I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for adoption.

My great grandmother, Lizzie Edith Miner, was adopted by the brother of my great great grandfather, and then married her cousin, so she is both my first cousin 3x removed AND my great grandmother.

We’ve known about my maternal grandfather’s ancestry going back to the 1400’s, and that male line has gotten most of the attention. Thomas Miner of Chew Magna, England, is a common ancestor of Ulysses S. Grant and myself.

My biological great great grandfather kind of got lost in the shuffle. He was a civil war veteran, First Company, heavy artillery for the Union Army. He later married Lizzie’s birth mother. Their names were Sylvester Himes and Ellen Shehan.

It couldn’t have been easy for a young, unmarried woman to have a baby and give her up in the 1870’s.

As an adoptive parent, this detail of my genealogy is particularly compelling to me. It has opened up a whole line of ancestors that I didn’t know about. Through internet research, I have discovered two of my 7th great grandmothers, dating back to the mid 1600’s. They are from the same area where I still have cousins living today.

I adopted a newborn girl 24 years ago, and then teen siblings out of foster care over the past two years. I thought I was the adoption pioneer in my family. I’m happy to discover that others in my past have opened their hearts and homes to a child that was not born to them, and to acknowledge the ones who, for whatever reason, were unable to raise her.

When I think of what creativity means to me, it’s the thing that made me different. It was my identity. My brothers were good at so many things, and when I compared myself to them, I felt bad about myself. I didn’t value art yet. They could do things that I couldn’t do.

When I’m creating something, I have to have a plan, or at least an idea in my head. That gets me started, but then I keep my mind open and make discoveries along the way. Ideas come to me all the time. The idea to start a project, and then the ideas about working on it. When I stop, I’m not finished. I critique it, and then I modify it. I have to step back and give my mind time to take in the composition and then meander through the brushstrokes.

Sometimes that initial gesture stays the way it came out. Other times, I make alterations. At other times, I obliterate the whole thing and start over.

I want to feel a connection with the work. I want it to represent me when it goes out on its own.

I can’t turn the creative spigot on and off. I do notice that paintings flow out for a while, then writing takes over. I make pottery whenever I get the chance. Drawing fills in a lot of the chinks. There are times when you won’t see me creating anything at all. That’s when I am experiencing other things so that I will have something to say. Life is research for art.

Here’s what I do to enhance my creativity: I acknowledge it. When a thought… a memory… an impulse finds its way down my arm and out the pen, it lets the other ones know that it found the way out, and they line up waiting for their turn.

I have to be ready with something in my hand to record it, and some surface for it to wriggle out onto. Paintbrush to canvas, ink to paper, stylus to clay, fire poking stick to sidewalk… it could be almost anything.

I’ve heard it said that cave painters weren’t the artists, but the Great Spirit, or the collective unconscious is the artist. We are just the conduit. For many years, I have said that I just need to keep a grip on the moving paintbrush or pen in order for my creative impulses to manifest themselves. We shouldn’t think of ourselves as something separate from the universe, imposing some new, innovative ideas on it. We are made of stardust, and those wriggling expressions are just a tiny exhalation of the cosmos.

I was watching a documentary the other day. In it, a woman was talking about the exceptional pottery that was produced at a certain time in a certain place. She said it was like eggshells. That is definitely not my favorite kind of ceramics!

I like pieces with some weight to them. Still, I am trying to produce pieces with thinner walls. I want to have more control over my results.

Thicker clay keeps your coffee hot longer. It is less fragile. It tells you more than “look at how perfect my cup is… DON’T TOUCH IT!”

Lately, I’ve been trying to make plaques. They could hang on a wall, they could be used as trivets, coasters or cheese boards. They keep cracking before they are dry. I think this is a case where I don’t want to go too thin.

I’ll just keep trying.

I’ve described my paintings as my fingerprints that I will leave in the world after I’m gone. I used to do acrylic finger paintings when I lived in Charlotte. Nowadays, I don’t leave my physical fingerprints in paint.

When they cleaned 500 years of smoke and grime off of the interior of the Sistine Chapel, they found the print of the heel of a hand in the fresco. They surmised that it might be the hand of Michelangelo himself.

Clay accepts my fingerprints, and I see this as part of the process.

