Sketchbook Writings

~ From my sketchbook writings and images, Monday March 12th ~

This is a true story about today:

It's been a day.  Nothing noteworthy, nothing outstanding, nothing traumatic other than the aftershocks of a dream which remains unremembered but deeply felt all the same.  I've been off.  My skin crawling with anxiety, breath sticky in my lungs.  

Outside the wind howled like the apocalypse; rain directly parallel to the river, bamboo brushing the ground in prostrate repentance, birch grunting like sea sick women.

And me.  I stood outside in the mud, shivering in nothing but an old white tank and bare feet, willing the weather to make me feel alive.

I looked up.  "Is this all there is?"

I watched leaves fly sideways.  "Show me there's more."

Curls dripped into my eyes and rain slapped my neck.  "Give me something.  Let me know."

And then, honest truth on my life, in that gale force that would send the stoutest beast cowering, in the flood that threatened the very integrity of the earth, a hummingbird flew to me.  Winter colors of muted olive and seaweed.  Flying from the north, she flew to me, lighted on the twisted cherry, paused for only half a second and was gone.

And I laughed at this mother of ours, the one who keeps our hearts whole and our creatures fed.  Because even in my small tantrum, I was heard.

Sketchbook Writings

~ From My Sketchbook Writings, Tuesday January 10th ~

It begins like this:
An uneventful sunset eases into busy hands and a quiet mind.  It progresses like any dream of flying; walking turns to running turns to leaping turns to earth rotating slowly below one's soles.  And somewhere in there, the mind gives way to wild thoughts.  The dangerous thoughts that in one's waking moments are too big, too grandiose, too ludicrous to allow among the elderly at heart.  The children, well, they've always been unafraid.  So we tie wings to their shoes and tell them to fly and sure enough,
they step onto thin air.
All the while our hands keep moving while the mind leans back and sighs and says yes.  That will do.

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Sketchbook Writings

~ From my Sketchbook Writings, Thursday September 15th ~

It feels like fall.  Like damp soil and goosebumps on forearms and gray cashmere cardigans.
The leaves are falling.  Falling fat and flaxen but if I squint I can pretent they are snow.
I can not break this stare; is it possible to be hypnotized by a season?  To fall utterly and completely under the control of a force as distance and permeating as the orbital path of the earth?
Perhaps when I wake the shiver of bamboo will leave the taste of late season peaches on my tongue.  No.  My senses are confused.  They've been swirled and whipped up through the vortex of birch leaves and tiny gnats, spinning for one last golden second in the remains of summer.
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Sketchbook Writings

First and very foremost, let me tell you this:

As of July 9th, I am an Aunt, for the very first time.

Gemma Grace Gibson is now part of my life and flesh and blood.

I already love her.

And I have never wanted to buy baby clothes so badly in my whole life.

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~ From my Sketchbook Writings, Tuesday July 12th -

The world seems bursting with life, fresh eyed and tender footed, and in far greater profusion than last year.  Last summer all my preparations, my energy, my preoccupations were focused on the swift approaching winter of my heart.  The winter of my body, the time when death in small doses would claim bits of my flesh.  I could not see the glory of the sun for my fear of the snow.  And while I harvested summer's bounty, put up stores and made note of blooms, my thoughts were filled with winter and I shivered in the light.

But this season, this time around, the stakes have changed.  New life surrounds me.  

Just yesterday I sat in focused stillness watching a starling teach her young to forage.  In the suburban expanse of the front lawn, she was iridescently black, sleek, and hopped on two stiff legs through the unmown dandelions.  Her single remaining offspring, a fluffy mushroom colored thing, squawked incessantly.  His gapping pink tongue would be a dead giveaway in dry grasses or squatting with the awkwardness of youth in the cedars, but here in the bounty of green fescue he was ready for every morsel she dropped into his waiting mouth.  She would pop, pop, he was squeak, she would produce a small mystery the color of cherries, he would flap messily to her side and she would neatly place the treasure right down his gullet.  This carried on as long as I could stay still.  I lost count of the minutes in my adoration and childlike amusement.  As an outsider, it seemed a silly teenage ploy for freebies, but deeper down I knew he was learning to survive.  But aren't we all?  Silly things, learning to survive?

Then last week, standing in the lingering heat of the valley as crickets sang, I watched the deer.  A leggy doe, large-eared as any I've seen ambled just on the far side of fence.  Her fawn, spotted brightly, spooked at leaves drifting down from the oaks, at fat and lazy bumblebees, at the sound of tires on asphalt from the road down the hill.  I watched them with purposeful intent, trying to etch their forms in my mind, the tilt of an ear, the light in an eye in order to later record them.  They picked along through the field, the doe leading the fawn towards the greenest shoots hidden alongside embankments and circling the trunks of trees.  I tried to follow silently, but placed a heel right into a crackling mound of dry leaves.  The fawn startled and tucked but the doe snapped her gaze right into mine.  She raised her neck to full height without breaking her focus and pulled in long, slow breaths, testing the wind and my very human scent.  Halting, the fawn followed suit, before they both turned tail and disappeared into the brush.
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Sketchbook Writings

~ From my Sketchbook Writings, Sunday May 1st through Tuesday May 3rd 2011 ~

(Along the Northern California Coast, in God's own best Spring weather, with naught more than a sketchbook, a pair of cowboy boots and kindred soul to share it with)

* * *
Coffee suits me well this morning.  Thanksgiving blend indeed!  The sky is an expanse of brilliance, causing my eyes to squint and water as I outline bits of tile and glass in my sketchbook.  The people in this town feel easy, and I wonder how far reaching the cadence of their footsteps carries. When I leave, how long with I carry their slow swagger?
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* * *

For now I sit with bare feet, cold on the railing, watching waterfowl of every size floating and soaking toes in the estuary.  In the dunes below a cat hides in marsh grass, all controlled breath and snakelike tail.  He triggers a zephyr than sends my thoughts clutching at a dream; he must have been there last night, whispering feline fantasies about goslings and ancient wooden stairwells.  A single osprey hushes the noisy chatter below.  We nod, exchanging respects. The sun of the afternoon, evidenced by my scorched neck, has been masked by a marine layer.  My toes are cast cold and blue in this light.  I should stop eating pretzels.  I should pop in the shower.  I'm giving up should from my vocabulary.

* * *

* * *
I'm drunk on the luxury of the sky.  This little trip, passing so quickly, is best described by light: the flickering hot glow under the canopy of redwoods, the quiet cashmere cape while consuming eggs and toast, the bright afternoon which reduces everything to raw shape and form, the ethereal gleam of bluffs at sunset while the quail cooed and the rabbits scattered.  These are colors for which there are no names, only fleeting memory and stuttering tongues.
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