one of the ways I amuse myself in the shed.

hush. I know it looks like play.

(but it's research, honestly.)

ha. play's all it is, plain and simple. or play masquerading as work. Work, if you want to be precious about it.

I could dress it up some. I could go on for paragraphs about birds and fish and how they'd use glass and water as intermediary sorts of media for translating each other's esoteric and arcane languages, and how this informs my Art.

art-speak. I might not have the particular education for it, but I can spit it out finely if I need to.

I choose not to need to. it's not a taste that appeals to me, that's all. it's neither good nor bad, it's just a language that isn't mine.

by the way. the birds say rain, definitely. the fish I don't know. I haven't been to the river in a while. and the shed says hello.

(it's all different now, inside and out. the doors are off, flipped upside down and backwards, being painted and repainted, being used as impromptu easels. clothespins hold the papers in place.)

resting, sort of. preparing. for what I'm not entirely certain.

but there's no sense worrying too much about these things. culminations, convergences, coincidences, whatever they might lead to or away from, for the most part I'm contented and when I'm not I'm consoled and very lucky to be well-loved.

the nests I've been making (woven painted spoken sung thought dreamed) have been becoming larger; it's difficult for the shed to contain them, so they find other places to go. this suits me well enough.

black and white appeals to me more. I take fewer pictures, but like them better. delete more, at first with the bliss of purging. now, with the calm of understanding there is nothing that needs keeping, nothing that can't be found again. paint for the sake of painting, but with sometimes the tiniest inkling, like an itch maybe, of what the larger pattern could be.

anyway. I'll be back from time to time. right now it's time to wake up the girls and get ready to walk down the hill to sit on the curb in the cool summer morning and play hangman with the girls while we wait to meet the morning bus. summer school for them, and mornings to myself, serene and purposeful, slowly productive.