When this happens

Today’s word upon waking was grace. As it is Sunday I thought that was pretty cheesy. Long as I have been doing this word of the day thing I remain skeptical. So today after my snarly thought came the phrase ‘moving through hard things today, be graceful’. Well you can guess how that went, by noon today no less than 5 people had expressed some form of upset feelings to me.

This afternoon I thought of upset feelings like a weird form of bumper pool. My upset feeling ball careens into your feeling ball upsetting you and sending your feeling ball into someone else’s space. On it can go, often enough, it seems, picking up steam.

Gosh it is hard not to get upset back! And I didn’t, but all day long little snippets and snags kept popping up in my mind and I’d go back to that cheesy Sunday word, grace, be graceful. Finally I looked the word up because when I call on something so many times in one day I start to question it’s meaning: graceful - characterized by beauty of movement, style, form, or execution

Back to my bumper pool game, I see now my work is not so much to make sure that I will not get moved or bumped but my work, my gracefulness, is what I do with the hit.

Again the flood, such a teacher.

Surprise

Most days I do a word thing when I wake up. I choose a ‘word of the day’. Persevere has been the word over and over again since August 28th.  I’d get out of bed thinking, again? At night before I go to sleep I think about the word and see how it set the tone for the day or helped me navigate a situation or would have helped me if I had remembered to think about it.

Yesterday’s word was surprise. I’d never had that word before. I arrived at the dam for the dark sunrise dog walk before Jennifer. While standing on the dam looking down the hill, I heard this really odd sound, like something driving through the trees and hitting everyone of them, clack, clack, clack, loud. Of course it was really still quite dark. Rosie and I stood there staring into the black woods frightened and dumbfounded. Believe me, this is how the word of the day thing sometimes works, I was indeed, surprised.

The noise stopped, nothing came out of the woods at us and I figured it was probably a moose or a buck with a big itchy rack rubbing against the trees. Hmm, I thought, I got my word of the day out of the way early.

On with my busy day I went. I was at the gallery hanging outdoor winter lights when a fellow came up to me with a big camera on his shoulder.

http://www.wcax.com/story/16148274/wilmington-businesses-show-resilience

I chuckled when I went to bed last night, I guess the day had more surprises in store, on tv! I didn’t even fluff my hair.

Revisiting

Like many artists I save my rejected monoprints to tear up and repurpose as cards and collage parts. Most of my big and rich pile of rejects washed away in the flood. Today I went into my home storage boxes to see if I could find anything to tear up for Thanksgiving thank you notes. I want to send thank you notes to all the people who came to the gallery after the flood to help with the debris and the clean up and clean out.

But I got lost looking around in my flat file. Here are two early in the game monoprints:

Happy Shapes, 9"x 11"

Red Square,  9"x 9.25"