, creeping around in circles around myself. In some ways, I welcome her in that I think she has helped me make wise decisions, but sometimes she dominates the thoughts too much and I wonder where Temperance and Confidence are. Perhaps they take a lot of day trips, mini-vacations, and visit me only intermittently. Perhaps I need to create a home that they think is theirs, so that they stick around more and Worry can take some of those day trips out into the country.

My dream is to buy some land sometime next spring (Spring 2014), I hope, and start to build a little house for me and some spaces for gardens and animals. Maybe there will already be a house or a barn there. I wish to invite people there, but that it will always be my place. I don’t know if it is the sadness that is lingering around the sidelines of my mind lately, or the transition into the stillness of winter, but I really feel that I require my own place, a place of space and quiet that will always be mine. When I think of this, the risk of being the witchy lady who lives at the back of a field somewhere, with chickens and alpacas and vegetables and flowers, I worry: what do I think about that?

Eccentricity is this tricky knife’s edge of being true to yourself coupled with a need to not just do things because they are weird and people will take notice. Eccentricity is saying my weirdness is ok, and this is me and always has been so there is no point in suppressing it for a sake of comfort. I feel like, for the first time in my life, I am being true to myself and doing less and making more. I feel very shy around others and am hesitant to express myself in words. Making something, drawing, cooking, is much easier. Writing is much easier: if I could write to everyone then maybe I could actually speak and say what needs to be said, but I think if I started communicating via letters or passenger pigeon that might be a bit odd. I have to work on my tongue-tied nature, that spirit of Worry always there, always saying, “is that the right thing to say? What will they think if you say that?”.

I have been writing of myself lately as if I am a spider molting an old shell, a new one forming in the harshness of cold air and sunlight. I feel like the shell is starting to harden, toughening up here, loosening there, allowing new joints to move and swivel around, but that I am not ready just yet. I am still very delicate and my sense of things very tenuous: as if maybe, now, I can reach out and grasp onto certain things and know them, but that the majority is still yet to be discovered.

A new phase of life, indeed. Life in a Tasha Tudor place where I work with ladies who are jewelers, fiber artists, potters, midwives, yoga teachers, moms, spinners, and who store and can food for winter and order organic vegetables by the pound from local farmers to make organic sauerkraut. A place where the pace is slow but yet the days pass by fast. A place where no matter how cold it is outside, the inside of the studio is warm and I can wear tank tops while forging copper and melting silver into beautiful things. A place where my heart is loosening, slowly, and allowing my own happiness to form without the need to martyr myself to others. A place where boats come from Canada and drop off fresh fish in Maine, where old Victorian houses sit in small towns overlooking still shores in the late autumn.

Posted on November 4, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

Photodiary — Hidden Places

Posted on October 27, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

This morning, I woke up early and saw myself reflected in the morning sunshine in the mirror across from my bed. After doing my morning routine of yoga/pilates/meditation, I pulled on a light jacket and a pair of shoes and walked down the street.

This is what I saw….

Hydrangeas Change Colour

This summer house is all closed up, so naturally, I snuck onto the property to sit by the sea.

Early morning sun streams through fall leaves

The colours of every plant still growing are just incredible….nothing is more beautiful than this motley!

I gazed off up Somes Sound at lobster boats scooting across the water

I skipped some rocks whilst looking around

And stared out at the rocks and grass and seaweed

I gazed down at all the summer cottages wrapped up for winter

Come Monday, all these leaves will be gone!

The other day, I went strolling to a park nearby. At sunset, this is what I saw…

Autumn is a rainbow here

The sun set behind mountains and cliffs

And the sun shone on the bark of birch trees, until it all but disappeared

Now That I Know…

Posted on October 26, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

{only the last photo in today’s post is one of mine….all others are Google Images found by searching “fog”}

What seems like many years ago, I taught in a school in East Austin in a room with one bright orange wall.

Orange was the color that designated 8th grade rooms, although I taught all three grades in that room. Typically, while I was a teacher, I was “split” or taught multiple grades in the same year. It was really challenging at first, but became much easier as time went by. In this room, my second room in that school, there were many windows along the back wall and it looked out over the rooftop of the first floor and beyond that, the neighborhood where all the kids who came to us lived. That neighborhood was one of the worst in Austin, poor, ugly, dirty…a typical neighborhood that poverty and city neglect has left to decay and never improve. In that neighborhood there were no grocery stores or doctors, no movie theatres or good parks. You had to cross the interstate that was about a mile away to get to that sort of thing. I always wondered why a city would build a neighborhood so isolated from the city itself.

