Last night we wet to a screening of a documentary film, ‘The Blood of Yangzhou District,’ about Aids orphans in China. The film won an Oscar for best short documentary on 2006 and tells the story of an impoverished rural village in China where residents sold their blood for money. The needles with which the blood was extracted were not sterilized and soon most of the adults in the village were infected with HIV/Aids. Some of their children were infected at birth and are, sadly, now orphans. When American aid workers arrived in this village they encountered squalid living conditions and people dying without any medical help at all. It was mostly children who were left and no one wanted to care for them because they have Aids.

It was heartbreaking to see these stories and to see the truly distressing conditions in which these people live. Although the Chinese government now provides medicine so that these children may become healthy and live normal lives there was still no one to care for them properly and to oversee their medical regimen until the arrival of the American organization, The Alliance For Children Salvation Association, founded by Dr. Kay Johnson in Boston. They designed a program in which the children were placed in foster families in cities so they might be situated near a hospital should they need help. They are each assigned a health worker to oversee compliance when it comes to taking the regular doses of medication they need to stay healthy. Their lives are vastly improved now from when they were first discovered in their villages, neglected and ill.

The film was presented as part of a fund-raiser for the kids by my daughter’s childhood friend, Eliza Petrow, who was instrumental in designing the program for their care. I felt so proud to know Eliza and to see the way she has grown into such a compassionate, wise and effective advocate for these kids and others. It’s the kind of thing that gives me a great deal of hope for this world. When I was a young woman few people thought of service careers. I’m truly in awe of what so many young people like Eliza and my own daughter, who is a teacher, are accomplishing.

There are so many worthy causes, it’s hard to know sometimes which to give to. I’ve decided to give to the ones that come my way as this has done. 100% of the donations go to helping these children. If you’d like to contribute please go to The Alliance For Children Foundation website. Pretty amazing to look at those smiling little faces.

Today I dug up samples of earth to be sent for soil testing from both my friend Sally’s garden and mine. We are planning to try our hands at growing vegetables, trying to go a bit green here in the city, a bit self-reliant and to cut our use of the car running to the shops etc. I called a man at the University of Massachusetts and he instructed me to take 12 samples from each garden and to dry the soil on newspaper in the sun then sift it and send one cup’s worth of each garden. Right now the soil is spread out on paper on the grass in my back garden and I hope it will be really sunny and warm tomorrow to dry it out. It’s important to test it for nasty things like lead, of course. No point planting seeds in poisonous earth.
The garden is part of my increasing interest in what’s happening to our planet. It’s a small thing but if we all did small things there would be a shift in the way we use energy. There are now 6 billion of us on the planet, that’s 4 billion more since I was a child and I can totally feel it. I think of the city of Toronto where I grew up. Next to our cluster of houses were farms on all sides. They were gone by the time I was a teenager and our house which was on the edge of the city limits is now considered a prime city location. I can only imagine how places like Calcutta have changed.
The man at the lab was rather funny and vague—the absent-minded scientist! He was in the midst of testing soil! He’ll tell us what we need to know. If we get the go-ahead we’ll be building raised beds next week and getting started.

Meanwhile, Allan found an injured cardinal beside the busy road today. The poor thing has a gash in its head and we think it may have been hit by a car. Allan came home, retrieved a cardboard box, gently lifted the bird into it and brought him home. He set the box on the table on the deck outside our kitchen door and gave it a little dish of water and a crust of bread. But it’s not moving much. I think he may soon leave this life but he’s comfortable and safe right now and we got to stand very near him without him flinching. Maybe he could see that we were friends. I have to hand it to my dear Allan for noticing this wee bird and going to his rescue. Now we wait to see how his life will unfold and wish him luck.

