Archives for category: art and the artist
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Sight, Sound, Scent, Taste

October 19, 2023 //
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I’m sipping an iced cold brew coffee, and nibbling a breakfast sandwich from the local baker on a foggy Autumn morning. The sounds of the city seemed muffled as I crossed the park from my parked car to the office. The fog wraps the high-rise condos and office buildings in a peculiar disappearing act, and as they rise into the fog they disappear, with only a few lights still twinkling through the mist. The ice in my coffee clinks when I lift the cup and the coffee is bitter and icy, each sip simultaneously refreshing and just a bit perplexing; I am used to drinking hot coffee in the morning, and I have no idea why the change this morning (I just “went with it”). The sandwich is savory, well-made of fresh bread and warm, freshly scrambled eggs. The crunch of the toasted bread is a nice complement to the warmth and softness of the eggs. The hint of salty flavor from the olive tapenade used as a condiment delights me. It’s a very pleasant morning, and it lets me forget for awhile what a fucking trainwreck the world seems to be right now.

…Will humanity even survive itself?…

I smile quietly to myself, feeling incredibly grateful to have a Traveling Partner who understands enough of my trauma history to “get” why it’s a terrible idea for me to read the news (or get tempted into doomscrolling a news feed). He filters the news for me very considerately, finding reliable sources that are very factual and less inclined toward click-bait or emotional provocation, and does a lot to keep “war porn” away from my eyes (and consciousness). I don’t do well if I get mired in despair over faraway battlefields I can’t do anything about, but would still obsess over. I have looked directly into the eyes of War and I have seen too much, too clearly. I have ties to people and places that seem chronically in conflict. I just… can’t. I care too much, and have little influence or power to make real change. All I can do is raise my voice (and vote, with my ballot and my money) and do my own best not to be part of the problem. I send heartfelt kisses his way and hope that he is sleeping deeply and dreaming of wonderful things.

A murder of crows flies past the window and settles into the trees below. Autumn. The sky is beginning to lighten with the arrival of the new day, but it’s a gray and featureless sky this morning, and not very exciting. I still find myself inspired by the fog, the city lights, the towering high-rise condos reaching into the mist… the artist within looks over the analyst’s shoulders; I should paint this weekend. 🙂

I’ve started reading Lord of the Rings. I never have. I once started The Hobbit, but I struggled so much with the author’s writing style I just set it aside and never went back. I’m just a bit embarrassed by that, but… Proust is also waiting for my attention. I’ll get there. lol So far I’m well-into the first book of the trilogy, and enjoying it quite a lot. I smile a silent thank you to my partner again; his fondness for these books is certainly a large part of why I decided to give it another try.

…So… A misty Autumn morning and a new day unfolding ahead of me. Somehow it’s already time to begin again. 🙂

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Categories art and the artist, autumn, Brain Injury, breathe, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, Love, meditation, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, The Art of Being, War and News of War

Taking Time for the Time It Takes

September 30, 2023 //
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I’m tentatively sipping this fresh (quite hot) cup of coffee and endeavoring to avoid burning my mouth, while savoring the goodness of a still-hot cup of coffee on a Saturday morning. I’m still working on (with the help of my Traveling Partner) bringing my new laptop properly to life as the machine I understand so well (and which seems to understand me).

One careless misstep resulted in having to fight off the cancer that is OneDrive (omg, spare me, ffs) – I rather stupidly let that thing begin syncing my files, unaware that it was set to do so (no doubt through some earlier carelessness or lack of understanding)… wouldn’t have been such an issue if I were not also a user of DropBox for backing up my files, and had allowed that to have sync turned on and permitted to run in the background “for convenience” (omg, no no no no!!!)… the result? A crazy loop of OneDrive and DropBox seeking to back (each other) up continuously… and we’re talking about many tens of thousands of high resolution photographs, and multitudes of gigabytes of documents preserved over many decades (that through my own insecurity about “losing my memories”, had become multiple copies of copies of copied folders – in some cases also including .zip versions of those very same nested multiplicative folders and files). It was a fucking nightmare. In point of fact, an actual literal nightmare, because I dreamt through the night last night of having lost just the one and only precious file that actually mattered, because I did not realize it was stored as a single copy on fucking OneDrive – and had deleted all that content out of frustration without checking for that file. Omg. For real though?

