it's been ages hasn't it

Yes. It has. lists have been made then torn up and thrown out, so many slivers of moments when I let the hip bones sink a little deeper into the backs of my calves and my spine curves to one side.

Just like that the season has changed. those tiny yellow hands of the liquid amber trees waving up at me as I walk through puddled sidewalks, they brought tears to my eyes this morning, as if my childhood had risen up and punched me in the chest; that sweet smell that I always equate with the chlorophyll being breathed out of so many leaves all at once. The wintery sighs from plants.
The scarves have been dug out of boxes, the many cardigans, the woolly black knitting I never finished last year because SD seemed to have just run all out of chill.

Bobbie pins are back in style, my hair is growing and I know not what to do with it yet. Pins and pins and sloppy curls

My life feels like it is rotating from spin cycle franticness to that slow steady turn of contentment.
Stitching the lines, cutting the threads, whispering in the dark with my nephew in our fort, digging the soil until my sides hurt, riding the train on cloudy days, biking in the night with my scarf wrapped tight, chasing the cats with my rubber boots on.
drawing dark deep silvery spaces with graphite. Oh how I wish I could live in that silvery graphite sheen.


(p.s. these images came from my sister who always seems to nail it on the head, or maybe nature does that job, she just gets lucky, a lot.)

skin of my

cold tiles on my feet
leaping out of bed like I was 5 and it was christmas. It's that moment when mom justleft the house and at the exact moment when the garage door hits the sidewalk, the house is quiet, I'm up.

Ed Sharpe and the magnetic zeros shimmy me across the carpet and out to the garage. I'm masking off the hallway and front entry way, prepping for painting. Blue masking tape all around the edges and dusty corners ( yes mom they were dusty)

I have a list of things to do. That's always a great way to start a day. Why don't my days feel like this more often, like future in action, like vorfreudt, or whatever that word is that describes the sense of giddy anticipation for what's to come. We don't even have a word for it in english.

Kitten face comes and rubs into my arms and shoulders and any minute now I'm gonna kick all this off and grab that old bike and race out into the street and down all the alleyways, smashing that to-do list into a million waiting pieces.

I'll be looking for walls to paint and bathrooms to clean and lights to dust and cobwebs to extract for a tiny sum. I need to fund this project that is my life.

Mid day

empty nests under the bridge
a flock of large geese at dusk
the smell of campfire is still lodged in my brain.
Waves crashing onto rocks and the exact weight of your hand.

distracted, sidetracked, lack of interest.
daydreaming, reading, petting the cat, listening to music, feeling the sunlight, feeling the cold edge of the wind.
I can do these things for hours without accomplishing anything. I wish I was an avocado, wish I was a bicycle spoke, wish I was a tiny brown bird hopping around in pine needles, wish I was that branch stretching into the sun and bouncing in the breeze.

My 5th grade teacher told me I was so very arty and it was appropriate that I was teaching kids how to draw things. Nevermind that it is not them teaching me how to draw the things they love instead. I wish I could eat their scritchy wiggly lines across the pages, those lines that are light and shy, the lines that are dark and hard and never erase from the page; I wish I could eat them and take them in and draw with that kind of innocent heart.

I drew my own hands, sign languaging letters that I learned in 5th grade, LYL, and drew them in black ink onto a paper cut and pasted it to the railroad bridge, and walked away and when I looked at it from afar the lines did not seem like my own, but they made my heart swell . something was in the lines that I could not describe, only feel.

Tuesdays

Woke up late because I couldn't sleep at all last night.
Projects just keep rolling through like tanks.
paper cuts, small drawings, sewing hoops with gray wool sewn with all kinds of lovely.
These are the small projects, the large ones include the parachute that is just overwhelming sometimes, the slips, and the clothesline book.
Hoping to meet the art hop deadline and sell a lot of this on the streetcorner.
Not having camera and scanner power to show you is a bummer. come visit me instead. we can hide in my fort.

FRESNO!!

I woke up to rain this morning, yes I worried about the raisins, but it was just a few sprinkles.

New possibilities: slides, clotheslines, embroidery, working bigger, bigger BIGGER!
drawing class with kids, kitten purrs, letters in the post, long lost friends, biking in and outof traffic on shaw ave. watching grizzly bear documentaries with my brother, playing with the neighborhood kids.

I dare you!

til the wheels fall off

some things are just certain to happen. I'm starting a new chapter on wobbly legs,
feeling lost and messy and chaotic and scrambled.

Why does it seem to work out for everyone but me?
When someone else could say the same about my life I'm sure.

I'm thinking of going underground, hiding out in my deep nest of art making.
or moving to india to meditate and chant my life away in an ashram.

How could I hold your hand and tell you how proud I am that you have moved on , that you made things happen, that you're doing a good job?

Gems

I can't get these pieces out of my head. I'm coming to terms with the fact that in order to produce real work with integrity I need to have a space that is somewhat fixed, while everything else is chaos.

Clare Grill,



Chris Kenny



waterhalo makes me want to start a new journal.