By Celia Meade
These days I drink coffee from a fluted mug, and I love the feel of the ridges against my fingertips. Today it took me back to when we were first married. We drank café lattes from fluted French bowls, the coffee percolated on the stove, topped with milk scalded in a saucepan — so continental. Most of our dishes — a collection of chipped, mismatched porcelain — came from the Salvation Army, but those bowls we bought new, to savour our coffee ritual.
I loved those steaming bowls of latte. We’d sit on concrete planters outside The Roasterie with dogs underfoot and savour this coffee with friends, on Saturdays, on the busy road. I had an art college friend who wanted to start a business to support herself after graduation and she decided against opening a coffee shop. She said coffee had peaked. Instead, she opened a stationery store, she painted all day, and hired someone to man the store.
Those were the days before cell phones, before Starbucks, when people mailed letters to each other. Still, the stationery store was successful, even if her crystal ball was wrong. She quit painting after 10 years anyway. No gallery would take her large canvases, even though they were striking and memorable.
I especially loved one canvas she painted of a cow being lifted by a crane. The implied violence to the cow would’ve precluded me from hanging it in my house, even if I could afford it back then. Not that art has to be decorative or easy to live with.
My friend herself was not easy to live with. She did live with someone, but she always wanted a little extra on the side. She grew depressed with the artist grind, with her collection of canvases gathering dust, and became a sports agent, abandoning her own creative work.
Bowls. Bowls that are empty and bowls that are gathering dust. What do my friend’s actions say about her in relation to bowls? She was a person with unslaked desires. You could say her bowl was never full enough, she didn’t get enough attention for her art or feel her partner was enough either. (I wonder whether being an agent helped in that regard.)
I don’t have the answer, of how to manage this desire, how to create something in the face of society’s disregard to your efforts. It’s hard to do something challenging like painting, or writing, and find it unrewarded remuneratively, even if you run a business on the side to feed and house you.
There is a bowl, however, that needs filling in us, that is filled by the creative act. The trick is how to keep filling this bowl, to let it fill up and spill over. Filling the bowl will give you that satiated glow that comes of being in the creative state, in what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi termed flow. But this bowl is so fragile, it has to be handled carefully, and the creative juice that spills over has to be allowed to seep away.
I know it feels wasteful to go to all that effort, but it’s all right, it’s alright. Keep yourself feeling good, feeling full of the act of creation. This is your own imaginary bowl. Grind your beans, scald your milk. Just use it to make yourself feel good. It’s enough to feed yourself.
The Salt Spring writer and painter’s most recently published book is the 2024 poetry collection called Anatomy of the World.