Artwala Road

Outside the front door!

I just opened the door to discover that the white stuff is taking over!  We are home and staying put tonight as 2008 drops off the calendar and we usher in a brand new year.  It’s cozy and warm here in our house and after our travels, fine as they were, I’m very glad just to be here.  I’ve spent the morning getting myself up and running on Facebook.  Who knows why but it seems necessary if I’m to be part of 2009!

I’m so hopeful that this year we’ll make a quantum leap as a country into more kindness to all and to the planet now that we have our wondrous new president.  Not that we can lay all the necessary changes on him—we’ll all have to do our part—but at least now we’ve lifted the blanket of despair. At least now our elected officials want what we want.

Usually I write out a list of resolutions the day before the new year but I so seldom keep them. Why is that?  They’re too ambitious, I think, too stringent.  Like—go to the gym every day.  I cannot do that even if I write it down.  I find it boring.  So this time I’m going to go a bit easy and focus on the things I love.  Walk every day.  I love to walk outside.  I will walk every day to my new studio and home again in all kinds of weather, even snowy days like today.

I want to finish two projects this winter, both writing projects—my drawing book and my novel which has been rescued from a dreadful computer accident but still has to be restored in the right order and version.  This accident stopped all work on this piece last summer just when I was about to send it out.  Curious and curious.  I write just because I love it and perhaps also because for many years I was way too busy to follow this passion.  Or I didn’t believe I could.  Or I thought I must have training or money in the bank or one of a thousand other things.  Or I thought what I wrote must be perfect, not good or authentic but perfect and it’s all perfect, of course.  Every honest effort.  I know that now.  Sometimes, like when I’d lost this long labor last summer, I think—that’s it!  I’ll never do all this work again.  But then ideas come and I begin scribbling again.  So all I’m saying is that I’m just about to finish both this piece and the book I started on drawing as a way to discover the world and yourself in it.  If I hadn’t lost the novel I might not have jumped into the drawing book quite so soon.  I did it to console myself and it soon took over.  I love it and have just to do the drawings that go into it now.

I will continue to make art as I always have.  I feel like I’m an art explorer now—an aging, intrepid, female Marco Polo!  I’m looking for a brave new world.  I’m not a painter; I haven’t the patience or expertise or character for it, but I do have visual ideas and they are often rendered in paint though not always. There are drawings too and prints and things I do on the computer.  I’m thinking about all the ways images get out into the world.  I’m reading Banksy: Wall and Peace, about the great graffiti artist in London.  I will not be a graffiti artist.  I’m too much in love with the blank wall and the unadorned everything.  I’m too respectful of the property of others, not enough of an anarchist.  But I’m thinking of how to sneak the idea that we’re more than we think we are into the art salt shaker and what it can be sprinkled on.  I’m wondering how ordinary people can encounter the extraordinary and find beauty, how they can surround themselves with amazing images and inspiration, how they can lift themselves up.  I stay awake at night thinking about this. Then I sleep deeply.

I want to improve my photography skills this year.  They are really at ground zero.  I’ll have to read the camera manual.  That sort of thing is always very hard for me but I will do it.  Mostly but I want to take more photos as a way of paying closer attention to the world around me.  Sometimes I think the whole world resides in my head.  Wrong.

I’ll be eating more vegetarian food this year.  That’s easy.  I like it and it suits me.

And I’ll be wishing everyone well in whatever ways I can.  I will try to be present for all the people I know which is not always easy and even to those I bump into on the street whom I’ve never met before.  I’ll try to stay open to whatever comes my way and just flow with it.  I think I could be a Taoist now if I could be anything.  Once it would have been impossible.  Now there’s a hair’s chance.  Maybe that’s progress!

Here we are, a snowy day that forces quiet reflection upon us and chocolate cookies and tea.  But the party animal cannot be entirely restrained.  When I popped my head out the door I saw that even a walk to our local bottle shop might be perilous especially with a bottle in hand on the return home.  I said to Dear A, ‘Oh, no, it’s new year’s eve and we haven’t any champagne.’  Upon which he opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle he’d hidden on the bottom shelf!  What  a man!  We will sip champagne and watch Pride and Prejudice tonight.  Again!  We love it!!

And so I wish you all, dear readers, a very happy, healthy and peaceful new year—a year full of love and light.  May we all bring our good energy into this world and make it the place we want it to be.

Happy New Year!!

