Today is the first day of creativity boot camp, and the assignment is ivory. One of my primary — and most difficult — tasks will be to be kind to myself and just follow what happens without being mean and critical. That’s hard for most people, I think, and if you have a cruel and hateful inner voice, as I do, it’s just shy of impossible. But I am going to try – to step out and be daring, and just follow myself without offering explanation and apology.

high school graduation, 1977

Ivory is pale skin, skin that is lit from the inside, skin that is soft and beautiful. I have ivory skin; I always have.

me and my camera

Ivory skin is one ideal, peaches and cream, pale and beautiful. There are other ideals, too – tan and bronze and cafe au lait and olive and honey. But those beautiful colors do not make ivory their opposite, ugly – ivory is another beautiful way of being in this world.

Ivory  is cream.

Ivory is precious.

I am ivory.

My hands are ivory. My hands are MY hands, they resemble the hands of my father, and my grandmother, but these are my hands.

my hands

Throughout my life, other people have commented on my skin – my lovely complexion – and I insisted on belittling it. I can’t tan, I’m pale and ugly, your skin is honey but mine is putty. But I was wrong, every time. I am beautiful ivory.

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.