I’m a lifelong city girl but this year I’m going to plant a garden, one that grows vegetables! Our city house does not have a lot of earth around it but it does have some and one side of the house gets glorious sunshine for most of the day. I’m inspired by my friend Kelly who has an acre of land and grows all kinds of things. But I’m also inspired by what’s happening on our planet and by the movement towards being more conscious about the energy we use both in going to and from the shops and in having our food shipped from far away. I’ve always been very conscious about the quality of food we eat and having fresh greens and tomatoes right outside our kitchen door will be great. I was just visiting my friend and neighbor, Sally, this morning and she too is going to put in a wee vegetable plot. My wonderful son is coming to do some work here on the house this week so I’ll get him to pick up some timbers for Sally and us to make raised beds.

There will be things to learn, of course, but that will be fun. Allan and I tried our hand at a community plot a few years ago but we weren’t good at getting ourselves over there. It felt difficult to pull ourselves away from work and will be much easier to have the plot at home. We’ll have to get a delivery of good earth. I’m not quite sure how the original settlers in Massachusetts actually survived on the stony soil here. But once we’ve got some good earth going we should be able to get the vegetables planted and be off to the races. Could be famous last words but I think not! We can’t have that!
Now I will have to plan out what we’ll have—tomatoes for sure and a few herbs like basil, dill, parsley, coriander. Then lettuce greens. I love salad every single day in summer. It is my favorite, favorite food, for sure. I want to put in a rhubarb patch somewhere though maybe not in the same spot as the other stuff because it takes up room. A few zucchini would be nice and perhaps other squashes. I might just start with that and see how well we do this first summer. There’s also the possibility of a second plot beside the deck. That would be for carrots and cucumbers and maybe a few spuds.

When I was in San Francisco I bought a wonderful book called—World Changing. Al Gore wrote the introduction and more on this soon when I get a bit farther into it. The problems in our world are so very complex and challenging now but every little thing we do can make a difference and join us to the spirit of positive change. Even a little city plot. And I think this plot will make me more conscious of others things that can also be done, that I can do. It does feel like time I did more. Some of it is just old habits that need changing. But by next weekend I should be up to my elbows in dirt! Yay!

It’s a rainy Saturday here in Boston and there were only four of us drawing today. Our goal was to work on getting a little more abstract. Realism is always interpretive anyway and we’re all interested in breaking free of its constraints. I’m really always interested in exploring. I think that’s what a class is for and, with luck, we get ideas and experience to further our art in whatever way we want to continue. The thing that grabs one artist is not necessarily what grabs another so it’s good to try things out, to really experience them as a way of coming to know who you are as an artist and even as a person.

So we folded our paper in half and drew from a photograph of flowers on the top half with the intention of simplifying. In other words, we tried to leave some of the detail out, to leave some of our lines open, to keep shading to a minimum. The object is clear but the rendering is light. That done, I asked the class to then open the paper and complete the picture using something from the first image but not all. I think the results were really interesting.

Sometimes it’s a question of coming in closer, or reversing dark and light, or just doing lines. In every case, what emerged was more interesting because it allowed the viewer to engage with the image by trying to find meaning in it though not literal meaning. I think that art in a pure form like this is energy. Depending what we do we can create a field of energy in our work—a field of lightness, or tranquility or excitement, all kinds of things. It’s the viewer’s job to watch themselves and their response to the piece at the same time as viewing the art itself.

Art can take us out of our small minds and into our big, expansive ones. So even if it is just a practice it is a fine, fine thing to do. We confront ourselves even when we are focused on something outside of ourselves. We see the ways we inhibit ourselves and the ways we begin to free ourselves. And, very often, we see the ways in which we judge ourselves and our work. I think this is why it’s so hard to break free in art—we’re groomed from our first day in school to perform the ‘right’ way, to get ‘good’ grades, to ’succeed.’

I called this class ‘The Mistakes Class’ because I really want us to make mistakes, to go that far out. Luckily I made one myself today. I tried something and just couldn’t find anywhere to go with it. So, it was on to something else. I can’t even say it was a mistake I learned from—it was just something that didn’t work. But the next piece I did really did work and I couldn’t have done it without going way too far in a fruitless direction first.

