Sunflower Days In The Studio & New Discoveries…

These are sunflower days in the studio…

I bought this bouquet of little sunflowers yesterday after therapy when I was food shopping, a little splurge, and the flowers are great therapy themselves. I can’t look at them without feeling immense joy. These are golden days for sure, everything shimmers in the intense heat outdoors and inside I live in bright colors, often with touches of gold, because the bright light coming in the studio windows lifts my spirits and I feel happy so much of the time now.

I am painting a lot these days and as I do my soul just expands in ways I have never known before beginning to paint, and working with acrylics is an amazing experience, kind of slip-sliding and gliding across the canvas is like letting go and just, weeeeee-ing through the hours. I’ll tell you exactly how I feel inside just now. I feel like my favorite e.e. cummings poem, in just spring. This has been one of my all time favorite poems since gradeschool…

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…. Mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful. It just doesn’t get any better than that. e.e. cummings made me fall in love with language because he was just a gourmande, making your mouth water with his words. You wanted to say them outloud, sing them! I still can’t read this poem without wanting to run outside and jump rope and hop onto a tire swing hanging from a high tree and just swingggggggg and go weeeeeeeeee! Oh, I am almost breathless with joy over this poem yet again.

And yesterday something wonderful happened, a truly tremendous discovery, and I can’t believe it took me this long but it is so freeing and joyful and over the moon fantastic. Okay, here goes, I’ll try to make this brief…

All my life, even though I have had numerous small presses and created delightful little zines and small publications, I felt, somewhere inside myself, that if I didn’t write BOOKS, you know, novels and works of non-fiction that had great import, that I was wasting my time and would never ______________________ (Become successful/famous/make money, yadda yadda yadda…) And I have bemoaned, repeatedly, my agonizing inability of staying with a big book in the writing of it as I have grown older and the meds that I am on and my basketful of mental health diagnoses created an inability to stay the course, but all of a sudden yesterday in a burst of writing pages and pages in the journal something hit me right between the eyes and woke me up. I DON’T HAVE TO WRITE BIG BOOKS, I can create the zines that I love, page by page, and share them with the world as I once did, and that can be enough, more, that can be EVERYTHING.

and the little balloonMan whistles
far
and
weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee……..

I have been playing in the journal a lot too, after a few years of having fallen away from the journal I make pages and pages of art, collage, I paint in shapes to write in, I am just having so much fun…

 

So today I am going to begin, just begin, a single page of my new zine, a compendium of tiny delights and surprises, each page standing alone in its profundity, the tiniest things being as big as the universe itself, and I am twirling in joy, my little girl inside giggling and plucking dandelions to tuck behind her ear and I am airplaning around the garden with the little balloonman and I am going far and weeeeeeeee and twiddle de deeeeeee and it’s a fine day to be in a studio with my four little pugs and my funny grey parrot and a bouquet of sunflowers, my journal, and a golden painting to return to while I imagine the zine’s first page into being.

How could it have taken this long to have come to this joyful realization? It matters not. I am here now.

Love,