Peace to All!
Everyone being home and the absence of schedule and a head-achey tiredness have suspended time in a peculiar but needed way… shouldn’t the darkest days of the year contain a bit of quiet? I made a most delicious soup today (with chorizo and beef stock made yesterday by simmering vegetable scraps with ox tails). Read and read, with and without the heating pad. Steps outside to give Jack the needed business breaks. Not much else.
Read two books since Christmas – “Nightwoods” by Charles Frazier, and “The Sense of An Ending” by Julian Barnes. Both well worth the time. Plus, I’m creeping through Joseph Ellis’s “American Creation”, Eliza Pinckney’s letters, and a book about fashion in colonial America. Getting a picture of a distant time, added to by re-watching the first in the John Adams series on HBO.
It feels good to be quiet. And to not run around.
And even swathed in quiet, I managed to complete Schedule C today – about six weeks earlier than usual because financial aid forms will be due in a few days.
What I have not managed to do, is reflect back on the year and ask the usual questions – that is, what would I like to let go of? What would I like to invite? The thing I MOST wanted to let go of — my 9 to 5 job – is already gone, and there’s not been a single day since September when I haven’t bumped into profound gratitude about that. I wish I was a more patient person… but there probably aren’t enough drugs in the world to make that transformation happen (my running friend would counter, “exercise, Dee, exercise”). So there’s that.
If anything of interest pops up in terms of framing artistic endeavor for the New Year, you will be the first to know! I do know that I want to draw and write more. Maybe that’s enough. “I want to draw and write more”. Right now the whole idea of finding some edge to articulate a commitment toward feels like way more work than I’ve got it in me to do. I hope that’s the bug speaking.
… still wishing for snow.
A picture from two weeks ago.
Happy New Year to all!
