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Meera Lee Patel

ARTIST, WRITER, BOOK MAKER
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Dear Somebody: On dreaming.

March 1, 2024

UNTITLED #1: A collaboration between me (age 6) and my child (age 3)

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

N and I sit at the dining room table and color a gigantic set of fabric butterfly wings for her to wear. She’s been working on them since the beginning of January. She hasn’t worn them once; I’m not sure she ever will. She’s more interested in the making, and so we color: her, a medium heart, mostly outside the lines, and me, a small circle, mostly inside the lines. Hers is better. 

We chat a little here and there, but mostly we are each lost to our thoughts. 

As an author who wants to write for children, and as a person who has children, I find myself returning to my childhood often—perhaps too often. I mine my past for particular memories and recall the feeling of experiencing them. For a handful of scenes, I am transported viscerally: even after 30 years, my body holds onto the feeling. It’s chosen to, though I don’t always understand why. For the rest of my childhood, I am simply a member of the audience, watching a tape that has been rewound and replayed so many times that the quality is beginning to wear. 

When I feel nostalgia for childhood, it’s mostly for a period of life where I had an abundance of time: time to practice whistling; time to wake up and read, half falling out of bed, letting the blood rush to my head; time to run until the breath caught in my chest, astonished at how my own body worked; time to think about nothing and no one or everything and everyone; time to take multiple hours to eat a lollipop, and then still wrap it back up for later; time to mush and mix—sand, flour, water, spices, broken glass, tin foil, paint, grass, mud—just to see how it feels. Time to be bored. Time to dream.

For many, childhood is a harrowing time, full of unknowns and a loss of control. It is impossible to become—a big kid, a grown-up, an author, a mother, no matter how badly you want to—until one day, you are. There is no guarantee; there never is. Children understand that, but children also know how to dream, and dreaming provides immunity. 

For the last 15 years, I’ve cast off dreaming in favor of pragmatism—and in all truth, this method has served me well. I am practical and (mostly) disciplined. I set achievable goals. But when N came home from school and told me she’d used a very tall ladder to climb into the sky and take a nap in the clouds, I found myself in awe of her imagination and disappointed in my own, unsure of when I’d lost my ability to dream. 

I color another circle. I think about how dreams are barriers that stands between the crags of life and hopelessness. I think about how believing in a different world is essential to creating any change: to changing the way we think, feel, and behave. I think about how expansive dreaming is, how it becomes easier to remain open—and accepting, if you can consider alternate possibilities, even those unknown. 

I think about how N was my dream and now she is her own, and how much good I’ll have done if I can teach her to remember that. I think about how open and forgiving she is. Her unprejudiced spirit gives her more clarity than I could ever hope to have.

“I like this color blue,” I tell her. “It’s soft but also bright.”

“I like that one, too,” N tells me. “I love all of the colors that I know.”

TUESDAY

UNTITLED #1. Cut paper collage and acrylic paint on paper. Begun in 1993, completed in 2023.

I made this paper dinosaur when I was six, and N painted this acrylic landscape toward the end of 2023. A few days ago, I collaged them together. Our first collaborative painting. 

It is the first, I hope, of many collaborations—paintings, books, choreographed dances, and of course, building our relationship. The biggest collaboration; the best dream.

WEDNESDAY

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” —James Baldwin

THURSDAY

Today I sat on a panel discussion with a few peers to discuss book publishing and how books have helped build our brand. The conversation was interesting for me, and I enjoyed learning more about my peers, each of us with our own distinct paths and challenges. A career in book publishing is not simple or easy for most of us, but it is possible—and if you love books, that’s what matters most.

My own experience with my brand and how I view creativity has changed so much, especially in the last two years. The conversation moved quickly, and I didn’t get a chance to speak about what I really wanted to, which was: treating your brand as a living, breathing thing. 

If enough of you are interested, I’ll write about this topic for the next edition of my Craft series. 

If you missed yesterday’s panel talk (with Katie Daisy, Rebecca Green, Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw, Jane Mount, and Meenal Patel), you can watch the replay here. 

FRIDAY

To be a good
ex/current friend for R. To be one last

inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship
advice for L. To be advice

for my mother. To be a more comfortable
hospital bed for my mother. To be

no more hospital beds. To be, in my spare time,
America for my uncle, who wants to be China

for me. To be a country of trafficless roads
& a sports car for my aunt, who likes to go

fast. To be a cyclone
of laughter when my parents say

their new coworker is like that, they can tell
because he wears pink socks, see, you don’t, so you can’t,

can’t be one of them. To be the one
my parents raised me to be—

a season from the planet
of planet-sized storms.

To be a backpack of PB&J & every
thing I know, for my brothers, who are becoming

their own storms. To be, for me, nobody,
homebody, body in bed watching TV. To go 2D

& be a painting, an amateur’s hilltop & stars,
simple decoration for the new apartment

with you. To be close, J.,
to everything that is close to you—

blue blanket, red cup, green shoes
with pink laces.