The orange wall was in the front of the room and was covered with two white boards and a flat screen tv, if you believe it. I taught almost everything via PowerPoint on that flat screen tv. Large screens with bright colors are lifesavers when you are teaching kids with the attention span of a fruit fly. There were two doors: one we used, and one we didn’t. The one we didn’t was typically covered in a huge poster made of butcher paper that somehow related to what we were studying. At that school, I made many of these posters as I loved to have large, colorful representations of what we were doing. My favorite one that we made was entitled “Dragon City” and was a city made of multi-colored block buildings all made by students. Below the city were tectonic plates that, tragically, were always moving, causing earthquakes. To the side there was a large volcano that was always on the edge of eruption. There was also an ocean with a tsunami at all times, high winds that caused hurricanes and weather conditions that created tornadoes. Life was rough and tough in Dragon City, but all the people lived there, anyway. When the students and I first made it, I made them watch part of Werner Herzog’s short documentary La Soufriere, and talk about why they thought the people would stay when they knew they might be killed.

Daily life in that school was difficult and funny. There were many students who were extraordinarily challenging, but there were also many who were great and inspiring with their intelligences. I tried my best to work with them and challenge them but also help them along, holding their hands a little bit and showing them things they would never otherwise see.

Because of the location of the school, up on a hill in the middle of Austin’s second greenbelt (although this greenbelt was unused by hippies looking for swimming holes), we had different microclimates than the surrounding neighborhood. Because we were up and away, typically our mornings, especially in the transition times between summer and fall, fall and winter and winter and spring, were very foggy.

In the back of my room I had an altar and a coffee machine (what more do you really need?). Every morning I made coffee with maple syrup in it; maple syrup was my reward for surviving there and at home as this was the year I got divorced. On foggy mornings, I started a tradition of fog bathing.

When the kids came in, I would throw open all the windows and we would let the morning fog roll into the room, filling the classroom with clouds. The fog clouds were cool and damp and murky-feeling, as if you were in a forest, not a building. If you looked out of the windows, you could see the fog pouring in over the sills, into our low pressure, controlled climate atmosphere of our school. Sometimes, when the kids weren’t in the room, during an off period, for example, I would sit in the front of the room, doing work at the computer and look up to see banks of fog like water rolling in toward me.

That school, despite its many problems, was in a beautiful spot in east Austin: ringed with trees and fields it sat. It sat on top of a seam of calcite, metamorphic limestone, that had been blasted to build the school. Oftentimes I would take the students in my elective out for a constitutional and we would go and collect beautiful rocks to bring back to the classroom. We would crawl around the retaining walls that were built along the back of the school, hiding when principals or janitors came by (they didn’t understand the need for constitutionals or for beautiful rocks), putting rocks and dead bugs in pockets to cart them inside and place them, delicately, on shelves or windowsills. Nothing ever happened to these rocks despite the concerns of principals: none were ever thrown at each other or through glass.

Sometimes we would go exploring in the woods just to see what was out there, and I would try to get the kids to scream primal screams with me in the woods; they had no experience of the outdoors and were scared of it. One of them even told me, “Miss? Black people don’t go into the woods!”. But after a few journeys, they liked going out there and climbing over cedar trees and into spiders’ webs and finding evidence of people living in those woods. They climbed around over cliff’s edges and got dirt in their shoes and needles in their hair. They would always come back when called, and in we would go again, to reintegrate into the world that was our school.

At that school we had a school garden, and goats, and an after school program in which we wrote a literary magazine and made pinhole cameras. I sat in the hallways and talked to students during my time off, and went into other classrooms who were struggling when their teachers quit in the morning, or the middle of the day.

The best times, for me, in terms of reflecting on what I was doing, what the work actually was, came though, on those days when I could stand, drinking coffee with maple syrup, and stare out those back windows. If I could stand and stare awhile at the plants, at the rocks, at the books on the altar, at the posters on the walls and floor, at the mobiles hanging from the ceiling, I could wrap my head around what I was trying to do there. I later realized that, although I was great at crowd control and counseling, that I needed to learn how to teach, and so I left that school after two years. It is only now, four years later, that I can look back and see the forest for the trees. Now I can see the beauty even of that place: the waves of fog pouring into my classroom as students worked on building cricket homes or proving photosynthesis in test tubes or reading about light years.

