Tom Waits bonus track

Because this made me laugh out loud and, hey, it's Tom Waits day at my house, thanks to Melissa's call this morning.  xo

Tom Waits sings our tiny boat away from the dock

Photo shamelessly borrowed from here, with thanks.

Does it ever come over you, a sense of change?  You've been sitting in the antechamber for what feel like lifetimes, time enough for others you know to produce creative work and find a market for it.  What I once thought of as sloth may be essential marching in place.  We are not where we were, we are not yet ready to step into whatever is next.  From all sides the possibilities beckon, they insist, but the bridge has not yet been built and we are not such strong swimmers.  Is it any less wrenching to leave an old, likely outgrown version of self than to leave others we love?  Perhaps even more difficult, for we, it, can never be fully abandoned, we will always be with us, if not in fact then in memory.  No wonder we fear and resist change.  It is a solitary journey across open water, even with a boat our arms grow tired.  I wish my sense of adventure were more robust, my reticence more easily overcome.  I have doubts about being too old for this, not entirely clear about what "this" is.  As I am occasionally quoted as saying, when given a directive by the universe or its front man, inner wisdom, "You can't mean me, you can't mean now."  However it does mean me and if it doesn't mean now it means sometime very close to it.  Shiver me timbers.  My heart's in the wind.

Keep swimming

Ken Lee, thank you for the sky I couldn't capture.

Having just (recently) gone on and on about Los Angeles and its irregular cold, mentioning the wintery sky, etc., etc., the sun set last night in blazing stripes that suggested paradise, right here at home.  Unable to leap out and snap my own photo, the art I found on-line is an exact color match.

Every day, possibly every moment if I thought quickly enough, I could find reminders of why, in spite of how relentlessly it labors, despair does not win.  Because there are poets, because roses bloom, because my son assures me he would know if I had been turned into a pod person overnight and would run, were that the case.

Because the contents of Frida Kahlo's undiscovered closet are considered art and a window into her unique being.


Because Tom Waits says the clouds are like headlines on a new front page sky.