Loud and Quiet at the Same Time

Shelving library books, and blending color into forms with acrylics can’t productively exist at the same time, but for me, they feed each other and allow me to recover from what each one conjures into being. They take turns passing the baton back and forth, in order to keep me in peaceful, buoyant motion as I travel through the sometimes insipid interim world to get from one to the other. I spend my days as a librarian and my nights as a painter. At night, I mix acrylics together in wild combinations to see what they might have to say as they emerge from paint layers and water. In the morning, I am lassoed away from the haze of the previous night’s creative venture, and away from my tangled bedsheets, into a library where its order is the life source of its function. The erratic waves of letting my mind fly through color is resolved as I walk into a world of structure. I find it funny that I was one of the messiest kids in the world, and I decided to become a professional organizer.

Each year I spend as an elementary school librarian, the urgency for books to return to their rightful locations loses importance. I have attempted to teach my students the structure of the library; picture books here, fiction in the back, and books never, ever left on the floor. I repeat silly rhymes, and beg them to use the “pull the book out like a bookmark next to the one you want to look at” method. We’ve done this demonstration multiple times. The library still ends up with intermixed genres, books under benches, and barrettes and glitter treasures beside the reading nook. After story time with neon-colored heroes and monsters with underwear on their heads, the chaos of book selection ensues. I check them out as seamlessly as I can until they line up and prance away, or joyously run, or trip on their shoelaces scattered like octopus arms. They are so elated, holding their books open as they attempt to multitask, walking and reading, back to their classrooms. I chuckle at the different types of child disasters that are unleashed upon the library, named by each class’ most haphazard child. The library has endured hurricane Judah, tsunami Everett, storm Angelina, etc.

Once they’ve cleared the library, it’s quiet. Then the meditation begins. I gather books, slide them into a perfect row on a cart, like dominos pressed against each other with a bookend. I take them to the shelves and slide the floppy rectangles and solid squares into place like tetris puzzle pieces. I press a flat hand behind the vertical line of books to evenly meet their bindings an inch away from the shelf edge. The quiet of the space generously lends itself to each whisper of a book’s sound; covers thunking against smooth metal, pages sighing as they close between their neighbors. Sometimes I take a step back and just look at the line up of stickers on the bindings. Alphabetical, fraction-numerical, perfectly horizontal, organized by subject and genre. This whole concept is parallel to the antiquated system that librarians have been using for centuries. I feel connected to the beginning of booktime. I fall in love with the order. As I’m moving through these motions, my mind recalls stories I’ve read, places bookmarks in my memory of the next book I’ll read, and my thoughts feel carefully placed alongside the catalog of the world’s literature, mostly in the fiction section.

When I was a kid, my mother used to play tricks on me to get me to clean my room. I was her messiest child and she tried subtle and not-so-subtle ways to let me know. “We’ll make this a competition!” she’d shout from her room as she facilitated a cleaning contest between my sisters and I to clean our room the fastest. I would eagerly close my door, and I know I immediately became distracted with notebooks and pencils. All I wanted to do was write stories and make things on paper that I liked in a world of so many things I disliked. I also realized that the prize of having a clean room at the end of the contest wasn’t worth it. She tried other strategies like reading Jillian Jigs by Phoebe Gilman to me, which was a story that playfully scolded a whimsical girl with rust colored hair for her perpetually messy room: Jillian Jigs! Jillian Jigs! Your room looks like it's been lived in by pigs! I can still hear it in my head as I make my bed in the morning.

When I was younger, I used to go into an art project without a seatbelt, jumping straight into the pallet, smearing ideas into colors at the exact instant they came to my mind. This left me with interesting results that sometimes made me proud, and sometimes added inventory to my closet. Such artistry! I thought. One can never know their true creativity if they try too hard and study the great notables of painting to ultimately become unoriginal. Planning is just an invitation to stunt creative flow.

As a librarian, I’ve learned to blend math and creativity into harmony. Now, I use a ruler and cerulean painter’s tape to measure straight lines against paper as I arrange my paint tubes in a ROYGBIV wall facing me. I line up paintbrushes in thin to thick, round to sharp. I get so invested in the composition of pre-painting, even though I can feel my ideas racing and pushing impatiently against the gates of my mind, rushing to become materialized. I have learned that my meticulous and orderly plan and preparation for the soft and comfortable landing of my creativity into the corporeal world will do my mind and existence justice.

Just as I stare with satisfaction at the books in their rightful Dewey decimal place, I stand back periodically to meditate on the progress of artwork. Being a librarian and the painter are like an inverse to the other. Library books tell stories of the untamed madness of authors and creatives contained within margins, page numbers, and bindings, only to be found when placed in the proper location for the world to uncover. Creating a painting is formed by a system within a mind that remains unnamed and can only be seen when placed within the confines of a canvas. With painting, I don’t think I ever really want to find the source of where it’s coming from. I find peace in the place where labels can’t exist, and I find peace in the place where the labels are at the heart of the search. It’s perfect, they are both so loud and so quiet at the same time.