The Art Spirit

When I left the first of January I didn’t have a bucket list. Only a direction - west to east - and a rough timetable, hoping to return home by Father’s Day. But in the final days of Japan, the western way began to creep in and a to-do list emerged:

- Tidy up the Scamp for camping

- Get the mountain bike in for repair

- Teach Molly to fetch as knowledgable dogs do

- Spend quality time with each of the seven grandkids

At the top of the list - clean my closet once and for all.

It took a while but I finally got to it last week. Two bags of clothing for Goodwill. Sweaters for the dry cleaners. A jar of stale ginger chews for the trash and a bar of half eaten dark chocolate as well. And my old Kindle, dead as a doornail but hopefully revivable. It held the charge and yesterday, on the flight to Hilton Head for a week with Sarah, Zac and the kids, I opened it up.

There’s a certain delight anytime you open a Kindle. But after months apart, one is witness to a minor miracle as books once important enough to purchase raise their hands and call for attention.

For some reason, unknown to my conscious mind, Robert Henri’s “The Art Spirit” was among those most insistent.

I’m as talentless as they come but I admire greatly those who paint, draw, sculpt. Those who take the raw material of their art and reveal that which had been hidden inside - inside themselves and in the paint and pencils, canvas and clay. And when I read Henri’s classic a few years ago I became enamored with a world as foreign to me as Kathmandu or Kyoto.

So yesterday on the long leg from Des Moines to Atlanta, I once again waded into “The Art Spirit”.

Not far into the Introduction my imagination / attention was grasped by Henri’s characterization of the sketch hunter:

The sketch hunter has delightful days of drifting in and out of the city, going anywhere, everywhere, stopping as long as he likes - no need to reach any point - moving in any direction following the call of interests. He moves through life as he finds it, not passing the things he loves but stopping to know them, and to note them in the shorthand of his sketchbook or on his drawing pad. Like any hunter he hits or misses. He is looking for what he loves and tries to capture it. The hunter is learning to see, to understand, and to enjoy.

I’ve taken hold of a pencil to sketch only a few times in my life life, each time reminded that my brain doesn’t work that way. And yet I know what Henri was talking about. Nearly every day of my journey I was in that place, that drifting way of being in the world, of being a hunter and learning to see. That’s the world I left behind when I returned home.

This morning as I walked the beach absent the sunbathers,

I returned to Henri and wondered how I might live that way again. Not every day, for that’s not how I’m meant to live at this time in my life. But once a week, perhaps, or every two weeks, or even once a month. I don’t have an answer for the question but I intend to pursue it.

In the meantime, I stand at the water’s edge,

gazing across the great pond and toward the far shores of Morocco,

a land I’ve yet to visit but is now on my bucket list.

Between now and the day I walk those shores I hope to have taught myself in some small way how “to see, to understand, and to enjoy” in my own backyard.