Great art, or High Art as I call it, is something that communicates very strongly and without guile, the way great religious leaders teach us to live.
Some pieces do communicate obnoxiously strong but it’s obvious the artist’s intent isn’t to GIVE but to demand attention be given to himself.
Pusillanimous is my new word. My younger brother, Don, is a good example of someone entirely not pusillanimous. Without fear he sang, with an untrained voice, in a large church meeting. He sang as though he was telling the dearest message of his heart and as though his words just happened to have a tune attached. He sang his message to us, his favorite people.
Don sang in full voice, like an opera singer, he changed the rhythm of the hymn to say better what he wanted to communicate and all who listened heard with their hearts. I didn’t see one person cringe or raise an eye brow at the occasional missed notes or when his voice broke. Don gave us everything he was and had.
When I grow up I want to be like my brother and although he died young and didn’t have years and years to teach me more, I keep him in mind as I paint. When I grow up I want to live with Don and be just like him and had him in my thoughts as I drew this picture.nancymauerman.com

John holds a broom above the bristles and waves the handle in the air above his head and all around like he’s got hold of a magic wand and he’s trying to turn the flying dandelion fluff into ice cream bars.
He’s not afraid of spiders, in fact he gently escorts them out of the house and he knows the Brown Recluse Spider does not suspend its web outside in open where everybody can see, but a Brown Recluse got him a few years ago and he doesn’t want THAT to happen again.
What we see, and don’t readily recognize, we tend to immediately label as “BAD”. I’ve read the Plains Indians would break ice in the winter to bath daily, afterwards they’d rub rancid bear grease into their skin to protect it from the weather. They didn’t notice the scent but they certainly did notice the Europeans’ scent. Those crazy people’s modestly covered every part of their bodies, except hands and face, (to hold in all that smell?) and only bathed once or twice A YEAR!
Then there was a misinterpretation concerning cooking pots. A native person might be given a big old piece of buffalo, too big for his cooking pot so he borrows one. When he returns the pot it’s filled with a portion of that buffalo.
But if a pot was borrowed, by one of those light skinned new comers, it was not only NOT returned with a “thank you” portion of food, and it was not only empty (but to put the point across emphatically) it was scrubbed CLEAN, until it SHINED, INSIDE and OUT!
I blame my indoor cats for what my neighbors may see as unusual behavior. My cats need grass but they won’t eat the nice growing stuff I buy at the pet store. So I go outside and select new tender spears, pick them, washed them well, cut them up in bite sizes pieces with scissors and serve salad in little heaps on the floor. Picking grass during the day probably looks like I’m pulling weeds (all recognizable and normal to all those not in the know) but at night by FLASH LIGHT? Perhaps I appear to be having a hard time finding my pet earth worm again?nancymauerman.com

John fell in love with tiny towels. He loved to watch them expand in a bowl of water. He adored the feel of a towel as it expanded in his hand as he poured water over it, he stared into thin air for hours, although the TV was on, as he determined how many more to purchase, he gleefully ran to the phone and placed an order, then worried every day until towels arrived. Then checked and rechecked the shipping order on the computer, and finally, like Christmas, his favorite man the UPS fellow, delivered BOXES of them!
May I remind you how small the towels are? BOXES of them! John poured them out, covering his desk to luxuriate in them; he rolled them in his fingers, and put them in bags, as he numbered them, and he stared into the thin again, deciding their uses and where and how to store them.
He received quite a few more than he ordered. What a deal! Now the next step: placement of the things. He walked neighbors half way to the park with their kids, expounding the towels’ virtues and beauties. He met neighbors as they got out of their cars, he knocked on doors.
Then he was back to thin air as his occupation. What were these nice people thinking? Why couldn’t they be excited? Why couldn’t they see the value in tiny towels? What was wrong these people?!! Were they stupid?
You may be thinking the same thing as John, tiny towel are wondrous, if you’re the kind of person who reads this blog. If so, leave me a blog comment and I’ll have John contact you.
Can you imagine the public delight John would be if he had grand kids?
I sit on the porch and commiserate with him and tell him, “John I love you because your “NORMAL” is so strange.nancymauerman.com