Sunset at Suminsby Park, Northeast Harbor

Now the fog I see and experience rolls toward me from the harbor that is 4/10 of a mile away. It rolls up the streets from out in the ocean, traveling like someone floating up into town, drifting down the main street, up Summit Road and toward me. It flows and falls between houses and garages, and peeks between the branches of trees. Fog is so much a creature of its molecular structure: water pours even in its different phases. A few days ago, I woke up to a foggy day where everything was grey and green. I stood out on the porch awhile, watching the fog move down my street, through the tall juniper trees, over my neighbor’s cottage, along the driveway and out toward the street.

Cross My Heart and Kiss My Elbow

Posted on October 25, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

Knowing others is wisdom;

Knowing the self is enlightenment.

Mastering others requires force;

Mastering the self needs strength.

He who knows he has enough is rich.

Perseverance is a sign of will power.

He who stays where he is endures.

To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.

Thirty-Three – Tao Te Ching

I have three books on my coffee table: the Tao Te Ching, Art Forms in Nature, and The Meaning of Life. These three books inform more of my decisions and ideas and thought processes than probably all of my other books put together; I am almost constantly referring to this or that within their pages.

Yesterday I went driving with a friend out to Sullivan, a town about 45 minutes from here on the mainland.As we drove we saw open fields and barns, strange houses that are the pet projects of their owners, and Canadian geese lying in meadows. We drove past an overlook on Frenchman’s Bay and saw the mountains of our island off in the distance…bubbly like huge navy blue marshmallows on the horizon. We saw ancient houses of the rusticators and talked about living here two hundred years ago in those giant places….how cold they must have been all the time! We saw ponds and lakes and both had the still surfaces of autumn. The grasses at the side of the road are slowly dying, changing colors from the bright greens and pinks of summer to rusty browns, tan, gold, and white. Soon they will be darker brown, and then, covered with snow.

I love this part of Maine; I love its isolation, its uniqueness, and its refusal to join contemporary times. It seems that you could turn back the clock here and drive along those same roads and only the cars would be different.

Nothin’ But Time

Posted on October 24, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

A Bottle of Milk

Posted on October 24, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

Last night I was making cornbread to go with some stew I had made a couple of days before, and I realized I was out of milk. It was 6:48pm, and I realized that there was nowhere in town to go and buy another bottle of milk, as the store closes at 6:00pm. I realized that even if I had a car, that it would take me 25 minutes to drive to the next town that had a store that was open after 6:48pm. I realized that I now live in the slow lane of life.

I used water instead (it was delicious cornbread) and all was well. I walked out, later in the evening, to take a turn around the town, as I am wont to do lately. It takes about thirty minutes, give or take, to walk around Northeast Harbor from end to end. As I walked, the police car drove past me. Then, he turned around and drove past me again. When he did it a third time, I realized that this was a pretty exciting evening for him…..32 year old woman, alone, walking down Maple Lane!

I was trying to sort out some tricky jewelry designs in my head: two commissions are presenting some design challenges and I find that walking, especially at night, really helps me get good ideas and inspirations. Mostly, I walk down streets where almost all of the houses are empty. A few windows glow, here and there, through the trees, but, for the most part, this town is asleep by dark. Right now sunset is at 5:30pm, and after daylight savings begins in a week or so, the days will begin to shorten down, down, down to darkness at 4:00. Luckily for me, December 21st is a mere two months away: the days will begin to lengthen as soon as my 32nd birthday passes.

Today I spent a couple of hours discussing life, the universe and everything with a friend while we drove around the park looking at the last of the fall leaves. Bursting yellow, ochre and brown, these lasting leaves seem to scream out against an increasingly naked landscape “we are here – Look at us!!!”. Up on the top of Cadillac Mountain we stared out at the islands that stripe the bay as it opens up into the Atlantic Ocean. The afternoon sun is so sharp, so angled at this time of year. It glances off flat salt water and shines with a bright gold that hurts the eyes. It slices through the needles of fir trees, and makes maple leaves glow orange-yellow-pink-brown-green. The wind is gentle and the surfaces of ponds are like glass. As you drive past them, you can see naked trees interspersed with bursts of red and yellow and orange that are reflected on the calm surface. The water is the color of mercury, or of burnished pewter. Everything in the late afternoon is still and shiny: metallic and glowing as the sunset pitches over the horizon.

