Underbelly

In my building at work, there are sections of the main hall that have floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto the world. Sometimes I get up, just to stand, to stretch, to walk, to leave my computer, and I go to the water fountain to refill my water bottle. The fountain is in the hall so I leave my suite and I see the real world, the one I sort of forget when I'm in front of my computer.

From my fourth-floor hall, the trees are down below. They were particularly luminous today, golden and umber resplendent on the approach to their season finale against and thick gray sky. It was the color of trees against sky that pulled me to the window but it was the ladybug that kept me there.

On the other side of the glass a ladybug was walking up the surface, an inch and a world away from my face. I watched its soft side undulating to move in straight lines, six hips?, maybe? working in pairs to go a distance. I don't know if they're called hips on a ladybug. I don't know how to describe what I'm seeing even as I see it accomplishing its task right before me. I watch its tender parts exposed to me, feeling safe against glass to it, and then it lifts its back wings, the uninteresting ones, and then its front wings, the dotted pair we love, and in the time I have to think that I never even remember about a ladybug that it has those other wings, its gone for places I'll never see. It was wonderful, its motion, even as I know I barely understand it.

It made me think of graduate school, in people-years also an inch and a world away, when once I was trying to describe something about heightened perspective in shallow sculpture. My professor thought I had an interesting idea, possibly a new one, which is the holy grail of graduate school, but she and I couldn't find enough supporting literature to develop fully the idea I wanted to express, and on my own I couldn't identify or create the vocabulary. That's a whole other story, how I left at least two good ideas in graduate school and walked away, and how I'm completely okay with that, and how that's a perspective anathema to a successful graduate school experience and how my thesis advisor and maybe even my parents didn't understand that I was content not to pursue any farther, I had other interests pulling me in other directions. And maybe only now, where I find myself occupying a fairly high-profile position at a name-famous institution, does the played-out history support the confidence I put into my intuition that my path to happiness (as includes, luckily, success) wasn't the most obvious one before me.

The sculpture was Donatello's Annunciation, and I'm not even Christian but I have a serious thing for Annunciation scenes, and Donatello's is my favorite, and years later when the lovely husband and I were in Italy and art history was already a thing of my past, I cried when I found it in Santa Croce and stood before it. I cried then for its magnificence, and for finding myself on a pilgrimage I hadn't known I was making, and for how incredible it is how much there is to know and how little I do. The scope of potential always humbles me, and standing under my favorite Donatello after scrutinizing its image for years and being right there and still not summoning the words to describe what I now was sure I was seeing -- it was fantastically gratifying, in its beauty as a piece and in confirming my humility before the greatness of ideas.

And then I thought about this today, watching the ladybug whose parts and movement I can't describe, and lots of people, I know, feel scared to feel small in the world, and I love it. I find it safe, and somehow thrilling. It's reassuring to know I'm tiny and ignorant because that means there are a million good choices out there, not one best choice, even if others see a clear path, a lot of ways to do a thing or get from here to there or explore and discover.

That's the sort of thing I find reassuring regarding work, specifically, where I'm trying to build out an idea and I don't have a path to follow and I do have lots of support but also lots of scrutiny. And I don't know what to call the ladybug but I know to watch him fly and I never learned how to describe Donatello's shapely juxtapositions but I knew enough to get my idea advanced enough to leave it with someone else who could spend (and enjoy doing so) more time pondering it and I remember every part of my career from graduate school then to the fourth floor today has come on the confidence of following the non-standard choice, four times, now, I think, from there to here.

And it was just a ladybug, just a water break, and there goes my brain connecting dots and it's a thing I used to think was a little strange about me, this internal spigot that won't ever just relax, and now it's a strength and makes me arguably as good as anybody at shaping the thing that demands to be built out and it's with a lightness that I return to my computer, glad for the moment in which I reminded myself that I am comfortable with there being a lot to learn, a lot I don't know.

image source
Cropped image of The Annunciation by Donatello, c. 1435. The piece is not big and is positioned on the church wall at higher than a person's head, so it's really difficult to photograph. This isn't even my photo, though I have plenty of awkward Annunciation photos of my own, but we were there in 2004. Those images are on film and I'd have to scan them. Can you even imagine?

And if you really want your poor head to explode thinking about how something was carved 600 years ago in unnatural proportions so it would "read" well from beneath and how that purposeful distortion makes the very modern dependence on photography unreliable, as photography expects a perspective of its own, let me show you how my brain connects Donatello to a contemporary quilt artist named Luke Haynes. That has nothing to do with anything, but I wouldn't have been there to notice the ladybug if I didn't always love how small and bright the trees look from the fourth floor.