I’m still a bit pooped from our time in San Francisco, have to say. But so many wondrous things seem to be happening that are leading in good directions. I’m still very inspired by the Art in the City symposium at Harvard a couple of weeks ago. It makes me think how much of art and literature in the last part of the twentieth century was invested in form in an intellectual way for its own refinement and sake. How little art and literature in the recent past has looked out beyond the small ego self. This is just a thought but it seemed we had our heads in the sand as our planet slid into dilemmas we ignored—overpopulation, the burning of fossil fuels and their effects, extreme poverty, pollution and illness. Making another drawing is not going to solve these problems but I think it can lead us to our brave, creative selves where we are able to look both inwards and outwards and take good action in the world. Maybe it’s all perfect as the Buddha said but I hope artists are going to be part of the solutions we need now to create. More on this soon and I’d love to hear your thoughts too. But now I’m going to cook dinner and try to get back on east coast time!

We’re back from San Francisco and I apologize for disappearing without a word. I intended to post en route but we traveled around so much and time was shorter than I expected. We went out as Allan was to do a radio interview with Michael and Justine Toms on their New Dimensions program and we decided to tack on a vacation. The Toms broadcast from Ukiah, a couple of hours north of San Francisco and we drove up to that beautiful wee town in poring rain and were delighted to wake up the next day to a charming place set in a valley in the far reaches of the beautiful wine country. The Toms are doing such good work interviewing authors and artists. It was a real pleasure to meet them and I’ll let you know when the radio interview will be web cast.

So many things happened on this trip. I hadn’t been anywhere new for a while so it was fantastic to see beautiful San Francisco, the incredible landscape and seascape all around and especially to meet some great people. I love that most of all, for sure.

After Ukiah, Allan gave a presentation at JFK University set up by his friend, artist and writer, Julie Stiles. JFK actually has a Department of Consciousness and Transformation! Pretty cool and not the sort of thing we find much of here on the east coast where we have to work through things the good old-fashioned way stumbling around a bit. I met two wonderful sisters, Pauline and Gillian. They’re from Liverpool originally but have lived in San Fran for years. Pauline is a nurse who uses art for healing and Gillian uses writing to get people to step forward through telling their stories. I could have talked to them all night and hope we’ll get to share a little through the grace of the internet!

Pauline and Gillian tipped us to the farmer’s market at Ferry Pier on Saturday and we spent the day roaming around there with Julie and eating Mexican food. It was great to hang out with Julie and chat about the process of making art. I can see that we don’t give ourselves nearly enough chances to do that when we’re home. It seems like we always have things ‘to do.’

San Francisco is so full of amazing vistas and architecture, a magical place, as is the landscape and seascape all around. We spent a few days at The San Remo Hotel which reminded us of other times and other realities. It was built in 1906 after the San Francisco to house workers rebuilding the city and restored to its former self a few years ago. I think Raymond Chandler roams the halls at night which made it a kind of cool place to stay.  Truly felt I’d stepped behind the brilliant curtain of light and beauty that is so much of San Francisco into something grittier.  The rooms are tiny, the furniture original to the early 20th century and the bathrooms separate from the rooms. A modest splendor. I like my creature comforts and was, at first, reluctant to stay anywhere where I might have to pad down a long corridor in the middle of the night to use the loo but the place is full of quaint charm and history. Our neighbor, George, was a permanent resident of the hotel, a jolly man in his seventies. Who knows what brought him there but I loved his cheerfulness even though his life was lived in a nine foot square room. I met another man when I went to wash a few clothes in the laundry. He, too, must have been a permanent resident because he was washing his curtains. He was young and handsome and greatly concerned that there was only one dryer working. I don’t know too many young men who wash curtains but this fellow did.
The hotel was so intimate—total strangers toddling about in their undershorts and pajamas to use the showers and toilets. Everyone was courteous and affable. In ordinary hotels people breeze right by each other but in The San Remo they greet each other with a smile and a hello. You really do need to say something when you meet someone in the early morning in your pajamas. It was great.

