Melissa Stephens Art

Here’s a nerdy but likely not surprising fact about me, I LOVE the English language! Mrs. Haas, my 12^th grade English teacher, was a gem. Fresh out of college, she taught my mother and, as she neared retirement, she taught me. She inspired my mom to study English in college and, later, to also teach the subject to high school seniors. She inspired me as well to learn and to love everything about English: reading, writing, vocabulary words and, you can verify this with my kids, even grammar. She captivated the entire class, even those who hated English, when she read aloud. Her voice brought Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities to life, as if Madame Defarge herself was sitting in our classroom, knitting. In addition to her oratory skills, she diagrammed sentences on the blackboard like they were works of art. She taught the rules of grammar in a way I’ve never forgotten; they made sense. They were logical, like solving a complicated Algebra equation or predicting the products of a chemical reaction. Science, math, and English, along with music and sports, formed the bedrock of my high school experience. Looking back, I’m sure what I loved about all of them were their clearcut rules. Why some subjects even had laws thanks to Newton et al and I gravitated to them like that fallen apple pulled to earth. Art? Art had no rules. Unfortunately that meant I made no time for it.

Mrs. Haas loved introducing us to new vocabulary words. She said that if you used a word 10 times it was yours for life and, at 17, I wanted to add as many new ones as I could to my linguistic treasure chest. At 60, I’m still delighted when I discover a new word. Recently, the art group I belong to exhibited work in our 2^nd annual gallery show. This year, we asked one of our members, who is also a beautiful poet (that’s like being an English language rocket scientist in my opinion!), if we could use one of her poems as inspiration for our visual art. In a marvelous grouping of different styles and mediums and interpretations, we displayed our collective artwork together with her poetic words on one of the gallery’s walls. It was sensational! This was the poem she chose for us (included with permission):

GRATITUDE

Rainfall,
liquid gold,
bathes parched earth
in life-giving water

One Goldfinch leaves
the shelter of trees,
forsakes sanctuary
to perch
on a feeder.
His voice lifts,
his golden throat throbbing
with each sweet note
he sings – his paean
to the rain.

Isn’t that what
gratitude is:
tenderness toward
the wilderness
in the world
and in ourselves;
grace in the face
of adversity;
a song to the rain?

Rebecca Pierre

Did you catch that word in the second stanza, paean? Holy new word to me! I ran for my dictionary in search of the definition:

Paean: a song of praise; a hymn of triumph; a work that expresses enthusiastic praise for its subject

It took me months to create my piece of art (featured above) in response to Rebecca’s lovely poem. Many ideas and many attempts frustratingly hit the recycling bin. Finally, I found my way, not surprisingly, by returning to some of the tools and materials I enjoy most: a charcoal pencil (the goldfinch); scraps of collage paper (the bird’s feeder); and stitching with my sewing machine (the church window-like frame). My bird, like the one in the poem, is lifting her voice, singing her “paean to the rain” (the drops falling from the upper right corner).

My husband and I spent this past week at our lake house in northeastern Pennsylvania. Roughly an hour north and west of Scranton, it sits smack dab in the middle of nowhere, in the rolling Endless Mountains. There I find it easy to contemplate wilderness: the 10 Canadian geese (a skein!) honking their way south, landing on the lake’s calm waters, a brief respite, before resuming their biannual pilgrimage; the 19 wild turkeys (a rafter!) grazing each morning in the field where we play spirited games of badminton in the summer; the sole great blue heron stealthily high stepping along the shoreline in search of sustenance; the lone deer emerging from the woods to drink from the water’s tranquil edge, creating a fleeting image of two deer, one who will turn back into those woods for protection from hunters in months to come and the other, an ephemeral reflection in the lake’s mirrored surface; and the solitary bobcat, confidently striding toward the house, his padded feet soundless, his keen eyes focused on our bird feeder’s ready-made snack.

Echoing Rebecca’s words, in this place I find a balm for my soul, a sanctuary from the wilderness constructed by our society’s deep divisions. In this place I find grace, a hard-earned acceptance of the tangled wilderness that resides within me. In this place I find solitude, a companionable friend, that eases my anxiety and coaxes me toward hope. Like English and Algebra, this place makes sense. I’ve been coming here since my early 20’s yet, no matter how much time passes, it feels the same. Until, like the delight of discovering a new vocabulary word or of watching a mature bald eagle teach her juveniles to hunt, it surprises me with wonder. Here I feel free, childlike, grounded, at peace. Here I lift my voice and sing my paean, my song of praise, my hymn of gratitude.