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I have really enjoyed this exercise of taking or finding a photo to represent each day of this month. But now the month is over. Now what?
I'm considering small, daily collages (I habit I'd very much like to form, but I'm worried about having enough time to do it consistently,) or continuing with the pictures. I guess I have to decide today, if I'm going to start on March 1!
Thanks to BlogPrinting.com, I now have printed archives of this blog for 2005 and 2006. They came in the mail last night. It is kind of wierd to hold a year of my thoughts in my hand like this, oddly less wierd than knowing that those thoughts are sitting out in the ether of the internet. What was really more shocking to me, though was reading through the 2006 book and finding entries I had written a year ago, that I could have easily written now, this week. My seasonal emotional cycle is actually fairly predicitable, as much as I try to ignore it, and rail against it. It was a bit calming to read about how I felt last February and March, and then last April, and know that because I feel the same this February, it is likely I will feel again the same come April. That is, better.
What a good weekend we had. The hall closet is cleaned out, reorganizned, and now tidy. My closet has been purged (and I found two old pairs of jeans that fit me again). Our new stove has been put to good use making scones and soup and two versions of sausageandwintergreens, our favorite dish. I have spent time in the studio and made things. We wrapped up our Sunday with a nice bottle of wine, some simple but delicious food, some good chocolate (Vosges for me, Lisa had a Dagoba Lime bar), a fire in the fireplace, and knitting.
It has been a while since I have had my hands messy with paint and I have missed it. I don't generally paint landscapes and I have no idea where this one came from. But I like it.
Taking pictures of myself painting is a bit like angling two mirrors toward each other and looking down that long reflective hallway to infinity. Strange. Intriguing.
The new stove came today. Lisa called me in the afternoon to tell me that the kettle sounded different when water boils over gas. And was so much faster! We are so very excited to finally have a gas stove. Cooking on electric is just not that precise. And it has a convection oven. Think of all the things we will make! Dinner parties are in our future.
I have two hard meetings today, my first and last meetings of the day. In between I have a schedule so full that I don't have time to walk from one meeting to another, and so am having to make peace with the fact that I will be running late all day long. I dislike these days, when I have no time to pause, ground myself, get composed.
I told one of my employees recently that it is good to understand tree pose when working with a particular manager in our department. He is a frenzy of brilliant, disorganized, speeding thoughts. He thinks and talks quickly, interrupting himself and carrying on parts of the conversation in his head. It is often hard to follow him, and frustrating to try to get him to make or agree to a decision. But if you are solidly grounded when you talk to him, and slow your words to a normal pace, he usually responds by slowing down also, finishing his thoughts, meeting you in that quieter place to have a productive conversation. I didn't realize how often I use this "trick" until I was describing it to her. When I am calm, people respond calmly to me. When I am centered, I can find solutions to hard problems by feel, rather than force.
Today I need the calm. Today I will practice tree pose while in motion.
Last night I was inexplicably exhausted. Falling asleep standing up, while dinner was still in the oven. To keep myself awake until I could eat, I worked a few segments of this scarf I started over the weekend. I love entrelac because I can start and stop it. I can finish a segment in 6 or 7 minutes, which is a common amount of time spent waiting for something else to happen. The pattern is easy enough to remember that I can take just the yarn and needles in my bag and leave the pattern at home. No chart to carry along or refer to. I can just pick it up and go. The backwards knitting and the color changes are interesesting enough to keep me engaged, but not so complicated that I have to pay full attention to work on it. I can fill in the intervals of life with knitting.
