And now . . . Small Works takes a more serious turn.

Just for a moment, so I hope you won't mind.  I've been working on a few little personal essays that need a place to speak -- and since I'm in charge, when they begged to be heard I agreed to let them.

We'll call this series

Small Works Secrets . . .

I'll spread them out a little over the next few weeks,
and I sincerely hope you'll feel inclined to share some of your thoughts as well.

Secrets.  We all have them.  They cause some of us to overeat, or to medicate ourselves in one way or another, or to sleep with a light on, or to read or watch things we shouldn't, or to not do things we should.


And I'm convinced we ought to be glad we don't know all of them.

But sometimes sharing them can be good, because we get glimpses into new places in others that help us to understand some of our own secrets, and it eases the burden of keeping them just a little.  So I'm going to take a leap and share a few of mine with you.

Small Works Secret Number 1:  The Happiness Factor

Robert Frost wrote:  "I have been one acquainted with the night."  What good are the words of a great poet if we cannot borrow them to express something better than we can express it ourselves?


If you asked the people who know me well for ten words that describe me, I don't think happy would be on the list.  You might get nice or smart, and probably cynical, but I'm simply not a bubbling font of happiness.  And that's not likely to change.


But by far the word I hear most often to describe my work is "happy." 


Perhaps the happiness in my work shines brighter because sometimes it's dark where I am -- not a situational darkness, but the inside kind where you would turn on the lights if you could just find the switch, but instead you grope around in the dark until the lights somehow come on by themselves.  Who knows how?


My daughter was helping at a show for a bit while I went to have lunch and she told me about a group of women who just kept raving that my work was so HAPPY.  After about the tenth time she'd heard that word, she wanted to shout, "If you could just HEAR the commentary that goes on while these things are being made . . . !"  But she didn't.  She kept my secret, as I keep hers.  We understand each other, because we are two links in a long chain of relatives who have struggled to find inner happiness.


We were born that way, a defect in our wiring that makes our happiness mostly unrelated to what's going on around us, and instead a function of what's going on within us.


There are ups and downs, of course, some good years and some inexplicably bad ones.  It's a ride we'd all like to get off, but we know we've been buckled in for life so we do what we can to make the most of the highs and minimize the lows -- things like creating art, for example.  And for some reason, my art remains optimistic, no matter where I sit on the hill.


There are cracks in my work sometimes, of course . . . a wry glance or a character's comment that if studied might provide the hint of something slightly menacing under the bright surface.  But that is what, for me, makes it true.


I suppose making happy art must be my attempt to commoditize happiness -- to wrap it in neat packages that I can present to others, even though I can't quite figure out how to open them myself.



And if that elusive happiness 

-- the shining thread that slips through my fingers 

but into my stitches --

feels real for other people . . . 

then I suppose that's the most 
reliable kind of happiness 
I will ever imagine.