A feral act and John adopted each other. The cat is solid gray, not yellow, but John calls her Canary. Needing to justify his commitment, exertion, costly cat food, and love he tells me,”I look out the window in the morning and if the cat is alive I know the air is safe out there.”
When John feeds Canary she often hisses and swipes at him. I seldom feed Canary but when I do I call her, “Sweetheart” and she purrs.
It occurs to me Canary may have a name for John.  nancymauerman.com

In the past, when I collected rain in large plastic barrels, I had to fight mosquitoes but no more. I found no larva in my galvanized steal barrels so this year I suspended a galvanized bucket in each plastic barrel and IT WORKED!  nancymauerman.com

My husband, John, appears to be a relaxed person but in many ways he is not. Before knee surgery, several years ago, he drew swirling long lined arrows on his limb and wrote words, instructions telling the doctor where certain important meridians were and therefore where the Doc. WAS NOT allowed to cut!
He’d just finished an Eastern Massage class in which meridians of energy were constantly discussed so he wrote those instructions in a violet stuff that could not be washed off and took months to wear away.
When he returned to the doctor for stitch removal, the doctor was still so angry he could hardly talk.
Another example of John balancing off his laxidasical persona is last night’s conversation. I have a series of bad dreams every night so when I said, “Good night” and added, “I hope you have better dreams than I do.” He said, “Oh, I will! I have my dreams all planned out!”nancymauerman.com

You’d probably be surprised at what I learned in my first public school sex education class. It was all connected to sets of cement stairs. I grew up in an old Nebraska neighborhood and walked to school past big heavy black metal rings set into the cement curbs. Not all houses hosted them so mine held a certain status because a ring lived at the bottom of my front yard steps. The house next door, a larger fancier corner house fronting the long tree filled boulevard, had a tall cement staircase of three steps as well as a hitching ring.
Our parents told us when they were young, families still rode in horse drawn carriages and needed the hitching rings to tie their horses to but everyone lucky enough to have Mrs. Platz as a teacher also received sex education in relation to those three cement steps.
Mrs. Platz was SO SORRY we were wearing knee length skirts! For the first few times she’d repeated her lament we didn’t hear it because we were too busy thinking how LUCKY and FREE we were.  We no longer had to have our skirts measured from the ground to some magical number on the first day of school and periodically after. For my first few years in school, all girls would wear skirts at an exact distance from the ground, this number, depending on age, was sent to our parents in August to they could prepare our clothes and teachers grabbed yard sticks to check on the modesty distance every time they stepped out of their class rooms. And any teacher could measure a girl’s skirt at ant time.
“Why?” all the girls would ask their moms. The answer given most often was, “So in school photographs as you girls stand in a row, all your skirts will all line up.”
That sounded lame but Mrs. Platz had the real reason. When finally we’d heard her sad lament often enough we asked her about it.
“Because men and women enjoyed themselves so much more when women’s skirts were down to the ground.” she said and, “Men would loiter at the cement steps waiting to see a women’s ankle as they stepped up into a carriage. Women didn’t show anything below the neck, wrist, or above boot heal.”
I was thinking, “So when they saw an ankle it was in a boot and they were excited?” Evidently, yes and Mrs. Platz said some men were so overcome with excitement, when they saw their new wives in nightgowns; they fainted clean away for the joy of it all. Men loved the curves of a bare ankle, the various shapes in a leg, the delicate wrist, (that’s why we wear bracelets to show that off), the soft lower and upper arms, the throat and shoulders; all the hundreds of other voluptuous curves we no notice, no longer SEE, let alone enjoy. Men and women’s enjoyment in life was been substantially diminished. What a pity!!!  nancymauerman.com