It's been thin and quiet around this blog but I've been day-jobbing and re-prioritizing family and reading and writing. It's enough to get up in the morning, get showered and out into the world with my to do list in tow and my sketchbook in hand. I draw, I dream, I listen and I wonder when the news of good people dying too young is going to stop. The untimely death of my kind and caring, warm and wonderful aunt-in-law (mirroring as it does the untimely death a few years back of my caring, warm and smart aunt) has me thinking anew about the true uncertain of live. How we could go at any moment. It's a true truth and a scary one and I'm not suggesting that you stop what you are doing and get all morbid.
I am wondering how we go from the quick silly wit of kids (think knock-knock
jokes) to the way poets think about death ( knock knocks get mortality in this essay by Donald Hall).
And you know how we never have enough time, never have enough money, never have enough ideas to make art? We make the best we can in the time allotted sometimes and othertimes, we (and this is the royal pronoun have you, when I say we, I really mean me...maybe you, too?) make nothing for days on end until it kind of hurts. And then the art burts out and some of it stinks and much of it makes no sense but we remember that the making matters and the truth is in the living and we have to go on living.
So we do.
Thank goodness, meanwhile, for poets, for painters, for Cezanne's Apples , for my wonderful husband and for good mail lately. And because Mark asked nicely a while back, below is a glimpse of my coffee shop show...