but you know sometimes you just can't wait for inspiration to strike. strike, what a funny choice of words, like the gift (gift? curse? both I suspect) of that flash of idea, like the
oh whatever. I was going to go on about the way the fish were jumping at the riverbeach the other day at sunset, and almost everyone had gone home but we were still there building a castle or something anyway. right at the edge of the water where the waves kept washing away everything we built but that didn't deter us any. it's all a matter of perspective, the dissolution of the made thing, distance and time but what lasts forever? certainly not a sandcastle.
I won a prize once, building, at a different beach in another country entirely. I don't remember the castle or the prize or the day, really, but the sand I remember, and the lake so many years ago, and the way we used to have to take a boat over to the other side of the lake to get to the sand dunes and how they were like another world. now there's a wide mowed path through the reeds, and it makes it easier to get there but it's not the same. and of course it's not the same, why should it be, why would you want it to be, just for comfort I suppose, for the illusion of permanence.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
sitting down to write with no particular subject or inspiration in mind.
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if permanence is an illusion and change is the only constant, what makes us yearn so strongly for things that remain unchanged? how did we become a species of wanting what isn't and fighting against what is?
is that the ceiling of your shed?
it's possible, I suppose, that permanence isn't an illusion at all. that there's a solid and unchanging structure underneath everything. the more I think, the less I know for sure. and half the time I'm not even sure what I think, or believe.
sometimes when I'm making things, or watching things happen, I feel this pull of connection to something bigger, as if I'm the doorway only for something to pass through, or a window for it to be seen through. at those times I doubt my sanity, even while I feel blissfully held and content inside the notion of being part of a larger pattern, seeing however briefly the connectedness of things. if I was a religious person I suppose I'd say I was having a vision, a friend of mine calls those times god-moments.
wanting what isn't and fighting against what is, oh yes. I know that all too well. and I see it in my children, especially my youngest. she will fly into fits of sadness and anger against the way things are and (according to her) shouldn't be. and I tell her, uselessly, that what is just is and there's no sense tying yourself up in knots about it. but she doesn't hear, or understand, and maybe it's the source that nullifies the message for her, because after all I am the same intense joyful/despairing person, I have the same want to make the world be the way I think it should be, so who am I to give any sort of advice? (yet I do. I'm her mother, after all. it's my job.)
yes, the shed is about 3/4 painted in and outside. it's gotten quite flowery and cheery on the outside. I think my painting's getting better, but I don't know if I'll ever be satisfied with it. I toy with the idea of taking lessons, learning some techniques. I think if I did that and combined it with what I've taught myself I could make some good paintings. but I hesitate to do that because I'm stubborn, and have a tendency to want to do things myself, slowly, in fits and starts, often painting over and over the same space, in love completely with the way the brush moves through the paint. one brushful of paint can last a long time, I use every bit up and the shed walls and ceiling are covered in so many layers of different colours and thicknesses that it's all quite confusing. but now and then a picture or pattern presents itself.
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