We have had three days of bright, sunny skies, despite it being cold. Today, the sky is a dull grey, a balmy -6°C. A light rain is falling. It is the perfect day to get back to work.
In a way, I am back at the beginning — getting back wholeheartedly into my daily routine — ready to practice my art daily. Today I begin working on a rewrite of a novella for which I’ve recently received some constructive feedback. It feels good to be back to work, to reconnect with these characters, to let them once again get inside my head.
I struggled for the last six months or so that I was in Ottawa to work — write, paint, practice the piano — because something was missing there for me. Perhaps it was more that I was missing in action. I felt as though that Ottawa wasn’t rich enough for my spirits, that I was no longer able to blossom there, no matter how hard I tried to toil the soil, to replant myself there. I felt like a withered flower bending towards the earth with dry, brittle leaves, and no amount of watering would bring it back to life.
For a long time I kept coming back to a particular passage in Julia Cameron’s The Sound of Paper: “We must, as the elders advise us, bloom where we are planted. If we later decide that we must be transplanted, that our roots are not in soil rich enough for our spirits, at least we have tried. We have kept hold of the essential thread of our consciousness, the ‘I’ that gives us the eye to behold.”
Here I am, in Sherbrooke (Québec), after being transplanted, ready to commit to living here, as I am — to see the beauty that surrounds me. This is now home, and at home, I settle down to work.
In a way, I am back at the beginning — getting back wholeheartedly into my daily routine — ready to practice my art daily. Today I begin working on a rewrite of a novella for which I’ve recently received some constructive feedback. It feels good to be back to work, to reconnect with these characters, to let them once again get inside my head.
I struggled for the last six months or so that I was in Ottawa to work — write, paint, practice the piano — because something was missing there for me. Perhaps it was more that I was missing in action. I felt as though that Ottawa wasn’t rich enough for my spirits, that I was no longer able to blossom there, no matter how hard I tried to toil the soil, to replant myself there. I felt like a withered flower bending towards the earth with dry, brittle leaves, and no amount of watering would bring it back to life.
For a long time I kept coming back to a particular passage in Julia Cameron’s The Sound of Paper: “We must, as the elders advise us, bloom where we are planted. If we later decide that we must be transplanted, that our roots are not in soil rich enough for our spirits, at least we have tried. We have kept hold of the essential thread of our consciousness, the ‘I’ that gives us the eye to behold.”
Here I am, in Sherbrooke (Québec), after being transplanted, ready to commit to living here, as I am — to see the beauty that surrounds me. This is now home, and at home, I settle down to work.
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