As the light comes back, slowly guiding us through winter into spring, the long to-do list of my studio/life seems to be growing with every day’s growing light.
A time to pick up the threads of unfinished business, revisit paintings and projects, feeling my way through the shadows on the road and charting a new course. Certainty seems impossible. Healing what needs to be healed means calmly reviewing with kindness and re-inviting the proven – painting, music, and making fires to recalibrate the senses, with gratitude for what is and the abundance ahead.
When I came across a beautiful poem by Dan Albergotti, I deeply felt the lesson of solitary melancholy that seems to have settled in over the past months. As the poet Jane Hirshfield remarked in an interview: “You can’t read a poem by someone else and not recognize in their experience your own face. This is a continual reminder of amplitude, intimacy and tenderness… Art is a field glass for concentrating the knowledge and music of connection.”
Enjoy the poem, maybe it is a connection to similar emotions felt and encouragement that you are in a good place and this is what you are supposed to do. And that it will expand the love for yourself and others, as well as the love for your work, especially when it is practiced in the belly of the whale.