Lucy Bellwood – Page 3 – Lucy Bellwood

How It’s Been

A to-do list full of eight different links with "Blog this" written in front of them.

This is a fraction of the items currently in my to-do list app, which functions more like an underpass covered in graffiti tags these days than a tool for productivity. I’m passing through, jotting down names of people I meet, frantic reminders of deadlines, books to read, errands to check off. The chaos of it gives me shivers.

As my dad loses access to words, memories, faculties, ranges of motion, I lose access to inspiration, strength, sensuality, executive function. We mirror each other. My losses aren’t from infirmity, but from emotional exhaustion. Caregiving life is often a life of attrition, and the marathon is taking its toll. I got away for four days last month and came back with a deeper awareness of what’s actually been happening. There’s the kind of burnt out where you can still write about it, and then the kind of burnt out where you can’t. There’s no paper trail from these last few months. The calendar, the blog, my Patreon, my newsletter: all blank. This is how it is sometimes, but it can’t be how it is all the time.

That break was a full breath—an influx of oxygen that look me from 2% on Low Power Mode to a wedge of green battery. Not fixed, but functional. Maybe 38%. Enough to catch little pockets of joy with. Enough to open the “New post” tab and not just want to take a nap.

marlee grace says “I think Summer plays its cursed trick on me to speed me up when I want to go just as slow as October reminds me to.” It gives me chills to read that, because my body feels that way too. In summer I need stillness. The heat and the light and the chaos push me to overextend, when what I really need is five deep breaths face down on the ground, forehead to the earth, painfully aware of the size and shape of my nose as it mushes into the carpet. In the winter the studio is cold in the mornings and I want to dance and I love to dance and it’s not so hot that the idea of riding my bicycle makes my eyes water. But when I’m as tired as I am from a summer of doing Too Much, the movement is hard to come by.

Back to School energy is real, but/and it’s not the same as summer’s altogether-too-brightness. I’ve written here before about how school was often synonymous with spacious, silent mornings that stretched on forever. I can have both the stillness and the movement. I’m chipping away at the space for it. I am trying. I know my body remembers the moment I give it space to do so. (I feel like this is all I say these days, but it’s still true.)

I just saw a punchcard someone made for saying “No” to things the other day. I need to make one.

There. I made one.

Brain Food, Reading

Spells

Add cardboard (carbon), gently torn, to some dried leaves (carbon), and the leftover zucchini bits and broccoli floret (nitrogen) from dinner, and you’ll end up with a singularly useful and generative substance (“soil”), from which all other life now stems. Is that not amazing? And it’s available to you. The earth’s deepest and most primal incantation.

I lost track of Cassie for a year or two but I’m now I’m subscribed to her newsletter about compost and it’s great.

Brain Food

Manufactured Longing

Working on the music, for me, it’s kind of important to not fake it in some ways, to not try to force this emotional state out of it, to sort of pay attention to what’s going on in your life, if you’re feeling inspired or motivated just letting it happen. […] Especially after you’ve released a bunch of records for a long time, you don’t want to manufacture longing.
RIP Brian McBride

Blog, Delights

One Quick, One Slow

Two lovely pieces of feedback on the blog in very different mediums recently: a tiny, encouraging email from Rob right after my last entry and the sweetest postcard from Piper that arrived in my PO box sometime in June (but given the way life’s been going I didn’t manage to stop by and discover it until well into July).

Maybe it’s because blogging is often a much quieter affair than posting on social media, but I love these little blips and boops of connection. They hit harder than comments and likes and reblogs. They feel more personal. They remind me to reach out and email people (or write them a card!) when their work strikes a chord.

I had cause to do this recently with Ursula Vernon, whose work I’ve been following since I was in middle school. She’s been sharing some very vulnerable comics about dealing with breast cancer and I thought “My god, if not now, when?” It’s been over TWENTY YEARS and I’ve never taken the time to tell this person how much discovering her website and her comics and her delightfully eccentric illustrations meant to me as a weird tween without a lot of artistic friends. It’s an impossible gift when someone’s been a fixed point in your creative community for that long.

It reminds me that even if social media is crumbling around us, people can endure. The impressions we make on one another outlast the silos and the buyouts and the implosions.

But it’s good to come out and say so every once in a while.

Blog

Thought Stream, Friday, 9:43am

I’m sitting here thinking about internet silos, the exhaustion of trying to post all the things in all the places, the relief of not being in an active Kickstarter cycle anymore, how two hummingbirds fencing in mid-air is more exciting than any action film, how much has changed since the WGA went on strike in 2007, what it would look like to write things for my blog and then share them everywhere else rather than trying to tailor things to each channel, how little lust for Instagram I have when I’m not obligated to be there, the Mother Theresa quote on the chalk board in front of this house, the vast gulf between the place I help take care of as a part-time job and this place that I’m looking after for friends, how much love pours out of the funky flooring and flaking windowsills, where I should eat lunch today, how much I need to pee, making physical objects, the power of niche communities, how every industry has its 1% and that 1% colors the public perception of how we do what we do and how so many people really do have no idea how the money shakes out no matter how many times we explain it, the Hooded Oriole who came, long and slender, to the sugar water feeder just ten minutes ago, the oleanders blooming, the possibility of rewilding a large stretch of our property, and building something there in the process, the fact that there are no rules on the blog, the emerging judgement that this is indulgent and pointless, the retaliation that it doesn’t matter, the gift of time, the inclination to capture, even imperfectly, the feeling of swinging on a porch swing while I write and how pleasurable and correct it feels to be writing while in motion, like recording a Ramble while walking, like understanding music through dance, like being in conversation with a friend while you both bob in the surf of the Pacific Ocean.

