It was a creative decision.

Sometimes the beauty is easy. Sometimes you don't have to try at all. Sometimes you can hear the wind blow in a handshake. Sometimes there's poetry written right on the bathroom wall.-Ani di Franco, Good, Bad Ugly

So I took it, that first step. I started writing things down. I started and once I did, I could not, cannot stop. Maybe it is like me and exercise and after the initial endorphin rush wears off, and after one too many days in a row of not doing it, the drive to do it will subside, but for now, it is feeding me. Writing/photography, no matter how amateurish, is helping me to be in the world making creative decisions instead of just parenting and financial ones.

Deciding to write things down,and choose pictures that I've (mostly) taken to go with the writing and share what I am doing as I go were the first creative decisions I've made in a long time. I guess I was making them in imperceptible ways but they went without saying, they happened without conscious decision or thought.

The decision to start noticing things and write about them, to look side to side, down and up and in for beauty, has been an important decision for me. Permitting myself to make creative decisions makes all the other decisions I make everyday bearable. By deciding that I too am capable of being involved in a creative process, I am letting myself to be assailed by beauty. This decision and the subsequent ones I make each time I publish a post, persistently change me.

I let myself see beauty and now I cannot unsee her. I let her enter and now she won't leave. I am, now that I know she's in the house, seeing her everywhere, sometimes just for a moment, but she can be found in the unlikeliest places.

She hollows out new channels. She demands new things of me.

The first conscious creative decision took so long to make. I am so excited to find out where the next ones will take me.

Comments

I entered August without you.

I won't visit you this month. You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you. I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.

Fists full of lettuce

It is a pot of a variety of lettuce plants. It was planted by my mom. She has been living with Stage 4 bile duct cancer for at least 1.5 years (that we know of, probably a lot longer). Standing and gardening are becoming harder as time goes on. She learned about gardening from her dad as a kid and kept on gardening every year of her adult life. Sometimes the gardens were tiny or rudimentary, but with the help of my dad , they have become major and, at times elaborate, growing projects over the years. Now it is a collection of raised beds and regular beds that hold a host of plants, vegetable and flowers. Something that was clear that first spring with Stage 4 cancer is that gardening would continue in a big way, cancer or no cancer. It was important to order the seeds and start them inside and get them planted outside, no matter what. Spending time together in the summer with cancer now consistently involves gardening and following instructions. Plant...

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still. We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue. Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision. They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped. Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...

Growing Versions

Search This Blog