Friday #6: Refuge, Sanctuary

{Jamie's note, I wrote this at 10:45 am, hours before I heard about the tragic shooting of children and teachers in CT. It's all the more apt, I think, to reflect on the need for refuge, sanctuary, and the lost innocence of girlhood. I've not gone back and edited all that in, but it's on my heart and mind as I publish this)

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Friday 6: 

Too haggard to give you an unedited photo...

Today what I need is quiet space. I need the sensory calm that lurks in the still upper rooms of the Bradley galleries. 

I need my favorite borrowed living room, a cavernous space that is hung with brightly colored abstract art and that overlooks the lake. 

I need a certain spot on a certain red, modernist couch that is surprisingly comfortable. 

I need refuge. From the projects of my life. From the demands of children, budget, driving, shopping, staying connected, and the pulls and deadlines from the 40+ classes I’ve taught this year. From the world at large. From other children who bully my own, from my past and future, from the terrible things that happen all the time. 

December is almost done, and I need sanctuary.

Today, I walked quickly through the museum. Knowing exactly what I needed from this visit. There are new square-shaped admission stickers all of a sudden, and I’m a bit paused by this.

“How are you today,” the ticket checker asks me.

“Tired,” I confess honestly.

He doesn’t know what to make of that frank answer, so we leave it at that. I’m grateful not to explain.

As I step past the counter, into the museum, I’m greeted enthusiastically by an old man in a blazer. He’d just been taking an elderly couple’s picture in front of the iconic Chihuly glass sculpture. They were both wearing Christmas sweaters.

“Welcome,” he exclaims. “Have you been to the Art Museum before?”

I give his nametag a quick read: Volunteer.

I want quiet, but I pause for a moment: “I come every Friday.”

“Excellent! Excellent!” he beams.  

For a moment, I’m tempted to tell him more, but the silent, empty upstairs places call to me.

I walk through the mostly empty galleries, keys stuffed into my back pants pocket, camera bouncing on my neck, laptop clutched in its black case in my arms, just like I used to carry notebooks in high school. (Before I ever, ever had a laptop). 

I don’t look at the other museum guards; I want to create the illusion that I’m just a girl, alone in the world, going somewhere. 

I like situations that I contrive that remind me of how it felt when I was a girl. I think about that as I look around my borrowed living room space and out at Lake Michigan.

I read an essay not long ago in The Atlantic, by critic Caitlin Flanagan, about writer Joan Didion. In essence, Flanagan argued that Didion’s writing-- and Didion herself-- is stuck in an eternal girlhood. Something that made Didion's reporting in Slouching Towards Bethlehem take our breath away. Something that Flanagan blasts her for now that Didion is old and her daughter and husband are dead. In the Atlantic piece, it seems that Flanagan's shouting at Didion: Wake up! Your bones are frail, and your spine starting to bend. Your precocious girlhood is long gone, and you have yourself destroyed it through your long years of living.

I think of this often when the demands of my life threaten to consume me. I miss my girlhood. I miss the eagerness with which I thought of my adult life. I miss the lack of responsibility that came before homes, children, and budgets. I miss being poor and it being only on me. I miss spending long days reading. I miss the quiet spaces that I seek now. I miss believing in my own beauty and youth. I miss the dreaminess that came before darkness took many of my ideals away.

I sit on this couch. In the stillness of the museum I love, and I close my eyes. Just for a moment. And I pretend that this is where I live. Art lives here, and for three minutes this Friday, so do I.

And then, my phone chirps. I get a text with a picture of my son making art at school. (He's covered top to toe in red paint). And then my husband texts me to tell me he's finally done with all the work of this semester. 

And then, a tall, skinny man with flyaway, chin-length grey hair drags a giant red metal, movable ladder into my living room, with it’s wheels clanging and creaking.  He clears his throat a few times, sneezes, and then starts changing the light bulbs.  They creak in protest, their whines punctuating my stillness, like the cries of my children.

It is time to go. Before I leave, I scope out this other living room space, in an adjacent gallery. 

Perfect for what it contains as well, "biomorphic works that inspire spiritual quietude"

Like these pieces of art, I am interested in how the "object interacts with the environment" (the object being my life); like these pieces of art are studied,  I'm here to study myself "in contrast to the lake...to the gallery's white walls..."

Here's where I'll be if you need me any time soon, in my new living room, considering how the(as the card above notes): "play of the 'inner' and the 'outer' further suggests a relationship between the physical and the spiritual."

See you next week.