Brain Food, Experiments

Inventory

I signed up for another one of Jocelyn’s online classes last month, and so far I’ve found it incredibly helpful in finding my way back to bits of myself and my creative practice that have been occluded by caregiving. One of the exercises was a mind map exploring all the tools we use to access and interact with our creative selves. The four stages she suggests are Ritual, Connection, Collection, and Synthesis. Here’s a big mess of ideas around those hubs:

A mind map showing various quadrants of creative connection.

I love letting myself use little doodles to explore concepts like this. I think it started after Shay Mirk shared some More/Less lists they’d made for the year and inspired me to make my own. (Pretty sure I did one for 2022 as well but I can’t find it so here’s an old one.)

A list of Less and More goals, featuring things like equating pain and work, blogging, ocean, trying to go it alone, and other little illustrated concepts.

I see these inventories and remember that I have such a robust series of practices for doing what I do. I also see how the things I’m pursuing in my life right now have roots in this list from two years ago, which I love. It all takes such a long time.

I recorded a Ramble about all this the other night that I still haven’t edited and uploaded to Patreon, but it’s coming. Still circling the question of my job and what I think it is vs. what it actually is.

Illustration, News

Serpentine

An unexpected bit of Promotion on the blog today:

Serpentine is now live on Kickstarter!

This collection of poems by Tara K. Shepersky features loads of full-page watercolor illustrations by me and gorgeous printing from our publisher, Bored Wolves. (You can even grab our first collaboration, Tell the Turning, as part of the campaign—not to mention a host of other goodies like postcards and special bookplates by calligrapher Amber D. Stoner.)

A selection of watercolor paintings from the book, Serpentine.

The book is a love letter to a particular river in Northern California, and to Tara’s peregrinations from north to south along various West Coast highways and byways over the course of her lifetime. Her work is contemplative, rich, tender, and full of love. It’s an honor to be in conversation with her words through watercolor. When describing the book, she writes:

Serpentine is blue and green: many shades, from cerulean to viridian to young-alder to haze-above-the-Pacific. She’s soaked with sun, even when the particular poem takes place at night or in deep shade. Sunshine permeates. Blooming permeates. Celebration permeates. Refuge permeates. Serpentine reaches out to help you shuck your anxiety and displacement. I hope Serpentine will turn out to be a strong companion for you, as she has been, for a very long time, for me.

Once again: HERE’S THAT KICKSTARTER LINK. This is a short campaign (just two weeks!) so I’ll be writing about it again with some more watercolor work before things wrap up.

Brain Food, Reading

Four Reading Rhymes

I’m washing my eyes with words and hoping something turns up that works as I’m moving forward.
Robert Eggers, on writing dialect for The Lighthouse

7. People pretend there are readers and non-readers. But there are just people willing to practice the patience necessary to get hypnotized, and those who quit before their eyes turn into spirals. To read is to welcome this hypnosis, await its arrival, then trust its direction.
Gabi Abrão

Life happened because I turned the pages.
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

Art, Illustration

Father’s Day 2023

Drawn in Procreate with my finger while feeding my dad supper.

I keep trying to look—really look—at all of it: what’s not here, what’s still here, how his face changes when he’s tired or alert or confused or happy. I keep thinking about cartoonists who have been in this position before me and the drawings I’ve seen them do of the people they love at the end, when it feels as if there’s no other way to stay present.

I am trying to stay present.

Sometimes (like this week) that means staying somewhere else, using the mild distance of a local housesit to recalibrate my understanding of where we’re at. My fatalism wanes at a distance because when I visit I see more of him. My presence becomes a novelty, and he perks up at novelty. I get to err more on the side of what’s here than what’s not.

This, too, is a gift.

Brain Food, Reading

The Island

I wish I’d known at twenty-one, when I developed a chronic illness and became suddenly alienated from all my peers, that over the decades, one by one, all of them would come join me on my island.
Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments

I come back to this quote a lot these days, thinking about it from the perspective of losing a loved one early in life, or becoming a caregiver, or any of the other life circumstances that hit us before we feel they “should.” It’s a weird construct, when you get right down to it. These things happen all the time, so what undergirds the idea that they’re aberrant?

I’m much further into reading Stephen Jenkinson’s Die Wise than I was a couple months ago. (Funny how I can’t crack into a book that gets too directly at my current lived experience while I’m right up close to it. I had to go to another state before I could find a way in. I’m hooked now, though.) As far as he’s concerned the undergirding is a sense of entitlement; this particularly North American obsession with individuality and control and comfort.

The book’s full of things I feel like I’ll need a long, long time to process.