Home again. We drove through Boston in a taxi last night around midnight and I found the grittiness of this city, its red brick and well-worn buildings, all so familar and somehow comforting. It’s home and it’s good but the great vistas of San Francisco are in the mind and heart now too.  Anyway, many more tales to tell and much inspiration. To be continued!

I just spent the whole day at the Harvard Graduate School of Design at a symposium—Art in the Life of the City: London Stories. Several curators came from London to share stories of ephemeral art in the city—art that is not intended to be permanent and that often engages the viewer as participant. Many of the talks were densely intellectual—so much information that it was difficult to keep up. It’s clear that England and Europe are far ahead of us here in the United States in terms of this sort of engaged public art. Forty per cent of artists in England no longer think of art as object making. For them it is experience making.

I will write more about this but tonight, after this amazingly inspirational day, I’d like to tell the story of Antony Gormley’s Waste Man who you see here. Gormley went to the depressed English seaside resort of Margate to create an art piece that told the story of the exodus in the Bible. It is the story of how we leave the old behind and he asked the people of Margate, many of whom are poor, to give to this project by finding some object in their homes that they’d be willing to let go of. Maybe something that, when they let go of it, they could also let go of the pain associated with it. He obtained a space in an old abandoned amusement park and created the skeleton of a man with steel beams, eighty feet high with one arm raised like the Statue of Liberty. With the use of cranes they attached the detritus of this community of people to the frame to create the statue of a man made from junk. There was a piano, desks, chairs and who knows what.

One young woman clutched a small paper shopping bag. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I can’t tell you what it is,’ she said, ‘but I must let it go. It is time to let it go.’ She went up in the crane and deposited her package in the very heart of the man.

When he was complete, the whole town of Margate gathered around one night and they set him on fire. He burned all night until there was nothing but rubble left. Everyone huddled around and watched.

‘No one ever comes to Margate,’ said one spectator. ‘This is something special.’

I confess I’ve not thought much of art in these heart-based, political, public, ephemeral, huge-scale terms but now that I’ve experienced Waste Man and other similar works I feel both humbled and changed. There is work to do on this planet and artists can not just bring awareness to social problems they can actually change people. If you can rent the film, please do. The people of Margate have let go of something—an old way of viewing themselves. One burning night and working on this man together changed them. No one will forget this experience.I am not such an artist but I will consider now how I might be more engaged with the world in whatever it is I now do.

Because I designed the poster for this event I was invited to dinner in Harvard Square with the presenters. There was the chief curator of the Tate Modern, my favorite museum, the head of The Royal Society of the Arts, the director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, the producer of The Sultan’s Elephant and more. And they were all women, all a little younger than I am, but not by much. They are immensely accomplished women and I have to bow down to them for the courage and determination they have but I declined dinner. I knew I did not have anything to offer them, not in a group setting.

So I walked from the GSD through Harvard Yard to the bus. There were cops everywhere and a bandstand set up in the yard. It was a beautiful sunny day, (the first day of summer—spring is already over!) and I had to walk a little out of my way because the cops were closing down the yard for this event. I asked a student what was going on but he didn’t know. I stopped in at The Coop, the Harvard-owned bookstore and spent a pleasant half hour browsing around. When I exited, by the back door, I saw three men dressed identically in blue blazers with little buttons in their lapels. A mild curiosity but I paid no attention—I was much too full of inspiration from the day. I passed a man on my way out the door, turned left and was told by a rather burly dude that I must go to the right. I could see a couple of black limos down by Mt. Auburn Street on the left. ‘Why’s that?’ I said. ‘The prime Minister of Britain is visiting,’ he said. ‘You’re joking!’ I really couldn’t believe this just having spent the whole day with the culture honchos of Britain and having just declined dinner with them. The man laughed. ‘You just walked right by him!’ Funny. Not only could I have had dinner with these incredible women but I might have met the Prime Minister or at least said hi, if I’d had my eyes open. Well, there you go. Time to open the eyes!
Anyway, I hopped on the Number 71 bus and came back to home sweet home. But something changed for me today. At the symposium we all caught a glimpse of possibilities and who knows where any of us will go from here. This is not about ambition but inspiration and another door opened. So I say thank you to these incredibly intelligent and brave women who have really devoted their lives to art as curators and producers. Magic has happened.

