Tourmaline Fading...

Nesting at Soundcliff...

These recent mornings of incessant rain have been waking me early. I am obviously becoming rested inside the luxury of more sufficiency of “unstructured time” which I hold as my precious preference.

I suppose the rain becomes some deeper invitation to more generously grant myself permission to follow both an inclination to get up earlier than usual, as well as to stay abed if I wish, than I might if I were trying to protect myself from the more usual notion of a certain less interior imperative from clock & calendar.

I feel the need to continue trying to explain myself on this concept, butting heads with the Puritans, albeit with a growing bit of celebration, knowing it now meets with more of understanding & appreciation inside this house than when I first arrived with the desire to slide into a day rather than tackling it with the “Silha energetic”...

The gray of this morning has taken the description of “Totally Faded Tourmaline”. We continue the exercise Stephen has shared from his beginning days in the Northwest... creatively naming the myriad grays of our atmosphere.

I bring a jeweler’s vocabulary grounded in gems & metals to his softer abstractions. Weather is so ubiquitous & local as to be supposed a poor writing topic, yet it does so much to describe interior mood. He wrote haiku on the ferry. I’ve use it similarly to practice verbal descriptive techniques over my years keeping a journal.

I am beginning to find desire to go back into the studio it has been nice to abandon awhile during the holiday social time, even though it was also the scene of much social energy during this season of bell sales. There is the need to do the inventory & ready the books for closure. Once that business is settled, I can begin to indulge my artist’s needs.

Like the recuperation inside this “slugdom” since Solstice, the rhythms of my work wax & wane to quite literally wax again... now it is the carvable variety of that word I begin to crave, as has been my seasonal habit for years.

[I note my discovery in that sentence of the same letters forming those two words... crave to carve... carving such craving into new work.]

After the rushing holidays I can submerge into the quiet remaining winter nights to nurture & birth what has been gestating in the fertility of the year’s production & sales seasons. Observation of public responses & reactions during the Open Studio time, plus their suggestions for designs adding to the collection of my own curiosities nets fodder enough for three or four month’s research & absorption at the wax desk.

By now the still low & late sun has broken through to glaze wet surfaces with a weak but welcome warmth... still fading the tourmaline depths of the Sound. Tahoma has been invisible of late, taking her own rest, no doubt.