If you see slight dimples on the bottom of a clay pot, you could assume that fingertips were used to lift the wet pot off of the bat. It’s a clue as to how the pot was made.

I don’t ask my clay pieces to be perfect. I want to see that they were made by hand. I am a beginner, and my hands are clumsy. With each piece, I learn something new. It’s not always something I can write about, or even be aware of, but every minute I spend at the wheel, my fingers become better acquainted with the clay. I learn how far I can I can go before the clay crumples, and I start again.

Every time I make something that stands on its own, I am excited. Even if the walls are a bit thick or the rim isn’t completely flat.

My favorite part is when I pick up the stylus and draw into the surface of the leather hard clay. The fish swim out, the way they swim from a pen onto paper, and even with a new medium I feel at home.

I was thinking about dappled sunlight while I daubed paint onto the canvas, my face up close to it. The colors evolved on my palette, each one a combination of what came before it.

The sunlight daubed onto my Grammy and me in a cemetery where my ancestors had been laid to rest. She was a combination of her parents. We visited their grave. She and Grampa mixed their colors to make my Mom, and then she and dad blended their hues to come up with me.

We’re all made of the same stuff, handed down from generation to generation. We each get our turn. We get to walk around, feel the summer breeze in the shade of ancient trees while the branches sway and paint us in golden light.

We get our chance to live a life and tell our story.

The colors I started with were like my great grandparents, and so I am still them with a few others mixed in.

I want to hear the stories of their lives. Without them, I wouldn’t be. Their stories are my stories. We’re all chapters of one volume.

Each chapter is full of adventure and heartbreak, love and loss. Creative solutions to challenges, and a nonchalance about the confluence that merged to give me a turn.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been repulsed by buttons. I don’t know why. I don’t remember being traumatized by a button. Even the word is uncomfortable for me.

It’s an embarrassing phobia to have, because I know it doesn’t make any sense.

My mother would dress my brothers and me in white button down shirts for church, and by the time we got out to the car afterwards, I had my dress shirt off and was in my t shirt.

Steve Jobs had the same condition. It has a name: Koumpounophobia.

I felt some comfort from learning that this is a thing. That I’m not the only one.

I guess it’s fairly common for people to be repulsed by little holes, like on a poppy pod, or even the seeds on a strawberry. Those things don’t bother me at all, but maybe they’re related. Coins don’t disturb me. The metal button on a pair of jeans is no problem for me at all. It’s the plastic ones that I hate. Especially if they’re brownish to resemble antler or wood. Those look like boogers.

Often, I have to wear dress shirts to perform weddings. I’m ok with it if I have a necktie to cover the buttons. If I take my suit coat off, I can roll the shirt cuff.

Recently I thought it might be a good idea to change my look. For many decades, my default has been t shirts or sweatshirts and jeans. I have some clothes that I’ve been wearing for 10, 15 years. Some longer.

Three years ago, when I got a job at the school, I bought a couple of button down shirts to wear to work. I wore one of them one time on the first day of school. Now I’m trying it again.

By talking about it or writing about it, maybe I can desensitize myself.

Twice this week, I wore button down shirts to work. I have new ones in several colors. Maybe I can do this.

It’s so easy to pick a famous artist to name as my inspiration, and yes, they made a lot of beautiful paintings! Those great masters were seen by the right people at the right time, and then it was easy for others to agree. They’re pretty much out of reach by people like me.

For my inspiration, I’ll choose my grandfather, who would stop the car in order to sketch the power lines with crayon. My grandfather, who did rubbings of medallions set into the floor of a crowded piazza. My grandfather, who taught art classes on the coast of Maine.

He was neither intimidated nor intimidating. I don’t know that he ever showed his work in an art gallery. I think he drew and painted because he loved to do it. I don’t believe there is any better reason.

The emotions that cause us to create are bound to come through in what we create. We don’t have to manufacture emotions in our art, though we tend to get better at expressing them as we find our own voice and visual vocabulary. This is how our style changes as we mature. It’s not always about adding a new trick. As we gain confidence, we can let go of the tricks, and respect our viewers to see for themselves. Art is not a one sided conversation.

You don’t need anyone to tell you what to see or what to feel.

Don’t follow in anyone else’s footsteps. You have footsteps of your own.