Taking Flight: Creative Waters (Offering 9.2)
Making space for life, art, and the choices that shape us.
As Taking Flight continues, this chapter moves through a season of deep creationāart, water, pregnancy, and the decisions that come when life is asking us to open, even before we feel ready.
(If youāre new to Eclosion: An Artistās Path to Power and Peace, start at the beginning. Or visit my Memoir Hub for a full table of contents with links.)
Creative Waters
Standing high on scaffolding at the WET Science Center, my tool belt slung low over my hips, accentuating my round belly, I steadied myself. Reaching up with my impact driver, I screwed in the last bolt that would support the frame from which One Water would be suspended. Feeling strong, I descended the ladder to find my collaborator for the WET Science Center looking at me with something akin to awe, saying, āI will never forget you up on that scaffolding, using power tools while pregnant.ā
I smiled, remembering how just a few months earlier, I couldnāt picture myself doing a single Art in Action project while pregnant. Now, I was swimming through the waters of not just one, but three large projects, all focused on water, while our baby swam in the waters within.
Two of the projects were hanging installations, each for a separate water education center. Jointly, I shared workshops with over 2,000 people, mostly at middle and elementary schools, all of whom created art for one of the projects. Iād come home from those workshops, sinking down on the futon couch in our cabin exhausted, feet swollen, and quite pleased with myself. It felt so right to be co-creating art about water with our baby living and growing in the waters of my body.
As the weather warmed and I wrapped up those projects, I moved on to the painting of a large-scale estuary mural for the Puget Sound Estuarium. This was a particular treat as my dear friend and collaborator Annie painted with me. Annie was the same brilliant biologist and artist I worked with on the Plastic Whale Project, and she was pregnant too.
It was a tall, exterior mural, requiring multiple levels of scaffolding. Setting up the scaffolding while almost eight months pregnant blew my earlier exhaustion right out of the water. You should have seen us up there with our round belliesāfeet braced on the planks, continually realigning our centers of gravity as we drew large paintbrushes across the wall, back and forth, brush stroke upon brush stroke, laying down layers of green and blue that brought a translucent quality to the water as it deepened from estuary to open ocean.
This work, difficult as it was, steadied me as the drama at Delphinia kept getting more tangled and yet, somehow stagnant at the same time. I am not a patient person by nature, and with the nesting impulse on overdrive, I was long past ready for a resolution with Delphinia. I kept leaning into patience with Shon, waiting for him to make a decision about how to move forwardāI may have been carrying our child, but Delphinia was his first baby. As the weeks and months wore on, the stress of our living situation only got worse, and I was very worried about bringing our child into the world in the midst of this stress. With no conclusion in sight, I decided I couldnāt do it anymoreāI was not going to subject myself and my baby to living in that uncertainty any longer. The time had come for me to take action.
When Shon got home from work that day, I held his hand and looked into his beautiful hazel eyes. Then I gave voice to the reality that had been building inside of me for weeks: I couldnāt live at Delphinia any longer. I told him how much I loved him, and that I wouldnāt ask him to give up Delphinia for me, but I couldnāt stay. I needed to be somewhere more stable when the baby came. It was time for him to make a choice.
Shon had poured his heart and soul into Delphinia for almost two decades. Heād nurtured the land and his relationships there. Heād built a wood-fired kiln and one of the cabins with his bare handsāif the stories are true, he built that cabin wearing only shoes and a tool belt. He maintained the buildings and put in a well. His ceramics studio and kiln were there. In many ways, Delphinia was his identity. Giving it up had to have been one of the hardest choices heād ever faced.
He chose our unborn child. He chose me.
Preparing to Open
With the decision to leave Delphinia made, we turned our sights to buying a house. Shonās job at Evergreen gave us the income we needed to get a home loan, something neither of us had really thought was possible before. And so, as we began untangling ourselves from Delphinia, we also began the house search.
Prices were high in 2016 and after living on such idyllic land for so long, it was challenging to find places that we really loved and fit our budget. We visited house after house with our realtor. Each time, as we walked the land and checked out outbuildings for potential studio space, heād ask: āDonāt you want to look inside?ā If we didnāt like the exterior, we wouldnāt bother with the house.
I so wanted to be settled into our new place for the birth, but that was looking less and less likely. My due date got closer and closer as we rejected home after home and I kept reminding myself that we just needed one house. Just one.
Eventually, we made an offer on a beautiful old home with a funky floor plan, on two acres of land. It had a shop, studio, and additional building that the owners used as an antique store. Weād initially crossed it off our list because it was out of our budget. But, desperate for a place to land, I came up with the idea to turn the antique store into a rental, so that we could afford the higher mortgage. With Shon and my carpentry skills, we made a plan to purchase the property and remodel the antique shop.
The negotiations on the house took forever, and my goal of being settled into our new home before our baby arrived wasnāt going to happen, so we set about readying our cabin for the babyās arrival. Since our midwife didnāt want me navigating the steep stairs after the birth, we removed the wood stove from the main floor to create space and brought our bed downstairs to the āliving room.ā
It was high summer. Iād finished up my major projects a couple of weeks before my due date. Shon was working as the supervisor of construction services at Evergreen, a temporary position he applied for when the previous supervisor retired. It was a nice bump in pay but kept him very busy. I spent my free time practicing prenatal yoga, swimming, and getting ready for the babyās arrival.
Shortly before my due date my womenās circle hosted a Mama Blessing for me, ritualizing my transition into motherhood. Each woman brought meaningful beads and strung them together to make a birthing necklaceāa symbolic, yet tangible offering of their presence and support during the birth. I sat like a queen as they took turns coating my belly and breasts in plaster, sharing birth stories and advice, pouring love into me as they made a belly cast, adding a red paper heart at my request.
I was ripe with anticipation, filled with the wisdom of mothers.
Where in your life are you being asked to create spaceāfor something new, something tender, or something that needs stability to grow?