These little things I want to tell you

It is the end of the day for me here in my studio perched above a snowy field. It has been a quiet day and the snow has been falling most of the afternoon but landing lightly. It is not amounting to much other than it has freshened up the field below my window spreading a fresh table cloth on a marked up old tableau. 

I worked all day yesterday and was grateful for the chance to be with a group of women and to teach. Today nothing was required of me so I drove to the little city and spent the day in the bookstore combing it for an idea or a thought as I rested. To me a bookstore is like a spa or a sauna. It carries me into the heart of my life, my work. My work? Wasn't I supposed to be resting? Well I was because for me most of my work is indistinguishable from my life. They are intertwined. They have been since I first picked up the hook. That hook led me to art, and my life is art.  

Writing is an art and today I bought a book that I read twenty five years ago, The Artists Way, and I decided to read it again. It is hard bound and has a couple of Julia Cameron's other books in with it. It is red and black and lovely with a ribbon to mark your pages and I decided I wanted to bring it home. I want to see how I will read this book differently now after a lifetime of making art for a living. Surely there are things I missed. Ideas I will find new again after a lifetime. Yes, a lifetime. Years and years of putting pen to paper, rattling keyboards, gathering wool, and sliding it a loop at a time through linen. A lifetime of ideas mined from my heart, my childhood, the spruce out my window. Simple ideas.

And today as I began the book again after leaving it long behind I said to myself "you should write, not read" and so I came to you, faithful listener, and I began the dance of tap, tap, tap, because you are there and I am here and I need you to know that I have a story of making in my heart. I need to share with you the women I grew up with, the sea that surrounds me, the fields that I walk upon. I need to share the sky above me, and the moon that shines this house. And that need is big and pervasive and it makes me happy that you are there to see my story, to hear my story. It makes me happy that you listen to the quiet of my day. Because big things are not happening here, and they may not be happening at your house either. I have no drama to share. I just have a mindful little life that notices the bowl of oranges on the pale kitchen counter, and wanted to tell someone about how the peel scented her hands when she ate one. And this is such a small thing but small things are what carry us from day to day. Many small things make a life. The plums in the refrigerator for example were of no interest to anyone except William Carlos Williams and his wife, yet we have been thinking about them since 1934 when he wrote the poem. When I think of that poem I see those plums in a bowl in a bare fridge. I see them there. 

My life is not particularly interesting but it is my life. And I want to capture it word for word, rug by rug. I want to let you know that I was here. That I too have eaten the plums, and peeled the orange. That I have loved, and that I have loved being here.