Isn’t it beautiful? The photo is by Sarah Laslett for Royal de Luxe, the French theater company that created The Sultan’s Elephant, a performance piece in which this gigantic mechanical elephant walked through the city streets of London in 2006. It was produced by Artichoke, a theater production company and funded by the city of London. To think that ordinary Londoners had no idea what was happening when this elephant appeared is extraordinary and thrilling. On Thursday and Friday, this week, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, sponsored by the Loeb Fellowship, will hold a two day exploration—Art in the Life of the City: London Stories.

The photo is one side of the program I designed and, yes, even after the computer hassles of yesterday it is now printed and looks great! I popped over to the printer in Harvard Square this morning to see it. It’s tabloid sized and I now have the photo on the wall of my studio. It’s great to think how art can be a collaborative venture that gives joy in mysterious ways. What a preposterous idea to have a gigantic elephant appear from the wreck of a wooden ’space ship’ that has crashed into one of London’s main streets! It’s even more preposterous to think that no-one, not even the media had any idea what was happening. But all of London got caught up in it. It’s magic that no one in London will ever forget. How fine is it to carry a little magic with us as we move through our lives?

The computer problems of yesterday are now forgotten. Funny how they can trip the stress switch. The printer, Derek, was very kind today to say he knew just what I was talking about. Perseverance pays, as they say. Things can always come right.

I’m so looking forward to the event and will report. I’m expecting to be massively inspired as if I’ve seen an elephant walking down the street. Stay tuned!

A long, long, long day. Who knew it would be like this? You never know. Today I got beat up by a computer program, wrestled to the ground and kicked. They can be like that. I would have punched back but I didn’t know how! Ack. It was truly frustrating in the way only computer things can be. (They are smarter than us, I believe.) I used new design software to design the program for the big event at Harvard this week about art in the city which I’m so excited about. The printer called this morning to say he needed me to add 1/8 of an inch all around. No problem. In any other program I know it is no problem but not this one. And then when I found the way after a few stabs everything was fine EXCEPT for four or five lines of type which were just screwed up. And there was no-one to say why because computers don’t actually speak and techie message boards are a real nightmare if you actually want to hear your issue addressed and not 5 million other people’s issues.

Can I tell you how many things I tried to fix this problem? No, I won’t do that to you. I’m no good at technical things, it’s true. I have BASIC knowledge only and I started to think that BASIC knowledge just doesn’t get us anywhere. At one point I felt like crying but then I thought—what’s the point? Who’s going to care even? What good would it do, tears on the keyboard? It might even ruin it and then there goes a couple of hundred dollars! So I sucked them in.
And what would I cry about? A computer glitch. There are people in the world with real problems and I’m going to cry over the fact that I have tried to do something 437 times and in 362 different ways and it still didn’t work! We can’t have that. Those were my thoughts but I was lucky they were finding head space because the old head began to feel like it was squeezed in a vice. I even thought that this day might AGE me or give me high blood pressure or something. Finally, finally I found most of the way forward. I must leave the last bit to the printer and give him my solemn promise that I will never, ever use this program again.

Now I sit with a glass of the red and reviving and I know why the grape exists. It is for moments like this at the end of a long, long day. At noon I had lunch with a new friend and babbled incoherently about software. Me! I’d lost my senses and will have to make profuse apologies. I even started to think, perish the thought, that I’m no good at ANYTHING. A computer program can do that to a girl like me.

