Early Morning Reflection

Lubec foggy morning drive.

 

 

Visit from heron at Mulholland Light, Campobello

(New Brunswick, Canada)

 

 

Where two meet.

 

 

Back at the drawing table: Order and disorder.

 

 

Best climbing tree ever, missing a few limbs now.

(West Gardiner, Maine)

 

 

Thinking about the thinking nook.

 

 

Heidi's tomatoes at the Lubec Open Air Market.

It's been a great season! Come visit the market on Saturdays 9-11 downtown.

Open through October 12th.

 

 

 She flops wherever she wants regardless of how inconvenient it is to her human companions. She's such a cat.

 

 

I woke shortly before five to one of those sunrises that Lubec is notorious for. Fading midnight blue gave way to a soft blend of yellow to green. Moon still in the sky.  I listened to the stillness and noted the absence of the rooster's call. Nary a being had come to wake save for me and the cats. I slipped into comfy paint-stained yoga pants and an old ripped tee, filled a bucket with hot water, and headed into the cave.

 

For this morning I needed the dark and still. With only a dim light and the sun filtering slowly into the space, I began the ritual of wedging and weighing. In relative darkness, I listened to the sounds of the clay as it rolled along the surface of wood, the sound of my hands as they cupped this malleable dirt into round forms, and the hum of the wheel as I centered and pulled. The heater emitted an orange glow warming the left side of my body. Clay was heavily scented with musky earth, like patchouli.

 

In the darkness, all the senses come to life. My mind went on one of those journeys where stream of consciousness leads from one thought to another. I thought of O'Keeffe and how she took to pottery in her eighties when her sight had faulted so badly that she could no longer paint. I closed my eyes and with only the sense of touch centered and formed a pot while repeating the mantra that all my pots receive: love peace joy compassion and sweetness of life.

 

I thought about the space where two meet and how in one moment we can feel this perfect balance and stillness and in another deep anguish. I thought about how much of our lives are determined by fated circumstance versus a determination to create it as we envision it. Or maybe the two work in tandem?

 

Inundated with news of all that is wrong in this world I find myself slipping further from that space that my soul most longs for. What is the best path for the most good? Scream and shout? Or find my center and visualize? It seems that, as with most aspects of my being, I haven't found that space where I can blend it all. I immerse myself in one or the other - at least for short bits of time. But there must be a space - in the middle - where I can synthesize it all but still keep the calm?

 

This past week was a time of recharging, rebalancing, and refocusing. I lessened my work hours and spent a lot of time walking, driving, and thinking. I gave myself permission to let go of obsessive work tendencies to explore and process. It felt sort of like a mini vacation at times. I've come back to the studio with a new perspective and perhaps a releasing of always having to know the outcome. I have begun a drawing that is in a sense a continuation of where I left off last spring. Though this is the start, it is not where I will end up in three months time as the semester comes to close. I am questioning what it is that attracts me to these images of decay and chaos juxtaposed against the serene.

 

Searching. Trusting.