While driving with my mother through town I did happen to glance absently at the windows of a building, a beautiful building in Belvidere. What I there did see was a possibility, a beautiful and engaging possibility.
I'm officially, seriously serious about opening my own business. I feel as though the myriad threads of my life are about to come together into a Big Beautiful E: E for everything! E for ecstacy! E for embrace!
I've been thinking about our art night gathering. I am looking forward to the relief of expression that comes with your companionship. I've been thinking about stories I want to tell; draw out. I kind of feel like I'm getting to know myself again, remembering ideas that I've had and never followed through with. This is fantastic!
I've learned/am learning that I like to approach a drawing with an idea or story or feeling in mind, something I want to convey because it has intrinsic value. I've learned that an insecurity I've felt as an artist, until now, is that I have nothing to say in my work, let alone anything interesting. (Where did I learn to judge my ideas/myself so severely? ) I am learning that the dialogue in my head is interesting, if only to me and very much worth pursuing. I feel like a conscious co-creator with Chaos and Joy. It's beautiful to think like this, see this, us, earth.
Just a few months ago I'd have told you that this passage struck the heart of me to pieces because it reflected my own intimate thoughts so clearly; I had grown to resent and avoid my sketchbooks and journals...
At first the passage of time, marked clearly by each recorded date, gave her half-conscious pleasure, but time in a book can pass through many days in an hour and still drag at the spirit as heavily and specifically as its own confining skeleton. There is no freedom in a journal. It is an accurate record of the prisoner. Even his greatest fantasies are only fantasies of a man trapped in time. A year had passed when Evelyn set down the book, but it was someone else's year. She had not turned on the lamp of her own evening. - Jane Rule, Desert Of The Heart
Now I can tell you this:
"... of a meadow that seems as big as the ocean to the very little girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist. She threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked. I feel as if I might walk on forever, without coming to the end of it." -Kate Chopin, The Awakening
"She began to look with her own eyes: to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life. No longer was she content to 'feed upon opinion' when her own soul had invited her." -Kate Chopin, The Awakening
I am reacquainting myself with how to listen and observe, to engage the way I did when I made/had the time to see, i.e. when I was in art school nearly ten years ago, and my 'job' was to look and seek and learn to tell the stories, to engage with and be educated by as much as I am able, with the drama of the gardenaroundme.
Good God this is fun!
ps I am in love with the curtains in my bedroom. For six years I have almost totally loved my bedroom windows... but now that they are curtained in shiny coffee-with-cream and white colored floor length panels I am 100% in love, love, love. I am a textile whore, oh yeah!
Willing To Fight by Ani Difranco The windows of my soul are made of one way glass don't bother looking into my eyes if there's something you want to know, just ask I got a dead bolt stroll where I'm going is clear I won't wait for you to wonder I'll just tell you why I'm here
'cause I know the biggest crime is just to throw up your hands say this has nothing to do with me I just want to live as comfortably as I can you got to look outside your eyes you got to think outside your brain you got to walk outside you life to where the neighborhood changes
tell me who is your boogieman that's who I will be you don't have to like me for who I am but we'll see what you're made of by what you make of me I think that it's absurd that you think I am the derelict daughter I fight fire with words words are hotter than flames words are wetter than water
I got friends all over this country I got friends in other countries too I got friends I haven't met yet I got friends I never knew I got lovers whose eyes I've only seen at a glance I got strangers for great grandchildren I got strangers for ancestors
I was a long time coming I'll be a long time gone you've got your whole life to do something and that's not very long so why don't you give me a call when you're willing to fight for what you think is real for what you think is right
I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides, I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us. Namaste, Ram Dass
I'm not sure if any living soul knows this about me but Helen Keller is incredibly dear to me. She is one of the people I have felt drawn to since childhood; she inspires me, moves me, ignites me. When the quarter bearing her image was released in '03 I began to keep one of these coins in my art materials box as a token of endurance and persistence and commitment to finding my own way through... (as a side note, when I draw I often "paint myself into a corner" and I'm always looking for the way out of it in my work:))
That being said... I was done working today quite early, it was like having another day off after a wonderful Samhain weekend. It's been a beautiful, sunny and windy day and whoa nelly am I glad I was not buried in the basement of Hell's Kitchen all day! Normally, to get home I catch a bus that drops me off right in front of my house but today I was on another route which meant that I had to walk five blocks to get home... half way there, lying on the sidewalk and glinting in the sunshine was a radiant new quarter; it was heads up! This quarter had my name all over it. (By the way, I love finding pennies that are tails up so that I can flip them over for the next passerby as a way of spreading a little luck and funny joy.) When I flipped it over and saw Ms. Helen Keller flashing in the light I nearly gasped. This was no small treasure for me to find but a token, an omen, a sign and an acknowledgment of the path I'm on right now.
I know it seems like small change but how often do you find a quarter on the pavement? The only other time in my life that I've found anything larger than a dime was when I was about nine years old - I found a twenty dollar bill curled up in the gutter in Chicago after my first ride on a motorcycle with my Aunt Tinkie's boyfriend, Mean Gene. What kind of Jungian metaphor is this? Ha ha ha:)
As of May 30th of this year I made a promise to myself and this coin showing up about six months into my journey seems like an extraordinary and fortuitous affirmation.
