I have some quiet time in the middle of this lovely Saturday. It’s pleasant. The day looks likely to be a hot one, and there’s the air show… Any time now, the background experience will become so so noisy. I’m not looking forward to it. My Traveling Partner sleeps, for now. That won’t last. I sigh quietly. There’s pleasant music playing quietly in the background. Quite a lovely moment for reflection.
I think over the tasks on my list of things to get done this weekend, all of it on top of the everyday effort to be the person I most want to be, moment-by-moment. That’s sometimes like a whole extra job. LOL I give myself a moment to acknowledge that although it sometimes feels as if it’s truly an uphill climb to make progress some days, progress does get made. It’s a journey, and the journey itself is the destination. It’s about being, and it’s about becoming. There is always more to do. There is effort involved, and practice, and my results vary. I’m very human.
I breathe, exhale, and relax. This is a pleasant morning. I’ve finished most of the basic household stuff I’d planned to do. I’ve done the trip to the store, and figured out what to do, later, about dinner. Now I’ve got some time for me. Paint? Nap? I don’t know. This headache may make the decision for me, and I’ll be honest that I resent the fuck out of that. lol
…Still…perhaps it will be easier to begin again on the other side of this stupid headache, anyway…
My choice of trail this morning is a bit crowded. Summer mornings often find me sharing the trail, even at this early hour. I can already feel that it’s going to be a hot day, too. Things cooled off during the night quite a lot, but it was warmer when I stepped out of the house than it has been, by several degrees. I’ve a few things I’d like to get done while it’s cooler, before the heat of the day settles in.
A new day.
I finally got started on my soft pastel adventure yesterday afternoon. A change of preferred artistic media is… complicated (at least for me). I’ve been a painter in acrylic for decades. It feels comfortable and natural to me. Pastels are new, novel, and unexplored previously. I’ve got my pastels ready, and for me the next step is study. This is much easier than it was back when I began with acrylic, or even further back in time, to my watercolor origins. Now I can easily queue up some YouTube videos of artists working in pastels and just watch them work. I sometimes find that even a very artistically “fluent” artist may not really understand what they are doing as they do it, and the discussion is a distraction. I finally turned the sound off and just watched various artists (whose end result spoke to me), while I listened to music. I greatly value watching an artist work in their chosen medium.
… I learned a lot through observation…
This morning the world “looks different” as I walk along the trail between river and marsh. There’s a mist clinging to the ground in the low land at the water’s edge, and the early morning sunshine is dazzling, illuminating leaves and stalks of meadow grass. I look at my surroundings in the context of painting the scene using pastels instead of acrylic. My perception and understanding of what I see is altered. I walk, eyes open with wonder and curiosity. “How would I capture that?” Is an unspoken question, repeated frequently.
… I keep walking…
The sun rises higher. The light becomes brighter, bolder, harsher. Shadows shift. Colors change. I walk and watch.
Voices approaching from behind me startle me from my reverie. I pause and let a small group of photographers walk past. I stop where I am to write and reflect, finding myself eager to “get on with things” in order to knock out my list of crap that needs doing, so I can get back to my studies and subsequently take advantage of this wellspring of inspiration welling up from within me. I’m eager to give the new pastels a proper exploration and see where they take me creatively.
More voices. More people. The trail is too crowded for a creature such as I. lol I stand up and prepare to head back to the car to begin again.
I’m relaxing after my walk, wondering if it may continue to rain today. It looks like it might. I’m thinking about the weekend, mostly quite a nice one, spent in the good company of my Traveling Partner. Father’s Day was Sunday, and I even managed to surprise him with a gift (that he also liked).
The weekend was interesting in another way. Chosen changes. Change is, and no amount of running from it (or insisting on standing still) will change that. Sometimes what makes the most sense is to choose change. It’s a useful way of guiding my journey in life.
Here’s an example; I am frankly pretty “over” my current smartphone. It’s an older one, still quite functional but becoming irritatingly “uncooperative” and vexing with each new update by my carrier or the manufacturer. (I get tired of having to go back and turn off a bunch of bullshit and bloatware every time there’s an update, too.) My Traveling Partner pointed out I’m perhaps overdue to move on to a newer (and not carrier-locked) device.
My current smartphone is “only” 5 years old… but that’s also pre-pandemic, 4 employers, and two addresses ago. lol In terms of technology, that’s a long time. We shopped together, talked about the options, and I picked out a replacement. It’ll arrive in a few days and then I can “move out” of this phone that is vexing me so often and move on to being vexed differently with a new one. lol I’m grateful to have my Traveling Partner’s expertise and help with this one; it’s the sort of change that really fucks with me in a multitude of little ways.
