Today

...we did a Christmas Bird/Mammal Count, an all day event. The deep snow made it challenging, but at -8 C it was a pleasure to be out there. All day the wind knocked trees into each other, banging mounds of snow off the spruce and breaking icicles off the crowns. What a fantastic racket! If woodpeckers were pecking, we sure couldn't hear them. But I could hear myself think. Ideas came. Lots of them. They were banging around in my head. They're still banging.

Anyhow, our biggest challenge of the day was tracking down the ptarmigan. There were tracks everywhere, but we didn't spot any birds until they began to feed after 3 pm.



I think this one got the wrong end of the stick.

Be sure to

...check out Portage, "a routes map to the poetry ecosystem." It's only a few days old, but it looks great already.

Poets take risks in their work

Well

...I continue to spend most of my time in the studio. It's hard to believe the weekend is here already. Time disappears when I'm writing, but not nearly as quickly as when I'm painting. And then there's the matter of sleep. When I'm writing I usually get up a million times to write something down that came to me just as I was on the verge of falling asleep, but after a day of making quick decisions in watercolour that are both conscious and spontaneous and after negotiating the space between control and the loss of control, between brilliance and mud, I'm definitely ready to sleep.

In other news, Aberrant Lounges, a new chapbook by Kimmy Beach and published by Martian Press, showed up at the post office yesterday. It's a good looking chapbook. I look forward to reading it.

By the way, I'm still waiting for my Amazon order to show up.

Anyhow, now that I know which of Santa's reindeers I am, it's time to find a sleigh and get into the holiday mode. Posts will be light or non-existent until early in the new year.

Psst! Santa, I found a sleigh!


We're good to go. Happy holidays!

After a morning of writing, imagine

...going out for coffee just to get away from it. You're sitting there, eating a warm cinnamon-pear scone and trying to shake the dense lines out of your head, when someone you know sits down at your table and tells you this. Well, this summer it happened. Greg sat down and told us the whole story. I always thought I'd shake my head, roll my eyes and exclaim my usual oh please! if anyone told me such a story, but the weird thing was I just sat there and listened as if what I was hearing was nothing out of the ordinary. Obviously I consider him a reliable narrator. Rather than questioning the story, I wondered what I'd do in that situation. H and I spend a lot of time in the bush in that same area. How wonderful it would be to see such a thing. Every time I think that, a little voice tells me I should be careful what I wish for.

After five solid days of painting

...I decided to take the weekend off to tackle a pile of less creative tasks like laundry, dusting and vacuuming. Yesterday while I was vacuuming, the bones of a poem popped into my head, so I stopped what I was doing and quickly put the words down on paper. Some of my best work has come to be while flossing my teeth, but if memory serves me correctly, this is the first to come during vacuuming. The origin of the word floss goes rather well with the creative process. Rough silk. That's a nice way of describing the beginnings of a poem. Unfortunately, the word vacuum comes from the Latin vacuus meaning empty or void. That's not so good.

This morning I read about the journals of the Goncourt brothers. Yikes. While I do share bits of news and such with writers, usually about myself, I clearly don't know the first thing about dishing literary gossip. May my "archive of anxiety and thwarted ambition" and repository of "woes and disappointed hopes" always be small and unremarkable. A vacuum. A mean free path of great magnitude.

An ermine

...appeared outside my kitchen window just as I was eating my celebratory Cream of Wheat!


Yes, it was a great day in the studio. Anyhow, H photographed the ermine while I watched and ate. The ermine was not too popular with the birds. The chickadees and gray jays ganged up on it, but it was the hairy woodpecker that carried out the assault. The ermine raced around the yard, up and down the willows, attacking and being attacked, until it finally doubled back to the willow and poplar just outside the kitchen window. There it feasted on suet.


Certain this ermine was a sign, I consulted my trusty Dictionary of Symbols.

Ermine

Purity and chastity -- a virtue that it personifies in art. Apart from the white fur, the link with purity was reinforced by the notion that stoats died if their white winter coats (ermine) were sullied. Ermine trimming on the robes or caps of nobles, judges or teachers has the symbolism of moral or intellectual purity.

Hm. I wonder if ermine trimming on a blog carries the same symbolism. By the way, the ermine seemed to approve of my celebratory feast.

Thanks to steady nudging

...from Ariel and H, I finally made my way back into the studio yesterday. The first task was to ready the space for the work I've been avoiding. That meant removing all the work from the walls and putting it in racks and flat files. A big job. I've never done that before, but I decided a new approach was necessary. Out of sight, out of mind. A cliché, yes, but an apt one. Anyhow, H did this for me because many of the works are too large for me to handle without damaging them or myself. By the end of the day the studio was ready.

This morning I walked into a fresh space. Easels with fresh white canvases. Bare walls. I booted the computer, clicked on CBC, took a clean sheet of watercolour paper out of the drawer and before I knew it I was lost in the work. What an incredible day. And incredibly exhausting. Best of all, the work I produced has a freshness about it. A freeness. I imagine that's because there was no work on the walls to influence my eye. Some paintings practically tell you what you should or should not do. "Ya. Do that. It's safe. It worked for me." Or "Eek! Don't do that! What are you thinking? That's what you did to me and I'm not going anywhere." Today there was nothing but CBC, and it had nothing to say about what I was doing. I just painted. It was heavenly. Of course, my little good luck cat, which I've had since I was a kid, looked on with a straight face.


This cat has been painting with me for more than twenty years and it will be there when I turn on the lights in the morning. Needless to say, I'm excited about painting again tomorrow. No nudging needed now.

To all those

...who've told me to break a leg, I say Tut Tut.