Walking, swimming and Sufjan Stevens

"Going barefoot in nature immediately helps clear your energy. Stepping out onto the sand, putting your feet into the ocean, hugging a tree, all of these clear your energy. Nature is an incredible neutraliser of energy." Anita Moorjani

A lot of my routines have fallen by the wayside. The fatigue has been acting up quite a lot lately and I am technically on holidays, so I took a break from my normal day-to-day, including elements of my healing-from-cancer regime. I am aware that I put a lot of pressure on myself to do all the right things, and that pressure equals stress, which is what 'all the right things' are supposed to ease... I am still trying to find a rhythm that allows me to trust the process and not beat myself up when I fall short of my often unfeasible expectations. 

Exercise is an antidote to fatigue, though I have a tendency to overdo it and then pay for it the following day(s). And sometimes only proper rest will help. But while I haven't touched the dumbbells and haven't done any running for a few weeks, gentle exercise such as walking and swimming has been a salve.

Stripey symphony: My sister and nephews in the Burren - hats made by my sister

 

 

John and I went away for a few days (within Ireland) and did a lot of hiking - since the lockdown walking has become a huge part of our life. In recent weeks I have walked around islands (Cape Clear and Omey Island, Inis Oírr - we cycled around the latter), in forests, on beaches, Greenways, the karst landscape of the Burren, on the loops near our house, 5km along the rocky shoreline to a pub and returning via the coast road. We have walked together (often in silence) and each on our own, with family and friends, with dogs, and with strangers: I took part in a forestbathing session with a lovely group and two wonderful guides and hugged a lot of trees on my personal forestbathing forays.

The old runners I have been wearing in lieu of hiking boots are now falling apart, and on the recommendation of a friend I am tempted to buy a pair of recycled barefoot boots. Feeling the texture of the ground is like a foot massage (I also regularly walk barefoot in the garden or on the beach to ground myself) and the balancing act of walking on a rocky shore or any other uneven surface makes you use different muscles in your legs.

 

I still go swimming in the sea at least twice a week, and it was a joy to explore other beaches and find hidden swimming spots. We took my nephew to Inis Oírr and swam in clear turquoise water. On Cape Clear I waded into the water among rocks covered in shells and emerged with bleeding scrapes all over my legs, from what had felt like lightly brushing against the stones as I floated. I loved even that. Being in cold water makes me feel so alive. 

 

 On the ferry to Inis Oírr

 

I spent the Irish heatwave of 2018 indoors suffering the side effects of aggressive chemotherapy and radiotherapy and unable to handle the hot weather. Last year I stayed covered up (the advice was to do so for a year following radiotherapy) and didn't swim until September. This year I have been exposing the surgery scar on my back and my radiotherapy tattoos with abandon (and SPF 50). Sometimes those souvenirs catch me by surprise when I see them or when my hand touches the scar in the shower - it all still feels unreal - and I marvel at what my body has been able to do since I finished treatment.

 

The soundtrack to these last few months has been at least 50% Sufjan Stevens, an all-time favourite. One of the songs I have been playing on repeat for the past couple of years ("Casimir Pulaski Day") is about remembrance and cancer and I connect with it on so many levels. This concert from 2006 is one I keep returning to. I almost feel I am in the audience when I watch this, and something about the overall aesthetic and the atmosphere - the wings, the uniforms, the group dynamic on stage, and of course the music - gets me every time ("Casimir Pulaski Day" starts at the 6-minute mark).

Books: On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming

"The Misses Williamson inspired in her the gift of transforming the everyday that has enriched my whole life." Cumming, Laura: On Chapel Sands, Chatto & Windus, London 2019, p.145*

Laura Cumming writes about art like no other critic and with great sensitivity and empathy towards her subjects, evoking the life behind the work. Her books on self-portraits and Velázquez were both outstanding, and her most recent, a memoir about her mother and thus a deeply personal project, is no exception - I read it in April and still think about it almost every day.

The photograph shown in the last image above is reproduced early on in the book and then again at the very end, with a revelation that moved me to tears (not the only time while reading this book) and that has been hinted at in some articles and reviews, but I don't want to include any spoilers here.

Cumming's art critic's eye is evident throughout and she brings alive the art of famous artists (Bruegel's "Fall of Icarus" is central to the book) as well as artworks by her relatives, some acknowledged and celebrated during their lifetime - her father's, who died prematurely of cancer -, others hidden and only freed from obscurity through this labour of love - the photograph that looks like a Vermeer painting, taken by her grandfather, a "travelling salesman who would like to have been an artist", with dreams unfulfilled and buried. Her mother was a gifted artist who gave up painting when she got married, as she felt there "was only room for one painter", but she took up weaving instead, painting compositions with wool.

