contemplación

This morning, the first thing I saw when I got out of bed was this little linocut, sitting on my dresser, waiting for me to decide where to put it. I bought it in Oaxaca last week. We’d been ambling back from the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca and found ourselves in a square with displays by printmakers (mostly). We went from booth to booth, talking to young artists, choosing a few pieces to bring home as gifts. The ones I loved best were too big for me to carry in my suitcase (a vivid etching of whales, another of women swimming underwater) but no matter because there were lots of small prints. I bought this one for myself, a contemplation I can relate to. The young man spoke a little English and he was insistent that I know his name. Vale Uk. Will you write it in my notebook, I asked, and he did. It means Valley Dog, he said, smiling. Is that the name your mother gave you, I wondered, and yes, he smiled. My name. So my Valley Dog: where will I hang it? It’s 5 inches wide by nearly 6 inches long, printed on nice paper, a little lopsided. Which suits me fine. If you’ve seen my quilts or received a Christmas card from us, one of my linocuts printed on our Chandler & Price platen press, you will know that everything I do is slightly off centre.

I’ve been in a contemplative mood this week, which is perhaps why I am thinking about a place to hang Vale Uk’s sharp-toothed dog singing to the stars. Yesterday I had an appointment with the ophthalmologist to determine the current condition of my retinas. I fell on ice in 2018; the impact of the fall set in motion the process of retinal detachment and ever since, I’ve had many procedures to repair the damage, some of them in Sechelt but the last 4 or 5 at the eye care centre at Vancouver General Hospital. Yesterday, after images were taken of my eyes, the ophthalmologist examined them on his computer screen, and then examined my eyes. I was so relieved to hear that there were no new issues. I could see the images on the screen, the repairs like tiny buttons along the edges of the retinas, and a few bigger ones too. (I was told by the specialist in Vancouver that my retinas were threadbare.) So there’s that to think about.

And yesterday, before the eye appointment, I had a meeting with my new publisher, associate publisher, and editor assigned to my book. They were so enthusiastic about it and had some ideas that made me feel so grateful, not only for their praise but for their belief that this is work that deserves to be published, to find a readership. We will be working with quite a tight timeline in order for the book to be published early in 2026 but I’m ready to do what I need to do. In the night I was awake thinking. I began writing this, little by little, in the fall of 2022. By spring I had a draft, which grew and changed over the next 6 months. I didn’t know if the work was something I should even think about publishing. It’s personal, intimate, and in a way it’s my #MeToo story, complicated, troubling, and not entirely negative. It look me more than 40 years, nearly 50, to remember and record the events and what they meant. Mean. When I’d talk to John about it and confess that maybe I shouldn’t consider it as something to publish, he’d tell me all the reasons he thought it should be. He has known me almost as the long as I’ve carried the story, he knew the person at the heart of the book, and in the house we share, there are the images I write about, most of them paintings of me. And not me, which is what I explore.

So there’s lots to contemplate this week, and in the future. I want Vale Uk’s coyote (or dog; maybe both?) in a place where I can see it under its veil of stars. It reminds me in a way of the passage from Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater” that gives my book its title:

Let a body venture at last out of its shelter, take a chance with meaning under a veil of words.