Rosy Revolver: A Newfangled Rhetoric

Dearest reader:

A few commitments this year to you,
To blog at least once a week.
To entertain wholesale inquiries.
To teach and share relentlessly.
To be more engaged in social media (gulp).

A few commitments this year to me,
No to custom orders.
No to alterations of my work.
No to making things that don’t feel authentic or significant to me.
No to completing a piece and selling it if I’m not completely happy with it.

And a few others, while we’re chatting.
Less complaining, more comedy.
Less doubt, more conviction.
Less worry, more present living.
Less looking back.
Less.
Less.

And less comparing myself to other makers and other mothers, feeling myself as being not much more than a pile of flaws at the feet of those I admire, respect, or once loved. And less reaction mode, less defense. More intention, more scheming, more offense. More hustle. There is a roadmap in my mind to the place where my daughter will see me standing one day. There is a portrait tucked away in my soul’s pocket of the woman I want to be.

Less turning the other cheek. More flipping tables.
Turning tables.
Less debt, financial and otherwise.
And- (after this)- less talk. More action.

I’m starting the year by being finished. With the old ways. With passivity, being merely a bystander in certain areas of my own life. What would I tell my children if they were standing on the sidelines at my age, still waiting to feel like an adult, still waiting for life to start?

Perhaps it was losing two of my dearest friends in the past year and fifteen days (but who’s counting?) or perhaps it was turning 35 and pondering that I’m blessed if I’m halfway through my “good years” (a strange thought). Or, perhaps it’s the fire that comes with a return of creative urging, or muses and angels with devil horns, or a good love that sees me through my worst, or becoming a mother again, or something altogether unthought of. Whatever the trigger, the slow and simmering awareness that THIS is my life has suddenly boiled up into a hot overflow of readiness- doneness- finishedness- a bestowal of the fact that’s been in right in front of my face for decades: there are things I can control and there are things I cannot. The division of the two sounds obvious but for me, the one still apologizing for mistakes made years and years ago, the one hanging onto every knotted thread that wasn’t mine to untangle, the one slamming my head against closed doors, lifting so much that was never ever mine to carry... this realization is freeing. What is up to me? I am. Honestly, that’s about it. But being up to me leaves me in charge of an entire universe that is this woman....

I am a maker of art and myself.
I am a mother to children and work.
I am blessed beyond words,
Broken but better,
And I am finished.

Ta Eph’hemin, Ta ouk Eph’hemin?
What is up to us, what is not up to us?

New work will be up online at 5pm EST today. You'll find it by clicking on the "website" tab above, or by going to www.rosyrevolver.com .

Happy 2018.
Thank you for being here.

This was us.

If you know me at all, either via social media or in person, you've seen this picture before.
This was the best night of my life.
This was the night I married David with five of my favorite women standing by me.
Weren't we something?
We were infinite.

Six of us.
Two years ago.

Six of us.
And two years later,
there are four of us left.

That's me, in the center. Literally held together by the virtual fibers of these women.
On your far left is Audra. She lives down the street from me in this small town, is cousins with my husband, is the kind of woman and mom that makes you want to be better. To her left is Dori. I met Dori at my son's fifth birthday party. One of the most genuine people I've ever known, she showed up in a baseball hat and I thought she was the most beautiful understated thing I'd ever seen. Then she made me laugh, and I was hooked. Between me and Dori is Kelly. Kelly has been by my side since the eighth grade, though we hated each other back then. Years later, in high school, she knocked me out cold, but that's a story for another post. That girl keeps my sanity and my faith in her back pocket, and pulls them out to remind me of who I am when I need it the most. On my other side are UmberDove and SunnyRising. I met them as many of us meet in this new age world, online through the blogosphere. Fellow artists, these two understood a part of me that perhaps very few of my local friends do. They have always been quick to make me laugh at the indignities and unknowns of the artistic life, fast with reassurance, endlessly inspiring. The friendship was still relatively youthful when this photo was taken, but deep as hell and just as pulling.

Such a crew!
We. Were. Infinite.

You would never know looking at this, that one of us just came from a chemo treatment, grinning beneath a carefully styled wig. Another is dazzling in all of her Stage 4 glory. Yet another would begin to battle potential blindness in the not too distant future, and still another would be diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder that would leave bloody lesions on her legs and in her kidneys. Two years. Two.

About fourteen months after that night, Dori lost her fight with breast cancer.
Roughly six months later, Umber lost hers.

* * * * *

I share this to let you know where my mind and heart have been since taking my sabbatical last year.
One thing I've learned since my wedding is that so much of who we are is defined in death.
If only we could remember this while living.

It's been an interesting span of time. One where I have felt a survivor's guilt, a guilt for not having been more present when presence was an option, a guilt for the days when I lived my life in a lazy way. Even a guilt for allowing myself to be driven by stress (and what did I even know about stress) and dollars and external expectations. I've discovered since then that, for me, time is such a tease, and I went through a spell where I felt, "hell... perhaps we are not infinite at all?" And yet, in the end, in the way we hold each other together, the way we carry each other far into an abyss of sky we may never ourselves live to see again? The way we are linked, the way we pull each other forward, bring each other home..? Ah. Perhaps we are more infinite than I ever thought. Because of sisterhood. As women, as mere mortals, so frustratingly fragile, so frustratingly HUMAN... we are infinitely broken. And infinitely beautiful. That is what this series of work is all about.

I hope you enjoy it.
And thank you, for welcoming me back into the fold.

Broken Necklace No. 1
Sterling Silver, Fine Silver, Kingman Turquoise, Leather