But now, the house is quiet. Dear A was fortunate to have already planned a dinner with a friend tonight so I am here and the pressure in my head begins to lessen. I am glad for Dear A. It would have been a dull evening to hear all about this over the dinner table and I’m sorry to say that he would have done so. But no, now I take another sip and tell you. I’m sorry but thanks for listening. Bottoms up!

Every week in our art class we sit around a table for a chat before we start working. Usually we talk about what we’re going to be working with that week and today we worked on abstraction. But before we began one of our group said she sometimes wondered why she was doing art. She has a very good job and doesn’t sell her art, at least not at the moment. So, is it worth the time and effort? We all agreed that we have a good time on Saturday mornings but is that all that’s happening and is it enough?

In my last post I was (curiously) asking much the same question. If we are not making a splash is it worth swimming? We went around the table and everyone spoke about what doing art is about for them. One of our artists said that she does art for mental health. It’s a lot like meditation. It takes us to the place of peace so that’s a good thing right there.

This same person said that the creativity we consciously nurture in making art becomes much more present in other aspects of her life. When I think about creativity I think about abandoning preconceptions, of diving into the unknown, of learning to trust, of failing and succeeding, of playing and having the courage to go where we haven’t gone before. It does alter our lives when we internalize these qualities.

All very cool. Still, I think of a memoir I read, Final Edition, by the British writer E. F. Benson who wrote the wonderful Mapp and Lucia stories. In the book he told of a friend who had decamped to the island of Capri and for twenty-five years labored on the definitive poetic translation of a selection of ancient Greek epigrams. “He read me some of them, his voice, charged with emotion, trumpeting out the emotion of the triumphant lover or falling to a whisper as it mourned for the untimely death of a beloved youth.” And then, “my heart sank at his elation.” The result was wooden. “Happily the gods in their mercy had withheld from him the perception of his own incompetence.” The man died without publishing his long labors. They were left to E. F. Benson in the will in the hope that Benson, an established writer, might take on the task of getting it published and promoted. But he could not.

I really love that story. I love the man’s devotion. He got to where he got to and enjoyed some of the fruits of a romantic life on Capri. A consolation.

In the same book, E. F. Benson wrestled with the question himself. His first novel, Dodo, a book no one ever reads now, launched his career and made him famous and rich. Curious no one reads it now, isn’t it? Then he wrote several more books and they were soundly trounced in the press. He thought his career might be over and went into a period of deep questioning. It was writing he loved and he couldn’t turn away from it. He decided to carry on and to ignore the public, to write only what he cared about. From that came Mapp and Lucia. Those stories are not widely read now but they were for a good while, are brilliant fun and may come back again, who knows.

Who knows the permutations between these two realities? But, to me, it all looks rather fabulous, one story really no better than the other. Each person was on his own journey and neither gave up. So moving, really. Writing took one man to Capri, the other to fame and fortune. You can’t lose.

I worked this weekend on the program for the Harvard Design School event next week—Art in the Life of the City: London Stories. It’s going to be such a great event with speakers and films informing us of wild public art projects like The Sultan’s Elephant, the Crack in the Tate Modern floor and Waste Man—a forty foot sculptural man made of discarded furniture that was later burned. These are great dramatic art pieces—experiences so vivid that they change our relationship with the world. Just to know the joy of seeing The Sultan’s Elephant stroll down a London street, to stand watching with thousands of other people, n one knowing where it came from or what it was about—just magic.

So I was designing the program. On one side is an enormous photo of The Sultan’s Elephant and on the other the program, several other images and the list of speakers with their bios. Many of the speakers are women—that’s good news, and many of these women have amazing jobs—there’s the chief curator of the Tate Modern, the producer of The Sultan’s Elephant, the director of the Royal Society of Art, a research fellow and sculptor at an art college. These women are on boards of Everything, are consultants of Almost Everything. And they’re doing incredible things—trying to make urban space more hospitable and working to make cities greener. Their accomplishments were so lengthy that I almost ran out of space for them on the program.