Cumming unravels her mother's life and the secrets around her disappearance as a young child (when she was abducted from the beach) with the help of images, constructing a biography via the interpretation of pictures both real - photographs, paintings - and those formed in the mind. She also quotes passages from her mother's own memoir, which like her daughter's is beautifully written and was a birthday gift to Laura. The book is suffused with her mother's artistic sensibility and ability to "transform the everyday".

I don't write detailed book reviews here, and I am hesitant to sum up the content. I noticed that a lot of the marketing centered on the kidnapping, a sensationalist approach that is misleading and does the book a disservice. While the book does relate a real-life mystery, there are so many layers to it: It is about family and memory, community and the individual, the psychology of identity and consciousness, art, the power of images and objects, silence and lies, class, the sea, and most importantly, about love in its many forms. It is a delicate and intimate piece of life writing and an exquisite meditation on loss.

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*The US title is Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

See also: Laura Cumming talks about On Chapel Sands in this interview in The New York Times

Portraits

I have been painting and drawing a lot of people and animals, especially portraits of family and friends. If anyone is interested, I posted some work-in-progress photos of two of the paintings above on my long-neglected art blog (though the plan is to merge the two blogs in an effort to simplify). At one point I had all my nephews keeping me company in the studio, albeit in 2-D!

While I sometimes have people sit for me, the examples shown here were all based on photographs and screenshots of paused videos - the latter works very well, as I can choose the 'pose' from a much wider range. I tend to start out with a very rough sketch and let the face emerge gradually.

In Enda's portrait (third picture above - when he was one year old and pre-haircut, for those who know him only with short hair) he is wearing a soft knitted top my sister had made for him that is tied at the back with a ribbon. I loved painting the stocking stitch and the ribbon and the light in his hair. With Henry (fourth picture) it was the oval of the snap fastener on his little shoulder that caught my attention - sometimes it is those small details that I find particularly poignant.

Love, compassion, light: Celia Paul's Self-Portrait

This memoir by the artist Celia Paul has accompanied me for the last few months, moving from bedside table to coffee table to dining table to my desk in the studio. I read it almost in one go, but I have been going back over certain passages and revisiting the reproductions of her work and the photographs.

While substantial parts of the book are about Lucian Freud (another artist whose work I admire - Celia Paul was one of his lovers and muses and they had a son together), she emphasises that he is made part of her story instead of the other way around, "as is usually the case".

I was more intrigued by her relationship with her family and her mother in particular and the work that arose (and continues to arise) from those family bonds. Her paintings of her mother and of her sisters are very moving and tender. Paul does not consider herself a portrait painter, but rather an "autobiographer and chronicler" of her life and her family, telling their story in images.

The memoir charts finding her own voice as an artist and breaking away from the role of the muse. So many artist couples have played out the dynamic of the woman making sacrifices that enable their partner to thrive. Paul shares a lot of insight into the challenges and obstacles to becoming an artist that women face and offers up her experience of working out "a strategy" to carve out the solitude that is essential for making art. This involves not living with her husband, as she needs to have her own private space*. She also talks about the conflict between motherhood and artistic creation, how being with her son makes her unable to work, as "all my concerns are for him" when he is present, and how she feels the guilt and separation acutely.

This interview includes interesting observations about Paul's connection to other artists (I love her voice; she emanates such calm and poise). She feels "this moral quality to Constable, this kind of love and compassion that comes through...", informed by familiarity with the subject matter: "you can't do anything unless you understand it".  As she writes in her memoir,

"I only ever work from people and places that I know well. This insider knowledge gives me freedom to take liberties with the forms and structures of the faces and figures, the clouds, the waves, the houses. [...] If I know my subject well, it's almost as if I don't need to look at them in order to give them intense attention, and yet I need their physical presence."

(Paul, Celia: Self-Portrait, Jonathan Cape, London 2019, p.3)

This is what gives her paintings their intimate and empathic quality. Even in reproductions in print or on the screen the spectral light in her paintings is powerfully conveyed - her work contains a "juxtaposition of the mystical with direct observation" (p.5). Her mother would regularly travel to London from Cambridge, climb the 80 steps to Paul's flat and pose for long periods of time, during which both artist and sitter would enter into a meditative, elevated state. Paul often uses spiritual language to describe the process of painting people, and her sisters and husband also give their perspective of what it is like to sit for her, by all accounts a transcendental experience.

In the interview the curator asks her about the evanescence of her seascapes and Paul reveals that she only really started working from water after her mother's death, when "forms broke up, nothing seemed permanent. So my subject seemed to be water, in a new way." She also talks about her "struggle between dark and light", with the light always emerging from the darkness, and the influence of Goya, how the light behind the figures in his family group paintings seems to be the subject of the painting, and how there is a "melancholy feeling about that, that the light will actually outlast the figures".