Fuuuuuuuuuck. Okay. So. Frustrated raised voices and a few tears later, followed by careful slow conversation on the level one would have with a fairly stupid child (thanks, though, Love, I get it now)… and I think we’ve got this shit sorted out… only…

…new laptop. There may be a hardware issue; the monitor was flickering (unacceptable). I think my Traveling Partner resolved that with skilled troubleshooting in the display settings. G’damn I appreciate the depth of his expertise on this crap – I have not kept up my technical knowledge, as so often happens with “use it or lose it” sorts of things, and I’m clearly very far behind the state-of-the-art OS-wise! I could have seriously borked my new laptop if I had proceeded to simply delete a bunch of (to me) suspicious looking OS files. LOL (“Okay, Boomer…”)

Breathe through it; it’ll be okay.

Yeah. She’s here. She “lives and breathes” – as much as she can as a machine. I know, I know; she’s not actually conscious, sentient, or a living being. I just rely on this tool to the point that “she” feels personal and real to me on a level beyond machinery… like a motorhead with a favorite car. I’m okay with that.

(Note: AI is not yet a thing, y’all, just stop. We’ve got some fancy machine learning tools, but those tools are not “AI”; they do not think and can not reason or understand the material they ingest or the content they spit out. Not yet, so just fucking stop sucking down the marketing hype.)

So… definitely needed this 2nd coffee, and I’m trying to enjoy it before it goes cold. 😀

…Because it’s already time to begin again, and I’ve got shit to do in both the real and virtual worlds. Life is short, and time passes all too quickly. 😀

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, art and the artist, autumn, Brain Injury, breathe, forgiveness, Free Will, Frustration, gratitude, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, Relationships, The Art of Being

The Lingering Cough, The Lasting Adventure

September 4, 2023 //
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I’m mostly over my recent bout of whatever miserable illness struck me (and my Traveling Partner, and step-son). I’ve got a lingering cough, which frankly is no surprise to me – it’s nearly always the outcome of any sort of respiratory illness for me. It’s a byproduct of damage incurred from a combination of childhood illness and military injuring (those oil fires did me no good). It’ll pass, just takes me a bit longer than it otherwise might.

The new job starts tomorrow. Exciting. There’s ongoing forward momentum with my Traveling Partner’s business, too. It feels wonderful to support that, and even to help. Today I took next steps getting an Etsy page set up (almost done with that…). One thing at a time. Like any journey, it’s about next steps and incremental progress over time. I think about other details that I can add to the new page… a friendly shop-video walking future customer’s through our shop, and sharing our thoughts about how we make products, and what inspires us, maybe? Additional listings. Things like that – basic stuff.

…A lot of life’s richness and complexity is built on very basic stuff. That seems worth thinking about…

I sit in the studio, with the fragrances of scented shower fizzies filling the room. I am reminded that there are a couple more scents I meant to make batches of this weekend… cucumber-melon, lavender (a favorite), and something that smells like a rainy autumn walk. So many luscious scents to delight me in the shower – I want to make them all! The new batches of chocolate-orange and meadow flowers are lovely. (I find myself wondering if it’s too soon to take another shower, already…?)

In spite of the lingering hints that I’ve been ill recently, I’m enjoying the weekend with my Traveling Partner. Some video gaming. Some video watching. Some cooking. Some laundry. Some crafting and making. Nothing fancy – all of it’s been very “basic” quiet living sort of stuff… but… isn’t that what life is built upon? The small delights? The everyday pleasures? The time and care taken on things that are utterly routine? Life’s lasting adventure is built on small steps forward, not so much the grand gestures or big moments – those are rare, which is fitting for the way they hit our consciousness so much harder in spite of how fleeting they truly are. I find so much value in being present in the small moments and the basic stuff. I savor this one, with my now-cold coffee long-forgotten on the edge of my desk, just one sweet pleasant moment of so many… it’s too easy to overlook how many lovely moments there really are, if I am constantly rushing from one “big deal” to another, without pausing for breath.