To be the blue & the red.
The green, the hot pink.

—When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen

xx,

M


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In Life Tags Motherhood, Parenting, Parenthood, Art, Collaboration, Writing, James Baldwin, America, Publishing, Craft, Katie Daisy, Rebecca Green, Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw, Jane Mount, Meenal Patel, Meera Lee Patel, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Chen Chen, Poetry
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Dear Somebody: After some time away.

July 15, 2022

A page from my recent sketchbook in Rabastens, France

I spent the larger part of June finalizing my visual journaling retreat with my friend and skilled illustrator Rebecca Green. Over the course of 10 days, we taught 17 students how to capture everything they saw and felt within the pages of their sketchbooks. We focused on both the emotional and technical aspects of translating moments into drawings, and by the end of the trip, we all went home having learned more about art, community, and ourselves than we'd bargained for.

I plan on writing more about our France trip later this month, but for now, today's letter is a jumble of the many things circling my mind over this past week.

MONDAY

I've been away for 11 days. This is the first time I've been away from N in her entire life, and I'm nervous to go home. Will she still want me to be there? I climb out of the Lyft and up the four steps to my front door––a heavy wooden number punctuated by a dozen panels of glass. T swings the door open and N peeks out from behind him. He's grinning, excited to see me, but N is quiet, even solemn.

“Look who it is!" T says, encouraging her to react. "Mama is home!”

N touches my knees quietly before toddling away, and in that moment, I feel relief. At least she's not upset, I think to myself, not knowing what the following 3 weeks will bring.

I didn't know then that N could hold so many tears. I didn't know that my little laddu wouldn't want me to brush her teeth or give her a bath. I didn't know that she'd scream hysterically for her dad, kicking herself out of my arms to create more distance between the two of us. I didn't know then that my 11 days away would plant 23 days of screams, tears, and confusion in the body of a small child who no longer wants her mother.

I didn't know. I didn't know.

TUESDAY

The best part about traveling is that time stops being itself, instead choosing to stretch on and on and on. For the first time in years, I sit and work in my sketchbook for as long as I want––without interruption. Such joy! Such absolute luxury. I know it won't last long, so I try my hardest to be in the moment. And I do. And I am.

Some sketchbook pages from France are here, here, and here; Becca's sketchbook pages from our trip are here. My favorite sketchbooks these days are from Koba, Emma Carlisle, Cromeola and Sean Qualls.

WEDNESDAY

I think about my friendships frequently: how to nurture and support them, how to be a better friend, and also, how to cut a not-quite-right friendship loose. T and I talk about community regularly. We witness our own friendships stiffen or expand through the various seasons of our lives. More than once, I ask him if I desire too much from my friendships. Echoing my friend Cyndie, he reminds me that not everyone is for me––and that it's also OK to aim higher–-to want more.

“I want more friends, more casual impromptu hangs, more dropping by with dinner, more walking and talking and advice sessions, more kids underfoot, more asking for and saying what we need, more hands to carry heavy boxes, more laughing and cackling and snorting, more children farting at the dinner table, more of what makes life messy, less painful, more sweet. I want to give and receive, to always be swapping Tupperware and food, all of us crowded together like curvy lumpen mangoes in a baking dish.”––from Angela Garbes' latest book Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

Friendship means different things for different people. Not everyone is in it for the same reasons, and quite frankly, not everyone is interested in the amount of effort a beautifully messy, loving friendship requires. But Angela Garbes, I think, is.

THURSDAY

I am reading: The Land of In-Between, Planning for Disaster, How to Cope with Radical Uncertainty, The Sour Cherry Tree

I am listening: Baquenne, Carla Bruni, Yves Montand

I am watching: Ernest & Celestine, based on the original children's books series by Gabrielle Vincent. Becca & I watched it on the plane ride home from France and were immediately taken by the soft watercolor and ink washes and the endearing tale of two friends who choose each other, again and again.

FRIDAY

To love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you down like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think,

How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.

–The Thing Is by Ellen Bass

Thanks for reading and for being here with me. See you next week!

xo,

M


To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

In Sketchbook Tags Rebecca Green, Artistic Retreat, Teaching, Motherhood, Traveling, France, Sketchbook, Emma Carlisle, Koba, Cromeola, Sean Qualls, Friendship, Community, Angela Garbes, Yves Montand, Carla Bruni, Baquenne, Ernest & Celestine, The Land of In-Between, Planning for Disaster, How to Cope with Radical Uncertainty, The Sour Cherry Tree, Ellen Bass, Poetry
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Meera Lee Patel is an artist, writer, and book maker. Her books have sold over one million copies, and been translated into over a dozen languages worldwide.

Her newsletter, Dear Somebody, is a short weekly note chronicling five things worth remembering, including a look into her process, reflections on motherhood, and creative inspiration.

Join thousands of other readers by subscribing.


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