The language in the book is often sparse, and this minimalism, coupled with clear-eyed honesty, carries an even stronger emotional impact. There is one passage, when describing her mother's childhood, that relates a tragedy her mother was witness to and haunted by, and it is something I haven't been able to get out of my head.

Gwen John was another inspiration that is apparent in the two paintings above and below, in the containment and stillness of the self-portraits (John is also another example of a female artist having an all-consuming affair with an older male artist - Auguste Rodin. It appears Freud expected a similar subservience from Paul).

The book is also a meditation on the intersection between the written word and visual art. Paul says writing the memoir - she had not written much previously, apart from early diary entries and poems, and found 'freedom of speech' in painting instead - has affected her art: "I feel a new assurance in my painting, through a growing confidence about using words again."(p.5)

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* Her husband Steven Kupfer wrote this essay about Celia Paul's art: "Celia Paul - Painting her Life"

On scanxiety

Photo taken in Italy last year - my first swim in the sea since my diagnosis

the marks on my back after a session on my 'bed of nails'

"All patients have complicated relationships with their scans [...]. We first learn we have cancer from scans, then learn from them if that cancer has shrunk or disappeared, then learn if it has come back. Scans are like revolving doors, emotional roulette wheels that spin us around for a few days and spit us out the other side. Land on red, we're in for another trip to Cancerland; land on black, we have a few more months of freedom." - Bruce Feiler

I am so relieved that I have 'a few more months of freedom' before my next appointment.

Cancer - or rather my own cancer - hadn't been on my mind that much until the scan date approached. Other things, both in the world at large and my personal life, have been taking up a lot of my mental energy, and when I veer towards fear I ground myself in activities I love, such as painting and reading. My cancer-related thoughts are mainly with people I know who are facing tough decisions or are running out of options. Right now I am lucky.

And yet, knowing too much about my diagnosis, the awareness of the high risk of a recurrence is always at the back of my mind. My therapist once said that any fears we have as humans, when peeled back, ultimately reveal a fear of death. And scanxiety is pretty close to that original fear.

While I was calm overall, the week between the scan and getting the results I felt the familiar tension, and since the scan the fatigue has been acting up.

 

The scans that fall into June are also a painful reminder of what could have been, as my due date was June 30, 2018 - instead, around that time I found myself at my lowest during chemoradiation for the inoperable lung cancer I had been diagnosed with as a fit 34-year old non-smoker (I did have surgery as well, but it is not the standard protocol for the type of stage III the cancer was). I was propped up on our daybed, unable to move and with excruciating side effects that many people would find TMI.

 

In December 2017, after a week of bleeding, I had braced myself for the 12-week scan at the gynaecologist's, willing the image to show growth. Fast-forward to my regular oncology scans, and it is the opposite - staring at different black-and-white images at appointments during treatment, looking for shrinkage and disintegration; the fear when the lymph nodes didn't respond as hoped; and now, post-treatment, always wishing for a 'nothing'. And repeatedly having to confirm I am definitely not pregnant each time so I can have the CT scans.

But all of that is a small price to pay for being able to live a fairly normal life, or a 'new normal' post-cancer life. 

Something that isn't talked about that often is how scanxiety also affects those close to the patient. In fact, it can be worse for family members or spouses. My deepest worries are about how my diagnosis affects John and my family, though I try not to entertain the spiralling thoughts about what might happen. And I am no stranger to what it is like for close relatives - my dad died of cancer and my mum was diagnosed after me. The feeling of helplessness and the fear are definitely worse when it is somebody you love, and I am feeling both right now, as my mum has to have a biopsy because her last check-up didn't go as we had hoped, so there is more waiting.

These days I am frequently reminded of 'lifeshocks' - they keep coming. 

My coping mechanisms include my usual rituals and this time especially the return to sea-swimming and my new 'bed of nails', aka an acupressure mat, a birthday present from John, who knew I wanted one. I sometimes do yoga nidra while on the mat and often fall asleep on it.

Creativity is another tool, and Julia Barnickle's wise words soothed me when I felt overwhelmed. This is what she has to say about scanxiety and anxiety in general - I aspire to her serenity. She also uses the exercises from The Artist's Way and believes creativity to be an important part of her healing.

I read an interview with an actress whose brother had died, and she talked about how around the same time work got very busy for her and the shock gave her a surge in energy. Looking back over shocks big and small I find that to have been true for me at certain points - trauma often paralyses you, but sometimes it can fuel your creativity and productivity.

Speaking of creativity, I am grateful for all the commissions coming my way and am donating half of the money from art sales since my return to work to charities and to our local cancer centre, which has been a great support for the last two years.  

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Here is another article on scanxiety, including tips on how to cope with it.

Also, it would be lying by omission if I didn't admit that sometimes the only thing that works to pause the thoughts is binge-watching a series (most recently Self-Made).