Another example of choosing change with self-care and personal growth in mind? Artistically I have been feeling a bit stalled and struggling to “find my voice” after losing my Dear Friend this year. I didn’t have an understanding of how grief would affect me creatively (this time), nor did I anticipate the ways my Traveling Partner’s injury might affect my comfort with being “distracted by” the desire to paint. I find myself unable to begin new work, too aware that he may need my help any time (acrylic paint dries quickly and I tend to “work wet”). Unable to finish old work, because it brings to mind interrupted conversations with my Dear Friend that now can never be resumed.
I just can’t get going “as things are”… and the more I thought about it, the more significant the medium I tend to favor seemed to be. I’ve worked primarily in acrylics for about 20 years. What if I could work slower… oil paints? No, too slow. Watercolor?Maybe…but… too wet? What if I could work slower without “working wet” at all…? Something I could easily step away from and come back to… I found myself also considering size. I generally work with canvases that are large-ish… not huge, but often “over mantelpiece” or “behind the couch” sizes… I had begun to work much smaller in recent years (a combination of convenience and physical limitations). I never replaced my big easel when it finally failed me. I rarely used it anymore. Large work on paper never suited me…but I started as a watercolor artist, working on paper, as a teenager. Is it time to scale back and return to older ways? I feel hungry for something new.
Continuing to reflect on what I’ve been doing artistically, what has inspired me recently, and what is most physically comfortable at this stage in my life, I found myself considering a big change… a change of medium. (That’s a bigger deal than I know how to communicate, and will come with a potentially very steep learning curve.) Pastels. That’s the “big reveal”, I’m planning to try pastels, and may return to working exclusively on paper (less storage space needed for completed work, too). It’s an exciting thing to contemplate.
I find myself in an interestingly “in between moment”, standing poised between who I’ve been and who I may become, at least artistically. It’s less a crossroad in life than a sharp bend in the path in front of me, beyond which I can’t at all see what is ahead. I’m okay with the uncertainty and the unknowns. I’m excited and eager to move forward, to move on, and to grow with new experiences and new knowledge. This change, particularly, percolates through my consciousness in an interesting way. I think of a snake shedding her skin. It’s a good metaphor for choosing change and the growth that can come of it.
…Pastels…? I would be more easily able to do plein air work when I go camping… less to carry, more compact, easier to clean up… I sit with my thoughts awhile… The future is filled with potential.
I think about all the various artistic mediums I’ve tried, all the techniques, and the tools… I think about what worked for me, and why, and where I was in life for each of those things… I think, too, about practices more generally, and what has worked, and how much it has mattered to simply “try things out” to learn what really does work best for me. It’s an interesting journey.
There are new steps to take, and new skills to learn. There are new practices to practice, and old chaos to tidy up. There is old baggage to set aside, and old pain to heal. It’s a journey. A process. Incremental change over time doesn’t have to be all happenstance and wandering; I can choose change. I can choose my path, and choose my opportunity. I can choose to begin again.
It’s a new day. A Saturday. I woke from peculiarly surreal and also vaguely sexual dreams with a sense of being “interrupted” and also having slept in quite a bit (which is a pleasant luxury, for me). I dressed and quietly let myself out of the house to watch the sun rise from a local trail. It was a lovely morning for it.
Daybreak on a favorite trail.
…I walk on…
Later, as the morning develops along the way.
I followed that with routine errands, arriving home sufficiently early to enjoy my morning coffee with my Traveling Partner while he enjoyed his. We spoke of 3D printers and projects, and things of that sort, until we’d both finished our coffee and it was time to move on with the day.
…My dream(s) still linger in my thoughts, which is a bit unusual these days. I dreamt of kissing a dark-eyed youth in a collegiate stage of early adulthood, who captivated me with his quiet confidence and led me by the hand to some less-than-ideally private place to take things further, only, that turned out to be a local business (?!) that opened quite unexpectedly, filling with customers – young women dressed only in towels, giggling as they passed us. We left, and attempted to find a happy haven “at my place” – only it wasn’t my place at all, it was… the first floor of some bizarre high-rise condo, where the current owners politely explained that they had purchased my abode, and upon breaking through the ceiling discovered 3 further floors above, lavish, luxuriously appointed, and clearly out of my price-range. They were courteously apologetic about how obviously I did not belong there. We sat at their vast kitchen counter in an expansive kitchen that was never mine, sipping deliciously well-crafted espresso (even in my dreams, there is coffee). My dream ended in contemplation of “where to go next”, when I realized I was alone where I stood. No dark-eyed youth. No giggling young women. No urbane well-spoken householders. Just me, standing on a rainy street in the twilight of my dreams. I woke, ready for a new day, simultaneously amused and puzzled by my strange dream(s). I’ve been dreaming a lot lately. Thankfully, few nightmares, just strange surreal dreams.
