This is why I've been away from my usual amount of 'screen time' this month (hence no blog posts): engaged in the labor of scouring, seeking, visiting, meeting, selecting and moving-into a new home-and-studio-combined. The studio-movement portion is still in the works, but it is time to welcome you to my humble and quaint, private new home with no potty or fridge but a deluxe amount of solitude, ambiance and flow.
There she is:
A beaut.
I have a hot plate, a dry sink, and a chicken key to the facilities inside the 'mother' ship to my 'mother-in-law' suite, with a lovely gal inside of it who lives life much like me. And the sound of ducks laughing in the morning. I have all I need here folks.
It takes me back to my favorite days of living solo in Alaska, where music could be loud at all hours of the night, wine could be consumed in unabashed quantity, burning wood stoves and tree needles were smelled from the open doorway, and a sense of calm pervaded everything (though I won't glaze over the week of 'negative-fifties' or the nagging winter wish for someone sweet to snuggle up with that comes with Fairbanks' version).
My bed is up high just like before, and I hosted my first friend for tea just the other morning. Its definitely one-at-a-time-guests style here. Its good. A home is important to me, crucial to be "just so", always needs to be described as my sanctuary or else its just plain miserable, and likened to my cozy rabbit hole to retreat & recuperate from a day of engaging with the outside world. A home is not a house. But the perfect house can make the ideal home...
'house', the book, (posted just below) appeared in my dream the other night, as an offering I gave to a particularly special little brown-skinned boy, a promise to return to the place he navigated: a retreat center in the middle of the city...sweet,warm, ornate structural and soulful oasis of spirit, flow and simplicity of play & wonderment in the middle of the drone of daily life tasks. One square block of utopia.
This makes sense pretty much only to the dreamer and her dream therapist (i.e. "me" and "she"), but I thought it pretty extra-ordinary that my tiny book of actual concrete existence, made almost eight years ago by a younger, less aligned and far more pessimistic version of myself, would be the perfect gift and promise to, well, myself, in the aspect of my little-boy "self" in the realm of the unconscious. And so I dug it out and placed it high on a shelf, to regard it with new honor.
Metaphorically sacred structure ("house") as a promise to return to sacred metaphorical structure ("retreat"). Whoa. Dreams...
Structures, space and notions of home continue to be the steam in my engine, I guess.
No, I know.