Natural beauty: skincare and dental

The contents of our bathroom cabinet are not all 100% plastic-free, but where possible we buy and use natural products in sustainable packaging or homemade versions.

I have been using a menstrual cup for around 15 years, since my early twenties, and more recently got some period underwear as well - and a portable bidet as a gift from my mum after my sister recommended it (that's all for another post - no taboos here!).

I don't buy cotton wool or similar. For taking off make-up I use muslin cloths that I store in a glass jar beside the basin. They also work well as a hot cloth for cleansing (I love Dr Hauschka's cleansing milk. The smell reminds me of my mum - it is the only product I currently have that has that white creamy scent idiomatic of so many lotions - something redolent of baby care and sunscreen and very comforting).

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Another cleanser I bought a good while ago (a little goes a long way) and use as my main face wash is a Dublin Herbalists one that comes in a 'jam' jar. The consistency is like something between honey and liquid wax, so when you massage it into your skin you can almost feel it drawing out dirt and impurities. Adding water then turns it milky, and I take it off with a muslin cloth and warm water. As the brand name suggests, this is an Irish product.

I still use the frankincense and geranium moisturiser my sister made for me, and for sun protection I either use REN's SPF 30 or, when I want something akin to foundation (I rarely use foundation; I prefer a bare face), Ginzing SPF35 Hydrating Prettifying Finisher by Origins. It has a subtle glow and shimmer. I used to have Dr Hauschka's bronzer, which was nice and light. 

I tend to sleep with nothing on my face, but I do love Dr Hauschka's Night Serum, which goes on as an imperceptible layer. My skin feels softer and plumper and overall healthier the following morning. 

The Ben & Anna toothpaste comes in a jar with a wooden spatula. The charcoal dental floss feels tougher than conventional floss, but you get used to it. I never bought the dispenser; I just get the refills - we simply use scissors to cut off the length we need (it's crazy that the floss by the main dental care brands is mostly sold in plastic dispensers). We have Mable bamboo toothbrushes, and I like that they have a 'heavy bottom' and thus stand on their own, which means they don't get gunky sitting in a glass.

My sister also made me a jar of deodorant over a year ago that is still half full (at the moment I use it every day, but for a while I alternated with a geranium one I still had - also natural - which I used for exercise and when I expected fear sweat, as the jasmine one is not heavy-duty - but it still works well. I must ask her for the recipe).

Finally, rosewater is lovely as a toner or a hydrating mist and, of course, being rose, it is linked to the heart chakra. After everything that lung cancer and treatment did to that area of my body, I take extra good care of it, so one of my rituals is to spray rosewater on my chest. I used to buy this for other people and hadn't bought a bottle for myself in a while, and then, last year, in one of those examples of synchronicity, Angela in our local healthfood shop put one into my bag as a present, and now it is part of my routine again. And it is an Irish product.

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As always, none of the above are affiliate links and I do not get paid for endorsing products here; I just post things I like!

Flowers

From Lindgren, Astrid & Hartung, Louise: Ich habe auch gelebt. Briefe einer Freundschaft, Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 2016

I have been filling a sketchbook with botanical illustrations, experimenting with different styles, though most of them are quite realistic. I adore both the highly detailed botanical drawings of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and more stylised modern interpretations and am not sure where to go with mine, but enjoying the ride.

The ones in my sketchbook are all done with watersoluble coloured pencils. I only started rendering flowers in oils and acrylics as the main subject of a painting in recent years. Art history is filled with stunning examples of floral art, and they are hugely popular as a theme, yet for some reason I had only ever used them as part of a composition and rarely let them take centre stage.

I love Georgia O'Keeffe's big and bold sculptural paintings of flowers opening and blossoming. And cut-paper flowers and of course the real thing, fresh and ephemeral or preserved: For my birthday my nephew gave me a card with pressed flowers (which I will frame) and a beautiful necklace containing a daisy (and my sister's card was her own gorgeous botanical drawing). I've been revisiting The Paper Garden with Mary Delany's intricate botanical collages created with scissors and coloured paper and thinking about the lovely gesture of adding flowers to diaries and letters. Throughout their correspondence Louise Hartung would send Astrid Lindgren flowers in the form of bouquets and bulbs or pressed and attached to paper.

Since Christmas we've had two different amaryllises indoors, red and pink. Ever since my older sister pointed it out, I like to think of it as the plant of the three Wild sisters - my sisters' names are Anke and Sibylle, so bits of our three names are included in Amaryllis, in chronological order (I'm the middle child...).

The red variety, as so many red flowers, is a symbol of love, but in Victorian times, the amaryllis was associated with pride (which was seen as a good attribute, denoting beauty and strength) and in China the red amaryllis signifies luck. A pink amaryllis is a friendship symbol and I have been drawing it on cards. All varieties represent hope as well. Our two specimens brightened up our rooms in the darker months before the garden came into its own.