July 2022 – Glass & Lead

Holes

health pendants

1″x 2″, glass

If you read my post last week, you know that I was thinking about all the small gaps in knowledge that young kids have, and how those fill, or don’t fill, over time. This week I’ve been spending a lot of time with my grandmother, who is struggling with severe dementia. I made this pendant bigger, to represent the vast knowledge that she’s acquired over 97 years, but I’ve left even bigger spaces between the pieces of glass. The holes in her understanding are growing every day. Not sure where she sleeps, not sure who I am, she’s losing the big picture bit by bit. As I put this together I struggled to leave the spaces. In fact, after I took a photo of it I couldn’t help myself; I squeezed in more pieces to fill the empty spaces. I wish it were that easy to re-fill the spaces in her understanding, but answers to her questions just fall away leave holes as big as they were before.

Marshmallows and other Martian treats

health pendants

1″ x 1″, glass

We were talking recently about mysogyny, which comes up sadly frequently when we listen to the news, and someone jokingly piped up that it means someone giving massages. It made me remember the kids’ mistaken belief when they were very young that marshmallows must come from Mars. The pieces of glass in this pendant represent the fragments of information that we accumulate over time, piecing together an understanding of reality that sometimes still has small holes in it. The pieces don’t always fit together perfectly. As parents we have to hope that what we provide as the informational building blocks will be almost enough, and that we can teach our kids how to fill in the spaces with the right combination of humor and logic.

Precarious

health pendants

1″ x .75″, found objects

I was going to make another pendant in the series “balance” since I’m still on a quest to find the perfect balance of time, jobs, energy and interests. But this week is special. It’s the week that 988 rolls out across the U.S. I worked for more than a year to help states and territories get ready for the roll-out of this new mental health crisis line. I helped them piece together new partnerships, assess their resources, and think about what it will really take to respond quickly and fully to someone in crisis. As I balanced my big red bead on its wobbly base, I thought about how precarious the sense of balance can be for each of us. It takes just the smallest jostle to go tumbling down, and the we find ourselves in a pile on the ground it’ll be comforting to know that we can call 988 to help us get back up again.

Strapped for Time

health pendants

1″ x .75″, found objects

Someone told me today that if I was strapped for time, she’d be happy to take something off my list. It was such a lovely offer, and so respectful of what feels like a never-ending list of things to do. But the idea of being strapped for time made me take apart a watch (of course) and behind the face showing hours I found a dial with all the days of the month and an even smaller dial inside that one with the sun and moon. It made me reconsider my list. While it feels long when I look at it each day, when I take a step back and think beyond now and today, pull apart the layers of time, I have all the other days of the month, and time in the mornings and at night to get things done, and slowly I tick through my items, one at a time, until they’re gone.