"Look out your window and I'll be gone"

"Now it is possible for artists to have and eat that particular cake by adding that, after all, science is in one (rather attenuated) sense "mere" art; art is all there is."

Annie Dillard

"Living by Fiction"

So it is that I find my self here again.  Yet here isn't really "here" now is it?  Things change, you have changed; the sky is a bit bluer than it was last time you sat in this spot and inside you feel it too.  You have moved on, walked out of the picture into a new frame.  Even in the same place you see it different, you notice that dried lief still attached and find the light showing on new places on the bark of the aspens.

For the artist, his life becomes art.

There, you see it?  There is the madness, the ever present threatening chaos, our lives like the kitchen if it isn't clean every day!  And there; there is the peace, the joy, the salvation and hope that though it maybe bad it will not be bad every day unless that is what you want.  But not for me. I like the change.

Down form the mountain

It is like coming from a different world that existed only thirty miles from my old world but contrasts between a small busy town and the drop of heavy snow from waited branches of sub alpine grand fir and larch trees.  My quiet respite from every day life in a friends home at the base of the Great Rockies has had a slowing effect on my mind.  It was a piece of that river that I moved upon only a few months back.  Full of quiet reflection and happily a step towards some more great art pieces!

  I find that the best art is a surprise first to the artist and then to viewer.  Here is "The Revenge of Mother Earth"!!!

"Our very life depends on everthing's

Recurring till we answer from within."

-Robert Frost-

"Snow"

I have the honor of house sitting this week in a place that is as close to my dream home as I have ever been.  I happily sit here in the quiet of a mountain cabin as the snow falls deeper from the open air.  After my last noisy home I feel the tension slowly drain from my mind and limbs.  Time stands still here; stuck on pause for the retired owners.  I can think, I can dream again.

Life has been fitful as of these last few weeks.  The skies are grey, winter is endless, the snow is dirty, the girl lets me leave, and I am the crushed flora and fauna on the forrest floor waiting for spring.  My work has taken a hit and that is what has depressed me more than any of the rest.  The noise of my past home started eating away my already weakening concentration.  It was beginning to get to be to much work just to make my self think of work.  -This by the way is a great indication, for the artist, that you need to do something different.-  I moved out.  I am a bum right now and maybe I should feel shame but that wouldn't change my actions so what is the point.

One day at a time.

Some days are like shadows of the next and future.

I am trying to stay focused on my work but life sweeps you a crossed it's floor and pushes you into it's corner.  February is a hard month for me, I don't get enough sunshine or outdoor activity and find my mind turns into a cesspool of grinding stone!  I just finished "A River Runs Through It" by Norman Maclean and have been working on finishing two other stories by him as well.  It is all about Montana, hunting, fishing, logging, fighting, drinking and family.  He writes the most about the mountains and the rivers and that is why I love his work.  He listens to both of them and writes what they tell him and it is beautiful.  I can't wait until I can get back into the mountains, ya, I live in them but it is different when you are surrounded by peaks and the quiet than just living next to a mountain.  I have two month left to be suffocated by the indoor life style before I can go a roaming through the high alpine once again.  It is O.K. it is February and this feeling of slowly turning grey always hits me and I think I am falling apart. I am not just transparent.  

   I have had the flu for the past four days.  I feel like I just lived through swallowing a gallon of anti-freeze, I feel like I am full of a bunch of chemicals.  I feel like I smell like chemicals seeping out of my skin.  The fever left after the first day.   I love the visions you get with a fever, maybe they are dreams, but what every they are I am fascinated.  Now I just can't eat anything and feel weak, dazed and a little confused at what I am doing here.  Confused because I am not sure where I should be, but being here doesn't seem right ether.  I think I need to read some Greek Mythology.  I was invited to go to Omaha City this week end but it is this week end so I guess I missed my chance there.   It could be that I should have gone and that is why I feel this huge sense of displacement.  I don't know, I am just all messed up in the head right now, I need to eat but can't and the sun is out in the middle of February. 

After the fever.

It is the clash of life,

the hard pill we must swallow,

the grit with the cream

and the hope with the lost past.

It is as if we never said hello

but can't say good by.

One man says it is twisted

               Truth,

the other man says it is

               Balance.

Which man is right and

does each half to be wrong?

Is selling your dream, your child,

your soul, your hope for just a 

bite to keep you a live wrong?

Yet we sell so much more each day.