"Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection.
Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are
given true affection, there will be no opposition between
interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse.
It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it."
Simone Weil
What I remember of Nice ... the little art galleries, the flower market, the bench in the Jardin du Monastere above the city where I ate a pissaladière and sketched, drinking bottles of rosé in the dark on the beach and somehow finding the way back to our horrible little hostel more than a little tipsy ...
And me like a broken record saying, "I can see myself here. I can see myself here. I can see myself here."
Another place I've ambled and admired - turned by tragedy to a tableau of a different color.
"The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater."
J.R.R. Tolkien
Raoul Dufy
Open Window, Nice
The point is, you need to focus all this swirling, intense, imaginative mind-fuckery into something bold and bright and useful. You must figure out where to put this! You must make something with your big, clumsy imagination! You must learn to focus really hard and work really hard, even if at first you only make shitty-looking, stupid, pointless things ...
“Eventually all things fall into place. Until then, laugh at the confusion, live for the moments, and know everything happens for a reason.”
Albert Schweitzer
How is your self-discipline doing these days?
Sometime’s I wear down 15% of my phone’s battery before I even get out of bed.
I’m thinking about installing a phone dropbox outside of my front door. I won't even bring it inside the house anymore. Maybe I’ll rig it so that I’m notified inside the house when I get a text message or, god forbid, a phone call. Just in case.
I remember the first time we got internet at home. I was in elementary school and the first website I went to was BonneBell.com. In middle and high school, I was squarely plugged into instant messages and emails. In high school, I would stay up late on Friday and Saturday nights ... building geocites websites and listening to pirated music. I had a cell phone by the time I went to college. Smart phones rolled into town in a big way right around graduation. Network connectedness is in my DNA.
I had to ask what people did when they got in car accidents before cell phones. Apparently good samaritans would stop and help? I still have so many questions about this.
Author Sy Montgomery says by the year 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.
Norman Rockwell learned to draw by listening to his father read Charles Dickens to his boys after they finished their homework. Rockwell sketched the characters of the novels as he listened.
My mom worked night shifts at my dad’s company for a little while when we were kids. She was in the middle of reading the Anne of Green Gables series to my sister and me. Instead of making us wait until she had a night off, she would tape record herself reading the next chapter while we were at school so we could keep going while she was away at work.
Speaking of my sister ... here's us in the back yard. Wild and free.