Reading their bios I couldn’t help reflect on my own. I couldn’t help reflect how much more I’d like to do with my life to effect positive change in the world, in what new ways I’d like to engage with the world. It made me think about my own path and theirs. It’s not that I ever aspired to be a curator or a producer—those are different skills than what I have, more in the thinking domain than the feeling one which is mine. I’m better suited as an artist, as a writer, but still I’ve not achieved what these women have, not even by half. This is not to diminish what I have achieved—I’m just thinking this through here.

I started my career at The National Film Board of Canada and I was just twenty-four when I was asked if I would accept a job as a producer. The difference between me and these highly accomplished women is that I said thank you so much but I think not. I see myself as a writer, I said, as a creator rather than a producer. I was absolutely clear about this. A bit hot-headed but clear! I’ve wondered occasionally if I didn’t made a mistake. My philosophy now is to say yes to yes. But, then, I thought I might lose what felt so urgent and important—the chance to see where art would take me.

I was very ambitious as a young woman—there were so many things I wanted to do. But, at the same time, I was my parents’ daughter—I loved fun. I loved people and never worked late as some of my co-workers did who went on to have distinguished careers in film. No, I was out on the town. I didn’t get home until midnight half the time and when I got to work in the morning (always on time by the way) I couldn’t wait to compare notes with other, usually older, co-workers who’d given dinner parties the night before or been to the theater. I’d usually been in a club listening to the blues or out to dinner at a restaurant with a friend or at the movies.

Then, one day, I won’t tell the whole story now, I quit that great job to go freelance. I saw I was not a animation filmmaker after all. I hadn’t the interest in the long labor it took to bring a film to completion. I loved the writing and the design—that was enough for me. I had no real plan just an incredibly clear vision—I must jump ship and move on. Not long after I married a blues musician, one of Muddy Waters’ band members, and moved to Boston. So, there you go—the chance at another kind of life was done then, for sure. For sure!

When I was reading the biographies of those women I was getting a twinge of something like envy. How fun would it be to work on The Sultan’s Elephant—to create that kind of magic! But my friend Sally, who is working to bring these people over here from London, said that she called over to London one evening at 8 pm their time and they were still in the office. Let’s put it this way—at 8 pm I’m usually at the dinner table with a glass of the red having a chat with Dear A. Last night both kids stopped in, though not at the same time, so I was at the table until 9 pm then we watched the last episode of the new Sense and Sensibility. Today I’m back to the revision on my book which nears completion. And tomorrow I drive through beautiful Vermont to Montreal to visit with my dear mother for a few days. Then, when I come back, I will meet with my wondrous drawing class—we’ll explore abstraction which one of our members requested and will be a great exploration.

I have a very, very sweet and amazing life though not a public one. I no longer worry about money because I know how to make it. I love my family and my friends. And, this is so fine—wonderful new people are entering my life. They are not high-powered producers or curators. They are artists of various sorts, musicians and yoga teachers. They have time for coffee or a visit to a museum or dinner.

I’m so glad I wrote this all out. I’m so glad I see that all that time ago when I was surely a mixed-up young woman I still had some sense. I knew I didn’t need to explore that important job, that my journey was more of an inward one and a family one. Every day now I sit down and write. I do design work too and art but the thing I wanted to do when I was twenty-four is what I’m doing now and have done for the last few years when time finally opened up for me. There’s no guarantee that what I write will find its way into the world and I do it anyway. And I’m going to hold my head high because simply doing it, simply working very hard on something you truly feel called to do and doing it with love—that’s enough. The rest is not up to me.

It does make me think though that every once in a while we need to sit down and just appreciate ourselves. I can still get that twinge where I think it’s the big job that is most fabulous but it’s only for the person who wants it. Tonight, I’m going to sit at my kitchen table with my Dear A again—just chatting and counting my blessings.  The envy is just the sneaky old ego anyway, silly thing that it is.