Little Drawings Adopted

“These are only hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses; and the rest is prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action.”

T.S. Eliot

In my experience with doing the little drawings, two other similar exercises have come into my life. One is from Julie, the wildflower botanist, who has her students choose a plant that calls them, observe it carefully, draw it as a contour drawing (following the outlines without looking at the paper) or just look and draw, next draw its essence, and then record the message the plant has to impart.

I learned another form in a devotional painting workshop with Laura Summers of Free Columbia. She would propose an “object for devotion”, for example a window. We first looked at it inwardly and with a loose pencil-scribble defined “outside” and “inside”. Choosing just two watercolor paints we added them to the paper (inexpensive multi-media paper). Then we added other media like crayon, colored pencil, pastel, watercolor pencil, and resist crayon (spontaneously and freely!), placing the new markings both outside and inside the watercolor. We tore tissue paper and glued it on and then repeated whatever steps we liked. We just kept on going, trying always to keep in mind the original devotion.

The following example of my own work with the little drawings Barbara describes in the July 1st blog is more analogous to the assignments the gnomes gave her (and to her way of finding release and transformation with particular issues). It grew out of my effort, over weeks, to switch my home phone service AND hold onto my old number. Here’s a gestalt jumble of one of my six or so hour-long calls. You will recognize it.

The machine, trying to sound humane and kindly: I see you’re calling from…is that the number listed on your account? Thanks. I’ll just look that up. Stop texting while driving; take the pledge. It sounds like you’re calling about a number; is that right? One moment while I get more information. For quality assurance. . . Our representatives are busy serving other customers.

Then come the real people, scripted to sound humane and kindly. Karen says she will have to transfer me to technical support. Robert says the other phone company has my number and I should call the same number I called in the first place, again. Jacob says, “What state are you in?” I say, “I’m in California; where are you?” He’s in Arizona and is not able to access California numbers, but he’s very sorry and will connect me to someone who can. There is pure silence for ten minutes; I stick it out until the muzak comes back on.

During the silence I make a plea to Mano and the Little Ones for help. Not only that, I have started keeping a sketchpad and pastels handy so that I can dispel the frustration by doing little drawings. This particular drawing has distinct black shadows, no doubt picking up on what is beginning to seem like a mental torture chamber.

Now here comes the nice woman Alisha who is also sorry but has some real information. In the end she puts me on hold too but promises to stay on the line until I’m actually connected to the next person who is going to help me. I can’t hear Patrick very well, except to get that he’s very sorry for all my trouble and wonders if I’m trying to portal a number from another company. Then, suddenly, after an hour on the call, I hear: “We’re sorry, your call did not go through. Will you please try your call again.”

Thanks to Mano, I am now calm and in a rather playful mood and I do call again. With the first representative I start to joke amicably about my experience and how those 13 guys ruling the world couldn’t have thought of a better way to keep the population too busy managing phone service and health insurance to revolt. I know she’s not responsible, I say, and it must be awful having people tell her how mad they are all the time. “Oh, they don’t say that,” she laments. “They just yell. All day long people are yelling.” She then tells me about the grasshoppers that are taking over Albuquerque and how she’s so freaked by them she always leaves her building with two colleagues who shield her from the worst of the flying hoards.

Ah yes! With this human connection, sanity resurrects and this stranger and I fall into balance. It even feels a little seditious, since we are being recorded for quality assurance and the telephone company surely won’t approve of being made fun of or of our straying off topic. But the risk is worth it and, indeed, the quality is established. I see that finding a way to connect even when the systems are crazy brings healing. I also note that being prepared (with sketch pad or knitting or whatever) keeps me from being swallowed up in the layers of maddening complexity.

Looking at my drawings and reflecting on the ever-creative encouragement from the gnomes, I figure out that my outrage arises when a machine pretends to be a person and when a real person is scripted to sound like a machine. The mechanical voice is the hardest, because my oddly perverse attempts to converse with it turn me into the sarcastic, caustic person I try hard not to be. As for the flesh and blood people, it’s not hard to have empathy for an employee (the proverbial messenger) who puts up with furious people all day and has to face a grasshopper infestation on the side . . . and to take delight in the jewels of connection that can arise in unlikely places.