Dear Readers or something formal like To Whom I am Reaching—
I feel filled by so many familiarly new changes that I have found within me the desire to do something like yell into the void that is an online blog. Something about the inside-ness of an oncoming winter season always ignites my desire to write— and to find any (varyingly) warm sun spot. I have spent the last season or so quietly compiling the ideas of what I might want, you know, like take off or landing when you can see the map but can also still imagine how big things are in relation to your body.
All that to say I wanted to have a way to reach out a hand, or a voice, and to create an appendix of time (an organ one can live without, but while I can I’ll keep).
Currently, and maybe a little bit always, I am drawn to warmth. I sit by the fire in my cabin in the woods and I sometimes am filled with the endless inspiration and joy and desire to be alive that exists in part within me, and in part in things like the fire in my yellow chair, or the afternoon sun (also yellow). Other times I feel the overwhelming a-loneliness that exists in isolation in an oncoming winter. I feel like I should be working more, instead of just embracing that the explosion of making overcomes me and is expelled from me at intervals that I cannot control, only influence.
I have been reading, in a similar fashion— occasionally ferociously, and I am deciding (right now) that I don’t need to spend the time it would take to finish a book that I don’t feel compelled to read, because no one is making me, and while I deeply want to reject the notion of wasting time, it is a waste of time.
I have been making new structures within my paintings, fragments or confines, and with that am anew creating a structure of working that works for me. I am working on not limiting myself by my own assumptions. By which I mean something like because I struggled with my work at some point early in the day, the whole day doesn’t need to be written off as a bad-studio-day, because that carries some weight of wasted time in a way, or a sort of burden of some kind, and usually I can be called back to sitting under the glowing-giant-orb-paper-lantern after an amount of time has passed. I am also trying to trick myself into working, or at the very least sitting in front of what looks like working, by turning on only the light right above my easel’s chair’s head.
As I get further and further from my return from France, I feel the morning-person within me fading. I want so badly to be a morning-person person, though I’m not sure why, as it’s not oft hard to find myself toiling into the night. I do know that as my sunshine hours —hours where I more often feel alive but also more acutely aware of my aloneness, as it is illuminated— are dwindling, inversely my desire to be a morning-person is ignited.
Will I make less assumptions? More work? Wake by eight every morning? Find within me enough continuation of this calling to call out to actually press continue? Or even bigger, find rhythm in making, writing, singing as loud as I can in the car, while remembering to keep my eyes open, and at least generally forward?
Yours in a time-bending manner,
Elise