December 31st, 2008 | Category: Dear Reader | Comments (8)

We’re back from a week in London with Dear A’s mama, a day at home then four days in Montreal with my mama, with my husband, children, brother and sister-in-law.  Christmas.  So many intangible gifts.  Our mothers grow old.  Dear A’s is 85 and hunched over with osteoporosis; mine is 90, her blood pressure high and ankles swollen.  They’re happy to see us and discombobulated too.  We break their routine, whatever it is, and they no longer have the energy to want to do much with us.  They’re happy if we watch TV with them and cook dinner for them.  We watched a lot of TV in the last ten days.  Still, it was good.

It’s clear they won’t be with us all that much longer which is how it is and how it will be for all of us.  They’ve lived long lives and both had all kinds of extraordinary travel, agenda books filled with more parties than we’ll ever see in our lifetimes because they loved parties, closets full of fine clothes.  And now it’s over.  They sit at home, chat with a few friends, go out on errands and watch TV.

But I thank them for being there so long, for just being who they are, each in their own way.  We can’t compare lives really but one thing’s clear—they came of age in a very different time than we did.  Sometimes we had great difficulty understanding each other but when you live long enough, as they have, all that separates us falls away and we get to feel the deep connection of one person’s journey to another’s.

I’m sad to think of my own mama facing her departure which must surely come sooner rather than later at her age.  Sad, because she so vigorously embraced life and gave no thought at all to the end of it despite the fact that her own parents died young, or perhaps because of it.  The truth is death doesn’t require a lot of thought; she’s taught me that—it just arrives one day.  When the time grows near, acceptance does too.  On her part and mine.  The miracle is that all that’s good is shining forth.  The humor, which both my parents had in spades, is more brilliant than ever.  The spirit as alive as ever and doubtless will be ever more.

One day at a time.  We creep towards the new year and know—we only have this day.  Today.  So, cheers, all the best for the next one and thanks to our mothers who’ve taught us more than can ever be written in ways that can’t be counted.  The gifts of Christmas and family gatherings.  It’s all this that underpins whatever art we make, if we’re willing to give it the space it deserves.

December 29th, 2008 | Category: Dear Reader | Comments (4)

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas time.  May you be merry, eat well and sip well too. Soon enough we’ll be stepping into a new year so let’s see this one out with as much fun as we can muster!

Cheers and back soon.

December 24th, 2008 | Category: Dear Reader | Comments (3)

The holidays draw near.  I thought we might just fly under the radar this year.  We’re kind of a bah-humbug family at this point, all of us a bit obsessed with our own passions—me with art, Dear A with his writing, the son with his building business, the daughter with teaching and writing.  Obsessed to the point of finding it hard to break away.  And we’re all caught up in living—people over and over at people, dinners, openings, office parties.  For each of us our work is so entwined with our lives, so happily so that we sometimes forget that we’re part of the great microcosm and cannot be separate from it, thank God.  And so the holidays are snatching us up.  Things have been arranged for us.  A dinner on Sunday with cousins, two trips, a friend’s birthday party this weekend.  And names pulled from a bowl this very morning so that a few gifts will be bought and passed out to one whose name we pulled on the day.  We’ll buy a turkey and I’ll cook because I’m the best cook of the bunch of us and I like to do it.  Dear A will buy the wine and perhaps a little cognac.  It will be Christmas after all and then New Year’s.  Both the daughter and son have made other plans for Christmas eve.  We have a party but may or may not have the strength for it.  If not we’ll resort to our standby Christmas eve and sneak off for sushi.  One year it snowed and we walked the mile to the Japanese restaurant along the busy street around the corner from us that was silent in its snowy wonder.  There were only the two of us in the restaurant that night and they waited on us like royalty.  We drank saki, tipped generously and staggered home.  Christmas Eve is now Sushi Night.  And today on Debra’s blog I was reminded of English fruit cake and mince pies and Christmas pudding.  Of the lot I will insist on finding tomorrow a Christmas pudding from England, the kind we always had as children in Toronto where I grew up, English Canadians that we were and that Dear A had in England where he grew up.  The whole thing is not so much trouble really when you leave it all to the last minute.

Dear A, who is ever so polite, groaned audibly at dinner when I mentioned that we really must get a gift for the cousins who we see so rarely.  ‘But what?’ he said.  He claims no one has ever liked a single gift that he’s bought.  The truth is that he’s not a shopper, not in the least, but he’s quite fine to shop with when he agrees to go out.  After a glass of the red we decided to choose something from the shop at the art center where everything is handmade.  I’m thinking of a small royal blue platter with a dragonfly painted on it—simple and quite fine.

And so, we lurch into the season.  There’s no point in resisting.  Why do we even think of doing so?  Party poopers!  The holidays are after all a collision of all that’s good and wildly off about us all.  We might as well celebrate.

December 12th, 2008 | Category: Dear Reader | Comments (9)