March 23, 2013
The morning is still still and grey weighed down by two feet of spring snow. Even the sky is heavy. The birds do their best to lighten things up but we have no warm welcome for them this year after the long flight north. Just heavy grey, heavy snow, covered in old rabbit tracks.
It is the other end of winter. Still fine and clean here in the country, but since the weather has stayed cold we are in a kind of stasis, shifting restlessly under the great white blanket that gets heavier and heavier even as it thickens each night with new snowfall. Like a dancer who has been told to sit still, a singer told to be silent, and just wait……
But Winter is not for waiting… Winter is for telling stories to each other, to ourselves, is it not? Winter is for listening.
I am glad of it this March of 2013, as we approach Easter next weekend. I have gone deep this winter, deep deep into the ideas of legacy and inheritance, gifts and projections. Into the effects of choice. My work with these paintings and the music I’m writing has naturally taken me there, (amazing to me, what hand tools have inspired) but other encounters and events in these months have resonated – some most alarmingly.
I’m almost, but not… quite… finished…. this process…. like a whale returning from the bottom of the ocean I need this extra time to find the surface again…
When I do emerge, it will feel very very good to speak to real people instead of paintings and recording devices, computer screens and cello strings. It will feel so deeply rewarding to take my own garden shovel and just dig with it, rather than painting the idea, then the deeper idea, then another layered idea… of shovel. (I’ll post the painting here so that you can see – a ridiculous layering of images, just to try to present these ideas about legacy and choice – ack, me.)
I can feel my feet tingling in anticipation of the soft cold mud that will receive them in my first barefoot walk outside.
Until then I work to finish. This is also a fine, fine thing.
Tonight, the Georgian Bay Symphony and the Georgian Bay Concert Choir (some 180+ incredibles!!) will play a program composed entirely by Schubert. Along with many many dear friends, my Mom is in the choir. I will be in the cello section. Mom & I haven’t played together in a big concert like this since Carnival of the Animals when I was 16. What a joy.
HA! As I wrote that last paragraph, the spring sun emerged through the grey. Suddenly, it’s quite a different world out there – full of life and warmth, though appropriately (for me), still covered with a thick coat of white.