Welcome to the art/life trail. November offers time to reflect.
These four weeks provide a natural time to reconnect
to what holds deep meaning for you.
Consider your dreams, ideas, visions, inclinations to express yourself.
Reflect upon the creative juice within your relationships.
Also note the opportunities facing you through your current challenges.
Hail, Drozda, mixed media/canvas, 24 x 36″
Lines Written In The Days Of Growing Darkness
Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out
to the petals on the ground
to say,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do
if the love one claims to have
for the world be true?
So let us go on
though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.
Mary Oliver
Here on the art/life trail we take note that there is a tangible and useful creative force:
it’s called focus.
What you focus on expands
At this time of the year the art/life naturally turns attention inward.
Imagine that you are journeying down toward your creative roots.
Creativity is on the side of health _
it isn’t the thing that drives us mad;
it is the capacity in us that
tries to save us from madness.
Jeanette Winterson
Winterson describes her writing practice as she navigates the descent
in and back out of madness :
What made it possible was the sanity of the book
in the mornings
and the steadiness of gardening
in the spring and summer evenings.
Planting cabbages and beans is good for you.
Creative work is good for you.
Marsh Night, Drozda, ink/illustration board, 8 x 10″, private collection
In November navigate by the light of the Introspection/Death & Rebirth moon.
A book about madness and the creative process brings to mind
the critical need to face the demons whose job is to stop you cold. Face…
but do not feed the demons.
Easier said than done
November is naturally the time to review how you’ve grown
as you embrace the high/low, up/down,
back/forth, in/out, dark/light, light/shadow.
Sally Mann’s documentary ‘What Remains’ explores death through the lens of her camera:
“I never felt it necessary to leave home to make art.”
We’re heading home…and when we find it we realize it.
When we feel at home, we sense, that indeed, home is the most excellent place of all.
‘Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep’, Drozda, Acrylic/board, 10 x 12″, private collection
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Coming in the next issue:
The third installment of the monthly ‘Tree Farm’ series
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Camp Blue Bird Gulch
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