For You Blue

On embracing the ordinary

Blue on my hands. There’s a certain kind of pride I have in seeing it, the islands of ink on my ring and middle fingers. I’m not that kind of artist, the kind that can wear the proof of my practice on my skin. But I wish I was.

My favorite blue pen exploded this morning while I was writing in my journal. In the past, I would have been upset with the ruined page, but since the New Year, I’ve resolved to let my journal be messier. If not there, then where? I write in multiple colors now, put things in brackets and boxes, doodle in the margins. At a time when I’m not making much art, I like the idea of my journal being a kind of daily art project, a creative practice, for no one’s eyes but mine. It doesn’t have to be perceived to be valid, I remind myself.

But still, inevitably, I feel it again, even when I said I wouldn’t this time around the merry-go-round of motherhood: the restless slide toward discontent as I begin to worry I’m invisible, irrelevant, if I’m not making art and sharing it. Hence the brief thrill of pride at the blue on my fingers, the beacon to the outside world saying, something flows from these hands.

That itch to be extraordinary. That agitation to make something great. What a huge nuisance. When I quiet it, I am, at my core, deliciously content. When I tamp down ambition’s hot lick, then I can see the magic in these ordinary days: the stacks of mail on the dining table, the Dutch oven crusted with last night’s meal. Sun on snow. Afternoon light crawling through the house like a wild thing. A hand held in the dark, skin gone papery in the dry air. Coffee with cinnamon. Peanut butter bread. A perfect blue pen. The baby’s first smiles revealing a dimple in his plump cheek.

I am at my best when I want nothing more than this. When I let my little life be enough.

If you ask me now, I’ll tell you blue is my favorite color. But I would have been embarrassed to say so when I was younger. It’s too obvious. Everyone loves blue. How many odes have been written to this one color? Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. I always picked something less common, wanting to telegraph to the world just how creative I was. Magenta. Chartreuse. Lavender.

When I was around ten years old, I went on a trip to Salem, Massachusetts, with my mother. It was winter in Witch City. We did some touristy things, learned about all the horrible ways people were persecuted by the hysteria of the hive mind. In 1600s Salem, standing out meant death. In 1999, I wanted nothing more than to be considered interesting.

In a dark, dusty gift shop, I got my fortune read by a warlock. He asked me what my favorite animal was, and I said, kinkajou. He sniffed and pushed his glasses up his nose. You don’t have to try so hard to be different. It wasn’t much of a fortune, but I was amazed, and a little ashamed, that he’d seen some hidden part of me so clearly.

My favorite blue—the one now staining my skin—is anything but ordinary. International Klein Blue is a rich ultramarine named for Yves Klein, the French artist who first mixed it. This blue is luminous, pulsing, almost neon. It feels mythic and improbable. It has a depth you could fall into and lose yourself in if you look too long, but also a density that buoys you back up again. A color that’s a lot like love.

At the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020, I put out a record called The Caretaker. It was terrible timing. There I was, freshly signed to my dream label, and all the momentum seemed to fizzle out overnight. The big release show was canceled, the international tour was canceled, and my career promptly stalled.

Z and I had gotten married six months before, and I remember looking at him one day and feeling struck by this thunderbolt of thought. The fog of depression lifted, leaving every inch of our life together sparkling. What if the most extraordinary thing I do in this life is loving and being loved by you? It would be enough, I understood. It would be everything.

It’s a thought I’ve returned to often over the years, whenever I begin to get that prickly feeling that I should be somewhere other than where I am. This ordinary, extraordinary love—love of family, of friends, of home, of land—has enough megawatt energy to power a lifetime.

Hannah Bay calls this idea “reclaiming ordinariness.” The idea that there is depth—luminous and surprising and inspiring—in the smallest parts of your days. That you can live a big, wild, creatively rich life while also pursuing something as normal and common as building a family and a home. That quieting a certain kind of ambition is not a failure but an opportunity to choose again what is already in front of you, to love the life you have, to let it be enough.

“You don’t have to be exceptional to be fulfilled,” Bay writes. I don’t have to pick the magenta kinkajou. I love blue. I love birds.

I love this crumb-filled carpet, the folded stacks of my boys’ laundry, the moss-covered boulder beneath the maple tree.

I didn’t get to tour The Caretaker, but we did do a livestream on album release day, with Z on drums and me on piano. We strung fairy lights around the living room and invited the world into our home. There was no applause between songs, only the sound of the train in the distance and the creaking bones of the old house we loved. It wasn’t the grand Brooklyn blowout I imagined, but it was somehow fitting, to celebrate an album whose lead single was a song called “Ordinary Talk.”

I remember, again, that the magic lives in these moments, close to home, close to the heart.

My mother said to me recently that she wishes she had done more with her life. In her mid-seventies, she’s having a late-life burst of ambition, which recently took her to Mexico to give a TEDx talk. But she has always been an artist to me, and it is her ability to continue to dream and create through all phases of life—no matter the level of visibility or success—that I find truly inspiring.

Now her paintings hang all around our house. She has a way of applying the paint in colorful slashes, giving it motion and life, the kind of organized mess I try to channel in my journal. She particularly favors blue.

We hung one painting above the changing table in the baby’s room, and it is his most favorite thing to look at. It soothes him instantly. What is he seeing, with those newborn eyes? The swirls of paint depict two musicians, one playing harmonium, the other sitar—everything rendered in swoops and whorls of International Klein Blue.

I place Shea down on the table and he smiles. That dimple.

It is enough. It is everything.

This essay was written while listening, appropriately, to Elori Saxl’s excellent record from 2021, The Blue of Distance. Highly recommend!