This is the screensaver working clock that I’ve had on my laptop for a year. It changes colors sometimes, I don’t know why. To me it is gorgeous.

April 21st, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

This photo by Nigel Peake is the desktop image on my computer right now.

April 21st, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

I haven’t been wanting to draw, I’ve just been wanting to write. I go to my studio and my drawings say hello and tell me what is wrong with them and I walk past them and sit at the desk to write. Yesterday I sat in my dining room all day and wrote nonsense, almost all day nonsense, and then I spent three hours cooking dinner and in the middle of the bolognaise sauce i realized what to do and let it simmer while I wrote a stronger draft.

Nor have I been photographing very much. Just phases I guess. But then yesterday I went on a walk after dinner and there was this beautiful dead grass on the ground that looked like a drawing to me. I picked it up to draw it. And today on a walk this morning, there was the strangest blossom cluster and I picked it up to draw it. I feel it itching in my fingers, I really do, suddenly, a tingling of wanting to capture something.

And then today online, I found garima saxena’s art books (garminasaxena.com –> books). The energy in them is something I relate to very much. A certain energy that I think I lean towards when I’m making.

April 21st, 2009 | Category: written | Leave a comment

A fallen orchid petal went into the compost bowl on Saturday, as did the egg shell from spinach ravioli I made on Friday, and then a thorny piece of plant that I found on our morning walk on Thursday.

April 20th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

I was sure it was fall this morning. I felt my shoulders tense. I felt ready for the beauty — the neon haze of wet leaves — and the preparation toward cold. I felt the layers of clothing, and the boots, and walks that begin tense and end shed. Hot showers. Harvesting what we have worked for all summer. I was sad to realize that the cold rain meant spring.

April 20th, 2009 | Category: written | Leave a comment

My grandfather grew up in Alberta, Canada, and when he tells this story his face rains with tears.

He was young, like six or seven, and he and his sister had to travel many miles to and from school each day. They had built a sled that their horse pulled so that they could get to school more efficiently. But there was a snowstorm one day that piled up snow up to the horse’s stomach, and the horse pulled them and pulled and pulled and then couldn’t anymore and sat down, buried in the snow. They were buried, too, and the snow kept coming.They couldn’t see the school and they couldn’t see their home, many miles from either of them, all of them covered in snow. They held each other to keep warm and cried. Many hours passed.

Their teacher asked, Where are the Mandryk children? but no one had seen them. They had not missed a day of school before. The teacher knew that they were in trouble. She left the school children warm and unattended. She went out on her horse toward the Mandryk house, her own horse struggling through the snow. After some time, she saw their horse buckled and buried, and the children covered in snow. She put them on her horse with her and carried them safely to school.

It is wild to realize that my grandfather and so I would not have lived if it were not for her. I can picture her clearly. I read a New Yorker essay this morning about two female teachers (“Roughing It”) in the cold of Colorado and I thought of her. So much energy was expended then to keep alive and to take care of each other, to scrub clothes and build fires and make and mend. She was sturdy and tough and maybe not artistic. Life didn’t have room for that. I feel close to her when I am making — my own paint, bread, dinner; drawing and writing to record or slightly save.

April 20th, 2009 | Category: written | Leave a comment

Last year was the year that the city suddenly traipsed every sidewalk and put metallic silver spraypainted circles on the slabs that were cracked. We had until November to fix them. Now all over the city there are brand new slabs like new teeth next to old, gray slabs. Old, old, new, old, old, old, new. About $125 per slab to fix. On a walk one morning last year we counted as we walked up our sidewalk: eight new slabs. Three months to find the money to pay for them. And now all over the city in handwriting on wet concrete is the date, 2008. It makes that year seem extremely remarkable. That was the year that people wrote in the sidewalks. Boris 08. Allen loves Frances 2008. Pioneer Field Hockey 08. If history is what we write about, then that was the year that everything happened.

April 17th, 2009 | Category: written | Leave a comment

I’ve been so tired that yesterday I went to read a book and I don’t even remember sitting down in the chair; I was out for two hours in the middle of the day. I coudn’t have helped it. I swear I don’t even remember it. I was overcome when I awoke with those feelings that come sometimes for everyone, that I’m not sure what my purpose is, what my passion is, why I’m here, what I long for, what drives me, what could even satisfy me. But even in those moments, there is always this beauty in the world. I am so grateful for that. Feeling alone last night, unquenchable, I sat out on the stoop by our porch and just felt this overwhelming beauty of the world. I can always see that. There is always visual beauty, even when I’m despondent. The sky was very dark and clear, and the air was body temperature, I didn’t have to tense my shoulders in to stay warm. It was so quiet, the synapses in my brain stopped reaching for something that wasn’t there and we all stayed still. A machine to slow the world. Sometimes being outside at night alone is both the most lonely and the most unlonely time.

April 17th, 2009 | Category: written | Leave a comment

I’ve been reading Mary Jo Bang’s book of poems “Elegy” that chronicles a year after the death of her son. Right when I am wanting to start this journey, what a subject. My heart doesn’t want to hear the poems and also needs to hear them. One poem, “The Opening,” has nine stanzas which each begin with “Open the door and look in.” I love this form. What door? Look into where? The world she makes is strongly visual and also bewildering. I often don’t know what I’m looking at, or I think I do and then it mutates. Here is one stanza.

Open the door and look in.

Everything is in place.

The flickering heart

The owlet eyes are locked on.

A serpentine hair hangs over an ear.

A hand comes up to touch it.

A rhythmic hum runs ahead of the wave.

Someone turns her head

And hopes, no, lopes across the lawn.

April 16th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment