the blue muse

So many things I should be doing. But I am here, alone, the house is quiet, and it is way too hot to do anything but read. And so I am on the couch, with berries and chocolate and a glass of red wine, reading. It is 6:00 o’clock in the evening. I am going to read until it is late, as late as I can stay awake.

I am reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which I have only just begun, but already, I am in love with it. In love. Edgar’s fascination with words mirrors my own, although I can speak, while he cannot. But I speak best when I write, when I can see the shape of the words on the page, hear the rhythm and the cadence in my mind. Words.

Two special people recommended this book to me, my daughter Kimberly, whose taste in books is so similar to mine, a remarkable girl who keeps surprising me with her insight and her generosity of spirit. And Debi, whose words I fell in love with right from the start, whose words are prose and poetry and painting and song all mixed up together.

Words. The poet in me has never stopped dreaming, though indeed, I left her sleeping far too long. Words were the first tool I ever used to create something. When I was thirteen, poems started flowing out of me, out of the blue. I had no idea, at the time, where they came from. Sometimes in a poem, I would use a word that I did not even know that I knew. A word I would have to go and look up, see what it meant and if I had used it correctly. Words that had embedded themselves in my subconscious and been forgotten. Golgotha was one such word. And yes, I had used it correctly.

I started reading the dictionary, just to look at all those words.

Words I have fallen in love with. Serendipity. Rapscallion. Avarice. Actually. Ranunculus. Fritillaria. I love words for the way they sound as much as for their meaning. I love the music they make when you string them together.
I love that the song I sing will always be different than the song you sing.
But both will be music.

I love words that sounds like what they mean. Sibilance. Gigantic. Phlegm. Still. Patina. End.

So many things I should be doing. But I sit here worshiping words. That has been my way, all my life. Words.

A picture painted with words is better than a painting for me. Because in my mind each word is its own brush stroke, set down one at a time, until suddenly I see what the writer is saying. Beautiful pictures that stay in my mind, my pictures. The next person reading will paint her own.

Words.

There are days when I soar, days when I glide,
days when wings flap against wind.

There is the nest that always needs cleaning, the babies that need
to be fed, the busyness of survival.

There is joy and sadness, smoke and mirrors, passion and inertia.
There is promise and potential, fear and insecurity, hope and creation.
All wrapped within this tiny egg that I watch and watch, waiting.

The sun glows through my wings and tinges them purple.
I rest on a branch to watch the sunset. I sleep when it is dark and rise
at dawn, taking off at first light to feel that freedom: flight.

I go higher each day, adding space between me and the tree tops.
I fly so high that I find silence.
All I hear is my breath, a rustle of feather, the wind.

I find myself, up there, in all that space.
Alone with my thoughts and the sky.

There is always room for the view.

The air conditioners had to be put in the windows yesterday. Already I miss the sounds of summer. I feel like a caterpillar inside a cool cocoon. But I would rather be a butterfly flying in the breeze, even if it is a very warm one.

Oh, I know that I could. No one says you have to use air conditioning. But I have to work here, and that gets to be unbearable when it is so hot, my studio ends up being the warmest room in the house, and I can’t get anything done because all I can think about is how hot I am. I know, I know, I shouldn’t complain. Such a rough life…

But I miss the crickets, the birds, the breeze. The smell of flowers floating in through the windows. I miss having that tiny slice of outdoors peeking in through the windows.

Last night I took some much-needed time to myself and read. Baseball was on the television, turned way down low, even though my husband had gone to bed hours before. I think I have grown used to it, over the years, reading with sports on in the background. I used to switch channels as soon as he went to bed, now, most of the time, I don’t bother. I just turn the volume down and keep reading. It is comforting background noise. I read for three hours straight, I haven’t done that in ages. It was wonderful.

In summer, if I had the option, I would read all day long. When I was a kid, I would do just that, sit on our front porch and read entire days away. There were a lot of kids on my street, maybe twenty or twenty-five, and at least some of them were always outside, playing. I was almost always out there on the porch, reading.

These days, of course, I have obligations, work and chores and life, and I can’t spend entire days with my nose buried a book. But if it were an option, that is exactly what I would do. Read all day. That should have been my vocation. I would have excelled at it.

But one of these days, this summer…

I am going to go and find myself a porch.

when one door closes
another one opens

when i open my eyes
there is possibility

i am turning
in circles of wonder

embracing this day
with potential

yes, i am open

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this post is part of The Sunday Creative, stop over to see more beauty!

I realized yesterday, after finally catching up on all my paperwork, that today marks the halfway point of 2010.

What a crazy year it has been! But also a great year, one filled with learning and creating and growing and meeting new people. Who could ask for more than that? Time slips by so quickly, but I don’t mind if that time is spent doing things I love.

I am so lucky, I spend most of my day creating something from nothing. I guess we all do that in a way, don’t we? I am an artist. Quite often a starving artist, yes, but still, I would not change what I do. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I think about it, sometimes. Wouldn’t life be simpler, easier, more stable, if I just got a day job like everyone else? Probably. But I wouldn’t be happier.

It is the struggle that makes art real. You can’t get there by luck or by chance. You get there by sitting down (or standing) and doing the work. Going through the motions. Everyday.

Whether its writing or painting or photography or jewelry, you just keep doing it, plowing through, until one day something slips out that you just know is there.

It doesn’t happen every day. It doesn’t even happen most of the time. But if you don’t go through all those days when it doesn’t happen, you will never get to the place where it can happen.

Today, I am halfway there, in more ways than one. Today I am breathing in the silence of my soul and exhaling a song.

Today, I am here, in this moment.

And later, this afternoon, I might just be there.

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P.S.
I am SO excited to be featured today over at
Kim Klassen’s Cafe offering up my version of

The Perfect Day

I would love it if you stopped over to say hello…
Kim’s place is just wonderful, and so is she!

Today I am over at Vision and Verb

sharing thoughts about space and lace curtains…

would love for you to stop by and say hello!

Sometimes you just have to stop everything and vacuum, you know what I mean?

Yesterday I planned to catch up on a whole bunch of things, blog posts, guest blog posts, paperwork, etsy listings, my flying lessons e-course, and more. And I did accomplish a good deal of that in the morning. And then suddenly, I found myself vacuuming. Not just my daily routine vacuuming, which is a 20-minute stint through the downstairs to keep the hairballs from becoming tumbleweeds. No, this vacuuming session started in the basement, which is not a finished basement, but a storage basement since we have no garage. And it has needed a good vacuuming for, well, months…

So that took me two hours, I didn’t just vacuum, I cleaned and organized and tossed. And then I headed to the second floor, which is my son’s room, and yes, he is in charge of vacuuming there, but if you are a mom you know that every once in a while you have to go and do it yourself because, well, a 24-year-old is just never going to do the edges or under the furniture. And then I moved down to the first floor, which, as I said, I do every day with my little cordless vac, but once a week or so I need to move furniture and get the edges with the big loud, noisy, heavy, vacuum as well.

All told, I vacuumed four hours. It was quite the workout.

But it felt so nice to have it done. And of course, all the other things that I was planning to do still need to be done. But sometimes you just have to stop everything, and yesterday was that day. Sometimes your priorities get determined by life. Sometimes they get determined by love. And every once in a while, they get determined by hairballs.

At least now I have a clean backdrop to work in. And that feels good.

Really, really good.

I have been working hard on jewelry lately, and this weekend I am going to start adding some of our new pieces to the etsy site. Thought I would give you a little sneak preview here…lots of fun stuff, including our new line with a matte finish!

What are your plans for the weekend?

This week’s you capture challenge was get down low. I loved the idea, but my knees were not quite as happy about it.

My dog couldn’t quite figure out what I was doing down there, and this picture made me laugh…

And you have to laugh, right?

I am in my studio and it is late, so late that I should be in bed, actually, but I am here, writing words that were waiting to be written. I sit here and see a firefly out of the corner of my eye, just outside my window. A single firefly, on its own, and I wonder what that means, what it is trying to say to me as it flits so close to my window like my own private beacon.

Perhaps I am reading too much into it, and it is just there, doing what a firefly does. But it doesn’t feel that way, it feels like it is there for a reason. And now it has landed, just sitting there in one spot, blinking. Does that mean it’s dying? Or is it calling for a mate, playing a game of S.O.S.? I don’t usually see them so close to the house, but the field out back is lit up like an upside-down starry sky on nights like this. Is this one lost?

If I were a child I would go outside and catch it in a jar, but I don’t want to catch it now, I want it to fly free, and I don’t want it to be dying, I want it to be wondering, sitting there looking in at me sitting here in the dark, if I am writing words about it. I want it to be the spirit of someone I loved, or someone that loved me, or someone that loved anybody, once, sitting there enjoying life, now, as a firefly. I want it to mean more than just an insect sitting on a leaf, and I don’t know what that means, either.

It is easy to see why years and years ago, people thought they were faeries.

At our camp, this past weekend, they were everywhere, more of them than I have ever seen before, and it was beautiful. I was entranced, and I was enchanted, I kept walking out to the road to watch them dance in the field across the way. I don’t remember ever having seen so many at one time.

And I don’t remember ever having seen just one, sitting by itself outside
my window. But I love that it is there. Meaning whatever it means,
or doesn’t mean.

It’s still a light shining bright in the night.

And I am not afraid of the dark.