I am home today - with another rotten cold. It seems that this is the year for it - two weeks in September and now again...so, what do I do? I answer emails that are urgent and search Pinterest for pictures that are anything but. I sniff and cough and wonder when I will feel better as I scroll through images of pristine rooms, extraordinary vistas, good and bad art, people's fantasies and dreams.
I am trying to understand this new fad - creating public bulletin boards of images of lives that are not your own, rooms that are immaculate, women and men who are perfectly groomed, endlessly attractive, and strangers. On the one hand, it is a constant reminder of how clever and creative and amazing the wide world is...but then, something else is happening there.
Pinterest is like Oz; it is a land of dreams.
I set up my own board a few months ago, and I admit that I am drawn to it as I find good ideas and pictures of the most amazing places. But what does it mean to me? What does it mean to anyone? And more important still, does anyone really live like this? Maybe. Maybe the distance and the frame created by a camera can change how we see the world. In reaction to this musing, I started to amass a secret archive of photos of my own house on my smart phone. Yes, there are pictures of the grand babies, and the children, and the dogs...but there are also pictures of these rooms in which we live...pictures of the kitchen, the dining table, a shelf, a pomegranate on my drawing table from a friend in Arizona. There are a surprising number of pictures of homemade tarts and cupcakes and pavlova. Flowers from the garden and the florist. Little glimpses of the ephemera to which I am so drawn. And somehow these pictures comfort me. They prompt a tender regard for the life I have now. Just when I think that all is for naught - which happens now and then - I flip through these pictures on my phone and think,"Oh yeah...life is good."
I am not sure about all those white zen rooms or the arranged cheeses on antique trays that I find online - but I am sure about my own little pomegranate - about the color of the light in my studio - about the way a beam of light lands on the floor in the living room every sunny morning. I am sure that this is my life - and while it is a hell of a lot more work than the pictures on Pinterest suggest, at the end of the day, it is real and it is mine. Really mine, after all.
I get a lot of comfort from this little house - even though it demands so much. It is hardly an architect's dream. And it is certainly not a designer's showplace! But this is the house where we tell our stories, live our lives, hope for the best, and face things as they are. This is what we've got and it is enough. I think we (or at least I) need to learn to love the little lives we have as surely as we lust after other vistas. We need to live in our own lives, fully, doing the best we can with what we have and surround ourselves with the books, the pictures, and the bric-a-brac that help us to remember that life is precious, we can be kind, we have been loved. This is what really matters.
It seems likely that I will continue to "PIN IT" now and then when I stumble on something amazing on line. But it is even more likely that I will take pictures with my cellphone just before friends arrive or just after I have run around cleaning up after a weekend with the grands...and when I do, I will say thank you for this good life.
But today - no running around, no cleaning up, no friends for dinner. Today, I have to get over this cold.
I love you Miss Kelly - and miss you madly.
