Checking In - Updating - Life Intervals

Let me start with a quote from Alan Watts to help explain my long moment of silence.

“Music is a delight because of its rhythm and flow. Yet the moment you arrest the rhythm and prolong a note or chord beyond its time the rhythm is destroyed. Because life is likewise a flowing process, change and death are its necessary parts. To work for their exclusion is to work against life” – The Wisdom of Insecurity.

My voice has been arrested long enough. I started to feel that if I paused any longer I would lose my creative tempo. Nonetheless I needed a contemplative, perspective producing, sabbatical from writing and making art.

Clearly I’m not one of those people who will write in their blog daily or even often. My rhythm is slow and moves strangely with notes of discord. But I’d like to think I have more to follow than my rhythm, I also have sweet sounding and seductive melody that guides my movements.

(Aaaargh! I can’t concentrate! At this very moment my rhythm is totally being interrupted! The loud and abrasive noise of housemates chatting about how best to clean the kitchen and the eco-evils of plastic are distracting me. It’s hard to write and think abstract thoughts when people are talking loudly, cupboards are being slammed, dishes are clanking against each other, and water is being turned on and off.)

(I guess I could go sit in my room, on my bed, and write but I’m funny about my bed. I feel my bed should be reserved for two essential activities and writing is not one of them.)

I plan on writing more and more often once I have my art studio up and running. Right now it’s slowly being constructed on my few and far between free hours. I’m a very busy woman these days. Making art and writing about my life had to be placed on pause to make room for some of life’s other essential activities, namely:

Moving to San Francisco
Adopting a corporate career
Establishing a corporate identity
Securing a place to live in a junky gem house that is rent controlled
Cleaning out the house, garage, and yard
Finding housemates
Building a vegetable, herb, and flower garden
Reacquainting myself with old friends
Making new friends
Going to college classes at night to catch on some stuff
Learning to sing opera
Developing an obsession with motorcycles
Visiting my family
Helping my sister with her wedding
Spending weekends hiking in the Marin and Oakland hills
Backpacking into the Emigrant wilderness to gaze at the milky way
Exploring and practicing the teachings of living, dead, & local Buddhist teachers
Walking around the city (a lot)
Lap swimming in the evenings at the nearby gym
And, like I said, slowly building out another art studio for myself

Yes! My friends, I will be making art again soon – very soon. I seem to have kitty cats on my mind a lot these days and think I may start some homage paintings to our incredibly ancient and mystical feline friends. I’m also looking to fire up the old camera and start shooting the city. I think my series From The Street needs to be enacted in San Francisco. And lastly, I feel a strong urge to start making some videos. Winter is on its way and with the rains art will start to emerge from my new studio.

But on its own time, in its own way, with it own unique rhythm. (I bet the videos [moving pictures, in time intervals; and music-sound intervals] will highlight this point nicely).

Lastly, I want to thank everyone who got on my ass with a steady rhythmic beat of nagging urging me to start writing again. Without you the pause in my music might have become something like early hours experimental college radio show, unbearably annoying.