Nothing new, just LOVE YOU, every corner, every crumb

Falling asleep imagining vintage neckties for the fictional Mr. Apotienne.  I believe he might have been drawn to this Klimt-inspired fabric.

The Klimt pattern, called Apple Tree, encourages, perhaps urges me to do what has been calling so annoyingly, like neighbor boys when I was four years old, screaming over the fence for my mother to give them cookies.  The older one, soon after we moved the next year, climbed into his father's oil tanker truck, released the brake and crashed through fencing, foliage, pasture and what-all to collide with the dairy at the end of the block.  We all assumed his life trajectory had just begun.

Paying attention to the hectoring, I did some watercoloring the other day and a disturbingly primitive effort it seemed to be.  A conversation with a sister artist about how her work did not match the expectation either let us soften toward our output.  In my best moments, I am able to see my work, whatever form it takes, as an unclassified rogue beast with a very pointy head, bald, of course, upon which I give it kisses and gentle pats.  The work, for better or worse, is ours, is us.  We will, if we persevere, become better at it and if we don't become better, we will have the virtue of consistency about which we may feel pride.

Such a response is not at all the same as assuming anything we do is wonderful, extraordinary, worth lots of money and why aren't the publishers and gallery owners calling?  The response is the very one we, for I assume I am not alone in this, wish to embrace about all the aspects of ourselves, that of unconditional - yes, I believe it exists - love for all our pointy-headed and warty parts.  We are not intended to demean ourselves, nor our work, both of which are in process, both of which are continually becoming.  We are our most exalted moments and our weakest links, soaring inspiration and the shame-riddled slacking on our exercises.  We love the genius and the backslider equally.  And we love our work, either privately and quietly or openly and with noisy hoo-rah, the same way.  To reject any part of the whole being is punishing, mean and probably familiar. 

We are not witless, we know what work hits the mark and what doesn't.  Love it anyway.  Love it and celebrate it and let it worm its way into your heart where it belongs.  No one ever told me this was a continuum, that each thing was a gateway to the next.  I assumed there was an end we reached where we stopped and accepted this was how it would be for the time we had left.  Nay, nay, I've discovered that it, we, evolve, expand, alter and persist, if we are lucky and willing, growing to fill the impossible largeness of  our pointy-headed selves.

(Very likely I've said all this before, which means I will likely say it again.  I repeat what I need to remember.)