"I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly."

                                                                                                                                                                                     Anne Dillard

Some one has pushed auto-pilot, with out asking me, and this is my machine damn-it!  I know the brain is a muscle and not a jelly suspended in plaster holding two video cameras recording the world and erasing at random.  I know this........  Well, summer is here and with it's long days spent out side, in the sun, with the makings of money and the coming after-math of exhaustion.  I have dirt sinking into the pores of my hands.  I am a gardener this summer, as I have been for the past two summers, and like the past two summers I have found I live in polar opposites from one part of the year to the next.  Winter is at a sharp right angle to summer living; I don't know if this is mentally healthy.  I am guessing that it isn't, for any time you feel like you are on an upper level of the old Nintendo video game Tetras it is time to re-orientate and remember gravity!  It is summer time!!!  It is for a celebration of this crazy place - all the balloons are coming out bursting and then being reborn to just burst once again!  To sleep doesn't seem needed, there is just to much to do and every one is smiling.  I can't rip my self from my brother porch in the evenings, the flowers are still running colors in my mind, as we sip cold beer and watch the mountains play a slide show of shadows.  An artist must be still for a time, must be the sponge before the spout, everything the artist experiences becomes the expression and I believe all this.  Where the monkey and the wrench and the gears get put in the same room and start punching holes in the walls of my head is the apex between my inspiration and my self awareness. 

  I haven't done much for art in two weeks, or three.  I have to reming my self to not feel a certain nagging guilt or paranoia that once the engine cools it will never start again. "Are you avoiding your art?" a friend of mine asked me as she walked up to the porch last night.  It was me, Ben, beer, and the shadows on the mountains.  I laughed, it is all a person can do sometimes, when you just don't have an answer for the riddle.  So I sit there letting the tidal waves build inside me; I want big canvass, fresh smooth and ready to dance the color; fined form, in value, and it's speech!  I want to bury my head in Prussian Blue and breath Crimson!  I want to cut out my heart and use it as a stencil to paint an arrow to You!!!!!!!!!!!!  Do you get the point?  I don't have the canvass, the paints still are covered in caps and lid and all that remains is to sit on the porch and laugh with Ben.  It is summer time, the flowers are our party favors and we smile as if it had always been this way!