…I pause for breath…

Life isn’t “perfect” (see the opening paragraph; I’m still not 100% over being sick, for starters, and on top of that I was born a human primate, so… there’s that). It’s not bad though. Hell, it’s better than bad… it’s good. I sit here smiling quietly. This is enough. More than enough. This is pretty fucking sweet, generally speaking, and I’m contented and sometimes even actually “happy”. That’s a very subjective condition, and it stymies me how similar circumstances are across the entirety of my life – there were a lot of moments in which I could have been far happier than I actually was, but… I wasn’t. At this point, I think that was (in many cases) as much because I just didn’t know how to be that thing we call “happy”, every bit as much as it had anything to do with the specifics of my life in that moment. Kind of a lot, actually. How peculiar. I can’t go back in time and “fix that”… but… you know what I can do? Revisit some of those moments through my recollections, and enjoy that moment then from my perspective of now. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m griefing myself over how I felt at that time – no good would come of that. I’m just taking time to recall something pleasant, doing so in great detail, and also letting go of any lingering baggage that may have become attached to that time, place, or relationship, and just… enjoying what I can about that time, then. It tends to reduce the lasting misery of miserable times, by undercutting the memory of the misery, and giving a wee boost to the memories of joy, however brief, fleeting, or impotent they seemed then. Worthwhile.

I pause again, this time to cough. It’s time to begin again. Some hot tea, perhaps…?

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Categories Allegories, art and the artist, breathe, forgiveness, Free Will, gratitude, health, Healthy Living, inspiration, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Summer, The Art of Being

767 Miles of Self-Reflection

July 24, 2023 //
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I drove down the coastal highway, thinking thoughts, and sometimes singing bits of songs I remember well enough to sing them as the sights go by. I stopped often, for various “view points” from which I had hoped to snap a few pictures. Most of those looked like this…

One of many “sights” along my route.

The entire northern section of my drive was enveloped in fog, or mist, or wrapped in low-hanging clouds. Not much to see. LOL

A couple cups of coffee later, the mists persisted late into the morning, well-past the point at which I had expected the clouds to have “burned off” with the rising sun. It was clear I wasn’t going to be pleasantly distracted from my thoughts by the tremendous views; those were utterly withheld from me. lol

For most of the drive, the world appeared to be mostly undeveloped, as if created instant-by-instant from my own thoughts…

It was still a lovely day for a drive.

It was early on a Thursday morning, though, and there was very little traffic. I made good time down the highway, as if toward a clear destination. Truth was, though, the journey really was my destination. I set out to spend the drive with my thoughts, and there wasn’t anything to distract me. It was hard to see it as a problem.

At several stops, and all weekend long, I made a point to take notes about the journey. Thoughts that seemed worth preserving beyond the moment. For convenience, I’d started a draft blog post, and just saved my notes there. When I look them over this morning, I’m amused that they seem almost poetic…

I sit quietly with my morning coffee, trying to assemble some group of words to share the experience of these recent days, mostly without success. I can’t do better than the fragmented notes I took along the way, and a handful of pictures. There’s something to learn from that, I’m sure. More to consider. Another opportunity for self-reflection beckoning me from a distant future moment.

I did eventually drive far enough down the highway to escape the cloud cover…

Looking back, between the clear blue sky overhead, and the deep blue ocean below, in the distance the clouds linger.

The camping wasn’t fancy, it was just a place to rest for a night. I stayed in managed state park camp grounds. It was fine. It was also quite crowded. The camps were clean, and well-maintained, but also rather noisy. In spite of the crowds, both were really pleasant places to camp, and I may go back, some other time, for some other purpose.

There was no real solitude to be found in these places, and each morning I packed up and drove on, content to make my departure with haste. I drove with purpose.

There were reliably flowers everywhere.

In the middle of all this driving, there was an important (and delightful) stop midway to visit an old friend. My longest female friendship of many decades. We haven’t sat down together in shared space in so many years – it was long overdue, and very grounding. It felt like a homecoming of a different sort.

…There are few things as precious as time spent in the company of good friends. I don’t do enough of it.

There is more to share, and a lot to continue to reflect on. There were lessons learned, and lessons observed – with much to learn still developing slowly from those observations. In general, the whole thing was time well-spent. A good time.

…I’m so glad to be home once more…

…so glad.

It’s already time to begin again. 🙂

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, art and the artist, Brain Injury, breathe, forgiveness, Free Will, gratitude, grief, Healthy Living, inspiration, loneliness, Love, meditation, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, solo hiking, Summer, The Art of Being, turning 60, women, Words

Later, Better

May 25, 2023 //
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Change is. Taking some quiet time really mattered. Helped a lot.

Memorial Day weekend.

I’ll take weekend and try to s I rt myself out and soothe myself. Garden. Maybe paint. Get some trail time.

There are still verbs involved. My results still vary. I’ll keep practicing. Maybe get some sleep.

I’ll begin again.

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, art and the artist, breathe, forgiveness, Free Will, gardening, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, meditation, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Spring, The Art of Being, turning 60, War and News of War
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