I’m in enough pain today to feel quite distracted and disinclined to do much, but there is much to do, and I feel creatively inspired… I may spend some portion of the day in the studio, painting, if I solve some of the puzzles involved in the two pieces I am presently working on. Individual paintings take longer these days. They are… more “involved”, and have greater depth of meaning. I think this has been an outcome of going through menopause, strangely enough. My thoughts and my emotions seem to take longer to process fully, but I get more out of them when I “get there”. Emotions have more breadth and depth – and more recognizable significance, with less chaos. Thoughts travel along more tangents and down more rabbit holes, but once every thread is pulled, and every depth explored, I find I have a greater understanding of where I was headed in the first place, and what to do with my thoughts when I get there.
…I sip my coffee and think about how useful all that would have been when I was much younger, stronger, and faster. LOL Life is weird.
My Traveling Partner interrupts my writing to ask me what I’m doing (which I guess I should expect, since I chose to be writing in the living room; a space we routinely share). I answer. Then I manage to interrupt him when he shares a thought, and he sternly tells me he’ll “try not to be annoyed” by that. I manage to refrain from pointing out the interruption to my writing that started the conversation in the first place, which for me is no doubt similarly annoying. I chuckle to myself; we both find a flow state difficult to find or maintain if the other is in the same shared space. It is evident we enjoy each other’s company greatly. I do struggle to set boundaries when I am reading or writing, though, and he rarely seems to recognize that both those activities (for me) require my full attention and focus to enjoy properly, or understand that I sometimes want the full measure of my own attention for myself. I don’t bother to say anything about it (again). Then I wonder if that’s a mistake…
I sip my coffee and move on. Letting small things stay small has real value in life and love, and I’m not inclined to “start shit” on such a lovely Saturday.
I continue to fuss about a particular “how to” challenge with a painting I keep coming back to – it is a self-portrait, so perhaps I am “too close to the subject” in some way. I find myself stalled because it really wants a different technical approach than I typically prefer, and the requirement to slow down, take my time, and work on the practical details with consideration and discipline vexes me. There are no suitable shortcuts! Shit. This one is going to be “do it right, or don’t do it at all”, and this confounds me. There’s something to learn here, and I sip my coffee grateful for the lesson. I don’t suppose learning will slow the inevitable result of being mortal, but I hear it may keep me young(er)… sounds worthwhile.
I sigh outloud and sip my coffee. Age, aging, human life, human mortality… so much more obvious as concerns these days than they were in my 20s. I look at my pillbox… double-checking that I’ve taken everything up to this point in the day that I’m expected (required to). “Fuck aging” I mutter to myself, nonetheless grateful for medical care, and the prescriptions that help me maintain my health acceptably well.
I resign myself to being distracted from my writing; if I want to write utterly without distractions, I definitely need to be alone, and in an unshared space. That’s just real. I chose this location – and I did so because I want to enjoy my partner’s company, and also write. Not sure how I thought that would work. LOL
Well, shit. There are paintings to paint, and dishes to do… I suppose it’s time to begin again.
I woke early. It’s a Sunday. I had hoped to sleep in, but it’s not that day, not that experience.
I somehow managed to “psychically wake up” my Traveling Partner although I was sleeping in another room. (I honestly just don’t know how I woke him, but he turned up to tell me that I had done so within seconds of me sitting up to acknowledge a new day. “Psychically” covers it as well as anything else for now.) I dress and head out for a walk, hoping he can get some more rest. I choose a favorite trail that’s a bit of a drive to get to; it prolongs my time out of the house.
… It’s a lovely misty morning for a quiet marshside walk. I get back to the car too early to head straight home; if my partner is sleeping, I want to be sure he gets more than an hour of napping! Good time to jot down a few words.
An Autumn Sunday
My plan is to return home, make coffee, and spend the day creatively (and doing laundry, and tackling some outside chores that should not take long). I’m specifically so very hungry to be painting, and shit just keeps getting in the way. Some days it just feels like “everyone wants a piece of me” and there’s nothing left for me at the end of the day… Or week. Routine chores and practical shit that just has to get done uses up most of my time and attention, leaving me too tired physically to then also paint. Time taken in the studio often feels like time taken away from my partner. I could do better. I need to do better. Painting is, for me, both a form of communication and a form of self-care and I am failing myself on this pretty seriously.
I sit with my thoughts and half an eye on the clock.
What an emotionally difficult weekend this has been. I meant to spend most of it painting and loving my partner. I managed to fail on both of those intentions pretty notably. Tears well up when I acknowledge that for myself, but they don’t fall. I take a deep breath and exhale. Another chance to begin again. G’damn we said some pretty awful things to each other. That saddens me. I know I can do better.
So, it’s another day, another chance to be the woman I most want to be, another opportunity to choose my adventure and walk my own path. Adulting is hard, but I know what I want out of my day, even if I am not entirely sure which verbs are most likely to get that result.
Evening Light 