Heed the call

Floral images ushered me into sleep last night, into dreams no longer remembered except as impressions and a sense of peace.  Flowers printed onto everything have elbowed other thoughts aside (thank you!) to become a renewed obsession, language, identity.  The call of these sprigged beauties has stalked me for a while.  Their voice is growing louder and much more insistent.

Fabric by Liberty of London

We are, I know, called by what needs us.  For a few months if not longer, illustrators from around the world, especially those who use lots of red, but others as well, have pulled me into unimagined realms where I feel oddly at home, welcome.  Add the florals which arrived more than a year ago with roses-on-anything and I think I have absorbed these images for an adequate amount of time.  Now I need to take the next step.  What also calls is the temporarily set aside relationship to intentional, exhausting, healing exercise.  My physical therapy is now up to me and I have let myself be distracted by the shine and sparkle of flowered print and illustration.  I'm not sure that exercise needs me.  I certainly need it.

In this movie that is life, I see us all handed clumsily-wrapped bundles, bound in rumpled paper and too much knotted string, shoved emphatically in our direction on the platform of the train station by a stranger - he may be wearing Leonard Cohen's famous blue raincoat, torn at the shoulder.  Each parcel is intended for no one else, is an assignment that can be completed only by one candidate.  We leave that package in the taxi at our peril, for it will appear again, shouting louder, seeping more revoltingly, causing strangers to give a sharp look, then turn away.  They recognize the cry, especially if they have ignored their own.

It is not a neat business, nothing predictable about it, unless one tracks the clues back and back through this lifetime, maybe others.  A grandmother's fading wallpapers, reused scraps on an intricate quilt, childhood picture books, murals painted on kitchen and patio walls, the chintz dress of a handmade Raggedy Ann.  I have been the teabag in this cup my whole life 

Yesterday's post with Diebenkorn's thoughts on certainty tell some of this story.  I have come to believe that every moment is an act of faith, nothing is assured or promised, not in an ordinary fashion.  I think what we were guaranteed was an adventure, depending on your definition of adventure, something much closer to myth than the Hardy Boys.  Danger, defeat, redemption, turnabout, loss, triumph, stoic plodding, graceful turns and endless wonder.