Photodiary – New Orleans Pharmacy Museum

Posted on October 23, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

I mentioned this place a couple of times in earlier posts, but here are photos from the amazing New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, a place you should most definitely visit the next time you visit the city of New Orleans…at $5, admission is a bargain!

The New Orleans Pharmacy Museum is located at 514 Chartres Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

Den Huset Som Flyter

Posted on October 19, 2012 by pacienciapaciencia

Today I move into my winter house….on Lookout Way in Northeast Harbor. My little winter house is grey on the outside with a black door and I live upstairs, in a loft that floats above the street. There are lots of windows and a lovely porch for sitting and a big, open floorplan perfect for cooking and knitting and sewing or whatever catches my fancy.

When thinking about moving into my house, my first place of my own in five months (!), I am filled with happiness, excitement and a sense of relief. I am so grateful to the friends and family who have put me up since leaving the tall, skinny house in Philadelphia. After it was broken into, I was never able to sleep there and I think that is how I came down with shingles the last week I was in the city. I was proud of that house, despite its many flaws: its slanted floors, its leaky ceilings, its ill-fitting doors and hodge-podge kitchen. I am a born interior decorator; I think I wrote about this earlier, about how I feel like my home is a giant, ever-changing art project. People often tell me, when they come to my home, that it is beautiful and cozy. I take this as a huge complement because I spend most of my time at my house, being somewhat of a homebody or hermit.

Yesterday, as I was driven through the woods in a friend’s amazing old 1970’s Porsche and staring at the blazing colours in the leaves, all yellow, red, peach, and orange, I felt winter coming, creeping around the edges. We sat for a while at a camp house over by Long Pond, and I could see the yellow sunlight slanting so sharply through the trees, making the moss shine gold in the afternoon light. As we sat, we heard the strange calls of loons floating on the pond in the distance. Their call sounds like a strange ghost and ricochets across the water: it makes you shiver.

I am sitting here, drinking coffee and thinking about the winter house, and the winter season that is inevitably marching ever closer with each passing day; even now as I sit in my parent’s kitchen, the huge maple tree outside has hundreds of green leaves dotted with the rust spots of autumn. Rusting leaves that are turning yellow and brown and ever so slowly falling to the ground are the harbingers of the blue light of winter: the ice and the snow and the cold wind. Tomorrow it is supposed to rain all day and I hope to make it to the Asticou Gardens before all the leaves are pulled off the trees in the next few days’ storms.

I have been really inspired lately by an artist new to me, Carl Larsson. My family received a Christmas card of one of his paintings, and since seeing it, I have been spending lots of time looking at his interpretations of Swedish domestic life at the turn of the last century. I am not sure if it is because the climate of Sweden is so similar to our climate here, or if it’s all the red furniture and old stoves, but I truly love his paintings and have chosen to be inspired by his artwork, the Pharmacy Museum of New Orleans, the performance space of Sleep No More at the McKittrick Hotel, and the assemblage-collage-collection artwork of Joseph Cornell and Rosamund Purcell to decorate the new house. This house is only mine for about eight months and then becomes a summer weekly rental, so I cannot truly move into this place and take it over as I am wont to do…but it’s good practice for the more permanent place that I will find in the spring.

In the meantime, boxes are packed and stacked and ready to be loaded into the car my brother and I will be using to move me to my new house. This is only the second house that I have had that has been mine and mine only; I cannot truly express my absolute love and excitement at the opportunity to live by myself again. It is such a luxury, and such a beautiful one. When I packed everything up yesterday and got it ready to go, I was so happy to realize how little stuff I actually have. During the packing process, I got rid of even more stuff, making a large pile to donate to various organizations here. It feels great to feel like I am opening a door into a new life, one of my own making, one of my own choosing, solely because it is what I wish to be doing with my time and my life.

After moving, I will spend time unpacking and decorating my new little nest, and planning out my Halloween costume. There is a small community celebration here that I hope to add to by doing a storytelling hour at the library, in my character of Perchta, a sometimes benevolent spirit of spinning, yarn, and the hunt (appropriate, no?).